This here’s another lesson in my ongoing True Game Mastery course. If you’ve not been following the series from the start, now’s not the time to jump in. Use the course index to catch up.
The True Game Mastery Course Index
Enough frigging combat already, am I right? Two long-ass lessons with four lessons’ worth of information are too damned much. Time to cover something different. But not too different. I’m still teaching you how True Game Masters resolve various kinds of in-game conflicts that arise from Encounters. Right?
Because Encounters don’t come in kinds, right?
If you’ve been paying attention, today’s lesson’s gonna be a lot easier than the last two. It’s about managing the action when the players’ characters Encounter traps and hazards. And, as with the combat crap, I’ve already told you how to do it. You just don’t see it yet.
So, open up the hangar cause here comes the spoon-feeding airplane…
Blundering Into Trouble
Welcome back, dumbasses.
I wasn’t kidding last time; that’s what I’m calling you now.
Today’s lesson: how do True Game Masters handle the game when the players’ characters blunder into traps and hazards. And when they don’t
What Are Traps and Hazards?
What’s a Resource?
I recently made the mistake — twice — of trying to discuss — and compliment — the attrition-based mechanical design in fantasy adventure roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons. And all I managed to do was confuse two-thirds of you and destroy what tiny shred of patience I had left for your nonsense.
I also discovered some of you have no idea what constitutes a resource. Because many of you acted like certain things that absolutely, definitely are resources don’t count or don’t have value. And since we’re talking about things that deplete resources today, it’s kind of important to know what that means.
Anything you’ve got and can expend, use up, or lose is a resource. Hit points and hit dice are resources. Spell slots are resources. Money’s a resource. Torches are resources. Available inventory space is a resource. Yes, empty space in a backpack is a resource. Favors owed and reputation and glory and honor are resources. Even if there ain’t a mechanical system in place for handling them. Time’s also a resource. Both in-game time and real-life playtime are resources. And that’s true even when there ain’t a ticking time bomb about to blow.
I’ve been making a point of being pedantically, definitionally clear since How to Run Encounters… NOT! — and I know you all love pedantically clear definitions — but I don’t think that’s always the best approach. There’s a time for pedantical clarity and there’s a time to trust you to know shit when you see it. And this is one of those times.
The second one.
You know what constitutes a trap. You know what constitutes a hazard. Conceptually. And while I’m going to spew out a pedantical definition, know that True Game Masters don’t spend a lot of time arguing about what lands within and without the fuzzy lines around conceptual, game-design definitions.
This lesson’s about managing the actions when the characters encounter harmful but inanimate elements of the game world. Traps are usually — but not always — crafted by sentient beings whereas hazards usually — not always — comprise natural conditions, forces, and events. Some traps and hazards cause harm or deplete resources whereas others create obstacles and still others incite undesirable consequences.
None of that’s prescriptive though. If you’ve got something your gut tells you is a trap but that doesn’t quite fit that definition, it ain’t the trap that’s missing something, it’s the definition.
The point is, traps and hazards are what you think they are. They’re bad things or happenings that make like difficult. And they’re usually at their worst when they go undetected.
Game Masters Resolve; Adventure Designers Create
Just a quick reminder that this series of lessons is for Game Masters running games and resolving Encounters. It ain’t for Adventure Designers building games and planning Encounters. That’s called Homebrewing and it’ll be covered later this year. Much later because I keep discovering new things about running games you need to learn.
How Mere Game Executors Think Traps Work
Mere Game Executors suck at handle traps. That might not surprise you; they’re Mere Game Executors, after all. But most Mere Game Executors actually handle most shit perfectly adequately and run reasonably okay games. But not when it comes to traps. Do you know why most players and Game Masters hate traps and excise them from their games? It’s because even otherwise fine Game Masters fuck them up so bad.
Player: I search for traps.
Game Master: (Rolling Dice) You have detected a trap. If you open the chest, acid will spray in your face!
Player: That is not good. I disarm the trap.
Game Master: (Rolling Dice) Unfortunately, you did not disarm the trap.
Player: Bother. I disarm the trap again.
Game Master: (Rolling Dice) This time you have disarmed the trap.
Look familiar? Most Game Masters — even the good ones — basically handle traps like that. And it’s crap. If you don’t see why it’s crap, reread Dealing with Problematic Actions. It’s all there and I ain’t explaining it again.
Most Game Masters see traps — and hazards — that way. Even if they dress them up with pretty prose, it’s still Roll-to-Detect-Now-Roll-to-Disarm. And that leads to them thinking some pretty stupid things.
Passive Scores Take the Gameplay Away
For example, when Game Masters see Encounters with traps as basically two dice rolls, they can’t fathom why it would be a good idea to drop fifty percent of the gameplay by comparing Passive Perception scores to static detecting Difficulty Classes. The idea of declaring a trap Detected without a die roll really frosts their asses.
No Rogues Means No Traps
Likewise, boiling traps down to Detect-and-Disarm Die-Rolling leaves Game Masters — and players — feeling like it just ain’t fair to throw a trap at a party if a member ain’t trained in Trap Disarmery. Which is fair enough. Given the trap above — if you open the chest, you get acid face — what the hell else can you do?
Consequently, putting any treasure behind a trap’s basically just saying “This is only for parties that bring rogues.”
