D&D 5E Why traps in D&D usually suck

[DMSage]

Traps
(by DMSage.com)
​

Traps are rarely used correctly in D&D and other roleplaying games. This article is going to show you how to avoid making your epic level rogue appear blind as a naked mole rat, how to prevent your players from feeling like you insta-killed them with an impossible surprise, and how to construct quality traps that give your players something to feel good about SOLVING.


I chose the word solving intentionally in the last paragraph because I’m going to share the story of the first puzzle I gave my players to solve the very first time I DMed.


My characters were locked outside of a massive dungeon door in the bowels of a crumbling ancient castle. The door had five colored slots inset at its base into which five matching colored orbs had to be placed. The orbs were hidden in the ruins scattered around the empty old castle which I had mapped out on paper.


In this puzzle, the PLAYERS are trying to solve a puzzle and the CHARACTERS are trying to solve a puzzle. This is a very important distinction. The solution to the puzzle, as you might have guessed, is that the green orb goes in the green slot. The blue orb goes in the blue slot. That was the solution to the puzzle I had given my PLAYERS to solve! Unless they were toddlers or colorblind, it will take them two seconds to find the solution. I was aware of this.


The reason I thought this puzzle might work was because the true puzzle was for the CHARACTERS to solve. The orbs were hidden throughout the rubble of the abandoned castle and the characters had to go out and find them. The puzzle that I thought was being solved in my mind was the characters searching for the orbs.
The puzzle turned into a disaster. My players would search for the orbs in the rooms they were in, but I knew once they found all the orbs the puzzle was over. In an attempt to prolong the puzzle I made, I would withhold information that the characters should have noticed and ask them to make perception checks hoping they would fail to make my puzzle worth while. Inevitably they would fail a check and ask to make another. Of course I had to let them because if they didn't find it they couldn't move forward. Eventually I had to give up on the whole concept of this puzzle and just start telling them where the orbs were to move the game along. This puzzle failed on many levels and I have learned a lot since then.
My takeaway from this was that FINDING something is not a quality puzzle for players.


To make a quality puzzle you must give your PLAYERS something to solve.


To make a quality trap you must give your PLAYERS something to solve.


Imagine the king of your land is suspended above a lava pit by a rope which is slowly burning. Now that’s a puzzle. That is something your players have to solve by flying, using spells, stopping the rope burning to buy more time, or begging an NPC to swing him to safety. This puzzle gives lots of options to your players and makes them think. They can't just solve it with a roll of the dice.






My realization in figuring out how to make exciting puzzles, is that traps behave the same way as puzzles. They need to have something for the players to solve and choices for the players to make.


Before we go on I want to briefly talk about how senses work in D&D. I think this topic warrants an article of its own but I’ll overview it here.


As a dungeon master, you must be extremely cognizant of the fact that your players don’t have senses in your world. While the DM has a vivid picture in his head, the players get only the information you tell them and nothing more. Abusing this fact can make your characters appear blind and your players feel cheated. Many DMs try to hide their own game making flaws by withholding sensory information the players should have. To me, this is cheating.


As a DM you must be clear with your players in your descriptions. When entering a new area, players should be told ALL relevant sensory input their character would get. A DM should give clues, hints, and foreshadows all the time.


And this leads us back to traps.





Typically, the main puzzle of a trap is the perception of it. Once the trap is spotted it is also solved and that makes them boring. Many DMs try to make their traps more interesting by leaving out sensory information and giving no clues to the traps whereabouts. This causes the players to miss the trap and stumble onto it. While more entertaining, there is a better way.


There are two ways a DM can shift the responsibility of finding the traps. He can make it the character’s responsibility by calling for perception checks, using passive perception, or rolling randomly to represent the characters searching for the traps using their abilities or the DM can make it the players responsibility to find the traps by requiring players to state where and how they are looking and requiring them to state the specific skill checks their characters are making.


