One of my favorite dungeons: characters enter the complex seeking a mcguffin for their employer, set off a trap that sprays them with a fine mist. Nothing happens. Puzzled, they continue. Next room features pressure plates that cause globes of intense light to flare, dazzling the characters and disturbing a nest of spiders. Lights seem harmless other than dazzling. Next trap triggers a flare of brilliant silver light, no apparent effect. Characters find the mcguffin and steal it. Employer thanks them, leaves. They later figure out employer is a vampire, who would have been very unhappy to encounter to spray of holy water, the sunlight globes, or the extremely empowered turning effect. Traps should definitely inform a clever player about Team Us, and also what they are expecting Team Them to be.
If you wanted to have a more vicious option, have it spray acid that would damage their tools and hands making further attempts problematic. Depending on how they describe picking the lock, you might want to give them a reflex save to not hit the face.
Fantastic video, I always look forward to hearing what you have to say. Breaking down the different purposes and goals and origins of the traps was helpful for taking things step by step. I think one of my favourite traps I've done was at the end of a Trial to Prove Worthiness situation. The God who created the island wanted only those of clear wit, ingenuity and a sense of wholesome camaraderie to pass, as they were the God of spreading joy (often through laughter and pranks). The earlier ones had been riddles, creativity, teamwork, and the final was trust. (I was trying to have my players grow closer together through the Trial). The final one was to speak a secret that they had been unwilling to share amongst those present. The Trap could discern truth/lies and could tell whether the secret being told filled the criteria or not. It had no punishment, it simply wouldn't let people through, and leave them to stew and bicker amongst themselves as to why their words hadn't worked. Theoretically, this is the easiest of the traps, but it's where both the party, and the people they'd been following both tripped up.
Snape potion puzzle: potions should have a hidden interaction, if you take the protective potion before the poison, you enter a different room trough the doorway(need to be dragged exactly halfway to the shadowlands before severing yourself from translocation magic or something).Door riddle: filters wildlife from those that share your culture. Good if you did not get the chance to tell the password to others, bad if you install it as the only line of defence.
I think that riddle doors can certainly make sense and be a lot of fun, they just need to exist within a proper context. For example, in one of my games a dragonborn cult had captured a village of dwarven miners, forcing them to build a lair into the side of a mountain. To seal off the hidden entrance, the cultists employed an ornate magical door. Some of the dwarves carving the door secretly etched instructions, in dwarven, about how to open it hoping it would lead to their rescue. Unfortunately they couldn't finish the message, but the rhyming scheme left a riddle for the players to deduce the last phrase in order to understand the secret of opening the door.
First video of your's I've seen, and been thinking of making a Kobold trapper character, so this actually gave me several ideas and brought up a good point of the "us vs. them" idea. Thank you
It wasn't a riddle on the door to Moria. It was a greeting. When it was made, the Elves and Dwarves were on good terms. living fairly close to each other and had open trade. The words on the door were a simple greeting or message to their neighbors, "Say friend and enter," not a riddle. It was pretty much the same as someone having a sign that said knock before entering, or ring bell to get attention of clerk.
A thing people never seem to do with traps is have some of them set off already. Especially with a "trial of the worthy" series of traps, it seems likely someone would have made it through a couple, then died.
I will pint out in the case of the Potion Trap that Snape set up, you are supposed to take a risk and pick a potion, as a way to disincentivize intruders from finding another way through. You provide a gate to the castle so the invaders don't try and come through the servant's entrance. The puzzle was dumb bs so the protagonists can succeed, but the rest of it was sound since you don't want someone to get frustrated and try and destroy the trap all together.
Depends what universe, and the circumstances. Usually in D&D there's an afterlife of some sort, even if it's "soul getting trapped by a phylactery" afterlife. There would presumably be some sort of feeling associated with that, even if it's a feeling of not feeling, as it were.
I try to avoid puzzles and riddles in games as they tend to be just a test for players instead of the characters. When I do feel I need to add them... I offer a bonus for anyone who can solve it in under two minutes. Everyone who sits out gets to make an INT-15 check to discern the answer and the highest roll gets the answer AND the bonus. Out of the all the people I have DMed, I think only one person was much good at them.
What if instead of the «us» being the special ones who can avoid the traps, the «them» are the special ones who can`t. I mean that the trap is set to stop a particular group of individuals, and that is why there are solutions for the traps inside the dungeons, safety reasons. For example, in Teen Wolf, in one chapter there is a girl who stepped on a bear trap, then asked a friend to look for the instructions to avoid having her leg crushed. The boy said «why would there be instructions on how to dissarm the trap written in the trap? That doesn`t make sense», to which the girl said that bears usually don`t know how to read. Of course, the boy could not read for magic reasons at the moment, but the point is still valid.
When it comes to how much damage traps do, remember first that not all trap makers have the _ability_ to make traps damaging above a certain degree. A trap made by hunters or kobolds might only be _able_ to do so much damage. The designers might lack the mechanical or arcane knowledge needed for potent traps. They may lack access to resources needed to build potent ones, like living in an area poor in metals, or having pretty weak local poisons. Simple lack of _space_ can prevent the trap makers from building big or elaborate traps, limiting what they can do or how effective they can be. Second, older traps may end up losing their potency due to the passage of time. Springs lose their tension, gears rust, wooden components take water damage, poisons or acids become inert, etc. Third, the designers might just be merciful, preferring to wound, scare, or stymie efforts to get through, rather than just killing people outright. It does happen that some people are not interested in being deadly. Naturally, that mercy may be tempered with pragmatism, and the traps increase in deadliness as intruders go along. Starting out harsh enough to wound or scare, but getting deadlier for the sake of those too persistent to be put off by earlier traps. Fourth, it's always important to remember that most people in a DnD world have, at best, 1d8 hit points. A single arrow trap that does 1d6 damage would handily kill the average commoner, and severely wound even the heartiest. Most folks also don't possess access to immediate and convenient healing, either in the form of spells or potions. If the first trap doesn't most intruders, subsequent ones are bound to do so. What I said earlier about some traps requiring more work/resources/knowledge than others holds true here. Trap designers are likely to put weak traps early on, that are likely to kill or drive off a vast majority of potential intruders, simply because people with greater than 8 hit points comprise a smaller percentage of the population. It's only later, when the early traps have weeded out the weak and uncommitted, that the REAL traps start coming up. Fifth, more powerful traps will also tend to be traps that are harder to _reset_ after going off. A swinging blade trap might swing out, and then swing back into place, ready to go off again. A trap involving a boulder dropping or a glyph of warding activating are much harder to use twice. If the designers are no longer around, the big traps might only _ever_ get to go off once, because no one around is able or willing to reset them. So it makes sense for simple, repeatable traps, or ones easy to reset, to be put out front. Where, as we established before, a vast majority of intruders are going to arrive.
Along the lines of your Pharaoh's tomb analogy, I always liked to "trap" my players with magical weapons in knight/warrior tombs. When a knight/warrior was buried with his weapon or armor, the items were bent or broken in a way to render them useless to grave robbers. But a magical item is much more difficult to break, therefore wouldn't they try and render the item useless in some other way, such as adding a counter enchantment (i.e. a flaming sword also does fire damage to the wielder). Team Us would know not to use the item, but Team Them wouldn't know until they got burned. Speaking of Team Us and Team Them, I always wanted to visit Australia until I saw your video where you talked about funnel web spiders, and having arachnophobia, it has made me hesitant to visit. Now I'm wondering if this was a trap, and I find myself in Team Them? #ted
I feel like not making traps %100 lethal makes sense for "team us" too. Because "team us" is still just people (assuming) and people tend to make mistakes. But at least you wouldn't make the same mistake twice that *almost* killed you.
A thing I see a lot of people forget is that monsters in D&D can have immunities, Liches who trap their layer could literally have the entire dungeon filled with poison air or even no air at all. Fire giants could instead of having a door have a curtain of lava. Their biology is the way to bypass the trap as it were.
This is also why Beholder lairs make extensive use of verticality. And/or always-on magical hazards. Beholders don't just float, but project a cone of anti-magic in front of them. _They_ don't have to worry about getting around. That's for stupid, land-bound cretins with no anti-magic to worry about.
@@Bluecho4 but they also want their differently abled minions to navigate the lair without difficulty so their errands can b be accomplished in timely fashion. Maybe their inner sanctum is protected like that, but I'd imagine the majority of the lair is accessible (if tricky and trapped)
Exactly. The only reason not to do this is if it would literally make the dungeon unbeatable for some parties. Of course having the initial puzzle being the players figuring out how to survive in the dungeon could be fun. I found a nice compromise by running a dungeon owned by a mummy who had a huge tanker of liquid poison that would open behind the players once they were too far into the dungeon, slowly flooding it behind them. This puts the players on a time limit, now they can't take any long or short rests and the mummy is basically fine no matter what happens.
or that lethal poison is super illegal and expensive and hard to get? :D Or a poison that makes you turn purple makes you easy to identify. ( imagine bank putting real bombs instead of paint bombs in money xD )
I'd also consider a less lethal poison as a warning, "I'm not interested in killing you but I'm serious about keeping you out and don't care about your wellbeing. Consider yourself warned."
Leader working with bad guys doesn’t trust his underlings. Instead of poison, uses ink. If underlings try to steal from him, they’ll think they’re poisoned as the ink makes its way along the bloodstream. He sees the “ink stain “ and knows who’s been in his stuff.
Then either what's behind the trap also has a sell-by date or team us didn't think ahead, or team us all died unexpectedly and left the thing in a temporary location.
I literally did this once at a wizards' academy. The player could have done the legwork to find the password for the arcane-locked door or brute-forced it, but instead they said "I forgot the password!" which triggered a Magic Mouth posing a riddle as the wizard's security question.
I like the idea of traps that make narrative sense. My favorite dungeon I've designed was an old abandoned wizard school; all the traps were glyphs of warding storing nonlethal spells, triggering if any non-professor opened the trapped container, because they didn't want to actually kill their students (stuff like a Levitate-for-a-few-hours trap, and one that cast Continual Flame on the thief's head). These were inconvenient, but any mid-level spellcaster could easily dispel the effects (but the students couldn't). I think my players thought I was going easy on them with the nondamaging traps until they figured out that every trapped chest they'd opened had booze in them, and I reminded them that this school generally taught teenagers.
Favorite of mine: Door in the Thieves Den. Doorknob is engineered assuming most people are right handed. If the knob is turned clockwise, rods inside the door slam into place silmilar to a safe and guaranteeing the door won’t budge. An alarm also sounds. Members of the thieves band know to turn the knob counter clockwise to open it.
Sick. Love it - it'd be great to leave clues in notes, and that the big weakness of this lock is that people love to brag about it or make fun of those who set off the trap. "Old Gorn knew better, but his normal reflex kicked in and fucked up, and now his best robes are burnt to a crisp." Those'd be great clues. Nicely done.
