You know, this is not the most exciting video in the world, but new DMs are being made every day and this can help them. We got more exciting videos in the future. :D
Don’t be like that! Trap can be extremely exciting if your game has emphasis on positioning! This video will DEFINITELY help me out a lot, and I’m sure it’ll help others as well!
I concur. My players are about to see a lot more, and spicier, traps! I had somewhat often skipped them if they were in a module because I found them boring. I see value in them now and how they can add atmosphere to a dungeon.
Matt, I know you read some of these comments, so I'd just like to say what an amazing thing you're doing here. Your running the game videos are one of the reasons I started playing D&D, and it's since then become a huge part of my life. Your help, advice, and witty comments on fantasy, politics, and whatever else happens to be on your mind are invaluable to me. You have made my life just a little bit better with these videos, thank you.
I third this, I wouldn't have been a DM if not for Matt, and I might even be a better person then if I hadn't come across running the game. It's also inspiring to see such a talented and passionate DM designer and writer make awesome stuff (refrencing S&F and the chain as well).
One of the things I've adopted from a discussion on reddit is the "What do you do?" mechanic for traps. "As you step forward, you feel a slight tug on your foot. A tripwire. It's too late to not trigger the trap, what do you do?" Depending on what the trap is, and what the players say they do, changes the outcome of the trap. If it's a pitfall, and the player says they drop to the floor... well make your save at disadvantage and try again next time. If it's an arrow trap however, that same floor drop might give advantage on the save! Leaping from the trap might avoid it altogether, or it may put you more squarely in it. I also typically only give them a few seconds in real life to make their decisions, if they hesitate at the table their character hesitates and just stands there. Adds some drama and encourages quick thinking methinks.
I'll never get tired of Matt giggling gleefully when a trap like the Gelatinous Cube/Pit trap or his own Cube/Mimic trap works and the players are induced into 'running around like chickens with their heads cut off' mode.
It's a Factory of Monarchs in the wild! I'll have to check-out your Greek myth stuff as I've been back-burner noodling with a Greco-Roman setting for years! I'm happily reading through Theros atm!
Xanathar's Guide to Everything has an entire chapter dedicated to traps. It even introduces the concept of "Complex Traps" which play out like 1/2 combat 1/2 puzzle. I thought it was pretty neat. Sounds kinda like what you mention towards the end of the video. Keep up the great work Matt! =]
@@Akeche Yeah I figured that might the case, and I don't blame him. He seems like a very busy guy, and he's learned several editions of the game already. Just figured it would be helpful for others looking for trap resources. I'm definitely gonna check out the book of challenges.
Came to say the same, and also agree that Matt may have all the stuff he needs in is head, or existing references already. However the XgE is so good in many ways, Id recommend it fro all new players / DMs / at least a couple of copies in a play group :)
My favourite kinds of traps will always be runes of reverse gravity. Especially in the middle of a fight. Suddenly, players are literally on different playing fields. Featherfall is a good spell to have in my games, FYI.
@@TheGoblinoid Definitely can be. I was with a larger company and wasn't actually in the RPG department. But, said large company just let their entire RPG department go about 5-6 months ago.....
I... never thought about it that way. Traps are made to prevent players from bringing all their force to bear, not just to drain resources and the like. I think I’m going to start using traps now, thank you.
An Indiana Jones style mosaic tiled floor (randomly trapped) with appropriate treasure visible on the far side. Crumbling floor tiles that fall to great depths, vines for grabbing to save yourself. On a complete set of failures (DC 15 avoid trapped tile, DC8 grab a vine) they fall and automatically become entangled in vines 20 feet below hanging in the void for rescue, taking some fall damage (2d6). To add the right amount of tension, once a tile crumbles, or the first character makes it across, skeletal warriors start to rise up and attack from the treasure, but they are also prone to falling through the tiles, except they don't grab the vines. Made for great tension and some real hilarity as characters could reach out to grab adjacent falling friends or vines. I also had some of the random treasure tumble down the pile and roll out onto the dodgy tiles, or have the skeletal warrior pick up the obviously magic weapon to use. Disarming came into play and so did abseiling into the depths to retrieve the fallen treasure.
Coming from older editions one of the times I got confused was “where the heck is the disarm trap skill”. It took some time for me to realise that there isn’t any and players have to come up of the way to disarm it and describe how to the dm.
Tbph i always just thought that sleight of hand was expanded to cover it. I always ask my players to describe what they are attempting to do though to make sure it would even work if they are successful
Jordyn Young Yes me too because I was stuck with the mindset that one of these things had to be the disarm trap skill. It can be used sometimes depending on the trap I guess.
Thieves tools is the default but you have to take the trap into consideration. Leaves over a pit isn't a "disarmable" trap. You have to go around it or though it. There isn't triggering there. A trip wire, pressure plate, or something of the like is where thieves tools come in.
Hey Matt, I've been Dm'ing for my Dad and sister throughout quarantine and I'd like to say thank you for this series. Its been a wealth of helpful guidance.
one thing I found in grimtooth's that I really liked was something called the "idiot's vase", although I modify it to be more fun and less brutal. My interpretation is an enchanted vase that visibly has a key or some other piece of loot at the bottom, but if you stick your hand in, you never seem to be able to reach the bottom. if you break it, the enchantment shatters and deals force damage. the real trick to it is to simply turn it upside down and let gravity do the work.
My husband has been the "forever DM" and I wanted to give him a chance to play. Your videos have been so helpful to me as I try my hand at running the game. I am excited to see that you are still making them. Thank you for all the tips and tricks- I have been really enjoying being the DM.
Absolutely love that you tell everything in the beginning without a stupid intro music video etc. I always watch the whole video because you have great content
One of my favourite things for the third use of traps, especially when it comes to higher levels, is the glyph or warding spell. The spell can do a lot of dynamic things - silencing spellcasters, wall of fire and the like the split the party, etc. It can even do something "traps" definitely aren't intended to do, and a powerful cleric could throw a glyph of warding down to cast Heal on themselves (or a similar beneficial spell) in response to a certain trigger. In my game recently a Drow Matron Mother had a very mediocre time when the party got a clutch Feeblemind off on her, making her far less threatening. If she ever comes back from the dead (very unlikely, but not impossible) she'll be sure to have a glyph that Heals her if she makes an attack with her Demon Staff - a last resort option normally, but really the only thing she can do once feebleminded. I think generally when it comes to traps to make a seemingly easy or manageable encounter spiral out of the party's control, traps that divide and conquer, or debilitate the party somehow, are much better choices than traps that simply do some additional damage. The goal with a trap in this scenario in my opinion is to make the party ask "well how to we deal with this new problem in addition to the enemies we face" and a trap that just fireballs the party or similar is easily answered with "heal through it". Another great video, I know I'll be checking out the book of challenges and maybe throwing some of these nasties at my players in the future. :)
I made a poison trap that is the classic "the doors close and poison starts to fill the room." The trick was the trap opens in three rounds, but the characters can easily plug the pipes where the poison comes from. There was very high anxitey and basically told the players that if they're not careful they could die. By the way, this was in pathfinder 2e.
When you’re considering if a trap is what you need to make your encounter more interesting, and in that moment your phone tells you Matt just uploaded a video about Traps. I love synchronicity.
I'm way earlier into the RTG series and am so happy you're still coming out with more! I'm not COMPLETELY new to DMing (I've DMed maybe 3ish campaigns with a new one this Saturday) but every single video I basically learn at least one new thing and it's so engaging and interesting! Thanks so much and excited to learn more!
Update: last night was session 1 with my new party, and it went so smoothly and everyone was laughing nearly the whole time. I took lots of advice from the RtG series and I think it really helped
Traps don't always have to be deadly or dangerous to spice up a mission. I remember during one campaign through an enemy stronghold, we passed through a normal looking hallway only to discover the hard way one of the walls had a powerful magnet installed behind it. Everyone with metal armor or weapons needed to do a strength save; easy for the ones with only a few things, and damn hard for anyone in heavy metal armor like our paladin who failed and found themselves pinned to the wall. This put us in the situation of figuring out how we free them before a guard patrol could find us. The paladin could take off his armor to un-stick himself, but then he'd have to adapt to, well, not having any armor until we could get it unstuck. While the trap itself was never the danger, it really helped break up the flow of the dungeon and forced us as the players to get creative.
Traps can also encourage exploration of more complex dungeons - if the party spot a trap, and there are routes they haven't yet been, they might decide to explore one of those routes to see if there's a way around the trap. Locked doors can have the same function. In terms of splitting the party with traps, pit traps are excellent for this. It's a little bit of fall damage - but if you put a couple of zombies at the bottom of a 15' pit, you've created a situation where only one or two party members are in immediate danger - leading the others to focus on helping whoever ended up in the pit. If a couple of ghouls then take advantage of the distraction, you've got yourself a pretty tense fight. I mean, for a party of four level 4 PCs, two zombies and two ghouls are a medium encounter, but if you've split the party like that, it's a whole (hole?) other situation to deal with. Sure, provided they have a cleric, the party will almost certainly get through largely unscathed, but during the fight itself? Much like with the portcullis, they're having to deal with not being able to use the tactics they're used to using. The important thing with traps is that they have to make sense when you consider who lives in the area. Nobody is going to defend their lair with a trap they themselves cannot easily get past.
What about a cave-in instead of a pit trap? A natural weakening of the floor in a catacombs built too close to an underground river or cistern -- the stones fall away, the characters fall into a sinkhole beneath. The noise attracts a bunch of undead. Same trap, but now it's more synchronous, makes more sense within the setting. Not to mention, the adventurers now have difficult terrain to negotiate when they are on their way back out of the catacombs, maybe while being chased by a large army of undead they disturbed deeper within. Hmm.
@@lfoster6759 Works just as well; the idea of a pit trap was more because a necromancer could just throw a couple of corpses into the pit, then cast animate dead on them (I forgot that it has a 10' range, but the necromancer could animate them and then order them to dig the pit - at that point, the control over the zombies will wear out, but the necromancer won't need that control because they're at the bottom of a pit.
Two things: 1. I have used Treacherous Traps (5e) and, although it isn't perfect, it adds an incredible amount of the 'stuff' I want in trap making. I was a backer to their project and wasn't disappointed in the slightest. Highly recommended! 2. This is a general comment about Matthew Colville's videos that I didn't really recognise until now. Coming from someone who teaches college-level students, this video made me realise that Matthew Colville is incredibly good at explaining things that are incredibly obvious in a way that anyone could understand. This isn't a slight against him in any way, as doing so can be incredibly tedious and sometimes difficult. Thank you, Matthew, for being the kind of person D&D nerds need, but don't deserve.
