It takes the Trapsmith NPC from the NPC codex over a week to dig a 10ft hole in the ground(assuming he took 10 on his craft check).
Can you propose any fixes?
-Nearyn
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Choose to allow them to complete their work more quickly. That's about the only advice I know to give, all things considered. Traps are simply... not that threatening, so I'd say allowing them to be completed in a more reasonable frame of time is more than fair. Alternatively, if you're looking for ways to make traps kind of nasty, start throwing in symbols of pain, death, etc. in various places. Those are really the only traps that a party will have to be worried about, and they're already easy to put in place. Just uh... might want to adjust their power for lower level parties. =P Sadly, even those are easily dealt with.
Get creative with your traps. Have an obvious trip wire with a very difficult to spot pressure plate just on the other side, for example. The PCs will generally assume that it's safe to proceed and set off the actual trap. I would suggest anything from having it trigger an acid pit to the other, more hilarious pit that actually tries to nom people. Other options could be traps that summon monsters (conjuration traps are a lot of fun), traps that drop the PCs into a heretofore unknown room below and the walls start to close in, and so on. Even the good old spears coming out of the walls and ceiling gag can really be an adequate eye opener.
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Choose to allow them to complete their work more quickly. That's about the only advice I know to give, all things considered. Traps are simply... not that threatening, so I'd say allowing them to be completed in a more reasonable frame of time is more than fair.
You have never been brought from full hp to -10 on an 11 CON character before. By a single trap. Whilst playing your highest-level and favourite PFS character.
Traps. Are. Evil.
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Choose to allow them to complete their work more quickly. That's about the only advice I know to give, all things considered. Traps are simply... not that threatening, so I'd say allowing them to be completed in a more reasonable frame of time is more than fair.You have never been brought from full hp to -10 on an 11 CON character before. Whilst playing your highest-level and favourite PFS character.
Traps. Are. Evil.
I've never played an 11 CON character before. Come to think of it, I don't believe I've ever even had a PFS character go unconscious before. Must've been a hell of a trap, though. Guessing someone prepared explosive runes today? I know that happens in one scenario that I had the pleasure of GMing. A player was kind enough to read the inscription. >_> Regardless of demeanor or intention, I think we can all agree that as a GM, there's just something great about getting to say, "I have prepared explosive runes today." The look it puts on players' faces is priceless.
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Yeah, well, to be fair, I was a level 4 playing in tier 6-7...and it was a trap that got the whole party. The trap dealt some falling damage and then 1d4 spikes attacking at a bonus equal to my AC. The GM rolled a 4 on the 1d4 for me.
Still, it was evil.
Yeaaaahhhh, I can see how that might have been an issue. Falling damage is trivial at later levels, but it can be a real killer early on. Some calculations actually showed that a high level character could survive a trip into space, live through the burning damage of reentry, and still manage to survive slamming into the ground with all the speed of a meteor seeking its final resting place on top of it all.
The problem isn't confined to traps; all mundane crafting is broken. Basing the time-to-craft on the item's cost divided by DC, was a bad move. Lower-DC items, supposedly easy to make, take longer than equally expensive harder-to-make items.
I am inclined to agree whole heartedly with this. In fact, I'd go on to say that the magic items take too damn long to make as well. Sure, it was probably mostly done as a means to control character wealth, but it can really put a damper on parties that are very even anyway.
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Amusingly, magic traps are ridiculously overpowered if you make them self-resetting.
Magic Item Crafting with Cooperative Crafter can be as quick as you want. Get a few people with that feat and you multiple the speed by 2, 4, 8, etc (since it isn't a dice roll result, you use normal multiplication).
If you have a Valet familiar and can cast Simulacrum, then making a lot of cooperative crafters is pretty easy. Otherwise it is more expensive but still doable.
... I may or may not have had a character make a small army of fairly powerful simulacrums for this exact reason.
Can anyone suggest alternative rules on crafting in general then? Are there any good open source, or relatively cheap supplements that do a workover on crafting so as to make it better in general? Or fixes the ludicrous prizes of trapmaking for that matter? Aforementioned hole in the ground cost 62 gp and 5 sp to dig.
-Nearyn
cool, thank you very much everybody :)
Guess I have some reading to do
-Nearyn
Traps and poisons are problemtatic for the abstracted PF system (most game systems really, but especially this one). The hit point mechanic makes most of them not work well. A 20' deep pit with spikes on the bottom sounds lethal. And it is for a 1st or 2nd level victim. But your 5th level PC will be injured. Your 10th level PC will scarcely be inconvenienced.
