Traps: What Should Become of the Spike-Filled Pit?

[Number48]

To take a look at traps, we have to take a look at the overall game as well and what is fun and what isn't.

A spike pit in the middle of a hallway in an abandoned tomb: Either a useless waste of time or DM cruelty. You can use that spike pit to set up 3 scenarios, though. #1, the kobolds in the lair don't know the party is coming. The trap is set off and they gear up and take defensive positions and start harassing the PCs with little hit-and-run tactics, or the trap is discovered and disarmed/avoided and the PCs reap the benefit of a getting deeper into the lair before the kobolds can mount a better defense. #2, the kobolds in the lair are already expecting the PCs. The trap is set off, a PC is stuck in the pit while archers jump out from the far side and bruisers from behind the party try to push more PCs into the trap. This set up allows the party to avoid that trap by disabling or avoiding the spike pit and thus be at less of an advantage to the kobolds, or by discovering the ambush and turning it to their advantage. #3, the spike pit trap isn't in the hallway, it is in the big room up ahead and isn't hidden. This is not really a trap, it is tactical terrain. The terrain belonging to the kobolds, they are more ready to use it to their advantage, but the PCs can just as easily turn it around and throw kobolds in.

In those 3 scenarios we have to ask, what happens in a party with a rogue and what happens without the rogue? After all, we don't want to MAKE anyone play the rogue any more than we want to MAKE someone play the cleric. Let's assume 4 PCs and the 4th PC might be a rogue, or might be a 2nd fighter. The rogue has less hit points and armor than the fighter, so the correct trap is one that deals damage and hampers the 2nd fighter to the level of the rogue that avoids the trap. If you don't set it up that way, you are punishing the party for running without a rogue, which means you are setting up a "right" way to play.

Next, the harder part, is defining who overcomes these traps and how. In older editions, the thief had to take care of traps and locks and wasn't too great in combat. The problem with this setup is that if there are no traps or locks, the thief (rogue) player is punished for playing the "wrong" character. In 3rd edition, the rogue was useful in combat, but not against undead or constructs and that could also punish him for playing the "wrong" character. Then there's the problem of, what if the rogue doesn't or can't find the trap? For instance, if the trap is a bunch of unmarked pits in the middle of a combat area, and the rules require the rogue to actively search to discover them, there is no way the rogue can do his anti-trap job in the middle of combat. That would punish the rogue character again.

So, I see the middle ground as way to always have every character be useful. If you have no rogue, you have to suck up the extra damage but you can because the hit point or healing pool is bigger. If you have rogue as a primary class, he has to be able to use what makes him a rogue always. If the rogue is going to have a sneak attack feature, it has to always be available. Not necessarily every hit, but you can't have whole groups of monsters immune to sneak attacks. If the rogue is expected to make trap encounters go easier, then he has to have a way to deal with traps always. That means he has to be able to spend his action or part of his action in the middle of a combat tossing a leather cloak, dead body or his backpack on a trapped spike pit square and rendering it normal terrain at least temporarily. He has to neutralize traps that there is no way of easily disabling. To mechanically disarm the pressure plates activating the poison darts is tedious and boring. To roll a shield along the lip of the trap in time with you running across the room such that the darts all hit the shield is much more epic.

Traps are good, but only if you have designed the entire game taking them into consideration. The assumed goal, I would imagine, is that the game is always fun for everyone.

Of note, see my post in the "Your 5E" thread. I would handle at least part of the difficulty with rogues by making the skill-part into a secondary class with the dodgy, mobile, sneak attacking part being an unrelated primary class. If you take both of these as your primary and secondary classes, you might want to take something like "Tomb Raider" as your tertiary class. In that system, you could also have a fireball-slinging wizard for your primary and still take the roguish skills for your secondary and then your tertiary might be something like "Arcane Trickster".

 

[Li Shenron]

Which published books (any edition, not even necessarily D&D) do you guys consider to be really good at teaching a DM how to deal with traps?

