Types Of Combat Hazards – Traps

Mine your combats
Traps in some game systems are standalone elements. However, I consider them a hazard if they factor into a combat in any way. Encounters without combat that just have traps in them I would consider hazardous for your health, but not a combat hazard.
Traps have been around RPGs since day one. In my first D&D session in grade 5 we were playing Keep on the Borderlands and my rogue got nailed by a trap in the kobold lair. 5 points of damage! I begged the cleric for healing and continued onward, but more cautiously. And by more cautiously, I mean everyone else lead from that point on while I guarded the rear.
Traps on the battlefield are a ton of fun. They heighten drama, add risk, and provide new options to combatants. They should be more than just a damage dice roll. Minor traps can harass, impact movement (pun not intended), cause hesitation. Traps can change the course of battle.
A third foe
In typical battles there are two sides. Traps create a new enemy, usually unaligned. They open another front for foes to defend or strategise against. Consider traps as a third foe, or x+1 if there are multiple factions in a battle. This not only helps with encounter balancing, but ensures you champion the traps well in your planning – traps added as an afterthought often feel patched-on or are underperformers.
Envision the trap in battle
This is a fluffy tip but oh so important, and oft neglected. How do you see the trap working in the battle? What contribution do you envision it making? How do you imagine it will affect gameplay and make the combat more fun and interesting?
Busy game masters will be prone to just selecting a trap and placing it on the encounter map. This is fine some of the time. But you should celebrate traps as strange, dangerous, and unusual combat elements. Make them special.
Surprise trigger
Unexpectedly triggered traps are wonderful in combats. For example, you’ve heard of land minds? What about magic mines that detonate if a certain school of magic is cast? Proximity triggers work well too, especially if there are specific triggers so it becomes a bit of a puzzle.
Surprise location
Traps in unexpected locations are always good for a table laugh, such as traps to the sides of doors, traps in front of fake glowing objects, trapped treasure, and so on. Portable traps can help you work out a lot of inconsistency issues that pop up with surprise locations, such as when arming areas already swept by the party or locations dangerous to everyday life.
Controllable
One side or the other can control various settings on the trap to provide tactical combat advantage. Perhaps a trap can be aimed, suppressed, disabled, delayed or embiggened.
Chain reaction
The first trap merely starts a sequence with deadly consequences. The puff of air is shrugged off by the barbarian who watches in fascination as the air pushes a round rock that rolls over to a switch that cuts a rope which scuttles across the floor up to the falling ceiling block….
Shock and awe
Traps can contribute more than blood cell count on paving stones. They can release new hazards, such as smoke or glue, or loud noises to attract more combatants, or a massive magnet effect that slows all metal armoured foes.
At some point during encounter design or preparation, envision how the combat will run and what role the trap has in it. Likely you will spot deficiencies and opportunities you’ll still have time to tweak for.
For example, with their fly ability PCs might use air superiority to make battles against land-bound foes easier than expected, and low ceilings is getting tired in the game. Perhaps some airborne invisible mines will make the PCs cautious for this combat and the next few too.
Placement is key
Some spots are better than others when placing a trap on the battlemat. Think of it like a chess game or tactical board game. If X happens then what? If Y happens in response, then what?
Some of the many factors to consider:
- Where will the PCs enter or be placed on the battlefield?
- Where will the foes enter or be placed?
- What likely movement routes will be taken by either side?
- What battlefield features will draw combatants to inspect, engage with, or move toward?
- Do the PCs tend to spread out or clump together?
- What are the usual attack modes of the PCs? (i.e. potential trap trigger conditions)
- Who is likely to win initiative?
- How fast can the PCs move?
A lot depends on the nature of the trap. Once you have a trap selected, look for its strengths and weaknesses. And untriggered trap in combat is such an unfortunate waste. Look at what the trap needs for it to be triggered, the type and nature of damage it does, and what might increase its chances of success.
