Designing Devilish Traps in Dungeons and dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by world anvil this powerful web-based rpg campaign manager is perfect for building organizing and creating your worlds you can use it to plan your games create maps and handouts and keep all of your notes at your fingertips during play or even share them online with your group they're constantly innovating with new features such as integrated character sheets for many major rpg systems so you can manage your world and the characters in it a basic account at world anvil is completely free letting you get a feeling for all the amazing features on the platform follow the links in the description below or go to worldanville.com to try it out for free today and now onto this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are discussing designing devilish traps for your dungeons and campaigns in d5e traps have been a part of dungeons and dragons since the very beginning and are a really interesting element to add into almost any encounter that you experience in dungeons and dragons today we're going to be talking about some of the uh flaws and benefits to creating traps and how to use them well in your campaign setting there are also many pitfalls to run into when you are building traps as a dungeon master so we're going to talk about some of those problems and figure out some ways to make traps really interesting and fun even when they're ruining your player's day there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling so kicking things off i just want to say that the simple pit trap for first level characters is actually a really cool encounter if you've never tried having your first level in characters simply encounter a dungeon corridor where there is a 10 foot by 10 foot wide pit trap that is 20 feet deep and lined with spikes and never seen just actually how much of an interesting encounter it can be you really should try it sometime it can be illuminating to realize how sometimes even the simplest trap can present a compelling obstacle and oftentimes the simplicity of a pretty normal trap as an obstacle can often get missed in the urge to create this rube goldberg machine that we imagine that is something out of like an indiana jones movie you may have heard us say before that the reason that you have a secret in dungeons and dragons is that it is revealed and the same goes for traps the reason why you have a trap in dungeons and dragons is so that it is sprung some of the biggest problems that dungeon masters and players run into with traps surround how traps are activated sprung and detected and so often what happens with traps is that they basically boil down to a skill check either the player characters make the perception check to detect the trap and then make the thieves tools check to disarm it and nothing happens and a pair of completely uninteractive dice rolls to decide the entire encounter or the players fail those roles and in some cases especially if you're looking at old school dungeons the players just die instantly and that's not really engaging or interactive gameplay we can do better than that even with a small amount of extra work and thought behind it like any encounter in the game the point of a trap is to present a compelling obstacle for the players to have to bypass or get around by interacting with it and using their wit cunning and abilities in order to find a way past the situation the truth is is that the rules of dungeons and dragons actually already have all the tools that you need to make interesting traps it's just that they're in the wrong book they're not found in the dungeon master's guide but really traps that work like monsters or spells turn out to be way more interesting than the ways that traps are often presented in books like the dungeon master's guide so if we apply a few of those principles of how monsters and spells work and kind of reverse engineer those when we're designing traps we actually get some really interesting results so there's many different ways to use traps we're going to try to summarize it into three different categories on how you might present traps in your games you could think of traps as a combat hazard an exploration obstacle or a distinct encounter when you're designing them so in our first case we can think of a trap as a combat hazard and in the simplest way we simply use a trap the same way that we would incorporate another monster into our encounters or in the way that we would modify the environment a great example of this is actually just taking that aforementioned pit trap and saying that in the area where the player characters are fighting a group of goblins there is a pit trap and so as the player characters charge across the room the goblins have dug a pit already and they can fall into it the cool thing about this is that this makes the goblins a more challenging and interesting adversary but if the players are really really smart and notice the pit trap they might be able to turn it into an advantage of their own just like any other element of the environment presented in a combat encounter something that's really compelling about this option is that adding a trap to a combat encounter is a really interesting way to amplify the stakes in your combat encounter a lot of times dms struggle with the idea of making a combat encounter more than just hitting goblins with swords but by simply adding something like a pit trap or any type of trap adds in nuanced elements that elevate the entire combat encounter in meaningful ways a pit trap on its own in a hallway is somewhat boring to encounter and a room of goblins can be boring to encounter after a while but when one of your characters falls into a pit trap and goblins are stabbing the other players and a swarm of rats jumps into that pit trap and starts gnawing on the character who's stuck down there well now you have something really interesting by combining these elements it's like making a delicious trap filled peanut butter and jelly sandwich almost immediately whenever players see an active trap in the middle of a combat encounter it already gets their minds racing of how can we turn this into our advantage which encourages creative thinking and problem solving traps in this regard can actually be really easy to easy to use you can simply use the really really dead simple ones from the dungeon masters