Another fantastic third edition book is "Traps & Treachery" which has detailed mechanical descriptions for traps and how to describe them to players who notice them and what they can do to disarm them.
My favorite rules for traps in any edition of D&D are "Encounter Traps" from 3rd edition. Originally published in Secrets of Xen'drik for the Eberron setting, and then reprinted in the core product line in the Dungeonscape book. "Encounter Traps" differed from regular 3rd edition traps in that they each required multiple successful disarm traps, and they had evolving or repeating effects every round. You rolled initiative when they were triggered, and you had so many rounds to figure out how to disarm it before or while something bad was happening. Classic!
The best (most memorable) trap for me ended up as an NPC. Long story short-ish: The party ventured down into the dungeons beneath the ruins of Castle Greyhawk. Zagig himself had put a magical trap on a door decades ago, a pretty tough one to find and disarm. But the rogue of the party didn't come that evening, so instead I decided the magic of the trap had made the door sentient! When the ranger searched the door, and failed the check, the door shouted "BOOM! Did I get'cha?" and grinned. After a short convensation, and some much needed lubrication on the hinges, the door agreed to become the front door of the party's estate back in the River Quarter of Greyhawk, that they were currently renovating.
Something I kind of love about this video is that most of the advice you give here is just what you've been saying for years in Q&As, and live streams and the like when you would get questions about traps but in a concise and significantly more put together format.
Im using some simple traps in my campaign right now. The adventures have to get thru a tunnel complex with 2 groups fighting inside. Goblins and kolbolts. Kolbolts are using traps and tactics to fight back. Sometimes the adventures comes across a trap that has already tripped with some troops in the middle of recovering. Or come across the trap maker and a defense squad resetting traps and looting bodies in those traps. The nice thing is when they start going the wrong way the traps get more elaborate and patrols become more common. And this makes sense because it is getting closer to one group or the other. This is great for lower levels because I dont know if they will but they can always come back once they are stronger to wipe out one or both of the groups of monsters. Plus they can role play, they are lost and come across a hobgoblin nearly dead in a trap that was set off. They could kill and loot him or they can pull him out and use him as their guide. Then the question becomes how do they do this? Threats and intimidation vs mercy and kindness. Each thing has their own perks and benefits
I enjoy utilizing the Passive Perception mechanic in 5e. Adventurer slips through a door, and notices the low perception check to notice the tripwire (without need to roll the dice). Now they are aware. Now they can investigate the layout of the contraption. They can worry. They can problem solve. It comes down to the description of the workings of the obstacle.
5:31 I think Wizards is leaving money on the table by not having toy soldier style Bucket of Goblins (with attachable bases so you can use them as minis) for sale.
In 5e, when deciding how much difficult a trap's stuff should be to interact with, or how much damage a trap would do, it's a good idea to use the stats of a monster in the dungeon. I could swear i heard this first in one of your videos, but since I didn't hear it in this one I wanted to vouch for that advice.
It's also useful to consider what, in-universe, the trap is intended to do. Not "what are the mechanics of the trap", but it's function within the larger space it occupies. Traps take a great deal of time, effort, knowledge, and resources to build and maintain. The more complex the trap, the more of all of those you need. A trap built to last hundreds of years without maintenance even moreso. No one goes to those lengths without a good reason. Nor do they implement them within spaces they intend to occupy (even for a brief period) without good reason. Tombs tend to just want to discourage looters, so their traps will be designed to hurt or kill casual grave robbers (1d6 damage is often more than sufficient). If the trap is designed to slow intruders down, the traps will be more inconvenient than damaging (though a foot stepping into a spiked-filled hole that cripples it for life will certainly inconvenience and slow them). If the trap makers would rather capture intruders, the traps will be built to _literally_ trap them in a confined space, knock them out, or otherwise make locating them easier (instead of a spiked pit trap, it might just be a regular pit). Even "insane wizard dungeons" (Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain) have some esoteric purpose, even if known only to the insane wizard who built it. Etc, etc.
Eh, I don't think you should do that with using monster stats to determine. Part of having a trap is to break up the monotony of "Let me throw another monster at the party". Which means, unlike a random encounter, the trap's going to have some purpose or goal in mind of its creator. Some traps (like pit traps without spikes, net traps, snare traps, and those snapjaw traps (bear traps)) are all designed capture, immobilize, and/or restrain a target without killing the target. (Maiming, however, is still on the table.) These are used by group who do believe in taking prisoners or like to recruit more slaves. This is why they're found all around goblin lairs. And, since they're generally not lethal (and hopefully the home teams knows where they are), they won't typically have a disarm or kill switch. Then you have what I call "the corridor traps". These are usually built into structures, and their primary purposes are to slow down any attacking group, alert the defenders that an attack is on the way, and buy those defenders time to organize their defenses. Again, these aren't generally designed to be lethal, but at this point the defenders probably aren't too interested in taking captives. Since these people are living with these traps in a manner akin to "sleeping with a loaded gun under their pillow", these traps won't be "fully lethal" and will have some sort of deactivation mechanism or bypass so the locals don't generally fall in them. But in no terms should a party of adventurers take these traps on willy nilly. Finally, we come to what I call "treasure traps". These traps are there to guard something, someplace, or someone very important. These should be the traps that leave red stains on the walls and brown stains in armor. If the party fails to detect or disarm the trap, there should be a good chance someone dies. A trap could be something as small as a needle or as large as a 50 foot corridor. The outcome could be poison, magic, a rain of rocks and rubble, or just some good, old-fashion sharp blade of steel on a swingy stick. But these traps should be the hardest to detect and disarm. Again, for these traps, they'll have ways to disarm them, and I'm generally of the mindset that there should be some clue as to the danger and disarming. It could be as simple as the corpse of some unsuccessful thief, odd stains on the floor, or even watching some retreating kobold forget the trap was there in their panic and tripped it. Which brings me to the other thing: detecting the trap. You're not going to get that from CR rating of the local monsters. That's going to be a combination of many factors: Skill of the trapmaker, age of the trap, and how much your goofy party is paying attention to their surroundings. A goblin who has to tie up two dozen snare traps probably isn't going to be too bothered making a perfect slip not for the trap or completely covering it with leaf litter. Likewise, a pit trap dug ages ago isn't going to have the greenest of cover and recent rains might have started eroding the side. Then again, maybe those dwarven miners and sculptures were talented enough to make those pressure plates nearly indistinguishable from the flagstone around them. But, even the most poorly concealed snare trap can snag a party on the run from a band of bugbears because the party wasn't watching where they were going.
@@Bluecho4 I agree about thinking of their use in-universe. Personally, that's why I don't use most of the really Indiana-Jonesque traps, and prefer to play with simple, practical ones. There's a lot your local kobolds/goblins can do just with hidden pits, nets, tripwire-crossbows and some hidden bear traps. I think they add a lot of immersion to some creatures, meaning attacking them on their turf is a real pain. Like, Matt's example with orcs and their pit traps is excellent.
@@jackielinde7568 If one has monotony in the story then one has no story. If the players are not eager to reach a certain point like getting the princess before the dragon eats is then you have two choices. Simply close the book as the adventure is over or get more interesting fast.
Matt, I am working a night shift and super bored and just found this new upload so I just wanted to shout out to you and say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thanks to your series I have started running DND with literal zero experience just 4 months ago, now we are well into the thick of my homebrew campaign. I ran oneshots for 10 people, all of who want to keep playing and I have a steady group of 5 who send me endless praises. Which really belongs to you. Just a few months ago, I would have never imagined playing, god forbid running DND, thinking it to be something only a veteran could do. The way you explained the game, how you interpreted this complex game into simple components and explained its merits had me too jittery to play with my friends and I just had to try. Before, DND was some nerd thing too intense for me, now its a playground for me and my friends to craft as we please. 2 of my players initially didnt even want to play DND at all because they thought it wasnt for them (one is sports freak and the other never liked rpg or gaming like rest of us) and after running the game in your Colvillian style (I say that to them a lot) they can't get enough! They are the ones bugging me constantly to play more frequently now. Even if you dont read this, just wanted to say thanks, for bringing such a delight into my life in a time that could have been very dark. You truly are a river to your people.
I'm very impressed by your analytical approach to how and why to use traps. I've been watching videos all day looking for ideas and this is the first that really made me think in depth about the reasons behind the traps and getting into the mindset of the players that could interact with them.
Dael Kingsmill had a super good suggestion about traps in one of her video : the "Click" moment. When someone triggers a trap, describe briefly the sound it makes and ask the player "Fast! What do you do?". If the player says "I jump!" or "I shout "On the ground!" and duck down", depending on the kind of trap, maybe offer advantage for the saving throw roll or let the player dodge it completly if that makes sense. That worked pretty well in my game!
Trap Theory and Trap Theory II by Runehammer are some of the best content I've seen for describing the purpose of traps for rpgs where they're relevant. Purpose in both mechanical and roleplay perspectives. TLDW on these is that you always need constraints to apply to the players, and the players need clear goals. If they're familiar with their character sheets, then mechanical traps should be fun. If they're familiar with their characters, then roleplay traps should be fun. Links: th-cam.com/video/D3HSw-ANugg/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/wdca18nObAk/w-d-xo.html
I love how it all boils down to bait, a threat, and a timer, and how that can really apply to just about everything in the game, not just mechanical traps in dungeons.
@@duskworkerdron5901 Me too. Depending on how far you take the idea, it can give you a very different perspective on the game. Those are always useful.
One of my favorite stories involving a trap was when I was a player, my first 5e game actually. We were in the underdark going through a cave with old worked stone (I was a dwarf and my stonecunning check revealed to me this place is old and was important at one point(red flag #1)). We came to a narrow passageway that led to a T intersection. In the middle of this passage unbeknownst to us was a pressure plate. One of the players stepped on it and it clicked. Nothing happened. They stepped off fine. The next player went, click, nothing. The third player, cocky and assuming the trap old and broken after all this time, crossed it, click, and a fireball went off at the plate's location burning him. I was the 4th to cross and I remember sitting there like "oh well that's simply amazing!"
The thing that goes for traps as well as all dramatic devices - simple premise, with an unexpected twist, and opportunity for further drama. It's nearly a foolproof format. Gate slams down, but just between the two groups of party members! And now, hobgoblins are coming to see what happened. Let me make one - a pressure plate fires out arrows, moderate damage. But they hit oil lanterns on the far side of the corridor, and now flames rush towards the players. The entrance to the mine they just came in, propped up by wooden beams.
