Stop Hiding Traps 

Can you add closed captions to this, please? I am deaf and want to watch the video but it doesn't have captions. :(

@@bethanytaylor554 If you wait for a week or so Google will automatically add captions. Unfortunately I don't have enough time to do captions for my videos.

DIABOLICAL, hahaha

the trap _is_ the player!

This is genius

No party I have ever played has been able to just cross a simple nondescript bridge without becoming paranoid. It must be a trap!

Perhaps traps could be divided into the categorys of "Trick" (Where it doesn't actually harm the player but inconveniences them somehow), Hazard(Where it can harm the player, though is usually obvious enough that you'll probably see it without having to specifically looking for it as long as you aren't rushing ahead or acting recklessly...) And Ambush, where the thread of harm is still there but it's more of an attack activated by whatever enemies are attacking you... (Like a Kobold trying to swing a Bear trap into your face to lock you down while the others pepper your character with arrows and the one that swung in on the bear trap is now trying to shank you as well...)

@@minnion2871 I concur with this thought. The 1e DMG Appendices G and H provides tables and guidance for Tricks and Traps, but does make a fairly clear delineation between one being a harm / hazard (traps) and the other more of a puzzle, obstacle, or weird occurrence (tricks) for the PCs to overcome or at least deal with. Not to say that a trick can’t be hazardous or harmful, but I believe the spirit of the thing is as per your point.

Good point! Really great reminder as to why movement rates actually mean something.

I agree that rushing headlong should be its own risk, and even that is an informed choice on the part of the players - so the consequences are commensurate with their choices. Aside from a warning that moving hastily might make them miss secret doors, traps etc., there's nothing else the GM has to advise. Let them lie in the bed of spikes they made.

love this!

Click is great, been using it 3 months and it’s great

I heard about this from Dael Kingsmill, who got it from someone else haha. But yeah I love the idea!

Yeah, this is actually sick advice! The tension is there, and the coolest thing about this as well, is your players will immediately ask for details in the room that would normally be just simple flavour. They step on a pressure plate and hear a click, so they ask 'Okay, do I notice any holes in the wall, or other markings on the floor? And you can describe that in more gritty detail, giving your players tension, but also immersion. 100/10 great advice.

Love this, mix in at a roughly 11 : 1 : 8 ratio with obvious hazards:standard traps:time-delayed traps with obvious signal on preparing to activate.

Very good thank you

I like this, there're players who love to RP and problem solve at the table, and those who really don't want to and feel like they should just be able to roll the dice for their character's skill to handle the problem. While the RP aspect is more immersive, it means that if a player who is not real detail-oriented or outgoing wants to play a character who is, they're going to have a bad time. Going with the "either/or" method allows for both kinds of player-character interaction at the table. Groovy 👍

Do both ways at once. A good description of the search process yields a bonus to the detection role. They role so they know if they fail.

Agreed! The Labyrinth game is a master class in non-combat-oriented role-playing. Great for kids and adults too!

I was thinking the same thing as I was watching this - old school complex traps are much more in line with Trap Expert and how it would manifest in the fiction than the 3E-plus traps that have been more the norm for the last 20 years.

Thanks!

I just commented the same thing basically. I agree completely. 👍🏻👍🏻

Instakill landmines. Walking along, then boom, no more adventurer.

@@zubbworks I'm not sure you're following the spirit of the original poster, there...

@@benvoliothefirst With a spot check of like 12 or something.

@Reggie Jackman Not really. A simple achievable landmine in dnd would be creating a thin clay vessel, and placing a alchemist fire inside, then lightly bury it. While it wouldn't "boom" like a traditional landmine, but a pc's leg would burst into flames and they'd need to put it out. "Machine guns" exist in D&D in the form of Repeater Crossbows. They have a mounted case, usually 6 bolts, and can fire a bolt for each attack made with it, needing to reload when the case is empty.

@Reggie Jackman I mean, no one can force you to like D&D, and if it was one of the worst designed systems, it would've disappeared into the abyss like countless other rpgs. 5E is D&D's most successful iteration of the game, so it must be doing something right.

I recall one scene in a Bourne movie where he did miss a laser tripwire that set off a silent alarm, telling enemy forces he had entered the room/house/whatever it was in that scene. So it was like a D&D trap ringing the alarm bell.

Or the party can use better tactics.

Do you remember “Taking 20”? Pepperidge Farm remembers. But yeah, taking 20 is how you can check for traps without taking ages making rolls and decisions at the table. It’s not a thing in 5e I think, so I’ll explain it even though it feels very obvious to me. Ignore that bit if you know. It’s like taking 10, but takes 2 minutes instead of 6 seconds. It represents taking time to meticulously and slowly perform the skill check. It requires you to effectively roll a 1, 2, 3… until roll 20 after 20 rounds (2 minutes) of effort. Taking 10 on the other hand is a single round. You just try for average and wind up a half point under. It requires no rolls, and the same amount of time to walk down the hall from a play time perspective. “I walk down the hall, taking 20. I find DC (whatever) traps automatically.” Ta-da. That’s all it took. It’s also why older editions had four types of “turn timers.” 6 second rounds for combat, but also 10 minute rounds for local/dungeon area exploration, hourly for overland exploration, and daily for downtime and the like. You can pick 5 squares to take 20 on per exploration round. Ten minutes deducted from your hour(s) long spells, pick another 5. Repeat until combat. Role play when appropriate. That was the gameplay loop. It took essentially no time, because it is just how searching used to work. You decided fast or slow, and use either 10 or 20.

