Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 50 - Using Traps In Your Game

Episode Date: December 6, 2020

Traps - some DMs love them and others hate them.  PCs usually hate them so how do you use them effectively in your campaign?  How can they go wrong?  Why are Pixie farts brought up so often this week?

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 50 of the Taking 20 podcast, using traps in your game. This week's sponsor, Assault and Battery Fish and Chip Store. Come for the felony, stay for the filet. Holy crap everyone, 50 episodes. I never thought I'd get a chance to record my thoughts on tabletop gaming for this long. I only get a chance to do this because of you listeners, so thank you to everyone who's listening to this podcast. Whether I know you or not, whether you've reached out to me or not, I greatly appreciate every single one of you.

You can't see my hand with bourbon in it, but here's to all of you, and here's to the next 50. Oh, it's good. It's good. Do you have any feedback for me? Ideas for an episode? I'd love to hear from you. Please send me an email at feedback at taking20podcast.com. Oh, and I'm thinking about doing a giveaway for episode 75. If you're interested in sponsoring that or providing items for the giveaway,

I would be happy to mention you as a sponsor and give you a little bit of rep. So I'm shutting my pregame trap now. You see what I did there? You see, it's wordplay because trap can also... But you know what, mate? Fuck it. On with the episode. This episode focuses on traps. Because trap can also... But you know what, mate? Fuck it. On with the episode.

This episode focuses on traps. For purposes of what we're going to discuss today, I'm going to say that puzzles are more complex. They have a complex logic behind them, while traps tend to be simpler in nature. It's a pedantic differentiation, to be honest. A 10-foot covered pit in a jungle with sharpened spikes at the bottom. Is it a trap or a puzzle on how to figure out how to get around it without becoming shishka barbarian? I'll do a puzzles episode later on that focuses on encounters with more complicated mechanics, but for now we're going to stick

to the simpler traps. Some examples of traps from movies you may have seen, and spoiler warning for some 20-plus year old movies. Indiana Jones movies are rife with trap examples. A rolling boulder, a wall of bugs, spikes from the walls, and a separate one spikes from the floor and ceiling, saw blades coming out of the walls and ceiling and floor, and so forth. The Mummy, the fun Brendan Fraser one, not the Tom Cruise one that tried to set up some weird monster franchise. Yep, The Mummy with Brendan Fraser is 21 years old as of the time I'm recording this. Fuck, I'm old. That had a beetle treasure made of blue gold, whatever the hell that is, that turned into a carnivorous burrowing beetle. Pressurized salt acid at the base of a statue, crushing walls, a treasure room that seals you in with the previously mentioned beetles, and an entire

city that sinks beneath the sand. Defining traps is extremely difficult. I mean, some of them make attacks against the players, like arrows shooting down a hallway, and spears that shoot out of an archway, or swinging axe blade caused by a pressure plate. Some serve primarily to delay the party, like the rolling boulder that gets released when you take the gold statue off the pressure plate, a falling stone door, falling portcullis, stones, a breakaway floor over a 30-foot pit. And others go for debilitation, poison gas, the salt acid spray, level-draining negative energy or necromantic ability score damage. Traps get a bad rap all in all. God damn, that sounds

weird. Let me change that. There are a lot of bits, ink, and recorded sounds dedicated to how awful traps are in RPGs. The Angry GM, which is a great blog for DMs, has an entire episode detailing why traps suck. I'll put a link in the resources page at www.taking20podcast.com. That blog is a great read. Please check it out. Reddit also has tons of posts of DMs and GMs who just hate traps. In my simple mind, traps have three components. A trigger, an effect, and clues.

The difficulty and lethality of the trap will depend on how you play with these three components. Traps have a trigger, pressure plate, motion sensor, and electrochemical nose that detects people as they go by. Maybe the members of the cult know to dip their shoes in a certain fluid to not set the trap off. Some other trigger, like setting foot on a sloped hillside. Anyway, a player or NPC that does something and the trap is sprung. Once the trap is sprung, there's some sort of deleterious negative effect that happens. The pointy end of the trap, as it were. The floor gives way. The whirling blades

of death start up. The heater coils fire up to heat up the room. The player begins sliding into the deep pit of pixie farts. Somewhere, someone just sat more upright in their seat. Pixie farts, you say? Adieu, go on. No, no, no, no. Go find some other podcast that talks about pixies and farts, please. Wait a minute, why am I talking about pixie farts so much? I mean, did this concept awaken something in me? No, there's no time for self-discovery. I have a podcast to do. Back to the topic at hand.

There's a trigger, the action that sets the trap off, the effect, the bad thing that happens, and the trap has some sort of clues to its discovery, deactivation, and or neutralization. Mechanically, what do these clues look like? Trap discovery is most often a die roll against a PC ability to possibly notice the trap before it goes off. Perception check to see the tripwire. A nature roll to see if the hillside looks unstable and disturbing it could cause an avalanche. A survival roll to see if the hillside looks unstable and disturbing it could cause an avalanche. A survival check to notice the footprints that avoid this one particular square.

An arcana check to notice that the stones in the dungeon floor are arranged in the draconic word for claw shot to the balls. Trap deactivation is also usually a die roll to neutralize the trap. It could be a sleight of hand or thievery or whatever your game system uses. Some sort of roll to disable the trap's capability and efficacy to render the trap broken, disabled, or otherwise unable to unleash its effects on the PC. Here, I've made the check and I've changed this little gear so the big bad trap isn't able to hurt you anymore. Trap neutralization as opposed to deactivation is a superset, actually, of deactivation. The party takes actions or makes choices to render the trap ineffective.

