Return to the Tomb of Extremely Boring Traps

[Saph]

So our Pathfinder group has recently been playing through the Tomb of Horrors, and I've been noticing something.

Namely, that trap-focused adventures are really, REALLY boring.

• Only one person can act: In the typical combat everyone gets to contribute. Even if only one person can act at a time, the PCs can cooperate, and since the battlefield's constantly changing, everyone has a reason to pay attention. Traps are different. They're basically solo encounters: only one person can interact with them at a time. To make things worse, that person is usually the same person.
  
  This gets to be a problem real fast when you have a decent-sized group. Our group has six players and whenever a trap came up, five of the players had to sit around and do nothing while the rogue handled everything.

• The mechanic for dealing with traps isn't interesting: Traps are done on a binary basis. Either you succeed on your Remove Traps/Disable Device/Thievery check, or you don't. There's none of the variety you get in a combat or social encounter.

• The consequences of failure aren't interesting: D&D traps basically function as a HP tax. If you get hit by them, it just means you have to spend X amount of healing resources.

• They slow down gameplay: Once players run into the first couple of traps, they'll generally have the rogue start searching everything. And I mean everything. At length. And the more dangerous the traps are, the worse it gets. In our game, after the rogue missed the first trap because of a low roll, he started taking 20 on every square.
  
  It creates a sort of paralysing effect where players want to explore, but can't move beyond the cleared zone until it's been searched. And once again, it's generally the case that only one character can effectively search, either by having Trapfinding or having the best perception score. So again, everyone else just has to sit around and watch.

I know it's traditional for D&D parties to have a skillmonkey/trapfinder role, but I'm really wondering why the early editions did it in the first place. What's the point of having a job and a party role that only one person can fill?

[Benly]

Well, as I recall a lot of the Tomb of Horror traps were designed to be disabled not by rolling Disable Device but by the players actually coming up with a workable plan of how to deal with this problem with the resources at hand. In that regard, once they were spotted they were more of a puzzle than a skill check.

As for spotting them, I tend to houserule that rogues automatically search for traps when they get close enough, because HAHA SWINGING GUILLOTINE IN THE FACE isn't all that much fun really.

[Lapak]

I know it's traditional for D&D parties to have a skillmonkey/trapfinder role, but I'm really wondering why the early editions did it in the first place. What's the point of having a job and a party role that only one person can fill?

In the early editions, trap disarming was not always as easy a skill check. Some traps were explicitly something that you couldn't disarm but could avoid; others had a specific method of disarming and it was expected that the players rather than the characters would work out what needed to be done. Only once you'd worked out what needed to happen would the differing levels of character ability come into play - the fighter might be the one to figure out that you need to pin the trigger-stone in place, but the thief is the one with the hands steady enough to do it. The same was true of trap (and secret door, and etc.) detection - there was sometimes the chance of finding something randomly, but a more reliable method was to say exactly where and how you were looking.

Which is to say that trap modules like Tomb of Horrors were explicitly meant to test player skill and attention to detail rather than character skill.

[DarkEternal]

For the exact same reason that in the times of yore, there was only one class that could hit really hard, one class that could heal you and one class that could blast stuff from far away. It's what they do.

Me, I like traps when they are properly dosed. I didn't really play Tomb of Horrors, so I can't really comment on that, but a well placed trap can bring a lot of confusion in a party, and I particularly favor mechanical traps when compared to magical ones.

For instance, in one of our last mini campaigns(high level campaign, they were level 14 or something at the time), the party walked on top of a floor which was actually a mechanical trap, released by pulling a level, which the villain of said encounter did. Basically, what it did was open the floor beneath them. The ranger was the only one that saved. The rest dropped in, some odd 5-6 feet, really not deep, in black water which was basically a substance which nullified all spells, arcane and divine, meaning all magic.

Oh, and also there was a gargantuan dire shark swimming in there.


It was fun watching then scraping to escape and being afraid for their survival.

However, I can see how it would be boring it it happened all the time, but really, I can see that happening whenever you put something where only one character shines(aka, if you make all fights the sort where enemies don't have spell resistance or something meaning all magic users can thrive and martial combatants can twiddle their fingers), but if you mix it up so that everyone can have ago, toss in a golem every now and then, an antimagic field here and there, it brings the variety everyone needs. Same thing with traps.

[Redrat2k6]

@Saph

I agree.

I would like to see trap mechanics match Indiana Jones movies, where the binary system would help make it easier or provide more options to overcome the trap.

*such as running away from giant boulders*
*yelling at women to stick their hands in bugs*
*slowly pulling said women up from a giant lava pit*

etc.