But how do you know the way players turn it without asking them about it and so giving away the biggest clue? I mean, a person most likely will say "I open the door" or maybe "I turn the doorknob"
@@zozilin Once the knobs turned the traps either been sprung or not sprung. The sound of the rods slamming into place and the alarm sounding is a bigger clue.
@@zozilin You can reasonably assume anyone with basic intelligence will, out of habit, turn the knob to the right. Another way to do it would be to change it to a handle, and then assume everyone is pushing it down instead of up. I work at a hotel and lemme tell you - nobody thinks to turn the handle up. Doors get stuck all the time, it can be reasonably solved by turning the handle up. Safety doors tend to "stick" when you push on the door, and then turn the handle, as you basically force it to stay locked with pressure. Almost nobody attempts this. Admittedly, this might be a good time for a low-intelligence player to shine. If a player had an intelligence score under 10 and attempted to open the door, I might let them go through completely unharmed as they don't use any preconceived notions about how the door opens. More intelligent people would know which way you're "supposed" to open it, whereas less intelligent people might actually do it the wrong way. Even if the less-intelligent character goes through fine, it might be difficult to replicate what they'd done - or more likely, the players would think that door wasn't trapped at all. If you want to hide it, make them roll an intelligence saving throw after the trigger has been trapped. Until the players specifically speak about the handle, or nail an investigation check, you can reasonably assume they'd turn the handle the typical way. One way to sneak it in is to simply say that when they open the door they turn the handle. Dropping that little detail everytime they open a door seems like it might give it away, but that's subtle enough that most players wouldn't think twice about it. As soon as you describe the door as having a knob (or handle in some cases) they'll likely let their own real-life-prejudice get in their way. If you wanted to make a really unique check, everytime they open the door make an ultra low failure intelligence saving throw DC. For instance a 5. The trick is, that a success is actually a failure. If you succeed, you recognize how doors are supposed to open and use that knowledge. If you fail, you open the door "the wrong way" and it actually disarms the trap. It'd be enough to tip off your players something is going on with the doors, but not enough for them to figure it out, as their abilities that stack success actually are hindering them in this fashion. Until suspicion is seriously cast on the door, or the potential of turning the knob or handle the other way is brought up by the players via a History, Investigation, or similar check.... you don't have to say anything to hint, because it's very reasonable to assume players know how to open "typical" doors.
My favorite trap, and the one that has been most informative for me as a DM, are the decoy chalices from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Nothing about the trap is complicated. It is just a bunch of decoys that serve to filter out the avaricious from those who truly understand the nature of the Holy Grail - but the decoys offer only death. It is a great trap, deeply thematic, and also one that cannot be checked for by the rogue, since there is no mechanism, and one that cannot be dodged with Detect Magic, since all the cups in the chamber are enchanted. Good stuff.
The doors of moria weren't supposed too be a riddle door. They were intended to be language lock. It was established earlier in the book that very few noldor/high elven speakers remained in middle Earth. Hollin, the elven nation that was built smack up against the walls of moria, was a noldorian nation, and the doors had been installed there for the sake of opening a trade route. And it makes utter sense to make the door open to the rare language of the people you want to trade with. (Plus, there was a garrason of guards stationed at the door when it was in use )
I've been toying around with the idea of a mix between having a language be a key by itself to open the door and being able to deduce what the key is if you know part of the language. I envision "modern" Elven basically having derived from a dialect of Sylvan. Today there's an obvious distinction between the two languages just like Latin and any romance language, but far back in time, ancient elven was much closer to Sylvan than it is at the time the adventurers discover the door. A character (or two, since it's fun when the party works together) who understand both Elven and Sylvan automatically understand the ancient Elven. if they only know one, they'll be given half of a puzzle and the players need some level of cleverness to fill out the blanks. Still working on how to make this work in practice, but it's a decent way to show through a puzzle that this ruin is very old (it's not like a language belonging to near immortal beings age or change quickly) and establish a tiny bit of world building by saying there's a connection between the Sylvan and Elven languages. I might even be able to reuse the puzzle in some form by saying that if you know a language that uses a specific alphabet like Dwarven, then you don't necessarily need to know Draconic to deduce what's written on a door. Of course, the shortcut to solving these riddles is the Comprehend Languages spell so I'm discouraged by putting too much energy into something the players don't need to solve because their characters have abilities that should make them automatically succeed on the challenge.
@@scottmcdivitt2187 True, but to the suspicious mind, it became a riddle. Agreed, the Elven language is the real key. Another favorite of mine comes from Foucault's Pendulum. The prompt for a PC password is, Do you know the password? The character knows the user is a Kaballah expert, goes through various permutations of God's name, then in frustration finally types "no" for the password. Which of course is correct.
@@oOPPHOo comprehend languages breaks so many things. I'm inclined to think some of those spells should be toned down a bit. Like comprehend languages or detect traps. I haven't really had that problem. I'm using the optional rule where a short rest is a night, and a long rest is a week. It makes people... cautious...of their spell slots.
In defense of Severus Snape, the theory I'm behind is that the "layers of defense" of the Philosopher's Stone weren't actually intended to keep Voldemort out of the inner chamber. They were intended to keep him focused on getting there and make him feel like it was his best shot at resurrection, so that he wouldn't leave Hogwarts and go after other, more practical ways of returning to life. If Dumbledore only wanted to keep him away from the stone then he could have left it in his desk cupboard and never told anyone.
Just going to point out, my computer has a "password hint." Maybe hints to the password on a door isn't such a bad idea, so you don't forget what the password is.
Sure, but those secret questions tend to, again, be something you would know or not know just by being yourself. Mother's maiden name, first pet, childhood favourite toy, rather than puzzles anyone could potentially work out. A riddle or hint or what have you would serve less as a password reminder for someone in the know and more as a captcha in this context.
MonarchsFactory On the other hand, imagining what sort of locked doors a riddle or knowledge test etc would open, and why it would exist, is in and of itself an interesting exercise that creates all sorts of plot threads
@@MonarchsFactory Good point, but I think there would be some way of the person who created the trap to remember passwords or trap placement, some type of logic to it. Unless the person who created it is 200iq. People forget things, and they know they forget things. People also are in favor convince, hence why passwords are often really bad in real life. Mechanically I think we as DMs need to do better with traps to make them interesting for the players. I know when I play I don't find the repetitive nature of asking for trap checking over and over to be fun. Simply making 1 roll in order to disarm a trap is also pretty uninteresting. Something else to consider is how traps are constructed, maintained and reset. We should consider weaknesses in a trap's construction, maintenance and how if possible, a creature would reset a trap. Too often DMs want their traps to be too perfect and there is more to consider in a game other then completely abiding to realism. Another type of trap you didn't mention, is the one designed to inform about the entry. Something that isn't designed to prevent, capture or test an intruder, but rather mark the person who broke in, or leave signs of entry. Simple examples of these traps: A paper wedged between the door that falls when opened or the ink cartridges that explode they put on clothing or money packs to mark thieves and stolen goods.
@@MonarchsFactory Be VERY careful with that... Mother's maiden name and city of birth ay be public record, depending on country. First pet, childhood toy, and others are often on those "friendly" questionnaires going around on Facebook and Tumblr and other social media things. One very public politician in the USA got his personal email hacked several years ago because all the password reset question answers were public record or covered in news stories. This is why I recommend lying. Where were you born = "the sun". First pet = "T-Rex". Mother's maiden name = "none of your business". Make them consistent between sites so you don't forget the weird answers and it's something only you know. Also... my password hint for my computers are things like "it's your password, idiot" and "Random character set #5", which do tie in to the passwords I rotate between. Just nothing that would give anyone an actual clue about the passwords unless they are as deranged as I am. But back to the game. Many traps are designed to be puzzles for players to work out to give them something other than combat to entertain them in a dungeon. Breaks up the monotony and lets them do things without burning up daily combat resources. Depending on your players, it can be fun to have an unrealistic trap or door opening passphrase if they like working out the riddles, or it could be fun to have more realistic traps that they have to work around rather than figure out an answer that they wouldn't really get due to in game lack of knowledge. Depends on what you're going for and what the trap is meant to do. Dael's vid is great for the latter option, which is what I personally prefer.
With respect, I think there are many situations in which a 'kill you dead' style trap e.g. the poison lock, not really being a lethal threat to an adventurer - DOES makes sense. Just because the builder of the trap would ideally WANT their trap to kill someone dead instantly, maybe they don't have the skills or materials to build such a trap. Maybe the best thing they have is a puffer full of spider's venom, but a puff of it is half as lethal as when it's stabbed into you. Or, perhaps they might have the means, but it's just not worth the full investment to create a powerful trap when a cheap/easy one will be sufficient to deter or kill the most likely people to try and enter: Amateur thieves or the over-curious, rather than a (relatively) hardened team of veterans helping each other. A simple car door lock deters 90% of people who would steal something valuable from your car, a car alarm 'trap' deters another 9% and that last 1%? Eh, it's probably not worth the cost of worrying about them, because even if you splurge on a fancy trap just for them, there's a decent chance that if they can bypass the alarm they'll bypass or survive whatever else you put in their way. Besides, if they persist after getting acid splashed all over them or some pretty severe burns from your flamethrower trap - Well, that's why you have multiple traps or monsters or minions behind that ddoor to finish the foolishly stubborn interlopers off!
So I'm running a game tomorrow morning that will feature a puzzle lock on a door in a beholder's lair. Thank you so much for pointing out how stupid that is at the perfect time, now there'll be a note saying something like "Stop leaving clues for yourselves!" and the hints hidden around the room by its various minions.
Finley McLaren That's actually a great idea of how to get around that plothole in an intelligent and funny way. After all, it's so human to do that, and that's exactly what would happen if some powerful being decided to put a complex puzzle lock on a door
Update: The fighter in heavy armour decided to scout ahead in the hub of the beholder's lair, alerting it and several of it's minions, turning the session into a four hour combat encounter. The party escaped but is now invisible, a giant owl, and a tiny spider statue reapectively (the fighter was petrified twice in the battle). No sign of a puzzle door.
I love it, it adds a layer of politics and 'large' scale warfare into the game as well as some awesome new magic items. There is also an adventure included. The art is amazing and the mechanics for all the different kinds of strongholds is awesome!
I was practically harassing my wife to catatonic rage (yes I know that don't work) with my persistent squee just from seeing the samples and lineup of artists in the backer updates. The book seriously gives some of the WotC core books a run for their money.
holy shit is this the person that gave a lecture about the significance of Helen's initial introduction as Elastigirl in the 2004 instant classic 'The Incredibles' (Dir. Brad Bird) in a Big W department store!?!?!
