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Stop me if you've heard this one: you're walking through a corridor when a party member trips a wire. Blades immediately descend from the ceiling, damaging the whole party... who then promptly heals up as if nothing happened. Big whoop.
And as silly as this sounds, I think this is a pretty serious issue with simple hazards that makes them not work at all well as standalone threats in PF2e. As part of encounters, they can be really interesting as a way of spicing up the environment, and complex hazards are effectively encounters of their own, but simple hazards tend to be really binary: either they deal enough damage to wipe the party, in which case they're likely to feel extremely unfair, or they don't, in which case PF2e's general lack of attrition means their effects are promptly erased. It's pretty binary and generally out of place, which to me makes me feel like those traps are more the product of a design philosophy from prior editions than something fully-adapted to the current system.
It doesn't have to be this way, though, and I feel traps of any kind could be pretty threatening in dungeon crawls if their effects were about inflicting debuffs, rather than damage. If a damaging trap left you drained from blood loss instead of inflicting easily-negated damage, then even a simple hazard like that could have a lasting impact on future encounters, and the party would have a reason to pay even smaller traps more mind without having to dangle the threat of a TPK via a single hazard reaction or the like. Similarly, other hazards could inflict other conditions, such as hidden poison darts leaving you clumsy or enfeebled, or a haunt leaving you stupefied or frightened for an extended duration, and because those conditions generally require resources to clear, those could play into longer-term gameplay in a way damage just doesn't really achieve in 2e. This would also help enrich those simple hazards when used in encounters, too, as they could trip party members up in an even greater variety of ways.
So yeah, the TL;DR is that I think simple hazards as implemented now feel mostly like a relic of past editions than a fully-functional gameplay element in 2e, because just dealing damage or a very short-term condition isn't a threat in a game where Treat Wounds exists unless that damage is immediately lethal (which I don't think would make for a very fun simple hazard either). If simple hazards instead focused on inflicting lasting debuffs to the party that would be difficult or costly to clear mid-dungeon crawl, then they'd be much more relevant as solo threats to the party while also having their function enriched when used to spice up encounters.
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While I appreciate this post and think the ideas expressed in it make a lot of sense, I disagree.
I like that simple hazards are simple in PF2, and not very impactful for a simple reason: it discourages the use of what I call nuisance traps, and makes gameplay better as a result.
What do I mean by nuisance trap? Oh, things like the old 10-foot pits in D&D adventures. Take a d6, pull the character out of it, pop a charge from a Cure X wounds on, and keep going.
They were not narratively impactful; they were not engaging gameplay, the entire point was typically resource attrition, and they were really overused. Most of us, I imagine, have seen old school adventures that had pits, trapped doors, etc, all over the place, including places where they made no narrative sense.
PF2 creates a disincentive to create that sort of trap, as they don't even resource attrit very well now, and I love that for a very simple reason: every hazard in my adventure has a narrative reason to exist where it does, simple or complex.
But, all the above said, if you want a debuff-style hazard, make it! The hazard creation rules are easier than the monster creation rules, and the monster creation rules are simple. I would just remind that if you are using XP, and not milestone, then you should expect your PCs to complain when they get single-digit XP for a lasting debuff, since simple hazards (since they are simple) do not give out much XP.
I much prefer complex hazards with their routines for anything lasting, but it certainly can work with simple ones.
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I like that simple hazards are simple in PF2, and not very impactful for a simple reason: it discourages the use of what I call nuisance traps, and makes gameplay better as a result.
What do I mean by nuisance trap? Oh, things like the old 10-foot pits in D&D adventures. Take a d6, pull the character out of it, pop a charge from a Cure X wounds on, and keep going.
They were not narratively impactful; they were not engaging gameplay, the entire point was typically resource attrition, and they were really overused. Most of us, I imagine, have seen old school adventures that had pits, trapped doors, etc, all over the place, including places where they made no narrative sense.
The entire point is to avoid nuisance traps, though. Simple hazards as they exist right now are generally just a nuisance: you trigger the hazard, you take the damage, you patch it up with Treat Wounds, and that's it. The hazard may as well not exist, as it just wastes everyone's time without leading to any lasting consequences. The debuffs I listed can't just be cured with a low-rank heal; the methods to counteract them are costly and not fully reliable, such that it would not be in the party's interest to waste high-rank slots on counteracting the debuff from a hazard unless it's genuinely quite serious. Thus, the hazard would have a lasting impact, and its existence would be justified.
As for old-school adventures littering maps with traps just to annoy players: that's not an issue with traps, that's an issue with how they're being used in that specific context. You could very well have that kind of old-school dungeon crawl in PF2e where all of those traps are nuisance traps that deal piddly damage, such that the party would just have their time continually wasted throughout. Changing those to lasting debuffs would not address the problem of trap overuse, but could at least create an opportunity for something like a Tucker's Kobolds-style dungeon crawl where some particularly trap-oriented creatures try to soften the party up every which way they can with hazards before finishing them off.
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Yeah, I figured most of what Lia was saying was actually supporting Teridax’ argument.
I think it’s a really valid note, but I’m unsure even if debuffs will matter given, as Lia says, they too might just end up as resource attrition. I’d be interested in seeing *anything* that might somehow skirt “but magic” or “but healing”.
Mostly I find the best environmental hazards work in tandem with combats and ambushes, where they act to hamper action economy, mobility and/or inflict debuffs and damage. Otherwise they are just a blip that is overcome narratively rather meaninglessly.
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Indeed, the key design philosophy mismatch here in my opinion is that simple, damaging hazards make sense in a game with resource attrition, where the party has only a finite amount of healing before they have to pack up and go camp or risk dying. In a game that gives the party resource-free healing, that attrition effectively ceases to exist, so when a hazard only does damage on a reaction, that damage does nothing except delay the party a little unless it's grossly lethal... and nobody wants their character to die just because they failed their Perception check and a roll against a single hazard reaction.
