I like traps. They're fun.

For me, of course. Not so much for my players.

In the same vein, I don't go out of my way to screw them and at the same time, they hurt if a character sets them off.

And they don't just have to be man-made; they can be natural or even incidental. Regardless, its all down to that crucial Wits + Survival roll. And hey, it's always good to provide a Crafts/Science/Occult/Computer roll to disarm the damm thing if in case they do manage to not set em' off.

It's also great for players who put their character's dots in Survival because they are tangibly preventing severe punishment for themselves and the rest of the group. Bonus EXP for particularly evil ones!

And yet, at least where NWOD's concerned, I've never seen another GM use them. Not even a tripwire or a pit of some kind. It strikes me as odd, it does.

Anyway, what do you grumpy bastards think of em'? And have you used them?

I am a big fan of traps. The key with traps I think is they are something that work best when the GM is constantly being inventive, assuming that the people who build them are trying to work around existing expectations.

Well, my tastes have evolved. I was GM'ing when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and it inspired me to make lots of inventive traps. I had some very inventive players who were good at solving traps and tricky situations, and who brought along plenty of NPC ally fodder, so it was pretty fun, and not too many characters we cared about got killed.

Traps helped me develop as a sandbox-in-a-world-that-makes-some-sense GM, also because of players who were smart critical thinkers, and would also be thinking along the lines of who put this there, how and why? It also developed my thinking along the lines of traps with different purposes, and balance versus realism, and the goals of the trap-setters beyond the traps.

For example, if a trap-setter has an underground lair and really wants to kill people who get to point X, there are quite a few ways to arrange that which are very deadly. But how hard are they to engineer, or to reset, or to prevent from being triggered by the wrong stimulus, etc. And, how dead and/or paranoid do you want your players to be afterward?

BTW, reading the generic GM resource book Grimtooth's Traps (two), I was at first pretty entertained, but later realized I would use pretty much nothing from the whole book. The attitude was full of surreal jokes, things that didn't make sense or were impossible or silly, or things designed to torture players and kill or abuse their characters almost always in ways that seemed to me to be about a sad mean juvenile contest between DM and players, that left a bad aftertaste. There was some devious creativity but the mindset was all stuff that showed me ways I did not want to be as a GM, so it was at least helpful as a warning.

"What is 'what Admiral Ackbar was trying to warn about', Alex?"



(I'm sorry. It had to be done away with early.)

Quote from: Opaopajr;870141"What is 'what Admiral Ackbar was trying to warn about', Alex?"

(I'm sorry. It had to be done away with early.)

A day in the life of admiral Ackbar:
http://imgur.com/gallery/5nF9F

Quote from: Skarg;870115Traps helped me develop as a sandbox-in-a-world-that-makes-some-sense GM, also because of players who were smart critical thinkers, and would also be thinking along the lines of who put this there, how and why? It also developed my thinking along the lines of traps with different purposes, and balance versus realism, and the goals of the trap-setters beyond the traps.

I had a similar evolution... from fairly ridiculous traps that were just deadly tricks to play on Players... to traps as a means of presenting information, atmosphere and backstory.

QuoteBTW, reading the generic GM resource book Grimtooth's Traps (two), I was at first pretty entertained, but later realized I would use pretty much nothing from the whole book.

Did people actually use those traps in-game? It seemed like a joke book for gamers... though every once in a while our GM will plop one of those books on the table just to mess with us.

I like placing traps. I pretty much treat them as monsters to defeat and give EXP for those the tougher ones the PCs defeat.

Easy ones I use where appropriate.

Racial trap use is something I like to play with too. PCs learn to expect various clever little pit and snapjaw traps in Kobold lairs. But about none in bugbear or Ogre lairs. Hobgoblins have a thing for scything blade traps while Gnomes use a-lot of animal themed traps. And Mind Flayers loooove those damn teleporter traps.

The main thing is that there should allways be a chance to detect and avoid or neutralize the trap. And that could be as simple as not walking into a very obvious and very deadly trap.

With the right group of players it is very easy to place traps, even accidentally.

"In the middle of the cave is a 30' wide pit full of bubbling green slime. There is a winch to your left, and a rope leading up to a rung bolted to the cavern ceiling about 20' up. A pair of manacles dangles from the end of that rope. There seem to be a pair of desiccated hands still locked into the manacles."

"...I scoop up a handful of the goop, and I taste it."

"..."

Being a realism bug, I don't do traps in a number of the ways traditional to RPGs.  Not only do we have centuries of archaeology experience to testify that what happens to ancient ruins is that they fill up with dirt and debris, no one's ever found any traps -- outside of Hollywood and pulp fiction, that is.

Beyond that, I think less by way of "Gee, what baroque contraptions can I invent to snuff PCs?" than "So, OK.  I'm the Duke of Karanissa.  On the income from my estates, how can I most cost-effectively defend my treasures from looting?"  Machinery is finicky.  It breaks down.  Often.  A lot.  Pre-industrial era, it's often large, cranky and difficult to maintain.  The beams and ropes on those counterweights have to be replaced every few years, and to do that, you need service entrances.  I'm thinking less along the lines of "Why, I ought to shower a mad artificer with gold" or "Why, I ought to spend five times as much on an enchanter," than "I think I'll spend a fifth as much and hire a half-dozen more guards to patrol the place."

