K wrote:
You are supposed to be adventurers who know their job and are better than average at it and making people auto-fail some challenges because they didn't remind the DM that they are fucking skilled adventurers every few minutes is extremely lame.
You don't actually want it to be something you have to remind the DM, rather something you can toggle on and off. The act of forcing people to constantly repeat over and over "I search for traps" is boring. It tends to bog down the game, and eventually you'll just get a PC who creates a SoP anyway where they always take a 20 on a door before opening it.
You want a situation where you can look for traps anytime you want, but doing so actually costs you something so you don't want to search everything. That way people get to choose whether they want to be in search mode or not and it's a meaningful choice. Being in search mode should mean that it's easier to surprise that character with monster attacks.
Your decision tends to hinge on whether you think monsters will actively find you, or you'll run into traps. If you're in the Tomb of Horrors, you're much better being in search mode, or at least having some people in search mode. If you're in a bustling hobgoblin lair, you may just want to forgo searching for traps altogether.
Swordslinger wrote:
You want a situation where you can look for traps anytime you want, but doing so actually costs you something so you don't want to search everything. That way people get to choose whether they want to be in search mode or not and it's a meaningful choice. Being in search mode should mean that it's easier to surprise that character with monster attacks.
I agree. Obstacles/Traps (of whatever type) are timesinks to delay characters. Being in search mode means that exploration takes longer, with therefore a greater chance of meeting wandering monsters and using up resources. Whether they roll for it or talk over what they're doing, they've committed their time.
I disagreed with a girl, which means 3rd edition sucks.
Moving right along, a trap's only use, in the end, is to scar the psyche of a player forever. It doesn't bring anything to the table but doubt and indecisiveness(?) to the table, bogging down every dungeon until the end of time to a fucking crawl. End of line.
I've always been extremely disdainful of the idea of 'trap as self-contained obstacle'. They especially make little sense for medium-leveled and up people to be stymied by, considering that most of the advocates are all of 'throw a rogue at it!', which to me is just one more way that people try to stick their low-level dicks into everything.
Now, traps as a setpiece or terrain enhancer, that's something I can get behind. A trap that summons a new critter ever 1d4 rounds until disarmed? Or a trap that shoots fireballs out of a turret every time the Artificer or Wizard speaks a command word? Potentially very cool. But that stupid Indiana Jones bullshit? Keep that shit to the low levels.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
If you think in terms of what you might actually use a trap for if you were trying to stop an enemy and not challenge them, it'd mostly be used to funnel or inhibit enemy movements so you could catch them in an ambush, or else slow them down so you can set up your defenses. You wouldn't typically be trying to kill your opponents with just traps, except maybe in some kind of self-destruct sequence that you wouldn't really plan on resetting and sacrifices the whole room it's used in.
Chamomile wrote:If you think in terms of what you might actually use a trap for if you were trying to stop an enemy and not challenge them, it'd mostly be used to funnel or inhibit enemy movements so you could catch them in an ambush, or else slow them down so you can set up your defenses. You wouldn't typically be trying to kill your opponents with just traps, except maybe in some kind of self-destruct sequence that you wouldn't really plan on resetting and sacrifices the whole room it's used in.
Walls that shoot together and squish the enemy immediately rather than slowly, spiked pits covered with deadly poison, teleport trap into detention block deep underground, with antimagic field coming up to trap them once they're there...
RadiantPhoenix wrote:
Walls that shoot together and squish the enemy immediately rather than slowly,
Given that the slow ones already exist, you'd think that this would be, for whatever reason, impossible mechanically. Magically, just have your impossibly strong guy hold the walls apart for a few seconds (should not be impossible) while the Wizard dispels.
spiked pits covered with deadly poison,
Neutralize Poison is available to Clerics level seven and above. Delay Poison is available at level three.
teleport trap into detention block deep underground, with antimagic field coming up to trap them once they're there...
This is the only one that seems like it could actually work against a party of adventurers.
You know, it's okay that all those traps can be overcome by prepared adventurers, seeing as how that's what they're for. Unbeatable obstacles don't make for good gameplay material.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
But a competent opponent should know that prepared adventurers aren't going to be more than slightly inconvenienced by them, and should set them up with the expectation that this is all they will do. Setting traps with the expectation that they will regularly kill adventuring parties who aren't way in over their heads anyway is a stupid move.
Swordslinger wrote:
You want a situation where you can look for traps anytime you want, but doing so actually costs you something so you don't want to search everything. That way people get to choose whether they want to be in search mode or not and it's a meaningful choice. Being in search mode should mean that it's easier to surprise that character with monster attacks.
I'm not really sure how making a trap minigame improves the game. It just seems like a unneeded tax.
You options are:
1. Time tax, where you either use a skill to look around, but probably just toss rocks around until the traps go off. This turns into a resource tax because more time means more monster attacks, but in some adventures it's no tax at all.
2. Resource tax. You spend spells to either recover from damage, destroy the traps, or do things like sending summoned monsters to just set them off, but their existence is taken care of in downtime.
