So I am a fairly low-on-traps DM, which is good, since when one pops up, none expects it...
Still, running one of my more recent games I decided to make a trap gauntlet, a long corridor of danger, with the prize at the end. In the movies and books this is a very fun concept, axes and spears randomly jerking out at no warning, turning floor tiles, flamethrowers... but it was greatly not fun in our session... granted, I am probably the one to blame, but our party was quite rouge-heavy.
Question, how to make it work? One of the ways I thought so far, is making traps ridiculously hard, so that the party must find a clever way to get by, or put it all on a timer, like a wall closing in behind them, pushing them forward. Automatons or monsters immune to traps, or traps themselves (ooze pits and oozes themselves) forcing a fight inside the gauntlet...
Any other ideas or experiences?
My advice is to try to use trap not as the main encounter but as an extra ingredient for something else.
Exactly my thoughts so far...
You throw down a gauntlet. You run a gantlet.
Thanks! English is not my first language...
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uh... I live in colorado and gauntlet is spelled the same if its a glove or a rite of abusive passage. Gantlet is only used as a railway term. I have a 178 iq and english is my first language. I don't know anyone that has ever used the word gantlet.
Well, one of my other (expensive) hobbies is model railroading, so I've actually heard of a gantlet before.
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At low levels traps are very dangerous. Also...traps don't have to have a way to disable them in the corridor room. The mechanism to disable them can simply be another room. I have seen a couple of adventures just do that.
Proximity alarm magical trap also works best, since you don't have to worry about the pc even finding the trap, it just activate as soon as they get close enough.
Make it a chase.
Grab the chase rules from the GMGuide, make each trap an obstacle, invent some need for haste (flooding dungeon, boulder chasing the PCs, rivals etc) and bam! Exciting!
Chases and haunts and traps are all awesome ideas and great in movies and action scenes. Not so hot in this particular game though. You can try and add more narrative elements and let people use alternative means of problem solving if you want to try making it more interesting. That might do a bit.
Traps are - in general - an odd feature of the game. They're iconic, but they're mechanically very strange.
The thing is that if PCs suspect traps, they can - and will - simply take 20 on their searches. If a party has a rogue-like character, they're usually guaranteed to find the trap. Then comes disabling, which you can't take 20 on. Thing is that usually you don't need to.
Worse, it's awkward to assign the disable DC. How often do you want your players to fail? Is a 50/50 chance okay? Hard to say. It's easier to make that kind of a call with a bad guy's AC because you know that there are going to be 3-4 rounds of combat, with many attacks made. A single bad roll isn't generally a big deal.
With a trap it's all or nothing.
Because of that, I believe most printed materials deliberately set the DC artificially low. They don't want 50/50 odds. They want low odds for a reasonably optimized character to fail. Which is what you get.
A trap that is not triggered is not a cool trap.
What players don't know about might as well not be. A monster with a bunch of abilities they don't learn about through Knowledge(bad guy) that doesn't get used in combat... pointless. Yeah, I know you need them because different players do different things, requiring different reactions, but ultimately hidden cool is not cool.
So I've thought about this a lot. And I remain convinced... traps are an odd feature. They kind of sort of don't work.
Traps are kind of bad. Only a few characters are designed to handle them well, and that's only part of what makes them bad. Only 1 member of a group can typically participate in disabling the traps. And they're very much all or nothing. If players have cause to believe an area is trapped they will take 20 to detect them (unless given some good reason not to) in which case they will detect them. If they don't detect them on taking 20 then they never had a chance and they will feel cheated on that. Then, so long as they don't fail by 5 or more they can keep retrying to disable the trap without other problems. And even if they manage to fail, the party usually has exercised caution. Only the rogue will be in the range of the trap. And will subsequently just be healed by the wand of cure light wounds. Unless of course a trap can outright kill the rogue, but then that it is a trap poorly chosen by the GM. If a player lost their character to a trap they'd be pretty unhappy about it.
Ultimately, without something else going on the trap is a simple drain on resources that is pretty easily mitigated by a little gold to hp exchange.