Completely agree. To understand where to put what kind of trap, it's best to look at it from a military perspective: What is the proper use of mine fields, tank ditches and barbed wire? It is either to slow down enemies *where you can easily spot and shoot them*, or to allow you to cover your flanks with only a few sentries, with the "traps" giving you time to send reinforcements and making it harder for your enemy to sneak by (or delaying them enough that they will be inconsequential when they finally make it). Basically use #3 and #2. Use #1 only happens incidentally, when one of the former kind of traps gets abandoned, and is pretty much useless. As the saying goes: "An obstacle not covered by fire is not an obstacle".
I ran my first ever campaign for 3 of my friends on Sunday and it went INCREDIBLY. Even though it was over Google Hangouts. We all had a blast and are excited to play again this Sunday. And it was entirely due to your videos! (as well as dimension 20 and naddpod inspiration). The tips you provided helped make my first session 1000 times better than it would have been otherwise, though I do also have my incredible players to thank for such a good time too. Thank you so much for helping me gain the confidence I needed to run a game of D&D. When I got into it, it wasn't even hard! Excited to see where this incredible hobby takes me and my friends and I'm excited to steal more of your ideas and put them in my game
One of my favorite traps is a simple rope snare that lifts the character into the air when triggered. The character is dangling upside down, and has to rely on their comrades to free them using a nearby release. If the other characters simply cut the rope, the character falls and takes a bit of damage. If the rope is slowly let out, the reach the ground safely. I find it works really well to have one of these traps on a path so the players can learn the mechanics, then start placing these traps in combat encounters. Melee characters are removed from combat, ranged characters have their mobility taken away, and the party must weigh freeing their friend vs finishing the encounter
I remember a few of the haunts in RIse of the Runelords. They could be pretty nasty if you failed enough rolls but always had some great failsafes to continue into more RP opportunities or info about the area you were exploring. One was within an abandoned cabin in the mountains. A blizzard hits during travel and the players are forced to take shelter. Inside however, they're met with the ghosts of dwarves who try desperately to warn the players. Fear and madness spiral out of control, hindering the players more than helping them despite their best efforts before the wails of a CR 17 Wendigo ring through the night. The haunt is just a setup for the encounter to build atmosphere and it's such a great use for it! Another was the haunted mansion on an oceanside cliff where foxglove took up hiding, in which you learn about his dead lover and her demise. Failure to resist the haunt had a character get possessed. It starts slow by opening the window in her bedroom, gazing out to an ocean but soon escalates into leaping out onto the steep roof. At this point the player can break free of the haunt and try to grab onto the edge but if one rolled bad enough, multiple times, they'd fall to their demise into the ocean or even get skewered on the weather vane! Most traps end up being a "Surprise!" one and done event that either causes damage and has the players feeling cheated for rolling poorly or on the other hand, grinds the game to a halt as they find a trap and endlessly plan on how to avoid it if the disable device check fails. Haunts on the other hand, give so many more opportunities.
@@bryal7811 Exactly. And the solution to a haunt is always creative, too. It's not just a disable device roll, but you have to figure out and satisfy the condition. Delivering the ghost's last letter written while it was alive, or somesuch.
My favourite trap from Grimtooth's was Fibber McGee's Cupboard of Caltrops. Literally just a cupboard full of caltrops that would fall out all over the players when they opened the door
The advice I have for traps is: context matters. I pressure plate in the middle of a hallway is different from a pressure plate in the middle of a room. On paper, they may have the same stats, but the one in the middle of the room is much easier to bypass. The trick to good traps is using the context around it to give players the opportunity to creative their way around it if disarming it isn't an option. Plus, if players do bypass a trap instead of disarming it, it now can serve more purposes. Making escape harder for the players if they have to run, or giving the players a resource to use against enemies.
One of the tricks I learned from The Angry GM is what he called the "Click Rule". Where if you set off a trap, you are given some kind of warning that they just did so. The eponymous "click", and it should reflect how the trap's activation method and general nature. (The click of a pressure plate, the snapping of a tripwire, the turning of gears in a mechanism, the landing of a huge rolling rock, etc). At that moment, the DM asks "what's your immediate response?". It's your split second reaction to setting a trap off. Depending on what you decide (which, if you take too long, might be "Nothing"), you might get Advantage, Disadvantage, or a neutral reaction when making the resulting saving throw (or, where applicable, the trap is given Advantage or Disadvantage on its roll to hit you). Examples include diving in a particular direction, blocking with a shield, ducking, etc. It's whatever you decide to do in the moment between activating the trap and it going off. The purpose of this mechanic - this extra step to traps - is to give the player more agency in what is often a binary state between sensing the trap, and not sensing the trap and thus being at the mercy of the dice. You get to decide how you react, and thus have just the slightest measure of control.
I clicked on this video, thinking about that book on my shelf. Then you explicitly mentioned it. I LOVED that book when I was a kid. I sat and read through them all, because I didn't have people to actually play with on the long summer days.
You diagnosed my trap anxiety perfectly! Really appreciate the way you broke it down in a way that makes a trap useful to the DM. The DM’s guide should be written like this.
Xanathar's Guide To Everything also has a section on simple and complex traps, how to make them, and examples of each. It's a good starting point for making your own traps.
I absolutely love this video series and look forward to every new episode. It has been a great resource for me as a GM who has not run a game in over 18 years, and a first time D&D GM.
Little tip that's less about traps and more about combat design: Have combat take place in a room filled with traps. It creates fun dilemmas. A pressure plate triggers a bottle of everlasting smoke. Suddenly the room is heavily obscured by smoke, the echolocation relying bats are angry and there are still a bunch of pressure plates in the room threatening to electrocute anyone who steps on them. As Matt brings up, pits are a fun way of creating tension in combat because suddenly the party may be isolated from an important roll in the party like the frontline barbarian of the damage dealing rogue. Fill the pit with poisonous snakes that don't really damage the trap victim as much as the poisoned condition just makes it difficult to climb out. Having something else to fight down in the pit means that even if the victim can't get out in a few rounds, they still have something to do.
As I am running a funhouse megadungeon I have given my traps a Rube Goldberg vibe in the descriptions as much as I can. What the players don't know is that the two liches that run the Megadungeon are MC Escher (the architect for the whole dungeon) and Rube Goldberg (master of trap design). I love the use of Rube Goldberg as insperation. Great job Matt.
Matt Colville thanks for the series. I have built/am building the "Blackhaven Caverns" the formentioned Megadungeon based on your video on the Whiteplume Mountain. And I have had great joy at seeing my players try and thwart the overly elaborate trap mechanisms. Also I have been passing your videos along to some of my players who are preparing to move behind the screen themselves.
I've always loved the puzzle room trap. I think was mentioned in a previous video where there's a countdown on a wall in sealed room. And all the players have to do is nothing and it resolves itself. When my player tested it a second time kind of laughing the room off. I made the room spit out an encounter at them.
My favorite FunHouse Trap is the Splat Trap. Simple 10 foot pit, long enough that it would be annoying to climb down the walls of the pit and climb back up the otherside, only except halfway across the pit (which is easy enough for most adventurers to jump across) there is an invisible wall that crosses the length of the hallway. Anyone brazen enough to jump across said simple pit trap will go splat and fall into the pit. You can even put holes in the bottom of the pit that may contain retractable spikes, just make it obvious that players minds will go that way. The spikes don't actually exist, the holes are just there for decor.
Matt you're awesome! I would just like to say that these videos are what really got me into DMing. I've been at it for a little over a year and already got 3 of my players to DM and one other is thinking about at least doing a 1 shot! Thank you for all that you do. Keep up the great work man.
Keep on the Borderlands does have some interesting details intended for new DMs and has a pretty good 5e conversion for it. Traps are part of it! That plus the 3e Book of Challenges, Grimtooth's Traps etc. are super useful for thinking about traps and "hazards".
My heart lights up every time I see a new RTG video. Even in these dark days when DnD is scarce to play, always nice to have a mini delve into the imagination with our main man Matt.
Here's some trap archetypes; 1. Pass-traps. These are traps explicitly designed so that those who know the dungeon can prevent themselves from being hurt with minimal effort, but also to allow the dungeon to be unlocked in case the "passholder" came to die in some way. This is usually where riddles come in. Those who know the riddles already can just recall them from memory and if they need a second to read over it, nothing happens. But if they give the wrong answer or take too long, the dungeon starts to menace them. 2. Pain traps. Some places you're just not meant to be and there's no solutions. You're just not welcome. 3. Environmental weapons. Your monsters know the traps and they know how to activate them without being hurt themselves. They can step on a pressure plate to cause the roof above the players to collapse. 4. Death machina. Not all traps are constructed. Some things are just hazardous by themselves and perfectly un-designed to kill humans. These are perfect for illustrating that there's no clever riddle to solve. Some places are simply deadly because physics made them such. You just have to be careful.
Grimtooth's books of traps are awesome. In 3.5 the rules on traps are more precise. I use traps in my campaign (3.5). I haven't played a lot of 5e but I've never encountered one in 5e. Interesting video.
Listening to Matt Colville talk about D&D gets me excited in a way I can only assume an 80's kid running AD&D did back in the day. My only experience is with 5e in the past five-ish years and I only feel this excited about running an "Adventure" rather than a campaign when listening to one of your videos. Don't know how you do it, but it's pretty awesome!
My favorite trap is from one of the 3.0-3.5 era Traps &Treachery books. The "Cat&Mouse" Trap. In a wizards arcane library there are several books on display and a number of friendly and harmless cats loafing about, presumably pets of the wizard who owns the library. If any of the displayed books are touched, the trap within the book activates. The trapped book casts baleful polymorph on the victim, temporarily turning them into a mouse. Upon seeing the mouse, the cats in the room swarm upon it and attwmpt to devour it. If the player can escape, they return to "human" form a few minutes later.
I heard you talking about a lot of this before, but I'm glad it is now all in one video for easy reference. Plus, you are always fun and inspiring to listen to.
My personal favorite trap came from the Ghost Tower of Inverness. The very last encounter, in fact; the gem you're there to steal is able to defend itself, and the last encounter is about how to get to it without having your soul ripped out.
honestly, the first chapter with it's 10 rules for encounter design are all you really need from the book. it gives you a handy checklist of things you should ask yourself as you design not just encounters but dungeons and story beats. everything else is just examples of how to use those 10 rules in action so you can brew your own ideas
Simple trap: An open pit in the floor of a room or corridor. Looking down the pit, there are a collection of spikes with a permanent Sympathy spell cast on them. Adjust the height of the pit for fall damage, and set the save DC to what should get a few of the players.