Be creative with effects
Look at every condition and damage type in your game and build traps for them. Same with spells and strange effects. Look at the special abilities of the PCs, equipment, and magic items. Apply the most interesting effects to traps.
For example, a trap that emits concussive bursts, dazing friend and foe alike, is much more fun to play than one that merely does 1d6 damage. A trap that causes allies to attack each other, or forces combatants to flee in a random direction, or makes victims attack by grapple makes combats memorable.
Do not forget about area effects. Smoke bombs, noise suppressors, or bursts of substances can catch everyone off guard, or at least affect multiple victims for greater combat chaos. A trap that causes a wave of magical effect to blow through the battlefield will get everyone excited, as would a tall building forced to collapse or long chain whip that whirls across a huge radius.
Make some traps obvious
Not every trap needs to be invisible or catch combatants by surprise. Sometimes the obvious ones are the most entertaining. Either one or both sides avoids the area of the trap, which could have consequences, or foes try to figure out how to use the trap against each other, or while the fighters fight, the rogues and bards get some investigation gameplay in.
Why is the battlefield trapped?
Be sure to make the situation believable. Justify the trap’s existence. “Previous owners” is often a good answer. Portable traps allow lots of utility. A large expense account is another plausible answer.
Watch out for tricky answers. You don’t want to spend much time on trap backstories. If you see your answer getting complex, that’s a flag to simplify your explanation about why the trap came to exist where it is. Another, er, trap, is having to create layers of new game elements to support your rationale.
“Just because” is a good answer too, but I don’t want you to get cornered by clever players who choose to investigate the trap looking for details, or who find a logical flaw with the trap selection or placement.
Hopefully your battle traps become part of post-session stories and the campaign’s lore. They are so versatile and offer so many options for changing combat strategy, atmosphere, or difficulty.
Here are two related articles you might find interesting:
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September 8th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
[…] Traps as Combat Hazards […]
September 9th, 2009 at 7:15 am
I’ve had some interesting experiences with unintentional “trap-like effects”. Traps actually fall into three types: alarm, hinder, and kill. Everyone knows about kill traps, but when was the last time you saw a trap that existed solely to let the keeper know of the opposition’s approach? Things like rusty gates, loose rocks, and animals (wild or domestic, guard animals or just easily startled) can act as unintentional alarm traps. Hindering traps keep intruders immobilized or limit their options while the guards arrive. Nets, cages, automatic locks, even nonmagical darkness can be a major problem for a party caught unprepared. Something not meant as a trap can act like one when it has a trigger and can ruin a character’s day. Poison darts are one thing, but how about a corpse still carrying a pathogen that caused a major epidemic a hundred years earlier? Works much like a poison trap when the PC goes to take the artifact from it, but he doesn’t even know he triggered a trap, and you can throw contagion into the mix.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:46 am
I like using glue. Nothing frustrates fighter types more than being unable to draw their weapons (or arrows in the case of archers) or let go of the hilts etc because a quick-setting glue has just rained down over everything…. But when a bunch of AD&D players started to use Green Slime and Black Puddings the same way in my campaign, that was going too far!
September 9th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
@Mark. Great ideas! Would you mind if I posted your comment in the newsletter?
@Mike. Recently my players argued about capturing a rust monster and leveraging its services. The glue idea is great. In a rules fashion, that would be like saying ‘not separated within X rounds is glued together?’ That’s a super trap!
September 10th, 2009 at 8:42 am
On the topic of glue…
An invisible Immovable Rod modified so it can’t be deactivated, covered in glue (the one that can only be disolved with a universal solvent) with a paralysis trap placed on it. Place one of those at forhead height and watch the fun.
September 13th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Hey Johnn, if they ever try their rust monster gambit, why not hit them with a rust monster whose acidic exudance is also a very strong glue? They get it into their trap but can’t get it out…
September 13th, 2009 at 10:58 am
That would be a sticky situation!
I think such a creature would have a built-in solvent, else the glue would either wipe the species out or make killing them too easy for PCs.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:08 am
[…] Traps as Combat Hazards […]