Let's imagine you were setting a trap to deter thieves from using the secret escape route to get into your fortress.
Would you set a trap of a single low powered xbow bolt that will slightly injure someone in the unlikely event it hits them? Probably not, but you see that all the time in published scenarios.
No what you would do is set a trap that fills the corridor with flame to roast anyone in there. Of course a high level PC is suddenly not harmed by the fire.
You might set a guillotine blade to cut the first guy in half as he crawls through the low portion. Of course if he is a high level guy it scarcely hurts them.
So then I guess you would pay a fortune to have a really high damage trap to protect the weakest point in your defenses. Your a BBEG prince so you can afford it.
But most any player group is going to cry foul when the corridor fills with a 20d6 blast and TPK's the 3rd level party.
All in all, traps just don't make too much sense in the PF system. I still use them as GM. But sparingly. More to keep the party on their toes and remind them it is a dangerous situation than for any significant result.
A 'trap' that is mostly a noise maker/alarm makes sense, I often throw those around likely entry points.
From the PC side. Trap making sounds wonderful. But unless you have a group that really works with you and a campaign that can handle really slow progress, it just doesn't work out that well in practice.
Yes, a mid to high levels you can pretty easily make a bunch of traps to kill mooks. But did you really need much help handling the mooks? It won't really bother the lieutenants and BBEG's all that much.
No I don't have a suggested fix. The problem is a result of the system and would require a major revamp of the whole thing.
Traps can be useful if combined into a combat setting. They can make combat more interesting by making terrain dangerous to PCs while enemies may be able to ignore the dangers. Such as a trapped floor repeatedly casting burning hands, but the room if filled with fire elementals.
As set alone pieces, they slow the game down. Usually single out one specific person to try and disable it, assuming you're capable of spotting it. If no one can spot them, then the person with the highest hit points or reflex save usually gets stuck at the front. Or you summon a horse to walk in front of you for an hour per level. At best traps as an individual encounter are a drain on healing resources and not much else. They're not particularly fun for anyone unless you have a rogue player who decided to invest in it. And then, it's really only fun for him. Which sucks, because you had to make a special encounter for character to feel useful (some GMs do this on purpose, I don't really care for that as a player or a GM).
Alarm and divination traps with live (or undead) guardians work well and are less dangerous to the owner of the dungeon. But this doesn't mean traps can't work. I've seen a whole book with about 200 of them and some were quite creative, like a pit with a funnel and a shrink person spell (which expires quickly, trapping medium creatures inside), then submerging the trap with dirty water so they suffocate.
Dropping a porticulis in front of them and behind, while activating a firewall or cloudkill in between is also a good trap. Reverse gravity into a prismatic wall is also a good cheese grinder. Basically a good trap needs 2 things: some way to trap intruders and some way to kill them.
I've also got an idea to make a dungeon where the treasure is behind one of the walls (which the owner uses pass wall to access it and the wall otherwise looks ordinary, but they might find some traces with DC 25-30 Perception check) and a whole dungeon filled with traps and undead as a decoy. As a reward, the end of this dungeon contains a piece of paper with explosive runes.
The way I see it, a proper way to do a dungeon run is to use divination to scout it, then teleport or dig around it with magic. Or at least test every corridor with summon monster.
Sigh, looks like I'm a killer DM.
I'm not going to lie, this sounds awful. I would hate to play a melee character in your games.
Traps are best used in series, where the consequence of one trap sets off the trigger of another trap. When used in series, traps can really amp up the damage, even enough to take out high level characters. Make some of that series area effect traps and you can even have the potential to KO the entire party.
With high level parties, with traps, it is 'go big or go home'. Traps in modules, PFS play and APs tend to be single traps and that is why they are relatively ineffective against high level characters.
Don't be afraid for a module or an AP to swap out traps to replace them with another trap with more teeth (make sure to give out more XP accordingly), or make a 'Carnival of Carnage' trap (what my players call my series traps), with is a trap consisting of several traps in series.
Case in point. This one 'Carnival of Carnage' trap of mine is a favorite and you can change out elements to taste depending on the party level.
The first in the series is a simple spike pit trap. The opening of the pit trap cover triggers an area dispel meant to strip off protections and anti trap measures like feather fall, fly, stoneskin, etc.
