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The Cats
2020-07-30, 03:29 PM
Coming up with in-dungeon obstacles that aren't just things to fight or 'gotcha you stepped on a pressure plate and take damage!' is probably what I'm worst at as a DM.

I came up with one good one like two years ago that I still brag abut cause it's all I got: The boiling pot. Illusory floor drops the party in a pit of water, real floor then slides into place trapping them in as the water temperature starts to rise.

I steal a lot of ideas for this stuff from published adventures and now I wanna steal your ideas too if you've got some good ones to share. Just any engaging trap or environmental hazard ideas you have in general.

Also would't mind a couple I can throw into a oneshot I'll be doing this weekend: Takes place partly in an abandoned frost giant steading now occupied by ice goblins (who can rapidly freeze water or melt ice at will) ending with an expedition down a deep shaft to recover the remains of a large magical device that was cast down it.

ShuckedAeons
2020-07-30, 04:24 PM
I think it was written in a book, but I for the life of me can’t remember the edition.

Essentially the trap is that you have a boulder rolling down a slope Indiana Jones style, the catch is that at the bottom of the slope is a magic tune that teleports the stone back to the top. There can be crevices to hide in or any flavor you want to add, but unless the cycle is broken then that rock will keep picking up speed and preventing further passage.

Man_Over_Game
2020-07-30, 04:32 PM
Traps are just a triggered effect.

A triggers -> B happens.

Player response is what they're allowed to do in between the two. All you really need for a good trap (hell, good game mechanics), is just the option to react to the trigger before the effect happens.

That could be time, or it could just be a list of options that your players can immediately decide on, or something along those lines. You can even have no response between the trigger and the effect (such as being ambushed), as long as there was something the players could interact with leading up to the trigger (like clues). For a trap to be allowed to have it's effect, it must have had a reasonable possibility of disruption.

Although the easiest method is just inserting time between the trigger and the effect, which is easily handled by physics. Physics generally leave a lot of options to interact with, and time is an easily manageable throttle on difficulty. Problem with making stuff that doesn't utilize time or physics is that it means the DM is basically having to think about everything the players could do, instead of the players doing the work for him. When you try to use in-game mechanics, or magic physics, or "someone's opinion of the players", etc., you're basically deciding that you're going to be doing a ton more work with fewer player options.


For example, illusory boulder chases a group of players down a tunnel, where the floor eventually leads into a illusory floor panel that's actually a spike trap. While the sounds and visuals are real, anyone who keeps their wits about them would recognize that the floor isn't shaking and the tunnels aren't taking damage from the boulder. Other options include trying to stop the boulder, or reacting to the sudden dropoff from the floor from being agile.

Another one is where the players are dropped into a sand pit with a giant hungering maw in the center. It's full of teeth, and will definitely kill you if you drop into it while it's chewing, but it's also the way out. When the players fall into the pit, small, annoying, venomous insects drop from holes in the walls. The insects start small, but slowly get better and more dangerous. The insects will try to attack the players, but eventually fall into the maw. After getting its fill, the maw becomes full and stops chewing, stabilizing as a (precarious) tunnel for the next area. However, a player could attempt to climb into the holes where the bugs would come from, if one wasn't releasing any bugs for an unknown reason, or the players could attempt to disable the maw on their own or find a way back to the area they fell from.

You got a spider-themed dungeon, so you want a spider-themed trap. The floor has a pattern of a spiderweb, and in the floor is what appears to be an image of a giant spider that seems to be alive. When a piece of the web is physically touched, the spider will briefly turn towards the disruption, before dashing off to catch its prey. It's bite has a special venom that turns the victim into a piece of the "floor", or rather, a statue. It starts with the infection site that touched the spider and slowly turns your body into stone over a day (faster with . Solutions include touching the opposite side of the web as a distraction, spreading out so the spider is confused about what direction to move in, finding a way to dispel the trap, avoiding touching the floor, or even just drawing something that's harmful to the trap itself (such as fire on the web).

So use fuses, vibrations, things falling or sliding, something getting bigger or smaller, etc. That's...it.

Darth Credence
2020-07-30, 04:57 PM
Indiana Jones movies have some good ideas if you are up for an easily recognizable stolen trap.

I had a couple of things recently that are traps/encounters, but I really liked the way they turned out. I'm playing D&D 5e, but I'm sure things could be adapted.

First one, I started by creating a magic item I called a carving of wondrous power - basically a cheaper version of the figurine of wondrous power, carved from wood, which meant it was fragile enough that it had a chance of breaking and would break if defeated. I set up a long hallway with carvings of animals on the sides. At one point near the middle, they passed a point where two wolf carvings were directly across from each other. When the eye line was broken, it triggered the carvings, and some wolves appeared on either end of the hallway. Made for a fun little battle.

Second one, which writing it out like this is amazingly similar, but it didn't play that way. Fairly long room, with a bunch of stone carvings of geometric shapes, heavy on spheres. Everyone was fascinated by them, trying to figure out the reason for them, if they related to anything else, and so on. In reality, they were purely there as ammunition for the poltergeist tied to the room - nice, hard, compact stones that could be flung at peoples heads. The size of the room was also such that any of the lighter people could be picked up and tossed around, going the maximum distance before hitting a wall.