I will say, though, that other debuffs are less likely to suffer from the problem of being easily countered at little cost, because counteracting in PF2e does depend on level and spell rank, and costs resources. For example: suppose you're a 3rd-level party and you trip a 3rd-level simple hazard that leaves one or more party members enfeebled. You'd have to expend a top-rank spell slot to cast sound body to counteract the condition on one party member, and the spell would only end the condition on a success. Even moment of renewal, arguably one of the spells best-equipped to counter these enduring conditions, is balanced to be limited to one use per target per day, and even a Cleric with Restorative Channel would likely want to conserve resources when possible here. Unlike damage, conditions aren't so easily erased in PF2e, and that's something that could be built upon for simple hazards.
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I think a couple of things have to come together to really create a nuisance hazard:
- Just a standalone encounter
- Simple hazard that doesn't do enough damage to wipe the party
- Not that much time/space pressure that prevents out of combat healing
- No other significant effects from the hazard
- Doesn't really provide anything else to the plot
Each of those could actually be different;
- Maybe there's enough time pressure that healing up does force you to dig into your spells/potions instead of using free but slow out of combat healing.
- Maybe it does inflict annoying conditions
- Maybe it makes noise that alerts other enemies (making those encounters harder) or triggering the trap also damages loot
- Maybe it inflicts enough damage to be really scary. But then you might want to back away from a simple pass/fail effect. It's not really interesting for the GM to go "oh, everyone failed the sky-high perception DC, I guess you're all dead. Womp womp."
I think a problem can be that the perception DC, disable DC and damage all tend to go up very much together when you use higher level traps. That's not necessarily the most interesting way to use traps though. A trap you can't detect doesn't really create interesting game choices. It just happens to you. However, if you know that hallway A has a really hefty trap in it which is tricky to disable, but hallway B has enemy checkpoints in it, now it's a tactical choice. So by loosening up the correlation between trap damage/disable/detect numbers, we can make traps more interesting.
Another way to use standalone simple hazards usefully is to foreshadow. So you find three spiked pit traps in a room. Ok big deal. But this dungeon layout is symmetric, and now you have a fight in the other room that's got the same shape as this one. Enemies are at the far side of the room and seem to be waiting for you to come to them.
Yet another way is to use them is actually surprising people with them in a fight. Traps are doable to find in exploration mode when you're actually Searching. If you open a door and there's monsters in the room though, most people just move into the room without Seeking further. If there's traps there, you're going in blind. So that fight with kinda medium scary enemies becomes a lot scarier if your barbarian just walked into a pit trap and is gonna spend two turns climbing out.
Recently I played a PFS adventure where the bossfight started by a trap going off for a ridiculous amount of damage. It started the fight with most PCs at half HP or even (close to) Dying 1-2. The enemies were somewhat threatening, but a lot of the spice in the fight came out of that initial burst of damage.
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While I definitely agree that simple traps are particularly good at adding context to a dungeon and are at their best when fully integrated into an area's general theme and narrative (as opposed to a burst of random damage from out of nowhere), the fact that simple damage traps need a lot of dressing up to not just be a nuisance I think still highlights the underlying issue: this is fine if the standard was that simple traps did something else, and it's fine to have simple damage traps as part of some other encounter (so long as their purpose is explicitly marked as such), but it'd be even better if the default were for those traps to work fine out of the box. It could, for instance, make all the difference to a GM who's building their first dungeon and is unfamiliar with the subtleties of hazards, such that following clearly-set guidelines could lead to a dungeon with traps that are at least impactful in some form, instead of just acting as speed bumps.
I do think one of the underlying issues with PF2e that plays into this as well is that the game has no real rules or system for time pressure. It's entirely up to the GM to decide whether they want to hurry the party along and how they want to go about doing that. Other systems like Blades in the Dark, by contrast, use clearly-defined mechanics such as clocks to measure the party's progress and how close they're getting to something bad happening. There's an entirely separate discussion to be had on this, but implementing that kind of clock mechanic could help significantly in establishing win and lose conditions in and out of encounters that don't just revolve around killing or dying, and in this particular case could allow even "speed bump" traps to have some sort of importance if there is a meaningful cost to taking the time to heal, which isn't a guarantee in the base rules.
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Have to agree with Teridax, "you can work really hard to make simple traps scary" isn't really an argument that simple traps are fine as is.
Part of the problem is that while you can design more robust encounters to make simple traps better, the set dressing of having some trapped object or pathway in a fortress, dungeon, or ruin of some kind is very tropey and thematic, but the current design makes it almost impossible for them to feel meaningful at the same time. Building more complicated encounters doesn't help if you aren't looking for the event to be part of a complicated encounter.
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I will say, though, that other debuffs are less likely to suffer from the problem of being easily countered at little cost, because counteracting in PF2e does depend on level and spell rank, and costs resources. For example: suppose you're a 3rd-level party and you trip a 3rd-level simple hazard that leaves one or more party members enfeebled. You'd have to expend a top-rank spell slot to cast sound body to counteract the condition on one party member, and the spell would only end the condition on a success. Even moment of renewal, arguably one of the spells best-equipped to counter these enduring conditions, is balanced to be limited to one use per target per day, and even a Cleric with Restorative Channel would likely want to conserve resources when possible here. Unlike damage, conditions aren't so easily erased in PF2e, and that's something that could be built upon for simple hazards.
The asterisk here is that absent time pressure most "long-term" debuffs aren't incredibly interesting. The party can just stop the adventure, go rest in town, and prepare the relevant slots to remove the curse/disease/condition. If they lack a prepared caster, they might need to spend gold to hire someone. Or they might not even need spells, as some conditions just go away with time (drained) when not tied to an affliction.
