I run a lot of traps in my game, and my players love them. They ask me for more. My traps are often better and more memorable than the monsters. Yes, I admit it: I am bragging. This is one of those exceedingly rare cases where I am justified in doing so. Some folks on here are going to say that my way is like puzzles which are like riddles which are only fun for people who like solving riddles but their characters are smarter than the players playing them so they should just get a skill roll representing their superior in-world skillz blah blah blah. My response: haters gonna hate. Here's how I do it. First, get rid of this notion of two skill rolls. If you go that route, you don't even need to describe the trap. Why bother, right? You're just wasting our time with flavor, Mr. DM: let's get on with the good stuff. So it's effectively like this, plus a bit of flavor: the rogue rolls well, "You find a trap," rogue rolls well again, "Ok, you successfully disarm it." Blech. Make your traps so the characters absolutely know there is a trap. Just put it out there for everyone to see. Neon lights, -->TRAP HERE<--. A hallway with spikes poking out of the walls on either side, and a lever at the far end next to a ladder going up. Rogue rolls to detect trap. "Yep, it's a trap, folks." Duh. Ok, but how to disarm it? Roll a skill roll, and if he succeeds, he pulls the lever? Is this before or after he walks past the spikes? This is an unfair example, of course, because the spikes are just there for show and the ladder is the trap. The monk pulls a ridiculous acrobatics stunt, jumps past the spikes without a scratch, gets on the ladder, goes halfway up, and - hoping to disarm the spikes for his friends - pulls the lever, which releases a lock that was holding the section of wall that the ladder is on in place. His weight makes the wall segment spin him around upside down to the other side where he is unceremoniously dumped into an underground lake 70' below, assuming he fails a reflex roll. Swimming rolls and lake monsters are always good for some instant high drama, amiright? Subterfuge. Misdirection. These are the tools for good traps. Now, if you're a merciful DM, you could rule that the rogue's trap check revealed that the spikes or the walls they're on can't possibly move. So what on Earth is that lever for, then? Make them sweat. Another fun trap trick is what I call "the second stage." Example: the room is roughly conical in shape, with the floor serving as the base, and the ceiling is so high up your light source doesn't quite penetrate the shadows up there. In the center of the room is a dragon's egg, held tight in a gold stand shaped like claws that's bolted to the floor. Ooh, you think this room is trapped? Maybe? The rogue rolls a '1', but c'mon, everyone knows it's a trap. The dumb fighter steps closer into the anti-gravity field and takes a bunch of d6's damage from the fall to the ceiling. What he finds there, and what the party would have found had they figured out a way to get some light up there, is some skeletons in rusty armor. The key word here being "rusty." ...because a panel halfway up opens up and water starts pouring in. And because of the anti-gravity, it falls up. Now the party is in a race against time to figure out how to get their wounded warrior buddy out of there before he drowns. And as DM, you drop this on them (heh) only after the laughter regarding the anti-gravity fall dies down. They think it's over. Ok Mr. DM, that was a good one! Now how do I get back up- er, down? "Well, that's the thing, see, because OH HEY HERE COMES WATER!" So what role does the rogue play in this trap system with fewer rolls? Great question! He's the guy who stocks up on all the right supplies! This kind of trap trains players to stock up on pebbles, rope, iron spikes, 10' poles and the like. He specializes in knowing what kinds of supplies to bring (and here is a place where the DM, through NPCs, can give helpful hints back in town). He also puts points in Climb and Acrobatics. These skills tend to come in handy with these kinds of traps. As does Perception. You don't use the rogue's successful rolls to solve the trap; instead, you reward him with clues. Like informing him he doesn't think the spikes would move, or that the fact that the stand is bolted to the floor gives him a funny feeling. Ok, so the next thing to think about is how to make the traps make sense. Why would such a trap be in this dungeon? What possible purpose would it serve? How would the locals avoid setting it off? This helps with the verisimilitude thing. And I have also found that limiting myself by asking these questions in advance - and by thinking about who would have designed the trap - actually enhances the creative process. One final trap as an example. The party comes to a cylindrical room 30' across. 