Traps and Why You Need Them

As a dungeon master, there are dozens of things to keep in mind, but at the forefront of the adventure is the dungeon. It’s in the name of the game, the dungeon is a key feature to just about any Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and in my opinion there’s no feature of a dungeon more critical than traps. A dungeon with no creatures, but filled to the brim with traps can still be an interesting experience which tests your players: their ingenuity and creativity, their character building, and in some cases even push the limits of their roleplaying.

Let’s start simple; what is a trap? It seems so obvious, it’s a thing that the players happen across and it causes something bad to happen if they do the trigger. It’s a broad category that encompasses a wide array of options that give you, the DM, a large amount of agency as to what the players happen to encounter. A trap can be basically anything you dream of, as long as it presents a challenge of some kind to the players. Traps can be creatures– everyone knows about the mimic pretending to be a chest, veterans know that mimics can be anything they want, but not everyone recognizes that ambush predators are traps. Are the players working their way through the dilapidated ruins of a temple in the jungle? Assassin vines blend right in with the foliage working its way through the cracks in the walls as nature reclaims the ruin. The players are moving through an abandoned alchemist’s laboratory? A gelatinous cube of dubious origins can be lying in wait, posing as a puddle of mysterious goo that a particularly curious (or foolish) character may go as far as to touch with their hands!

Now that we have established that not every trap is inanimate, we need to understand that not every trap is hidden. Think Indiana Jones, when he’s stealing an artifact that causes a boulder to roll down toward him, it’s not like he didn’t know there was a trap. Players are smart, and sometimes unintentionally aware of the metagame that things are likely trapped if the circumstances are too easy, and characters can be even smarter than a player from magic or expertise. Present your player with a jewel on a pedestal in the final room of the dungeon, and explain it as simply as that, maybe explain that it’s glowing or floating, but leave it bare bones. Players will freeze up, they will wonder, “What’s the catch?” The catch could be anything: touching the jewel prompts a save as the necromancer whose soul is inside is attempting to steal your body, removing the jewel from the pedestal causes the doors to close and the room to fill with water, or maybe it’s just really hot to the touch and scalds the player as they grab ahold of it and makes it hard to transport. My personal favorite solution is nothing– you don’t always need a catch, because if everything has a catch, then nothing does because your players are always expecting it. “You perceive no changes.” I love that line. Let them stew in the moment wondering if they failed a skill check or if nothing is happening.

Okay, we have a better understanding of traps and how to use them, what about why; why use a trap in the first place? The answer is simple: adversity is fun. Now, I’m not saying you should put your players through a meat grinder (unless that’s what they signed up for), but nothing should come easily. What good story ever read, “They showed up to the forbidden temple of doom and decay, walked to the end, grabbed all of the loot they could hold, and went home”? It’s never the easy route which makes a good story, and it’s your job as the dungeon master to present a challenge that your players can find, adapt around, and overcome. Traps can test a player’s ingenuity, even something as simple as a pit trap in a hallway prompts the question, “How do I get over it?” The pit makes the whole hallway impassable by normal means, so your players may look around the dungeon for a big board to lay across the chasm to cross safely or use rope to rappel down and back up. Traps can test character building too, even the lowly pitfall gives the players an opportunity to show off their character’s abilities like casting fly, wild shaping into a flying creature, maybe they have a really good jump skill and can simply make it across like Mario. Traps can even present a roleplaying check to players, including the lowly pitfall. A party member fell into the pit, will you save them? If you save them, is it out of the kindness of your heart, is it because they’re necessary to get the job done in this dungeon, is it in exchange for gold or a favor, do they still owe you something and you need them alive to collect? A single trap, as simple as they come, presents the opportunity to explore the scope of the core gameplay loop of D&D in a single encounter all at once.

It’s important that a trap has a solution of some kind. Some solutions are simply a Disable Device check, or knowing the trigger and avoiding the trigger itself like flying over a pressure plate or not flipping a switch. Some solutions can be costs which must be paid, closer to a trap out of the Saw franchise, which demand the victim of the trap lose something in exchange for bypassing the trap’s real effect, in D&D that can be gold, previous loot from earlier in the dungeon, or even something as devious as actually going as far as Saw, such as sacrificing a limb or a party member. Some traps may have the solution of no solution, which may sound like a load of BS to some, but these are important too. A trap with no solution, may be constructed by a highly powerful being to contain a macguffin, and they didn’t want people to just waltz in with a rogue and take it. My favorite option with solutions to intricate traps is to not even think of one, but instead let the players stew for a bit. Let them think of solutions, a few simple ideas failing will let the tension climb higher, and then when you hear a solution you find satisfactory or which the players all agree is cool, let it work. Explain how their solution was THE solution you came up with, and watch as they pat each other on the back, they’ll even look at you like you came up with the coolest trap they’ve seen in a while.

You should almost never run the same trap twice, at least not in the same campaign, to keep things fresh and interesting, but that doesn’t mean a brand new trap around every corner! Simply changing the trigger of a trap, or adding poison to the darts shooting from the walls, or mixing in spells can make old encounters FEEL brand new.