I think Snape left clues, because he knows he might be up against Voldemort and just die, making the stone trapped in there (which is not the purpose of those protection). Mostly, the only real purpose of those traps is to slow down any trespassers enough for Dumbledore to come and stop them. I am pretty sure the professor at Hogwarts could have set up deadlier traps and traps that eleven years old could not set off easily.
And now, I am wondering why Hogwarts does not have special classes for students showing really high potential, like the trio or Fred and George or Snape when he was a student.
Honestly, I think the real answer is plotholes and relatively shoddy writing at some level. We can assume that there's some level of meaning to it; it shows that Snape is important, closest to Dumbledore in his extracurricular activities and plans, the one he trusts the most, competent, and can presume the metaphor that Snape himself is a riddle is intentional. I find that reading in even more layers of meaning into Rowling is wooly and often a self-fulfilling art, especially when she herself makes her prior work and its interpretation look less than credible by making up new "old" interpretations from wholecloth now that the books are finished. It's easy enough to create such insights, I just made her into Trelawney and only started trying after realizing what I had done halfway through. She made a compelling, magical, fascinating world, but the execution of the plot and writing leaves things to be desired.
The trials to get to the stone were set so anyone that knew them could get through. It did not rely on all of them going, Snape's could have been set so if a person was being force by another wizard they could slip them the wrong answer.
ThePomoAa What do you think Dumbledore was doing allowing the Harry trio get away with almost anything they wanted and directing his professors to design traps that an eleven year old could figure out? All he cared about was that his mirror spell was so clever Voldemort would never get the stone anyway... The rest of the traps were for testing Harry, Ron, and Hermione! Pop quiz final from the headmaster! :-D
One of the best traps I ever experienced as a player was where we were in the house of someone who we suspected to be working with an evil cult - there was a magical trap which basically caused each of the characters to see a completely convincing illusion of their worst fear. The only way that the character would break free of this would be to somehow force themselves to engage with this fear - my character - Larissa, a Tiefling Sorceress - had lost all her magic, and then found herself in a room, looking at the lifeless body of a fellow party member that she was secretly (to the other characters, not so much to the players) in love with, and written over and over on the walls, in blood, were messages from this other character asking where Larissa was. Larissa broke through this, when, on being attacked in the vision by zombies that she had no real defence against (no magic, and very poor with weapons), she made herself pick up the body of her companion before fleeing...
Great video Dael! You might be interested in reading through Cryptomancer, an indie rpg that uses irl information security concepts transposed onto a magical setting, and kicks around a lot of the same ideas you talk about in a more systematised way.
Amazing, but you forget a little used trap -- the triggered one! These can be useful insights into Team Us but also introduce other interesting bits of your campaign world. You might find the skeleton of a long dead thief caught in a trap.Or you might find a trap corroded by something...clever way to break a lock with acid....or... rust monster? As a side note, keeping a tiny rust monster grub contained in a wood or glass case makes for a kind slow but effective lockpick btw. Just don't let them get too big. If so, sell them to lycanthropes as they are always in the market for them. Or so I hear.
First time I've seen any of your videos. Have to say I'm quite impressed, you've earned a new subscriber lol. It's rare to find people who actually try to logic DND stuff, and it's what I usually do for the games I run. The idea of the little hammer trap is glorious lol.
Traps in D&D these days are just the legacy from earlier editions. In OD&D and AD&D, generally the point of a trap was to a) give the Thief something to do; b) to challenge the players, not the characters, and c) setting up roadblocks. For some, that tradition isn't there. So yes, the ideas you put forth help fill the gap.
One thing I will add. The best use for a booby-trap (ie a harmful one) is to initiate an ambush. If your comrade steps on a land mine, you should expect machine gun fire seconds later. So if your party triggers a magic mouth, why not have that followed up by arrows and fireballs immediately?
I've always hated "puzzle trap" games. Frequently the puzzle is WAY TOO elaborate. Like really, especially in a word of horse and buggy technology, who is going to build stone structures on the order of Stonehenge in order to trap a robber? And the solution is a "huge inconvenience" that "team us" must also accomplish every time we want to access "the prize" (run 2 miles of labyrinth turning knobs in 5 different locations so that I can finally pull the lever at the final door) It may make for entertaining game play. But seriously, that's a lot of work to go through every time I want to see my prize possession and gloat "my preciousssss"
Additional idea to the trap with no effect. Trap with a insignificant effect. Fires a dart with like, 1d6 damage. Actually triggers major alarm elsewhere, but the players may just go "oh, that was nothing. Lol." Sit back and wait for their faces when they turn the corner.
good content and interesting ideas but I have to admit that I kept watching mostly to try and work out your accent. Australian? New Zealander? American? Australian/New Zealander who moved to America?
I also like Matt Colville's idea about traps that split the party. Trapdoor opens, and one or more of the party members is down a hole. Alarm also sounds to let the goblins know you're there, and goblins appear, either in the pit below, or up above with the remaining team members. EDIT: But I'm definitely stealing your ideas. Love the Team us/team them principle.
One of the most memorable moments from my current campaign was when our rogue successfully disarmed the trap on a small box, only for us to find out later that the trap was Power Word Kill! (Also, in that same underwater ruin, THE EYE OF VECNA was just on the floor in a jar, lol)
Riddle on the door trap is actually valid, you just misclassify it as a Lock&Key trap, when in fact it is a TrialForTheWorthy one, and if classified that way makes a lot of sense One can be worthy not only in body but in the mind as well :) So with Severus, he just decided that doesn't matter who is at the philosofer's stone door, if they can solve the puzzle, then they're worthy to get past his "layer". Some people are just incredibly naive :D
YES! This needed to be said! My game has a wizard's tower. If you walk up to the door, a magic mouth spell tells you to "Go away, the master isn't in, you have no business here!" Written on the doormat is a moderately difficult riddle. The answer to the riddle sets off the glyph of warding on the door, injuring/killing the intruders and alerting the wizard's minions. He's forgetful though, so there's a spare key under his doormat.
Concerning your suggestion to improve the Leap Of Faith: actually, the camouflaged bridge begins a bit below the ledge where Indy is standing, so when he's stepping out, he falls about 30cm before hitting the bridge. This way, anyone testing the air beyond the ledge will in fact find nothing, unless they crouch down very low, while still allowing the bridge to be connected to that side of the chasm. Also, Indy would surely have fallen to his death in your variant, as he didn't actually _leap_, but simply take a step forward. But well, he did not take a leap as instructed, so that's probably what should have happened ;)
To me the worst traps are the ones that take place in ancient ruins where people supposedly lived. "Honey can we maybe skip dinner with the Smiths tonight? I don't want to have to bother with stepping on the correct 16 pressure plates again just to open their front door, plus I'm still sad about how our daughter Diane died last time to the poison darts that shoot out when you step on the wrong stone." Personally I joke that the reason ancient civilizations like the dwarves in Elder Scrolls and Azmeri in Path of Exile aren't around anymore is because their obsession with traps killed them off (either by making simple tasks like opening the front door take incredibly long, or by constantly suffering accidental deaths). At least the Harry Potter example makes sense because they're sealing something in a vault.
Tolkien's "password"door works because it was NOT a password door. The CHARACTERS we follow saw it as a "riddle", but it wasn't built as such. They only saw it that way because the word used to open the doors of Durin were lost to time, at least to any manner of record keeping. At the time they were built, those meant to know how to get in (those particular elves they were friends with, that is why the message was written in their language, not dwarvish) they would know the word if they needed. Most of the time, they wouldn't, as the doors were usually open, with just guards checking who comes and goes. It only became a "riddle" due to the loss of knowledge and the death of the original inhabitants, not while it was still in use, and that is pretty realistic. Originally, the "riddle" was really more of a greeting and instructions to the elves, and a symbolic gesture (to them, the doors would always be open[able]).
Traps are intended as a defense. That's obvious and should go without saying - yet, nobody seems to pause to consider how a trapper would intend to bypass or disarm their own traps. There's no good in trapping your treasure chamber so thoroughly that even you can't get to your stuff, right? So then the challenge is the mindset of the person who laid it. And you really laid the issue out far better than anyone has ever explained it before.
Not sure if this was mentioned, but sometimes the purpose of traps is simply to wound, harm, or sometimes weaken "team them." Think Dumbledore and Harry retrieving the (fake) locket horcrux. Or small dart traps meant to weaken them before the kobold ambush
When Dael was talking about triggering an alarm trap, but nothing happening seemingly, therefore increasing the paranoia, I personally like to ask my player to roll a DEX save in that moment. It doesn't matter what they roll, because you describe them attempting to dodge whatever threat they think they might have let loose, only for nothing to happen. It temporarily raises the tension as the try and figure out what they tripped as they roll, but then realizing it wasn't a "deadly" trap that feeling of paranoia then begins to set in. It helps to simulate that reaction much better I have found. Additionally, the players I have done that too have enjoyed the idea of what seems to be a pointless roll, as it helped to serve the atmosphere and immerse them more.
I disagree slightly on the poison trap. It'd be more malicious for it to seem ineffective at first and then kill everyone over time or after a while. Like you do with rat poison to keep the rats eating and get more than one who tested the trap.
It would be more malicious, but it would also fail to do its job, since the tomb artifacts would just get picked off the dead bodies of the robbers by some other blokes.
@@SimeonDenk not if the door is fake to begin with and the actual entrance to the artifact room is a secret door hidden in a dead-end. (preferably behind an illusory wall)
Poisons can also be used, not to damage, but to disorient. Poisons that paralyze or make the person sick. Give them vertigo, nausea, fogged thought processes, or hallucinations. Heck, the latter can work really well if incorporated into the dungeon's design. If the intruder is hallucinating, they end up getting freaked out by decorations or the like. They're certainly liable to miss other traps, or become so fearful of traps that aren't there that they depart. Not to mention the utility of a poison that just puts someone to sleep. If the designer intended to return to the trapped area frequently, they'd expect to find and deal with anyone who tripped the trap.
@@SimeonDenk you've heard of the term "Decoy" right, the point is the people trying to rob you don't know that the door is fake, they try to open the door get poisoned and die, then even if they manage to open the "door" it leads to nothing so they gain nothing, so nothing to loot from their soon to be dead bodies.
In defense of the starter adventure trap that you mentioned: making traps make sense also means putting them in an economic context. Traps cost money and you’re not going to put a trap on a gem that costs a large percentage of the cost of the gem itself. People with player Class Levels are rare once-in-a-generation heroes, you’d never think to plan for them. You plan for normal people who would never have more than 6 hit points.