IMHO, traps = area denial.  Pits with punji stakes.  Murder holes.  Deadfalls and snares that were set up last week, not last century.

Quote from: Ravenswing;870215Being a realism bug, I don't do traps in a number of the ways traditional to RPGs.  Not only do we have centuries of archaeology experience to testify that what happens to ancient ruins is that they fill up with dirt and debris, no one's ever found any traps -- outside of Hollywood and pulp fiction, that is.

I prefer more active traps to places still active. Fantasy Viet Nam as some like to call it.

But apparently at least one pyramid or necropolis tomb had a falling block trap. But it was more like a blockade than a trap if I recall correctly.
But Egyptians at least preferred long term deception and massive walls of stone to curtail would be thieves. Fake treasure rooms accessed by easy to defuse block traps and false walls while the real treasure was sealed up in doorless rooms and other ingenious works of architecture.

Pit traps though need no maintenance. But I've never heard of any real ones in tombs.

Reality though doesnt include fantasy materials, processes and magical effects that can make long term mechanical traps viable.

My favorite was when some PCs got to wondering how the dart traps in a complex worked. So the busted down a wall. Behind the wall they found skeleton who was tasked to patrol a sealed off hall behind the wall and maintain the dart mechanisms regularly.

Quote from: Omega;870221I prefer more active traps to places still active. Fantasy Viet Nam as some like to call it.

But apparently at least one pyramid or necropolis tomb had a falling block trap. But it was more like a blockade than a trap if I recall correctly.
But Egyptians at least preferred long term deception and massive walls of stone to curtail would be thieves. Fake treasure rooms accessed by easy to defuse block traps and false walls while the real treasure was sealed up in doorless rooms and other ingenious works of architecture.

Pit traps though need no maintenance. But I've never heard of any real ones in tombs.

Reality though doesnt include fantasy materials, processes and magical effects that can make long term mechanical traps viable.

My favorite was when some PCs got to wondering how the dart traps in a complex worked. So the busted down a wall. Behind the wall they found skeleton who was tasked to patrol a sealed off hall behind the wall and maintain the dart mechanisms regularly.

When it comes to dungeons and traps, these days I will take exciting and deadly over realistic. I used to avoid them for realism reasons, but once I let that go, my games got way more fun. I think some level of internal consistency and plausibility is important, but I don't need it to be realistic (as long as there is some attempt to explain, that is fine by me).

Quote from: Omega;870221I prefer more active traps to places still active. Fantasy Viet Nam as some like to call it.

But apparently at least one pyramid or necropolis tomb had a falling block trap. But it was more like a blockade than a trap if I recall correctly.
But Egyptians at least preferred long term deception and massive walls of stone to curtail would be thieves. Fake treasure rooms accessed by easy to defuse block traps and false walls while the real treasure was sealed up in doorless rooms and other ingenious works of architecture.

Pit traps though need no maintenance. But I've never heard of any real ones in tombs.

Reality though doesnt include fantasy materials, processes and magical effects that can make long term mechanical traps viable.

My favorite was when some PCs got to wondering how the dart traps in a complex worked. So the busted down a wall. Behind the wall they found skeleton who was tasked to patrol a sealed off hall behind the wall and maintain the dart mechanisms regularly.

Huh.  That RPG has common skeletons with enough smarts to do maintenance and engineering work?  Spiffy.

The Egyptian "falling block trap" is something of an urban (or undead?) legend.  What the archaeologists really think -- as opposed to the lurid pulp writers -- is that it was a block intended to seal that particular shaft after the workers left, and it just didn't work.  Presumably the site manager shrugged, muttered something like "Seket eat their balls, I've been on this job seven months and my wives are having hissy fits, I'm outta here."

Quote from: Ravenswing;870255Huh.  That RPG has common skeletons with enough smarts to do maintenance and engineering work?  Spiffy.

The Egyptian "falling block trap" is something of an urban (or undead?) legend.

1: Depends on the use. D&D skeletons have ranged across the board from mindless drones, to pre-programmable robots, to aware slaves, to sentient and fully autonomous. 5e even mentions skeletons rising from tombs to defend cities and protect family. And theres allways those weirdos who research new undead to create.

2: The one I saw was not a trap. Just a secondary block that dropped down when a false sealing stone was removed I believe. Apparently it worked and caused the thieves to miss the actual vaults. I have never heard of actual falling block traps in tombs.

To me, traps have to be used sparingly but for effect.  They should also generally not be super-intricate, unless the person making the trap is kind of nuts.

My Dark Albion game tonight had the PCs entering a pictish warren, it was like something out of the vietcong. The picts had simple but deadly traps all over the place, and all of them poisoned.  It was way more than the PCs were used to, but because I otherwise use traps relatively sparingly, the sheer number of them struck home the particular distinctiveness of the picts as opponents.

For a dungeon game, I definitely dig puzzle traps. Farmer's "World of Tiers" series is part of the literary inspiration to which I took.