[Arbane]

]
I know it's traditional for D&D parties to have a skillmonkey/trapfinder role, but I'm really wondering why the early editions did it in the first place. What's the point of having a job and a party role that only one person can fill?

OD&D didn't have skills AT ALL, so the DM as supposed to give players a fair bit of slack when they tried to disarm/bypass traps via Rube Goldberg methods. ("Okay, we lay the ladder over the pit horizontally, and walk or crawl across one-at-a-time...")

[Fhaolan]

Yeah, when Tomb of Endless Traps was put together, there wasn't a 'disable traps' mechanic. Instead the players were expected to figure out how to do it.

Which is pretty much how I run games still. I put puzzle/traps in to entertain the players, not the characters. If the players like working out the solution to traps, traps tend to show up more often. If the players just want to roll against a 'disable traps' skill, then traps don't show up very often.

[Oracle_Hunter]

In 4E the trap focus has shifted from these sort of "one man" or "gotcha" traps (e.g. pit traps, poisoned darts) to "Trap Encounters" (e.g. fighting in a room with pendulum blades; rolling boulders). IMHO, this is the best way to handle traps in a game where Skills are used for trap removal - they let the Rogue try to shut down or avoid the trap while everyone else is dealing with the effects of an active trap.

In non-skill games (e.g. OD&D) each trap is actually a Player Puzzle. Those are as fun as your group finds Player Puzzles - me, I never liked them 'cause I was bad at them

[Yora]

This sounds as if the dungeon was actually playable back then.
But who thought it would be a good idea to make an adaptation for 3rd ed that replaces everything with a Disable Trap DC?

[Rockphed]

This sounds as if the dungeon was actually playable back then.
But who thought it would be a good idea to make an adaptation for 3rd ed that replaces everything with a Disable Trap DC?

Probably the same people who thought that removing the down-sides for magic AND upping the power thereof would be a good idea. And the same people who thought that the monk, whose entire thing is being hard to hit by getting really fast should have the ability to hit a whole bunch in a single round if he stands still. 3.x was full of bad design decisions, and you wonder at one more?

[Kurald Galain]

Well, I'm not really a fan of the Tomb of Horrors, but the point is that if you start taking 20 on each square, you're playing it overly rational - and most games do get boring when you play them overly rational.

[Benly]

Well, I'm not really a fan of the Tomb of Horrors, but the point is that if you start taking 20 on each square, you're playing it overly rational - and most games do get boring when you play them overly rational.

This is why every party needs at least one low-Wis high-Cha to declare himself leader and throw caution to the wind.

[WarKitty]

This is why every party needs at least one low-Wis high-Cha to declare himself leader and throw caution to the wind.

In our games this usually leads to the would-be leader being stuck out front on the end of a 10-foot pole.

[Occasional Sage]

This sounds as if the dungeon was actually playable back then.
But who thought it would be a good idea to make an adaptation for 3rd ed that replaces everything with a Disable Trap DC?

ToH was amazing and horrible, back in the day. I want the person responsible for the conversion to play them, one after the other.

With any luck, they will suicide in shame. Notreally. Just hyperbolically.

[kc0bbq]

In 4E the trap focus has shifted from these sort of "one man" or "gotcha" traps (e.g. pit traps, poisoned darts) to "Trap Encounters" (e.g. fighting in a room with pendulum blades; rolling boulders). IMHO, this is the best way to handle traps in a game where Skills are used for trap removal - they let the Rogue try to shut down or avoid the trap while everyone else is dealing with the effects of an active trap.

I really like how 4Es traps work and try to set up my 3.xE traps in the same manner. 3E Tomb of Horror just doesn't work. There's an answer to every gygaxian meat grinder effect you find in the old tournament modules. They're just not fun.

4E brings back some of the Rube Goldberg feel, and some of the published encounters with a trap as only part of a larger encounter can be really amusing.

The problem is that it can be hard to reinterpret 3E ToH without massively rewriting the traps. Some are merely off switches for the PCs life, and everyone goes into the thing paranoid these days. That's one of the charms of the 4E ToH sequel. You're encouraged to let the players who have been through the original to really play up the reputation of the place.

In its day, though, and in the right place (convention tournament), ToH was exciting. It was fun to get just one room deeper to find out how you the next party member was going to die and swapping stories about it.

It still works for my core group, but we're the people you hear chanting "TPK! TPK! TPK!" at RPGA events waiting to be assigned a GM.