The victims falling into the trap take the pit trap damage and the spikes but the impact now sets off another two trap, an area 'hold person' or a symbol of stunning and a trap that summons a swarm (or two or three) into the pit trap.
You see the elegance of the series. The second trap (the area dispel) ensures that feather fall or fly doesn't make it easy to avoid the consequences. Party members take falling damage and some or all are going to take spike damage. The third in the series (the hold person or symbol of stunning) would be inconsequential in of itself but it sets up an opportunity for the summoned swarms to maximize their damage because held or stunned party members can't escape or do anything about the swarms until they recover.
For higher level parties, just add in more elements or substitute more dire effects (like in the sample above, swap out the symbol of stunning for a symbol of death and have the hitting of the bottom of the pit activate a wall of arrows or a wall of spears trap.
I once in a really high level campaign had a death trap that consisted of TEN different traps elements. Each in themselves would be a minor threat to a high level character but together in rapid succession, it can potentially kill even a high level party.
Players in my campaign 'fear' traps as a result and respect them. I don't have players saying 'I'll just trigger the trap' knowing they can shake off the effect or suck up the damage. The last player who said that (many years ago) at one of my traps had their 18th level character die in the trap.
Hopefully, this is some inspiration to make traps more dangerous.
Happy Trapping!
Yes, you can make traps deadly. But killing of the entire party (or even one character) because you overpowered a trap to a point that the party never stood a chance is awful. It's not fun for anyone. Normal people don't want to be shoved into a meat grinder. Maybe if everyone knew from that onset it was going to be that type of campaign it would be one thing, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If you TPK a party because they had no chance of ever detecting or disabling the traps I have to ask you why you put the trap in?
Did you do it because you thought they could survive? If so, did you set the detection and disable DCs where the PCs had a likely chance (at least 50%) of doing so? Was it poor rolls on the part of the party that caused them to set off the trap? Did they have a character capable of disarming the trap or otherwise disabling it (summons)? Did you actually intend for them to survive?
It honestly sounds more like you're just trying to kill off players with overpowered traps instead of overpowered creatures. As a GM you don't win. You also don't lose. You can kill the players at any time you like, for any reason you like, in any way you like. But if you keep at it you wont have players for long.
In order to make traps as effective against high level as low level characters, it's possible to design traps that do a percentage of max HP instead of hard set amounts of Hitpoints or Stats. In order to stop making that a killer trap I suggest that someone who is reduced below 0Hp to recieve the remaining percentage of damage against the hitpoints his constitution score provides. So if you have 10% damage unused as the character went down then calculate 10% of his negative Hitpoints (with a minimum of 1) and detract it. Which will still leave the character bleeding off course (unless feats prevent that).
In order to give high level characters an edge give characters a Percentage reduction of their level.
I suggest not to allow the mixing of damage types (so either Hp or a Percentage) and certainly not in one trap. This will provide absolutely deadly traps for anything and the idea is to make traps dangerous (not always deadly) for any level and character.
Having players sweat if they will encouter percentage traps or Hard numbers traps will keep them on their toes.
I obviously gave the wrong impression. Sure, I can kill anyone off with a trap if I wanted but that is not my intent. Any DM can kill any party member or party off - just change orcs to balors in encounter X.
My intent is show how one can make traps more of a challenge to the party. It is just plain wrong in my book if the party attitude to a trap is just trigger it and take the consequences because the consequences are of little consequence to that character. Suck up the damage and heal. Easy pleasy.
I have seen these threads pop up time and again. The OP has asked if traps are useless. Perhaps, as they stand, depending on the party, the answer is yes, they are useless. I have heard of parties with no trap monkey in them because the drill on a trap is just trigger it and the party tank or the person with the highest saving throw sucks up the damage, the healers fix them up and away they go.
So I tried to address the question. Traps may be useless 'as is' but you can do yada yada yada to make them not useless.
Perhaps I should have put it in these terms. Traps can be designed to challenge even the highest party. They are neither useless or inconsequential. With my method, the challenge for the DM is NOT making a trap that can KILL the party. It is designing a trap that DOESN'T KILL the party but the consequences are such that the party can't take it for granted, can't simply trigger it and shrug off the effects on the trigger man and it forces the party to actually 'think' about how to bypass, mitigate, disable or otherwise deal with the trap.
