Just a quick question on XP for traps. Let's say I have a hallway that the adventurers traverse that has a fireball trap in it. Obviously, if the find the trap and disarm it, they get the XP, but what happens if they walk down the hall cluelessly, trigger the trap, take massive damage from it, but not enough to kill them, then continue down the hall into the next room without actually doing anything with or about the trap except for being hit by it. Do they still get the XP award for that trap?
Thanks
Craig1234 wrote: Just a quick question on XP for traps. Let's say I have a hallway that the adventurers traverse that has a fireball trap in it. Obviously, if the find the trap and disarm it, they get the XP, but what happens if they walk down the hall cluelessly, trigger the trap, take massive damage from it, but not enough to kill them, then continue down the hall into the next room without actually doing anything with or about the trap except for being hit by it. Do they still get the XP award for that trap?
Thanks
I'd argue that they did, because they did beat it, after all.
I mean, compare with monsters: You get XP if you survive them, whether or not they damage you.
By RAW, they get XP.
Kinda silly, but them's the rules.
That's what I thought, I suppose the learning represented by the XP award is "Don't go down that hallway again" - but it doesn't seem like that's as much learning as figuring out there's a trap and stopping it. Oh well. Thanks for the clarification.
Actually, let me extend this with this situation. I have a secret door that is trapped. If the adventurers never find the door, do they still get XP for the trap? I would think not in this case as they never really encountered the trap, but what do you folk think?
Craig1234 wrote: Actually, let me extend this with this situation. I have a secret door that is trapped. If the adventurers never find the door, do they still get XP for the trap? I would think not in this case as they never really encountered the trap, but what do you folk think? Correct. They don't get XP because they didn't encounter the trap.
However, if they do find the door, find the trap, and decide "Yeah, we're not going through this door and taking the trap to the face." THEN (most importantly) they find another way around to whatever room was on the other side of the door, they get full XP for bypassing the trap.
If they ignore the trap and never find the room it was guarding, they get no XP.
I don't think so, because they didn't actually successfully overcome it. In some cases, avoiding a conflict may count as beating it, but merely failing to go there or get whatever results usually doesn't.
There's a certain amount of intuition to this. Did the players do something that reasonably counted as overcoming a challenge? Merely not doing a thing doesn't count, but a clever strategy that allows them to accomplish a result without overcoming the challenge might.
Examples:
* There's a trapped secret door. We don't find it. We don't go to the room beyond. No XP.
* There's a trapped secret door. We make it through the secret door. We get XP. It doesn't matter whether we disarmed the trap or survived failing to; we overcame it and got to the thing it was protecting.
* There's a trapped door. We don't know it's trapped, but we have a paranoid spellcaster who concludes that it would make sense for it to be trapped, so instead of trying to open it we use magic to go around it somehow. We get XP for overcoming the barriers to getting wherever that door goes.
* There's a trapped secret door, which we don't find, but our mapper concludes there has to be a room, and someone uses passwall to get there. I'd give XP for this one, because even though your strategy was unconventional, and you didn't even know the threat was there, you got into the room despite protections.
* There's a trapped secret door between two rooms, which are also connected by other passages. We don't find the door, but we explore the rest of the place and end up finding both rooms. I would not give XP for the door/trap in this case.
Basic rule of thumb is XP = challenge overcome, to use an example there's a room with a young dragon lurking in it. If the party kill the dragon they get the XP, if they find out about the dragon and take another route to avoid it they get the XP, if they blunder onto another route and never even knew the dragon was there they don't get the XP.
For your secret door it would help to know why its there but offhand if they neither beat the trap nor deliberately bypassed it by another route no they shouldn't get the XP. They didn't overcome the challenge they just didn't know it was ever there.
Unless you're playing PFS, you're free to house-rule things if you don't like them.
Traps have always caused problems for me for a number of reasons. Cases like the one you describe are one such reason, but another is that their CR is heavily over-valued. Your fireball trap has the same CR as a 5th level wizard (4 in both cases), but any suggestion that they are equitable inclusions to an encounter is simply ludicrous. Traps eat through an encounter's XP budget at such an alarming rate that I find they can't aren't usable, and if you do use them the amount of easy XP you're handing to the party means they'll level up very quickly.
Quote: If the adventurers never find the door, do they still get XP for the trap? I would think not in this case as they never really encountered the trap, but what do you folk think? No, they didn't encounter the trap in that case, you are correct.
Dasrak,
I noticed what you mean about traps, I quickly calculated the CR of the one I'm working on, which is actually an acid spray, and if I did it correctly, it was somewhere around CR 10 or 12. What I ended up doing, because it made me feel good (lol), was to reduce the damage done by the trap to 2d6 (from 5 or more), because more than that would likely kill off the party. Then I looked through the sample traps to find one that did roughly the same amount of damage (CR3-4) and assigned it a value of CR3 instead. Does anyone else have better ways of doing traps that both make sense in terms of XP and don't blow the budget?
Thanks,
Craig1234 wrote: That's what I thought, I suppose the learning represented by the XP award is "Don't go down that hallway again" - but it doesn't seem like that's as much learning as figuring out there's a trap and stopping it. Oh well. Thanks for the clarification. Well, there is the learning experience of "let's be more careful going down these dungeons, yes?".
You could also say that they learned "ok, next time, as soon as you hear the click or ominous latin chanting coming from the walls, you run". Essentially, they trained their reflex saves.
Craig1234 wrote: Does anyone else have better ways of doing traps that both make sense in terms of XP and don't blow the budget?
I personally just drop the CR of traps by 2 across the board (which is 1/2 XP in most cases). So a CR 4 trap becomes a CR 2 trap.
The one thing you have to worry about then is "nuking" the party with too much instantaneous damage. If you're going to have one big powerful trap, then try to have something that presents a long-term threat rather than a single big bang. I wouldn't want to use a Fireball trap against a 2nd level party (big chance of instant death!), but a Summon Monster III trap? Sure!
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