You Must Be This Hurt to Level Up
Finally, when you’ve got a Game Master with the Detect-and-Disarm Die-Rolling mindset who also doesn’t understand the nature of Challenges and Resources, they can’t stomach it when players circumvent their hazards through clever play or blind luck. Such players haven’t overcome anything and they haven’t earned anything because they didn’t take any risks. I ran into this shit long ago when I talked about The Quicksand Incident. People were all like, “But if the players see the quicksand and just go around it, they haven’t done anything. They’re not even playing a game at that point.”
Get Your Mental Shit Together
Below, I’m going to tell you how to resolve Encounters with traps and hazards like a True Game Master. But if you’ve got any of the above misconceptions in your head, you’re going to think I’m nuts. That I’m telling you to ruin your game. So if you see yourself reflected in any of the above statements, you’ve got to get those misconceptions the hell out of your brain right now. Pour bleach in your ears and swirl it around if you’ve got to. I can’t help you until you do at least that much on your own.
Remember, your job — your only frigging job — is to tell the players what their characters see, hear, perceive, and know and then to determine how their resultant actions turn out using your own brain and whatever mechanical tools you’ve got handy. And nothing else. If those mechanical tools include Passive Scores, quit whining and use them. They’re a good tool. If the players surmise something terrible’s going to spray from the chest and consequently, they stand behind it, reach over the lid, and open it from the back, they’ve circumvented the trap. If they walk around the pressure plate and don’t spring the trap they did something and they deserve a prize. Hell, they deserve a bigger prize than the idiots who got blasted by the trap and managed to not die by virtue of having enough hit points.
Fantasy adventure games are about spending as few resources as possible. If the players get through your deathtrap dungeon without a scratch, they didn’t cheat, they didn’t avoid the game, they won! Don’t be a sore loser.
Know Thy Hazards
Given your job’s to tell the players what their characters see, hear, perceive, and know and determine how their actions play out, you must know the world in which the game takes place. Traps and hazards ain’t a thing you can abstract into stats and dice. They don’t work that way.
Mechanically speaking, a trap or hazard is a cause-and-effect thing. There’s a triggering If and a terrible Then.
- If someone opens the chest, then they are sprayed with acid.
- If someone steps into this space here, then a pit opens beneath them and they fall.
- If someone steps onto the bridge, then it collapses.
- If someone steps into the patch of quicksand, then they are sucked down into the earth.
- If someone moves within thirty feet of the crimson mold, then it drains them of hit points.
Those If-Then mechanical descriptions are a totally adequate way to describe a trap that goes off as designed, they’re not sufficient to handle any interactions beyond the trap going off.
True Game Masters know what their traps and hazards look like. They know how they work. They maybe can’t draw an engineering schematic — it’s okay if the guts of the trap are hidden in a big ole black box — but they can describe the interactive bits. They know, roughly, how the chest knows when it’s opened and they know where the acid comes from.
Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder do expect you to know that shit. Anyone who says that Detect-and-Disarm Die-Rolling is “just following the rules” needs to crack their books. The Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide describes narratively each trap presented on pages 120 to 123 and even includes what sabotaging many of them might look like in the world. While traps in the Pathfinder Second Edition Core Rulebook are given mechanical stat blocks, they’re preceded with a detailed explanation of trigger mechanisms and trap effects starting on page 520. The same can be found in the original Pathfinder Core Rulebook from pages 416 to 424. And they’re both cribbing off and building on the excellent trap design discussion in the Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide v.3.5 that starts on page 67.
The reason more people don’t know this shit is because they skip the text, read the stat blocks, and think they know it all.
Regardless, your job — as a Game Master — is to understand your traps and hazards well enough to describe their presence and action in the world. And if the adventure you’re running doesn’t provide you with those details, you’ve got to make them up. And if you don’t know how, you’ve got some homework to do, don’t you?
How to Run Trap Encounters… NOT!
Back in How to Run Encounters… NOT!, I said good not-Encounter runnery came down to two things: introducing Encounters and reacting to the player’s actions. No shit, right? That’s all an Encounter is. The characters Encounter something and then interact with it until they’re done. Or until it’s done with them. Whatever.
That there’s why you have to understand your traps and hazards as elements of the world, not just game mechanics. That understanding tells you how to present the Encounter and what happens when the players interact with it.
The Moment of Awareness… of a Trap or Hazard
The Traps of Soulsborne
Want to see precisely the level of detail with which you must understand traps and hazards to run them? Play a Soulsborne game. Play Dark Souls or Bloodborne or Elden Ring.
Because those games reward players who pay attention and play carefully — and because there’s no Disarm Trap skill or button — they make everything you need to know visible in the environment. You can see pressure plates and trip wires and mechanical bear traps if you look carefully. You can see the holes from which spikes issue or flame sprays or arrows shoot. And you can see the corpses, bones, and bloodstains from many traps’ previous victims. And you can even see when the environment’s used to camouflage the trap.
Encounters happen when the players’ characters become aware of something with which they might interact. And Encounters with traps and hazards hang on that initial moment of awareness. It’s that moment — and how you handle it — that makes or breaks a good Encounter with a trap or hazard. And hopefully, it’s obvious why that is.
An Encounter with a trap or hazard is very different depending on whether you notice it before it’s been triggered or after. As such, most traps are purposely made hard to notice.
Successfully introducing an Encounter with a trap or hazard begins away from the table. It starts with you deciding just what the characters might become aware of and when they might become aware of it.