And, I have a few planned coming up. I like the idea of a riddle that has a red herring answer, and getting it wrong means setting off a trap. Something like 'Seeker, prove your worth. Go to the end of the rainbow to proceed.' Have several doors, describe them one at a time, with the second or third having a pot of gold on it. The last door has a "w". Anything but the "w" is bad news.

D&D_Fan
2020-07-30, 06:07 PM
Here is a great book I can recommend:
Here are some of mine you can borrow:

Weight-activated Magnetic Floor.
Pit of Lava that must be swung over. There is a rope, but it is actually a Rope of Entaglement, or an Assasin Vine
Room filled with Whipped Cream. No spells are designed for it.
Polymorph a character into a Dolphin.
Turn off gravity.
Upside down Spiked Pit Trap 100 feet high + Reverse gravity.
The floor is alive: it is a monster.
Greased Stairs.
Just a door that is fake, and skewers the opener with a jagged blade coated in Purple Worm Venom.
Room of poison gas that must be solved in real time.
Crushing Wall pushed players through Giant Dicer.


This is a good list that I have. I used all of these in two dungeons. Hope you like.

Lagtime
2020-07-30, 06:51 PM
Well...

1.A area with a bridge over something. Water, acid, oil, lava or even just a fungus jungle. The bridge can be quite narrow and not made to take a lot of weight.

2.Same type of area....but the bridge is broken.

3.An area full of ropes, chains, fungus tendrils or webs.

4.A whole area full of dangerous bugs, normal ones or giant ones. With no path to the other side.

5.An area full of small holes in the floor or walls or ceiling or everywhere that shoot acid, lava, or whatever. Maybe there is a pattern?

Jay R
2020-07-30, 07:08 PM
1. The party is walking through a long underground passageway, and for about 40 feet, the floor is wooden. In point of fact, it's a bridge over a 39-foot long chasm. But the bridge is not connected to either side -- it just (barely) fits there. If enough weight (the party) is on the middle of the bridge, it bends enough that it falls through. Suddenly the party falls to a sloped passageway, on a 40-foot ski, sliding down to the pool at the bottom, with whatever water hazard you want.

2. Exploring the underground, they come to a lighted room, with a jade pillar ten feet in diameter. If they touch the pillar, the lights go out, and the pillar turns to common clay.

No, nothing changed. It's a teleport trap, and they are in an identical room one level down. All the passageways around are identical, so it will seem like everything's the same, until they get far enough away that they don't attribute the changes to the pillar.

3. In one of the Discworld books, there is a series of inane traps -- annoying but not dangerous. Their purpose is to lure you into a false sense of security until the last one appears:

a. A "Kick Me" sign placed on your back, followed by a large boot on a lever.
b. An extended hand connected to an electrode.
c. A feather duster that is extended at armpit height.
d. A bucket of white wash dumped on you.
e. The entire roof, a huge block of stone four feet thick, dropped on you, with words carved into it. "Laugh This One Off."

a_flemish_guy
2020-07-30, 10:16 PM
the piggy bank trap
- I got this one from a book I read once, the item hidden behind the trap needs to be either not or sparsely used and it must belong to someone wealthy
have a heavily trapped room which requires finesse to get through, then have a wooden box or drawer or closet which is clearly locked
any attempt to fiddle with or open (for additional sadism have the target carry a key which ultimatly does nothing but activate the trap) the lock will activate the trap (posion needle, gas, loud bang to alert guards, explosion,... you name it)
the trick is that in order to get to the item you need to smash the container open like a piggy bank but since the room is build to allow for finesse they wouldn't at first think of this

Squire Doodad
2020-07-30, 11:41 PM
If you want to do one to really annoy a high level party with means to escape from being stranded on another plane/part of the world several times a day...

Have a castle with rooms which seal themselves, then teleport the entire room (it gets replaced instantly by additional magic) to either the elemental plane of fire/the inside of a volcano (or something more dangerous). As soon as it is teleported, the room hits itself with dimensional anchors, leaving the party in a room that will be filled with death in a minute or three.

It's overkill, of course, and is more useful for the humor of having a highly effective and lethal trap that the party can just pop out of at later levels.

"Fake trap while the rest of the area is converted into an actual trap" is a fun one.

King of Nowhere
2020-07-31, 07:01 AM
I once put a pit trap in q room full of skeletons. The skeletons are light enough to not trigger the trap. I then had the room filling with water, in real time. I announced to the players that the room would be filled in 30 minutes, and gsve periodic updates on how much water they were walking through.

Another time i had the villain's lair equipped, in the last room, with a self-destruction mechanism. Pressing the button would trigger an explosion under whoever took the schmuk bait.

Speaking of which, use schmuck bait often. Whether the party fslls for it or not, it's always good for a laugh

Mastikator
2020-07-31, 08:55 AM
A trap could also silently alert the enemies that the party is coming- and exactly where they are. They could set up an ambush, or escape with all the loot.

For example: A door with a wire connected to it > pulls on a mechanism that alerts the enemies
A wire on the floor > walking through it has he same effect
A raised plate on the floor > triggers some minor falling rocks from the ceiling (party thinks falling stalactites is the trap) which alerts the enemies
Party member sits down on a chair > chair has whoopee cushion which makes out a sound to alert the enemies