Puzzles, traps, and devious dilemmas

[Afrodactyl]

Hi Playground. I just thought that it would be nice to get a big compilation of people's puzzle and trap ideas to inflict on their unwitting PCs. Just post your ideas below!

1. The old boulder/corridor trap, except the boulder is a regularly timed illusion. Until they decide to send an actual boulder down the hallway.

2. A door that can't be picked, smashed or blasted open, but will open if you knock and ask politely.

3. Room with a lever and a timer, and the walls close in. Pulling the lever resets everything only for it to start again. The door opens when the timer hits zero.

4. A door with four handles that opens to different rooms depending on which handle is used to open it. Use all four at the same time, and the door opens to the correct room.

5. Lever that opens a trapdoor/spike walls/fire jet/etc ten feet behind where the lever is.

6. Wooden staircase in which some of the steps are rigged to collapse when stepped on. The foot goes through the step, into the downward facing barbs. The PC won't take damage as long as they don't try to pull their foot out.

7. Maze full of easily seen and disabled traps. On reaching the end, the party gets the loot and is set upon by a monster that chases them out. Towards all of the newly-reactivated traps.

[MrStabby]

My guideline is consistency.

If it is a habitable space then there should be almost no chance of non intruders setting off the traps accidentally. You wouldn't have a pit trap in the middle of your living room - hobgoblins are just as smart.

A couple that I like are:

A trap that casts dispel magic. In a place that can only be reached by flying or water-breathing.

A trap that triggers when a spell is cast from a certain school of magic.

Alarm traps (low risk of killing yourself if triggered accidentally).

Teleportation traps

[arrowed]

I really like the versatility of Glyph of Warding, it reads like it was made for DMs to use it to design magical traps.
You could set one so that when someone walks through a door or falls into a pit trap it casts Stone Shape to seal the entrance behind them (like the boss fight doors in Legend of Zelda seal you in).
At higher levels Arcane Gate seems like it could be so much fun... two GoW in conjunction could cast Fog Cloud and Arcane Gate together, trapping your PCs in a 40ft section of corridor, possibly without realising it! It wouldn't be fatal, but it could stall the PCs after they trip an alarm or trick them into wasting resources.
Seeming: will your PCs turn on each other if they suddenly look like demons?
Hold Person could pair lethally with a swinging blade trap. The pendulum might be easy enough to walk through unscathed if you time it right, but if you don't speak the password you may find yourself held in place as it swings... and swings... and swings...
Thanks to Reverse Gravity, you can now include the incredible overhead pit trap in your dungeons! The rogue may well spot the trapdoor in the ceiling, but who would anticipate it would become the floor when they stood in the middle of it (away from all the convenient ledges to gab on to). Sarcastic DMs may congratulate their PCs on going up a level. :smallwink:
MWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

[MrStabby]

I think the glyph has to target the thing that triggered it? Although I seem to be on a roll for mis-remembering spells at the moment.

Guards and wards is pretty good as a guide to how to put a bunch of magical effects in an area, I just wish it was a little lower level so my character could stack it more easily each day.

[Zman]

In my current campaign they were effectively slaughtering a Cult of Baphomet. They work their way through the maze towards the inner sanctum. Well, they enter a large room with three stone arches, each has a stone door. Except, none of them open, they are merely carved stone to look like doors. If they investigate they can find the floor more worn to one area, there is an indent in the wall that perfectly fits the cults Minotaur amulets, which they had, but without the incantation to Baphomet it does nothing. The door is actually where the magical key is.

My party couldn't figure it out, as they snuck in and scattered the cultists before venturing into the labyrinth they had no cultists to interrogate. They retreated and returned with the Hill Giant King ally, who was waiting outside the labyrinth, believing his massive strength could open he stone doors. Obviously, it couldn't. But, they ended up figuring out where the door was and the Giant King broke it down which triggered the cultists below to begin a ritual to summon an avatar of Baphomet, aka Goristro. Had they figured it out they would have faced the Cultists and Minotaurs alone, but by breaking it down they had an easier fight with the cultists preoccupied with summoning, but then had to survive six turns of a Goristro and keep it close enough to the portal for it to be sucked back through when it closed. An epic shoving wrestling match between the Goristro and the Giant King. As the Goristro was being sucked into the portal it spent its last attack grappling a party member and dragging him into the abyss. Garen the Dwarven fighter will be missed.

[Afrodactyl]

All great ideas, keep them coming!

[Garresh]

There was a trap a DM ran a while back involving rotating floating cubes suspended over a spike pit. The spikes triggered and shot lightning up if someone even moved above them. The cubes would rotate to have a different side up every few turns. There were 6 cubes you had to step across, and each cube had 1 safe surface and 3 trap rune surfaces. When they rotated, the chains supporting them would disconnect, and then reconnect.

I consider this trap essentially a perfect example of how a trap or puzzle should be designed, and I'll tell you why. The "intended" solution is absurdly difficult, complicated and intimidating, but each of the individual elements can be utilized by almost every class in different ways to approach the problem.

Case in point, how our group solved it. The wizard analyzed the rotation cycles and went most of the way through. When he got stock and miscalculated on cube 5, his familiar triggered the 6th cube and he picked it up and ran across to safety.

The barbarian said "screw that", and waited for a rotation then hit the chains out of the way, and pulled one of the trap cubes out of the trap. Then he used it as mobile cover while the sorcerer cast fly on him and the ferried across. The rogue did some fancy work hopping from chain to chain by jumping during rotations to avoid getting electrocuted by the chains during a cycle. etc. etc.

Just an amazing encounter imho. When Im DMing I try to emulate that sort of design for doom puzzles now.

[djreynolds]

I just mentioned this on another thread,

I place monsters you have no chance of defeating to drive you to either appease it, or circumvent it.

Appeasing it involves multiple skill checks like persuasion, knowledge, history, and deception if the object to appease it.... isn't what it wanted.

I do a lot of natural obstacle crossings and toss in little goblin bands merely to harass.

I just want players to prepare for any encounter, so I purposely leave fresh kills hoping they will speak with the dead and maybe the dead has a clue.

I try to drain resources. I'm not out to TPK them, only make them realize there is more than stealth and perception to worry about.

Simply having a powerful monster only want to talk with the fighter is fun, how do you intimidate your way out of this!

Did the paladin and cleric have religion as a skill at creation? Well they must perform a religious rite to appease someone.

Oh, and having to save the villagers, who do not want to be saved, from say a flooding river is fun.

[Laserlight]

The party triggers the trap and they get the Raiders of the Lost Ark style giant-stone-ball thing, except it's a Gelatinous Cu...Sphere, scaled up enough that they don't want to just stand there and hit it. The party runs down the corridor and turns into a side corridor--we're safe!

Except the Sphere turns the corner also and comes after them! They race onward and come to a pit trap crossed only by a 4" wide balance beam that requires a couple of good Acrobatics rolls to get across. They have a round or two before the Sphere arrives, so if they're quick they can fiddle with Aid and ropes and get themselves (and the previously-rescued NPCs) across. The Sphere drops into the pit, and it's a good thing nobody fell into the spike pit and had the Sphere drop on them, but now we're safe!

Except what's that rumbling from the ceiling above the trap....another Sphere! Once again they run down the corridor, and find another pit trap--but this time there's no balance beam crossing it. Again, they have a couple of rounds to figure out a solution. In our case, the barbarian grabbed a rope end and leapt across, barely making it.