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Traps: What Should Become of the Spike-Filled Pit?
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<blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5783894" data-attributes="member: 22424"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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).</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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 <em>too</em> easy to find.</p><p></p><p>IMO, the way to make traps fun is <em>not</em> 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.</p><p></p><p>The way to make traps fun is instead to use them to challenge the <em>player</em> - 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?</p><p></p><p>So, provide clues to the locations of traps (so the <em>players</em> can work it out), and provide clues as to how to disarm the trap (so the <em>players</em> 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 <em>low</em> against "level-appropriate" traps - perhaps as low as 25% chance for each. The default should be traps defeated by player cunning.</p><p></p><p>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!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="delericho, post: 5783894, member: 22424"] 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). 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 [i]too[/i] easy to find. IMO, the way to make traps fun is [i]not[/i] 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 [i]player[/i] - 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 [i]players[/i] can work it out), and provide clues as to how to disarm the trap (so the [i]players[/i] 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 [i]low[/i] 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! [/QUOTE]
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Traps: What Should Become of the Spike-Filled Pit?
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