Traps

>play a sea sorcerer
>can breathe underwater from level one
I suppose I would starve to death.

>What are some ingenious methods that ensure the player dies?
>the player dies?

Umm...

Attached: scareddoggo.jpg (640x659, 82K)

Play Druid. Have a fish form, and create food/water as a cantrip.

If you're a GM, you can pull stuff out of your ass and say it kills the player. Both the way you suggested and the way I suggested will cause people to walk away from a shit game like that.

Have an intelligent enemy that monitors the PCs, studies their personalities, and exploits their flaws in a definitive way.

The problem with the trap in the OP is that it's not only impractical, it's also uninteresting.

From a world design perspective, the trap requires a lot of effort to construct, hollowing out a sizeable underground hollow transporting water to deep within your dungeon, and is very impractical to reset, requiring not only repairing the floor, but moving a gigantic boulder. which is at the bottom of a chasm. This is especially bad considering that it kills at most a single humanoid. The main problem is that the majority of measures that work against a deepish pit with spikes at the bottom, also works against the over-engineered monstrosity presented in the OP. Featherfall, flight, being too light to trigger weight based trap mechanisms, agile enough to get off a collapsing section of floor or having enough basic awareness of traps to avoid the section of floor rigged to collapse all get you out of this scot free. So this unnecessarily complicated pit trap is only practical against parties who are dumb enough to fall hard into a pit trap, are superhuman enough to survive a pit trap with no significant impact, but also not superhuman enough to remove a boulder before one of their members drowns to death.

From a game design perspective, it's a mildly interesting puzzle pit trap that if you fall for it, you have to figure out a way to remove a boulder before a party member drowns, but desu, any OSR party dumb enough to fall for a pit trap are going to be inexperienced enough, and almost certainly not powerful enough to destroy a boulder within a minute or so, which makes it a save vs death pit trap, which is incredibly boring.

In answer to the OP's question, if you're looking for ingenious ways to ensure players (I'm assuming there's a "character" missing here if not please seek immediate professional help (psychologists not hitmen)) dies you're approaching GMing from an angle that's not going to make the game fun for anyone involved.

Something like this

Literally the plot of Undertale.

What an inefficient stat spread.

>implying a door with vacuum on the other side wouldn't take an unbelievably high amount of force to open