A trap that can be used either for a comedic/low damage effect (with a more harmful/annoying variant) is a set of stairs leading up to a single doorway. Opening the door causes the stairs to fold into a slide and send the characters shooting back down to the bottom of the staircase with only their egos bruised (or a minor amount of damage depending on how long the slide is). Simpleminded characters or NPCs might enjoy deliberately triggering this mechanism over and over again just for the ride.
If you want to cause more hurt, have a Magic Mouth or two pop up near the bottom and recite "Magic Missile" spells at the party while they are trying to get to their feet. Or have the mouths start shouting out warnings, screaming cacaphonously, etc... This will make verbal discussion very difficult between party members and will probably bring any guards and/or wandering monsters in the area in search of the cause of the noise. Or have them conjure up a 'Cloudburst' or similar spell to drench everyone to the bone, extinguish any non-magical, unprotected light sources and just make life a little miserable.
Some of the best traps I've ever encountered weren't really traps at all, they were just ways to make the party (and the players) nervous. Imagine having to crawl through a passageway single-file underneath an enormous stone block while hearing scraping noises the whole time and seeing it visibly shift a few centimeters every few minutes... The DM may never drop the thing (it may just be reacting to geothermal conditions and won't fully block the passage for another 100 years), but I guarantee that everybody will be on edge the whole time if they even decide to go under it. And if the only way down to the next level of the dungeon is to go through, well... *evil grin*
You can also put the fear of the gods into the party by having them encounter other, more unfortunate souls whose bodies have not yet been cleaned out of traps that have been previously triggered and not reset (remember the beginning of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when Indy finds the remains of Forestal?) Even if there is no actual "trap", the psychological effect of seeing five or six goblin corpses absolutely riddled with arrows or darts laying in the center of a section of corridor that has hundreds of holes drilled in the walls would be enough to make any sane party stop and consider their options. At the very least, they find out that it is just an empty threat: the goblins were shot with the arrows AFTER they were dead (any healer, ranger, necromancer or anyone in general who is familiar with dead bodies can tell this with closer inspection), the holes are just empty holes or are even just painted on the walls and there is no trap at all. Even better: they blow a bunch of spells, scrolls, potions or other items teleporting everyone to the other side of the hall, spider-climbing across the ceiling, etc... and either way, you've challenged them as a DM without doing one point of physical damage.
Consider other, more subtle effects that can be used as well.
One area of a dungeon corridor has a bunch of torch brackets with actual lit torches in them while the rest of the dungeon has been dark so far (so the decorators went crazy...you have to be a bit insane to build a dungeon in the first place. Or else the light is there specifically to foil infra-, dark- and low-light vision for some reason).
The floor of a room is covered in unevenly-shaped tiles that each bear a different rune (the runes are actually just nonsense, but no player in the world is going to think that: they'll be looking at them and trying to figure out the "correct path" to take to get to the other side).
Another room looks empty, except for that strange message scrawled in blood on the opposite wall (so it's actually a few local kobolds who decided to vandalize the room with some red dye they stole from someone...your players don't need to know that just yet).
And so it goes.
A slow, steady usage of the psychological aspect of trap placement combined with a judicious usage of REAL traps will keep even the most jaded group on edge and probably inspire an adventure to remember even if it was just supposed to be a normal dungeon crawl. And if they get to the point where they are checking every 10 feet for a trap, you can always put a stop to this by making it harder/impossible for them to continue to do so: remind them that their mission is time-critical ("You only have two hours left to find and return the Crystal before the Duke is executed, you know..."), or have them pursued by something. I guarantee that a party trying to outrun some enraged ogres isn't going to waste time tapping the floor in front of them with their weapons and probing the walls ahead with their ten-foot poles.
Remember: any nincompoop can drop an instant-death trap on a party. Only a good DM can make a party jump, sweat and worry without physically hurting anyone in the group.
some ideals that i got while reading sarah's post.
in a ten foot wide hallway, have a block be at a strange angle and a giant scyth be attached to it, and holding a corpse to the wall.
What happened was that some poor slave keeled over and they decied to put his corpse to good use. If they examine the stone work and the 'trap' they will realize it's just a ruse.
Put in a few more like this, and soon they will stop looking at all. Then spring one or two on them, then go back to fakes.
Operant conditioning is great ^_^
Make sure that some traps are damn impossible to find, while others are pretty easy.
a good rule of thumb is to make the leathal ones easier to find then the non-lethal ones. cause forgeting where you put that trigger for the arrow trap will suck more then being stuck in a room for d20 hours....