There are positives and negatives to each:





Character’s responsibility


Negatives
Finding traps is random, based on dice rolls only
Getting hit by a trap feels unfair because there is no way to avoid it
Traps are either found or not found. It might as well be predetermined.
Players have no choices or tactics to employ. There is nothing to solve, traps are boring

Positives
Uses character’s skills
Allows for role-play and backgrounds to find traps
Exemplifies the rogue’s individuality, skills, and training in the game



Player’s responsibility


Negatives
Players don't have access to in game senses
Slows down the game with random checks everywhere
Doesn’t use character’s stats
Reduces character individualization if everyone can find traps regardless

Positives
Finding traps is not random
Feels more fair if the players can find traps
Players have something to solve
Players have choices to make



In order to have a high quality trap DMs need to accomplish several things:

• Finding traps should not be based on luck
• The DM needs to make sure random trap searching doesn't slow down the game
• Players need to have choices and puzzles to solve
• Solving traps should require the use of character skills, feats, and backstories to highlight character individuality and role play

My solution involves these steps:


Designing Quality traps

• Give it a story
• Design its components and solutions
• Identify its starting clues
• Identify skill check requirements
• Make it harder over time

Running quality traps

• Give sensory clues
• Find other ways to interact with/trigger the trap
• Adjudicate solutions
• Adjust difficulty

Find out how to fix this in the next article at DMSAGE.COM

 

[Wik]

All well and good, but really, you're going super generic here. How do you give a trap a story, for instance? And, just as importantly - why? If you give a trap a story, is there a way for the PCs to discover that story? Should there be?

I have a few rules for traps in my own game:

1. They must be in a place where a PC would look. Do not put traps in a place you don't want the PCs slowing the game down to search. So, no traps in empty hallways. Searching for traps is always a player's responsibility, UNLESS a passive perception check could conceivably find it. This, however, should only really happen in combats... and personally, I rarely use traps in combats.

2. Relay information based on perception checks. I allow PCs to make all their checks, so they know if they flubbed the check. They do not remake the check. They DO tend to treat any flubbed check as if the item were trapped - which is fine. They roleplay out how they're going to defend themselves.

3. Traps are not just damage causers. They are also time sinks. If PCs spend a long time "solving" the trap, they are consuming a non-renewable resource in the dungeon.... time. Wandering monsters happen, you see. If you have Wandering Monsters in your dungeons, traps make a lot more sense.

4. Failed disarm rolls do NOT trigger the trap! Or, at least, they do not trigger the trap unless the PC missed the DC by a margin of 5 or 10, or rolled a 1. This goes back to how the trap rules were originally supposed to work in, say, BECMI. This means that PCs that know a trap is there might not even try to disarm it, but will figure out the best approach to "solve" the trap without rolling dice.

This is an "old school" approach, but it goes sort of like this: every time you roll a die, you risk death. So, don't roll dice if at all possible. In a trap, PCs find the trap and the vector of how it's going to kill them ("It's a poison needle that shoots out of the chest"). They could risk a roll, but it might make more sense to prop up a shield, have people clear the room, and then go about opening the silly thing.

5. They involve player choice. Players should have the choice of whether they want to interact with the trap or not. In other words, it doesn't block the railroad, but is an option for further exploration (one of the three tiers of play, and really, the tier that traps should almost always belong in). In addition, if possible, give players an option in HOW they interact with the trap. If, for example, they encounter the poison needle trap above, they could either try to roll dice (the quick approach, but the one with a chance for failure), or solve it as a puzzle (the smart approach, but one that takes time in game).

6. Make them quick unless the whole party is involved. Most traps are simple "gotchas", and so should be resolved quickly. If they are complex and require some puzzle solving, they should involve the whole group... not just the rogue with a huge disarm score.

 

[mestewart3]

I have a few rules for trap design that I like to use.

1) Clues: I always make sure that there are hints that a trap is present in my ordinary checkless description of a location. This doesn't mean I just tell players there is a trap of course. I try to have just as many red herrings and false leads as I do traps. That keeps players on their toes.