Watching a video about traps and she goes wight into "we need to talk about harry potter". My trans ass don't know weather to laugh or despair that something this innocent feels like a reference.
the doors of durin aren't even really locked, speaking the inscription out loud in the language it's written opens the door. its a lock like a pull sign on a door is a lock. and it does totally work to keep out the rif raf. if you dont know the location and dont know sindarin you aint getting in, but basically any traveler coming from Eregion would pass that basic criteria and the door was made for them, so.
One of my favourite traps is when Nott triggered one and she had to make a dex save which she failed and a bunch of snakes fell on her. However they were long dead because someone forgot to feed them 😂
Thank you youtube alchorythm. I'm in love with this channel already! I like the "poison that drains your strength so you can't lift the thing you wanna steal" but don't kill the cleaner who you hired. But Do you ever feel like you over think things? ^^" most traps are there to be one of 5 encounters between long rests. other traps are there because people don't have money to build deathspell traps. Most of my traps are there to deplete the stuff out of my players batman belt, got antipoison? I got a poison trap. Got antifreeze? I got a freezething. Love the vid.
Whenever I run a game with goblins I love making them frustrating. All of their traps are loud and whilst fighting them they will spend their time laughing at you and mocking you. Each trying their best to impress their friends with the funniest insult. They will even avoid dealing the killing blow if they can do something that would irritate or humiliate the character
You maniac. It's 2am here in the USA when you uploaded. However, bless you for your content. I think you are continuing to forge an amazing community.(Also, did you get Matt's strongholds and followers PDF?)
Your videos are just wonderful. Even an old dog like myself can get good new ideas...thanks for the concrete examples from stories, as well. (I love the way you think about goblins as well. I may adopt that!)
Vitamin c for colds is a myth actually, you should take some zinc since your body uses a ton of it to make antibodies (it also helps with the sore/achy feeling you get since it's caused by the lack of zinc). I hope you feel better soon
Well as to snape's potion riddle in the Philosopher's Stone. Remember he was pretending to be working for Voldemort at the time, and he was also 100% sure harry and the like would try and go after Voldemort. So he had to design a trap that seemed legit, but had a very simple solution to get through, both for his "boss" and for the 11-year-old boy he'd sworn to keep alive somehow.
A good trap for a wizard trying to awe intruders could be a glyph that summons/constructs a magical being that is entirely overpowered, yet bound to remain at the trap, so the intruders can run away, properly cowed. A note to include, which may or may not be addressed depending on how smart you want the trapper to be: the being would be bound by the exact commands of the summoner, so depending on what those commands were determines what the players need to go though in order to get by. For example, whether or not the being can return fire, or hunt down those that snipe it from outside its bound space.
I agree that a poison trap on a lock should be deadly-but only if the substance is intended to be a deadly poison. What if it's actually a marker dye or pheromone lure for something further along? The fact that the stuff is bad for you is incidental to its purpose. Perhaps the poison is only intended to weaken them for a later test of worthiness, similar to how the Black Panther had to give up his powers before a trial-by-combat. One should never fail to consider the intent and personality of the trap-layer. It's entirely possible that the traps are supposed to be small and additive, so that victims suffer a horrible death by inches. The default assumption is typically that PC adventurers are Good(tm), and the place they're breaking into is owned by somebody Evil(tm), so cruelty should definitely be on the menu. GET WELL SOON, DAEL!
@MonarchsFactory weird that you criticized the Kazad Dum door lock, when it aligns perfectly with your Us vs Them concept. Knowledge of the sindarin spoken and written language is the key, elves and elf-friends are Us, everyone else is Them. What gives?
Ok I found you yesterday and I've been binging on your D&D stuff. I've been playing for ages but I have only just started DM. I have to say, your videos are so heckin valuable. Really well researched, full of fresh ideas, AND entertaining. The quality of what you do is striking especially considering how much stuff there is about RPGs on youtube these days. Keep going girl and thank you
Observation #1: Expect the ire of the Internet to fall upon you. You were critical of both Harry Potter and Tolkien. It shall not pass without incident. Observation #2: Suddenly, I really want a goblin video.
I loved trap design when I used to run games... Players are walking down a stone hallway. There is a corner ahead. A kobold walks around the corner and takes a pot shot at them. He runs back around the corner. The players give chase (mostly worrying that he will raise an alarm). They watch as he runs through a solid stone wall. In hot pursuit the player decides, well, it must be an illusion and tries running through too. The bottom half was. You could substitute an illusionary kobold but at least in the edition I was playing (probably 2nd or 3rd ed D&D at the time) Illusionary Wall was a midlevel permanent spell but having a permanent illusion of a kobold would have been expensive. I had a character that had a secret emergency exit to her house (she was a thief). It was a vine lined stone maze. She was an elf, and a small species at that. Pricks from the vine would put people to sleep (as well as do a small amount of damage as they moved through if they kept making their saves... it was narrow enough so even half-elves would be pretty snug, and if they had armor on it was pretty hopeless, although that would protect them from the thorns at least. Being smaller and dexterous she could mostly navigate the thorns. Being an elf she was immune to sleep effects so if she did get one or two scratches she'd be okay. To make it more dangerous the maze had two entrances. One whole half of the maze was a blind dead end... you'd failed before you even realized you were in a maze. There was spell- maybe programmed illusion? that let you set a trigger action but it could stay indefinitely until triggered. It would make the person who triggered it invisible and at the same time make an illusionary double of them programmed to carry out a specific action. The action? Go down the wrong maze entrance. If you did somehow make it through the right half it came out in a cave. She knew how to avoid the bear that slept there. (I think maybe there was a sleep potion hidden nearby, but it's been a long time.) I had window traps where to unlatch the windows the thieves had to put their fingers under to reach a clasp on the inside. It was a common lock in the city. Occasionally though there would be trapped versions that had a guillotine like action (inside, outside or under the sill) that would take the thief's fingers off. My favorites though were the ones defending my archmages house. She had a set of altars that you could pray at. One would grant you a strength spell, another haste, a couple buff spells to help you deal out more damage. It was important not to pray at the last altar though. That one cast a chaos spell on you, making you attack all your friends. (Not sure about the rules now, but because the players were voluntarily receiving the spells they didn't get saves). She also had a powerful enchantment on her spellbook. If you opened it a gust of wind spell closed it again and a powerful forget spell would hit you. Undaunted you would, of course, open the spellbook, which would close itself and make you forget that you'd opened it, over and over. Meanwhile she'd have been alerted and be on her way to deal with you. She had a sanctuary inside a prismatic sphere. There was a powerful spell out of FR called Spell Engine that would suck the power out of any spell cast in it's radius, which was larger than the radius of the chromatic sphere, which made deactivating the sphere virtually impossible. The only solution we found was an obscure spell called prismatic blade that could be made permanent. You'd have to know you'd need it though and bring it in advance to have any chance. Spell Engine would disrupt any new spells cast in the area (including the owners) but there were several powerful safeguards from pre-existing magics in place. The whole place was proof against teleportation-ed, but there were pre-existing pads attuned to the owner that would only work for them... allowed under the spell engine, but only as pre-existing magic. All of it was 2nd Edition D&D and totally legit. Spent a lot of gold on the place. No one ever did try to break in though and the campaign ended before it was finished. Edit- ooo, I had a goblin trap master who was being chased by the players. They thought they'd caught up with him. They saw his figure sitting in front of a campfire. I knew my players well. The campfire was just outside an old barn. His horse was on the other side of the barn. His back was to the barn. They needed to capture him. One of the players stalked closely and jumped on him... or rather the pile of his clothes stuffed with straw sitting on top of the bear trap attached to the chain tied to the horse. The trap snapped, the horse spooked, dragged the player through the fire. The icing on the cake was the rope died to the cut support beam that brought the barn down on the rest of them. No fatalities but it leveled the playing field enough that the trapmaster was able to escape.
I like the idea of an old dwarven stronghold which was once defended from an army of elves. The trap makes a big saw appear 5ft above the ground. It would just miss any wee dwarf - but a sneaky elf would lose their head!
One of my favorite dungeons: characters enter the complex seeking a mcguffin for their employer, set off a trap that sprays them with a fine mist. Nothing happens. Puzzled, they continue. Next room features pressure plates that cause globes of intense light to flare, dazzling the characters and disturbing a nest of spiders. Lights seem harmless other than dazzling. Next trap triggers a flare of brilliant silver light, no apparent effect. Characters find the mcguffin and steal it. Employer thanks them, leaves. They later figure out employer is a vampire, who would have been very unhappy to encounter to spray of holy water, the sunlight globes, or the extremely empowered turning effect. Traps should definitely inform a clever player about Team Us, and also what they are expecting Team Them to be.
This is a brilliant idea!
If you wanted to have a more vicious option, have it spray acid that would damage their tools and hands making further attempts problematic.
Depending on how they describe picking the lock, you might want to give them a reflex save to not hit the face.
Ohhh, that is mean, I love it!
Professor Dael Kingsmill strikes again (seriously, you as a content creator combined as a teacher, killer combo)
Fantastic video, I always look forward to hearing what you have to say. Breaking down the different purposes and goals and origins of the traps was helpful for taking things step by step.
I think one of my favourite traps I've done was at the end of a Trial to Prove Worthiness situation. The God who created the island wanted only those of clear wit, ingenuity and a sense of wholesome camaraderie to pass, as they were the God of spreading joy (often through laughter and pranks). The earlier ones had been riddles, creativity, teamwork, and the final was trust. (I was trying to have my players grow closer together through the Trial). The final one was to speak a secret that they had been unwilling to share amongst those present. The Trap could discern truth/lies and could tell whether the secret being told filled the criteria or not. It had no punishment, it simply wouldn't let people through, and leave them to stew and bicker amongst themselves as to why their words hadn't worked. Theoretically, this is the easiest of the traps, but it's where both the party, and the people they'd been following both tripped up.
Oooooooh, dope! Also makes me think of that one Adventure Time song.
@@MonarchsFactory Oh I'm not familiar, didn't have that cartoon where I grew up. What's the name of the song?
Makes more sense in the context of the full episode and I THINK I can post links because it's my channel so th-cam.com/video/yRgjMtUBKFU/w-d-xo.html
@@MonarchsFactory Thanks for the link!
Snape potion puzzle: potions should have a hidden interaction, if you take the protective potion before the poison, you enter a different room trough the doorway(need to be dragged exactly halfway to the shadowlands before severing yourself from translocation magic or something).Door riddle: filters wildlife from those that share your culture. Good if you did not get the chance to tell the password to others, bad if you install it as the only line of defence.
I think that riddle doors can certainly make sense and be a lot of fun, they just need to exist within a proper context.
For example, in one of my games a dragonborn cult had captured a village of dwarven miners, forcing them to build a lair into the side of a mountain. To seal off the hidden entrance, the cultists employed an ornate magical door. Some of the dwarves carving the door secretly etched instructions, in dwarven, about how to open it hoping it would lead to their rescue. Unfortunately they couldn't finish the message, but the rhyming scheme left a riddle for the players to deduce the last phrase in order to understand the secret of opening the door.
