How do you usually handle traps in your campaigns?

How do you usually handle traps in your campaigns?

What's the most interesting trap you dealt with as a player?

I usually put them in my ERP campaigns, it seems pretty hard to do them otherwise in a way that doesn't just become magical realm.

>Playing real old DnD, back when they were called thieves and not rogues
>We beat up some monsters, don't remember what type.
>Searching through their possessions.
>Come across a small wooden chest near this bunk, about 1 foot on its longest side.
>Thief picks the lock
>Oh, you tripped a trap.
>Spear shoots out, hits thief, takes 1d6 damage.
>Annoying, but no big deal.
>Ask him how a spear fit inside that tiny chest.
>Ref thinks for a minute, and then says "It's a compressed spear".

Use them extremely sparingly.
You only ever really need to use them 5 or so times and your players will NEVER forget

In my opinion, traps are kind of a remnant of an old era. They probably make sense in the old dungeon crawling mindset but not really in anything else. Arbitrarily taking a bunch of health from PCs or just dropping them then and there because they neglected to meticulously inspect every single room, corridor or object they came across and fucked their dice roll doesn't really contribute to fun. And I'd only ever use them for puzzle rooms or places where it would make sense to encounter them like the den or hunting grounds of a bunch of savage humanoid creatures.

Traps out of combat, IE "You failed your perception check, take this much damage", are fairly boring.

Traps in combat though can be quite fun.

Recently challenged a party with a gaggle of kobold slingers and shieldbearers at the far end of a trap-lined hallway. If they got to the little bastards the fight would be over in two rounds, but after the barbarian took a caltrop wound from the spike trap the PCs backed off and decided to find another way around.

>Traps out of combat, IE "You failed your perception check, take this much damage", are fairly boring.

That would indeed be boring if it ever went down that way. Don't tell me that's how you think traps are meant to be used.

In a tall chamber with a broken elevator, I once put a door about 20 feet up. The party came from a story above, and was planning to pass through the chamber to talk to a sequestered wizard.

They were intrigued, and after rearranging the detritus in the room, they clambered atop in and stood on each other's shoulders, with the party rogue just barely reaching the unlocked latch.

The room was full of bees. They were not happy.

Make them the focal point of an encounter, where things are happening because of the trap or centered around making the trap kill people.

The most creative trap I've ever dealt with was one a friend of mine DM'd in high school. It was a long rectangular hallway with a pathway of candles on the floor. Just outside of the candle's tiny light were a lattice of razor-sharp monofilament wires criss-crossed along the entirety of the hallway, all connecting to the floor. They were visible in light, but also made of a material that was highly flammable, making torches burn them away. This would be a good thing, if not for the fact that they were the only things holding up the floor.
The floor is actually a single stone slab suspended above a hundred foot drop into the cavern below. The only thing holding it up are these razorwires, which you can't see without being in danger of destroying them (sans magic, which was part of how to get through it). It was a fun room.

Above the waistline but below mid-thigh works best.

Unless you like your traps upside down, that's contradictory.

That's a neat concept, but realistically there's no way that the floor has enough leverage there to fling the guy into the spikes.

Lethal traps aren't fun because they completely derail whatever the players were going to do if someone dies.

Traps that just do a bit of damage aren't interesting. Players will just heal up and continue on like nothing happened.

Good traps have an effect that complicates the game without derailing it.

>Someone gets sprayed with green paint all over their face and armour, blinding them until they can wash it out of their eyes
>Later, when trying to sneak through a dark area, they find that the paint glows in the dark just enough to give away their position but not enough to see by

Not that guy, but I'm intrigued, how do YOU use traps? I struggle to make them relevant to my games.

>Players will just heal up and continue on like nothing happened.
No consequence healing disgusts me.

Not him either, but the issue is perception checks themselves. They turn traps into binary get fucked/don't get fucked machines, and add arbitrary danger to games that for the most part assume combat is the only significant risk to your character and are designed around that idea. That's why they really work well on editions that don't boil them down to a series of rolls to see how much it messes you up

I just want to say that I hate traps that rely on cartoon physics like that in the OP pic, especially because they're generally presented as something that's ever so "realistic".

They shouldn't be used that way. But lots of us have seen them used that way.

I use them as triggers to alter either the available paths to traverse the dungeon or to trigger/alter combat engagements. One state makes it easy to see what's out of place, another makes it easy to understand the what and why of it.

examples?

Well, teach us, guru

>Ask him how a spear fit inside that tiny chest.
>"Do you want to continue trying to open it to find out?"

>you are now picturing a goblin with a box of ACME Compressed Spears

even worse, that particular trap requires such wonders as monofilament wire strong enough to cleanly slice up an armoured pointman
also, imagine having to re-set that trap after it triggers. imagine having to re-set ANY of grimtooth's traps.

the classis trap
pitfall into gelatinous cube

elegant yet deadly

best traps are ones that are less lethal and more home alone-style annoying.
raiding a house
>kick the door down and rush in. get caught oh a bunch of hooks.
>assholes had dangled fishing lines with hooks on them from the ceiling and covered the floor in ball bearings.
>get to the stairs after cutting the fishing lines
>right before we reach the top the steps fold down and we slide down into the wall opposite the stairs.
>turns out it was a false wall. breaks away and we fall into the basement which has been filled knee deep with tar.

give us an example of how a trap should be used.

My players are usually short on time. Their reward is shrinking by the hour, their enemy is getting away or preparing, and so on.

So traps are mainly time consuming. If the players are creative they might be able to get around the trap in a matter of seconds, instead of 5-15 minutes.

And if they trigger the traps they're in for a bad time.