In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, a lot of details of traps were left undefined. Certainly, perusing the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Basic Rules, I had little idea about how and when to use traps. And, more importantly, what role they played in the game.

One of the oddest things was how bad thieves were at dealing with them. A first-level thief had about a 20% chance of finding the trap, and then also had to roll to disarm the trap! So, for any given trap, your low-level thief only had a 4% chance of success.

Which is, of course, ridiculous.

The thief did not appear at all in the original Dungeons & Dragons rules; they came later. These days, they are known as rogues and trap-finding and disarming is much less a factor in their capabilities. And with the high passive Perceptions of party members, finding traps is often child’s play.

Why Use Traps?

So, a question I ask myself is this: What purpose do traps have in the game? And, as far as I can work out, there are two primary reasons.

The first is to add flavour to a dungeon. The traps there are to be noticed. If you walk into an Egyptian tomb, then you expect traps – despite the idea of traps in tombs more coming from the imagination of storytellers rather than really existing. And so, going into a tomb and not finding a trap feels wrong. The point is not to kill the characters, but rather to say, “Hey! This place has stuff you expect in it!”

The second, and the more interesting one for our purposes, is to challenge the characters. My simple rule on every encounter in the game is that it is interesting if it makes the players think. And traps, when done correctly, get players away from the well-known paths of combat and into a situation where they are dealing with something unexpected.

And this is where the thief ability to find and remove traps has problems: Because it provides a boring short cut to dealing with the trap. If there is a poison needle protecting a treasure chest and the thief cannot disarm it, the players need to make decisions.

The Basics of Traps

Traps need to have a consequence and a method of overcoming them. However, the process need not be strictly scripted. As I have mentioned before, an open pit in a corridor can entertain a group for half-an-hour or more if they have not seen one before. And that is because they need to determine the method with which they handle it!

It is worth remembering that not every trap need be disarmed to be rendered ineffective. I posted recently about a trapped Fish Idol I used in my game. I did not, when designing it, determine the way the players could disarm it. I just worked out its mechanism.

Then, when the players found it, they made various suggestions, and I ruled on which would work. The one the players eventually tried – removing the eyes with a dagger while standing behind the idol – was not one I had thought of, but I ruled that it was successful.

That was, I believe, a successful trap: It made the players think about how to handle it!

A trap which allows a simple method of disarming it, such as the Dexterity check with Thieves’ Tools, sort of sits more in the area of being there for flavour rather than being a challenge. This does somewhat depend on your group. Some players enjoy the puzzles that provided by traps, while others would prefer using a simple check to overcome them. So, pay attention to what your players want.

Complexity Through Situation

Traps tend to work poorly on their own unless they are complex enough to engage the players. However, if the trap is not the only element of an encounter, then a simple trap does not feel out-of-place.

Shawn Merwin and Teos “Alphastream” Abadia recently touched on this in their Down With D&D podcast, and it is well worth listening to their thoughts on the subject. They describe some of the chief problems with combining a trap with monsters. The most common? It is probably that the best solution is to deal with the monsters first and then deal with the trap. Instead of it all being one encounter, it is two – with the trap providing complications for the first.

I think this is more of a problem if you have a predetermined method you want the players to use to deal with the trap. Having the trap’s effect just be a complication is interesting enough, especially if the players or monsters could use it to their advantage.

I am torn between how much you want the solution to be a bare mechanical solution (succeed at an Intelligence (Arcana) check to disable the magical trap) or instead be more specific about the basis of the trap and then work from those basics to allow solutions. “The eyes of the idol hold in the pressured ooze, and it sprays out when they are removed”.

There is likely no “best” solution that fits all situations. However, if you get the players to think about the encounter, then you are doing well!

Closing Thoughts

There are many, many more words that could be written about traps – indeed, I have barely touched on them – but a large part of this article consists of a philosophy of Dungeons & Dragons encounters I am considering: if the players need to make choices, I am designing them right.

But it is nice to have exciting complications to throw at the players, and even better if they are aware of them in advance. If you can smash a chest instead of disarming it, what then if you have fragile potion vials that are destroyed by the force used? Using a firebolt to burn off the lock may ignite the scrolls and cloth inside.

Traps should be there to entertain the players, but it is not always easy to succeed on that!