15' below the ledge where the party is standing is a pool of centuries' worth of waste material teleported from a bunch of magical chamber pots in the detention cells of an elven supermax prison. The depth of the foulness cannot be fathomed: the pool covers the entire bottom of the room. In the center of the room is a stone column, 2' across, that rises up out of the muck to the height of the party's ledge. On top of the column is a bizarre sci-fi-looking gizmo that the party still has no clue what it could be. Hanging from the ceiling a few feet above the gizmo is a clear globe in which floats a large brain. Keen perception will reveal tiny holes in the wall on the far side of the room. So...is this a trap? I think we all know the answer by now. The rogue reasons that the holes may be for darts. The mechanism must get loaded somehow, right? He searches and finds a secret door to a corridor that leads around to a chamber containing the mechanism. Free poison, anyone? Yay. And this is what I'm talking about: it has to make sense. Darts coming out of a wall without a way to put them in the wall makes zero sense. Ok, we still have to figure out how to get the gizmo. We need the gizmo, of course. We don't know why, but we're an adventuring party, and so we must have the gizmo. Never mind that the elves thought it would be a good idea to lock it away safely in this weird locale. So... the concept behind this trap from a fun-for-the-DM perspective is to tempt the monk to make an acrobatic leap for the column. After all, the darts have been disabled, right? I meant for the darts to be disabled so the monk would feel secure enough to jump. And when he jumps, he'll go SPLAT! up against the invisible wall halfway across, and slide into the muck. Hello, acid damage anyone? But by this point the monk's player is wise to my ways, and he tosses a silver coin across to the column, revealing the presence of the invisible wall. Am I disappointed? Not in the slightest, because by now everyone has a clear visual about what might have happened and it is hilarious. After that it was just a matter of figuring out the dimensions of the wall and a way around it. Obscuring Mist to locate its contours, and a combination of Entangle for vegetation on the ceiling and some nifty climbing and rope work by the rogue. Strictly legal by RAW? Who knows. I allowed it because traps are supposed to be fun and theirs was a creative solution. And if they hadn't disabled the darts first? Then when they did manage to get to the gizmo, that's when the second stage of the trap would have hit. It works both ways. Which brings me to one more thing. Afterwards, the monk's player asked me if they had found my solution. "My solution?" I asked. "I had no solution in mind." This confused the player and he was angry for all of one minute while I explained to him that this trap was made for a purpose by the elves: to keep the gizmo safe (from a very specific race, actually). The elves did not design it with this particular adventuring party in mind. But - and I have found this to be repeatedly true - the players will always find a way. You can count on it. So...that's it. I got a few score of these traps. To me, preparing traps is way more fun than statting up monsters in Hero Labs. Just sayin'. NOTE: No PCs were killed in the exploration of these traps. The monk made his reflex save, the fighter was hoisted up/down, and we already saw how they got the gizmo. But I'll add that I prefer traps that inconvenience or wound the characters if sprung, rather than insta-killing them.
We learned that the pre-generated characters do not come equipped with tinder boxes or matches, despite having torches. My 11-year old daughter, showing her true colors as a troll GM, laughed maniacally as we were unable to see where we were going. A quick return trip to town for tinder boxes, followed by someone finally agreeing to play the wizard (light), fixed things. Has anyone else noticed that when kids play, the tiniest details become important?
English to Welsh dictionary for all your elf naming needs. EDIT: I typically take what it gives me and clean it up a bit.
ElyasRavenwood wrote: So Lvl 12 procrastinator, I think I have a different opinion from you. That's the beauty of this game, that it can be played differently by different groups and still be fun for everyone. As DM, I respond to the desires of my group. My group doesn't like it when the game gets too "meta." They call me out on it, and they call each other out on it. So if I were to spare a PC just because he/she is a PC, that would be too meta. It would break their immersion in the game world. I'm sure your group is different than mine. I don't believe either group is better or more right than any other. That's a great thing about this game.
wraithstrike wrote: You will also notice that the OP cleared up several things as the post went on, but he never denied the rape charge. That's right. Either he forcefully raped her or she irrationally let him have his way with her due to Stockholm Syndrome. Either way she was his victim, and he was abusive. Whether or not this particular medusa was evil prior to her imprisonment is immaterial as far as I'm concerned. Her original imprisonment may or may not have been justified, but it did not include being left to the beast. That happened when everything went to hell after the disease he was carrying spread throughout the prison. Guards mutated into sadistic monsters and prisoners escaped their individual cells and formed gangs. To the mighty went the spoils. The medusa was a prize. My point is, in this situation I saw her as a victim, regardless of her past. I didn't delve deeply enough into her backstory to know her original crime, if any. If the monk had taken mercy on her and they asked for her history, I would like to think that I would have been creative enough to come up with something like, oh I dunno, like she was a headmistress at a school for the blind or something (brilliant, that!), but chances are I wouldn't have been so quick. Alias
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