guide and simply deploy them in this way and one of the simplest ways to adjudicate how difficult you've made your combat encounter is to just look at the damage output of the trap and treat it like an extra monster in the encounter one that can be disabled or taken out in a different way that the characters would normally not but of course the characters might not decide hey we don't want to disable this flame gout trap because we're gonna push the bad guys into it so all of a sudden it does act as a little bit of a neutral force because the possibility exists for the players to turn into their advantage it just so happens that usually the monsters know the trap is there at the start of the encounter but the players don't you could experiment with this even further though by in introducing traps that are not constructed and traps that are of a magical nature for example wild magic gone wrong even perhaps rolling on the wild magic table or some sort of natural phenomena like a thunderstorm that is causing bolts of lightning to strike down um that maybe you know some characters are wearing metal armor and are more likely to get struck by that or some sort of storm or water or vines or plants in the area there's a lot of different ways than just a mechanical trap that you can think about this so in virtually any environment there can be something that is not a trap in the traditional sense but still operates like one this is also a really great way to make your combat encounters more dangerous as your characters level up if at level one and two they fought a handful of goblins and they're after the goblin king and they keep having to fight goblins up until level 10 well by the time they reach level 10 killing goblins is no problem but if they're entering more dangerous hideous where the goblins have rigged the entire space with traps that they are in control of and know how to use you suddenly up the ante on how dangerous these encounters are and you can continue to pose threat to higher level characters with lower level monsters who are just smart enough to bring the characters to their domain and use their advantages against them this also rewards players really well for reconnaissance scouting and good planning if the player characters have explored their adversaries fortresses and know about the traps that are already there what they can be rewarded by disarming those traps or finding ways to disable those security measures before they even go in or even just knowing that they're there can really help the player characters turn what would be normally a really difficult situation into a much easier one so this can actually go both ways so next up we come to looking at traps as an exploration obstacle another key element of the game of dungeon dragons is exploring the environments that you find yourselves in and there are many ways that natural environments or dungeons or old castles or anywhere that your players go could have natural or unnatural traps rigged to cause a problem for them to move forward yeah the simplest example of this again is the aforementioned pit trap in the middle of the hallway there's no monsters there that are going to attack the players but if they want to get down the hallway they're going to have to cross over this pit trap in some way shape or form even if the pit trap isn't actually concealed and hidden if it's just an open pit that is 30 feet deep and 10 feet wide or even wider the player characters are gonna have to figure out some way to jump across that or get across that thing but of course the pit trap example is pretty straightforward because of course the characters can just jump across it so we might want to find ways to make it more complex than just a single skill check or ability that the players use to bypass that trap this is where traps start to get a little bit like puzzles or skill challenges really when i think about a trap as an exploration encounter my key thing is thinking about okay so how many character abilities or skill checks do i want the party to have to successfully accomplish in order to bypass this trap if you think about that aforementioned pit trap example well that's a trap where every party member needs to make one successful athletics check to jump across the pit but we can think about this in all sorts of other ways we might have a magical door that has all sorts of different locks on it that you know will cause acid to spray out unless they're properly disarmed in certain ways and those are just going to require a sequence of well executed skill checks and so often times what i like to do like the pit trap is make sure that the consequence for failure is really really clear with a pit trap you know that if you successfully make the skill check you're going to get to the other side but if you fail the skill check you're going to fall so if you're doing something a little bit more abstract with your traps and that not it's not so obvious physically as the pitch trap you want to think about okay what happens when the player characters make an attempt to disarm the trap and fail because in my books every attempt should come with some sort of risk involved and sometimes it just might mean the trap blows up in your face and sprays you with acid in some cases there might be a factor that says hey if you fail three times in a row this trap is gonna go into lockdown mode and you're gonna have a much bigger problem on your hands i think that exploration traps uh also give you a really cool opportunity to look at the environments that the characters are exploring if they're in a thick jungle and you're looking for exploration traps think about how the vines and trees and branches might interfere with their way forward perhaps it's a magical jungle and there is a great druid who is their villain that they're going to hunt down you don't need to present the villain but the evil druid could have rigged the trees to lash out with grasping vines or drag them into muddy pits that they now are being pulled under under the mud with so you have all of these ways to actually advertise and foreshadow things that are coming using traps and the environment that you are looking at and two things to keep in mind when you are using traps as exploration encounters is the first thing is that you don't want the trap necessarily to be a one and done sort of deal if the if all there is to the trap