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Does anyone else find the trap rules horribly difficult to wade through and apply to actual trap design? The last time I read through them and tried to design a simple mechanical trap I had flashbacks of high school trigonometry and my complete ineptitude to not only understand the words coming out of my teacher's mouth, but to discern any practical application thereof. Is there a guide somewhere, or a 3PP book that dumbs down the language or makes the formulas for CR determination actually make sense? Sort of a Trap Designing for Dummies book? If there isn't, to all 3PP out there, I would pay handsomely for such a book. Also, just so we're clear, I don't want a book full of traps someone else designed. I want a book that actually makes it easier for me to design traps and know that they are mechanically balanced to work within the Pathfinder system.
Thanks for listening.
Boom!...oh you weren't talking about in game.
Yeah I know what you mean but just slug on through. Once you have done it a few times traps become pretty fun. What I did was type out all of the steps and create for myself a cheat sheet. Once you have it down it is not so bad.
So until "Trap Design for Dummies" or the "Kobold Guide to Trap Design" come out stick with it. At worst just re-skin existing traps to meet your purposes. That is pretty fast and easy.
Do you by chance still have that cheat sheet? I'd be interested to take a look at it.
Unfortunately, I am out of town for work the rest of this week. Next week I will be able to look around for it but I can't before then.
Honestly, the mechanical traps are generally horribly CR'd. I'd say the CR system works so badly for them you might as well just drop it, design the trap in a way ypu feel would challenge the party, reduce it a little bit and test it on them. After doing his a few times youll get a grasp of wha your party is capable of. But its better to make them accidentally too easy than accidentally too hard.
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If you want some simple tips for designing traps in general, rather than for calculating the formula for CR, these would be my main suggestions:
1. A single trap is generally a really bad idea. It comes down to just a single roll to see what happens.
2. Don't look at the CR of individual traps, look at how challenging a whole encounter that involves traps is.
3. Mixing traps and creatures is generally a great idea.
4. Traps that rely on pure hit point damage become very binary past level 3; either they kill the victim, or they just take a few charges from the wand of cure light wounds. Past level 5 or so, this also applies to ability damage.
5. Traps are best when they are confusing and disorienting.
6. Consider who made the trap. If it's made for any kind of home defense, they'd not want the trap to hurt themselves.
To take an example, say that you want to challenge a 5th level party through a CR 6 trap encounter in a hallway of the dungeon.
Looking at the examples of traps in the book, we have these kind of stuff:
- Flame strike, will deal some minor damage and cost the party like 10 charges of CLW to heal. Takes like, 3 seconds to run and is boring as hell.
- Hail of bolts, see flame strike.
- Insanity mist, can really hurt the party if they have a wis dumper with low fortitude (perhaps a bard for example) but is still mostly a cost sink as the party likely has a wand of lesser restoration.
- Lemure trap: This is the first trap that actually is more than like two dice rolls and then done, but it's basically just a creature encounter and doesn't really feel like a trap for the players.
- Primitive guilliotine, see flame strike.
- Symbol of pain trap, pretty pointless by itself.
- Wyvern arrow trap, somewhere between the flame strike and insanity mist.
As you see, none of these make for an interesting encounter, and they're not really challenging either. Consider instead something like this:
This may not be an incredibly dangerous encounter for the party, depending on party makeup and player skill, but it is far more interesting (and it's easy to make it more difficult through deepening the pit and increasing the amount of spiders, or even better, through adding a few monsters with ranged attacks).
The party will stumble into the corridor, seeing a heavy mist appear at the same time as they hear chanting in an alien and strange tongue behind them. Some might run away from it, some might run towards it - only to face the portcullis with the mist extending beyond it. Those that run from the trap will likely fall into the pit, which isn't deep, but the durability and poison of the swarms combined with the bad vision and communication due to the fog can make escaping kind of hard, especially for weak characters. If the party is smart and efficient, no-one will be in the pit when the rest of the spiders arrive, but if they're not as efficient... well, at least the spider population will boom with all that protein.
