What's the best trap you've ever unleashed upon your players?

[mrtauntaun]

I love traps and puzzles as a DM. I love throwing them at my players and watching them try to figure them out. Doesn't go over well with the hack and slashers, but I believe it makes for a better, richer, overall gaming experience.
So I want to hear about your traps and puzzles! This thread doesn't have to be about traps that you've created per se, but can be about the best one you've used or incorporated into your game.

The best trap I've ever used was incredibly simple to solve, but due to the unique nature of player characters, it took a whole gaming session for the players to get past it. All, save one (the hack and slasher) thought it was one of the most rewarding sessions of the campaign.

A character walks through a doorway. He/she instantly dissappears. At this point, I take the player outside and describe the following:

'You arrive in a 30 foot square room. The room is well lit, but you can identify no source for this light, and no shadows are cast, even from you. The room is made of stone, and all surfaces, including the ceiling and floor, are an off-white color. What do you do?'

At this point i'll spend a few minutes with the character going over the results of various actions they try. Searching, attacking the walls, spellcasting, etc. After these attempts fail, i take them back to the group and start all over again with the next player, giving each instructions not to say a WORD. When they come up with more information, I take them aside again until they figure it out.

The solution? The room has an anti-magic field over it, so no spellcasting will work. There are no secret doors, no other traps, nothing on any of the surfaces of the room. As a player, they are driven to action, to try SOMETHING. To successfully get out of the room, the character must do NOTHING for 30 minutes. They must sit, meditate, read, but essentially remain in a state of low to no motion for 30 minutes. I eventually allowed sleep to count, as the hack and slasher was the only one who didn't figure it out, and it was holding up the group. After 30 minutes is up, a doorway appears to another room, where the other party members (who have escaped) are waiting.

I think it is a fiendishly clever puzzle, as a player just doesn't think about doing NOTHING, they must constantly act (as a general rule). Everything is action, little is reaction. You would be surprised how much time they spend trying to find out where the light is coming from.

I can't take 100% credit for it, a friend of mine in college used something similar, it's a variation of it, so it's not an original Mr. Tauntaun, but close.

So what are your goodies?

 

[sircaren]

A living minotaur trap. The PCs were rampaging through a dungeon of sorts, making a big ruckus. The BBEG had his minotaur wait about about 15' away from the doorway (to the side) and charge the first character through the door. It was great fun.

 

[frankthedm]

I like spiked 20' pit trap combo'd with ceiling cave in to fill it up. Very effective.

Most of my NPCs build traps to kill people, not to test the victims int or "use up" thier resourses.

 

[Crothian]

I don't even remember what it was but basically, the Pcs came to a room that all but one thought it was a trap. The one guy was convinced it was not a trap and over the next 20 minutes convinced everyone else it was not a trap. It was a trap and 2 characters died. THe guy who thought it was not a trap, died (his character) soon after as the rest of the party was pissed at him. I somehow kept a straight face through out the whole thing and got a good laugh after the fact.

 

[Bagpuss]

The solution? The room has an anti-magic field over it, so no spellcasting will work. There are no secret doors, no other traps, nothing on any of the surfaces of the room. As a player, they are driven to action, to try SOMETHING. To successfully get out of the room, the character must do NOTHING for 30 minutes.

Wow, it sounds like you've invented the most tedious pointless trap ever, what objective does it achieve other than totally frustrating the player as you won't except any of their actions, other than the one solution you have planned? Does it even achieve anything for the evil-overload that put it in his dungeon since it is overcome by sleeping?

Why doesn't hacking at the walls have any effect?

Why can't a rogue find this hidden door that appears after doing nothing for 30 minutes by searching?

Can we put this in the "Write a bad adventure" thread as it seems a classic example of something designed to make the DM look 'clever' because the only solution he will allow is the one he has written on the answer card.

 

[Davek]

Not really a trap, or at least designed to be a trap.

Party finds a locked stone door. They open it and find a prison cell beyond with a human prisoner. The party, the WHOLE party, moves into the cell to check out the prisoner, and the door slams shut behind them. At this point they realize that there is no access to the lock mechanism within the cell, and there are no friendlies on the far side of the wall.

It took them some time to bust out by pounding on the wall with a mace one of them had buried in their pack.

 

[devilbat]

My most recent trap is my favorite.

The party finds a door behind a waterfall. They enter and discover that the floor is covered in symbols (think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). The symbols seem to be random, but a Druid, or someone who make a Knowledge:Nature roll realize that certain symbols are druidic runes. Close inspection (Knowledge:Arcana or spellcraft) of the floor also shows that there is a summoning circle inlaid into the ground. On the other side of the room, is a locked door.

If the party step only on the tiles with druidic symbols, they will cross the floor safely. If they step on non druidic symbol, they trigger a greater glyph of warding located in the roof, and the door they entered through automatically closes and locks. The glyph is of the spell soften mud and stone. Within five rounds, water is pouring into the room from the river above them. If thats not bad enough, once the water covers the summoning circle, a second glyph is triggered, this time summoning a water elemental.

 

[astralpwka]

I like levers. they're so obvious, and nobody can resist pulling them. There is no learning from experience. You see a lever, you want to pull it.

Similar to: "Can he resist pushing the button? The shiny, candy-red button?"


No they can't!

 

[luke_twigger]

This isn't a trap I DM'd, instead it was one that caught me out as a player. It's not so much the trap itself which was memorable as the metagame circumstances.

We were playing a campaign set in Freeport and were down in the sewers searching for a hidden area. We found a secret door and when we opened it revealed a 10'x10' room i.e. 4 squares in size. Important note - we play using miniatures and there were 5 PCs.

So we were just about to go in and search this room, when the DM suddenly said "oops I made a mistake" and redrew the room as 10'x15' i.e. 6 squares i.e. now large enough for all the PCs to enter at once.

Which of course we did. Then the floor gave way and tipped us into a kind of combine harvester.

Afterwards we agreed that the DM resizing the room had a big impact on what happened and still laugh about it now whenever a DM has to redraw a room for whatever reason.

Luke

 

[AuraSeer]

The best trap I've ever used was incredibly simple to solve[...]

Are you sure about that? Anything "incredibly simple" would have taken your players less than a whole session to complete. Executing the solution may have been easy, but figuring out what to do clearly was not.

Judging by your explanation, you gave no clues that the players could use to determine the correct solution. You just dropped the PCs into bare rooms, gave them no information, and assumed they would GUESS how to get out. To me that doesn't sound like a useful puzzle or trap, it sounds like a surefire way to waste a game session.

You would be surprised how much time they spend trying to find out where the light is coming from.

If you were surprised by that, you must not have spent much time around RPG players. The light is one of only two features in the room; the other is the walls themselves. Players will investigate one then the other, looking for some clue to what their situation is. If they find no clues, the obvious interpretation is that they have checked in the wrong place or didn't use the right tool, so they will keep checking.

Incidentally, how was the mysterious light actually generated? And how did the PCs get teleported in (without even a saving throw)? And how did the room sense when they stopped moving? And why was it completely impossible to find the door before the time limit expired? None of that should have been possible, what with the room blanketed in an antimagic field. (That is, unless it was that special kind of AMF that totally screws the players yet conveniently doesn't affect the DM...)