[Skorj]

Really, the best way to play ToH is:

• With the original trap designs (no DCs)
• With one-off characters (perhaps even more than one per player)
• Without telling the players that it's ToH

ToH isn't all that fun if you get too paranoid about it, it's far better in a tourney environment where it's a victory if there's one survivor, and there's some time pressure.

The modules reputation doesn't enhance the gaming, IMO - if you have players who have never played it, better IMo to just warn them it will be difficult, but let them form their own impressions.

[grimbold]

Well, as I recall a lot of the Tomb of Horror traps were designed to be disabled not by rolling Disable Device but by the players actually coming up with a workable plan of how to deal with this problem with the resources at hand. In that regard, once they were spotted they were more of a puzzle than a skill check.

As for spotting them, I tend to houserule that rogues automatically search for traps when they get close enough, because HAHA SWINGING GUILLOTINE IN THE FACE isn't all that much fun really.

exactly this
the best traps require part participation to work out, the reason there is a trap finder skill monkey is because it makes sense for people guarding thousands of gp to protect it with whatever they can, and its not only rogues who can sense traps
if your really bored with traps you can do what i often do and allow anybody to find traps with a dc over 20 if they get a high enough roll

[Saph]

Really, I'm starting to wonder what the point is of using trap-heavy environments at all. Whenever I'm designing my own adventures, I use dungeons sparingly and pretty much never use traps.

I'm just not sure what traps add that sentient enemies can't provide on their own. If you look at most fantasy stories, traps are pretty rare - when Aragorn, Frodo, Gimli, and Gandalf are going through Moria, 'checking for traps' is not high on their priority list.

[Psyren]

I would like some middle ground; reward the player who picked the trapmonkey class by letting them see possible solutions to the trap encounter, but still require the participation of the others to get through it one piece, instead of a flat skill roll.

For instance, the Rogue can see which pressure plates to get the party to stand on, or where the wizard should throw fire his ray of frost to jam the gears, or when the cleric should take out the rock he cast Darkness on to block the shaft of light trigger for the collapsing bridge etc.

[Kurald Galain]

I would like some middle ground; reward the player who picked the trapmonkey class by letting them see possible solutions to the trap encounter,

This is circular reasoning, though: the only reason why anyone would play a trapmonkey is the expectation that there might be traps; so if there are only traps because someone is playing a trapmonkey, well, that doesn't help. "Trapmonkey" is not an archetype.

[Tvtyrant]

This is circular reasoning, though: the only reason why anyone would play a trapmonkey is the expectation that there might be traps; so if there are only traps because someone is playing a trapmonkey, well, that doesn't help. "Trapmonkey" is not an archetype.

I respectfully disagree; I have several members who won't play anything but Rogue types, and they whine if they don't get traps to undue.

[Lapak]

Really, I'm starting to wonder what the point is of using trap-heavy environments at all. Whenever I'm designing my own adventures, I use dungeons sparingly and pretty much never use traps.

I'm just not sure what traps add that sentient enemies can't provide on their own. If you look at most fantasy stories, traps are pretty rare - when Aragorn, Frodo, Gimli, and Gandalf are going through Moria, 'checking for traps' is not high on their priority list.

In LotR, traps are rare. In fiction generally, not as much. Indiana Jones was mentioned earlier, and is a good example; the opener to Raiders had him navigating a trap-rich environment, and The Last Crusade ended with a trap-solving sequence. And that's what traps add that sentient opponents don't: an opportunity for the players to think their way through a problem in their own time. Combat (and even diplomacy) requires immediate response - traps are a pace-breaker that lets the party stop and try to work out the smart thing to do.

Unless you go with the "DC X to notice it before it goes off, DC Y to disarm it" model, which is just a skill-points tax on at least one party member, in which case they are quite pointless.

Traps can also do other things than just hurting the party directly. A trap floor that dumps the party into the dungeons of a castle and closes above them might not even do any hit point damage, but it changes the landscape for the PCs in a way they might have wanted to avoid. If they do notice it, they can bypass that problem or even figure out how to force it to stay open and suddenly they have a new path open to them. Moving walls, falling portcullises, and retracting ladders can all do similar things.

[Telasi]

This is why every party needs at least one low-Wis high-Cha to declare himself leader and throw caution to the wind.

Funny, in my 4e group it tends to be my high-Wis low-Cha characters who get chosen to lead. It's odd.

Make the traps a puzzle. Let the disable device roll give them a clue, but make them actually figure out a way to disable the thing with what they have. I'm going to be doing this when I run my current PF campaign. This is the only way I can think of to make traps more interesting for everyone (and in general, for that matter).