The reason I watch your Running the Game series is because you get straight to the point. Seriously. With other people’s DM tips TH-cam videos the person blathers on and on. Most likely to eek out extra minutes to fit more ads.
I'm running my group through the 5E Tomb of Annihilation right now and they have made it through to the 3rd floor of the tomb. The traps have acted as the spirit of the dungeon and my players have loved interacting with puzzles sprinkled with a little bit of deadly. Even when one character drank from a pool of magic water and turned to dust and another was instantly blasted and disintegrated by trying to grab the gold sitting in the middle of the room they were more amused than heartbroken.
Every time I click on a new Colville video I learn a little something more about running dnd. I never thought about traps beyond step on trap, get hit before.
Wow. Traps in DnD 5e must be very different from Pathfinder. There are traps and hazards built into the modules, examples in the Gamemaster Guide, and the rules how to build your own. They have stats, what triggers it, how to disarm them, and if it has one action or multiple actions.
I believe it was MonarchsFactory who introduced me to this concept I really like: the "click" mechanic. When a PC activates a trap, I tell them "click! you have activated a trap". Then I allow them one reaction to deal with that before the trap takes effect. It's great because it gives a feeling of agency, and allows them to perhaps mitigate the trap's damage somewhat by working with the information they have about the area, and thus about where the trap could be... It's a fun gamble because it is just as likely to make things worse; perhaps they drop to avoid what they think is a spike trap, and fall face first into what turns out to have been a pitfall trap.
This one time, I made a room, full of mimics, and the moment the party started examining the treasure on the far end of it... mimic. Also, the room is filling with gas, fort save vs11, 12, 13, better get outta there! 14! Oh no your str is dropping fast! Thing is, why couldn't they just turn around and run? Well, they could, but the carpet was a mimic too, and so was that chair, and the pictures on the wall, and they all started blocking the door.
I love monster-trap! I just used a gelatinous cube as a trap: - The characters go through a empty corridor and find a hole on the floor that can be avoided by just going around, it’s pretty deep and they can’t see the floor below. They throw a torch and after seeing it’s 25feet deep they continue onward but find a deadend after two minutes. So they turn back and the torch disappeared. They throw another one and it goes out when it touches something that looks like water. The warrior looks at the rest of the party and dives down, everyone follows. They all found themselves in a gelatinous cube.
Also the first time you’ll say “You see a flying skeleton in front of you” you can be certain that someone will charge it and instantly dive into a gelatinous cube.
My favorite was when a halfling barbarian charged ahead into the dark tunnel with no light source screaming his battlecry about 200ft out all the rear of the party way back hear is "Yaaaaaarr...." *Phub*.... Then nothing.... He ran right into a gelatinous cube.
NordboDK I had once had a TPK for this exact reason, I described a tunnel to be super long, after 2 IRL minutes of describing this long corridor they all just started running. And one by one entered the cube. None made the save, for three straight rounds. And died. That was super depressing to watch, the trap had worked (tiring the players out of game and in game with long description of a long corridor) but I didn’t expect that four characters would fail a 13 strength check three times in a row each.
A buddy of mine and I came up with (well, worked on) a hack where everything in the world had a sort of HP called "Threshold". Traps, creatures, social encounters etc. Everything had this mechanic. When a monster's threshold is 0, it dies. In social encounters, the actors involved take turns using their social skills to reduce the opponent's social threshold to 0 in order to achieve the desired outcome and traps had a threshold for disarmament. Some traps initiated a timer upon first tampering, so if the PC didn't reduce it's threshold in time, something bad happened. Some tasks had a threshold that had to be overcome in one shot to succeed. We did away with Social encounter thresholds because it derailed RP, but kept the one for traps.
Any time your players are at risk of just making the same roll over and over, introduce elements of the adventure that force your players to make choices, to change their strategy. Perhaps an opportunity arises! Regarding failed stealth rolls not ruining the mission, see Matt’s Multiple Fail States video.
The fun of a heist is in the planning stage; what do the heroes know, how do the heroes get more information, what are their options for getting in, what elements of the environment can they exploit in interesting ways. You probably want to have a few complications that are harder to find out about (like the fact that the best day to do the heist, an inquisitor will be there), but you probably want avoid the thing that happens in heist movies, where their entire plan gets thrown in to disarray just after they start, because while that adds tension for the audience of the movie, it will probably feel like a screw job for the players in a game
First thing that comes to mind, based on all the movies, is give every NPC an individual motivation/goal/want, maybe some history with a PC, maybe someone else is on the same mission (rivalry/competition), maybe someone unexpected would benefit indirectly from the PCs succeeding, maybe people are open for negotiations, maybe every NPC is ready to stab every other NPC in the back, maybe someone is more interested in extorting the PCs than busting them. PCs might know a little bit about some of the people they are stealing from, perhaps from spying in advance or from someone who hired them or some of it may be common knowledge, or they may overhear conversations as they sneak about during the heist. Maybe they acquire some inside help, but that person is discovered to have helped them, and so they have to choose whether to focus on making the heist, or to save their ally. Can they manage both?
@@scottsbarbarossalogic3665 I have to respectfully disagree. I think planning can be a lot of fun (for the right group), but it's not the only draw of a heist. And planning is generally only fun if you feel like you've got a solid enough grasp of the scenario to make well-informed plans that won't instantly fall apart on you.
Just discovered today that my first ever d&d adventure was done in the delian tomb. Loved it and glad to know that no matter how experienced you are these videos are always useful. Respect to Matt and my dm John the Geordie
When I had my first (and to date only, sadly) D&D session my brother DM'd and incorporated traps into a battle with kobolds. My character was rushing too far in and not being careful enough and while attempting to engage the first enemy I suddenly had to roll a save. Turns out a second kobold had been hidden from sight and manually released a trap, a boulder, right on top of my head. I nearly went down but just barely managed to stay standing. It added to the encounter, did a meaningful amount of damage without totally messing up the fight for my party, and taught us (all three new players) to be careful and to expect the unexpected (and that kobolds are sneaky). It was great fun! Later the same dungeon we were facing the chieftain of the tribe. He shot down a crate from the ceiling, unleashing a swarm of ravenous rats right on top of us. This time I had learnt my lesson and was hanging back, but it got the other two players. It added a new unexpected enemy and made the encounter more interesting while keeping it balanced. I don't know how much of this dungeon my brother himself made up, but he did a great job!
I used a high level trap-puzzle that was just a square room with an orb on a pedestal in the middle of the room. Each round the orb absorbs the lowest spell slot of each player. Once the orb has absorbed 9 slots it casts a 9th level fireball centered on the room, on a separate turn. To open the door all a player has to say is "open the door" in Elvish (The BBEGs native language). I usually use this to guard treasure rooms/ a liches phylactery room. To hint at the "key" I put taunting script in Elvish on the walls
MATT! It's funny you mention Traps. Logan from the channel Runesmith has a video about traps. Where your video talks about the narrative of the trap and how it fits into the overall adventure or dungeon, Logan talks about how to construct a trap that functionally makes sense. He breaks it down into Visibility, The Trigger, The Failsafe (Because the people who live with the traps don't want to be a victim in their own traps), and The Outcome. Seriously, it's a good primer for those looking to make their own traps, especially if you want to avoid the "roll to detect and roll to disarm" rinse and repeat methods of traps. The video is found here: th-cam.com/video/1uSyptdcsOc/w-d-xo.html
You know, this is not the most exciting video in the world, but new DMs are being made every day and this can help them. We got more exciting videos in the future. :D
Speak for yourself, this is the most exciting video of my entire month! I've been looking forward to your insight on traps
Great to have more Matt Colville content these days!
Don’t be like that! Trap can be extremely exciting if your game has emphasis on positioning! This video will DEFINITELY help me out a lot, and I’m sure it’ll help others as well!
Its super solid. Going back to the Dealian (sp?) tomb is awesome.
I concur. My players are about to see a lot more, and spicier, traps!
I had somewhat often skipped them if they were in a module because I found them boring. I see value in them now and how they can add atmosphere to a dungeon.
Admiral Ackbar disliked the video.
took me way to long to get it.
Nicely done. Clappingpicard.jpg
Well done.
I see what you did there
So did the mods
Curious is the trapmaker's art - his efficacy unwitnessed by his own eyes.
Underrated reply
Unless it is a dragon that has made an arrow that can kill it but traps it to just watch the horror of adventurers as their Trump card sabotages them.
Ancient traps lie in wait, unsprung and thirsting for blood
Cruel machinations spring to life with a singular purpose!
Ambushed by foul invention!
Matt, I know you read some of these comments, so I'd just like to say what an amazing thing you're doing here. Your running the game videos are one of the reasons I started playing D&D, and it's since then become a huge part of my life. Your help, advice, and witty comments on fantasy, politics, and whatever else happens to be on your mind are invaluable to me. You have made my life just a little bit better with these videos, thank you.
I second this. Big time.
I third this, I wouldn't have been a DM if not for Matt, and I might even be a better person then if I hadn't come across running the game. It's also inspiring to see such a talented and passionate DM designer and writer make awesome stuff (refrencing S&F and the chain as well).
I’ll have to fourth this comment. My confidence as a DM comes from this series, and it always challenges me to not run the game by the book
One of the things I've adopted from a discussion on reddit is the "What do you do?" mechanic for traps.
"As you step forward, you feel a slight tug on your foot. A tripwire. It's too late to not trigger the trap, what do you do?"
Depending on what the trap is, and what the players say they do, changes the outcome of the trap. If it's a pitfall, and the player says they drop to the floor... well make your save at disadvantage and try again next time. If it's an arrow trap however, that same floor drop might give advantage on the save! Leaping from the trap might avoid it altogether, or it may put you more squarely in it.
I also typically only give them a few seconds in real life to make their decisions, if they hesitate at the table their character hesitates and just stands there. Adds some drama and encourages quick thinking methinks.
I'll never get tired of Matt giggling gleefully when a trap like the Gelatinous Cube/Pit trap or his own Cube/Mimic trap works and the players are induced into 'running around like chickens with their heads cut off' mode.
I'm putting this in my next session.
Thank you!! You didn't have to worry, my birthday's coming up this week so you're perfectly on time!