@@demonzabrak Somebody said, "How much time would you like to spend (either at the gaming table _or in world_)...". Perhaps somebody was thinking of taking 20. So let's examine the process from the in-universe viewpoint: 10' wide hallway that is 100' long with two rooms, each 30' square that need to be searched. Depending on how the GM works, you might also have to search either the walls and ceilings or the upper 5' cubes, since only an idiot would put all the traps at ground level. For this examination, we'll take the more charitable assumption and use the upper cubes, since it's faster. That ends up with 224 5' cubes, which will take 448 minutes to search, or just a bit under eight hours to travel 100' and search two rooms. Perhaps that makes sense in the worlds you play in or run; it makes no sense in mine. Everything in the "dungeon" would attack during that time, either in waves or as a single massed assault. And without that, two rooms per game day is boring and unbalancing, even if you subscribe to the 4-encounter model. (FWIW, I have run as many as 17 encounters in a single game day in a dungeon, because that makes sense to me. YMMV.) "Traps everywhere" is boring, especially if you're not the thief. As for "older systems", let's just say that I first played D&D more than 45 years ago. I was old-school when it was just "school". I graduated.

I can't tell you how freeing this was. I've always thought I had to anticipate every possible move my players might make as well as the branching paths that each might lead to. This is going to make DMing so much more fun for me!

Thanks! It's mostly due to patrons that I could buy all that art.

Serious question: why XP for being discharged? It feels like giving XP for getting attacked by a monster and immediately running away.

@@demonzabrak I give xp if the party triggers or disables the trap, not for already discharged traps. Traps are one shot hazards, and are usually dealt with when encountered, and discharged traps that the party finds are set dressing, like cobwebs and dirt in the dungeon. Sorry if I wasn't more clear.

@@richmcgee434 I think you have to use common sense, and the content of your site should match the concept. Are you saying that a dungeon cannot have a room or corridor that the inhabitants know to avoid? This whole point sounds like wanting to dogmatically limit design choices because of preferences expressed in the latest hipster rule book. Do whatever you want, obviously, but the hidden trap is a trope for a reason, regardless of whether Ben finds it fun.

@aaron Yes, you are right. It isnt a trap, it's a hazard. Hazards are good, traps are bad. That's my takeaway from this video

I don't think hazards are good and traps are bad. I think the problem is that rolls should never be passive. All rolls should occur as a result of player action. This means it is bad DMing to present a trap without clues to its existence. A hazard is a trap that is presented as obvious. Players need reasons to take action and that only happens because the DM told them there were actions that could be taken. Some players will not enjoy needing to pay tons of attention, especially today when the average person has an attention span measured in seconds. In any case, odds of detection should depend on how obvious the trap is (hazards are 100% obvious while death traps are perhaps only 1-5% obvious and other traps somewhere in between) and what players choose to do to find them (class and circumstance could play a factor here in addition to specific actions as some archetypes will have an easier time than others at detection even if the same approach is used). For disarming, again rolls should occur as a result of player action. When a player declares they want to try to disable a trap the DM should ask how they want to do that. The player can only answer that question if the DM has already provided clues to options through description. Lack of such description indicates a bad DM. Again, circumstances, tools, player action, etc., should determine odds of success in combination with the complexity of a trap. A very complicated trap may even require multiple rolls to disarm/disable different aspects of a trap (I think of it like doing damage to a trap and the trap is no longer dangerous after it has accumulated enough "damage"). Perhaps different pieces of the trap have different difficulties and playera could choose to start by dealing with the more difficult and dangerous portion or with the least dangerous part. Give players enough information to make choices. Finally, for damage players should once again be involved via action. A good DM will have, once again, provided clues on possible strategies to avoid or minimize the bad stuff. The action attempted by the player will suggest what rolls and modifications to apply in an avoidance roll. Depending on the trap a player could avoid the trap entirely, swinging blade, or the character(s) will always receive at least partial damage, gas chamber. Perhaps a trap can be intentionally set off to make it inert and safe without any damage to characters. The key is to engage in dialog with players providing as much information as possible and reasonable so players can make choices and take action along the way. I mean, if we run combats the same way people seem to run traps, then combat would be just as boring and not engaging. Player A swings, roll dice, success, roll damage. Player B swings, roll dice, failure. Player C swings, roll dice, ... you get the point.

This video does have a lot of good advice on how to run better traps by turning them into hazards but the techniques should be used for all trap types to different degrees. This is a great video!

That's an excellent trap

The problem is, a lot of those traps are things that players couldn't reasonably detect, even if they were looking. Admittedly, it's been a very long time since I read them, but I recall the room full of methane ("odorless, colorless... the only way to detect it is to breathe it, and that's what kills you") or the crossbow in the privy. Unless the mindset changed in later volumes, Grimtooth's Traps tended to be things the party either couldn't detect or couldn't prevent even if they did. That basically goes against the mindset of player agency and informed choice.

At that point they had it coming