Now, you'd like them to be a "tactical tax" and I can support that, but to do that we need to envision some new minigame where traps are something you deal with in units of meaningful time (like combat rounds).
geordie racer wrote:Traps are best when they delay, disarm or disable the victims - a crippled character is a liability. But is it fun or heroic ?
heoric doesnt matter. the heroism is something new to D&D.
adventurers didnt walk into a town and proclaim themselves heros, except for cavaliers...they went into town and the heralds of their exploits had others call them that. seeking heroism denies heroism itself because of the lack of humility and selflesness.
fun? well it is challenging and something that can be different than solving a puzzle, so depending on the group and regular style of play, the change of pace could be fun to those who dont have it often, as well some may prefer it.
"fun" cannot be defined by one for another.
Play the game, not the rules.
Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.
Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.
good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
Maybe traps need to be more obvious? It's always pretty clear in a movie when the room is a death-trap.
Of course, this only works for the least straightforward types of traps, such as the lettered floor corridor in Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, or the flamethrower-eyes room in the D&D flick. Who the fuck has fun with spinning blades and spiked pits. Its fine for a movie or video game, but in a non-visual medium, they suck. Hard.
Last edited by Guyr Adamantine on Sun Sep 04, 2011 10:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
shadzar wrote: the heroism is something new to D&D.
Ahahahaha oh wow.
3rd edition you didnt start out as a hero, jsut an adventurer still. so laugh all you want
Play the game, not the rules.
Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.
Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.
good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
Guyr Adamantine wrote:Who the fuck has fun with spinning blades and spiked pits.
They can be a lot of fun when you have combat going in the same room. Give the enemies some natural advantage against the trap, and go to town. That can be flame jets in the fire elemental room, spinny blades in the dread wraith room, lightning coils in the flesh golem room, et cetera. The players can fight through the trap, or work on disarming it in combat-time, either choice has real costs.
I mean, if you were a flesh golem crafting wizard, why wouldn't you fill your lab with lightning traps? At worst they keep your golems at peak health all the time.
That's a fair distinction. If we consider traps as distinct obstacles to be overcome, they are awesome in single-author narratives and terrible in RPGs. Dangerous terrain is awesome pretty much all the time.
It's the same difference between having players find a way to cross a ravine, and having players fight some harpies as they cross the ravine. Only one is actually interesting after the first couple of levels.
K wrote:I'm not really sure how making a trap minigame improves the game. It just seems like a unneeded tax.
Well I'm not really sure how making a combat minigame improves the game either. It seems like an unneeded tax.
If you think they add something to the game, I'm all ears.
As far as I can see, the decision tree is "do we take 20" on one fork and "don't take 20 and take our chances" on the other. That's not a big addition to the game for it to take up an entire class and a substantial part of any session played.
Combat, on the other hand, has hundreds of potential choices and outcomes.
I mean, if you really just want a resource tax you can just make them have no have saves and be impossible to find or set off by tossing rocks onto them. Then your players get taxed, but actual time is saved at the table.
Swordslinger wrote: The act of forcing people to constantly repeat over and over "I search for traps" is boring. It tends to bog down the game, and eventually you'll just get a PC who creates a SoP anyway where they always take a 20 on a door before opening it.
You want a situation where you can look for traps anytime you want, but doing so actually costs you something so you don't want to search everything.
It's interesting that you started off with a true premise (saying "I search for traps" x50 is boring) and then came up with a screwy conclusion (saying "I search for traps" x50 is interesting if it means you suffer some sort of penalty x50).
Traps that work more like monsters, with multiple sets of HD and attacks for damage (with conditions) that you focus-fire on for a while until you get their numbers down and win, that works.
Treat the AD&D sequence like reach advantage, threatened zones to avoid, trip and bullrush to open some space to work safely, and +3d6 damage vs traps because you're a Rogue. The traps just need to be dishing out some damage in the background to force the players to get on with it.
So there's a zapper in the back, guarded by an invisible, hiding, concealed "pit" that damages and grapples you when you get in reach, some wall blades with 10' reach that can be disarmed, and a spinning blade that can be tipped over to negate it's reach and let the Rogue tumble in and trap-attack the zapper.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
Okay, I know Skyrim isn't out yet, but guys, this is not hard.
In Skyrim, you can lay traps, and then start a fight, and use the trap as control. It doesn't do anything if you just have a corridor with a bunch of traps in it, because people will just heal the damage away after each trap.
Why do people want a trap without any accompanying monsters to matter at all to anyone?
You should never run into a pit trap that just springs, and doesn't call the Kobolds over to pepper you with arrows.
hogarth wrote:
It's interesting that you started off with a true premise (saying "I search for traps" x50 is boring) and then came up with a screwy conclusion (saying "I search for traps" x50 is interesting if it means you suffer some sort of penalty x50).
You have two choices. Either don't use traps at all and don't worry about it. Or you create a reason why you don't just search everything to make searching an actual choice and not just something you have to constantly remember to do.
Much like texting while driving, searching for traps in a dungeon means you lower your awareness to more distant threats to get a good look at nearby floor tiles and ceilings.
Last edited by Swordslinger on Mon Sep 05, 2011 6:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
Is there a problem with the plan of putting in traps, and then giving the player an automatic search check whenever an action they take would spring one the same as they get an automatic listen check whenever they walk near a sneaking monster?
Then the rogue always goes first down the hallway, and if there's a trap then he'll have a chance to notice it without having to spend player time when there isn't traps. If the party has no rogue they'll be hit by more traps unless they have a Headband of Detect Traps that the cleric made or whatever.
