D&D General Want to use traps? Make them obvious

[Kariotis]

It's my number one advice on anything trap-related: reverse psychology. Common sense tells us the players are after the loot, and it's secured by well-hidden traps. Well, if you spring a trap you only got the one moment of discovery. Suspense is a much better dynamic at a gaming table. Put the traps out in the open. Make them big and elaborate. Avoid hiding them behind spot-checks, just tell the players what the obstacles are so that they can start racking their brains at it. Then you start getting the character interactions, the in-game anecdotes about how "it's just like when we were under Waterdeep", the Rube-Goldberg disarming schemes, people volunteering for crazy experiments. You don't even need much of an incentive or none at all. You can hide the loot. If anything, they will assume that an elaborate trap means that there's something important it's protecting, making them want it more than if it's out in the open. All you gotta make sure is that you honor that assumption. Even if it isn't loot, it should be worth the effort.

Now, of course that doesn't mean you can't have your trip wire or rolling boulder trap from time to time to mix things up. But in general I've found it much more rewarding to think of traps as obstacles that are to be investigated than surprises to be sprung on the party. Think more heist movie and less Tom & Jerry.

 

[Lanefan]

The delimeter here is whether you want the traps to be a deterrent (i.e. scare people away) or to actually trap people for later questioning-punishment-execution-etc.

Making traps big and obvious might work as a deterrent, but it's not going to catch anyone. And sometimes the whole reason for having a trap is to catch people.

There's a palace in my game that sooner or later (if that group ever reboots) a party is going to have to break into; and they've already been warned the place is something of a honey trap: easy to get into but very very difficult to get out of. Its anti-Thief defenses are designed this way so the palace owners (i.e. whoever's on the Empire's throne at the time) can thin out the ranks of those who would dare try to steal from or spy on them by luring them in and then making sure they never come out.

 

[el-remmen]

 

[Reynard]

We have had this discussion a number of times recently and it usually boils down to a couple opposing viewpoints.

There are those that want their traps to make sense in the fiction, which has a whole lot of cascading consequences but usually lands on "traps should kill intruders and secure locations."

Then there are folks who think traps are there for the game more than the fiction. This usually leads to "make them.dynamic and complex and encounters in their own right."

The other "school" usually can be summed up as "traps are dumb and/or unfun and don't belong in the game."

In the end, the discussion usually ends up being a proxy argument about agency and fairness.

 

[Maenalis]

Give the players an item with permanent sense trap?
They know it's there, they just don't know how it works, what it does or how to disable it?
It makes sense in the world and it makes sense at the table. Win-win?

 

[Reynard]

An interesting thing about traps from the old school is that they did not automatically go off. usually if you stepped on the plate or whatever, there was an X in 6 chance it would activate. So you might go down the hall and not even know there's a trap there -- which could be a problem when you were fleeing back down that hall later...

The real problem with traps is they tend to grind the game to a halt. Either the players are poking every square foot with a 10' pole, or they are spending 30 minutes trying to figure out how to bypass the pit trap.

 

[Quartz]

Wasn't there an article in Dragon along these lines? Sometimes you want one; sometimes the other.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

It's my number one advice on anything trap-related: reverse psychology. Common sense tells us the players are after the loot, and it's secured by well-hidden traps. Well, if you spring a trap you only got the one moment of discovery. Suspense is a much better dynamic at a gaming table. Put the traps out in the open. Make them big and elaborate. Avoid hiding them behind spot-checks, just tell the players what the obstacles are so that they can start racking their brains at it. Then you start getting the character interactions, the in-game anecdotes about how "it's just like when we were under Waterdeep", the Rube-Goldberg disarming schemes, people volunteering for crazy experiments. You don't even need much of an incentive or none at all. You can hide the loot. If anything, they will assume that an elaborate trap means that there's something important it's protecting, making them want it more than if it's out in the open. All you gotta make sure is that you honor that assumption. Even if it isn't loot, it should be worth the effort.

Now, of course that doesn't mean you can't have your trip wire or rolling boulder trap from time to time to mix things up. But in general I've found it much more rewarding to think of traps as obstacles that are to be investigated than surprises to be sprung on the party. Think more heist movie and less Tom & Jerry.

I think a mix is best!

We faced a freaky trap which required arms be inserted and a blood “sample” be extracted.

I surely squirmed when I could not withdraw my character’s arms!

On the other hand, I am down with the weird unexpected trap

 

[James Gasik]

I don't use a lot of traps anymore. Back in the day, the players would be incautious, I'd get to tell them some horrible thing occurred to them, they'd be annoyed, start religiously checking every 5' square of the map for awhile, slowing the game down to a halt and there'd be a long string of "you don't find any traps", they'd get careless again, etc. etc..

4e came along with passive Perception and things got easier, people didn't have to check every 5' square and if you had a good group spotter, you'd never run afoul of a trap. But occasionally this tactic would fail as there are really hard to find traps. So it came to pass that my 4e group sprung a trap and...

They took a little damage and just healed up. Which is when I realized that most traps don't have the same sting they once did. I wrestled with this for awhile, thinking maybe I should make traps more lethal, but then I was like, "do I really want a TPK because a tripwire made rocks fall for 5d10 damage? Is that as much fun as them encountering whatever hellish beasts lie ahead?", so I didn't change anything.

When I ran the 5e "converted" Sunless Citadel, there were tons of traps, and because I enforced the dim lighting rules, the party who thought they could sneak around everywhere because everyone had darkvision blundered into quite a few traps (mostly because the DC's were set too high for 5e, IMO) but all it did was drag out the proceedings, or make the party want to rest and eat up...well time that wasn't valuable at all, since the dungeon wasn't built on a clock, and if it was, it'd have been a disaster "we failed because some kobold set up a hallway full of crossbows".

Plus, as we went on, the players started asking the one question these trap-filled dungeons never seem to have an answer for- why are all these traps perfectly ready to go off every time? Why do you rarely encounter a trap that some giant rat or goblin set off? Who is maintaining these traps in this dank dungeon anyways, especially in areas "that have been sealed off for centuries"?

Sure a glyph of warding can last a long time, but why is it always the PC's that blunder into them, and you don't find any that were triggered by some other hapless fools?

Hence where I am now. Using traps pretty rarely because unless I make them super lethal, it's at most a speed bump in the adventure, and worse, usually a speed bump one guy gets to interact with "I roll an x, do I beat the trap or do we lose another healing spell?".

I could get the same result with more engagement by having the party enter a room with four orcs.

 

[J.Quondam]

Plus, as we went on, the players started asking the one question these trap-filled dungeons never seem to have an answer for- why are all these traps perfectly ready to go off every time?

The Trap Resetters Guild maintains some incredibly lucrative contracts with a number of liches, dragons, sorcerers, devils and other high profile (but necessarily very secretive) clients.