Hey Veeky Forums can we get a thread for traps and ingenious ideas for traps?
I'm currently trying to design a wizards tower that's filled with traps for my PC's planning a heist. They will be doing recon to make sure the wizard is absent at the time, so there will be little combat besides a door Guard or two. The bulk of the content therefore has to be puzzles and traps. For the purposes of the story the wizard is not overly cruel so he designs his traps to fuck with thieves and maybe harm them a little, rather than kill them outright.
Obviously pic related will appear at some point.
Here's one idea I have for a room near the end, close to the objective. Up until this point most rooms will have had only one major trap each. This room will have two. The first will be something fairly obvious, doesn't matter what, so long as the players think they've beaten the room and are ready to raise the exit portcullis via winch. Whoever touches the winch though is trapped within a bubble of magical forcefield, but so far there is no direct danger. Spectral letters will appear inside the bubble asking the trappee "Are friends a blessing or a curse?"
For the others PCs a section of wall next to the winch will flip, revealing a game similar to Hangman. They have to guess a set of words one letter at a time and for every wrong letter the bubble will start spinning around the room. Slow at first but speeding up with every wrong letter. After 3-4 turns the trapee will have to start endurance checks, and then eventually start taking crushing damage from centrifugal (or centripetal?) force, until they die or their friends free them. The answer to the Hangman game is "It Depends" as a reference to the riddle in the bubble, though if anyone can think of a more apt suggestion let me know.
Whaddya think? Any suggestions welcome. I want my traps to be hard, but fun, I don't want my players feeling cheated.
My GM fucked with me once by blocking our path with talking door. No matter what password did we tell it, it wouldn't open.
We had to trick the door to say the password to open it
Julian Brooks
hehe now thats what I'm talking about
Kayden Perez
How did you find the password?
Henry Clark
A completely bare room, with each wall (and the ceiling/floor) being carpeted with the same outline of a door - a rectangle, basically. In the center is a blue crystal ball upon a pedestal, which reads:
>The most common solution will lead you to reward
Touching the crystal ball produces a random effect to come out of one of the stone doors. Snakes could pour out of the ceiling one, or a portal to the elemental plane of water could open from another. Touching the rest of that room will produce other random, intruging effects. The pedestal will make a ticking noise fill the room, the right wall will pulse with a glowing purple light, and moving the pedestal itself will cause all of the doors to magically re-arrange.
The solution is to break the crystal ball open. Have a magic item in there or something.
Luis Hernandez
Sounds interesting I'll play around with that, thanks.
How about a version whenever anything in a room is touched a mouth appears on that spot and just starts screaming. No traps, just lots and lots of screaming
Imagine
Aiden Gutierrez
That's pretty great. The idea I had with it is to give as many red herrings as possible in the room, making them think they're all part of the puzzle when the real answer was what any aspiring DnD party should do.
Just fucking murder the thing.
Easton Price
Yeah that's pretty clever to be sure. Psychological traps are better than physical ones imho
What a object that when touched makes the person hallucinate that they've settled down and raised a family. Years pass in their imaginations, they see their kids grow, they tend the farm with their spouse, get in arguments with neighbours, then get old and happy and retired, content beyond words. Only to be horribly sucked back into grim reality, with all those pseudo memories and experiences still lingering in their minds, impossible to shake.
Evan Morales
You couldn't try to break the door?
Lincoln Jackson
Sounds like a quality time at the universe's best arcade game/food place
Angel Hall
After a few traps to put the fear in them, lead them into a seemingly untrapped room with a stone dias in the center. On it, a shining pebble.
The pebble isn't trapped, but the party will assume it is trapped and leave it. Then, a few rooms later, they come into a room with a similar dias and an insert that matches the pebble they left behind. If they DID take the pebble and insert it, the floor opens up into an acid trap. If they didn't take it, the wonder of what could have been will torture them.
Gabriel Rogers
Oh shit you're right. Damn I thought that was an original thought. Ok, how about curse that makes you see out the back of your head but blinds your forward vision.
Or one that makes a new nose grow on your lower back, just above the tailbone
Asher Martin
A large bookshelf that compels the reader to read every book on it non stop in the pursuit of knowledge. There are a few skeletons laying around from people who have died from thirst/starvation.
Jaxon King
Toiler humor is the crutch of a lesser comedian, and the first one is cool conceptually but would suck for the player.
How about a curse that makes you deconstruct anything you put sufficient force against? Open a door? It explodes into four cords of wood and a few iron lumps. Grab a rope? It becomes a pile of unharvested hemp. Brace yourself against a wall? Roll to dodge the ensuing avalanche of quarry boulders.
Jose Bennett
Traps by their nature do tend to suck for the player.
How about every time you sneeze an effect similar to the Thunderwave spell occurs in a 10 ft radius around you.
Every time you talk there's a slighlty dissonant echo, or your speech is out of synce with your lips.
Your hands are constantly moist.
I like this brain-storming.
Brain-storm: a curse that gives an electric shock everytime you remember you have it
Hunter Stewart
What about the old sovereign glue on a treasure underwater trick?
Hell just a bottle of sovereign glue with a spell on it so it looks just like a healing potion.
Camden Clark
>A trap designed so that disarming it causes another, just as unpleasant, trap to engage.
>A trap that pops up one of the Symbol of [insert way that you get fucked over] in your face when you try to disarm it.
>A treasure chest in the middle of a hallway with a large red circle around it that you can only avoid stepping into by pressing up against the wall and sliding along it, and a clearly gnawed on skeleton on the ground in front of it. The chest is not actually a mimic, but the walls bond with any leather or metal that touches them and the wearer is stuck to the wall until they either strip or are chiseled out.
Adam Wood
>The Curse
Henry Phillips
A trap that wipes your memory of the last 5 minutes, and whenever you try to remember what was wiped, you're overcome with a feeling of intense terror.
Luis Bell
>You see a long corridor ahead of you >You trigger, but manage to avoid falling into, a lava trap built into the floor >Now a solid 15 feet of the floor from wall to wall is lava >Easy enough to jump so long as you don't completely botch the check >Take a flying leap, gonna make it >Transparent_Glass_Wall.gif
A room with no doors but the one they enter from, all that is left on the ground is a note that reads:
"There is no moving forward, except for back tracking"
They have to walk out the door they came in through backwards
Gavin Moore
How about a trap trap? Have him appear as a damsel to be rescued and have them rescue him easily. The catch is that he tags along but is a clumsy burden that gets caught in every other trap and needs to be rescued again and again and acting seductively. He wont be needed to finish the adventure and if a character falls in love with him reveal him to be a trap.
Blake Sanchez
Traps are gay.
John Brown
As they enter the room they are greeted by rotund, bearded man seated at a table on which several sheets of paper, dice, and a map are placed. The characters have to play a mini-campaign to defeat a bad guy in order to proceed.
Nathan James
>the universe's best arcade game/food place
What did he mean by this?
Gavin Young
>not just flying/climbing the tower and entering the upper room
i fucking hate puzzles and traps.
Colton Sullivan
Trap that teleports a PC into a jail cell and teleports a doppelganger in the exact same location and establishes a mental link between the two, making the PC control the doppelganger until the enemy chooses otherwise. The Doppelganger is played by the PC who doesn't know they are a copy. When most appropriate, the GM seized control of the PC and betrays the party. Alternatively, doppelganger dies to another trap and PCs freak out over their companion having been a shapeshifter all along.
Nolan Evans
>the most common solution Before I opened the spoiler I thought it was going to involve water.