If you have rogue as a primary class, he has to be able to use what makes him a rogue always. If the rogue is going to have a sneak attack feature, it has to always be available. Not necessarily every hit, but you can't have whole groups of monsters immune to sneak attacks.

I don't want to derail the thread, but I just have to say that I don't agree with this specific part, it's too much to say always. Sometimes the group may fight an incorporeal opponent and the fighter is in trouble, sometimes they end up in a silenced or anti-magic area and the wizard is in trouble... it's not a big deal if sometimes they are against undead and the rogue cannot sneak attack. Of course if it happens to often it becomes frustrating.

 

[Number48]

Which published books (any edition, not even necessarily D&D) do you guys consider to be really good at teaching a DM how to deal with traps?



I don't want to derail the thread, but I just have to say that I don't agree with this specific part, it's too much to say always. Sometimes the group may fight an incorporeal opponent and the fighter is in trouble, sometimes they end up in a silenced or anti-magic area and the wizard is in trouble... it's not a big deal if sometimes they are against undead and the rogue cannot sneak attack. Of course if it happens to often it becomes frustrating.

Well, I don't disagree with your disagreement. The occasional situation that is difficult for one or another character, fine. But to have entire categories of monsters be immune to the rogue by default is poor game design. Sometimes the DM wants to run a dungeon with lots of undead (or constructs, or plants), and sometimes that dungeon will have little in the way of traps or locks. Under 3E, it was just too easy for the game to be telling you to stay home, we don't need you tonight. It isn't a big gripe because it is very easy to fix, but we have to make sure every character can do what makes him special in a typical encounter.

Edit to add a comment about the Pathfinder Cleric. It used to be you were wasting having a lot of turn undead if no undead were around, or worse there were undead but you had no hope of turning them. The pathfinder solution was excellent. Your surges either heal or they harm undead, with the harm being hp damage instead of an all-or-nothing effect. Now your cleric never has to feel they have a class ability that's a waste of space.

 

[Felon]

Which published books (any edition, not even necessarily D&D) do you guys consider to be really good at teaching a DM how to deal with traps?

As I alluded to in the OP, 3e had a very cut-and-dried approach to traps. They have a little stat block including a Search and Disable DC. That's it. Adventures published would reinforce this by providing no details on a trap besides it's stat block. Essentially, the point a trap is not to challenge the PC's, just to found and removed with some rolls, or to be suffered. Their fondness for the ubiquitous magic glyph trap--which traps implicitly evolved into, transitioning from their "lowbie" mechanical stages--made this especially clear.

To 4e's credit, they did more than punt and actually took into account that traps could both detected and disarmed without using the core skills of Perception and THievery. Not only were alternate skills listed, but we were also provided some "countermeasure".

 

[delericho]

Which published books (any edition, not even necessarily D&D) do you guys consider to be really good at teaching a DM how to deal with traps?

I'm not aware of any pre-3e books addressing this specifically. There may have been something in 1st Ed, or indeed something third-party (Grimtooth's?), but I'm not familiar with those.

3e tended to be very poor in its handling of traps, with everything before "Dungeonscape" being entirely forgettable. "Dungeonscape" is good for one specific type of trap, the "Encounter Trap" (which laid a lot of the groundwork for 4e's Skill Challenges, BTW).

To 4e's credit, they did more than punt and actually took into account that traps could both detected and disarmed without using the core skills of Perception and THievery. Not only were alternate skills listed, but we were also provided some "countermeasure".

Yep, 4e made some improvements. Unfortunately, for every 'win' 4e seemed to introduce some new mistakes as well. In the case of traps, this tended to be in the form of Passive Perception, and in particular in making traps too easy to find.

IMO, the way to make traps fun is not mechanical.Whether you roll Thievery to disarm a trap or Engineering (or History, or whatever...) doesn't make all that much difference - at the table, it's still just a matter of someone rolling a die, adding a modifier, and beating a DC (or not). It gets pretty dull, especially after the first couple of times.

