Two Dozen Nasty DM Tricks

[Silverblade The Ench]

Haha those are bloody good

some of my faves:

Zombies filled with vials of smokepower and nails. Not only do they go BANG!, they often set off surrounding zombies, too...think DOOM with exploding barrels and shrapnel
Imagine a doorway, beyond the doorway, it turns hard right for 10' to another door.
Take a hydra, put it behind a wall beyond the 1st door, in a cage made f
from big iron bars with large spaces.
Now, put a "window" in the wall between it and the door, and cast a special Wall of FOrce in the gap...the wall of force is not affected by the hydra, or visa-versa. The wall of force acts as a one way mirror.
The party comes along, and sees what looks like a huge mirror...out of which the hydra's heads can suddenly poke through and eat the party!
DId I mention this was a learnean hydra?
Since the party has to fight by to get into the room where the hydra is,and have to deal with the other (locked) doro and maybe traps, and then the hdyra's protected by it's cage which it's heads can reach through.....
Yes, that is a very bad hair day for the heroes, muhaha!

 

[OchreJelly]

I agree that many of the OPs list is clever and fun. I have used my fair share of exploding zombies. However, I'll pass on the 'screw-job' style. Even when the 'screw-job' tricks are detectable (the non-detectable ones are the worst offenders IMO) they tend to slow the game to a halt.

It may seem fun at first, but when the PCs become paranoid enough that they are touching every floor tile with a ten foot pole or throwing food at every chest for fear of killer mimics, i don't feel it's a good use of our often limited time together. The true recipe for frustration is when the PCs are playing like this and they still get hit with a 'screw-job' trick. Very old-school feel for sure. If I want this style of game a one-shot of CoC is often the best fix. Just my opinion of course.

 

[ExploderWizard]

A lot of these tricks only become screw jobs if the DM suddenly changes up running style in an established game. If the campaign has been going for 6 levels with the default of searching with a skill roll and all of sudden situations start popping up that require detailed instructions from the player in order for the roll to have meaning, then the DM is being a jerk.

If, on the other hand, detailed instructions from the player is the norm for the campaign, then a careless or forgetful player can expect these things to happen. In this type of game, if these tricks are not used sparingly, the game will move very slowly and the DM should simply accept this as a consequence of this style of play.

 

[Remathilis]

A-Hole DM?

@$$-h4t DM.

 

[jdrakeh]

What I prefer is more mundane, "realistic" traps. Traps that can be circumvented by the actual inhabitants of the dungeon. . .

Emphasis mine. I'd like to see more of these, as well, though it's my experience that few (if any) traps in published adventures take this into consideration. It seems that most traps in adventure modules exist only to challenge players, with little (if any) regard paid to the logic of their existence and/or implementation.

The long history of dungeon traps in D&D reminds me much of the puzzles in video games like Resident Evil — you know, those puzzles where you have to run all over the place to collects keys to open otherwise normal doors. Getting to their desks at Umbrella must have been a complete pain in the ass for day to day employees.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that games with puzzles and traps like that were directly inspired by older editions of D&D with regard to challenging the player at the expense of consistent world building. I prefer traps and puzzles that challenge the player and the character, while also making sense in terms of the setting.

I recently designed a TWERPS 5-room dungeon for the first issue of Outre Realms (see .sig) and logical traps were a big part of that. Of course, another big part of it was making logical traps look perfectly absurd at first blush. There are hints of why the place was designed as it was, though I refrained from spelling out the specifics (allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions).

 

[Celebrim]

I agree that many of the OPs list is clever and fun. I have used my fair share of exploding zombies. However, I'll pass on the 'screw-job' style. Even when the 'screw-job' tricks are detectable (the non-detectable ones are the worst offenders IMO) they tend to slow the game to a halt.

It may seem fun at first, but when the PCs become paranoid enough that they are touching every floor tile with a ten foot pole or throwing food at every chest for fear of killer mimics, i don't feel it's a good use of our often limited time together. The true recipe for frustration is when the PCs are playing like this and they still get hit with a 'screw-job' trick. Very old-school feel for sure. If I want this style of game a one-shot of CoC is often the best fix. Just my opinion of course.

The trick to introducing these sort of things is to very clearly demarcate from the context where the tricks begin, and where they end.

The trick must believably exist in the campaign world. If the players are walking around in a human town, and suddenly the road opens up and they fall into a 30' deep pit with spikes at the bottom, they are probably going to be outraged and my opinion will have good reasons for being outraged. Afterall, plenty of people presumably walk along this road, there are businesses and homes along the road, and so forth. Why did they put a trap here and how do they manage to live with it? If there are death traps randomly scattered about the city, this would seem to greatly impact how the city operates - they would probably have at the least been warned not to wander about without a guide and there would probably be contextual clues that this particular section of street was lethally trapped.