Happy birthday, fellow Leo!
Happy human day!
It's a Factory of Monarchs in the wild! I'll have to check-out your Greek myth stuff as I've been back-burner noodling with a Greco-Roman setting for years! I'm happily reading through Theros atm!
Happy Birthday Ms Monarch
Happy b-day (that was?), love your stuff, and have permanently implimented your thieve's cant idea into my DMing
Xanathar's Guide to Everything has an entire chapter dedicated to traps. It even introduces the concept of "Complex Traps" which play out like 1/2 combat 1/2 puzzle. I thought it was pretty neat. Sounds kinda like what you mention towards the end of the video. Keep up the great work Matt! =]
I forgot about that, thanks for the reminder!
+
Sometimes, not all the time but some of the time, it can seem like Matt hasn't read the newer books. I think he even admitted he hadn't read the DMG.
@@Akeche Yeah I figured that might the case, and I don't blame him. He seems like a very busy guy, and he's learned several editions of the game already. Just figured it would be helpful for others looking for trap resources. I'm definitely gonna check out the book of challenges.
Came to say the same, and also agree that Matt may have all the stuff he needs in is head, or existing references already. However the XgE is so good in many ways, Id recommend it fro all new players / DMs / at least a couple of copies in a play group :)
I love traps that aren't just Dex Saves. Give the players an easy puzzle instead, a riddle, a difficult RP scenario, etc.
My favourite kinds of traps will always be runes of reverse gravity. Especially in the middle of a fight. Suddenly, players are literally on different playing fields. Featherfall is a good spell to have in my games, FYI.
Those arent traps, then. They’re puzzles, riddles, or difficult RP scenarios
"I put my information at the front so you don't have to spot through the whole video"
...instant like. Proceeds to watch whole video.
MCDM: Raises 2M
Matt: It's like we're a real company!
Never change, man.
"What is the fastest way to end up with a million dollars in the RPG industry? Start with two million dollars." :P
@@dahlmanerik Yeah, but I love Matt's humility. Like he appears to think he's no big deal.
@@TheGoblinoid I realize. It's just a funny quote I heard from when I worked in the gaming industry. :)
@@dahlmanerik oh gotcha. Man, is it that rough?
@@TheGoblinoid Definitely can be. I was with a larger company and wasn't actually in the RPG department. But, said large company just let their entire RPG department go about 5-6 months ago.....
I... never thought about it that way. Traps are made to prevent players from bringing all their force to bear, not just to drain resources and the like. I think I’m going to start using traps now, thank you.
An Indiana Jones style mosaic tiled floor (randomly trapped) with appropriate treasure visible on the far side. Crumbling floor tiles that fall to great depths, vines for grabbing to save yourself. On a complete set of failures (DC 15 avoid trapped tile, DC8 grab a vine) they fall and automatically become entangled in vines 20 feet below hanging in the void for rescue, taking some fall damage (2d6). To add the right amount of tension, once a tile crumbles, or the first character makes it across, skeletal warriors start to rise up and attack from the treasure, but they are also prone to falling through the tiles, except they don't grab the vines. Made for great tension and some real hilarity as characters could reach out to grab adjacent falling friends or vines. I also had some of the random treasure tumble down the pile and roll out onto the dodgy tiles, or have the skeletal warrior pick up the obviously magic weapon to use. Disarming came into play and so did abseiling into the depths to retrieve the fallen treasure.
Whats the difference?
@@ollep0lle Containment rather than punishment.
Coming from older editions one of the times I got confused was “where the heck is the disarm trap skill”. It took some time for me to realise that there isn’t any and players have to come up of the way to disarm it and describe how to the dm.
Tbph i always just thought that sleight of hand was expanded to cover it. I always ask my players to describe what they are attempting to do though to make sure it would even work if they are successful
Its thieves tools in 5e. The describe hw to do it approach is more OSR
Collin I do that for lock related traps. But some traps can’t be disarmed by thief tools. Leaves covering a spiked pit for example.
Jordyn Young Yes me too because I was stuck with the mindset that one of these things had to be the disarm trap skill. It can be used sometimes depending on the trap I guess.
Thieves tools is the default but you have to take the trap into consideration. Leaves over a pit isn't a "disarmable" trap. You have to go around it or though it. There isn't triggering there. A trip wire, pressure plate, or something of the like is where thieves tools come in.
"If you want to skip this video..."
That is the exact opposite of anything I've ever wanted.
Hey Matt, I've been Dm'ing for my Dad and sister throughout quarantine and I'd like to say thank you for this series. Its been a wealth of helpful guidance.
Speaking of Dael, her video on traps is a great follow on from this, it talks more about theming and in world explanations of traps
This one? th-cam.com/video/wXZXSYjlnGE/w-d-xo.html
Oh I'm early I better say something funny, uhh
Haha Matt Colville hair go ✨✨
Crab? Crab! Hey man, how you doing?
All hail the crab king 🦀
I love that you comment on stuff.
All hail the crab king
So hyped to see more RTG videos. Easily my favorite series on TH-cam. Love these vids Matt!
The T-section trap sounds like a perfect example of chronic and sustained cruelty. I love it
The iron gate trap was the one where they used the portable hole to go through right?
After months of drought, we're getting so many videos so soon. Maybe 2020 is getting better...
He is a river to his people
www.twitch.tv/mcdm/ is another great place to get your Colville fix!
He's been busy with Kingdoms and Warfare, which I am stoked for!
I see this commentor didn’t use the company issued time machine. Unlucky ☹️
one thing I found in grimtooth's that I really liked was something called the "idiot's vase", although I modify it to be more fun and less brutal. My interpretation is an enchanted vase that visibly has a key or some other piece of loot at the bottom, but if you stick your hand in, you never seem to be able to reach the bottom. if you break it, the enchantment shatters and deals force damage. the real trick to it is to simply turn it upside down and let gravity do the work.
I love you, Matt!! I am making a dungeon, so I needed this urgently!
My husband has been the "forever DM" and I wanted to give him a chance to play. Your videos have been so helpful to me as I try my hand at running the game. I am excited to see that you are still making them. Thank you for all the tips and tricks- I have been really enjoying being the DM.
Bless you for DMing, I'm sure you'll do great
Absolutely love that you tell everything in the beginning without a stupid intro music video etc. I always watch the whole video because you have great content
One of my favourite things for the third use of traps, especially when it comes to higher levels, is the glyph or warding spell. The spell can do a lot of dynamic things - silencing spellcasters, wall of fire and the like the split the party, etc. It can even do something "traps" definitely aren't intended to do, and a powerful cleric could throw a glyph of warding down to cast Heal on themselves (or a similar beneficial spell) in response to a certain trigger.
In my game recently a Drow Matron Mother had a very mediocre time when the party got a clutch Feeblemind off on her, making her far less threatening. If she ever comes back from the dead (very unlikely, but not impossible) she'll be sure to have a glyph that Heals her if she makes an attack with her Demon Staff - a last resort option normally, but really the only thing she can do once feebleminded.
I think generally when it comes to traps to make a seemingly easy or manageable encounter spiral out of the party's control, traps that divide and conquer, or debilitate the party somehow, are much better choices than traps that simply do some additional damage. The goal with a trap in this scenario in my opinion is to make the party ask "well how to we deal with this new problem in addition to the enemies we face" and a trap that just fireballs the party or similar is easily answered with "heal through it".
Another great video, I know I'll be checking out the book of challenges and maybe throwing some of these nasties at my players in the future. :)
Matt Colville, slowly succumbing to Lycanthropy right before our eyes!
I made a poison trap that is the classic "the doors close and poison starts to fill the room." The trick was the trap opens in three rounds, but the characters can easily plug the pipes where the poison comes from. There was very high anxitey and basically told the players that if they're not careful they could die. By the way, this was in pathfinder 2e.
When you’re considering if a trap is what you need to make your encounter more interesting, and in that moment your phone tells you Matt just uploaded a video about Traps.
I love synchronicity.
Serendipity.
Yeah, he's really honing his psychic skills recently!
I'm way earlier into the RTG series and am so happy you're still coming out with more! I'm not COMPLETELY new to DMing (I've DMed maybe 3ish campaigns with a new one this Saturday) but every single video I basically learn at least one new thing and it's so engaging and interesting! Thanks so much and excited to learn more!
Update: last night was session 1 with my new party, and it went so smoothly and everyone was laughing nearly the whole time. I took lots of advice from the RtG series and I think it really helped
That T-junction trap is so evil, I'm laughing
Traps don't always have to be deadly or dangerous to spice up a mission. I remember during one campaign through an enemy stronghold, we passed through a normal looking hallway only to discover the hard way one of the walls had a powerful magnet installed behind it. Everyone with metal armor or weapons needed to do a strength save; easy for the ones with only a few things, and damn hard for anyone in heavy metal armor like our paladin who failed and found themselves pinned to the wall.
This put us in the situation of figuring out how we free them before a guard patrol could find us. The paladin could take off his armor to un-stick himself, but then he'd have to adapt to, well, not having any armor until we could get it unstuck. While the trap itself was never the danger, it really helped break up the flow of the dungeon and forced us as the players to get creative.
Traps can also encourage exploration of more complex dungeons - if the party spot a trap, and there are routes they haven't yet been, they might decide to explore one of those routes to see if there's a way around the trap. Locked doors can have the same function.
In terms of splitting the party with traps, pit traps are excellent for this. It's a little bit of fall damage - but if you put a couple of zombies at the bottom of a 15' pit, you've created a situation where only one or two party members are in immediate danger - leading the others to focus on helping whoever ended up in the pit. If a couple of ghouls then take advantage of the distraction, you've got yourself a pretty tense fight. I mean, for a party of four level 4 PCs, two zombies and two ghouls are a medium encounter, but if you've split the party like that, it's a whole (hole?) other situation to deal with. Sure, provided they have a cleric, the party will almost certainly get through largely unscathed, but during the fight itself? Much like with the portcullis, they're having to deal with not being able to use the tactics they're used to using.
The important thing with traps is that they have to make sense when you consider who lives in the area. Nobody is going to defend their lair with a trap they themselves cannot easily get past.
What about a cave-in instead of a pit trap? A natural weakening of the floor in a catacombs built too close to an underground river or cistern -- the stones fall away, the characters fall into a sinkhole beneath. The noise attracts a bunch of undead. Same trap, but now it's more synchronous, makes more sense within the setting. Not to mention, the adventurers now have difficult terrain to negotiate when they are on their way back out of the catacombs, maybe while being chased by a large army of undead they disturbed deeper within. Hmm.