is that whoever steps on this pit gets shot with a dart and there's only one dart in the trap well then it's not really anything at all it's rather boring frankly and so i tend to avoid those kind of basic traps which unfortunately a lot of old modules are just filled with traps like this where it's like whoever opens the door first gets shot with an arrow there's not really anything for the players to interact in that respect beyond detecting the trap before it goes off this leads to a very important point that we want to make that the traps that you create should be just as interesting if they're detected than if they weren't the perception skill has become vastly overvalued by the community because the of the tendency of traps to be an all-or-nothing thing either you detected the trap successfully and wholly avoided it or you didn't and you got turned into a thin red mist this is too extreme and we should find a more moderate position when we are thinking about and designing our traps detecting the trap should be an advantage it should allow characters to avoid damage but it shouldn't just solve the problem once you've detected that a trap is there there should be something more required of the players to actually get around it and if they detect it before they actually spring it it should still pose a problem to them that's like oh well okay we know it's there but what are we going to actually do about it at this point you might want to elevate your trap to an entire encounter on its own which is the third option we're looking at where you present the trap much like a combat encounter but the trap is the entire essence of what the characters need to get through this is perfect for your gauntlet hallway or your trapped room full of mechanical whirling blades and lava spouts and all sorts of other crazy contraptions in this respect the trap is basically an amazing combination of a puzzle a combat encounter and a skill challenge all happening at the same time and the key thing to running a trap like this is found in those wonderful words roll for initiative you don't have to be in combat to put the party in initiative order and with with traps this is actually really really essential because it solves those problems of oh but i want to help them well now wait for your turn yeah every time that you ask for an initiative role what you're doing is you're taking the time of dnd and stretching it out for a section of that time you're saying in this moment we're going to slow things down by rolling initiative and see what each person does with every few seconds of the forthcoming encounter by turning a trap into this that has multiple parts to it you're giving each player an opportunity to spend those few seconds to try to maneuver or dodge or dismantle certain elements of the trap you roll initiative for the trap like you would a monster and that trap might have multiple things that it can do on its turn maybe you get to choose whether a whirling blade comes out of the wall a pit opens underneath them fire shoots out of the ceiling and you can use one of these on maybe you give it legendary actions and after each person's turn one of these triggers so by doing this you're actually creating an intricate encounter where each piece of it can be engaged with by the party but you get to slow things down with the initiative order and see how it plays out using things like legendary and layer actions and borrowing the design of complex monsters is a really fantastic way to do this there are many monsters in dungeons and dragons which are really fundamentally just living traps things like gelatinous cubes and even beholders really are basically just traps they just happen to have a body with hit points that the players can smash and much in the same fashion if you are designing a trap in this way you may even want to stat out the elements of your trap like a monster do things for them like give them hit points give them an armor class give them resistances and immunities to various status conditions and give them actions and reactions to use the only thing that we want to layer on top of all this are the traditional elements of how do things like perception and the ability to disarm a trap factor into it well we can get pretty creative with this one of the rules that i like to use with a trap like this is that if a player is facing a complex trap and they want to try to detect what the trap is going to do next they can make a perception check against the set dc of the trap and if they succeed the next time the trap attacks them or forces them to make a saving throw well that successful perception check guaranteed them a success on their saving throw or made the next attack the trap made against them automatically miss this means that using perception is super valuable because it will protect that player character or perhaps even an ally but it still means that the perception skill isn't gonna just let them get out of the situation they still gotta actually figure out what to do on the same token if they do see the trap and are engaged in a combat encounter sort of scenario with it disarming the trap might not be enough there might be fail-safes there might be multiple components that need to be disarmed so if your rogue with thieves tools spends their turn disarming the trap that might limit one of the options perhaps out of the three i presented earlier with the spinning blades fire shooting out of the ceiling and the pit traps if the rogue disarms the spinning blades that's one of the elements now taken care of but they still have the shooting fire and the pits that are going off so each disarming attempt might help the situation but rather than just having them say oh i see the trap oh i disarm the trap we're good you might want a little bit more than that especially if this is a potent encounter that you wanted them to have to deal with i like to actually borrow the rules for exhaustion with my traps so one of the things that you can do is that each successful disarm attempt against the trap effectively gives the trap one level of exhaustion and so as the trap is being more dismantled by the rogue it suffers from disadvantage on its attack roles it becomes slower moving if it has a mobile component to it you might even design your own exhaustion table for the trap that you've made and say that yeah the first check turns off this element or