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(2/17/04 3:19 pm) Reply
Re: Best trap/curse?
Our DM layed on one of our players in a recent game. We ended up calling it "chicks dig scars"
The DM agreed to let this PC to introduce another character to the campaign and play both of them simultaneously. One character is in a seat of authority over a fairly large kingdom and happens to be married. The other character came up against upon a witch whom he was to kill, but he agreed to let her live if she would grant him anything he wanted. He said that he wanted love. The witch placed upon his face an ignominious scar which, when seen by a woman of the same race would force her to fall instantly in love with him. Guess who fell for it? Yep... his other character's wife. All three of them are good friends and now this curse has come between them and is threatening their friendship.
They have only fought over her once, but now all three of them are struggling with themselves: the king torn between his country and love. Should he forsake his kingdom and chase after the woman he loves? His queen guiltily searches for her lover, frightened that she will become the cause of his undoing. And then there's the cursed one, who must choose either betrayal, or the love he has always seeked. Should he fall into temptation (he does have feelings for her) and steal his best friend's wife?
Re: Best trap/curse?
This is a puzzle of my own invention...
Have a room w/ a chasm, over which 2 bridges are placed...these bridges are invisible. Detect magic nor see invisible works on these bridges.
The characters enter the room and see a group of skeletons charging over the chasm to fight them. Ok, so there is an invisible bridge? well, this is where it gets tricky, one bridge is only material to those of an evil alignment, whereas the other is material to those of only good alignment.
Nuetrality can use either, so any rocks, statues, weapons (unless weapons themselves are senitent and have alignments), etc land on either bridge, but should a good character walk out on the "non-existant" evil bridge (to them anyway) they fall...
fall into whatever you want...200 ft chasm, dimensional door, whatever.
Re: Best trap/curse
One thing you could consider doing is simply layering the simple traps.
I've got folks in my game utterly paranoid from just layering a few things here and there.
I'm currently running a 3E version of Dark Sun with some of my own stuff thrown in here and there.
For anyone familiar with the setting, I started them off in the "classic" part of the setting's timeline where the sorcerer king Kalak getting offed by rebels.
The party was in on it, but had their own big fight, so to speak, off on the perifery, Kalak's assassination was sort of a back drop for them.
Anyway, eventually the party found its way down into Kalak's secret labs underneath his ziggurat, and there the "hijinks" ensued.
There were few real mechanical traps down there, most everything was magical based. And Kalak in my world was big into "redundancies." Every door down there had multiple glyphs on it.
The first door the party's rogue (well, I say rogue, it was a fighter with her search and disable device skills maxed out since no one really wanted to play a rogue at that point) found one trap on the door (I don't restrict finding magic traps to rogues only in my game, though they of course have the best chance to do so) in the form of a magical glyph. She was able to remove it. She then proceeded to open the door and was zapped by a second glyph that transformed her into a halfling (most things in there being too large for halflings to successfully manipulate, and Kalak hating halflings and always wanting more to experiment on).
Now, the fun really enters into it because the two half-giants in the party both had an intense hatred of halflings, and so it took a good bit of fast-talking on the polymorphed fighter to convince them not to "swat" her.
Long story short, as they proceed through the complex, she gets zapped by numerous redundant glyphs, including ones that layered the halfling polymorph on her a total of six times (in my game, "unfriendly" polymorphs can be stacked, and they can either be dispelled normally but with a chance of failure to dispel = permanency, or "slow and steady" over a course of weeks where they will definitely be dispelled without that risk), one application of being polymorphed into a pig, and finally, the form of a flying monkey.
The fighter really didn't like that last one (not that she was fond of the pig form to say the least) because she got mistaken for being the party wizard's familiar more than once.
Another way to have fun with traps/curses is to make the party have to deal with "random" or chaos magic.
For instance, in my campaign, the party went to The Pristine Tower, which is where arcane magic was discovered/perfected. The area around the tower was one giant chaos field and they had to make saving throws every so often to resist its effects as they traipsed through it.
I had a couple of different tables I rolled on for random effects when they failed their saving throws. Some effects were beneficial, some not so much. Various party members fell in love with each other, the wizard fell in love with his familiar, various cosmetic changes were made, one person was changed into a tiger like creature, other "baleful" polymorphings ensued, one person came down with a case of agoraphobia, and so on and so forth.
Not that elaborate traps are a bad thing, they can be quite entertaining, but you can also get a lot of "bang for your buck" by using simple things in "layers" so to speak.
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