@@lfoster6759 Works just as well; the idea of a pit trap was more because a necromancer could just throw a couple of corpses into the pit, then cast animate dead on them (I forgot that it has a 10' range, but the necromancer could animate them and then order them to dig the pit - at that point, the control over the zombies will wear out, but the necromancer won't need that control because they're at the bottom of a pit.
Two things: 1. I have used Treacherous Traps (5e) and, although it isn't perfect, it adds an incredible amount of the 'stuff' I want in trap making. I was a backer to their project and wasn't disappointed in the slightest. Highly recommended! 2. This is a general comment about Matthew Colville's videos that I didn't really recognise until now. Coming from someone who teaches college-level students, this video made me realise that Matthew Colville is incredibly good at explaining things that are incredibly obvious in a way that anyone could understand. This isn't a slight against him in any way, as doing so can be incredibly tedious and sometimes difficult. Thank you, Matthew, for being the kind of person D&D nerds need, but don't deserve.
Another fantastic third edition book is "Traps & Treachery" which has detailed mechanical descriptions for traps and how to describe them to players who notice them and what they can do to disarm them.
My favorite rules for traps in any edition of D&D are "Encounter Traps" from 3rd edition. Originally published in Secrets of Xen'drik for the Eberron setting, and then reprinted in the core product line in the Dungeonscape book. "Encounter Traps" differed from regular 3rd edition traps in that they each required multiple successful disarm traps, and they had evolving or repeating effects every round. You rolled initiative when they were triggered, and you had so many rounds to figure out how to disarm it before or while something bad was happening. Classic!
"It's like we're a real company with this stuff." -Matt
Matt, you *are* a real company
Love how straightforward you are with your early explanations! Keep being an outlier, for me it gives me even more incentive to watch the full video!
The best (most memorable) trap for me ended up as an NPC.
Long story short-ish: The party ventured down into the dungeons beneath the ruins of Castle Greyhawk. Zagig himself had put a magical trap on a door decades ago, a pretty tough one to find and disarm. But the rogue of the party didn't come that evening, so instead I decided the magic of the trap had made the door sentient! When the ranger searched the door, and failed the check, the door shouted "BOOM! Did I get'cha?" and grinned. After a short convensation, and some much needed lubrication on the hinges, the door agreed to become the front door of the party's estate back in the River Quarter of Greyhawk, that they were currently renovating.
Something I kind of love about this video is that most of the advice you give here is just what you've been saying for years in Q&As, and live streams and the like when you would get questions about traps but in a concise and significantly more put together format.
“If you spend this time making traps, you’re just making the game more tedious.”
Amen and AMEN.
Im using some simple traps in my campaign right now. The adventures have to get thru a tunnel complex with 2 groups fighting inside. Goblins and kolbolts. Kolbolts are using traps and tactics to fight back. Sometimes the adventures comes across a trap that has already tripped with some troops in the middle of recovering. Or come across the trap maker and a defense squad resetting traps and looting bodies in those traps. The nice thing is when they start going the wrong way the traps get more elaborate and patrols become more common. And this makes sense because it is getting closer to one group or the other. This is great for lower levels because I dont know if they will but they can always come back once they are stronger to wipe out one or both of the groups of monsters. Plus they can role play, they are lost and come across a hobgoblin nearly dead in a trap that was set off. They could kill and loot him or they can pull him out and use him as their guide. Then the question becomes how do they do this? Threats and intimidation vs mercy and kindness. Each thing has their own perks and benefits
Nathan Kelly - Brilliant idea to have the characters in the middle of two fighting factions and they actually see what is going on.
Awwww, this is going to make Dael's day. I love you man, thanks for continuing to be a river to your people.
"A Bucket of Goblins" made me laugh harder than it reasonably should have.
Ugh... Stage 4 lock-down... mandatory masks... beginnings of cabin fever.... This week su- A running the game video! Best. Week. Ever.
Hey ive just started stage 4 too. Must be an aussie
@@sjlemmon and both Victorians I'd wager.
That time seems so distant now.
I enjoy utilizing the Passive Perception mechanic in 5e.
Adventurer slips through a door, and notices the low perception check to notice the tripwire (without need to roll the dice).
Now they are aware. Now they can investigate the layout of the contraption. They can worry. They can problem solve.
It comes down to the description of the workings of the obstacle.
5:31 I think Wizards is leaving money on the table by not having toy soldier style Bucket of Goblins (with attachable bases so you can use them as minis) for sale.
In 5e, when deciding how much difficult a trap's stuff should be to interact with, or how much damage a trap would do, it's a good idea to use the stats of a monster in the dungeon. I could swear i heard this first in one of your videos, but since I didn't hear it in this one I wanted to vouch for that advice.
It's also useful to consider what, in-universe, the trap is intended to do. Not "what are the mechanics of the trap", but it's function within the larger space it occupies.
Traps take a great deal of time, effort, knowledge, and resources to build and maintain. The more complex the trap, the more of all of those you need. A trap built to last hundreds of years without maintenance even moreso. No one goes to those lengths without a good reason. Nor do they implement them within spaces they intend to occupy (even for a brief period) without good reason.
Tombs tend to just want to discourage looters, so their traps will be designed to hurt or kill casual grave robbers (1d6 damage is often more than sufficient). If the trap is designed to slow intruders down, the traps will be more inconvenient than damaging (though a foot stepping into a spiked-filled hole that cripples it for life will certainly inconvenience and slow them). If the trap makers would rather capture intruders, the traps will be built to _literally_ trap them in a confined space, knock them out, or otherwise make locating them easier (instead of a spiked pit trap, it might just be a regular pit). Even "insane wizard dungeons" (Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain) have some esoteric purpose, even if known only to the insane wizard who built it. Etc, etc.
Eh, I don't think you should do that with using monster stats to determine. Part of having a trap is to break up the monotony of "Let me throw another monster at the party". Which means, unlike a random encounter, the trap's going to have some purpose or goal in mind of its creator. Some traps (like pit traps without spikes, net traps, snare traps, and those snapjaw traps (bear traps)) are all designed capture, immobilize, and/or restrain a target without killing the target. (Maiming, however, is still on the table.) These are used by group who do believe in taking prisoners or like to recruit more slaves. This is why they're found all around goblin lairs. And, since they're generally not lethal (and hopefully the home teams knows where they are), they won't typically have a disarm or kill switch.
Then you have what I call "the corridor traps". These are usually built into structures, and their primary purposes are to slow down any attacking group, alert the defenders that an attack is on the way, and buy those defenders time to organize their defenses. Again, these aren't generally designed to be lethal, but at this point the defenders probably aren't too interested in taking captives. Since these people are living with these traps in a manner akin to "sleeping with a loaded gun under their pillow", these traps won't be "fully lethal" and will have some sort of deactivation mechanism or bypass so the locals don't generally fall in them. But in no terms should a party of adventurers take these traps on willy nilly.
Finally, we come to what I call "treasure traps". These traps are there to guard something, someplace, or someone very important. These should be the traps that leave red stains on the walls and brown stains in armor. If the party fails to detect or disarm the trap, there should be a good chance someone dies. A trap could be something as small as a needle or as large as a 50 foot corridor. The outcome could be poison, magic, a rain of rocks and rubble, or just some good, old-fashion sharp blade of steel on a swingy stick. But these traps should be the hardest to detect and disarm. Again, for these traps, they'll have ways to disarm them, and I'm generally of the mindset that there should be some clue as to the danger and disarming. It could be as simple as the corpse of some unsuccessful thief, odd stains on the floor, or even watching some retreating kobold forget the trap was there in their panic and tripped it.
Which brings me to the other thing: detecting the trap. You're not going to get that from CR rating of the local monsters. That's going to be a combination of many factors: Skill of the trapmaker, age of the trap, and how much your goofy party is paying attention to their surroundings. A goblin who has to tie up two dozen snare traps probably isn't going to be too bothered making a perfect slip not for the trap or completely covering it with leaf litter. Likewise, a pit trap dug ages ago isn't going to have the greenest of cover and recent rains might have started eroding the side. Then again, maybe those dwarven miners and sculptures were talented enough to make those pressure plates nearly indistinguishable from the flagstone around them. But, even the most poorly concealed snare trap can snag a party on the run from a band of bugbears because the party wasn't watching where they were going.
@@Bluecho4 I agree about thinking of their use in-universe. Personally, that's why I don't use most of the really Indiana-Jonesque traps, and prefer to play with simple, practical ones. There's a lot your local kobolds/goblins can do just with hidden pits, nets, tripwire-crossbows and some hidden bear traps. I think they add a lot of immersion to some creatures, meaning attacking them on their turf is a real pain. Like, Matt's example with orcs and their pit traps is excellent.
@@jackielinde7568 If one has monotony in the story then one has no story. If the players are not eager to reach a certain point like getting the princess before the dragon eats is then you have two choices. Simply close the book as the adventure is over or get more interesting fast.
Matt, I am working a night shift and super bored and just found this new upload so I just wanted to shout out to you and say thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Thanks to your series I have started running DND with literal zero experience just 4 months ago, now we are well into the thick of my homebrew campaign. I ran oneshots for 10 people, all of who want to keep playing and I have a steady group of 5 who send me endless praises. Which really belongs to you.
Just a few months ago, I would have never imagined playing, god forbid running DND, thinking it to be something only a veteran could do. The way you explained the game, how you interpreted this complex game into simple components and explained its merits had me too jittery to play with my friends and I just had to try.
Before, DND was some nerd thing too intense for me, now its a playground for me and my friends to craft as we please. 2 of my players initially didnt even want to play DND at all because they thought it wasnt for them (one is sports freak and the other never liked rpg or gaming like rest of us) and after running the game in your Colvillian style (I say that to them a lot) they can't get enough! They are the ones bugging me constantly to play more frequently now.
Even if you dont read this, just wanted to say thanks, for bringing such a delight into my life in a time that could have been very dark. You truly are a river to your people.
I'm very impressed by your analytical approach to how and why to use traps.
I've been watching videos all day looking for ideas and this is the first that really made me think in depth about the reasons behind the traps and getting into the mindset of the players that could interact with them.
Dael Kingsmill had a super good suggestion about traps in one of her video : the "Click" moment. When someone triggers a trap, describe briefly the sound it makes and ask the player "Fast! What do you do?". If the player says "I jump!" or "I shout "On the ground!" and duck down", depending on the kind of trap, maybe offer advantage for the saving throw roll or let the player dodge it completly if that makes sense. That worked pretty well in my game!
