D&D General [+] TRAPS! a positive thread

[Asisreo]

This is an obvious trap, but it doesn’t really give the players any hint as to what to do about it.

There's nothing they can do. As they approach McGuffin and turn it around, they finally unlock the secrets of their 300 adventuring day journey through the hellish lands of the Plane of Fire:

"The true McGuffin was the friends you've made along the way." You'd be surprised how many TPK's that one causes.

 

[Oofta]

There's nothing they can do. As they approach McGuffin and turn it around, they finally unlock the secrets of their 300 adventuring day journey through the hellish lands of the Plane of Fire:

"The true McGuffin was the friends you've made along the way." You'd be surprised how many TPK's that one causes.

I think it would cause a DMKP (dungeon master killed by players).

 

[MarkB]

I think it would cause a DMKP (dungeon master killed by players).

You got there before me - I was going to go with TDMK.

 

[Nefermandias]

Yeah, this leads to gameplay I find quite boring. Fortunately, this problem can be solved by doing two things:

1. Telegraph the presence of traps. Players can’t interact with traps if you don’t give them the opportunity to do so, so make sure players can determine that a trap is present from the description of the environment alone. Don’t gate this description behind a passive perception DC or make the players declare they’re looking for traps and roll to find it, just describe clues to the presence of the trap. Ideally, you want the players to catch on so they can interact with the trap. Failing that, you want them to feel like they at least could have caught on, and to be able to identify why they missed it.

2. When players do trigger a trap, give them another opportunity to interact with it. Instead of just dealing damage or telling them to make a saving throw or whatever, describe something about the trap activating - the click of the pressure plate, the twang of the trip wire, the sliding of rock on rock as a mechanism moves into place, whatever. Then let them describe what they do in reaction. Based on this description, consider changing the type of saving throw to be more appropriate to their reaction, or giving them advantage or even automatic success on the saving throw if it seems appropriate based on their reaction. Or disadvantage/automatic failure, if their reaction would actually make the trap harder to avoid.

That's precisely the advice Angry GM gives in one of his articles.

 

[Shiroiken]

Cruelest one I ever used was in an ancient red dragon's lair. The cave crossed over several lava pits, giving warning that there's a lot of danger (I mean, dragon's lair, duh!). On one of the bridges was made out of glass, rather than stone, with an illusion on top of it. The first 10 ft would hold up to 500 lbs before collapsing, with each 5 ft taking 50 lbs less (midpoint could only take 50 lbs). Unless the illusion was disbelieved or the bridge carefully examined by touch, characters on the bridge would drop into the lava below, dying instantly. Needless to say, no one checked it, leaving the magic-user on his broom of flying as the lone survivor. Irritated, he used his last wish from his ring of 3 wishes to turn back time 5 minutes to stop the PCs from dying. When thanked, he said "I wouldn't have bothered, but all your stuff was destroyed too."

Another one I saw in an old adventure (can't remember which one) that was great. A common theme of the time was to make the thief open any non-stuck doors they checked for/disarmed traps; that way if they screwed up, they'd be the one to suffer. It was a large room with 6 doors, 3 on each side (not counting the one the PCs enter from), with dozens of holes in the walls, floor and ceiling. Opening any of the doors would trigger the trap, which had to be disarmed by every door before stopping it. When a trapped door was opened, rocks fell from the ceiling, poison darts flew from the walls, and gouts of flame rose up from the floor... on every space except the opened door, leaving the thief completely unharmed.

 

[Charlaquin]

That's precisely the advice Angry GM gives in one of his articles.

Yep. I’ve grown pretty disillusioned with him of late, but time was he wrote some truly excellent articles on DMing fundamentals, and this was one of my favorites.

 

[iserith]

I included a modified Grimtooth trap in a recent game. Moving southward down a hall, the party encounters an open spiked pit with 5' walkways on either side of it. Plaster had cracked and fallen away from the ceiling, revealing a few evenly spaced holes above these walkways. Larger piles of rubble lay north and south of the area, part of the general ruin they had seen while exploring this place.

(The 14 and the red areas were not visible to the players).

The pit itself is a permanent major image. The areas marked in red are pressure plates under which is a spring. Anyone stepping on the plate is shot into the air as spikes descend from the holes in the ceiling. The PC is thus stabbed with spikes then suffers falling damage when they hit the floor. The trap then resets. To add a little risk to jumping, the difficult terrain on the one side, if landed in, may cause a PC to fall backward onto the pressure plate (DC 10 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check to avoid that outcome). Those that created this place were trying to prevent tomb robbers from going to some vaults to the south, but wanted to be able to pass by unharmed themselves if needed.

The party fell victim to this trap with the eldritch knight taking a beating from it. At that point they decided to be safe they would climb down into the pit and then back out of it. That's when they determined the pit was an illusion and just walked across.

 

[Lanefan]

One of my favourite traps is a very simple one that is safe enough now but (in theory) leads to headaches later: a basic pit trap, hard to detect (or covered by an illusory floor) except instead of just falling for ouchy damage the victim slides down a chute to be safely deposited somewhere on a lower level*. Ideally this arrival is a somewhat noisy process, alerting at least a few occupants of the new level that dinner has just been served...

Obviously the chute is greased to prevent someone just climbing back up it and is also defended at the bottom by a hard-to-open-from-the-outside version of a one-way top-hinged cat door. (the bang made by this door closing after the victim's arrival can be the noise source)

Once someone - or a few someones - have gone down this and the situation has become obvious the remaining party at the top has a choice: go in after the victim(s) and hope for the best or carry on with a reduced party. This choice is made much more difficult if the chute is long and-or twisty enough** to prevent communication between those above and those below.

And yes this splits the party. That's the point.

* - for added fun, I've once in a while had the deposit point be a locked cell in an active prison with guards etc.
** - or has a permanent silence effect partway down; here a really creative party might try to communicate by flashing their lights in a sort of Morse code provided the victim below can get the "cat door" open.

 

[MarkB]

A simple one I had for a kobold lair was a simple spiked pit trap across a corridor, just after a 90-degree bend. It was only 10 feet wide, a reasonable jump, and on the walls above the pit were a pair of empty fixtures, one on each side. If the party ran after a kobold as it retreated round the corner, they'd catch up in time to see that it had managed the leap across the pit, and was continuing off down the corridor.

Anyone who tried to jump the pit and follow the kobold would slam into the invisible iron bar set between the two wall fixtures. It was at just the right height that a small creature who knew it was there could grab it mid-leap to swing from and get a little extra distance, but a medium creature making the leap would slam into it at shoulder height, then plummet into the pit unless they made a very good dexterity save to grab the bar.

 

[CubicsRube]

One of the most devious traps I encountered was you find a young beautiful woman. She marries you and then owns you for the rest of your life...