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Death from above! Designing traps.
Rankenphile
Passersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderator mod
Passersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderator mod
Sometimes a good DM gets tired of throwing another handful of monsters at a party over and over again and decides to get a bit crafty, a bit devious, perhaps even a bit naughty, and will set up a cunning, vicious trap for the adventurers to discover, disarm and bypass safely - or not.
There are a number of useful resources available, but what are some of your favorite traps and/or puzzles you have created or encountered? What do you do when you create them? What makes for a good puzzle, and what makes for a bad one?
There are a number of useful resources available, but what are some of your favorite traps and/or puzzles you have created or encountered? What do you do when you create them? What makes for a good puzzle, and what makes for a bad one?
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2) Mind Fog + 1 round delayed Insanity/Confusion/Touch of Idiocy
3) Back in 3.0, Mass Harm + delayed Magic Missles was fun
Hmm...not coming up with anything else right now. I'll have to think on it.
Oh I don't know.
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Actually, I remember throwing the first one ("A 'familiar' situation") at a party. It didn't really work, because half the party was goofing off and finding squirrels and stuff, the other half was filled with people who were not that good at role playing or doing stuff, the ranger just used animal empathy (which I completely forgot about), and the sorcerer was being a punk that night, deliberately trying to undermine the game. But other then that... it went well.
So yeah, just be sure to watch for some things, otherwise a great book.
What makes for a good puzzle in a PnP game?
Let's set the stage first. The party (consisting of a D&D mage, a D&D Druidess, an Amberite lady, a Skunktaur priestess of luck from a Final fantasy inspired gaming system, a Super hero, and a catgirl martial artist) are Stuck inside of an umbral realm in the far umbra of the worlds of darkness (basicly outer space of the spirit world)... which is collapsing in on itself.
The party sets out to find the components they need to locate the artifact keeping them inside of the umbral realm, and discovers near a Grandfather Clock the size of the CN tower (complete with a gargantuan pendulum twice the length of a football field) the last one... attatched to a rather flimsy looking ward.
The mage in the party, figuring he knows best, dispells the ward.
Immediatley, everyone in the party gets hammered by a memory of somthing they felt truly guilty for, but twisted around so that the people who were wronged are screaming at them.
Shaken, the party begins to move on... and gets hit again.
Eventually, they manage to figure out that they're getting cockwhipped with Mind magic by the tower every time they hear the sound of the pendulum passing the midpoint of the swing.
Thus, they stuff cotton in there ears and get as far from the tower as they can in order to escape the noise (the less they can hear the noise the less of an effect it has on them).
Then they learn from the villain of the story that the tower is at the exact center of the umbral realm, and that if they don't hurry up and get to him, they'll be forced closer and closer to the tower, untill they are litterally crushed into the side of it and will be perpetually effected by the tower.
Now, they did get out of there, but I still think that was one of the greatest traps ever designed. Perhaps not from a LOL U TAKE 2325364576D20 DAMAGEZ!!11! perspective, but from a roleplaying one?
Oh yeah.
It really was a neat idea... it didn't show up on the rogue's Search roll, and there really wasn't a way of disarming it. We ended up going around instead.
There's more than one?
Yes..... but you might be better of seeing just the first one.
There's the original, and then one or two crappy sequels by a different director.
Especially avoid Hypercube, which is pure shit compressed to a disc.
The third one brings back the original cube, it's a prequel. It's actually good. The second is only good for the special effects, worth one watch. But I've seen the first about three or four times.
You should pick up some KoDT. There's a trap design in every issue for the last year or so. Pictures, description, usually generic system.
When a player tries to jump across the chasm, they run into a reverse-gravity field halfway across and start to fall upwards until they smack into the (possibly spiked) ceiling. Then, they start to fall down again... I can't recall if they just fall until they hit the bottom of the chasm, or if they run into the gravity field again and are repeatedly slammed against the ceiling.
Basically, a stone door which has a sign that says "Only the strong may enter". To open it, you must make successive Strength checks starting at DC10 and increasing by 2 every round.
Thing is, there isn't anything behind said door. When you push it open, you continually depress a giant spring behind it, when you fail a Strength check, or meerly get all the way to 20, it releases and slams you into the adjacent wall, dealing more damage the furth backwe you push it.
Ingenious.
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That's a fantastic trick, but what is the point to it? What is the reward for passing it?
I'm building an ancient, abandoned and very, very forgotten temple, and have a couple neat traps already set up - my current favorite is a balancing floor - it only triggers once there are heroes on both sides of the floor, and it causes them to have to work together to keep from having everything tilt and dump them into a pit. As far as puzzles, I have one where they have to keep dumping water into a vertical bucket conveyor belt to raise the next guy up. But I'm looking for more tricks and traps to throw in their way, but still be passable with a reward on the other side.
The reward for passing a trap is usually staying alive beyond the trap and being able to further navigate the dungeon. While very, very clever and potentially hilarious, that particular trap doesn't really offer much as a barrier or hindrance as much as it does just a rather cruel thing to do to a group.
edit: I mean, why would someone put a trap like that in their temple in the first place?
The trap may not offer a direct barrier or hindrance, but if the party fall for it, then it has served its purpose and harmed the intruders.
One of the traps: one of those coin-operated peephole "movie" things.
Only the lady stripper is a Medusa.