I played as a player in one campaign in which the drill was for the party tank to simply charge down a corridor to set off the traps or to kick the door open. That isn't role playing, that is metagaming to the extreme because the party tank knows that his hit points and saving throws are such that he will get banged up a bit and survive and the party healer will heal him up and then it is off to do it all over again.
My traps can be bypassed, they can be disarmed and they can be disable. They can be dealt with by 'clever and inventive' thinking. They can't be simply triggered with the metagaming belief that 'I can take the damage' because that is when the trap will kill that fool.
Perhaps some people prefer a campaign in which Indiana Jones walked through the dart trap to get the statue or stood his ground against the giant rock bowling ball... or that Pharaohs trap their tombs to protect them against smurfs or care bears- but my players don't.
As to your comment about my type of campaign. My players love my campaigns and they love my traps. The war stories that sometimes get told by them fondly recount how so and so met his fate in a particular trap among the other recounting of success and failure against creatures and BBEGs that long time players who play together discuss.
In closing, consider this. Among old school DMs and players, why does 'Tomb of Horrors' come up time and time again in story telling or as a badge of honor. Because it was almost insanely hard to get through unscathed and it was considered a badge of honor to get through in one piece and you got bragging rights if you did.
Today, the Tomb of Horrors would be held out as a example of bad dungeon design. Gary didn't care about dungeon design back then - he wanted to scare the hell out of players and he succeeded. Yet if it was so bad, why to people line up to play it? Food for thought.
Traps are best used in series, where the consequence of one trap sets off the trigger of another trap. When used in series, traps can really amp up the damage, even enough to take out high level characters. Make some of that series area effect traps and you can even have the potential to KO the entire party.
With high level parties, with traps, it is 'go big or go home'. Traps in modules, PFS play and APs tend to be single traps and that is why they are relatively ineffective against high level characters.
Don't be afraid for a module or an AP to swap out traps to replace them with another trap with more teeth (make sure to give out more XP accordingly), or make a 'Carnival of Carnage' trap (what my players call my series traps), with is a trap consisting of several traps in series.
Case in point. This one 'Carnival of Carnage' trap of mine is a favorite and you can change out elements to taste depending on the party level.
The first in the series is a simple spike pit trap. The opening of the pit trap cover triggers an area dispel meant to strip off protections and anti trap measures like feather fall, fly, stoneskin, etc.
The victims falling into the trap take the pit trap damage and the spikes but the impact now sets off another two trap, an area 'hold person' or a symbol of stunning and a trap that summons a swarm (or two or three) into the pit trap.
You see the elegance of the series. The second trap (the area dispel) ensures that feather fall or fly doesn't make it easy to avoid the consequences. Party members take falling damage and some or all are going to take spike damage. The third in the series (the hold person or symbol of stunning) would be inconsequential in of itself but it sets up an opportunity for the summoned swarms to maximize their damage because held or stunned party members can't escape or do anything about the swarms until they recover.
For higher level parties, just add in more elements or substitute more dire effects (like in the sample above, swap out...
I like the idea, but if you use the dispel magic as a Magic dead area, the second set of spells will not go off!!!! Or at least not before the Dispel magic has ended. So it's either a dispel targetted at the victims to strip them (if they fail the opposed check) or a Magic dead area followed by mechanical traps.
Still like the idea of follow up effects after the magic dead area lifts though. The players sigh off relief and then bam they are hit :)
I highly recommend THE WURST OF GRIMTOOTH'S TRAPS by Necromancer Games. If nothing else, many of the traps in there are INSPIRING. They are what traps were always meant to be.
As for crafting times, I use FABRICATE. Totally lets me build a trap quickly out of surrounding natural materials, even right in the middle of combat!
I found this a handy 3PP product:
http://paizo.com/products/btpy8ffg?Making-Craft-Work
It's $0.99 and about two pages explanation/rules, and solves the problem in a common sense kind of way.
I've recommended this before and I'll do it again! I love these rules compared to the original ones.
I obviously gave the wrong impression. Sure, I can kill anyone off with a trap if I wanted but that is not my intent. Any DM can kill any party member or party off - just change orcs to balors in encounter X.
My intent is show how one can make traps more of a challenge to the party. It is just plain wrong in my book if the party attitude to a trap is just trigger it and take the consequences because the consequences are of little consequence to that character. Suck up the damage and heal. Easy pleasy.
