Traps: do we have to have them?

[ogrezilla]

One think I love when I am DM in P&P RPGs and plan adventure for my friends is to plan different kinds of traps... Then when we play the game it's always fun to watch how they try invent ways to disable my traps... they go full on MacGyver mode and start to invent all sorts of devices that they can use to disarm or launch trap without danger...

That's the issue right there. In a P&P setting, you're free to use your imagination and figure out clever ways to bypass and disarm traps. In a CRPG, you're limited by the game system which consists of:

1) Select Rogue

2) Click Disarm Trap

 

Trap rooms, where you have to solve a puzzle to proceed, are good. Traps you can place in combat to add a tactical option are good. Traps randomly littered around dungeons are just tedious busywork that tries to justify having a rogue in your party (or horribly punishes you for not having one). All it does is needlessly slow down the game.

 

This sums up my thoughts pretty well. I don't have a problem with traps. But I don't want them to feel like busywork.

[daz23]

YES, a thousand yesses. Traps should be in every dungeon, and some should be instant kill.

[Jarmo]

Some, somewhere.

 

But sprinkling traps all over is just annoying. "what the hell... this guy has deadly traps all over his home??!"

 

And using level appropriate traps all around is likewise just wrong, not another orc having a godly complex trap guarding his stupid loot bag.

The difficult traps should be just where it makes sense for someone to spend a load of cash to guard something extraordinary.

 

 

 

I did like how you could collect traps in NWN and use them yourself, or sell them for a nice chunk of gold.

[Humanoid]

Bit ambivalent on traps. Player-placed traps are something I've never bothered with, outside of the ubiquitous Delayed Blast Fireball, and so is one of those features that'd do no harm to add but may well be skipped by a significant majority of players. This tendency is, I imagine, due to the typical design of static groups of enemies in most games that need to be manually lured - a fiddly, time-consuming and oft immersion-breaking process. If we somehow manage to get a more dynamic encounter dynamic, then I may revise the opinion.

 

 

As for enemy traps - I despised the IE games approach with a passion. It was incredibly tedious to me to always send the thief one corridor ahead of the party in any environment. More than that, the reward vs consequence balance of them was mostly pointless - a bit of minor damage and loss of disarm XP makes it nothing more than a chore. If traps are implemented, I'd like to see them used very rarely, and with interesting consequences for triggering them: causing environmental changes for example which force you into a different path, or even cause plot consequences like causing that plot NPC you were tailing to escape the current location.

[Chippy]

I'd like more conrol over traps - timed, and remote controled come to mind (even if it's explained as a piece of string). Otherwise you always get that 1 enemy that sets it off ahead of the rest. Also (DA:O comes to mind) if the components are too expensive, I found myself saving up for them throughout the game - and then just not needing them, even though I invested in the skills. Or just prefering to buy that 1 artifact.

[Syraxis]

I'd imagine traps are in for hunter/ranger/assassin type characters.