The party isn't very likely to die, but might very well take noticable damage and/or ability damage, and even if they can easily heal up afterwards, the encounter will have been much more memorable than "you get hit by a random flamestrike and take 10 damage". Naturally, there are other ways to solve the trap - a gust of wind will clear the mist for example, making it a fairly trivial encounter if someone is smart enough to use it.
Oenar, the Winter, those are great suggestions! I really appreciate the practical advice. I'm going to definitely be using your suggestions as I re-imagine the scenario.
Does anyone else find the trap rules horribly difficult to wade through and apply to actual trap design? The last time I read through them and tried to design a simple mechanical trap I had flashbacks of high school trigonometry and my complete ineptitude to not only understand the words coming out of my teacher's mouth, but to discern any practical application thereof. Is there a guide somewhere, or a 3PP book that dumbs down the language or makes the formulas for CR determination actually make sense? Sort of a Trap Designing for Dummies book? If there isn't, to all 3PP out there, I would pay handsomely for such a book. Also, just so we're clear, I don't want a book full of traps someone else designed. I want a book that actually makes it easier for me to design traps and know that they are mechanically balanced to work within the Pathfinder system.
Thanks for listening.
You let paizo's trap rules tell you how to make traps?
The traps were inside you all along. Come, let me show you the world.
http://trapaday.wordpress.com/
Honestly, the mechanical traps are generally horribly CR'd. I'd say the CR system works so badly for them you might as well just drop it, design the trap in a way ypu feel would challenge the party, reduce it a little bit and test it on them. After doing his a few times youll get a grasp of wha your party is capable of. But its better to make them accidentally too easy than accidentally too hard.
If traps are not hard, where will the real sense of accomplishment from besting them come from?
Make them dangerous to brutal. Consider what would really challenge you as a player.
For trapped monster areas, consider hindrance/slowing/debuffing traps alongside ranged foes behind cover and shielded from immediate death by melee chars.
A scary set up I heard of was a dungeon with a lot of dex drain poison and dex drain spells. The end bosses will be a team of fast archers with terrain on their side and cover.
You let paizo's trap rules tell you how to make traps?
The traps were inside you all along. Come, let me show you the world.
While I appreciate the resource, and will more than likely use it. I didn't come here looking for a book full of other people's traps. I was really looking more for a dumbed-down guide to designing them using the given rules (which when I try to read them feel like they were originally written in Chinese, then translated into French, and then translated into English, but like I said, I failed my INT check). My sincere thanks for the resource, but I'm still really hoping somebody has either an alternate system for trap design that isn't so convoluted, or has taken the time to dumb down the existing rules so I can make sense of them. :)
Then you can dumb it down.
Work out what you want it to do. It's size, the trigger. What disable device check they need to disarm it if any? Can it be dispelled?
Assign an appropriate dc or damage (or both). Is there a flow on effect from failing the same? Is there a delay and multiple effects? If a projectile, look to the rules for a guide on to hit and damage. If a spell, work out who made it and what the save DC would be. If a combo of spells, be careful not to overdo it, but if they are tough and cocky, break them a bit (for their own good).
Try less mechanic and rules based and more creative, especially if the rules aren't making a lick of sense.
If the DCs or damage are a bit off, it doesn't matter at all. The dm is the authority when it comes to traps in their games.
Good luck!
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The rules for designing a trap are actually rather simple: Just decide what you want the trap to do.
Then, once you're done, you can determine the CR of said newly-designed trap by using the CR-modifier tables. Since you can now ignore everything that's not applicable to your trap, the process becomes much easier than if you were to start with the table.
Of course, if the final result is a CR that's too high or too low compared to what you wanted, you can then check the table again to see which parts of the trap you can modify to reach the desired result.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The rules for designing a trap are actually rather simple: Just decide what you want the trap to do.