Being Aware
Let’s talk for a second about what awareness really means. I kind of danced around it in How to Run Encounters… NOT! and Dealing with Problematic Actions when I said that Game Masters give too damned much information away. You’ve got to provide sensory information on a drip feed. Especially when the characters encounter a trap or hazard.
Can we agree that the roll perception to see the trap and know everything about it approach is total horseshit? It’s how Game Masters turn Encounters with traps into push-button diceplay crap.
Encounters happen when the characters become aware of a thing they might want to interact with. That means awareness is nothing more than a suspicion that there’s something worth investigating. People get suspicious and investigatory long before they have solid information. Hence encounters with war parties across open plains begin when the party spots moving figures a thousand yards away. At that range, it’s possible to see a few people-sized figures moving around, but not to determine anything about them. And encounters with the same war parties in forests begin with the sounds of something crashing through the brush a couple hundred feet over that way.
The point is to present the party with the first significant detail they perceive and invite your players to take actions and make choices. Even if — especially if — those choices are to investigate further, to evade, or to wait and see what happens next.
What Might the Players Notice?
You Ain’t As Alert as You Think
Modern gamers live in a world of light, steel, glass, and plastic. They have no idea how dim, dark, cluttered, textured, and uneven the fantasy adventure world is and how hard it is to spot anything. Even a simple symbol carved into a hewn stone brick is almost impossible to spot without your nose pressed up against it. Especially if the space is abandoned and the walls are covered with fungus or sediment from dripping water.
Torches and lanterns don’t shine like iPhone flashlights. They flicker and they’re way dimmer than any light you’re used to. And medieval torches were smokey as hell. Total darkness is really, really dark. It’s oppressive. Walking through an Underdark cave is walking in a feeble circle of dim firelight in the middle of an utterly black void.
I’ve had players flabbergasted at their character’s failure to spot a thin tripwire in an uneven cave by torchlight. I’ve had fights about this. The real problem is most people don’t realize how crappy their own senses actually are. Your point of visual focus — the area you see in detail — is the size of your thumbnail held at arm’s length. I shit you not. Everything beyond that is just your brain Photoshopping the blur. Sort of.
The point is, if you ain’t pointing the thumbnail-sized center of your field of vision directly at something that ain’t moving, it’s part of the background noise. So, yeah, you can totally miss a tripwire.
There are basically four things that might make characters aware of a trap or hazard. That is, there are four things that might make them suspect something’s lurking nearby and some care is warranted.
First and second, the characters might perceive either the trigger — the pressure plate, tripwire, hidden catch, magical trigger rune, weakened wooden planks, depression in the snow, or whatever — or the delivery mechanism — the acid-spurting nozzle, blade-shooting slot in the wall, dangling stone block, alarm-raising chimes, precariously hanging snowdrift, or whatever.
Third, the characters might notice signs of danger in the environment. They might spot the bones of previous adventurers or hapless animals, scorch marks, shattered arrow bits, scratches in the floor, shattered splinters of broken arrows, the strange mark scratched into the masonry the owner cut to remind him where the trap is, or whatever.
Fourth, the characters might guess — or deduce — that the space or thing they’re investigating is the perfect place for a trap. Some shit just screams trap. Elaborate tile-patterned floors in otherwise plain dungeons, for example, suggest hidden pressure plates. Prominently displayed gem-encrusted idols on pedestals just scream trap. So too does every chest, strongbox, desk drawer, and cupboard in a kobold tinker’s workshop.
The point is, when you’re getting ready to run an Encounter with a trap, you’ve got to consider which elements to present and how to present them in the smallest way possible. Because the goal’s to invite the characters to interact with the situation, it ain’t to set off a trap in their face.
When Might the Players Notice What?
Trap Designer or Game Designer
This lesson ain’t about designing traps; it’s about describing and adjudicating them. But even so, I want to call out the conflict between World Design and Game Design.
As a trap designer living in the Dungeons & Dragons world, the best trap you can build — assuming you have the substantial resources for the massive engineering undertaking that is constructing even a simple mechanical trap — if you’re a trap designer in the world, the best trap you can make is one that’s totally deadly and totally invisible. Step in the wrong place? Bam! Dead.
I know that’s a gross oversimplification and there are lots of reasons to build traps that maim, scare, warn off, or raise alarm. Just go with me.
To a game designer, that’s the worst trap you can ever put in a game. Instant death with no warning? Fuck that. I’m playing something else. The best trap you can put in a game is one the party detects, investigates, and circumvents through attention, insight, and clever play.
Thus adventure designers face the dilemma of constructing traps that give the players a totally fair chance to overcome them while also making sense in the world. Lots of designers forget that part. Then again, lots of Game Masters think the best trap is one the characters spring and almost — but not quite — die from. But that should only happen when the players fail.
Knowing the signs in the world of a trap or hazard, that’s the big issue. Obviously. But it’s also important to know when the players and their characters might notice whatever they do.
To some extent, this is a game mechanics question. Every system’s got rules for deciding what the characters perceive in their environment, but lots of systems are pretty frigging loose about that. And that leads to many Mere Game Executors describing traps and hazards yards away to player characters standing in the doorway. And that’s crap.
Realistically — don’t read into that word choice unless you want a smack upside the gob — realistically, characters shouldn’t perceive the sorts of fine details that identify traps and hazards unless they’re within a dozen feet of them. Whereas Mere Game Executors check Passive Perception scores and describe entire roomsful of detail the moment the characters open a door, True Game Masters provide sparse details and reveal more only as the characters enter — and move about — the space.