I'm not sure those scenarios are better than Treating Wounds for 20 minutes. Both just kinda slow things down before letting them resume as normal. I think the larger question to tackle is time pressure, something which Paizo almost never exerts in APs.
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I mean I think scale is an issue here. Ten minutes to treat wounds and a whole day to return to town and recover or maybe spend money or go on a sidequest to manage a condition or curse or whatever are radically different amounts of investment.
I don't think it's reasonable to handwave them off as essentially the same, even in the absence of time pressure.
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I appreciate the hot take, but No, hard disagree.
Long term debuffs scare players and will instead result in players retreating. At least for my group.
I will however agree that traps need to be used differently. Players accidentally stumble into a trap, and the enemy comes to them in 2 turns or something like that.
Or have a room with traps as part of a climatic battle with the enemy know where to avoid and the players not.
And such a battle can include traps that do things other than HP damage. In fact, having a trap that reduces movement speed go off mid combat is probably much more interesting than some simple HP damage.
Another way to make simple hazards as they exist meaningful is to add time constraints. Sure you could heal up, but if the party knows they have a limited amount of time to find the hag and stop the ritual, taking 30 minutes to heal everyone up doesn't become a good choice.
Personally, I tend to remove traps completely as "stand alone encounters" and place them where they are meaningful.
This has basically always been a problem. Traps have always been used poorly, because people have always found a way to "negate" traps that only did damage. Now it's medicine, but before it was Cure Light Wounds or Infernal Healing wands.
The real answer is to stop putting traps in places where they aren't meaningful.
Maybe with a bit of including already sprung traps that could have outright killed the party (but aren't active) for thematic purposes.
Like traps are a fun thematic staple trope of the fantasy RPG. But they've never made sense from a mechanics stand point.
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Long term debuffs scare players and will instead result in players retreating. At least for my group.
I think this is one more argument in favor of integrating standardized time constraints, something you yourself mention in your post. In my experience, parties are okay dealing with long-term conditions if they feel they can still make progress within the day, and to echo what Squiggit said, the tables I've played and GMed at are much more reluctant to call it a day without lasting consequences compared to taking 10 minutes to patch up, but the fact remains that there isn't any common ground here within the game's rules when it comes to time constraints. It is entirely possible to have a table where the party gets to rest in camp overnight as many times as they want without incurring any negative consequences, and there's nothing in the rules that expressly forbids this, so at that table it would make perfect sense to go back to camp every time someone steps on a rusty nail or the like. At that kind of table, there would be no way of imposing lasting consequences of any kind short of a character death, and that's a problem that goes way beyond simple hazards.
One of the most interesting traps I've faced was at first level during the final battle. No damage (as we're 1st, right), just sticky so it interrupted charging forward and required escaping. Good setback we had to overcome and maneuver around w/o risk of a game-changing crit fail nor the feeling your PC's been neutered (like pit might have done).
One of the least interesting dungeons I've faced lacked dynamic effects, so if we had a setback (like say from a long-term debilitating trap), we camped. We were all halflings w/ ample food supplies so camping also suited our roleplaying. Static encounters meant zero ramifications, zero attrition (and hours to build pulley systems to move our animals up and down). Fun because it was funny.
As noted above, attrition w/o a narrative drive to push through leads to withdrawing to recover (thank you, scaling Cantrips). Attrition w/ such a drive is a bit difficult to write for a wide audience. How much attrition should one calculate into the following encounters? Are they facing the boss with a bevy of penalties and few spells or untapped due to party composition and chance? Mind you I LOVE heroes showing resilience vs. attrition, but I think PF2 supports recovering to full before each battle.
I do appreciate how Status penalties don't stack! 3.X/PF1 attrition could devastate you as it piled up. But you can have a slue of Conditions in PF2 and they might only amount to -1 (albeit probably on everything). Thing is players' expectations. In a horror campaign they might roll with semi-permanent/adventure-long setbacks, let's just squeak our way out of this. But most players I've had in non-horror campaigns want to flourish, not struggle (at least until they learn my campaign style requires a measure of struggle, making the victories earned and sweeter).
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I do think there's always going to be a basic narrative drive insofar as there is a reason why you're in the dungeon in the first place. If there truly is nothing incentivizing you to be out adventuring, you may as well retire and open a pie shop somewhere. Whether that drive comes with time pressure is another matter, but I'd say that some level of time pressure should always exist, because otherwise it's practically impossible to have any stakes. If the goblins who captured the local livestock are just going to let those cows live happily until the rest of time, and the farmers aren't going to suffer tangibly from the theft, then what you have isn't an adventure, but a mild inconvenience at best.
I also think it's important here not to make the perfect the enemy of the good, set expectations appropriately, and correctly identify where the problem is coming from here: if you're expecting a simple hazard to automatically provide this rich narrative all on its own, irrespective of larger context, I'd say the real problem here is that that expectation is unrealistic, because even the most narratively-interesting hazard is ultimately just a tool to help enrich a map. If you think giving simple hazards long-term consequences will make a map boring just because there are no stakes to keep you from going back to camp, your fundamental problem at hand here is that you have a boring adventure with no stakes, something that wouldn't be improved with hazards as written either. If you have a problem with hazards setting your party back in any way, then just don't include hazards, as threatening the party in some form is their entire purpose. At the end of the day, letting solo simple hazards have lasting consequences instead of no consequences at all when used as such would still be a pure improvement to their gameplay and tactical function, and would induce zero change to their narrative function. A lot of the issues raised here don't stem from hazards at all, so much as poor dungeon or narrative design, such that no amount of fixes to hazards would solve those problems.