Trap Theory and Trap Theory II by Runehammer are some of the best content I've seen for describing the purpose of traps for rpgs where they're relevant. Purpose in both mechanical and roleplay perspectives. TLDW on these is that you always need constraints to apply to the players, and the players need clear goals. If they're familiar with their character sheets, then mechanical traps should be fun. If they're familiar with their characters, then roleplay traps should be fun.
Links:
th-cam.com/video/D3HSw-ANugg/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/wdca18nObAk/w-d-xo.html
I love how it all boils down to bait, a threat, and a timer, and how that can really apply to just about everything in the game, not just mechanical traps in dungeons.
@@duskworkerdron5901 Me too. Depending on how far you take the idea, it can give you a very different perspective on the game. Those are always useful.
One of my favorite stories involving a trap was when I was a player, my first 5e game actually. We were in the underdark going through a cave with old worked stone (I was a dwarf and my stonecunning check revealed to me this place is old and was important at one point(red flag #1)). We came to a narrow passageway that led to a T intersection. In the middle of this passage unbeknownst to us was a pressure plate. One of the players stepped on it and it clicked. Nothing happened. They stepped off fine. The next player went, click, nothing. The third player, cocky and assuming the trap old and broken after all this time, crossed it, click, and a fireball went off at the plate's location burning him. I was the 4th to cross and I remember sitting there like "oh well that's simply amazing!"
The thing that goes for traps as well as all dramatic devices - simple premise, with an unexpected twist, and opportunity for further drama. It's nearly a foolproof format. Gate slams down, but just between the two groups of party members! And now, hobgoblins are coming to see what happened. Let me make one - a pressure plate fires out arrows, moderate damage. But they hit oil lanterns on the far side of the corridor, and now flames rush towards the players. The entrance to the mine they just came in, propped up by wooden beams.
Completely agree. To understand where to put what kind of trap, it's best to look at it from a military perspective: What is the proper use of mine fields, tank ditches and barbed wire? It is either to slow down enemies *where you can easily spot and shoot them*, or to allow you to cover your flanks with only a few sentries, with the "traps" giving you time to send reinforcements and making it harder for your enemy to sneak by (or delaying them enough that they will be inconsequential when they finally make it). Basically use #3 and #2. Use #1 only happens incidentally, when one of the former kind of traps gets abandoned, and is pretty much useless. As the saying goes: "An obstacle not covered by fire is not an obstacle".
I ran my first ever campaign for 3 of my friends on Sunday and it went INCREDIBLY. Even though it was over Google Hangouts. We all had a blast and are excited to play again this Sunday. And it was entirely due to your videos! (as well as dimension 20 and naddpod inspiration). The tips you provided helped make my first session 1000 times better than it would have been otherwise, though I do also have my incredible players to thank for such a good time too.
Thank you so much for helping me gain the confidence I needed to run a game of D&D. When I got into it, it wasn't even hard! Excited to see where this incredible hobby takes me and my friends and I'm excited to steal more of your ideas and put them in my game
One of my favorite traps is a simple rope snare that lifts the character into the air when triggered. The character is dangling upside down, and has to rely on their comrades to free them using a nearby release. If the other characters simply cut the rope, the character falls and takes a bit of damage. If the rope is slowly let out, the reach the ground safely. I find it works really well to have one of these traps on a path so the players can learn the mechanics, then start placing these traps in combat encounters. Melee characters are removed from combat, ranged characters have their mobility taken away, and the party must weigh freeing their friend vs finishing the encounter
Pathfinder's traps system is great, and "haunts" is one of the best implementation of traps.
They gave way too much XP though
They give a lot less (relatively) in 2e but have a lot of the same feeling
I remember a few of the haunts in RIse of the Runelords. They could be pretty nasty if you failed enough rolls but always had some great failsafes to continue into more RP opportunities or info about the area you were exploring.
One was within an abandoned cabin in the mountains. A blizzard hits during travel and the players are forced to take shelter. Inside however, they're met with the ghosts of dwarves who try desperately to warn the players. Fear and madness spiral out of control, hindering the players more than helping them despite their best efforts before the wails of a CR 17 Wendigo ring through the night. The haunt is just a setup for the encounter to build atmosphere and it's such a great use for it!
Another was the haunted mansion on an oceanside cliff where foxglove took up hiding, in which you learn about his dead lover and her demise. Failure to resist the haunt had a character get possessed. It starts slow by opening the window in her bedroom, gazing out to an ocean but soon escalates into leaping out onto the steep roof. At this point the player can break free of the haunt and try to grab onto the edge but if one rolled bad enough, multiple times, they'd fall to their demise into the ocean or even get skewered on the weather vane!
Most traps end up being a "Surprise!" one and done event that either causes damage and has the players feeling cheated for rolling poorly or on the other hand, grinds the game to a halt as they find a trap and endlessly plan on how to avoid it if the disable device check fails.
Haunts on the other hand, give so many more opportunities.
@@bryal7811 Exactly. And the solution to a haunt is always creative, too. It's not just a disable device roll, but you have to figure out and satisfy the condition. Delivering the ghost's last letter written while it was alive, or somesuch.
My favourite trap from Grimtooth's was Fibber McGee's Cupboard of Caltrops. Literally just a cupboard full of caltrops that would fall out all over the players when they opened the door
The advice I have for traps is: context matters. I pressure plate in the middle of a hallway is different from a pressure plate in the middle of a room. On paper, they may have the same stats, but the one in the middle of the room is much easier to bypass. The trick to good traps is using the context around it to give players the opportunity to creative their way around it if disarming it isn't an option.
Plus, if players do bypass a trap instead of disarming it, it now can serve more purposes. Making escape harder for the players if they have to run, or giving the players a resource to use against enemies.
One of the tricks I learned from The Angry GM is what he called the "Click Rule". Where if you set off a trap, you are given some kind of warning that they just did so. The eponymous "click", and it should reflect how the trap's activation method and general nature. (The click of a pressure plate, the snapping of a tripwire, the turning of gears in a mechanism, the landing of a huge rolling rock, etc).
At that moment, the DM asks "what's your immediate response?". It's your split second reaction to setting a trap off. Depending on what you decide (which, if you take too long, might be "Nothing"), you might get Advantage, Disadvantage, or a neutral reaction when making the resulting saving throw (or, where applicable, the trap is given Advantage or Disadvantage on its roll to hit you).
Examples include diving in a particular direction, blocking with a shield, ducking, etc. It's whatever you decide to do in the moment between activating the trap and it going off.
The purpose of this mechanic - this extra step to traps - is to give the player more agency in what is often a binary state between sensing the trap, and not sensing the trap and thus being at the mercy of the dice. You get to decide how you react, and thus have just the slightest measure of control.
I almost fell into a spike pit trap to hit this notification
I clicked on this video, thinking about that book on my shelf. Then you explicitly mentioned it.
I LOVED that book when I was a kid. I sat and read through them all, because I didn't have people to actually play with on the long summer days.
You diagnosed my trap anxiety perfectly! Really appreciate the way you broke it down in a way that makes a trap useful to the DM. The DM’s guide should be written like this.
Xanathar's Guide To Everything also has a section on simple and complex traps, how to make them, and examples of each. It's a good starting point for making your own traps.
Matt, Digging the longer hair. Hope you and your team are doing well given everything going on in the world. Thanks for the content!
I absolutely love this video series and look forward to every new episode. It has been a great resource for me as a GM who has not run a game in over 18 years, and a first time D&D GM.
Little tip that's less about traps and more about combat design: Have combat take place in a room filled with traps.
It creates fun dilemmas. A pressure plate triggers a bottle of everlasting smoke. Suddenly the room is heavily obscured by smoke, the echolocation relying bats are angry and there are still a bunch of pressure plates in the room threatening to electrocute anyone who steps on them.
As Matt brings up, pits are a fun way of creating tension in combat because suddenly the party may be isolated from an important roll in the party like the frontline barbarian of the damage dealing rogue. Fill the pit with poisonous snakes that don't really damage the trap victim as much as the poisoned condition just makes it difficult to climb out. Having something else to fight down in the pit means that even if the victim can't get out in a few rounds, they still have something to do.
Edit: and of course I should've just finished the video. Matt touches on this use of traps. Still, maybe my concrete examples will be of use.
As I am running a funhouse megadungeon I have given my traps a Rube Goldberg vibe in the descriptions as much as I can. What the players don't know is that the two liches that run the Megadungeon are MC Escher (the architect for the whole dungeon) and Rube Goldberg (master of trap design).
I love the use of Rube Goldberg as insperation. Great job Matt.
Matt Colville thanks for the series. I have built/am building the "Blackhaven Caverns" the formentioned Megadungeon based on your video on the Whiteplume Mountain. And I have had great joy at seeing my players try and thwart the overly elaborate trap mechanisms. Also I have been passing your videos along to some of my players who are preparing to move behind the screen themselves.
I've always loved the puzzle room trap. I think was mentioned in a previous video where there's a countdown on a wall in sealed room. And all the players have to do is nothing and it resolves itself. When my player tested it a second time kind of laughing the room off. I made the room spit out an encounter at them.
that trap description made me laugh so hard I started coughing. I love traps like that!
My favorite FunHouse Trap is the Splat Trap. Simple 10 foot pit, long enough that it would be annoying to climb down the walls of the pit and climb back up the otherside, only except halfway across the pit (which is easy enough for most adventurers to jump across) there is an invisible wall that crosses the length of the hallway. Anyone brazen enough to jump across said simple pit trap will go splat and fall into the pit. You can even put holes in the bottom of the pit that may contain retractable spikes, just make it obvious that players minds will go that way. The spikes don't actually exist, the holes are just there for decor.
Matt you're awesome! I would just like to say that these videos are what really got me into DMing. I've been at it for a little over a year and already got 3 of my players to DM and one other is thinking about at least doing a 1 shot! Thank you for all that you do. Keep up the great work man.
Keep on the Borderlands does have some interesting details intended for new DMs and has a pretty good 5e conversion for it. Traps are part of it! That plus the 3e Book of Challenges, Grimtooth's Traps etc. are super useful for thinking about traps and "hazards".
My heart lights up every time I see a new RTG video. Even in these dark days when DnD is scarce to play, always nice to have a mini delve into the imagination with our main man Matt.