GM: The twenty-food square chamber has but one entrance; the doorway Cabe’s currently standing in. The floor is tiled with irregular and uneven flagstones and covered with the dust and grime of ages. The walls are made of stacked masonry with deep seams between the blocks and no mortar. An iron-banded, lacquered oak chest sits in the exact center of the room on a square stone platform. The platform’s just an inch high and only slightly larger than the chest itself. What does Cabe do, Chris?
Chris: Oh, yeah, this looks safe. I’m entering real slow, looking around carefully, especially on the floor in front of me. I’m moving toward the chest.
GM: (Checking Cabe’s Passive Perception score on his Party Tracking Sheet) Good instincts. You notice a depression in the dust and grime in the center of one of the flagstones. What does Cabe do?
Chris: A depression? What do you mean?
GM: It looks like a small hollow or hole bored into the flagstone and filled with grime so it’s difficult to spot.
Chris: Huh. Can I dig it out… carefully… with my finger? Or my belt knife? I don’t want to disturb the flagstone.
GM: Cabe kneels down and works his knife into the depression. The dirt comes loose easily. There’s a hole through the flagstone and into the floor below. When Cabe peers into it, he can see the sharp point of something metal. A recessed spear or spike.
Chris: The kind of spike that might shoot out of the floor if the chest is disturbed or opened or something?
GM: …
Chris: Are there more flagstones with holes in them?
GM: Knowing what to look for, Cabe glances around. There are dozens of such bores in the flagstones in front of the chest and the stone platform and all around. The whole floor surrounding the chest about two feet out seems to have such holes. I’ll show you on the map.
Beth: Well, that seems excessive!
When Things Go Undetected
Once again, it’s normally the game mechanics that decide whether the characters notice the presence of tripwires and trigger plates and quicksand and rotted floor planks. This isn’t to say attentive players can’t — or shouldn’t — use environmental cues to avoid stepping in dangerous spaces whether they can see a pit trap or not. I’m just saying that bad die rolls and poor deductive reasoning can leave players clueless about the hazards around them.
Since the characters can remain oblivious to the traps and hazards around them, you’ve got to know what happens when the characters blunder haplessly into such dangers. And that’s way more situational than you might think. And it’s way less game mechanical too.
How the trap works — in-world and game-mechanically — are big factors sure, but so are the characters’ relative positions and movements. In other words, knowing how the trap works — in the world — and knowing exactly where the characters are and what they’re doing when it goes off are way, way, way, way way more important than knowing its stat block.
If only there was some way of running your game so you always knew precisely where everyone was and what they were doing before you resolve anything. *cough* action queue *cough*.
See? These lessons are just the same shit over and over and over.
The point is, you have to know the precise state of the world and the workings of the hazard when it goes off. Which you can’t figure out in advance. And then, you’ve got to use that knowledge and your brain — first and foremost and regardless of the game’s rules and stats — to figure out the possible outcomes. Once you’ve figured that shit out, then you can use the mechanics to pick the outcome that actually happens.
Because this shit’s all about Adjudication.
Play to Find Out What Happens
The Secret Trap Difficulty Knob
In my last lesson — on combat — I told you that Telegraphing is actually a secret Difficulty knob and that Telegraphing does more to tweak the gameplay Difficulty level than any mechanical statistic. Well, the same’s true of traps. The more noticeable the trap, the more likely the players will notice and investigate it. And the more they can learn by investigating it, the more likely they are to circumvent it. See where this is going?
Of the four aspects of a trap that might raise the characters’ awareness, two are about Telegraphing and Foreshadowing and Environmental Hinting. Want to make traps easier to deal with? Lay that shit on thick. Want to make traps deadlier? Scale back on that shit. It’s that easy. You know you’re hitting the mark when the party correctly guesses that a trap is present and then disables or circumvents it without the rogue pulling out their anti-trap tools.
Running an Encounter with a trap or hazard is no different from running an Encounter with anything else. It’s all about visualizing — and understanding the world — describing it to the players and then resolving their characters’ actions. Brain first, then dice if necessary. And that’s the key to a rich and deep Encounter with a trap or hazard.
Remember, it doesn’t matter how long the Encounter lasts or how close it gets to hurting or killing the characters. It doesn’t matter whether they avoid a trap completely or whether they even know how close they came to death. If the players guess there’s a trap in the room and nope the hell out, that was an Encounter and it was a good one.
I can’t stress this shit enough: running Encounters with traps and hazards is about presenting the world and inviting the players to interact with it. And that’s all it’s about. If you know how the trap works — to some extent anyway — you can figure out what happens in response to anything the players do or don’t do. And if they cleverly hamstring the trap by identifying the kill zone and staying outside it or covering the dart launchers with a steel shield, they won. So be a good sport and give them the win.
Even if they win by blind luck.
Mechanical Sabotage Skills
In many games there exist skills and abilities that allow various flavors of skulldugger to say, “I roll to make the trap not work.” That shit exists. And it should. Realistically, if a trap or hazard’s made of mechanical bits, a tinker should be able to untinker it. But that doesn’t mean you must boil trap gameplay down to “there’s a trap, roll to break it, good job!”