Long term debuffs scare players and will instead result in players retreating. At least for my group.I think this is one more argument in favor of integrating standardized time constraints, something you yourself mention in your post. In my experience, parties are okay dealing with long-term conditions if they feel they can still make progress within the day, and to echo what Squiggit said, the tables I've played and GMed at are much more reluctant to call it a day without lasting consequences compared to taking 10 minutes to patch up, but the fact remains that there isn't any common ground here within the game's rules when it comes to time constraints. It is entirely possible to have a table where the party gets to rest in camp overnight as many times as they want without incurring any negative consequences, and there's nothing in the rules that expressly forbids this, so at that table it would make perfect sense to go back to camp every time someone steps on a rusty nail or the like. At that kind of table, there would be no way of imposing lasting consequences of any kind short of a character death, and that's a problem that goes way beyond simple hazards.
I agree, but if you're going to implement time constraints, then you don't really need to implement traps with long lasting debuffs. You can stick with simple traps and just set a time limit that prevents healing everyone back to full.
In general, whether simple traps as they exist, or traps with long terms debuffs you have similar problems without a method of encouraging the players to continue on despite that "damage". The simplest answer is often meaningful time constraints.
Great points, but in essence damage & impairments all operate the same, it's just hit point damage is simpler to overcome. In old school DnD, hit point attrition mattered, then in 3.X/PF1 w/ CLW wands, ability damage was the way to go...until Lesser Restoration wands became popular (not to mention 15-minute nova-buff, scry & die adventuring days). Meanwhile the terror of Level Drain lessened and lessened down to the modest Drained condition in PF2 (which healing often cures at early levels).
There's sort of a compromise where PF2 allows you to feel like your PC's operating at their best, but you'll kinda need to be. And Paizo leaves time limits and dynamic dungeons more in the hands of the GM, maybe because it requires finesse to balance such pressure. So I'm not sure where lasting impairments fit into PF2's paradigm. Again, I'm a fan of heroes overcoming attrition, but that style has ramifications that a writer might need the GM to help them finesse, partly because it does involve gauging threat level, balancing time limits, and a dynamic/reactive story.
One trick Paizo often has used is to present the story as if there's a great deal of time pressure...but have none. I have mixed feelings about this that could probably be solved with a sidebar to GMs.
Agree with everyone you're saying Castilliano.
I have noticed my scenarios APs give an illusion for time pressure, but don't actually have any written consequences events happening if the PCs don't do the thing right here and now.
And you're right that managing the parties ability to fight, versus its impairments, and the power of the enemy is very tricky. Something that a Ap or scenario is unlikely to be able to do well.
Which is probably why we don't see it.
For me the answer is actually not to include traps except as dressing or within a combat location, or as a tool that draws more combatants into a room so the PCs have a harder fight to deal with and lose the element of surprise.
Let's face it, if a trap doesn't kill or permanently maim to the point of being unable to continue it's a poor trap. Booby traps from real life would generally kill if you didn't avoid them, but such a thing sucks as a game mechanics because you can maybe fail two rolls (perception and save) and die. That's horrible to play. So, were left with traps that aren't really traps as they're meant to be in the first place.
Interestingly, I am converting an old 1st edition AP that relies on a lot of different kinds of traps in its dungeon and is very intentionally not applying intense time pressure to its dungeons. Also, these are old 1st edition traps where healing was a different kind of resource, and thus I feel pretty liberated to change up traps as I desire.
Even so, I don’t think it is necessary for every simple hazard to apply long term consequences, even as it is fun to have some of that as well. Here is what I think simple traps/hazards can accomplish in an adventure:
They tell a story about the environment. Why are they present? Who put them there? How do they get maintained? These are all clues that feed players information and bring setting to life. Hazards that don’t do these things are a bigger problem than hazards that don’t end up being all that hazardous.
They change the way the players approach the dungeon. Are they getting reset? Are they one and done? Are they threatening enough to the party to make setting them off something to avoid? Or are they just about making some noise and eating up a little bit of time. A damage trap that can take an hour or more to heal from is really about the same as an early simple trap that sends the party back to town for a consumable supply who’s cost is something a GM should loosely be giving back to the players over time anyway. Not necessarily on a one to one basis, but if the party is going to be spending significant wealth on reversing conditions over time, the GM has to add more treasure or later encounters will get too difficult anyway. That is a behind the GM screen consideration, but so is “do I have enemies patrol the hallways, discover signs of the dungeon being invaded and react accordingly.” Time and treasure are equally valuable resources to a party based upon how the GM values them. Lots of folks addressed that already though. If the GM wants the roleplaying of the dungeon to slow down around acting out the process of searching rooms (from old school stuff like 10ft poles that don’t really work anymore, to summoning creatures and sending them into rooms before the party) then the GM can choose to adjust many dials on their hazards.
So I think, the question “does every simple trap need to have real consequences for setting it off,” can be yes even without those consequences needing to be tied to long term resource attrition. Noticing how your players respond to traps can justify a lot of different approaches to whether simple hazards are adding fun to the campaign or just slowing things down. But, longer term consequences are not necessarily going to make them more fun for parties who already look at them as nothing more than speed bumps on the road to completing an adventure.
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The opening post made me realize I'd never looked at what PF2 GM Core had to say about traps, and it turns out it does seem to agree with you on Simple Hazards. "In isolated encounters where the PCs have plenty of time to recover from hazards’ effects, simple hazards can feel more like speed bumps than true challenges. But when combined with other threats, even simple hazards can prove perilous."
Granted that's in the section on encounter building rather than the Hazard section, but it largely matches up to your initial criticism of simple hazards.
Looking at GM Core, about a quarter of the simple hazards in GM Core do impose debuffs that can last for more than a 10 minute rest (ex. Hallucination Powder Trap, Pharaoh's Ward, Poisoned Lock)
So I think your argument for what simple hazards should be has more system support than you think.
IMO, this depends on only of how do you traps.
As well said by many, traps originally were made to waste some players resources and to justify to have a rogue even in situations that you are exploring some abandoned DG.