Prestiege classes are a blasphemy against whatever almighty you recognise and a crime against RP.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Although I do sort of dislike prestige classes, myself, but I'm always interested in cleverly engineered traps and mischevious devices.
The point behind traps is not to have some fuckass reward in it, but to impede characters from going on. That's why they put traps in tombs. They don't count on anyone getting past it. If they did, then they didn't fucking design it right, now did they? The idea of a trap is not to be a pesky little thing, it's to KILL THE INTRUDERS.
And Echo, it's Grimtooth. I have most of them, and yes, they have some of the best traps in there. One of my favorites has a pressure plate on the floor and a door at the other end of the room. Now, the trap is a multi-functioning trap. The first time someone steps on the pressure plate, it opens the secret door at the other end of the room. As soon as they step off it, the door shuts. The second time someone steps on it, it releases a Fire Trap or equivalent when the door opens. As soon as the trap is sprung, the door shuts. The third time someone steps on the plate, the door swings open, and the counterweight for the door falls through the ceiling and hits whoever is stepping on the plate.
So I used this once.
The party goes in, and the door out locks behind them. They start searching the room for a secret door. Now, the members of the party present in the room are the Cleric, the Rogue and one of the Magic-types. The Rogue steps on the plate, and the door opens. Behind the door is the key to the door to get out of the room. They all rush for the door, and it slams shut before they can reach it. So they go into a discussion about who should open it. The magic-type is out because he's got a low Dex and no armor, should there be something else behind the door. So the Cleric outbids the Rogue on the basis that he has better armor and more HP than she does.
So he stands next to the door, she hits the plate, and BOOM! He takes a shitload of damage, and the door shuts. Now the Rogue and the magic-type are on the floor, peeing themselves with laughter. The rest of the party are outside the door, wondering what the hell is going on. So the Cleric gets up, hits himself with a Cure Light Wounds and says, "Okay, if this is so fucking funny, you go stand by the door, and I'll step on the god damn plate!" So the Rogue and he switch places. He steps on the plate, the door swings open, and he gets beaned in the head by the counterweight. He goes out like a light. They unlock the door, and the rest of the party rush in. The Druid heals the Cleric, who wakes up and says,
"SO DID WE GET THE FUCKING KEY?"
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You have a single, somewhat large room filled with bones, corpses, etc. Line the walls with whatever deadly looking devices you like. There is a single entrance/exit in the room. On the far wall from the door is a clock with a button under it.
When the adventurers enter the room, the door closes and locks behind them, and the clock begins to tick down. Should one of the adventurers hit the button, the clock will reset and count down from the beginning.
Most likely, one of them will hit the button before the clock finishes its first count down, and the rest of the party will search the room while one of them keeps mashing the button. There is no way to open the door, and the room contains no other way out.
Should the clock finish its count down, the door will slid open.
Perhaps the way the party need to go is behind a collapsible but perfectly normal looking wall, and the only way to break it down is by throwing a fighter through it at full power. So they need to charge up the spring fully, toally buff up the fighter then release the trap, so he gets thrown through the opposite wall mostly unharmed and the rest get a way forward.
Indeed, this is a great little puzzle. For a twist add a similar room later on in the dungeon with an identical clock, hourglass or whatever you were using. In this room, though, the door is already unlocked and touching the button/clock/hourglass triggers some nasty trap.
SoogaGames Blog
The players enter a 30ft cube room, on the other side of the rom they can see a archway leading off in the direction they want to go. On one of the walls is a huge image of a closed eye although a decent spot check reveals it is in fact moving very slightly now and again as if alive. Now the floor of the room is full of metal poles of varying height ranging from about ankle to waist height, there are loads of them in the room all sticking out of the floor at various angles generally getting in the way of anybody trying to move through the room and each one has a tiny bell attached to the top. The players had to make checks going through the room to avoid bumping a post and ringing a bell (I let them make either balance, or tumble or move silently depending on what they were best at and what made sense for the character).
If a bell gets rung the giant eye opens and the gravity in the room reverses everybody falls to the ceiling taking damage, the best part is when a second later all the metal tubes fall on them revealing they were hollow tubes that were left on top of metal spikes that now cover the floor. the party now have only a round or two to climp up the walls and out of the room (the doors are now 20ft up by the ceilling) before the eye closes returning gravity to normal and sending everybody in the room falling 30ft onto a bed of spikes.
Not really a trap but one time as my BBEG was running away fron the party I had him leave a sliced apple in the room as he left. The party burst through the door and I describe an empty room with an open door on the otherside from which they can hear the sound of footsteps running away. Then as an almost throwaway comment I say oh yeah andtheres an apple lying on the floor looks like something sliced it in half. This really freaks out the party who insist on casting detect magic, searching for traps, checking the apple to see if they can figure out if a blade or spell cut it! It gave me the idea that one of these days I'm going to have a room with an innocent item in it like a rubber duck on a pedestal or something and whilst the party are busy examining it the room starts to fill with gas or the walls start to silently move in.
Cue instant "I draw my sword!"
This is pure genius.
There's a long horizontal tunnel. The wizard starts climbing through there's a bend, and he continues onward. Forward is pitch darkness that even dark vision can't pierce. As he touches the darkness he's annhilated.
This is fairly straight forward and silly, except we lost six people to it (we used to play twelve to sixteen player games