First, you can’t treat that shit like a magical Get Out of Trap Free button. It’s mechanical sabotage. It can’t do anything. When you prepare to run a trap, you must decide what a talented mechanic could do to screw it up. Can they jam pressure plates or cut tripwires or pry the darts from their spring-loaded channels? Is the mechanism even sabotageable without prying up the floor tiles? Will sabotaging the mechanism just set it off?
Why do you have to decide this shit? Because, second, you can’t expect the player to know what’s possible. When your scoundrel identifies the signs of a trap, the player’s going to say, “Look, I have Disable Device; can I untrap the hall?” And you need to be ready with the answer, whether it’s “Sure, you can jam the pressure plate so it won’t move when stepped on” or “No, it’s not a mechanical device, it’s a dirt-covered blanket stretched over a pit.”
I know this is going to sound bonkers to some of you, but Trap Disarm skills and abilities are just one way to deal with traps. They’re not mandatory, they’re not panaceas, they’re highly specialized, and they’re usually not the most efficient solution. If you can avoid triggering a trap or prevent it from hurting you, that’s way more efficient than finagling its guts. That shit should be saved for the sinister traps that can’t be avoided or declawed.
Or when you want to deconstruct a trap and set it up somewhere else.
Or when you want to temporarily bypass a trap, but rig it to kill the idiots following you.
The Song Remains the Same
Angry Houserules: Click! and Whoops!
As something of a True Game Master myself — see how humble I am? — as something of a True Game Master myself, there are two house rules I bring to my tables regarding traps and hazards regardless of the system I’m running. I call them Click! and Whoops!
Under Click!, when a character triggers a trap or hazard I freeze the action at the exact moment the character becomes aware they stepped wrong. Usually just before something terrible happens. When a character steps on a pressure plate, for example, they feel it sink underfoot. Then, they get to decide — based only on the Click! from underfoot — what they do next: freeze, dive forward, jump backward, drop prone, raise their shield in front of them, what. Usually, they’re acting blind, but if they’ve been paying attention, they sometimes guess which direction what kind of hurt might come from. I then determine the result accordingly, granting bonuses to — or penalties on — saving throws. Or bypassing them altogether. In other words, I adjudicate the action.
Actually, I could do a whole article on the sort of awesome scenario design the Click! Rule allows.
Under Whoops!, whenever a character’s futzing — I said futzing — around with a trap or puttering in its vicinity looking for it, there are even-ish odds that a failure’s going to set it off. So, if you suspect there’s a trap and go poking and prodding for it and fail to find it, there’s a 50% chance it reveals itself anyway. In your face. When you accidentally set it off. Same’s true of mechanical sabotage. If you’ve raised the lid of the chest just a hair and you’re trying to unhook the latch inside it that’ll trigger the trap, odds are even that you’ll say “whoops” and shortly thereafter, yell “cleric!”
What’s the key to running an Encounter with a trap or hazard like a True Game Master? It’s simple. Just run your whole game like a True Game Master and run Encounters with traps and hazards the way you run your whole game. That’s the running theme in this whole series of lessons about resolving Encounters.
It’s just using the same core skills in every situation. In this case, it’s about using those core skills to…
- Determine in advance what details traps and hazards present in the world, especially their triggers and mechanisms and any environmental cues that warn of their presence.
- Present the smallest of those details when the players’ characters should become aware of them and use those details to draw the players into investigating further.
- Dole out the information on a drip feed as the characters explore their environment.
- Track the characters’ positions, actions, and movements at all times.
- Adjudicate traps based on how they work and what the characters are doing.
When it comes to trap-disabling skills, don’t treat them like magical anti-trap spray. They’re mechanical sabotage skills. They’re circumstantial, situational options, they’re not panaceas. And they don’t always work.
Above all, remember that the best trap is one the players know exists and avoid through clever play or lucky guesswork. If your players bypass or declaw your traps without ever rolling dice, they’re winning, not losing.
Celebrate that shit.
I find myself nodding along to all of this, it follows logically from what’s been discussed before. Thanks!
Great article! I only get to the table about once a month, so it’s hard to build the habits this series recommends, but the main things I’ve used to great success (I like it, the players like it and the game is better) are Click!, describing the first thing they perceive and telegraphing traps and hazards. The Goblin punch traps principles were also great with that.
The further from your thumbnail you get, the more bonkers it gets. You can’t perceive colour at the edge of your vision because there are no cones in that part of your retina, so your brain predicts the colour and that’s what you “see”. Cones also require more light than the rods which detect shades, so in low light colour is also imperceptible (try observing colour at night, no lights, tiny bit of moonlight or something). Next time we have an evening session I might take a burning torch and my players into the bush so they get it.
I’ve got to admit that sidebar on Attrition, together with *You Must Be This Hurt to Level Up* pointed to a belief I had held very unconsciously. I knew that players circumventing the traps (or monsters, for that matter) is a good play and a reward in itself. But, at the same time, a part of me was going on and on how the heck I’m supposed to get a tensed and engaging gameplay if my players find a way around everything. It’s a nuance but it’s very annoying. And it made me very stressed for lots of sessions, worrying about what to challenge my players with.
This series showed me already how to make an engaging gameplay from describing characters’ perceptions and letting them interact with that. But today’s feature showcases how to handle them descriptions and invitations to act without rigorous mechanics that’d impose when to narrate what and who invite to act.