Currently, due to how easily is the off-combat healing if you have enough time, specially simple traps are just an annoyance if they are used alone.
But the point is this. The use of simple hazards alone. Now that we can fully recover with just some minutes, these traps need something to make them more relevant, like they being set in a room with enemies that know about them and use them in their favor. Or in a time pressure situation where the players don't have time to spend some minutes to recover.
If the GM want a hazard that makes a more memorable by its own so it's better to use a complex hazard instead.
About hazards only doing damage, this is a false premise. This is just one type of hazard that's better for situations where the GM considers doing damage as the desired option, the game currently already have many hazards that apply conditions (this is specially common for haunts and
environmental hazards and many magical traps), including those that can only be removed using resources or a full rest.
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I agree, but if you're going to implement time constraints, then you don't really need to implement traps with long lasting debuffs. You can stick with simple traps and just set a time limit that prevents healing everyone back to full.
I agree, but that's a separate ask with a much larger scope. I'm not shooting for the moon here, just saying we could stand to have more simple traps with long-lasting debuffs. One does not preclude the other.
There's sort of a compromise where PF2 allows you to feel like your PC's operating at their best, but you'll kinda need to be.
This is a myth, albeit a commonly-repeated one. Although PF2e does let your party recover their HP to full, you don't even need to be at full HP, let alone free of conditions, to perform capably in an encounter unless you're playing at incredibly high levels of difficulty. It's not like traps would be the only thing capable of applying long-lasting debuffs either, and plenty of creatures can weaken party members in ways that can last across multiple encounters, sometimes even throughout long portions of an adventure. I would definitely advise against littering a dungeon with heavy debuff traps and difficult encounters unless that's very specifically the vibe you're going for (and your party's okay with it), but by that same token, if your party doesn't like being inconvenienced in every way, you may as well not place traps outside of encounters at all, as pure damage traps would achieve nothing either.
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Let's not forget tricks, as it used to be "tricks & traps", where a party might get misled or split (as bad as that is to GM). A tricky trap might cut off their exit route, make the party look hostile to allies or like buffoons, teleport them, shrink them, spoil their food, or mess with gravity, even causality. Fantasy's a crazy genre, and myths are full of bizarre effects and environments heroes have to endure (with varied success).
I remember a high level 1st ed trap where the party had to eat plates of food that multiplied exponentially, otherwise it would expand and smother them. The pregens for it had different eating ability based on their descriptions, so the hefty guy could eat more for example. Disintegrate of course was of great use, and fire could shrink meals, but made them harder to swallow. Truly bizarre, but I imagine everyone who struggled there remembers it these decades later.
And I agree diseases are a good sticky impairment, especially if the party doesn't check for them. Also curses. And Doomed, which is probably why it's for high level play.
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My perspective as a DM is the following:
1. Traps should have a clear purpose in a dungeon. Don't add traps unless they have a purpose.
2. Traps should have an impact equivalent to their purpose. Don't waste my time with traps that are wasting page space. I'll gloss over them.
3. Simple traps that do some damage, but little else and don't add any meaningful challenge to the dungeon shouldn't even be added.
4. I don't mind if the trap is there for some purpose that doesn't come to fruition. If a trap is there to prevent a quick exit from a fight like you trap you in the room with the BBEG and if you try to run, the trap will cause a problem then I'm ok with it even if the party doesn't set it off.
Traps haven't been super meaningful since 1st or 2nd edition D&D in my experience then a missed saved meant you were dead or seriously maimed.
PF1 and PF2 don't like to cut off limbs, have PCs dead in a sphere of annihilation, transport you into a coffin in a room full of hungry undead far away from your friends, or other "if you fail, you will probably die" type of traps. Grognards know what I'm talking about. This seems to be part of the trend towards making sure no one really loses their character and danger is only an illusion.
So not sure meaningful simple traps is desired by the player base. I would say each group should adjust simple traps according to what they think their players will enjoy or tolerate.
I lost so many characters to traps in 1st and 2nd edition D&D. I saw so many die to random traps. I must admit it did get tiresome after a while, but it sure did make traps feel super dangerous. Some of the traps were real fun and really made you feel the module designer put some real thought into how to kill or maim characters.
I don't think the current generation of gamers would enjoy dangerous simple traps with a long lasting effect.
I do think there's value to flavorful traps -- they don't have to threaten your party with death, but if they work in an interesting enough way that can definitely add flavor to a dungeon and tell something about the person, or people, who set it up. They don't necessarily have to result in an encounter each time -- that can get tiring pretty fast -- but traps when done right can certainly make future encounters more complex. For instance, if an infected spike pit afflicts its victims with a flesh-eating disease that applies a weakness to persistent bleed damage, that next encounter featuring a few thrailorns might become a lot scarier as a result. There's always going to be a mastery curve when it comes to using hazards to full effect, but given PF2e's lack of inherent time pressure, having more hazards that apply lasting effects would at least mean comparatively fewer of those would be reduced to mere speed bumps by themselves.
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Yeah, the underpinning issue here really is the lack of an overarching time management system. In a game where every exploration activity had some tangible time cost or impact on a timeline, then even simple damage traps would contribute by way of forcing a tradeoff between time to heal or having less HP for the next encounter. Because there is no such system, and thus nothing to stop the party from spending as much time as they want healing and resting in-between encounters outside of GM intervention, those simple damage hazards wind up in this awkward position where even GM Core has to advise against using them on their own.
This is probably again something for another discussion, but this kind of problem is one that would be directly addressed by a clock mechanic like with Blades in the Dark: if by default your adventure put you on a clock (which needn't be a super-tight schedule either) and every 10-minute exploration activity ticked that clock forward until a deadline where Something Bad happens (and you could have multiple of those too at increasing levels of severity), then that time pressure alone would allow exploration to be full of meaningful choices as well. In fact, this could even help address other notable issues like out-of-combat skill feats feeling much less useful than combat-worthy feats: if being able to save significant amounts of time and resources out-of-combat offers a meaningful benefit, in this case by preventing Something Bad from happening, then the feats that enable that would become much more valuable.
