Quote from: daniel_ream;570617I consider them humour books

This.

I only once played with a DM who used one of the traps, and it was a disappointing experience.

It was something like "something zips past you and slashes you in half" without ever knowing what the character did to trigger the trap, or what the trap actually was. The whole mechanism was behind the GM screen.

I have a couple of the books. Some of the traps aren't deadly, but most are yeah.
I have not personally used any of the traps as written exactly, but I have used them to get ideas from and then adapting them to be less complex, deadly and give the characters a chance to actually detect them as well.

But in answer to the question, unless you specifically state to your players "I'd like to run a dungeon with lots of traps etc, are you up for this".  I probably wouldn't use them, at least not in their pure form.

Quote from: The Traveller;570739To be fair, any character that happens on a deep chasm in a hostile dungeon and says "oh look, here's a handy rope, well off I swing" probably wasn't going to last long anyway. This is where thieves are meant to shine, does nobody play a thief anymore?

Haven't you heard?  Why play a thief when a magic user can do the job better

Quote from: The Traveller;570739Thing is, if a dungeon builder wants to put in very lethal traps, that's exactly what he's going to do.

I've never understood the "logic" behind dungeon traps anyway.  If a tomb or vault designer wants to make sure no one ever, ever gets in (or out), then just drop a 10,000 ton block of stone in the sole entranceway (see also Pyramid, Great).

Where traps do make some kind of sense is when they're used as a form of access control - you want someone to be able to get in and out, but only the correct someone, and so the traps are designed to be bypassable by someone who knows the secret.  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the Relic Hunter TV series had some good examples of this.  If that's the case, though, the traps have to be built like that rather than hilarious instant death machines for the amusement of the GM.

Quote from: daniel_ream;570772I've never understood the "logic" behind dungeon traps anyway.  If a tomb or vault designer wants to make sure no one ever, ever gets in (or out), then just drop a 10,000 ton block of stone in the sole entranceway (see also Pyramid, Great).

Assuming the occupants of a tomb DON'T want people coming in from time to time.  
Maybe they DO and have lots of interesting uses for the bodies and souls of the interloping adventurers!

Quote from: daniel_ream;570772I've never understood the "logic" behind dungeon traps anyway.  If a tomb or vault designer wants to make sure no one ever, ever gets in (or out), then just drop a 10,000 ton block of stone in the sole entranceway (see also Pyramid, Great).

If you wanted to build up the reputation of a place as accursed you could always have a huge maze filled with lethal traps ending in a 10,000 ton stone block.

Heh, well, no, I do use traps but they do damage not instant death.  And I try to know how they work and reset mechanically.  My PCs usually smash inert skelletons as a matter of course because they're generally programed to reset the traps.

But I would like to use the Mummies with the gunpowder kegs inside them, in a miniatures battle sometime

I love the Grimtooth series and used them a lot back in the day. I think, however, that the ratio of use is inversely proportionate to the speed with which the system in question takes to roll up characters, and the "feasibility" component of the underlying plot/campaign setting. A farcial world of mad wizards in multi-leveled underground dominions is more likely to get some mileage out of Grimtooth's Traps than a realistic fantasy world in which dungeons are a rarity and usually relics of a bygone era.

These days, while I almost never use them, I probably would dig out the Trap books for a DCC campaign, for example.

Put me down for another vote of "only use for humor". My main concerns are that the traps often don't make sense / fit in with the game world, break the fourth wall, and quite a lot of them are based on some pretty big assumptions that don't really match my games.

I like traps to be used sparingly, but when you start throwing in instant death traps that are almost impossible to circumvent, it just leads to ultra-paranoid players. Personally, I don't care for the style of play where the players feel they need to describe every tiny action in meticulous detail, check for traps every 10 ft, etc.

Let's be honest here.  Most people don't use those traps because most of us don't want to be dick DMs.  That's what it really comes down to.  They are a cool thing to share among the group, but anyone who incorporates them frequently into games without fair warning to the players is just a dick who will probably have the players kick him to the curb pretty quickly

I don't care for these. I prefer traps that are more like what you might actually see somewhere historically.

RPGPundit

I agree that you'd need some kind of buy-in on the idea.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;570745This.

I only once played with a DM who used one of the traps, and it was a disappointing experience.

It was something like "something zips past you and slashes you in half" without ever knowing what the character did to trigger the trap, or what the trap actually was. The whole mechanism was behind the GM screen.

Oooh, yeah. That's no fun. I might use Grimtooth's stuff in Earthdawn (I've seriously considered it, with some tweaks), mainly for two reasons:

1) There's a Horror-corrupted Named Metal Elemental ("The Artificer") who goes around and installs these THINGS, anyway. He likes to "play" with his food, tho. So most aren't designed to kill you.... right away.

2) Death (the Spirit-form) is trapped underneath Death's Sea (the northern half of the black sea as a lava-cauldron). Death doesn't quite work the same way in the high-mana Age of Legends, leading to "Last-Chance Potions" which work up to an hour after you're clinically dead and other such magics. (S)HE also tends to take an interest in mortals, and there are tales of Master Thieves stealing people back from her strange domain.

So,

 "Something zips past you and slashes you in half. You feel your body collapse in a warm puddle. A few minutes later, you have dim impressions, almost in black-and-white, of the stone hallway and your body settling into the effects of death. A whirring vibration distracts you before you notice your point of view is outside your body. The floor shifts, sliding your corpse down a chute. It lands on a metal tray, which slowly sink down a couple of feet, then tips you over onto a conveyor belt. A fine purple mist from a small hole in the ceiling sprays down over a section of the conveyor, and you feel pulled back into suddenly living flesh, heart beating wildly from lingering adrenaline as the magic pulls severed muscles and fascia together. The belt deposits you on a stone slab and at the bottom of a dark shaft. The slab rockets upwards, then suddenly stops. You find yourself in the main entryway of the complex again, next to the small bubbling wall-fountain. Only this time, the way out is gone, replaced by a slab of granite with the words 'NO EXIT HERE' in chiseled dwarf-script. A voice chuckles in your head...'FIVE LIVES LEFT LITTLE ADVENTURER. WHAT DO YOU DO?' "

Grimtooth's Traps is best used for high-lethality, whimsical games.  Lots of the traps have no clear means of detection for avoidance (even with a Thief/Rogue), and the design of some traps may clash with more "serious" campaigns.

I do like some of the traps, especially the ones meant to confuse the characters or give an escape clause.