You put boards across the weak floor. You wear gas masks to avoid the poisonous gas. Whatever choices the PCs make. Traps may or may not have an intelligent designer behind them. Sometimes they're a natural occurrence. It could be water built up behind a door because there was a leak in the wall that borders on the river. The wood floor has rotted from moisture. Avalanche conditions set off by the druid's thunder wave spell. An alligator-filled pond in a slippery, muddy ravine. A thorny tree that falls due to high winds

and blocks the road. But traps may not be natural. They could be placed purposefully there by someone with intent. The dart trap triggered by a pressure plate. Acid spray caused by infrared sensors. Spikes that shoot up from the floor to stab grave robbers in the feet.

Regardless whether there's an intelligent designer, they all have a trigger, an effect, and clues to their existence. Now I've been harping a lot about clues, and there's a good reason. Having traps that will always affect the players regardless of what they do takes away the player agency in a way. It means there's no chance the players will be able to react to the trap or prevent its negative effects. It feels cheap. Players will understandably feel frustrated. How could we have known that the soup the old woman served us in this cottage in the middle of the woods in the ass end of nowhere would be poisoned? Well, um, did you ever read Hansel and Gretel?

I mean, the fucking cottage is made of candy. There's an oven big enough to fit a moose rack and all in there. She cackled after every sentence, and she used words to describe you like succulent, and she's not a gardener. Those are what we call non-mechanical hints that can be built into the story, and while those are good, giving the players a chance to roll a die and allow their characters to notice something is off really completes the trap.

You missed all those clues and rolled a natural one? Bad day. Give me a fortitude save to resist the poison. If you don't want to give the players a die roll, I completely understand. But instead, give the players the ability to do something after the trap is triggered, but before the bad thing happens. A good comparison would be old landmines the way they're shown in movies. There are a ton of movies and TV shows out there that show someone stepping on a landmine and it just goes click.

It doesn't actually explode until they step off the landmine. So imagine the PCs trigger a motion sensor that makes a soft beep sound but doesn't release the laser net until the PCs cross a certain threshold. By the way, back on landmines, you know that's not the way real military landmines work, right? They don't step, click, and wait for you to step off. No, it's step, instant boom. They're designed to kill, not make someone stand still while the bomb gets disarmed. So if you want to limit the PC's ability to detect the trap, make them movie landmine type traps. The negative event is delayed for a time or until the player does something else. Hear a click, boom doesn't happen unless they move off the mine.

Gives the players time to make a plan and still avoid the negative effects. However you use traps, whatever devious things you have in mind to inflict upon your players, there are problems putting traps in your game. Traps will invariably slow down your party, and a slower party means a slower game. The first time they set off a trap and something goes boom or stabs them in the leg, they will naturally be more cautious going forward. That means more perception checks, more dice rolls, and those dice rolls take time. It means a ton more taps with a 10-foot pole or castings of detect magic, spraying silly string ahead of themselves looking for tripwires. Traps may even result in splitting the party with the trap finder

being 10, 20, 30, maybe even 50 feet ahead of the rest of the group. So how do you use traps effectively as a GM? Well, here's some tips that I've learned along the way. Give PCs the ability to roll to detect the trap or stop it before it goes boom. I think that's been covered previously. I think everybody understands why I believe that. Have a plan in case your PCs fail hard. Every die roll goes sideways. I mean, if you play RPGs long enough, you know that there are nights where the dice just betray you. Perception roll? That's a natural two for a nine. Oh, no traps? Okay then, I'm going to walk down the hallway. Oop, I set off the trap. Dexterity save against a swinging scythe. I have a 17 dexterity. I got this. Click. Natural 1.

I'm sorry, did you say that I took 63 points of damage? Crap. Do you know what would happen to your party should that happen to your PCs? I mean, what if the trap incapacitates one of the PCs? What if it straight up impales one, reducing him to minus 25 hit points, and shuffling off his mortal coil? What do you do for the player? Do you know how you could possibly bring another character into the game in the middle of wherever the PCs are?

Which is why I recommend you use traps occasionally and sparingly. The other thing I recommend is you look for opportunities to give your PCs a win. If they come up with a remotely plausible and reasonable method of disarming the trap, let them bypass it. At worst, give them a bonus on a die roll. Don't be afraid to incorporate traps into other encounters. The floor sends out bursts of super frozen air into the room that deal cold damage every time someone touches a dead god statue. The ice trolls are immune to the cold damage, so they use the trap to their advantage. Traps are a great resource to use to give highly skilled characters and scouts an ability to save

the party. The rogue is walking through a room and finds a trap. Nobody move. I see the lever, I'm going to go throw it. Traps will make your PCs cautious and think more. Traps can be very thematic if the right types of traps are used in the right way. Rolling boulders in ancient religious shrines. Scarab beetles in a mummy's tomb. So if you're looking for a way to throw something new at your PCs, consider traps. Put them in a clever area. Put them in a creative area and allow the in a creative area, and allow the PCs the freedom and the ability to find creative solutions. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to episode 50 of the Taking20 podcast, Using Traps in Your Game. Once again,

I want to thank our sponsor, the Assault and Battery Fish and Chip Store. I went looking. This is actually a real business in New York. I had no idea when I wrote the joke for the first half of the episode. So hey guys, free publicity. The Assault and Battery Fish and Chip Store in New York. Check them out. They could be fantastic. This has been Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.