The party opens a door to a room fight the monster then heal completely up after the fight. The party falls in a pit takes damage climbs out and heals up.
What makes one a nuisance and the other the main event?
Traps are skill test just as fights are a different type of skill tests.
Did they detect it.
Can they disarm it.
Is there a puzzle to figure out.
Can they avoid it.
Go a different route.
Last test, can they heal the damage for failing one of the above.
Still traps and monsters should have a reason for being.
Don't really need a separate mechanic for timepressure, There are guidelines for time pressure in the GM core aswell. Having Secondary Objectives such as "reach the end of the dungeon before the BBEGs minions destroys vital evidence" is entirely fine. We already measure time spent in rounds, minutes, hours and days.
If guidelines were as effective as rules, then we would not need hundreds of pages of rules to run Pathfinder 2e. "Think of adding time pressure maybe" as one tiny aside in GM Core is in no way equivalent to a well-defined mechanic for budgeting the time a party takes to progress through a segment of an adventure, and extremely few GMs will keep 24-hour time in painstaking 10-minute segments. The fact that these guidelines are vague and in no way enforced are the very reason why certain tables struggle with pacing and stakes, and why simple damage hazards are almost entirely nonfunctional on their own.
The party opens a door to a room fight the monster then heal completely up after the fight. The party falls in a pit takes damage climbs out and heals up.
What makes one a nuisance and the other the main event?
In this instance, one is an encounter where the party gets to act, whereas the other is a couple of rolls that mostly just happen to the party. You'll notice that I specifically mention simple hazards in this discussion, because complex hazards have the advantage of some baseline level of dynamic gameplay by way of initiating encounters. You can certainly have encounters that are far more interesting than others, but the system is robust enough that just dropping party level-appropriate monsters will always generate some minimum level of enjoyable and interesting tactical gameplay. The same cannot be said for simple hazards, which can sometimes enhance dungeons and encounters, but also sometimes achieve nothing at all.
Everything should have a reason for being, but even adding a trap in a way that makes narrative sense still doesn't automatically work on a gameplay level when the party can heal up easily. If you're investigating a trapper's den, for instance, it would make complete sense for the trapper to add bear traps, spike traps, and other booby traps all around, but the system simply does not allow these kinds of damaging traps to have any meaningful impact if the party can just Treat Wounds each time. What could be a tense battle of wits and attrition in another system, or even just PF2e if the party were on a clock, just doesn't work without major additional legwork from the GM, which really isn't what 2e is normally about.
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I want to echo an sentiment in this thread that traps should have purpose. While it's certainly fine to say "a trap that merely does damage and nothing else," is pointless in a game lacking attrition mechanics (and I and others could argue that traps like that can act as signposts for new players about potential hazards ahead), I don't think that the next logical jump is "simple hazards should impair" as a blanket statement.
I think simple hazards that impair the group are absolutely fine, but I don't see much of an intrinsic difference between "You are cursed until you return to town to have the curse removed," and "You take 20 damage and need to spend 10 minutes to heal it." Those are both examples of the simple hazard being used poorly. Like many are saying, effective hazards are impactful just as much as any combat encounter if handled correctly.
And hey! Not to advertise my own stuff, but I've written a few "simple hazard encounters" that I think illustrate clever ways to utilize more thoughtful hazards.
Like these classic traps that call for nearby reinforcements while detaining the PCs!
Or some falling stones during an escape through a burning forest!
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I want to weigh in on the idea of a clock mechanic being baseline in 2E. I am not against such a mechanic, but I do not think it should be baseline.
There are a lot of players who hate timers, even when they are very generous. So, a rule saying 'every adventure needs a countdown' would not go over well, IMO.
However, I would like to see an optional rules section with guidance on how to use countdowns for tables that would like them, or for specific adventures or scenarios in them.
I just do not think a timer should be a default state for every adventure.
I want to echo an sentiment in this thread that traps should have purpose. While it's certainly fine to say "a trap that merely does damage and nothing else," is pointless in a game lacking attrition mechanics (and I and others could argue that traps like that can act as signposts for new players about potential hazards ahead), I don't think that the next logical jump is "simple hazards should impair" as a blanket statement.
I think simple hazards that impair the group are absolutely fine, but I don't see much of an intrinsic difference between "You are cursed until you return to town to have the curse removed," and "You take 20 damage and need to spend 10 minutes to heal it." Those are both examples of the simple hazard being used poorly. Like many are saying, effective hazards are impactful just as much as any combat encounter if handled correctly.
The thing is, I don't think the statement that traps should have a purpose was ever opposed. Not one single person on this thread has raised an objection to that, and I certainly agree that game elements should be used for a good reason. Placing it in opposition to the OP and its message when there is no inherent contradiction therefore reads as a bit of a straw man to me: just because it's possible to misuse traps just as well as any other game element doesn't mean the design of certain simple traps misaligns with the game's design philosophy in such a way that it makes those traps exceptionally easy to misuse, even when the narrative justification is valid. Simple damage traps work perfectly fine out of the box in prior editions that feature HP attrition; in 2e where there is no real HP attrition past level 1, those simple traps need to be dressed up a lot more to be made to work, otherwise they just become annoying little speed bumps. As has already been mentioned above, claiming there is no difference between taking 10 minutes to heal and taking an entire day to recover is the kind of argument that only holds up in a forum conversation, because in practice all but the most lenient of tables will avoid repeatedly resting overnight with no consequences, whereas many GMs are completely fine with giving the party 10 minutes to recover.