This video is PHENOMENAL. In particular, your sentiments on traps that... TRAP YOU!
It really helped me.
First video of your's I've seen, and been thinking of making a Kobold trapper character, so this actually gave me several ideas and brought up a good point of the "us vs. them" idea. Thank you
It wasn't a riddle on the door to Moria. It was a greeting. When it was made, the Elves and Dwarves were on good terms. living fairly close to each other and had open trade. The words on the door were a simple greeting or message to their neighbors, "Say friend and enter," not a riddle. It was pretty much the same as someone having a sign that said knock before entering, or ring bell to get attention of clerk.
The team us/them explanation is excellent and works great
I hope you feel better soon, it sucks being sick.
A thing people never seem to do with traps is have some of them set off already. Especially with a "trial of the worthy" series of traps, it seems likely someone would have made it through a couple, then died.
The PURPOSE of A TRAP. *Emphaswish*
Easily the best part of this video for me.
I always thought entry into Moria was originally supposed to be trial of the worthy.
I will pint out in the case of the Potion Trap that Snape set up, you are supposed to take a risk and pick a potion, as a way to disincentivize intruders from finding another way through. You provide a gate to the castle so the invaders don't try and come through the servant's entrance. The puzzle was dumb bs so the protagonists can succeed, but the rest of it was sound since you don't want someone to get frustrated and try and destroy the trap all together.
I didn't know death was a feeling.
Depends what universe, and the circumstances. Usually in D&D there's an afterlife of some sort, even if it's "soul getting trapped by a phylactery" afterlife. There would presumably be some sort of feeling associated with that, even if it's a feeling of not feeling, as it were.
Old school poison traps tend to be save or die. But I guess players got tired of dying, so they changed it to "poison damage, save for half".
I try to avoid puzzles and riddles in games as they tend to be just a test for players instead of the characters. When I do feel I need to add them... I offer a bonus for anyone who can solve it in under two minutes. Everyone who sits out gets to make an INT-15 check to discern the answer and the highest roll gets the answer AND the bonus. Out of the all the people I have DMed, I think only one person was much good at them.
I think Tolkien's door counts as a trial of the worthy because it was a common entrance and orcs can't read. It wasn't meant to be difficult.
What if instead of the «us» being the special ones who can avoid the traps, the «them» are the special ones who can`t. I mean that the trap is set to stop a particular group of individuals, and that is why there are solutions for the traps inside the dungeons, safety reasons.
For example, in Teen Wolf, in one chapter there is a girl who stepped on a bear trap, then asked a friend to look for the instructions to avoid having her leg crushed. The boy said «why would there be instructions on how to dissarm the trap written in the trap? That doesn`t make sense», to which the girl said that bears usually don`t know how to read. Of course, the boy could not read for magic reasons at the moment, but the point is still valid.
When it comes to how much damage traps do, remember first that not all trap makers have the _ability_ to make traps damaging above a certain degree. A trap made by hunters or kobolds might only be _able_ to do so much damage. The designers might lack the mechanical or arcane knowledge needed for potent traps. They may lack access to resources needed to build potent ones, like living in an area poor in metals, or having pretty weak local poisons. Simple lack of _space_ can prevent the trap makers from building big or elaborate traps, limiting what they can do or how effective they can be.
Second, older traps may end up losing their potency due to the passage of time. Springs lose their tension, gears rust, wooden components take water damage, poisons or acids become inert, etc.
Third, the designers might just be merciful, preferring to wound, scare, or stymie efforts to get through, rather than just killing people outright. It does happen that some people are not interested in being deadly. Naturally, that mercy may be tempered with pragmatism, and the traps increase in deadliness as intruders go along. Starting out harsh enough to wound or scare, but getting deadlier for the sake of those too persistent to be put off by earlier traps.
Fourth, it's always important to remember that most people in a DnD world have, at best, 1d8 hit points. A single arrow trap that does 1d6 damage would handily kill the average commoner, and severely wound even the heartiest. Most folks also don't possess access to immediate and convenient healing, either in the form of spells or potions. If the first trap doesn't most intruders, subsequent ones are bound to do so. What I said earlier about some traps requiring more work/resources/knowledge than others holds true here. Trap designers are likely to put weak traps early on, that are likely to kill or drive off a vast majority of potential intruders, simply because people with greater than 8 hit points comprise a smaller percentage of the population. It's only later, when the early traps have weeded out the weak and uncommitted, that the REAL traps start coming up.
Fifth, more powerful traps will also tend to be traps that are harder to _reset_ after going off. A swinging blade trap might swing out, and then swing back into place, ready to go off again. A trap involving a boulder dropping or a glyph of warding activating are much harder to use twice. If the designers are no longer around, the big traps might only _ever_ get to go off once, because no one around is able or willing to reset them. So it makes sense for simple, repeatable traps, or ones easy to reset, to be put out front. Where, as we established before, a vast majority of intruders are going to arrive.
Please tell us more about the gobbies
Along the lines of your Pharaoh's tomb analogy, I always liked to "trap" my players with magical weapons in knight/warrior tombs. When a knight/warrior was buried with his weapon or armor, the items were bent or broken in a way to render them useless to grave robbers. But a magical item is much more difficult to break, therefore wouldn't they try and render the item useless in some other way, such as adding a counter enchantment (i.e. a flaming sword also does fire damage to the wielder). Team Us would know not to use the item, but Team Them wouldn't know until they got burned.
Speaking of Team Us and Team Them, I always wanted to visit Australia until I saw your video where you talked about funnel web spiders, and having arachnophobia, it has made me hesitant to visit. Now I'm wondering if this was a trap, and I find myself in Team Them? #ted
I feel like not making traps %100 lethal makes sense for "team us" too. Because "team us" is still just people (assuming) and people tend to make mistakes. But at least you wouldn't make the same mistake twice that *almost* killed you.
nice mcdm shirt!
Snape is an overdramatic drama queen *Flaunce!*
A thing I see a lot of people forget is that monsters in D&D can have immunities, Liches who trap their layer could literally have the entire dungeon filled with poison air or even no air at all. Fire giants could instead of having a door have a curtain of lava. Their biology is the way to bypass the trap as it were.
Truth. Love that thought.
This is also why Beholder lairs make extensive use of verticality.
And/or always-on magical hazards. Beholders don't just float, but project a cone of anti-magic in front of them. _They_ don't have to worry about getting around. That's for stupid, land-bound cretins with no anti-magic to worry about.
@@Bluecho4 but they also want their differently abled minions to navigate the lair without difficulty so their errands can b be accomplished in timely fashion. Maybe their inner sanctum is protected like that, but I'd imagine the majority of the lair is accessible (if tricky and trapped)
Or a goblin lair with pit traps that only activate if you’re a medium or larger creature.
Exactly. The only reason not to do this is if it would literally make the dungeon unbeatable for some parties. Of course having the initial puzzle being the players figuring out how to survive in the dungeon could be fun.
I found a nice compromise by running a dungeon owned by a mummy who had a huge tanker of liquid poison that would open behind the players once they were too far into the dungeon, slowly flooding it behind them. This puts the players on a time limit, now they can't take any long or short rests and the mummy is basically fine no matter what happens.
It could be that the poison trap is ineffective because it was set so long ago that the poison has passed its sell-by date.
Or that it's enough to kill a commoner (like 8 HP max, right?)
or that lethal poison is super illegal and expensive and hard to get? :D Or a poison that makes you turn purple makes you easy to identify. ( imagine bank putting real bombs instead of paint bombs in money xD )
I'd also consider a less lethal poison as a warning, "I'm not interested in killing you but I'm serious about keeping you out and don't care about your wellbeing. Consider yourself warned."
Leader working with bad guys doesn’t trust his underlings. Instead of poison, uses ink. If underlings try to steal from him, they’ll think they’re poisoned as the ink makes its way along the bloodstream. He sees the “ink stain “ and knows who’s been in his stuff.
Then either what's behind the trap also has a sell-by date or team us didn't think ahead, or team us all died unexpectedly and left the thing in a temporary location.
"Riddles on doors make no sense."
Me: looks at computer password hint. *sweats*
Password Hint: "Rymes with... Assword."
I literally did this once at a wizards' academy. The player could have done the legwork to find the password for the arcane-locked door or brute-forced it, but instead they said "I forgot the password!" which triggered a Magic Mouth posing a riddle as the wizard's security question.
Riddles in Tolkien books are a worthiness check, like "are you an elf?" Captcha
@@andresbolanos9158 Great idea to have the riddle in Elvish... if the entrance is for dwarfs
@@TheVelvetTV_Riesenglied Wasn't that one to show the significance of the friendship between Elves and Dwarves?
I like the idea of traps that make narrative sense. My favorite dungeon I've designed was an old abandoned wizard school; all the traps were glyphs of warding storing nonlethal spells, triggering if any non-professor opened the trapped container, because they didn't want to actually kill their students (stuff like a Levitate-for-a-few-hours trap, and one that cast Continual Flame on the thief's head). These were inconvenient, but any mid-level spellcaster could easily dispel the effects (but the students couldn't). I think my players thought I was going easy on them with the nondamaging traps until they figured out that every trapped chest they'd opened had booze in them, and I reminded them that this school generally taught teenagers.
I absolutely love that idea. Mind if I steal it for a One Shot?
@@Student-mo3zh dnd is basically communal idea sharing. go for it.
Favorite of mine: Door in the Thieves Den. Doorknob is engineered assuming most people are right handed. If the knob is turned clockwise, rods inside the door slam into place silmilar to a safe and guaranteeing the door won’t budge. An alarm also sounds. Members of the thieves band know to turn the knob counter clockwise to open it.
Sick. Love it - it'd be great to leave clues in notes, and that the big weakness of this lock is that people love to brag about it or make fun of those who set off the trap. "Old Gorn knew better, but his normal reflex kicked in and fucked up, and now his best robes are burnt to a crisp." Those'd be great clues.
Nicely done.
But how do you know the way players turn it without asking them about it and so giving away the biggest clue? I mean, a person most likely will say "I open the door" or maybe "I turn the doorknob"
@@zozilin Once the knobs turned the traps either been sprung or not sprung. The sound of the rods slamming into place and the alarm sounding is a bigger clue.
@@zozilin You can reasonably assume anyone with basic intelligence will, out of habit, turn the knob to the right. Another way to do it would be to change it to a handle, and then assume everyone is pushing it down instead of up.
I work at a hotel and lemme tell you - nobody thinks to turn the handle up. Doors get stuck all the time, it can be reasonably solved by turning the handle up. Safety doors tend to "stick" when you push on the door, and then turn the handle, as you basically force it to stay locked with pressure. Almost nobody attempts this.