[EccentricCircle]

I never used to use traps much at all for precisely the reasons outlined above.
the simple to disarm, easy to avoid or bypass traps of the DMG don't have the kind of exciting feel of the Indiana Jonesian Deathtraps you see in the movies.
for anyone who feels this way I would seriously recomend the Encounter trap rules presented in Dungeonscape. ( with a few additional traps in secrets of Xen'drik, some taken straight from Temple of Doom.)
by treating traps in the same way a combat works it encourages all of the players to become involved and creates a much more interesting and cinematic experience, traps become much more of a puzzle, and much more of a challenge.
there are rules for designing your own traps and when used in concert with the complex skill checks rules ( the 3.5 precursosr to 4e's skill challenges) you can create some very interesting death traps.

I now use death traps far far too often, but it is well worth it for the moments when the party decide to climb up through the hole the giant roling boulder fell through and find the giant hoppers full of boulders waiting in reserve...

[shadow_archmagi]

In our games this usually leads to the would-be leader being stuck out front on the end of a 10-foot pole.

Clearly the player's CHA wasn't high enough.

I once had a 3 WIS 18 CHA bard in a party. Yes, he rolled 4 1's.

The game tragically fell apart very quickly, but I remember one incident:

1. Players find hidden treasure trove
2. Pirates arrive to claim whats theirs
3. Party defeats them
4. Party argues over what to do
5. Richard steps forward "BURY THEM UP TO THEIR NECKS IN SAAAAAAAAAAAND!"
6. Party agrees to his plan and carries it out

[Saph]

In LotR, traps are rare. In fiction generally, not as much. Indiana Jones was mentioned earlier, and is a good example.

The main example, yeah. Indy is 20th-century, though.

I'm trying to think of a non-D&D fantasy setting which makes heavy use of traps, and I'm coming up blank.

1. Tolkien - almost no traps.
2. Narnia - almost no traps.
3. Wheel of Time - no major traps I can think of.
4. Raymond Feist - very few.
5. David Gemmell - generally none.

And so on. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if there's anything apart from D&D which treats traps as an essential part of a fantasy adventure.

[Kurald Galain]

I'm trying to think of a non-D&D fantasy setting which makes heavy use of traps, and I'm coming up blank.

Road Runner cartoons

The thing is, Indiana Jones (and Alan Quatermain, National Treasure, or even The Goonies) are all about exploring an ancient location that's either abandoned, or filled with nasties. This genre has traps. This genre does not, however, have much in common with fantasy. It's true that zero fantasy novels I can think of have significant traps - but there are also very very few that have dungeons to explore.

[Delwugor]

Really, I'm starting to wonder what the point is of using trap-heavy environments at all. Whenever I'm designing my own adventures, I use dungeons sparingly and pretty much never use traps.

I'm just not sure what traps add that sentient enemies can't provide on their own. If you look at most fantasy stories, traps are pretty rare - when Aragorn, Frodo, Gimli, and Gandalf are going through Moria, 'checking for traps' is not high on their priority list.

Agreed on all points. A trap here or there is fine but they must be such that they add excitement and drama heavy challenge.
I also sparingly use traditional dungeons and only one or two traps in them. Those traps are usually dangerous, but not always lethal, and always unique.
I have also found that traps which interfere with the party's progress tend to have alot of affect on the players. For example a trap which teleports the characters to different locations with other teleport traps, they spend their time back and forth jumping between traps until they figure it out.

[Psyren]

"Trapmonkey" is not an archetype.

I never said it was?

By "trapmonkey" I simply mean a skill-based class with the Trapfinding feature. Such classes usually pay for this ability via a number of weaknesses, most commonly their frailty in a stand-up fight. And yet rogues (and their ilk) are extremely popular classes in all RPGs. Since they are going to see play anyway, why deny them one of their advantages? Not providing traps for a trap-player is like denying access to costly material components for a spellcaster. Sure they can function without them, but you're taking away something they would have paid for.

[Lapak]

The main example, yeah. Indy is 20th-century, though.

I'm trying to think of a non-D&D fantasy setting which makes heavy use of traps, and I'm coming up blank.

1. Tolkien - almost no traps.
2. Narnia - almost no traps.
3. Wheel of Time - no major traps I can think of.
4. Raymond Feist - very few.
5. David Gemmell - generally none.

And so on. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if there's anything apart from D&D which treats traps as an essential part of a fantasy adventure.

Fair point. Nothing in classic fantasy leaps immediately to mind; of course, RPGs and stories are different in what they need to drive the story forward.

(On reflection, a fantasy series with a fair scattering of traps-as-major-plot-points did come to mind, but it's rather post-D&D: the Harry Potter series.)