Traps are an integral part of nearly every dungeon, but they are very easy to do wrong. There are some GMs who seem to think that the goal of a trap is to kill your party in
as devious and clever a way as possible. If your goal as a GM is just to kill your players, kindly refrain from GMing.
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| From Grimtooth's Traps |
Others decide to put traps on everything, turning the exploration of a dungeon into a never-ending paranoid sequence of skill checks. Putting traps in a dungeon is like putting spice in a dish: the right spices in the right amounts can add flavour, but using too much or too overpowering of a spice can render it unpleasant or inedible.
So naturally, to illustrate how to do traps correctly, I am turning to the Indiana Jones film trilogy. Not just because they are perfect movies, but because they use traps incredibly well. In a well-put-together movie, every element should contribute to the whole. If you just throw things in there for the heck of it, your movie will be
an incoherent, tone-deaf mess. But the three Indiana Jones films are well-constructed (the
first and
third admittedly more-so than the
second), and each trap Indy encounters serves to move the plot along or tell us something more about the story or the characters.
When you are designing a dungeon, you are like the director of a movie that your players are about to watch/star in. If you want it to be a good movie, keep the following tips in mind:
Trap your valuables (creatively)
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This is a pretty obvious one, so I won't spend too much time on it. It makes sense that the builders of a dungeon would put plenty of protection around their most valuable treasures. Your players will know this as well, so this is a good opportunity to get creative. They'll expect traps, but they won't know where, how many, or what kind.
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Traps can set the tone of your dungeon
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The first real trap you see in
Raiders is the spike trap that killed Forrestal, an old competitor of Indy's. Everything about this scene sets things up both for the dungeon and for the character of Indiana Jones. First, Indy notices the light and recognizes it as a trap, setting him up as an experienced and competent adventurer. Then Indy triggers the trap, revealing the impaled body of Forrestal. The camera cuts from Forrestal's gaping face to Alfred Molina's screaming one; they are framed almost exactly the same way, hinting at Alfred Molina's eventual fate. That one trap establishes Indy as a badass and Molina as an inexperienced coward, sets up Alfred Molina's poetic fate, and tells the viewer (and Indy) that this will be a dungeon full of dangerous and deadly traps.
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| It's like poetry. |
You can use the first trap to set the tone for the whole dungeon. Was your dungeon constructed by a paranoid wizard? Maybe the front door is trapped. Has the first level of your dungeon been heavily explored already? The first trap might be a dart trap that's out of darts. Is your dungeon inhabited by kobolds? Perhaps a crude trap, easy to detect and to avoid.
I once made a dungeon that was inhabited by a group of brigands who wore skull masks and lived in a tomb, hoping to scare nosy villagers away Scooby Doo style. The first trap in that dungeon was a pressure plate that caused a sarcophagus to slide open and a skeleton to pop up like some Halloween haunted house decoration. It meshed well with the goals of the bandits, who wanted to scare away intruders, and hinted that things in the dungeon might not be what they seemed.
Traps can become obstacles
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With a lot of traps, you either detect them and disarm them, or you don't detect them and you take some damage. In either case, it's just a momentary setback. But what if the trap can't be disarmed or bypassed, or there just isn't the time? When time is of the essence, a trap becomes more than just a trap - it becomes a real obstacle.
In
one of my dungeons, the party needed to cross an ancient dwarven bridge over a deep subterranean chasm. They soon discovered the bridge was trapped when a dwarven statue pushed their fighter off the edge (and onto a giant spiderweb). But they didn't have time to disarm the traps because their presence awoke a den of mobats, and the party had to fight them along the bridge all while avoiding the traps they knew to be there.
Raiders furnishes us with some more good examples. The pit trap seen above is merely an annoyance, easily overcome on the way into the ruins. But on the way out, with the added pressure of the collapsing temple and the closing stone door, it becomes a real challenge. It allows Alfred Molina to betray Indy and flee with the idol, and it leaves Indy with only a short amount of time to get across the pit and through the door before he's trapped.
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The dart traps all around the idol are another good example. On the way in, he can discover them and avoid them fairly easily.
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But on the way out, with the temple collapsing all around him, Indy has to just run through them, risking becoming a pincushion if he fails just one Reflex save.
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Note also that neither of these traps is really disarmable. That's okay. Not every trap needs to be disarmable; sometimes your party needs to overcome it with cleverness and teamwork.
Traps can be a punishment for a badly solved puzzle
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Deep in the ruined temple, Indy is faced with a puzzle. He must find a way to replace the golden idol with something of equal weight or risk triggering a trap. Unfortunately, Indy either forgets how much gold weighs or suspects that the idol is made of hollow chocolate, so he switches it with half a bag of sand, triggering the collapse of the temple and forcing him to run heedlessly through a gauntlet of deadly traps, including the famous rolling boulder.
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This scene is iconic for a reason. Not only is it a great action sequence, it shows our hero (already established as a badass) making a mistake and paying the price for it. It humanizes him.
Tying traps and puzzles together is a great way to add tension to a puzzle-solving encounter. The players will definitely be more invested in the puzzle with the threat of a deadly trap looming over them. But always make sure the consequences are manageable. No one likes to fail a puzzle and just instantly die.
~~~~~~~~~~~
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Well, I think I hear the bell ringing, class. We'll continue this
next week with more deadly traps, and I promise I'll include examples from
Temple of Doom and
Last Crusade, too. See you Monday!
-your professorial d20 despot
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