I have seen these threads pop up time and again. The OP has asked if traps are useless. Perhaps, as they stand, depending on the party, the answer is yes, they are useless. I have heard of parties with no trap monkey in them because the drill on a trap is just trigger it and the party tank or the person with the highest saving throw sucks up the damage, the healers fix them up and away they go.
So I tried to address the question. Traps may be useless 'as is' but you can do yada yada yada to make them not useless.
Perhaps I should have put it in these terms. Traps can be designed to challenge even the highest party. They are neither useless or inconsequential. With my method, the challenge for the DM is NOT making a trap that can KILL the party. It is designing a trap that DOESN'T KILL the party but the consequences are such that the party can't take it for granted, can't simply trigger it and shrug off the effects on the trigger man and it forces the party to actually 'think' about how to bypass, mitigate, disable or otherwise deal with the trap.
I played as a player in one campaign in which the drill was for the party tank to simply charge down a corridor to set off the traps or to kick the door open. That isn't role playing, that is metagaming to the extreme because the party tank knows that his hit points and saving throws are such that he will get banged up a bit and survive and the party healer will heal him up and then it is off to do it all over again.
My traps can be...
Yeah, I think I just misinterpreted your original post. With your addiitonal explaination it doesn't sound nearly as bad. But I've had GMs who used traps that got really disappointed when they didn't work as he wanted. We summoned a mount to walk ahead of us and they would set the trap off and then would figure out how to deal with it. Either disabling it, or taking another route etc. It got to a point where he set up multiple avenues but trapped every one of them. We couldn't disable them, and they reset every round. So instead we left the dungeon.
My issue is when GMs don't give you a honest chance of success and want to force you to fail. If that was your goal, don't bother. Just tell us rocks fall and everybody dies.
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I'm not a fan of traps because they're basically boolean. Either you spot them or you don't. If you do, you either disable them or you don't.
I don't find that fun.
Traps lack all the struggle, teamwork, and ebb-and-flow of luck that normal encounters have. They're just little arbitrary packages of damage that you may or may not see coming. Meh.
I like the idea, but if you use the dispel magic as a Magic dead area, the second set of spells will not go off!!!! Or at least not before the Dispel magic has ended. So it's either a dispel targetted at the victims to strip them (if they fail the opposed check) or a Magic dead area followed by mechanical traps.
Still like the idea of follow up effects after the magic dead area lifts though. The players sigh off relief and then bam they are hit :)
Dispel Magic doesn'td create an anti-magic zone like effect, it simply 'turns off' ongoing magic effects. Permanent effects like magic swords are disrupted for a short period of time. It is not an anti-magic effect that is on for a short period of time as one can simply recast a dispelled spell effect immediately after the dispel triggers.
That said, regardless of how you choose to interpret dispel magic, in the sample trap I outlined, the bottom of the pit trap (where the triggers for the other two traps are) should not be affected by the dispel magic because the dispel trap is at the top of the pit trap and assuming you make the pit trap deep enough, the bottom of the pit is outside of the area of effect of the dispel magic. And there is no time to recast 'fly' before the person goes splat on the bottom.
I'm not a fan of traps because they're basically boolean. Either you spot them or you don't. If you do, you either disable them or you don't.
I don't find that fun.
Traps lack all the struggle, teamwork, and ebb-and-flow of luck that normal encounters have. They're just little arbitrary packages of damage that you may or may not see coming. Meh.
This sums up my feelings about traps better than I could.
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I'm not a fan of traps because they're basically boolean. Either you spot them or you don't. If you do, you either disable them or you don't.
I don't find that fun.
Traps lack all the struggle, teamwork, and ebb-and-flow of luck that normal encounters have. They're just little arbitrary packages of damage that you may or may not see coming. Meh.
Yes, to a degree but one can argue that combat is at it core is boolean. You either hit or you don't. You either are hit and take damage or you don't.
To make it less boolean, you can do something like this which I have done to make traps feel more organic and real instead of 'Sucks to be you, take x damage as the ceiling falls on you"
You can do a 'onset time round' as I call it. Obviously, you can make a trap that instantly drops the ceiling on them. Or, you could do something like this for example.
"As you step on the area before the altar, you feel the ground yield under your foot a bit and everyone now hears the start of a growing more loudly stone on stone grinding noise coming from the two doors and from above. Looking up, you see rock panels starting to slide down over the two open door ways, and dust and small gravel particles is falling from the edges of the ceiling where it meets the walls. 5...4...3...2...1"
My players know this protocol before hand. When I start counting down, they have to declare what they are doing before I hit zero. Traps triggering doesn't allow the time for party discussion on a course of action. This forces the characters to take decisive action without discussing it amongst themselves. So using my example, the party can infer that the ceiling looks like it going to fall and the door ways are being blocked to prevent them form escaping the trap.
