So for various reasons my players have gotten an interest in trapmaking to even the odds against a larger enemy force.
Besides typical things like pits, snares, and punji stick holes, what sort of traps would be reasonable to make in a forest?
How long would it take to dig larger pit traps?
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Grimtooth’s Traps probably has what you’re looking for.
I actually want the opposite of grimtooth. I want plausible and realistic traps that my players can make in a reasonable amount of time.
There's a guidebook on boobytraps floating around the internet that should fit your criteria.
Check out the sorts of traps the Vietcong would employ. They had a similar resource base to your players. What you listed with the addition of logfalls and maybe crossbow traps are about the extent of what they'd be able to manage in a mundane fashion. Magic adds a bit to the mix but not as much as you'd think.
This is a very quick and very dirty homebrew that (very roughly) lines up with a non-D&D system, but in D&D terms, I'd say that PCs can move one 5x5x5 cu ft of dirt every (6-STR mod.) hours. A PC with STR 10 takes six hours per sube, but a more robust PC, say one around STR 14 it would take four hours. This is assuming a more reasonable pacing with breaks to avoid fatigue. For people in a hurry... maybe halve the time but make a CON roll vs Exhaustion at the end? Any wizards or druids in the party may want to hunt down a scroll of Move Earth.
This is faster than most would consider "realistic," but it gives PCs with prep time a chance. Pits are effective--even if you leave them wide open and obvious, they still block paths and halt charges very effectively--but they are time consuming to create.
Other options include bottlenecks (down some trees to funnel the army into a killzone and pepper them with arrows, etc.), stake traps (instead of the trap snapping up and catching the target in a snare, it snaps up with a number of sharpened stakes at face level), and deadfalls (drop something heavy, or better yet a bunch of something heavy, like boulders and trees). Ambushes in general are great, and there's no reason to fight 10,000 soldiers if you can drop a redwood on their commander and skedaddle.
Yeah, I've seen that before, it's definitely very informative and creative.
It's not a dnd game, but thanks for the example.
>Ambushes in general are great
Agreed.
They're outnumbered over 15 to 1 so they'll need every creative and tactical advantage to whittle away the numbers, shape combats, and fight more guerilla style.
I'm I doing right?
What a cute girl! Where's she from?
youtube.com
do vietnamese shit
Dammit, I was going to make this joke.
Best girl Astolfo, from Fate/Apocrypha
>poisonous jungle snakes in pits
>poisonous jungle snakes nailed to doors
>explosive flags
>explosive zippo lighters
>bent bamboo poles with spikes
>rubber band powered bamboo arrow
>holes with bamboo spikes
>giant boards with metal spikes hanging from some tree rigged with trip wires
>giant concrete spiky balls
>sabotaged ammunition set to explode
Not to shit on the vietcong, but most of these sound like shitty ideas for a fantasy campaign or whatever the OP is running.
Replace as necessary with basilisks inside really big cans of peanut brittle left on trails.
Being low fantasy and kind of medieval the only reasonable traps and snares you have outside of pits with spikes, whip traps, spiked logs, and rope snares, is maybe rigging a crude bow and arrow, or a field full of caltrops or something.
If there IS a way to rig something to explode, well... then things get really interesting. But I doubt you want, or will allow that.
American troops had shit-tier jungle training and just blundered around trying to cover the maximum amount of distance on their patrols which inevitably led to their routes being predictable and easy to trap ahead of time even with obvious stuff like that, because they'd go for the path of least resistance and wouldn't properly sweep their immediate direction of advance before moving through chokes.
The Australians got shat on by the US command for not covering even a fraction of the area that a US military unit would with their patrols, but had much greater success ambushing insurgents and far fewer casualties from both traps and ambushes themselves, because they used knowledge gained from counter-insurgency operations in the jungles of Malaya and moved slowly and carefully when out on patrol.
tl;dr even simple traps work when your enemy's commanders care more about meeting their political master's targets than the lives of their men
Curious is the trapmaker's art. His efficacy unwitnessed by his own eyes.
>How long would it take to dig larger pit traps?
A goddamn long time.
>girl
Barrels of oil strapped to trees, camouflaged with bark and branches.
Set to rope for pulling/dropping, shot with a fire arrows or activated with flint that'll grind when pulled out of place to ignite said barrels. (think molotov cocktail barrel with flint & steel pressed on the top)
Depending on the forest you could set fire lines to prevent entire forest fires once the army closes in. They're trapped in the forest fire and/or have to back out entirely.
Realistically how much do they care about the forest, and how much are they willing to sacrifice to kill an army.
>fill barrel with naphtha
>strap flint and fuse to side
>drop from underbelly of hippogryph on fly over
>sing "It ain't me" as barrels of watered down pitch go tumbling through the forest into fireballs
I don't know why I didn't think of it before, or why your post helped me realize it, but you just gave me the best, or worst, idea yet to annoy the fuck out of my GM.
Thank ye sir.
Shut the fuck up, Veeky Forums! That’s a girl and you know it! Your contrarianism and desire to spout memes is getting stale, and I dare say contrived. Just fuck off and accept you can’t just claim a random picture of a girl is that of a boy.
Whatever makes you feel better hon...
Make sure such missteps are the exception
And not the rule
grimtooth's traps is looney-tunes bullshit that's both impossible to set up and even more impossible to re-set, like that one trap that swings an entire hallway downwards instead of just making the floor drop out or something
and let's not forget the actual monofilament fucking wire involved in that one dumbass rube goldberg trap
If your character has access to a bag of holding you can fit two to three filled barrels and a few alchemist flask into it.
Net/rope/nail it all together, put it in the bag.
Open bag and push inside out.
Well it wouldn't be a good trap if everyone knows it's a boy.
How much do you care about the forest not burning down?