This is one of those instances where the best way to be convinced is just to try it. I definitely have held the viewpoint in the past that if the players just walk around the trap, it’s not interesting. Then I just…ran a couple traps where the players were made aware of the trap’s tells, found the trap, avoided the trap. And it was fun! I don’t think anyone walked away feeling like it was anticlimactic.
What I learned the hard way yesterday: you can’t properly run a trap if you failed to visualize the situation. I am running a heavily modified published adventure and made the mistake of thinking that I already knew what that trap is about since I read the section of it two times in the last months. Of course I didn’t really remember it so I had to hastily skim it at the table but I also didn’t use it directly since the party was fighting other enemies than in the official adventure so they would employ different tactics. So my description of what their characters perceived was a mess and my players had to ask a lot of questions and there were many misunderstandings and much frustration for both sides.
So time to reread the visualization article and do the exercises!
I’ve been doing a variation of Click! for a while, but I have a question about AOE type traps: do you ask the entire group what they do in that case, or do you just ask the one guy and then let the others deal with saves?
Secondly, regarding this example:
“Chris: Oh, yeah, this looks safe. I’m entering real slow, looking around carefully, especially on the floor in front of me. I’m moving toward the chest.
GM: (Checking Cabe’s Passive Perception score on his Party Tracking Sheet) Good instincts. You notice a depression in the dust and grime in the center of one of the flagstones. What does Cabe do?”
Why do you use Passive Perception here instead of just a Perception roll? I’m curious since normally this is the exact case where you have the player actively checking for something that would have you make a check. Do you just use Passive for most of these things?
I suspect that he checked the passive to see if a roll was actually needed at all. No point in throwing those dice when the character already can notice it passively. If the passive was below, the fact that the Character was actively looking for things would have been a reason to give him a roll.
Consider the information the player’s get from different ways of determining the outcome. If the player rolls themselves they get a lot of information that they probably shouldn’t. If the DM rolls in secret the players get the information that there is something to roll about, and given the context they will probably assume traps. Using passive scores is a good tool for determining outcomes without letting the players know that you are determining outcomes.
Also, consider pacing. Rolling dice is not great for pacing. Is it worth the cost for a grimy depression? Passive scores are good for situations where you want to prioritize pacing over the theatre of dice rolling.
Read his article about problematic action resolutions. But, the way I understood it was that he only asks for perception checks when the player uses some kind of physical action to search, like feeling the tiles with the hands, using a long stick to poke, etc. When the character just “look really hard”, you use passive perception.
Well, the issue with “I’m searching for” type rolls is that you might not want them to be open. If the player rolls low, they will question if they reason they don’t see anything is due to the bad roll.
Hence they got more information than they should have.
On the other hand, if you the GM roll behind the screen, they don’t know what the result is. But, why bother rolling dice if you have a stat that’s perfectly fine to adjudicate with?
Great article – it just makes sense. Time to hit the DMG and read up on trap descriptions; I know that this is one of the few things I’ve been lacking in my descriptions of traps. Love the ference to the Soulsborne games – they do so much right. I haven’t played them too much, but I do love how they do mimics. If you stop and look at a chest, if it’s a mimic you can SEE it breathing, and slightly moving on it’s own. Love that little detail. I’m also totally stealing “Whoops!” and adding that to my own game now lol. Thanks Angry!
I definitely agree with everything here and have implemented similar ideas based on your advice in the past, to great effect.
I was wondering how this interacts with Tension Dice Complications. A bunch of the complications you’ve suggested in the past amount to “a trap is triggered”. My first instinct is to handle these the same as everything else, starting at the first chance of noticing and playing it out just like a trap that has been keyed to the room. But on the other hand, Complications are supposed to be a bad thing happening, and the chance to avoid them was already failed when the players let a Complication happen in the first place.
How would you handle trap-like complications like “The floor gives way; a pit trap!” and “Ouch! A thorny plant scratched you. You start to feel dizzy.” Is that was happens at the moment of complication, or is that what will happen if the players botch the Encounter that could happen as a result of the trap?
D&D 5e deserves special mention for presenting its “Mechanical Sabotage Skill” as a clearly defined set of tools that you may be proficient at using on traps and locks. So when a player says “Look, I have Thieves’ Tools; can I untrap the hall?”, I can say “Your thieves tools include a small file, a set of lock picks, a small mirror mounted on a metal handle, a set of narrow-bladed scissors, and a pair of pliers. What do you want to do with them?”
Sounds like a great way of prompting the player to think about the situation (assuming you are already properly visualizing it as Angry describes)
I’ll be running my first 5E game soon, and a lot of the articles here have been really helpful. I read about the Click!/Whoops! scenario in an earlier article and I love the idea. Thank you for sharing it!
I haven’t played any Souls games, but I’ve played Terraria, which also has nasty traps. Many of them rely on the fact that caves and underground rooms are dark, the ground is uneven, and you can’t look everywhere all at once, especially if you’re dealing with enemies. It’s incredibly satisfying to learn to recognize the signs of these traps (strange gaps in the stone, statues in odd places, cracks in bricks) and avoid them, or gather up the mechanisms to sell for cash.
I’ve never understood why some DMs force unavoidable and undetectable traps on their players, or why they get pissy when players find creative solutions to a problem. To me, this always felt like a DM trying too hard to be clever and “win the game.” And it’s never fun.
I tried implementing these changes in our campaign. To my surprise, our Rogue player hated that.
