An unmoving wall could even be a trap with the right decoration or illusion on it.... (Think that loony toons routine where the Coyote runs into a wall he painted an image of a tunnel onto after seeing the road runner somehow pass through it. Couple that with an obvious open pit of spikes for players to leap over before smacking into the wall and well that's a pretty neat combo trap right?)
I had what I think is a pretty fun idea. I made a dungeon named Trap Emporium. It looks like any dungeon at first, though when you enter there is a reception desk, empty. Then a corridor that leads inside the dungeon. It's trap after trap after trap, no monsters really, just traps. At the end multiple chests, that are all trapped and empty. Frustrating ? Yes. Thing is, that's not all the dungeon. In fact there is a secret corridor that leads to hidden viewports to watch the trap rooms, there is a hidden door in the reception that leads to this corridor. This is a show dungeon where Kobold trap engineers demo their creations. But find the passage and you'll arrive in the trap boutique where a few Kobolds watched your group suffer each trap...
A fun parallel trap that I made once was in a tower that was taken over by goblins. I should note that my party is pretty cautious usually, so this trap is actually four traps in one. There was a staircase upwards. At the bottom of the stairs were poisoned caltrops, fairly obvious to spot, but underneath an open window, should the players decide to try to enter that way. At the top of the staircase was a large totem with multiple drawers inside. Inside one of the drawers was a swarm of spiders. The idea of this totem is to distract them from any other trap, moreso than the swarm itself. Near the top, one of the steps had a small pressure plate on it, releasing a home-alone style bucket full of acid from the top. The next step had the exact same thing. This last trap works because they're expecting that they've set off the trap already. It's important that each step is avoidable if they're careful enough. The caltrops are easy to spot, the totem is easy to spot. If the players took a moment to check underneath the stairs, they would have found hidden ropes from the pressure plates to mechanisms that release the buckets.
One of the best traps I've ever seen in a module was also a pun. It was a normal spiked pit trap, but once a player feel down them the large spider waiting inside the pit climbs up to push the door closed and web it shut to prevent the victim from escaping or getting help! The experienced player was the one who's character fell in, and the look of FEAR on his face when I described that happening was amazing!
You could also make a trap with a triggering mechanism ten feet in front of the damage. That way you either hit the trigger with a ten-foot pole and get hit or the tanks run ahead and the squishies get hit with the trap
I had a great one that fooled some very high level players! I made a puzzle hallway where they had to find the pattern of tiles to get across without being teleported back and shot at by a spell. This took them about 1.5 hours to figure out. Then at the end there was an elevator with button that looked like it would rise 15 ft and then go sideways into an open tunnel, progressing the dungeon. However, the elevator was nonfunctional, and the button activated reverse gravity, which threw several players into the cardboard ceiling which hid poisoned spikes above it. They were like "well this hallway is finally done let's press the button and move on" despite all of them having flight or climb speeds, they would've been easily able to just get up to the tunnel themselves. Maybe they thought it would mark them as non hostile for later traps? Was a really fun moment to see them go "oh we really messed up now" after having done the hallway with mostly bruteforcing.
That npc karen might have to appear in my games now XD Great video and definitely gonna use some traps in parallel in my next game. Got a group of paranoid mercenaries it would make perfect sense for 8D
I had to pause and reset just to see if I read right XD. Also I can imagine on the way I plan to make king NPCs (20 lvls above everything because D&D is a cruel place, princes are glass canyons or lvl 21 barkeeps depending on their age). Even kings fear Karen NPC
I had a pit trap where the mechanism that hid the trap has gone awry because of a cave in, so it wasn't hidden, just a hole with some spikes and water at the bottom. However, further ahead was a trap that caused fear in the party. Moderate DC because of in world reasons. But all it did was make them run away... And then they had to jump over the pit trap. Suffice to say that I wore their equipment and patience down on that session.
I love it, double traps. Traps in sequence are much more interesting. Now that I have found you, please keep making videos. Finally someone being a bit different in the D&D and RPG UA-cam Channels. The illustrated demonstrations are great. I think you should talk with Wally DM and a few others D&D UA-camrs.
I think he only outcome better than a character jumping over the first pit trap only to land in the second, is if they fall into the first pit trap only to climb out and fall into a second, worse one
Hello MTD, great video and topic! Really appreciate your guys videos 😍. The double trap idea is epic. A flooded double pit trap with a small tunnel connecting the two pit traps and one swarm of quipper fish. There is about 25+ D&D YTers doing co-op videos. I got asked if there is any YTers that I want to see doing these DM roundtables. I suggested you guys. So hopefully somebody contacts you and hopefully you will have the time for these DM roundtables. Thanks MTD, you have a wonderful day!
It took me a while, but I found them and I want them to join the DM Round Table for sure. The schedule is looking very full right now, but I will not forget.
