D&D General Your Best Traps +

[BookTenTiger]

I want to hear about your best traps. Not necessarily your most deadly, but your most memorable, tricky, fun traps.

For me, it was a corridor at the end of which was a statue that caused anyone who looked at it to be Frightened. The players figure out they could close their eyes and walk down the hall... Right into a hidden pit trap!

 

[Jacob Lewis]

This one time, at a local gaming store, I recently invited people to play Dungeons & Dragons. Then, when they all had gathered, I pulled out my 4th edition books. Classic!

 

[Lyxen]

Most memorable trap was not in a TTRPG but a LARP. I had put a label on the players map at a crossroads called "Crossroad of the trap". And there was a chest in the middle of the crossroad.

It was actually several boxes nested within each other. And there were magical traps inside each box, so that if you opened the innermost chest, you would get an effect, but you would also get an effect if you pulled out one of the boxes to look at the bottom of the box it was in. Only traps, magical ones that caused you to flee, drop some money in the chest and close it, attack players around you, etc.

I think we caught most of the players (there were about 250) of the LARP with this (sometimes several times with chests of varying levels), they could not resist the temptation.

 

[Seramus]

Grimtooth has so many, but my favorite is a large room full of sharp glass statues. When enough weight (the party) reaches the halfway point, the whole room tips forward.

You go siding. All the statues come crashing down. It's all fragile glass. Your decision if the far side of the room has a real door, a fake door, or a real fake door. And how will you open it beneath a small mountain of broken glass?

If the door IS fake, you have to wade through sharp glass and climb out the way you came, which now leads somewhere else because the whole room tipped.

 

[James Gasik]

This is a stupid one, but my players keep falling for it. In the 3e DMG, there's a trap listed as "contact poison smeared on a doorknob". Surely, said I, in my innocence, nobody is going to fall for this! So as a lark, I had the Hobgoblin Chieftain use that to protect his treasure room.

The Rogue didn't even search for traps.

One campaign later, I decided, for fun, let's do it again.

The Rogue FAILED to notice the easily spotted trap.

This started to become a running gag. The third time, and I don't even know how they knew, but my roommate suddenly stopped as he was about to open a door. "Hey, you know my armor has gauntlets, right?"

"Sure do."

He opens the door.

Half an hour later, the party is fleeing enemies, and they get to the door. The Rogue says "I close the door!"

(Cue a shot of my roommate giving the Big No in slow motion).

 

[LordEntrails]

In the first level of Undermountain I put a mimic disguised as an armoire. Pretty typical right? Well it was sitting alone in a room, party was immediately suspicious (as they had a right to be). Well, no one in the party wanted to approach it or investigate and they were going in circles. So the party wizard (2nd level I think) got fed up and boldly states that he walks up to it and opens it.

The mimic attacks with surprise. I roll a critical, and then maybe one point shy of max damage. Oops, instant death! We still joke about it 3 years later.

 

[James Gasik]

Oof. If you think it might be a mimic, throw some ranged attacks at it first!

 

[LordEntrails]

Oof. If you think it might be a mimic, throw some ranged attacks at it first!

pfft, yea. Lots of ways to check for mimics and traps, but they just couldn't figure it out that session!

 

[Joshy]

Let the players come across a shapechanger or two. Make a situation where they lose sight for a moment.
Roll some dice, makes some grunts and maybe give a couple quick glances at one or two players.
Tell the group they can can't look at each others paper and then hand out of pieces of folded paper to everyone that says something, usually along the lines of "Not the Shapeshifter".

The trap is that none of them are the shapeshifter, let the mayhem begin.

 

[Lanefan]

I've long had ideas on how to somehow use highly-localized gravity wells to mess up mapping and-or spatial orientation, but I've never been able to figure out how the result would work; and as one of my players is a high-degree physicist I gotta get it right!

Best I can think of is having what seems like a level passage actually lead to a different level.

As for more conventional traps, my favourites aren't so much pit traps as chute traps - a pit-like trap leading to a chute or slide that harmlessly spits the victim(s) out in a different area (a jail cell works best!) on a lower level with different hazards while completely cutting them off from the rest of the party.