Admittedly, this might be a good time for a low-intelligence player to shine. If a player had an intelligence score under 10 and attempted to open the door, I might let them go through completely unharmed as they don't use any preconceived notions about how the door opens. More intelligent people would know which way you're "supposed" to open it, whereas less intelligent people might actually do it the wrong way.
Even if the less-intelligent character goes through fine, it might be difficult to replicate what they'd done - or more likely, the players would think that door wasn't trapped at all.
If you want to hide it, make them roll an intelligence saving throw after the trigger has been trapped. Until the players specifically speak about the handle, or nail an investigation check, you can reasonably assume they'd turn the handle the typical way.
One way to sneak it in is to simply say that when they open the door they turn the handle. Dropping that little detail everytime they open a door seems like it might give it away, but that's subtle enough that most players wouldn't think twice about it. As soon as you describe the door as having a knob (or handle in some cases) they'll likely let their own real-life-prejudice get in their way.
If you wanted to make a really unique check, everytime they open the door make an ultra low failure intelligence saving throw DC. For instance a 5. The trick is, that a success is actually a failure. If you succeed, you recognize how doors are supposed to open and use that knowledge. If you fail, you open the door "the wrong way" and it actually disarms the trap.
It'd be enough to tip off your players something is going on with the doors, but not enough for them to figure it out, as their abilities that stack success actually are hindering them in this fashion.
Until suspicion is seriously cast on the door, or the potential of turning the knob or handle the other way is brought up by the players via a History, Investigation, or similar check.... you don't have to say anything to hint, because it's very reasonable to assume players know how to open "typical" doors.
I turn knobs counter clockwise first, and I am right handed.
My favorite trap, and the one that has been most informative for me as a DM, are the decoy chalices from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Nothing about the trap is complicated. It is just a bunch of decoys that serve to filter out the avaricious from those who truly understand the nature of the Holy Grail - but the decoys offer only death.
It is a great trap, deeply thematic, and also one that cannot be checked for by the rogue, since there is no mechanism, and one that cannot be dodged with Detect Magic, since all the cups in the chamber are enchanted.
Good stuff.
I feel like the lollipop was essential to the entire feel of the video. 10/10
“Vague and provocative” oh wait, she said evocative.
"and hey, maybe that feeling you wanted them to feel is death"
-Dael Kingsmill 2018
The doors of moria weren't supposed too be a riddle door. They were intended to be language lock. It was established earlier in the book that very few noldor/high elven speakers remained in middle Earth. Hollin, the elven nation that was built smack up against the walls of moria, was a noldorian nation, and the doors had been installed there for the sake of opening a trade route. And it makes utter sense to make the door open to the rare language of the people you want to trade with. (Plus, there was a garrason of guards stationed at the door when it was in use )
The "Us, not Them" concept really applies there, I think. And such an Elven thing to do, to wrap the password reminder in a gentle riddle.
@@GaryKlineCA but it wasn't a riddle. The password was literally written on the door, if the reader knew the language it was written in
I've been toying around with the idea of a mix between having a language be a key by itself to open the door and being able to deduce what the key is if you know part of the language.
I envision "modern" Elven basically having derived from a dialect of Sylvan. Today there's an obvious distinction between the two languages just like Latin and any romance language, but far back in time, ancient elven was much closer to Sylvan than it is at the time the adventurers discover the door.
A character (or two, since it's fun when the party works together) who understand both Elven and Sylvan automatically understand the ancient Elven. if they only know one, they'll be given half of a puzzle and the players need some level of cleverness to fill out the blanks.
Still working on how to make this work in practice, but it's a decent way to show through a puzzle that this ruin is very old (it's not like a language belonging to near immortal beings age or change quickly) and establish a tiny bit of world building by saying there's a connection between the Sylvan and Elven languages.
I might even be able to reuse the puzzle in some form by saying that if you know a language that uses a specific alphabet like Dwarven, then you don't necessarily need to know Draconic to deduce what's written on a door.
Of course, the shortcut to solving these riddles is the Comprehend Languages spell so I'm discouraged by putting too much energy into something the players don't need to solve because their characters have abilities that should make them automatically succeed on the challenge.
@@scottmcdivitt2187 True, but to the suspicious mind, it became a riddle. Agreed, the Elven language is the real key. Another favorite of mine comes from Foucault's Pendulum. The prompt for a PC password is, Do you know the password? The character knows the user is a Kaballah expert, goes through various permutations of God's name, then in frustration finally types "no" for the password. Which of course is correct.
@@oOPPHOo comprehend languages breaks so many things. I'm inclined to think some of those spells should be toned down a bit. Like comprehend languages or detect traps.
I haven't really had that problem. I'm using the optional rule where a short rest is a night, and a long rest is a week. It makes people... cautious...of their spell slots.
In defense of Severus Snape, the theory I'm behind is that the "layers of defense" of the Philosopher's Stone weren't actually intended to keep Voldemort out of the inner chamber. They were intended to keep him focused on getting there and make him feel like it was his best shot at resurrection, so that he wouldn't leave Hogwarts and go after other, more practical ways of returning to life. If Dumbledore only wanted to keep him away from the stone then he could have left it in his desk cupboard and never told anyone.
that makes sense and would be consistent with each of their characters going forward, but i don’t think JKR is that good of a writer
I was scrolling through comments looking for someone else who thought this!! Thank you! 😂😂
Just going to point out, my computer has a "password hint." Maybe hints to the password on a door isn't such a bad idea, so you don't forget what the password is.
Sure, but those secret questions tend to, again, be something you would know or not know just by being yourself. Mother's maiden name, first pet, childhood favourite toy, rather than puzzles anyone could potentially work out. A riddle or hint or what have you would serve less as a password reminder for someone in the know and more as a captcha in this context.
MonarchsFactory On the other hand, imagining what sort of locked doors a riddle or knowledge test etc would open, and why it would exist, is in and of itself an interesting exercise that creates all sorts of plot threads
@@MonarchsFactory Good point, but I think there would be some way of the person who created the trap to remember passwords or trap placement, some type of logic to it. Unless the person who created it is 200iq. People forget things, and they know they forget things. People also are in favor convince, hence why passwords are often really bad in real life.
Mechanically I think we as DMs need to do better with traps to make them interesting for the players. I know when I play I don't find the repetitive nature of asking for trap checking over and over to be fun. Simply making 1 roll in order to disarm a trap is also pretty uninteresting.
Something else to consider is how traps are constructed, maintained and reset. We should consider weaknesses in a trap's construction, maintenance and how if possible, a creature would reset a trap. Too often DMs want their traps to be too perfect and there is more to consider in a game other then completely abiding to realism.
Another type of trap you didn't mention, is the one designed to inform about the entry. Something that isn't designed to prevent, capture or test an intruder, but rather mark the person who broke in, or leave signs of entry. Simple examples of these traps: A paper wedged between the door that falls when opened or the ink cartridges that explode they put on clothing or money packs to mark thieves and stolen goods.
Tho if my computer was threatening to kill me if I forgot my password, I'd make damn sure to remember it.
@@MonarchsFactory Be VERY careful with that... Mother's maiden name and city of birth ay be public record, depending on country. First pet, childhood toy, and others are often on those "friendly" questionnaires going around on Facebook and Tumblr and other social media things. One very public politician in the USA got his personal email hacked several years ago because all the password reset question answers were public record or covered in news stories.
This is why I recommend lying. Where were you born = "the sun". First pet = "T-Rex". Mother's maiden name = "none of your business". Make them consistent between sites so you don't forget the weird answers and it's something only you know.
Also... my password hint for my computers are things like "it's your password, idiot" and "Random character set #5", which do tie in to the passwords I rotate between. Just nothing that would give anyone an actual clue about the passwords unless they are as deranged as I am.
But back to the game. Many traps are designed to be puzzles for players to work out to give them something other than combat to entertain them in a dungeon. Breaks up the monotony and lets them do things without burning up daily combat resources. Depending on your players, it can be fun to have an unrealistic trap or door opening passphrase if they like working out the riddles, or it could be fun to have more realistic traps that they have to work around rather than figure out an answer that they wouldn't really get due to in game lack of knowledge. Depends on what you're going for and what the trap is meant to do. Dael's vid is great for the latter option, which is what I personally prefer.
With respect, I think there are many situations in which a 'kill you dead' style trap e.g. the poison lock, not really being a lethal threat to an adventurer - DOES makes sense. Just because the builder of the trap would ideally WANT their trap to kill someone dead instantly, maybe they don't have the skills or materials to build such a trap. Maybe the best thing they have is a puffer full of spider's venom, but a puff of it is half as lethal as when it's stabbed into you.
Or, perhaps they might have the means, but it's just not worth the full investment to create a powerful trap when a cheap/easy one will be sufficient to deter or kill the most likely people to try and enter: Amateur thieves or the over-curious, rather than a (relatively) hardened team of veterans helping each other. A simple car door lock deters 90% of people who would steal something valuable from your car, a car alarm 'trap' deters another 9% and that last 1%? Eh, it's probably not worth the cost of worrying about them, because even if you splurge on a fancy trap just for them, there's a decent chance that if they can bypass the alarm they'll bypass or survive whatever else you put in their way.
Besides, if they persist after getting acid splashed all over them or some pretty severe burns from your flamethrower trap - Well, that's why you have multiple traps or monsters or minions behind that ddoor to finish the foolishly stubborn interlopers off!
So I'm running a game tomorrow morning that will feature a puzzle lock on a door in a beholder's lair. Thank you so much for pointing out how stupid that is at the perfect time, now there'll be a note saying something like "Stop leaving clues for yourselves!" and the hints hidden around the room by its various minions.
Finley McLaren That's actually a great idea of how to get around that plothole in an intelligent and funny way. After all, it's so human to do that, and that's exactly what would happen if some powerful being decided to put a complex puzzle lock on a door
Update: The fighter in heavy armour decided to scout ahead in the hub of the beholder's lair, alerting it and several of it's minions, turning the session into a four hour combat encounter. The party escaped but is now invisible, a giant owl, and a tiny spider statue reapectively (the fighter was petrified twice in the battle). No sign of a puzzle door.
I love today. I finished Critical Role, I skimmed through Colville's Strongholds and Followers right into a Dael Kingsmill video.
The Day of D&D
How is Strongholds and Followers?
Today was a good day.
I love it, it adds a layer of politics and 'large' scale warfare into the game as well as some awesome new magic items. There is also an adventure included. The art is amazing and the mechanics for all the different kinds of strongholds is awesome!
Im soooooooo far behind on crit!
Colville shirt on the day I get Strongholds and Followers? Excellent. +2 charisma and advantage on thumbs up.
I see you're a man of culture as well.
Is the PDF good so far?
It's SO. PRETTY.