Trying to discern the evidence I narrated, and gradually figuring out the trap design, put a lot of pressure on him around the other players, especially if he couldn’t get it right. On the other hand, if they tried to pitch in – he felt they were stealing his spotlight.
He later explained that since he built his rogue to be (mechanically) good at what he does, he expects to roll the dice – and actually be good at what he considered his character’s “specialty”. That is, without any interaction with the environment required of him.
I can see where he was coming from. But I still felt a bit disappointed by his answer.
I don’t get it. Supposing you are running 5e, he probably has a very high passive perception score, which means his character will spot signs of traps that nobody else will. He also has proficiency with thieves tools, and maybe even expertise. If he tries to sabotage the trap, he has the best chance of going it. Or, if he is the only rogue in the party, he probably is the only one who cans. And if the tries any other action to circumvent the trap, it will probably be a dexterity check, which he also excels at. How can he not roll the dice and be good? And how he don’t have the spotlight?
I may be sounding pedantic here, but I really mean what I’m saying. If I have a player in my table reacting like that, I would have a serious conversation with him. If he is not up to put any though on the game so beat a challenge, he doesn’t want to play a game, and he won’t enjoy my game. And if he wants an encounter all to himself, to demonstrate how powerful his build is, to have a time in the spotlight, RPGs probably aren’t the game for him.
In other words, I think there is a major problem of expectations happening here and I wouldn’t think that it is limited to this specific situation. Like I said, this would be a red flag for me and I really would have a conversation with the player.
As long as we handled traps with the method described in the article as “roll to detect than roll to disarm”, everything was fine. His character was mechanically (passive perception etc) robust, he usually rolled very well, and was happy with the results. He liked this way just fine.
But than I began implementing the changes herein. Suddenly his perception only yields vague clues instead of the whole trap. And now his DM requires an action plan before he may roll his formidable Sabotage Trap skill. That – he didn’t like.
This player and myself – we are childhood friends. Decades, both at the table and away from it. If there is indeed a major expectation problem around the table it came from me, not him. After all, I was the one who changed the way we used to do things.
More of an old-dog, new-tricks kind of problem, I guess. Let me assure you, he is a fine player. We go a really long way back.
Why not just let him succeed with the good role? Give him the vague description, he says, “I use sabotage.” If he rolls well, great! Either tell him what he did, or, tell him to fabricate from his imagination how it goes if it’s interesting.
You will have to tell him at least 3x that he can make up anything he likes before he gets it, but long term, it should deepen the immersion and engagement when he goes, “I did it? Great! Edgar the Craven sees a small hole, perfect for a dart trap, and plugs it with loose rocks and masonry. He uses another stone to trigger the pressure plate, and hears the satisfying crunch of the dart breaking.”
I’m curious to see if Angry replies to this, because I’ve had similar complications with players. I can see the player’s perspective. Traps and environmental hazards ask for a lot more visualization than any other situation for the players.
When players are in combat, they might get some things wrong about the situation, but they can generally fall back on describing some way that they use their weapon to attack the enemy which triggers an attack roll as expected. Same when conversing with NPC’s, there is a lot less precise visualizing required. We can get away with talking it out and having pseudo-conversations that can get the gist of it.
I’ve had groups that play some dungeons and then just say, “Man, I’m really tired of hearing detailed descriptions of architecture. Can we do a city factions adventure or something?”
Unfortunately, where he is coming from is basically anathema to the very concept of a roleplaying game. The very notion of a roleplaying game is that of interacting with a fully-realized world, which is something you cannot get from any other kind of game though some types of systemic video games are getting close. I understand your disappointment, but I recommend strongly that you stick with your guns. Remember what I said way back at the start of this series: that people resist change and that the reasons why they say they dislike things are never trustworthy. Put your foot down and make him stick it out for a few weeks. Only after that should you talk to him for feedback.
It would be reasonable to expect a player who chose to play a rogue, to actually act like one when he is confronted with a trap, wouldn’t it? However, I must admit that this isn’t the reason I was disappointed with him. It was a more selfish reason – I was trying to improve as a DM, and I felt that his behavior was holding me back.
When I’m back at the DM helm (we rotate…) I’ll reintroduce the mechanism.
Also, this is a great opportunity to thank you sincerely. A reluctant rogue notwithstanding, the results I’m getting when I implement your lessons are PHENOMENAL.
What player reaction have you expected? This player quite clearly chose his character concept with a different style of play in mind (which is easy to say, now, from the outside, with time to think about it…). As I understand it, Angry tries to make Player Skill matter. And your player chose his character concept based on the idea that Avatar Strength matters more than Player Skill. He payed the opportunity costs for choosing class, specializations and so on to have spotlight moments in certain scenes. And you devaluated his choices by GMing a different style of play. So this problem quite likely will arise again and again until you have spoken out.
Maybe you could use his Disarm Trap skill also as a clue finding knowledge skill. Therefore his Avatar Strength would provide a higher level of intel to support your player’s chance to make advantageous decisions in his spotlight scenes?
I expected a ttrpg gamer with about 3 decades of experience, some of which spent behind the DM screen, to recognize an improvement when he sees one. Even if that improvement doesn’t benefit his (current) character as it was built under different assumptions.
I understand this difficulty as an old-dog, new-trick type of problem, compounded by improper communication on my part as the DM at the time. Apparently talking old time friends out of old time habits is very hard. Who knew.