Now the party members can either run and dive for either door, find a place in the room for cover or do some other action like it was a surprise round. The key thing is they have to decide individually rather than a group, hence the count down and individual declaration of action.
Based on their choices, each individual will either:
1- avoid the trap consequences
2- stumble into a possible 'out of the frying pan and into the fire' situation by diving through the closing door opening they have not explored where another trap, a monster or perhaps nothing awaits
3- do some thing to mitigate the trap effects, allowing me perhaps to allow a bonus on a saving throw or mitigate the damage output
4- take the trap damage like a hero and hope for the best
The former is clinical and boring. The latter allows for some great moments as the party scrambles to avoid getting trapped and crushed, with party members perhaps opting for the nearest door (potentially splitting the party temporary if they go out both doors) or trying something imaginative (like diving under or beside a solid looking room feature like that altar, stone plinths, etc.
Not so boolean now, nor is it boring from a player view point.
Edit: This was a actual trap encounter in a game of mine.
Two of the five characters independently opted to sprint and dive out the door they had come in. They took no damage.
Two other characters, base on where they were in the room, opted independently to go out the door way they hadn't checked out prior to checking out the altar ... and stumbled into a pit trap and took damage for it. Less one think that isn't fair, the party could have check that area outside the doorway before messing with the altar. They most likely would have found it and since my players know I like serialized traps, it would have implied that perhaps the room whey were in was trapped in some way.... Live and learn.
The fifth, being a gnome and rightly deducing that he most likely wouldn't make it to a door in time, opted to dive under the bench-like stone altar. He took minimal damage as the altar protected him from most of the falling ceiling, but he was buried and the party needed to dig him out.
Grimtooth's traps are anything but boolian.
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I'm not a fan of traps because they're basically boolean. Either you spot them or you don't. If you do, you either disable them or you don't.
I don't find that fun.
Traps lack all the struggle, teamwork, and ebb-and-flow of luck that normal encounters have. They're just little arbitrary packages of damage that you may or may not see coming. Meh.
I agree with your diagnosis: PF traps are too much a one-roll thing. Consider this example of a well-designed cinematic trap:
Indiana Jones scene with golden idol
To me, it looks like escaping is not one, but a series of actions (with their own skill checks). If you have a head start, you can survive missing one or two checks, but eventually the big ball catches up to you.
Maybe a good dramatic guideline is: the more damage the trap can do (relative to the PCs durability), the more "steps" it takes for the trap to complete.
Trapping him in the cave to die of thirst.
Traps are good when used in combination with one another.
Example:
No level 1 character thinks the 1/2 pit trap that does 1d6 non-lethal is dangerous until there are Bear Traps at the bottom of the pit trap. Fall in, and boom, they make their attacks VS flat-footed since they have not been perceived.
Magical traps that cast deeper darkness and greater invisibility on everyone before the floor falls out into a dusty room. The PCs can only see the empty spaces as well as an equal number of invisible enemies in the pit. The invisible enemies attack the party, and the room they are dropped into is filled with a permanent zone of silence.
The PCs in this setup end up attacking one another, hence making their own lethality their own worst enemy. The invisible enemy might be an illusion, and each illusory enemy has the AC of the PC it is representing.
I agree in part with T O N. Traps should be used in conjunction with something. A simple pit trap might also have bell attached; when it triggers the bell rings. A round later kobolds appear with javelins from the next room.
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I think it sums up everyone's opinions when it's said that traps are best used in conjunction with something. I tend to use traps alot when PC's grant BBEG enough time to prepare against them, such as when they decide to stop going through middle of dungeon and fall back to strike another day.
While it's pointless thing if traps have low DC's in combat situations, no PC will bother disarming them or checking for them while that murderous ogre is pounding their ally infront. This is a reason why they can be more effective then usual.
Malag
The problem isn't confined to traps; all mundane crafting is broken. Basing the time-to-craft on the item's cost divided by DC, was a bad move. Lower-DC items, supposedly easy to make, take longer than equally expensive harder-to-make items.
This suggests that the trapsmith ought to be allowed to raise the DC in return for a greater divisor. Perhaps we could rework the math that way...?