The way to make traps fun is instead to use them to challenge the player - we need to get past this door, it's trapped, and the Rogue has tried and failed to disarm it. How do we figure it out?

So, provide clues to the locations of traps (so the players can work it out), and provide clues as to how to disarm the trap (so the players can figure that out, too). By all means allow the Rogue to roll for these things, but his chance of success should probably be quite low against "level-appropriate" traps - perhaps as low as 25% chance for each. The default should be traps defeated by player cunning.

In the ideal situation, any time a PC falls into a trap, it should be immediately obvious in retrospect that the trap was there (we knew this, and that, and that... of course that trap was there!). Of course, pulling that off is extremely difficult!

 

[Aenghus]

Another problem with traps is that many DMs I have seen don't allow a standard operating procedure, forcing players either to constantly repeat "we check for traps", or worse, always insist on the detail on how the traps are being looked for, jumping on any omission.

This bogs the game down incredibly and is to me very unfun indeed. I played an old school game relatively recently and fell back into paranoia mode, and I really didn't like it.

Of course a lot of games didn't have this problem, they had a player with no patience willing to roll up lots of PCs instead. If one or more players doesn't care about his PCs dieing, the game can be faster, albeit with regular fatalities. This tends to be the instigator type player also known as the "button pusher".

Designing good traps is difficult. I really hate instant death traps. Batman-type death traps are better, as they provide tension and the threat of death but a good chance to escape as well. Setpiece traps as appear in 4e are a good idea, but again difficult to design.

 

[delericho]

Another problem with traps is that many DMs I have seen don't allow a standard operating procedure, forcing players either to constantly repeat "we check for traps", or worse, always insist on the detail on how the traps are being looked for, jumping on any omission.

I hate both these things.

There should be no concept of the "standard operating procedure". This is a fantasy game, not some engineering manual, for Gygax's sake! Traps should be rare enough, and unique enough, to make searching for them more than just a checklist of things to run through.

On the other hand, DMs who pixel-bitch over finding traps are also missing the point. "Oh, so you checked the door, the handle, the hinges, the lock... but you didn't check the bottom-left panel explicitly...?" Yeah, right. If you want me to check in that much detail, you need to describe your entire world in that much detail, because otherwise how am I to know there even is a bottom-left panel to check? Is that too much work for our poor, harried DM? Great, then abstract the detail... but play fair - if you abstract, the players get to do so as well.

Designing good traps is difficult.

Very true.

I really hate instant death traps. Batman-type death traps are better, as they provide tension and the threat of death but a good chance to escape as well. Setpiece traps as appear in 4e are a good idea, but again difficult to design.

I really think there's a place for both. The thing is, those traps are intended to protect something; they're meant to be lethal, not merely level-appropriate annoyances for the Cleric to heal away in an instant.

So, while I don't like "save or die" traps, I do think many level-appropriate traps should include a real good chance that a PC is going to die. (Conversely, as I said up-thread, I think they should be pretty easy to detect.)

I do like the Batman-type death trap (or the Bond-type trap, or the "Encounter Trap", or the 4e set-piece - they're pretty much all the same thing). As you say, they're hard to design, though - a "Book of Traps" would be a good addition to the game.

 

[Felon]

Yep, 4e made some improvements. Unfortunately, for every 'win' 4e seemed to introduce some new mistakes as well. In the case of traps, this tended to be in the form of Passive Perception, and in particular in making traps too easy to find.

Let me say something that goes entirely against the direction to which RPG's have evolved:

I'm not crazy about havin a dedicated attribute that's used to make all checks for detecting things (i.e. Perception skill).

Why? Having perception function as a skill unto itself has the de facto consequence of it inevitably become a "power skill". Indeed, it will soar up to the top ranks of power skills. If a character ever gets a free skill proficiency of his choice (like certain 4e races), Perception is the go-to skill of choice if it's not already on the character's class list.