@@MonarchsFactory no u
I was practically harassing my wife to catatonic rage (yes I know that don't work) with my persistent squee just from seeing the samples and lineup of artists in the backer updates. The book seriously gives some of the WotC core books a run for their money.
holy shit is this the person that gave a lecture about the significance of Helen's initial introduction as Elastigirl in the 2004 instant classic 'The Incredibles' (Dir. Brad Bird) in a Big W department store!?!?!
I laughed unreasonably long and loud at this
Uhm... I need to know what was said for reasons.
@@mercyvanzyl316 Same
Pffft hahahahha
I think Snape left clues, because he knows he might be up against Voldemort and just die, making the stone trapped in there (which is not the purpose of those protection).
Mostly, the only real purpose of those traps is to slow down any trespassers enough for Dumbledore to come and stop them.
I am pretty sure the professor at Hogwarts could have set up deadlier traps and traps that eleven years old could not set off easily.
And now, I am wondering why Hogwarts does not have special classes for students showing really high potential, like the trio or Fred and George or Snape when he was a student.
P.S. : I loved the video, I totally agree with you and I think most of the time traps don't make sense enough...
Honestly, I think the real answer is plotholes and relatively shoddy writing at some level. We can assume that there's some level of meaning to it; it shows that Snape is important, closest to Dumbledore in his extracurricular activities and plans, the one he trusts the most, competent, and can presume the metaphor that Snape himself is a riddle is intentional. I find that reading in even more layers of meaning into Rowling is wooly and often a self-fulfilling art, especially when she herself makes her prior work and its interpretation look less than credible by making up new "old" interpretations from wholecloth now that the books are finished. It's easy enough to create such insights, I just made her into Trelawney and only started trying after realizing what I had done halfway through. She made a compelling, magical, fascinating world, but the execution of the plot and writing leaves things to be desired.
The trials to get to the stone were set so anyone that knew them could get through. It did not rely on all of them going, Snape's could have been set so if a person was being force by another wizard they could slip them the wrong answer.
ThePomoAa What do you think Dumbledore was doing allowing the Harry trio get away with almost anything they wanted and directing his professors to design traps that an eleven year old could figure out? All he cared about was that his mirror spell was so clever Voldemort would never get the stone anyway... The rest of the traps were for testing Harry, Ron, and Hermione! Pop quiz final from the headmaster! :-D
One of the best traps I ever experienced as a player was where we were in the house of someone who we suspected to be working with an evil cult - there was a magical trap which basically caused each of the characters to see a completely convincing illusion of their worst fear. The only way that the character would break free of this would be to somehow force themselves to engage with this fear - my character - Larissa, a Tiefling Sorceress - had lost all her magic, and then found herself in a room, looking at the lifeless body of a fellow party member that she was secretly (to the other characters, not so much to the players) in love with, and written over and over on the walls, in blood, were messages from this other character asking where Larissa was.
Larissa broke through this, when, on being attacked in the vision by zombies that she had no real defence against (no magic, and very poor with weapons), she made herself pick up the body of her companion before fleeing...
reminds me of the doctor who episode "The Doctors Wife" when Rory and Amy get separated while the Tardis is being controlled by House
I see a Colville shirt, I thumbs up. Simple.
S&F is out!
@@tecguySD oh yeah man, all over it!
Have you ever been to Colville, WA?
Hell, I'm thumbs upping the whole damned conversation :D And @Timothy Carter, S&F is great, got the PDF, can't wait for the physical book to ship!
Great video Dael! You might be interested in reading through Cryptomancer, an indie rpg that uses irl information security concepts transposed onto a magical setting, and kicks around a lot of the same ideas you talk about in a more systematised way.
Amazing, but you forget a little used trap -- the triggered one! These can be useful insights into Team Us but also introduce other interesting bits of your campaign world.
You might find the skeleton of a long dead thief caught in a trap.Or you might find a trap corroded by something...clever way to break a lock with acid....or... rust monster? As a side note, keeping a tiny rust monster grub contained in a wood or glass case makes for a kind slow but effective lockpick btw. Just don't let them get too big. If so, sell them to lycanthropes as they are always in the market for them. Or so I hear.
First time I've seen any of your videos. Have to say I'm quite impressed, you've earned a new subscriber lol. It's rare to find people who actually try to logic DND stuff, and it's what I usually do for the games I run. The idea of the little hammer trap is glorious lol.
Traps in D&D these days are just the legacy from earlier editions. In OD&D and AD&D, generally the point of a trap was to a) give the Thief something to do; b) to challenge the players, not the characters, and c) setting up roadblocks.
For some, that tradition isn't there. So yes, the ideas you put forth help fill the gap.
Poison doesn't scale in D&D. Decent poison is rare and expensive and isn't any problem if you're an advanced level.
Traps are very holiday themed. Home Alone is a christmas movie isn't it?
One thing I will add. The best use for a booby-trap (ie a harmful one) is to initiate an ambush. If your comrade steps on a land mine, you should expect machine gun fire seconds later. So if your party triggers a magic mouth, why not have that followed up by arrows and fireballs immediately?
I've always hated "puzzle trap" games. Frequently the puzzle is WAY TOO elaborate. Like really, especially in a word of horse and buggy technology, who is going to build stone structures on the order of Stonehenge in order to trap a robber? And the solution is a "huge inconvenience" that "team us" must also accomplish every time we want to access "the prize" (run 2 miles of labyrinth turning knobs in 5 different locations so that I can finally pull the lever at the final door)
It may make for entertaining game play. But seriously, that's a lot of work to go through every time I want to see my prize possession and gloat "my preciousssss"
It is 1:43 in the morning here in California but I'm still here because I enjoy your insight for roleplaying. Please do this more often.
Additional idea to the trap with no effect.
Trap with a insignificant effect.
Fires a dart with like, 1d6 damage.
Actually triggers major alarm elsewhere, but the players may just go "oh, that was nothing. Lol."
Sit back and wait for their faces when they turn the corner.
good content and interesting ideas but I have to admit that I kept watching mostly to try and work out your accent. Australian? New Zealander? American? Australian/New Zealander who moved to America?
ooh, that "tripwire and nothing happens" is amazing
silent alarm
I also like Matt Colville's idea about traps that split the party. Trapdoor opens, and one or more of the party members is down a hole. Alarm also sounds to let the goblins know you're there, and goblins appear, either in the pit below, or up above with the remaining team members.
EDIT: But I'm definitely stealing your ideas. Love the Team us/team them principle.
I now really want to put a password trap in a game just so I can justifiably put 'Shibboleth or Aboleth?' in my GM notes.
One of the most memorable moments from my current campaign was when our rogue successfully disarmed the trap on a small box, only for us to find out later that the trap was Power Word Kill!
(Also, in that same underwater ruin, THE EYE OF VECNA was just on the floor in a jar, lol)
I love how you just use a lollipop as a pointer. And the random intros are my favorite.
When she was first talking about the anatomy of a trap, I thought she was talking about hentai traps lol.
I mean... you could put those in too...
Riddle on the door trap is actually valid, you just misclassify it as a Lock&Key trap, when in fact it is a TrialForTheWorthy one, and if classified that way makes a lot of sense
One can be worthy not only in body but in the mind as well :)
So with Severus, he just decided that doesn't matter who is at the philosofer's stone door, if they can solve the puzzle, then they're worthy to get past his "layer". Some people are just incredibly naive :D
YES! This needed to be said!
My game has a wizard's tower. If you walk up to the door, a magic mouth spell tells you to "Go away, the master isn't in, you have no business here!" Written on the doormat is a moderately difficult riddle. The answer to the riddle sets off the glyph of warding on the door, injuring/killing the intruders and alerting the wizard's minions.
He's forgetful though, so there's a spare key under his doormat.
Concerning your suggestion to improve the Leap Of Faith: actually, the camouflaged bridge begins a bit below the ledge where Indy is standing, so when he's stepping out, he falls about 30cm before hitting the bridge. This way, anyone testing the air beyond the ledge will in fact find nothing, unless they crouch down very low, while still allowing the bridge to be connected to that side of the chasm. Also, Indy would surely have fallen to his death in your variant, as he didn't actually _leap_, but simply take a step forward. But well, he did not take a leap as instructed, so that's probably what should have happened ;)
To me the worst traps are the ones that take place in ancient ruins where people supposedly lived. "Honey can we maybe skip dinner with the Smiths tonight? I don't want to have to bother with stepping on the correct 16 pressure plates again just to open their front door, plus I'm still sad about how our daughter Diane died last time to the poison darts that shoot out when you step on the wrong stone."
Personally I joke that the reason ancient civilizations like the dwarves in Elder Scrolls and Azmeri in Path of Exile aren't around anymore is because their obsession with traps killed them off (either by making simple tasks like opening the front door take incredibly long, or by constantly suffering accidental deaths). At least the Harry Potter example makes sense because they're sealing something in a vault.
Tolkien's "password"door works because it was NOT a password door. The CHARACTERS we follow saw it as a "riddle", but it wasn't built as such. They only saw it that way because the word used to open the doors of Durin were lost to time, at least to any manner of record keeping. At the time they were built, those meant to know how to get in (those particular elves they were friends with, that is why the message was written in their language, not dwarvish) they would know the word if they needed. Most of the time, they wouldn't, as the doors were usually open, with just guards checking who comes and goes. It only became a "riddle" due to the loss of knowledge and the death of the original inhabitants, not while it was still in use, and that is pretty realistic.
Originally, the "riddle" was really more of a greeting and instructions to the elves, and a symbolic gesture (to them, the doors would always be open[able]).
Traps are intended as a defense. That's obvious and should go without saying - yet, nobody seems to pause to consider how a trapper would intend to bypass or disarm their own traps. There's no good in trapping your treasure chamber so thoroughly that even you can't get to your stuff, right?
So then the challenge is the mindset of the person who laid it. And you really laid the issue out far better than anyone has ever explained it before.
Not sure if this was mentioned, but sometimes the purpose of traps is simply to wound, harm, or sometimes weaken "team them." Think Dumbledore and Harry retrieving the (fake) locket horcrux. Or small dart traps meant to weaken them before the kobold ambush
When Dael was talking about triggering an alarm trap, but nothing happening seemingly, therefore increasing the paranoia, I personally like to ask my player to roll a DEX save in that moment. It doesn't matter what they roll, because you describe them attempting to dodge whatever threat they think they might have let loose, only for nothing to happen. It temporarily raises the tension as the try and figure out what they tripped as they roll, but then realizing it wasn't a "deadly" trap that feeling of paranoia then begins to set in. It helps to simulate that reaction much better I have found. Additionally, the players I have done that too have enjoyed the idea of what seems to be a pointless roll, as it helped to serve the atmosphere and immerse them more.
