Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 3290493" data-attributes="member: 5171">Indeed. The time you're not spending on monster stats, you're spending making your dungeon traps more interesting than "Reflex Save Half". For example:There's a tunnel ahead with extremely fast swinging blades. You can try to jump through, but it's a killer -- 10d6, Ref20 half. It's also immediately after a long (20 foot) jump, with no time to prepare, so anybody who doesn't have Uncanny Dodge takes a -4 penalty on the save.The tunnel you're in is actually very high (50 feet), and cables going across the chasm make it clear that there's a mechanism up there. Climbing up will let the player find a mechanism to partially disable the blades -- the damage drops to 5d6, and the save DC drops to 15 -- but a rocky patch will crumble as you get close to the mechanism, doing 3d6 damage (Reflex 20 half) and forcing you to make an immediate Climb check to not fall 50 feet back to the tunnel floor.If you climb down into the chasm, you'll see spikes down below you, as well as a mechanism that extends a bridge across the chasm. However, once you extend the bridge, automatic dart traps start firing (+12 to hit, 2d4 damage and they force another Climb check). You have to choose between climbing up quickly to suffer less damage, but having to make a riskier Climb check, or Climbing up slowly and relying on your Defense to protect you from the darts.So a player who does everything extends the ramp, obviating the Jump check entirely, and has a much easier save for much less damage. But they've also done a lot of other work along the way, exposing themselves to little bits of additional danger that they wouldn't have faced otherwise.And that's a relatively easy puzzle area -- all you have is Jump and Climb (and the question of the player's Reflex save and Defense) to deal with. In order to make something that appeals to an entire group of players, you're gonna want to put in, well, everything:- Stuff written in ancient languages that lets the reader automatically solve puzzles without Disable Device checks (for the Linguist people)- Locks and disarmable traps (for the Disable Device people)- The Holy Trinity of Movement: Climb, Jump, and Balance (for the acrobatic people)- Some enemies, both mystical and mundane (to break the tension of puzzles- Areas of overpowering enemies, or optionally areas where too much noise will cause the floor to collapse, or where breaking the path of the light will trigger spear traps (for the Hide and Move Silently people)And the kicker: because this isn't a video-game, you're going to need to give the players at least 2 viable ways to get through these areas. The primary way is the cool skilled way (weakening the blade trap and extending the ramp in the puzzle above), but if the player doesn't succeed or somehow botches the check (breaks the ramp, ruins the mechanism), they can still survive that trap -- at least, the guy with Evasion and Uncanny Dodge can survive it, and then he can automatically disarm the trap with a simple lever beyond the trap, which lets all the people who don't have Evasion still survive that trap.Okay, that was a whole lot of rambling, but hopefully it helps. Good luck!</blockquote>

Verification