Then, once you're done, you can determine the CR of said newly-designed trap by using the CR-modifier tables. Since you can now ignore everything that's not applicable to your trap, the process becomes much easier than if you were to start with the table.
Of course, if the final result is a CR that's too high or too low compared to what you wanted, you can then check the table again to see which parts of the trap you can modify to reach the desired result.
This, right here, is why I failed my intelligence check. I spent so much time trying to figure out how to build a trap from the ground up, I never even considered starting with the end product and working backwards. There are now two things I must say: Thank you to Are and DM Under the Bridge for pointing out my idiocy, and: I'm an idiot!
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Does anyone else find the trap rules horribly difficult to wade through and apply to actual trap design? The last time I read through them and tried to design a simple mechanical trap I had flashbacks of high school trigonometry and my complete ineptitude to not only understand the words coming out of my teacher's mouth, but to discern any practical application thereof. Is there a guide somewhere, or a 3PP book that dumbs down the language or makes the formulas for CR determination actually make sense? Sort of a Trap Designing for Dummies book? If there isn't, to all 3PP out there, I would pay handsomely for such a book. Also, just so we're clear, I don't want a book full of traps someone else designed. I want a book that actually makes it easier for me to design traps and know that they are mechanically balanced to work within the Pathfinder system.
Thanks for listening.
You let paizo's trap rules tell you how to make traps?
The traps were inside you all along. Come, let me show you the world.
http://trapaday.wordpress.com/
Thanks for the mention! I am the owner/writer at trapaday.
I would say there is no hard/fast rule to making traps. Just think of an effect you want. It can be any effect at all, perhaps something you saw in a movie or on TV. Decide if it is magical or mechanical and go from there.
In my mind, there are 2 general types of traps (killers and nuisances) Nuisances are meant to be triggered. They have minor, but annoying effects, and can be used in conjunction with encounters to "level the playing field". An example of a nuisance would be a trap that turns everything into difficult terrain just before an encounter with flying monsters, or a trap that does a temporary stat penalty.
Killer traps probably really shouldn't be triggered, and in most cases, should be obvious. The real fun in these traps is that you give the players a sense of accomplishment when they defeat something so deadly and insidious.
Shameless plug: I also write about traps at http://adventureaweek.com where I sometimes discuss how to use traps with an example. I have written on how you can use traps to set tone or to prepare the players for unusual encounters.
Anyway, thanks again for the mention!
Does anyone else find the trap rules horribly difficult to wade through and apply to actual trap design? The last time I read through them and tried to design a simple mechanical trap I had flashbacks of high school trigonometry and my complete ineptitude to not only understand the words coming out of my teacher's mouth, but to discern any practical application thereof. Is there a guide somewhere, or a 3PP book that dumbs down the language or makes the formulas for CR determination actually make sense? Sort of a Trap Designing for Dummies book? If there isn't, to all 3PP out there, I would pay handsomely for such a book. Also, just so we're clear, I don't want a book full of traps someone else designed. I want a book that actually makes it easier for me to design traps and know that they are mechanically balanced to work within the Pathfinder system.
Thanks for listening.
You let paizo's trap rules tell you how to make traps?
The traps were inside you all along. Come, let me show you the world.
http://trapaday.wordpress.com/
Thanks for the mention! I am the owner/writer at trapaday.
I would say there is no hard/fast rule to making traps. Just think of an effect you want. It can be any effect at all, perhaps something you saw in a movie or on TV. Decide if it is magical or mechanical and go from there.
In my mind, there are 2 general types of traps (killers and nuisances) Nuisances are meant to be triggered. They have minor, but annoying effects, and can be used in conjunction with encounters to "level the playing field". An example of a nuisance would be a trap that turns everything into difficult terrain just before an encounter with flying monsters, or a trap that does a temporary stat penalty.
Killer traps probably really shouldn't be triggered, and in most cases, should be obvious. The real fun in these traps is that you give the players a sense of accomplishment when they defeat something so deadly and...
Ha!
Hello, I love your work. Sending a message now.