When I’ll have another opportunity to reintroduce the system I’ll have to make sure I do a better job explaining the changes to my players. Don’t know quite how to go about that but I guess I’ll have to figure it out.
If this wasn’t a trap, but a “puzzle encounter” would the players reaction have been the same? Or is this merely a player expectation problem?
If it was a puzzle then most of the same skill checks could have been made, and no one would be any wiser. But, when there’s a large “this is a trap” sticker on the puzzle people suddenly expect to just roll dice and be done with it.
“I want to use my solve puzzle skill to solve this puzzle” said no one (Well I guess someone did… when they want to Investigation roll their way through everything)
I look at this from a different perspective. Think of a Ranger using Wilderness Survival or Tracking. Either would be very complex to roleplay and would rely on skills the player running the character simply lacks. Worse, the rest of the party blundering around could only make it worse since both the players and their characters lack these skills. The GM would need to read some of Tom Brown’s books or something similar. Then use enough exposition so the player has a chance to figure it out.
What you can do is introduce some really straightward traps that are tricky in world to disarm. Like, there’s a hidden lever on a very narrow ledge that will undo the poison and you can make it pretty clear where it is.
Baby steps, I guess.
This seems very common in modern D&D such as 5E and Pathfinder 2. The focus has become very much dependent on making the perfect builds. This in turn makes players think their character is their abilities.
Especially when the game differentiates abilities down to the micron, and everyone expects to fill a role in a group. Instead of the group coming together to solve problems, people expect to be the one who press a button on their character sheet, and magic happens. (For this I also blame videogames, which tend to solve most problems this way)
Whilst i do agree that this mindset is very prevalent in the D20/DnD space, I don’t think i agree with the perception that it is prevalent in PF2e. (or at least, insofar as it *is* a problem in 2e, it’s one that stems from a playerbase that cut their teeth on 5e and/or 3.5/pf1e, rather than anything inherent to the system)
The most common roadblock i see more experienced players running into with 2e is frustration at *not* being able to win the game at character creation like they’re used to.
Regardless of it’s other qualities, one thing PF2e does *very well*, is shifting the most impactful decision making away from your character sheet and onto your moment to moment decision making/actions.
I’ll admit my experience with Pathfinder 2 is very slim, so it might just be my perception. But, my perception is also that of the nu-D&D style PF2 is probably the best one.
Maybe I should look into the nuances more.
Remember that the Thief was a later addition and kind of jumbled the rules for handling these things. Before the addition of Thief, most cyaracters could try to do the things a Thief could do. With its addition to the game, suddenly other classes were apparently not allowed to try. A lot of OSR GMs solve this by making the Thief’s skills almost or actually supernatural in origin. Anyone can try to hide behind a stack of boxes. Only a Thief can be hidden by standing still in a shadow like Batman. One of my favorite OSR blog posts suggests making Thief skills basically magical in nature. A Thief makes a special gesture and mumbles some words learned from his master or his guild and it has a chance of unlocking the door. For your situation, I would allow anyone to try to figure out how to disarm the trap, but the player of the rogue can roll a dice to disarm it, and, if successful, all the rogue has done is successfully work his magic to make the trap stop functioning. If unsuccessful they have to disarm it the normal, mundane way.
I think your “Click! Whoops…” sidebar is the most useful bit in this whole chapter. That’s an actionable idea I can start using my very next session! “Whoops” I’ve basically already been doing for years, but “Click!” is a *great* suggestion that I really need to start doing.
Most of the rest flows from everything covered up to now. My players have been pretty resistant to it so far, mind you… they want to roll the dice and just have it work. I’ve compromised so far by letting them roll the dice to disable the trap, and then I describe how they did it. I’m trying to build up to getting the players to describe how they try to disable the trap first and then I let them roll to see if they succeed (if their description is possible or plausible)… but baby steps, I guess?
I’ve got one rule for traps: The more dangerous they are, the more likely I am to make the players aware that there’s something wrong.
I’m currently running the OSR introduction adventure “Tomb of the Serpent Kings” for my Worlds Without Number game. More or less the fist 5 rooms of the dungeon is focused on traps.
The first 4 is the same trap repeated. This is to teach the players, and the GM, that some traps aren’t going to kill you outright, but there is patterns.
The traps are so weak that they didn’t get a lot of warning, the players triggered it once, then figured out how to avoid them the next three times.
The 5th trap is a very elaborate way to kill intruders. Here I described anything that was out of the ordinary around them as they were looking around. For instance the ceiling above the door isn’t covered in the same roots hanging from the ceiling as the rest of the dungeon so far. But that’s all I told them.
We spent a lot of time there, and the players were able to trigger the trap in a way that was safe. I see that as a win. It was a problem, they solved the problem, we had fun.
(We have also spend almost an hour of play time moving a giant rock to the entrance of the dungeon to solve another problem, until the one mage say’s “I think I have a spell for this”)
Thanks for the article Angry, I enjoyed it. I concur with other commenters, this read as an extension of your earlier works, with the novelty being in the clarity of expression. Wish I could send this one back to my younger self!
I don’t see it on the planning, nonetheless would it be conceivable to do an article on how to manage a chase? Given your new pedagogical mindset, I have a feeling it would be quite different from the one you wrote 10 years ago
“If the players get through your deathtrap dungeon without a scratch, they didn’t cheat, they didn’t avoid the game, they won! ” What a short text for such a large amount of misconception-busting truth. Print that sentence along the top of every GM’s screen.