With all surprise avoidance wrapped up into a single skill--be they traps or ambushes--surprises can be largely mitigated, even if passive checks are taken out of the equation.

If you enjoy fiction, you can probably conjure up any number of heroes who possess amazing levels of alertness, but they all get blindsided sometimes--heck, even a lot of the time. Even superheroes like Superman, Daredevil, Wolverine, and Spider-Man get waylaid despite their amazing senses.

And there's also a converse issue, where not having someone good at Perception present also yields unfavorable results. As a DM, I'm rather disappointed to see players not find secret doors or hidden compartments or clues. What's that some of you say? Just use DM fiat to decide what characters find? Well, you read my mind. A lot of spotting and noticing is simply part of storytelling. The simple of looking can result in finding.

If skill checks are to be used for perception, I'd just as soon the check be part of another skill. Streetwise, Survival, some Knowledge Skills, and Thievery are all potential candidates.

 

[mmadsen]

If you enjoy fiction, you can probably conjure up any number of heroes who possess amazing levels of alertness, but they all get blindsided sometimes...

Fictional heroes tend to be super-competent at spotting danger; it's on the short-list of things almost all fictional heroes are good at. (They're also good at hitting things and not getting hit.) I don't think it's a problem that RPG heroes generally spot things.

If skill checks are to be used for perception, I'd just as soon the check be part of another skill. Streetwise, Survival, some Knowledge Skills, and Thievery are all potential candidates.

Yes, "realistic" perception -- if that matters -- tends to come with experience in that particular field.

 

[delericho]

I'm not crazy about havin a dedicated attribute that's used to make all checks for detecting things (i.e. Perception skill).

Why? Having perception function as a skill unto itself has the de facto consequence of it inevitably become a "power skill". Indeed, it will soar up to the top ranks of power skills. If a character ever gets a free skill proficiency of his choice (like certain 4e races), Perception is the go-to skill of choice if it's not already on the character's class list.

With all surprise avoidance wrapped up into a single skill--be they traps or ambushes--surprises can be largely mitigated, even if passive checks are taken out of the equation.

There's a lot of wisdom in this. And yet... I don't think I could support removing it. We've come too far.

And there's also a converse issue, where not having someone good at Perception present also yields unfavorable results. As a DM, I'm rather disappointed to see players not find secret doors or hidden compartments or clues.

I'm not. I try to build my adventures with a multitude of clues, secrets and what-not, including a fair amount of redundancy. There's plenty for the Rogue to find, and even if they don't find everything they should have enough to figure out the puzzles. And even if they don't find that secret door (or whatever), it just means I get to recycle that material later.

What's that some of you say? Just use DM fiat to decide what characters find? Well, you read my mind. A lot of spotting and noticing is simply part of storytelling. The simple of looking can result in finding.

I prefer a middle ground. If the players simply say "we search the room", then they roll. And, if they succeed, they get one of the room's secrets. If they're more specific, "we search the walls", then they roll - they get a bonus to find any secrets of the walls (and, if there's more than one, they find them all on a success) but also have a chance to find anything else in the room. And if they're really specific ("we check the statue's teeth") then they find anything in that area automatically, plus they get a roll for anything else in the general area (that is, the rest of the statue).

One thing I do advocate very strongly: never, ever have a single clue that the PCs must find. Because if they do, you can guarantee they'll miss it. (And even if you use fiat to give it to them, they'll find a way to misunderstand it!) In general, for every conclusion you want them to reach, you should place three clues - they'll miss one, misunderstand the second, and finally 'get it' on the third.

But if you absolutely, positively have to have them find a particular clue, then you have to just give it to them. Don't ask for a roll; don't even expect them to declare a search. Just have them find it. Otherwise, you're all going to spend a lot of time frustrated...