gives it disadvantage here the second element slows it down the second element means it takes less turns the third successful disarm attempt stuns it and it isn't until actually like the fifth disarm attempt that the trap is actually fully shut down and of course each attempt of these things you could say that each failed attempt actually undoes a previous success or causes some kind of backlash as well it creates a really dynamic environment and again you're just applying the principles that you already know when you're designing combat encounters and you're thinking about okay is this a balanced combat encounter in the respect that you've put a trap of an appropriate challenge rating in front of your party and if you're trying to figure out how much damage did my traps do well look at the monsters of the challenge rating that are appropriate for your party look at the abilities that monsters of that level have and that can be your guideline with these types of traps you could actually use a lot more than just thieves tools or perception you should take into account the player characters that you have at your table what are they skilled at what are they proficient with and how might they use those skills and proficiencies in order to bypass the trap perhaps one of your more elaborate traps that is a full encounter has magical and mechanical components something for the barbarian to smash and break something for the rogue to dismantle with thieves tools something for the wizard to counterspell or use arcane knowledge in order to dismantle there's a lot of ways that you can implement these sort of skill challenges and checks into a trap to have your player characters gain advantage or have the trap gain disadvantage or dismantle parts of it but keep in mind the elements of your trap and how your players might interact with them we can take this even further and perhaps perhaps the trap is in a holy temple and actually a character could use the religion skill or a cleric could use some of their own spells and abilities and actually helps disarm the trap more than just casting the pretty useless fine trap spell perhaps the trap involves a natural environment and the druid is able to use their nature and survival checks or their ability to speak with animals and plants to calm the angry foliage that is coming after them so there's a lot more opportunities than just thinking about traps in this mechanical constructed or often magical nature we can think of them as planar or natural as well and use that as elements to give more of our characters more opportunities to engage with the trap in ways that aren't just either disarm smash or detect it by a similar notion you could even allow characters to use the investigation check or other abilities and other skill checks to help them figure out okay how is this thing working how can i disarm this how can i maybe figure out how it works and start using it to our advantage ultimately i think the biggest thing to watch out for with traps is not letting the perception skill dismantle the entire thing would you say that that is the biggest trap of traps absolutely um so often the perception check is so proactively used that it just lets the players ignore it ultimately for me i tend to make the perception rule happen at the last possible moment when it comes to a trap for me the most interesting time to ask for the perception track with a ch with a trap is the moment it's sprung ask for the perception check to see if the player avoided it at the last possible second and that's a much more interesting way than than just you know scanning things visually i think that players often expect to be able to detect traps with a simple visual inspection and i think that this ignores all the ways in which really they're it is legitimate to have a trap that cannot be detected visually alone i think at the end of the day dungeons and dragons has often looked at traps as just a small little element that a perception check or a deactivation of the trap finalizes and i don't think that's the right way to think about traps if we apply the same mentality that we bring to our combat exploration and social encounters within dnd and apply that to traps or use traps to amplify the already existing situations we present something much more compelling to our players something that they can interact with something that will be as memorable as your favorite combat encounters there are traps that i remember from games that i've played of d d that stand out just as much to me as the final boss fight i love having a random element to my traps it really feels for me as a dungeon master like i get to get be surprised so that's where i love using like the tables that were introduced at the end of tasha's colorado and everything for like the the arcane environments or how we made up our own arcade anomalies table for drakenheim uh because you can use the wild magic table but the tricky thing about using the wild magic table that's in the player's handbook is that it's really geared towards having a sorcerer in your party so you can i love traps that use random elements that maybe even summon creatures that maybe have these unpredictable things to it because it creates this dynamic environment where the players are kind of wondering what's going to happen next and that's really the feeling that we're all here for to play d d so this has been a look at designing devilish traps for d d 5e tell us about your favorite traps that you've either fallen into or avoided or created in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please consider joining our community by following the links in the description below also we're making a book dungeons of drakenheim is coming to kickstarter we've partnered with ghostfire games to bring our campaign to life as a fifth edition module you can follow the links down below or go to drakenheim.com and join the mailing list so that you're up to date on all news regarding this kickstarter and don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which is tuesday nights at 6pm eastern on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more great tips for dungeon masters running games with dungeons and dragons right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 92,605

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: 7JKBVnvpI3s

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021