Skills and Traps

[MerricB]

Best moment of reading the Wizards blogs...

Matt Sernett
For example: Just today I was writing an essay for the September Design & Development column. While writing, I had a new idea about how traps should work. I knew Mike Mearls had done the most recent design work on traps, and I had a decent idea of how they worked from talking with him. I moseyed over to his desk in the dev pit and proposed my idea. His reaction was enthusiastic. Voila! I made up some rules for 4th edition!

Mike Mearls
I just had one come across my desk. Here I am, sitting at my desk after lunch, thinking about which of my shiny new comics I'm going to read first, when Matt Sernett comes over to my desk. Matt drops an awesome idea on my head involving skills. This is a cool idea, something that in nine months will be loved by everyone who feels that the skill system in 3e didn't do enough.

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=910861
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=906391

Heh.

Cheers!

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I guess we'll have to wait and see how those ideas turn out. I love traps but I really think they need to change the mechanics of them so they are more than the rest of the group sitting around while one person rolls his Search and Disable Device checks whilst hoping he doesn’t roll low.

The 2 FFG Traps and Treachery books are a great source of flavourful traps but it is hard to put a lot of that information into the game whilst still sticking to how the rules for traps operate.

I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Li Shenron]

Curse those teasers! They can't drop this hints like that and get away with "we cannot say more yet", now I won't sleep for weeks...

 

[Li Shenron]

I guess we'll have to wait and see how those ideas turn out. I love traps but I really think they need to change the mechanics of them so they are more than the rest of the group sitting around while one person rolls his Search and Disable Device checks whilst hoping he doesn’t roll low.

The 2 FFG Traps and Treachery books are a great source of flavourful traps but it is hard to put a lot of that information into the game whilst still sticking to how the rules for traps operate.

I love traps too and I like those 2 books a lot for their flavor.

One thing to note is that it's hard to find a good balance between the flavor and the mechanics. The problem you mention, which I think it's related to the players sitting around rather than the characters, is IMHO minimal with the core rules (which take 2 rolls for each trap). But it becomes relevant if you want to make trapfinding more interesting. The problem is that the player of the character who's a trap expert will LOVE some more complexity in disarming a trap, but some of the other players whose characters can only watch may bother if disarming takes more than a couple of rolls.

 

[Jhaelen]

I love traps but I really think they need to change the mechanics of them so they are more than the rest of the group sitting around while one person rolls his Search and Disable Device checks whilst hoping he doesn’t roll low.

Well, I HATE traps. I almost never use them (which probably explains why the party's rogue never bothered putting any points in disable device, but I digress...).

I even bought Dungeonscape (even though I dislike EXTENDED dungeon crawls) to have a look at the ideas to make traps more fun (encounter traps and all that). While those ideas indeed give everyone in the party something to do while the rogue is trying to disable the trap it's still far from my idea of fun.

It's mainly because my idea of a heroic demise is to be slain in a climactic battle against overwhelmingly powerful foes rather than by falling into some 300' deep pit to be impaled on some pointed sticks.

 

[Krellic]

The thing that impresed me about these particular blog posts was that for Matt Sernett it was purely an idea about Traps while to Mike Mearls it was an idea about Skills.

Interesting how a developer immediately starts relating it to the bigger picture...

 

[DonTadow]

The thing that impresed me about these particular blog posts was that for Matt Sernett it was purely an idea about Traps while to Mike Mearls it was an idea about Skills.

Interesting how a developer immediately starts relating it to the bigger picture...

More evidence that skills will be essential, but not as mathy as other 3e. My guess is to make traps more intracate (how do you go about disarming it) with one roll search/disabled. Maybe some traps have more than one part. Allowing other pcs to spot to notice other components.

Simple traps like pits and arrows should be handwaved if someone has a trapsense type ability. The intricate ones should be what the check is for.

 

[Szatany]

From what I'm hearing D&D is slowly turning into a game that has various mini-games in it. One such minigame was always combat. Now they are adding "social duels". If they also do that for traps, I can't wait to see how this will work out.

 

[DonTadow]

From what I'm hearing D&D is slowly turning into a game that has various mini-games in it. One such minigame was always combat. Now they are adding "social duels". If they also do that for traps, I can't wait to see how this will work out.

D and d has always been a game of minigames, just the minigames had few rules. Now they're add rules that won't intrude on the game and still keep the flow going. I think every table had different rules for social, handled traps differently ect. The reason we did this is because they didnt work in the book or were clearly unstated.

 

[NexH]

Hopefully traps in 4E will be as fun as the "Encounter traps" in Dungeonscape, but more plausible than those.