Traps and Snares - How to handle?

[Moofaa]

I did a quick search and didnt turn up anything, so I was wondering if anyone had any good suggestion or rules they use to handle player-created traps and snares?

I ran into a situation, in which the players party was severly outclassed. This happens a lot, as its an 'evil' campaign, and im running groups of good aligned 'heroes' against them. Anyways, true to their evil selves,they wanted to set a trap to kill this ranger and his freinds that had been causing problems for the evildoers campaign.

So they found a family at a cabin in the woods, killed the males, tied the women and children up in the cabin. Initially they tried to ambush the heroic ranger and his buddies, but it turned into a stalemate and they retreated.

Knowing the ranger would return, and knowing now they were outclassed, wounded, and not likely to survive a second fight, they decided to create a some traps.

The leader had this idea of cutting a hole for a trap door in the floor of the front porch of the building, then when the good guys went inside, leap up and close and bar the door, and set the building on fire.

I was stuck on the mechanics at this point. I looked up the trap rules in the 3e DMG, and it looked rather complicated and was focused on large traps like you would find in established dungeons, rather then juy-rigged-from-scratch traps. In addition this was taking too long, so I just had him roll an intelligence check DC18, and of course, he rolled a 20 so it worked perfectly, and the heroes never noticed the trap door until it was too late and he leapt up and shut them inside the cabin.

I also didnt find anything that seemed logical about simple hunting snares, tripwires, etc. Just wondering if anyone used any house rules for scratch creation of simple traps that actually made sense, didnt take a week to create and cost gold. I mean, if your a 7ft tall demon with a str of 20, Im pretty sure you can dig a 10ft deep hole in an afternoon with a shovel, and it doest take some sort of genius to make sharp stick to put on the bottom.

Of course, while 'anyone' can make a tripwire, dig a pit, etc. I'm sure it takes a measure of 'know-how' to make effective ones that are difficult to see. Which makes it difficult to set a DC. I mean, on one hand a tripwire is a tripwire after all.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

You could use the trap rules from the 3.5 DMG (page 74) to assign a DC for building the trap. Assuming the PCs aren't buying new kit to make the trap, there is no cost (the DMG listed costs are for buying traps from a master craftsman) other than the materials used. The DC for the Craft (trapmaking) check is based on the CR, and found on page 76 of the DMG.

If the PC hasn't got Craft (trapmaking), it'll be an INT check.

For simple snares and tripwires, use the same rules. The base CR is 1. How hidden is the tripwire? That effects the search DC, and that effects the CR. How much damage is the trap going to do? How hard to diarm is the trap? All this is in Table 3-13 of the DMG, page 74. If you don't have the 3.5 DMG, here's a link to the same table in the SRD. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/traps.htm#tableCRModifiersforMechanicalTraps) It'll work for D&D 3.0 just as well as 3.5.

For simple environmental traps, ignore the normal Craft skill times, and apply a more common sense rule. I'd say that Tripwires should take ten minutes to set per CR of the trap. Other factors need to be judged based on party resources: Summon a couple of Celestial Badgers and you can dig huge pits in a few rounds. But those stakes in the bottom of that pit need to be strong enough to hold fast when some poor ranger falls on them. That's what your Craft DC is all about.

[Fax Celestis]

If you've got the books, the Trapsmith (Dungeonscape) and Combat Trapsmith (Complete Scoundrel) provide mechanics.

[Moofaa]

Thanks, I'll check those out.