And while having hazards that alert nearby enemies is nice and all, that in my opinion is not a solution by itself. Those hazards have a very specific purpose, and need to be integrated in a much more specific way than most, which also makes them even harder to use properly than most other hazards and makes dungeon design more complex, as suddenly the effectiveness of your hazard intrinsically relies on a lot more moving parts just for even its most basic effect to work. This doesn't mean that there's no place for those hazards, as it's great to have chains of events where triggering a trap alerts a group of enemies and sets up an encounter where the party at a disadvantage... but at that point, we're back to traps creating meaningful detriments for the party, i.e. the entire point of this thread. Simple traps that apply conditions or other lasting debuffs effectively achieve the same end goal, just with far less complexity.
OK, But isn't that part of why they are just guidelines instead of rules. Paizo does not enforce what kind of stories GMs want to tell nor do I really think they should or even can without significant community backlash. Pacing and Stakes have no objectionably correct ways to set them.
This isn't even remotely true. Pathfinder 2e absolutely does enforce what kinds of stories it tells, whether it's by removing HP attrition, making the party feel superhuman with their feats and other abilities, or simply designing its monsters and world in a way that's radically different even just from 1e. Moreover, the rules have plenty of variants and optional systems for GMs to play with and plug into their game, so that even an optional mechanic like time pressure could very well be implemented using actual rules. That there is no fleshed-out system for this at all is something that could be improved upon, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.
With use of Foundry and other on-line tools, it's getting much easier. Our GM does exactly what you claim is "painstaking" and there's no pain at all.
Not every group plays on Foundry, and tables should not be expected to run their games on a VTT in order for the rules to work in a way that doesn't generate excessive bookkeeping. If timekeeping can currently only be measured painlessly with computerized assistance, then it stands to reason that simpler alternatives exist, as has been pointed out with the examples of Blades in the Dark and its clocks.
Disagree. There are plenty of players who would prefer a new puzzle requiring both different player ideas and different skill checks over another combat.
This is completely irrelevant to the basic fact that combat in PF2e is well-designed enough that even a random monster encounter can generate some baseline level of tactically engaging gameplay when run by the rules. Whether or not players prefer puzzles has no bearing on this minimum level of basic, out-the-box functionality, and it is this standard that I think ought to be more generally applied: PF2e prides itself on being a game where you can just run things out the box with few to no adjustments on the GM's part and work perfectly fine. This works for monsters, but other elements, such as simple traps, often need more finessing on the GM's part to be functional.
My experience playing on Foundry is that this is not true for such platforms. The system keeping track of the day clock and various ability timeouts makes it pretty meaningful. Yes, the party can still choose to stop and rest however long they like (at least, in many cases). But the game tracking various ongoing effects makes resting much more real feeling.
I play most of my games on Foundry and in my experience it absolutely is true. Resting for 10, even 20 or 30 minutes in-between encounters is often trivial even with the clock ticking, because in many cases there is no imminent threat other than the encounters being faced and the party has plenty of time in the day to go through the dungeon. If your party started the dungeon crawl at 9 AM and somehow ended up dawdling until 8 PM, that's 66 Treat Wounds' worth of exploration activities, which I'm sure you'll agree is slightly more than is needed for the average dungeon crawl even when the party does take their time to recover in-between every fight. That you personally feel some time pressure in absence of stakes does not mean everyone else feels the same way, nor does it require us to.
It is interesting to say that every hazard in a dungeon should be meaningful, but every combat encounter could feel totally random and players would still have fun. That is very much not the case for my tables and the reason we want to play Paizo adventures is because Paizo has the best, most thoughtful dungeon ecology in the business.
Now, I do agree that hazards should be meaningful to a dungeon, but it is super clear that people in this thread have very different ideas about what “meaningful” means. Some folks here seem to be arguing that every single hazard have a meaningful mechanical effect on the party in a way that adds complexity to at least one upcoming encounter. I don’t think that is a bad guideline or goal post, but trying to codify it by changing all traps to necessarily do more than damage feels like it is only taking away the ability to do other things with simple traps.
For example, a simple low damage pit trap near the front of a dungeon might appear to be useless mechanically, as it might do so little damage that there is no risk of character death from it and it will just be a minor, inconsequential time sink…when it is first encountered. But if the trap was disguised in such a way that it gives a clue about who is in the dungeon, that is already doing additional work that could be mechanically significant for some parties, even if it doesn’t appear that way to all parties. Then, if the pit can’t really be evaded, it creates the opportunity for other parties to actively plan on drawing an encounter into that hall and use it as a feature later on, so again, how mechanically significant the trap is will always vary by party.
Then I also think there is a very reasonable argument to be made that trivial encounters, traps or combat or social or skill based, can play a vital narrative function in an adventure or campaign that a lot of tables are probably going to ignore or miss because they don’t have anyone investigating the room or the creature or trying to piece the story together, and that is ok too, those encounters are not inherently bad encounters for everyone, there are just some tables that are not going to make much of a difference of “hey, this dart trap is very obviously not a part of the architecture of this tomb and have been added by a faction that might be using these traps to protect themselves from a different faction that can be pitted against each other if we play our cards right.”
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Pathfinder2e does not have its encounter challenge designed around attrition. Attrition is a PF1 thing. And is a major reason for the criticism of 'the 15 minute adventuring day' as the players learn to game the game to remove the challenge due to attrition.
Trying to reintroduce attrition into PF2 by means of long lasting conditions feels like a misunderstanding of the basic game design of PF2.
Yes, having a stand-alone simple hazard that does only HP damage - which is then removed because PF2 doesn't have HP attrition as a mechanic - isn't meaningful in a mechanical sense. It can be meaningful in a narrative sense: setting the scene and showing, rather than telling, the level of danger that the characters are facing.