2) Traps should always have intellectual solutions. Even the rogue has to find the trap mechanism in order to interact with it. Traps are never as simple as rolling a single check.

3) Traps should never be an auto kill. This is a preference thing, but I hate Traps that autokill players. I have never seen a player have a good experience with one of those. Poisons, slowly filling chambers, last second ledge grabs, and getting stuck are the makings of a good trap.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

This is an "old school" approach, but it goes sort of like this: every time you roll a die, you risk death. So, don't roll dice if at all possible. In a trap, PCs find the trap and the vector of how it's going to kill them ("It's a poison needle that shoots out of the chest"). They could risk a roll, but it might make more sense to prop up a shield, have people clear the room, and then go about opening the silly thing.

So much this. And it applies to combat, too. You're not supposed to face down a save-or-die monsters like a Banshee, secure in your +11 to Con saves--you're ideally supposed to kill the Banshee without ever making a Con save at all. The +11 is just your emergency backstop if all else fails.

 

[Wik]

So much this. And it applies to combat, too. You're not supposed to face down a save-or-die monsters like a Banshee, secure in your +11 to Con saves--you're ideally supposed to kill the Banshee without ever making a Con save at all. The +11 is just your emergency backstop if all else fails.

Yeah. It's why there were so many save-or-die effects back in the day.... they weren't really expected to come up much.

When it comes to traps, I always put them in the exploration part of the game. PCs are not in high stress situations, and there isn't usually a war of attrition going on that is the nature of combat in D&D. Because of that, trap damage in my games usually winds up being on the higher side of things - a little shy of "deadly".

My reasoning is, the PCs should bypass the damn thing anyway... and if they don't, they should be hurt hard enough so that next time they disarm a trap, they know what they've accomplished and feel good about it.

I do try and avoid the old school metagamey traps though. Traps, for example, that when triggered fill a nearby room with gas and not the room the chest is in (to kill the party hiding in the next room). Or pits that, when prodded with a 10' pole, open up a pit 10 feet away. Those were never fun.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I use two different types of traps.

1) simple resource attrition traps (mostly resolved by dice rolls, bit of roleplaying)
2) set piece trap challenge (more of an encounter in itself, longer investigation time, significant decision making)

The two kinds of traps serve different purposes. Whether either or both of these kinds of traps are appropriate will vary from adventure to adventure.

 

[Uchawi]

I ask why is the trap there? Is it to prevent someone from going in or out? Is it to alarm others? Is set offensively or defensively? I could keep going but the reason it is there leads to everything else and the mechanics involved. Just don't place a trap for the sake of the trap itself.

 

[Wik]

I ask why is the trap there? Is it to prevent someone from going in or out? Is it to alarm others? Is set offensively or defensively? I could keep going but the reason it is there leads to everything else and the mechanics involved. Just don't place a trap for the sake of the trap itself.

Generally agree... but it's D&D. Sometimes, you just HAVE to have that trap that's a revolving door with a gelatinous cube at the bottom, logic be damned.

 

[Uchawi]

Well of course D&D logic by that means allows anything. And it is pretty easy to explain in that context why the revolving door (based on weight of lighter denizens) has a garbage disposal at the bottom

 

[The Crimson Binome]

To make a quality puzzle you must give your PLAYERS something to solve.


To make a quality trap you must give your PLAYERS something to solve.

That's meta-gaming. In a role-playing game, the PLAYERS don't exist.

If you think that traps and puzzles are boring, then you don't have to include them, but asking the PLAYER to do something rather than the CHARACTER is missing the whole point of a role-playing game.

Proficiencies exist for a reason. It is no more reasonable for a stupid barbarian to cleverly bypass a trap, in spite of low Intelligence and no training in thieves' tools, than it is reasonable for an ugly barbarian to negotiate passage from hostile guards in spite of low Charisma and non-proficiency in Persuasion. It shouldn't matter if the PLAYER is a mechanical engineer or a stand-up comedian, because the PLAYER isn't actually there!