Here's some trap archetypes;
1. Pass-traps. These are traps explicitly designed so that those who know the dungeon can prevent themselves from being hurt with minimal effort, but also to allow the dungeon to be unlocked in case the "passholder" came to die in some way.
This is usually where riddles come in. Those who know the riddles already can just recall them from memory and if they need a second to read over it, nothing happens. But if they give the wrong answer or take too long, the dungeon starts to menace them.
2. Pain traps. Some places you're just not meant to be and there's no solutions. You're just not welcome.
3. Environmental weapons. Your monsters know the traps and they know how to activate them without being hurt themselves. They can step on a pressure plate to cause the roof above the players to collapse.
4. Death machina. Not all traps are constructed. Some things are just hazardous by themselves and perfectly un-designed to kill humans. These are perfect for illustrating that there's no clever riddle to solve. Some places are simply deadly because physics made them such. You just have to be careful.
Grimtooth's books of traps are awesome.
In 3.5 the rules on traps are more precise. I use traps in my campaign (3.5).
I haven't played a lot of 5e but I've never encountered one in 5e.
Interesting video.
Listening to Matt Colville talk about D&D gets me excited in a way I can only assume an 80's kid running AD&D did back in the day. My only experience is with 5e in the past five-ish years and I only feel this excited about running an "Adventure" rather than a campaign when listening to one of your videos. Don't know how you do it, but it's pretty awesome!
My favorite trap is from one of the 3.0-3.5 era Traps &Treachery books. The "Cat&Mouse" Trap. In a wizards arcane library there are several books on display and a number of friendly and harmless cats loafing about, presumably pets of the wizard who owns the library. If any of the displayed books are touched, the trap within the book activates. The trapped book casts baleful polymorph on the victim, temporarily turning them into a mouse. Upon seeing the mouse, the cats in the room swarm upon it and attwmpt to devour it. If the player can escape, they return to "human" form a few minutes later.
I heard you talking about a lot of this before, but I'm glad it is now all in one video for easy reference. Plus, you are always fun and inspiring to listen to.
My personal favorite trap came from the Ghost Tower of Inverness. The very last encounter, in fact; the gem you're there to steal is able to defend itself, and the last encounter is about how to get to it without having your soul ripped out.
i own that book and it really shaped how I view encounter design. i was lucky to read it early in my gaming career
honestly, the first chapter with it's 10 rules for encounter design are all you really need from the book. it gives you a handy checklist of things you should ask yourself as you design not just encounters but dungeons and story beats.
everything else is just examples of how to use those 10 rules in action so you can brew your own ideas
New monster: Bucket o' Goblins. "It's what you think it is."
This is going in my next dungeon.
Simple trap: An open pit in the floor of a room or corridor. Looking down the pit, there are a collection of spikes with a permanent Sympathy spell cast on them. Adjust the height of the pit for fall damage, and set the save DC to what should get a few of the players.
The reason I watch your Running the Game series is because you get straight to the point. Seriously. With other people’s DM tips TH-cam videos the person blathers on and on. Most likely to eek out extra minutes to fit more ads.
I'm running my group through the 5E Tomb of Annihilation right now and they have made it through to the 3rd floor of the tomb.
The traps have acted as the spirit of the dungeon and my players have loved interacting with puzzles sprinkled with a little bit of deadly. Even when one character drank from a pool of magic water and turned to dust and another was instantly blasted and disintegrated by trying to grab the gold sitting in the middle of the room they were more amused than heartbroken.
Every time I click on a new Colville video I learn a little something more about running dnd. I never thought about traps beyond step on trap, get hit before.
Wow. Traps in DnD 5e must be very different from Pathfinder. There are traps and hazards built into the modules, examples in the Gamemaster Guide, and the rules how to build your own. They have stats, what triggers it, how to disarm them, and if it has one action or multiple actions.
I believe it was MonarchsFactory who introduced me to this concept I really like: the "click" mechanic. When a PC activates a trap, I tell them "click! you have activated a trap". Then I allow them one reaction to deal with that before the trap takes effect. It's great because it gives a feeling of agency, and allows them to perhaps mitigate the trap's damage somewhat by working with the information they have about the area, and thus about where the trap could be... It's a fun gamble because it is just as likely to make things worse; perhaps they drop to avoid what they think is a spike trap, and fall face first into what turns out to have been a pitfall trap.
This one time, I made a room, full of mimics, and the moment the party started examining the treasure on the far end of it... mimic. Also, the room is filling with gas, fort save vs11, 12, 13, better get outta there! 14! Oh no your str is dropping fast! Thing is, why couldn't they just turn around and run? Well, they could, but the carpet was a mimic too, and so was that chair, and the pictures on the wall, and they all started blocking the door.
I love monster-trap!
I just used a gelatinous cube as a trap:
- The characters go through a empty corridor and find a hole on the floor that can be avoided by just going around, it’s pretty deep and they can’t see the floor below. They throw a torch and after seeing it’s 25feet deep they continue onward but find a deadend after two minutes.
So they turn back and the torch disappeared. They throw another one and it goes out when it touches something that looks like water. The warrior looks at the rest of the party and dives down, everyone follows. They all found themselves in a gelatinous cube.
Also the first time you’ll say “You see a flying skeleton in front of you” you can be certain that someone will charge it and instantly dive into a gelatinous cube.
My favorite was when a halfling barbarian charged ahead into the dark tunnel with no light source screaming his battlecry about 200ft out all the rear of the party way back hear is "Yaaaaaarr...." *Phub*.... Then nothing.... He ran right into a gelatinous cube.
NordboDK I had once had a TPK for this exact reason, I described a tunnel to be super long, after 2 IRL minutes of describing this long corridor they all just started running. And one by one entered the cube. None made the save, for three straight rounds. And died. That was super depressing to watch, the trap had worked (tiring the players out of game and in game with long description of a long corridor) but I didn’t expect that four characters would fail a 13 strength check three times in a row each.
A buddy of mine and I came up with (well, worked on) a hack where everything in the world had a sort of HP called "Threshold". Traps, creatures, social encounters etc. Everything had this mechanic. When a monster's threshold is 0, it dies. In social encounters, the actors involved take turns using their social skills to reduce the opponent's social threshold to 0 in order to achieve the desired outcome and traps had a threshold for disarmament. Some traps initiated a timer upon first tampering, so if the PC didn't reduce it's threshold in time, something bad happened. Some tasks had a threshold that had to be overcome in one shot to succeed.
We did away with Social encounter thresholds because it derailed RP, but kept the one for traps.
Missed you, Matt! Can we get a video on planning heists? How to not make it repetitive stealth roles till sudden but inevitable disaster.?
Any time your players are at risk of just making the same roll over and over, introduce elements of the adventure that force your players to make choices, to change their strategy. Perhaps an opportunity arises! Regarding failed stealth rolls not ruining the mission, see Matt’s Multiple Fail States video.
Fail states and skill challenges cover a heist very well
The fun of a heist is in the planning stage; what do the heroes know, how do the heroes get more information, what are their options for getting in, what elements of the environment can they exploit in interesting ways. You probably want to have a few complications that are harder to find out about (like the fact that the best day to do the heist, an inquisitor will be there), but you probably want avoid the thing that happens in heist movies, where their entire plan gets thrown in to disarray just after they start, because while that adds tension for the audience of the movie, it will probably feel like a screw job for the players in a game
First thing that comes to mind, based on all the movies, is give every NPC an individual motivation/goal/want, maybe some history with a PC, maybe someone else is on the same mission (rivalry/competition), maybe someone unexpected would benefit indirectly from the PCs succeeding, maybe people are open for negotiations, maybe every NPC is ready to stab every other NPC in the back, maybe someone is more interested in extorting the PCs than busting them. PCs might know a little bit about some of the people they are stealing from, perhaps from spying in advance or from someone who hired them or some of it may be common knowledge, or they may overhear conversations as they sneak about during the heist. Maybe they acquire some inside help, but that person is discovered to have helped them, and so they have to choose whether to focus on making the heist, or to save their ally. Can they manage both?
@@scottsbarbarossalogic3665 I have to respectfully disagree. I think planning can be a lot of fun (for the right group), but it's not the only draw of a heist. And planning is generally only fun if you feel like you've got a solid enough grasp of the scenario to make well-informed plans that won't instantly fall apart on you.
Just discovered today that my first ever d&d adventure was done in the delian tomb. Loved it and glad to know that no matter how experienced you are these videos are always useful. Respect to Matt and my dm John the Geordie
3 years later and I still love this video.
One of my favorite channels out there, thanks for all your work Matt!
When I had my first (and to date only, sadly) D&D session my brother DM'd and incorporated traps into a battle with kobolds. My character was rushing too far in and not being careful enough and while attempting to engage the first enemy I suddenly had to roll a save. Turns out a second kobold had been hidden from sight and manually released a trap, a boulder, right on top of my head. I nearly went down but just barely managed to stay standing. It added to the encounter, did a meaningful amount of damage without totally messing up the fight for my party, and taught us (all three new players) to be careful and to expect the unexpected (and that kobolds are sneaky). It was great fun! Later the same dungeon we were facing the chieftain of the tribe. He shot down a crate from the ceiling, unleashing a swarm of ravenous rats right on top of us. This time I had learnt my lesson and was hanging back, but it got the other two players. It added a new unexpected enemy and made the encounter more interesting while keeping it balanced. I don't know how much of this dungeon my brother himself made up, but he did a great job!
I used a high level trap-puzzle that was just a square room with an orb on a pedestal in the middle of the room. Each round the orb absorbs the lowest spell slot of each player. Once the orb has absorbed 9 slots it casts a 9th level fireball centered on the room, on a separate turn. To open the door all a player has to say is "open the door" in Elvish (The BBEGs native language). I usually use this to guard treasure rooms/ a liches phylactery room. To hint at the "key" I put taunting script in Elvish on the walls
I love the "Dubaly' Do!" Goes along so nicely with the "Thing-a-mabobs, and the Whose-a-mawhatsit."
MATT! It's funny you mention Traps. Logan from the channel Runesmith has a video about traps. Where your video talks about the narrative of the trap and how it fits into the overall adventure or dungeon, Logan talks about how to construct a trap that functionally makes sense. He breaks it down into Visibility, The Trigger, The Failsafe (Because the people who live with the traps don't want to be a victim in their own traps), and The Outcome. Seriously, it's a good primer for those looking to make their own traps, especially if you want to avoid the "roll to detect and roll to disarm" rinse and repeat methods of traps.
The video is found here: th-cam.com/video/1uSyptdcsOc/w-d-xo.html