Them Bones of Adventure - IV: Traps

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

Directly adjacent to the topic of searching and spotting static objects is that of Traps. Broaching it is in itself a meta-trap of sorts, recalling my readings around the blogosphere. I’ll try to lay my thoughts clear.

Trap Lethality and the Player

Trap: noun, spelled “[uhn-fair]”.

Should traps be lethal? Of course. 

Should traps be lethal in a real-world-logic sense? Absolutely not. That’ll just invoke the kind of jadedness and powerlessness that frontline soldiers are eventually reduced to. Not at all a feeling that fantasy, even the gritty flavoured one, should be in any rush to recreate.

Traps must have their rationality hammered into a gameable-shaped hole. The game is, after all, about facing and conquering adversity through pluck or might; something that the deadly-yet-unseen spear trap is totally remiss in bringing into focus. Thus, I defend that a trap’s difficulty to spot should be inversely proportional to its lethality, nurturing meaningful decisions instead of feeding the voiding hopeless sense of being the runner in a landmine marathon.

That said, rationally, traps, even the weaker ones, should have the credible damage potential to bring down an ordinary man. Meaning our levelled protagonists will be able to take their lumps and live to see another day well within the logic of the setting even as their feet come awash in the blood of any redshirts they happen to have bravely volunteered to take the point.

On the traits of the Useful Trap

What exactly is a trap in an RPG context? They’re pretty much akin to narrative devices and come in three flavours:

Erosion – Very low lethality; Difficult to discover;

- Exist to tax a party’s resources, slowly building up tension and unease as the characters choose to push deeper.

Pacing  – Low lethality; Findable as long as the right measures are taken;

- Exist to slow down a party’s progress, causing existential risk only if they are not aknowledged.

|-------- verboten design space ---------|

Setpiece – High lethality; Obvious to recognize;

- Exist to serve as meat of the game i.e. being interesting or at least unusual in nature and requiring creative input to be surpassed. Can sometimes assume the shape of puzzles but not necessarily.

The verboten design space filler means “I don’t go there”; Not that I like to plant absolute border markings, but the combination of “potentially lethal damage output & moderately hard to find” is much akin to sterile soil from a game running perspective. It can certainly be used productively given the right effort or party configuration, but it lacks universal utility.

The Crunchy Bits

As per the previous chapter on Searching, the player’s input is of the greatest importance.

It is here that the clarifying question: “how do you go about doing that?” comes into its own: if a player is getting ready to tackle a door, a chest, an object, or the party is gearing to spread out across a room, I’ll remember to tease out these open-ended questions that help reinforce the collective mind’s eye picture of what is happening and allow me to adjudicate fairly how likely anyone is to perceive certain sensory details, to spring a trap or walk into an ambush.

  

A good trap should be laid like a pop quiz question – obvious yet slippery to the mind, in bottlenecks that make sense and otherwise unguarded and remote passages with little to no foot traffic, with traces alerting the savvy observer. Once the player gets himself some seeing eyes, the answer should be almost a given most of the time, to enourmously rewarding effect when well pulled.

Detecting Traps

A note on Passive Perception – Like any other static object, traps are either In Plain View, Concealed or Hidden, the later two necessitating an active search declaration by the player, as well as time spent doing it (scan, rote or thorough), to be revealed. I reiterate that I don’t care about Passive Perception, to my mind it serves little purpose, only being usable to detect things that are both visible and amiss, something that a trap shouldn’t be.

Mechanically, the corresponding Spotting DC will either be in the 7-10 range for Concealed traps – that only need a rote search from a character directed at the correct space – and 12-20 for actual Hidden ones. These numbers are more formalism than dogma: generally I’ll want the traps to be found in response to careful searching behaviour, even by the most perception-challenged of characters, as per old school play, rewarding player involvement and not using stat shortcomings as a barrier to stunt play development. This is to say: if a character is weak at Perception, it should mean he pretty much always has to search extra carefully, not that he’ll blunder along from trap to trap with no recourse.

A declaration on game principles: if a search is forgotten, the player must be the one brought to task for playing the game poorly, pure and simple; there’s no crying about “my 9th level thief would never forget to check that!”, the player is the one running the character, not the other way around except where forceful abstraction is involved. Last I checked, Chess players were not allowed to rectify their opening moves on the basis of their rank never allowing them to forget certain things, I don’t see how DnD players should be any different.

Springing Traps

Like the old editions of the game proscribe, it is possible that a trap, particularly ancient ones, will only be triggered on a given chance (“1 in 4”, “1 in 6”, etc.), meaning that missing its detection and passing through its space, tapping ahead with a pole or sending ahead the most able-bodied man won’t necessarily result in a predictable conclusion.

From there, unless we’re going exotic, they’re either treated as attacks, if the armour the character is wearing can conceivably block the effect, or as Save-or-suffer rolls, for most everything else.

Disarming Traps

While propping a walkboard over a pit trap requires no great brain wattage, describing the inner workings of a complex trap can be daunting for the uninitiated (exhibit A: me) so, given that I’m not a swiss clockmaker, this will occasionally have to be deposited on abstraction's running bar-tab unless I get confortable with Mechanisms 101.

On the adjudication front, two rolls can be asked for, the DCs should begin at Hard ~ 15 and only go up from there.

- [Intelligence] check for determining how to disarm a given trap – or even if it is at all possible for the character to do so. Success on this roll will give the player access to the Disarm attempt's DC and the springing chance, as such it can be obviated if the character has experience with the trap type or if the player wishes to save time and risk going in with “never tell me odds”.

A failure won’t carry any special penalty, unless it is a fumble, in which case the observer has probably gotten carelessly handsy and either sprung the trap or made a ruckus.

- [Dexterity (+Thieves Tools)] check for the actual disarming effort.

A failure here will have the referee rolling the trap’s springing chance, a fumble will skip right to the hurtful part. Also, every time the character fails and tries again, increase the DC and/or the fumble margin by one, raising the tension on account of the character worrying the mechanism.

Note that, as ever, a well thought-out approach to a trap by the player (“I jam the spear trap’s firing tube”) can obviate any and all need for rolls, stepping over any of the above stages.

Closing Thoughts - Traps and the Open Table

I won’t practice illusionism by shifting the damage baselines. Instead I’ll be keeping these categories consistent: if a very-low lethality trap keeps to the same damage averages the dungeon will remain accessible even to a lower-level party that just wants to poke around under cover of stealth. The monsters can be beefier, sure, as they can always be evaded/outrun/misdirected, but if the baseline of “hard to spot/low damage” trap turns up actually being lethal, I’ll have a problem on my hands, likewise if the damage rates are ostensibly shifted around according to the level of whatever party wanders in, as it saps bricks from this fourth wall that I’m building in an altogether too visible way if suddenly I start saddling the exact same type of traps previously encountered with twice the damage.

It is possible, of course, to shift the type of trap being encountered, but that counts as special dispensation and should come along with ample foreshadowing, as the vanished ancient civilizations of the world at large certainly won’t be switching to the upgraded model at the mid-point of their aeons of dust-collecting activity.

If dealing with a high-level character, I’ll simply aknowledge the obvious: that he’s earned his survival stripes and can stand a few hits before resources start being sweated. I’m not worried, since the erosion is all I’m after. Of course, that is only possible because I’ll be doing away with the sworn enemy of attrition: 5E’s prohibitively friendly hp recovery.