I disagree slightly on the poison trap. It'd be more malicious for it to seem ineffective at first and then kill everyone over time or after a while.
Like you do with rat poison to keep the rats eating and get more than one who tested the trap.
It would be more malicious, but it would also fail to do its job, since the tomb artifacts would just get picked off the dead bodies of the robbers by some other blokes.
@@SimeonDenk not if the door is fake to begin with and the actual entrance to the artifact room is a secret door hidden in a dead-end.
(preferably behind an illusory wall)
Poisons can also be used, not to damage, but to disorient. Poisons that paralyze or make the person sick. Give them vertigo, nausea, fogged thought processes, or hallucinations. Heck, the latter can work really well if incorporated into the dungeon's design. If the intruder is hallucinating, they end up getting freaked out by decorations or the like. They're certainly liable to miss other traps, or become so fearful of traps that aren't there that they depart.
Not to mention the utility of a poison that just puts someone to sleep. If the designer intended to return to the trapped area frequently, they'd expect to find and deal with anyone who tripped the trap.
@@Daredhnu If the tomb is protected by a fake door, the poison trap is pointless.
@@SimeonDenk you've heard of the term "Decoy" right, the point is the people trying to rob you don't know that the door is fake, they try to open the door get poisoned and die, then even if they manage to open the "door" it leads to nothing so they gain nothing, so nothing to loot from their soon to be dead bodies.
In defense of the starter adventure trap that you mentioned: making traps make sense also means putting them in an economic context. Traps cost money and you’re not going to put a trap on a gem that costs a large percentage of the cost of the gem itself. People with player Class Levels are rare once-in-a-generation heroes, you’d never think to plan for them. You plan for normal people who would never have more than 6 hit points.
Watching a video about traps and she goes wight into "we need to talk about harry potter". My trans ass don't know weather to laugh or despair that something this innocent feels like a reference.
the doors of durin aren't even really locked, speaking the inscription out loud in the language it's written opens the door. its a lock like a pull sign on a door is a lock. and it does totally work to keep out the rif raf. if you dont know the location and dont know sindarin you aint getting in, but basically any traveler coming from Eregion would pass that basic criteria and the door was made for them, so.
I didn't know this existed...
But this is great
One of my favourite traps is when Nott triggered one and she had to make a dex save which she failed and a bunch of snakes fell on her. However they were long dead because someone forgot to feed them 😂
“And a player died... AND IT WAS SICK!!!! .... and heartbreaking...” I love that
Gotta fix that cube girl :) triggered;)
On Potter trap sequence: Particularly poor potions student blows up Snape, the stone is now beyond retrieval. Love the video.
put on a firefighter's jacket and sprint through the purple flames?
You must be one of the most fun GMs! It would be amazing to be one of your players ^_^
Thank you youtube alchorythm. I'm in love with this channel already! I like the "poison that drains your strength so you can't lift the thing you wanna steal" but don't kill the cleaner who you hired. But Do you ever feel like you over think things? ^^" most traps are there to be one of 5 encounters between long rests. other traps are there
because people don't have money to build deathspell traps. Most of my
traps are there to deplete the stuff out of my players batman belt, got
antipoison? I got a poison trap. Got antifreeze? I got a freezething.
Love the vid.
Love these videos. You're my go to channel for DnD stuff, even Matt Colville isn't as good to listen to as you are.
Whenever I run a game with goblins I love making them frustrating. All of their traps are loud and whilst fighting them they will spend their time laughing at you and mocking you. Each trying their best to impress their friends with the funniest insult. They will even avoid dealing the killing blow if they can do something that would irritate or humiliate the character
I've been doing the same jeapordy rant forever lol
You maniac. It's 2am here in the USA when you uploaded.
However, bless you for your content. I think you are continuing to forge an amazing community.(Also, did you get Matt's strongholds and followers PDF?)
I DID get the PDF and it is BEAUTIFUL
Your videos are just wonderful. Even an old dog like myself can get good new ideas...thanks for the concrete examples from stories, as well. (I love the way you think about goblins as well. I may adopt that!)
I just wanted to let you know that I saw this comment at the end of a very long and exhausting night of work and it made my heart happy :)
Wait how do you already have a MCDM shirt :O ?
Vitamin c for colds is a myth actually, you should take some zinc since your body uses a ton of it to make antibodies (it also helps with the sore/achy feeling you get since it's caused by the lack of zinc). I hope you feel better soon
Well as to snape's potion riddle in the Philosopher's Stone. Remember he was pretending to be working for Voldemort at the time, and he was also 100% sure harry and the like would try and go after Voldemort. So he had to design a trap that seemed legit, but had a very simple solution to get through, both for his "boss" and for the 11-year-old boy he'd sworn to keep alive somehow.
That is a much better excuse than some that have been offered!
A good trap for a wizard trying to awe intruders could be a glyph that summons/constructs a magical being that is entirely overpowered, yet bound to remain at the trap, so the intruders can run away, properly cowed.
A note to include, which may or may not be addressed depending on how smart you want the trapper to be: the being would be bound by the exact commands of the summoner, so depending on what those commands were determines what the players need to go though in order to get by. For example, whether or not the being can return fire, or hunt down those that snipe it from outside its bound space.
I agree that a poison trap on a lock should be deadly-but only if the substance is intended to be a deadly poison. What if it's actually a marker dye or pheromone lure for something further along? The fact that the stuff is bad for you is incidental to its purpose. Perhaps the poison is only intended to weaken them for a later test of worthiness, similar to how the Black Panther had to give up his powers before a trial-by-combat.
One should never fail to consider the intent and personality of the trap-layer. It's entirely possible that the traps are supposed to be small and additive, so that victims suffer a horrible death by inches. The default assumption is typically that PC adventurers are Good(tm), and the place they're breaking into is owned by somebody Evil(tm), so cruelty should definitely be on the menu.
GET WELL SOON, DAEL!
Goonies! Traps that give you enough time to panic before almost killing you. Play the bones!
@MonarchsFactory weird that you criticized the Kazad Dum door lock, when it aligns perfectly with your Us vs Them concept. Knowledge of the sindarin spoken and written language is the key, elves and elf-friends are Us, everyone else is Them. What gives?
This video was very cash money of you.
Ok I found you yesterday and I've been binging on your D&D stuff. I've been playing for ages but I have only just started DM. I have to say, your videos are so heckin valuable. Really well researched, full of fresh ideas, AND entertaining.
The quality of what you do is striking especially considering how much stuff there is about RPGs on youtube these days. Keep going girl and thank you
Every D&Dael episode is pure gold ❤️
Observation #1: Expect the ire of the Internet to fall upon you. You were critical of both Harry Potter and Tolkien. It shall not pass without incident.
Observation #2: Suddenly, I really want a goblin video.
I you like anime, there's a pretty popular one that even has some softcore porn. :)
Yes, please, give us your take on goblins!
I loved trap design when I used to run games...
Players are walking down a stone hallway. There is a corner ahead. A kobold walks around the corner and takes a pot shot at them. He runs back around the corner. The players give chase (mostly worrying that he will raise an alarm). They watch as he runs through a solid stone wall. In hot pursuit the player decides, well, it must be an illusion and tries running through too. The bottom half was.
You could substitute an illusionary kobold but at least in the edition I was playing (probably 2nd or 3rd ed D&D at the time) Illusionary Wall was a midlevel permanent spell but having a permanent illusion of a kobold would have been expensive.
I had a character that had a secret emergency exit to her house (she was a thief). It was a vine lined stone maze. She was an elf, and a small species at that. Pricks from the vine would put people to sleep (as well as do a small amount of damage as they moved through if they kept making their saves... it was narrow enough so even half-elves would be pretty snug, and if they had armor on it was pretty hopeless, although that would protect them from the thorns at least. Being smaller and dexterous she could mostly navigate the thorns. Being an elf she was immune to sleep effects so if she did get one or two scratches she'd be okay. To make it more dangerous the maze had two entrances. One whole half of the maze was a blind dead end... you'd failed before you even realized you were in a maze. There was spell- maybe programmed illusion? that let you set a trigger action but it could stay indefinitely until triggered. It would make the person who triggered it invisible and at the same time make an illusionary double of them programmed to carry out a specific action. The action? Go down the wrong maze entrance. If you did somehow make it through the right half it came out in a cave. She knew how to avoid the bear that slept there. (I think maybe there was a sleep potion hidden nearby, but it's been a long time.)
I had window traps where to unlatch the windows the thieves had to put their fingers under to reach a clasp on the inside. It was a common lock in the city. Occasionally though there would be trapped versions that had a guillotine like action (inside, outside or under the sill) that would take the thief's fingers off.
My favorites though were the ones defending my archmages house. She had a set of altars that you could pray at. One would grant you a strength spell, another haste, a couple buff spells to help you deal out more damage. It was important not to pray at the last altar though. That one cast a chaos spell on you, making you attack all your friends. (Not sure about the rules now, but because the players were voluntarily receiving the spells they didn't get saves). She also had a powerful enchantment on her spellbook. If you opened it a gust of wind spell closed it again and a powerful forget spell would hit you. Undaunted you would, of course, open the spellbook, which would close itself and make you forget that you'd opened it, over and over. Meanwhile she'd have been alerted and be on her way to deal with you. She had a sanctuary inside a prismatic sphere. There was a powerful spell out of FR called Spell Engine that would suck the power out of any spell cast in it's radius, which was larger than the radius of the chromatic sphere, which made deactivating the sphere virtually impossible. The only solution we found was an obscure spell called prismatic blade that could be made permanent. You'd have to know you'd need it though and bring it in advance to have any chance. Spell Engine would disrupt any new spells cast in the area (including the owners) but there were several powerful safeguards from pre-existing magics in place. The whole place was proof against teleportation-ed, but there were pre-existing pads attuned to the owner that would only work for them... allowed under the spell engine, but only as pre-existing magic. All of it was 2nd Edition D&D and totally legit. Spent a lot of gold on the place. No one ever did try to break in though and the campaign ended before it was finished.
Edit- ooo, I had a goblin trap master who was being chased by the players. They thought they'd caught up with him. They saw his figure sitting in front of a campfire. I knew my players well. The campfire was just outside an old barn. His horse was on the other side of the barn. His back was to the barn. They needed to capture him. One of the players stalked closely and jumped on him... or rather the pile of his clothes stuffed with straw sitting on top of the bear trap attached to the chain tied to the horse. The trap snapped, the horse spooked, dragged the player through the fire. The icing on the cake was the rope died to the cut support beam that brought the barn down on the rest of them. No fatalities but it leveled the playing field enough that the trapmaster was able to escape.
I like the idea of an old dwarven stronghold which was once defended from an army of elves.
The trap makes a big saw appear 5ft above the ground. It would just miss any wee dwarf - but a sneaky elf would lose their head!