But there are other ways of having hazards be mechanically meaningful. I don't think that having hazards cause attrition is the right way.
Simple traps are very functional. The rules are well set out and easy to follow. A fireball rune or Hidden Pit is much easier to GM than a combat. You can run things like that out of the box and they work perfectly fine.
This is demonstrably untrue, as GM Core has to explicitly state in its guidelines that using simple damage traps in the way you just described would generate nothing more than speed bumps for the party, thus making them "nuisance hazards" as others have described. I fail to see how asking for conditions here rather than damage is asking for more crunch, either.
Right, so this is play group issue then rather than a rules issue. If my play group is feeling the pressure from that clock and yours isn't, that's not a 'Paizo needs simpler timekeeping and more lasting impairments' problem, that's a 'Teridax's group's GM needs to add some threat with more oomph to make them move forward' issue.
Absolutely not, it's a basic issue with your math. Using your very own example, simply keeping track of time in the manner you've been saying makes it plainly obvious that there are far, far more opportunities to rest and heal than there are likely to be encounters in a dungeon, meaning that it is up to the GM to create time pressure. If your group personally feels the time pressure even in absence of stakes and plays accordingly, more power to you, but blaming everyone who doesn't feel the same way as you doesn't strike me as a particularly constructive or empathetic way of broaching this discussion.
Also, where did you get that straw man? I agree it's more than needed. It's also not anything I said.
I think at some point we need some kind of PSA where simply pointing out to someone how their logic doesn't work even on their own terms is not a "straw man"; it is in fact the opposite, and calling it as such is just a knee-jerk reaction to avoid engaging with one's claim getting debunked. The point is, your adventuring day as you've described it is not only lacking in time pressure, it is so tremendously lacking in time pressure that a party engaging the dungeon on your schedule could spend more than half the adventuring day doing nothing and still be able to recover every time as needed. That you then have to convince yourself and your party that the clock is ticking is a pretense you choose for yourself that nobody else is beholden to follow. You certainly haven't made it easy for yourself to convince others of why we should all behave like you do here.
It is interesting to say that every hazard in a dungeon should be meaningful, but every combat encounter could feel totally random and players would still have fun.
I'm not sure who you're addressing with this, because this is almost entirely the opposite of what the OP is about. The point being made is that both monsters and hazards should be able to be run out of the box with minimal adjustments and still work. Throwing random monsters or traps at the party is obviously not going to be as riveting as setting both in proper context, but both should have some minimum level of functionality that monsters have, but simple hazards often lack, as Paizo's very own rulebooks have to caution against.
Trying to reintroduce attrition into PF2 by means of long lasting conditions feels like a misunderstanding of the basic game design of PF2.
I'm not sure how this can be said in good faith when the very basis of this thread is that PF2e's lack of attrition makes many simple hazards a relic of past, attrition-based systems. I also am not proposing to reintroduce attrition here: just because a hazard applies a debuff (which people seem to assume automatically means it'll last until the end of the day, something I've never once stated either) doesn't mean that hazards should be used to whittle down the party in place of damage. You certainly could use hazards like that, but the basic use case I suggested is simply a single simple hazard imposing a debuff on the party that might complicate an upcoming encounter. If that is attrition, then events as basic as raising the alarm or trapping the party in a part of the dungeon are attrition as well by that same logic.
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Teridax, it seems like you are overlooking an essential part of the role of traps in encounter design. A sever simple trap is less than a trivial combat encounter as far as XP goes. So adding one level +4 simple trap to a dungeon is about the same as having a solitary level -1 enemy for a combat encounter. The trap is much more likely to be interesting and work out of the box as a challenge than the creature
Teridax, it seems like you are overlooking an essential part of the role of traps in encounter design. A sever simple trap is less than a trivial combat encounter as far as XP goes. So adding one level +4 simple trap to a dungeon is about the same as having a solitary level -1 enemy for a combat encounter. The trap is much more likely to be interesting and work out of the box as a challenge than the creature
I'm not talking about encounters at all here, so this is completely beside the point. I'm specifically discussing the functionality, or lack thereof, of simple hazards used outside of encounters, which has very little to do with level. What discussion have you been following?
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Teridax, it seems like you are overlooking an essential part of the role of traps in encounter design. A sever simple trap is less than a trivial combat encounter as far as XP goes. So adding one level +4 simple trap to a dungeon is about the same as having a solitary level -1 enemy for a combat encounter. The trap is much more likely to be interesting and work out of the box as a challenge than the creatureI'm not talking about encounters at all here, so this is completely beside the point. I'm specifically discussing the functionality, or lack thereof, of simple hazards used outside of encounters, which has very little to do with level. What discussion have you been following?
This one. If you encounter a trap, you’re in an encounter. That is how dungeon design works and how you allocate XP for each encounter, including story awards, social encounters and every other moment of adventuring that is supposed to feel significant. Encountering a trap outside of an encounter is not possible. The XP budget determines how difficult the encounter should be. A level-1 creature is a different challenge level than a level -1 trap by very intentional design. You are trying to talk about traps outside of encounter design but you are modeling the results on the expectations of encounter design, but ignoring how to do that according to the rules
This one. If you encounter a trap, you’re in an encounter.
Uh, no. That only applies to complex hazards:
Most hazards have reactions that occur when they’re triggered. For simple hazards, the reaction is the entirety of the hazard’s effect. For complex hazards, the reaction may also cause the hazard to roll initiative, either starting a combat encounter or joining one already in progress, and the hazard continues to pose a threat over multiple rounds. Some hazards have a triggered free action instead of a reaction; for instance, quicksand can suck down multiple creatures per round.
Once again, we are talking about simple hazards here, where "the reaction is the entirety of the hazard's effect", no initiative rolled, no encounter started.
You are conflating combat encounters and encounters.
You use encounter design to add all hazards to a dungeon.