Traps up to level 30 ?

[Merlin the Tuna]

Just scaled up damage and attack roll.

Pretty much. Dungeonscape had a few like this -- just regular old traps with huge damage and worse poison on them.

 

[Li Shenron]

Pretty much. Dungeonscape had a few like this -- just regular old traps with huge damage and worse poison on them.

The extended sweet spot of fun

 

[Imp]

It's a trap with a divination effect that tells it what adventurers are planning to enter the dungeon. It then scries them and plane-shifts them into the Negative Material Plane the Elemental Chaos or whatever it's called before they finish packing their backpacks.

 

[blargney the second]

Bribe a discontent hunchback to take a portion of your army around the far side of the pass, then attack from both sides.

Oh sorry, that's a trap for 300.
-blarg

 

[mmu1]

High level play had so many ways to get around those in 3E, yes. Those days are over. Remember, there are no assumptions that the party has a caster who can cast X, Y and Z anymore. Heck it stands to reason many abilities assumed to be possessed by level 15 in 3e, won't even show up until after 25th, if at all, in 4E. The game won’t stop being Dungeons and Dragons at higher levels, which will be a welcome thing after 3E’s upper levels practical being Spellcaster Superheroes or at best Dungeons, then Dragons.

Well, I certainly hope you're wrong, because that's essentially a summary of ways to wreck the game as far as I'm concerned.

Epic-level dungeon-crawling? Because nothing says "You're 20th level!" like yet another 5' wide corridor... If I wanted to do that, I'd play WoW.

 

[Intrope]

Bribe a discontent hunchback to take a portion of your army around the far side of the pass, then attack from both sides.

Oh sorry, that's a trap for 300.
-blarg

LOL!

Actually, a level 30 trap:
It's a giant orrey (you know, the things showing motion of planets)
Except:
It's whirling at a frenzied speed.
It's a far realms widget, so the orbs don't move in ordinary, euclidian geometry, but rather through higher dimensional space.
The orbs are actually spheres of annihalation.
It can sprout legs to chase you down
Oh, and if you break it Great Cthulu appears and eats 1d4 adventurers per round

 

[Wolfwood2]

I hope they can find a way to make traps fun, no matter what the level.

Current problems:

1. "Guess the square" searching. Either your specialized trapsmith searches every single square (time-consuming and non-heroic) or the player (not the character) has to successfully guess which square might have a trap and declare his search.

Noticing a trap is there should be some sort of automatic roll.

2. One roll, one skill, one person contributing, encounter over. Compare that to an encounter with a monster.

 

[Andor]

The first thing that popped into my head on reading "What does a 30th level trap look like?" was a scene from the Lensman books where they killed a planet by placing two other planets on intersecting orbits so that all three planets collided with a big smoosh.

Now THATS a 30th level trap.

 

[Shortman McLeod]

I dunno, really high-end traps always mess with my suspension of disbelief.

Doode, of all the things that *could* mess with one's suspension of disbelief in D&D, high-end traps have got to be near the bottom of the list.

 

[Gort]

I just hope they severely reduce costs for traps. The multi-thousand gold piece costs for a hole covered with leaves were just completely stupid.