The same in my opinion must be true of a goblin city. A bad example of the first edition play style that I've run into on several occassions is death traps in well travelled corridors of a dungeon, lethal traps in the BBEG's living quarters, fatal contact poison smeared on the doorknob between inhabited sections of a dungeon, and so forth. This is in some ways worse than finding a collosal red dragon at the bottom of a dungeon where the only access or egress is through a 3' wide 8' high door. Lethal traps represent a great expense to create and are dangerous to live with. A trap building society might have them on unused 'entrances' they never use, on dead-end corridors no one ever goes down', or possibly in rooms that are entered only on very rare occassions and only with great ceremony, but they won't just be randomly scattered about. The society will be adapted to live with the traps and the tools to bypass them when necessary will be handily nearby.

But on the other hand, if the PC's open a tomb which has never been entered since it was sealed up a thousand years ago, then I expect them to immediately shift to 'Tomb of Horrors'/'Indiana Jones' mode because the presence of cunning death traps is a given.

If the PC's are exploring some ruined dwarven city now inhabited by goblins, and they find themselves leaving the goblins living and working areas and entering the reliquery of a Dwarven temple that the goblins never dare to tread in, then contextually, the amount of caution they are expected to use changes as well. Similarly, if within the city, they raid the treasury of some powerful wizard, again, the amount of caution required changes contextually.

If the PC's encountered an ornately fashioned iron door deep within the crypt of an evil temple that is covered with various signs and devices of warning, and on the lentil of the door is written, "Death awaits any who dare tresspass", if they are outraged because opening the door sets off a lethal trap and reveals a horrible monster, then they've really no business playing D&D in my opinion.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

jdrakeh,
oh I agree totlaly that traps *must make sense*!
I alway shave it so the inhabitants can bypass it somehow.

simple:
hobgoblins lair, cavenr entrance.
it has a huge spiked pit trap the width of the cavern.
A bridge partially crosses this...but Continual Darkness globes block out what the bridge leads to...
So, if the pit is say 40' across, the bridge only goes in about 10', then a series of small islands and bridges lead off...some are trapped.
The hobgoblins know the route across in the darkness.

Alarms will sound from traps, and hobgolins will fire ballistae across the darkness hoping to "sweep" any intruders.

another:
necromancer's tower. Inside is a vast open area with many archers, skeletal fire giant lava hurlers, traps etc. he bypass it all by merely levitating UP through the illusionary floor/ceiling 50' above his head! Simple, logical, but devastatingly effective.
Muhaha!

too many DM's forget that no perosn in their right mind is gonna booby trap a thing they use frequently with a DEADLY trap, as the risks of them setting it off accidentaly are too damn high!
Would you put a claymore mine in your bedroom door?!

Exception would be magical traps, but even then, you are best using deadly traps in "false paths", like a route the inhabitants know not to use.Or traps that require them to be activated by someone as a safety.

 

[Raven Crowking]

If the PC's encountered an ornately fashioned iron door deep within the crypt of an evil temple that is covered with various signs and devices of warning, and on the lentil of the door is written, "Death awaits any who dare tresspass", if they are outraged because opening the door sets off a lethal trap and reveals a horrible monster, then they've really no business playing D&D in my opinion.

"You must spread some XP around before giving it to Celebrim again."


RC

 

[maddman75]

Put me down for anti-tomb of horrors. I can think of nasty tricks, but stuff like that takes me out of the game. Why would there be magical rust monster powder in a scabbard, apart from 'to screw the PCs over and destroy their items!' I can't think of any reasonable explaination that this should come up. Same with most of these.

I'm reminded of an old game where right at the start of the game there was a chest with a magical trap on it. We tried to disarm the trap, but it was too much for the thief, and dropped a fireball on us. We healed up and tried again, this time bypassing the trap. Well now a poisoned needle hits us! We try to disassemble the chest, and its protected by magical forcefields. We spend a couple of hours of game time messing with this box. When we finally get it open, its empty.

I'm exasperated, and wondering why someone would spend tens of thousands of gold pieces setting up this complex, multilayered magical trap and not have it actually protecting anything. The GM says 'its just there to screw with you!' like that is perfectly rational.

I hate traps, and generally only include them in game as part of a larger scene.

To contribute, I tend toward plot-based nasty tricks. One of my favorites is the Evil Mentor trick. The local lord is secretly plotting to rebel against the realm, and doesn't want any adventurers around mucking up his plans. So he sends them on riskier and riskier missions, often with bad information, hoping they'll go off and get themselves killed. The moment when they realize this has been going on is just priceless.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Any list of traps is going to have a lot of things that won't appeal to one person or another. I find that I cast aside at least 50% of what I got out of the Grimtooth's books, but that doesn't mean they weren't golden. Same applies to this thread. Pbartender does make a good point that its a fine line between challenging and screwing the players. My goal is to have the players either go, "We're awesome! We caught that!" or "Oh, crap! We should have seen that coming!" Certainly not "the DM is out to get me!"