Once I made a acid ceiling trap that occupied 3x6 sq, it would pour a acid rain and damage the players if they step on some pressure plates right below it. One of the 3 tiles in each row would not trigger the trap (due to malfunctioning). So my players were scouting for those by elimination, if two plates triggered the trap, the third was safe. However, the last two rows had the 3 tiles functional on the logic of being less used. It was pretty funny XD. Great video! Keep up the good work!
before watching this video i almost thought it was something more like "multiple different traps in the same position", having watched it the truth makes a lot more sense. although i still kind of love the idea of a snare positioned over a pit trap, or something along those lines
I did a trap once that had two pitfalls next to each other like this, but with a twist. The first, very obvious trap was actually not even a trap at all, but an illusion of one. When one of my players jumped over it, he fell into the real trap behind it. My players knowing that there was no way they could running long jump 20 feet of floor space then decided to throw a rock onto the first "trap" and figured out it wasn't really there when the rock they threw just kinda "floated in the air" after making a clacking sound.
I love the idea and the video. It's an interesting topic covered very succinctly. I do have a question, though. I'm curious why you used the phrase "in parallel" as opposed to the phrase "in series". If they're "in series", then wouldn't you run into both of them while walking the same path, as shown in the video. Wouldn't "in parallel" traps be traps that you place on different paths in order to defeat players that choose different traps. I guess I'm thinking of this like it's an electrical circuit. So maybe I'm entirely off-base. I'm curious if there's good cause to make a video of the other variety.
I like the idea of a cascading pit trap. The trap is a deeeeeeeeep pit, but with false "floors" which have a weight limit. This means a small, lighter target will take only a little damage (1d6), but a heavier target will blow through that floor and fall farther. It also ends more than one party member entering a pit to get the other out or to assist them. The tandem pit mentioned at the beginning might even have a *false* pit. It's simply an indentation with two "obvious" trap doors covering it. If the players open the trap doors, they'll simply see stone. The *second*, better hidden pit is the real trap. Worse, the second trap being triggered might unlock the "fake trap" as something else. I'd like to add here that pit traps with teleportation traps linked to the bottom are a fantastic way to re-route players. Or traps linked to chutes that lead elsewhere, or pit traps with locking trap doors. This way, you can take elements from movies like "Alien vs Predator" to separate the party intentionally, maybe as a plot point for further complications. This is also useful to do if you have players missing out on a session. Now you can run who you have, and maybe do a mini-session for the missing player when they return.
"Oh I'll just disarm this one obvious rope tripwire." **"Disarms it" by literally cutting it** *The GM takes a deep inhale to hold in that audible sigh.*
I swear I literally heard "LEEEEROYYY ah-JENKINSSS!!!" as I was watching this. Also, I'm now terrified of pscyho MTD DM from the beginning of this video.
This gimmick I'm not as much a fan of, as it seems rare that it feels less meta than practical. Especially when it's two of the same trap. What seems to be a better setup of parallel traps is when the easiest means of avoiding the first trap puts you at a higher risk of triggering the second, so that even if the party spots both, how to get around both becomes a minor puzzle to solve of "If we can't disable Trap A, how to we get around A without triggering B since we can't get in a position to disarm B without likely getting caught in A". For instance, a weight sensitive trapdoor trap with an elevated trip wire over it; if you spot the trapdoor but not the tripwire, jumping over the trapdoor is going to hit the tripwire, triggering the damaging effect in the area past the trapdoor. If the party spots both, you have to work out how to get over the trapdoor without reaching the elevation of the tripwire. Part of the beauty there is if they spot neither, the first person falls into the trapdoor trap, takes damage, gets rescued, and likely someone else makes the first jump to trigger the second, and the party can see that even if they had spotted the first, there was a backup trap. If you're going to have a "decoy trap", the decoy possibly shouldn't even be a trap at all, but simply resemble one enough wary enough of it to miss seeing the real trap. The problem then with decoy traps is that they can be a real slippery slope to trap paranoia, even in moderation. All it takes is one or two such encounters without a very clear "this is why this was set up like this" for players to suspect every trap has a parallel.
I discovered this channel from your recent vid and have been binging the whole lot. When you say kill an injured, over confident member. Do you deal 1/4, 1/3 Max HP?
DnD is about resource management, from the meta perspective of the DM the point of traps is to widdle away at party resources like HP, spells, time, ect. (Also for telling a story through the environment) Traps shouldn't be lethal to players because they are realistically only meant to soften them up so the big bad can kill them (dieing in glorious combat is a lot less horrible than to a humble spike trap) Of course having some chests in the tower of a lv 20 wizard who is paranoid and into unethical magic all be trapped with power word kill on failure if the 2facter authentication with thumbprint and retinal scanner that checks for aliveness is telling a story. (And the players that this loot is probably not worth it cause this dude was nuts and everything if value is behind a dc25+ lockpick with power word kill on failure and the guy is dead now)
Just one question. My party "average" health is a jumbled mess. The Hill dwarf warrior has 99HP, and the half elf sorcerer has 56. Cleric and warlock are somewhere in between there. What balance could I keep in mind??
An unmoving wall could even be a trap with the right decoration or illusion on it.... (Think that loony toons routine where the Coyote runs into a wall he painted an image of a tunnel onto after seeing the road runner somehow pass through it. Couple that with an obvious open pit of spikes for players to leap over before smacking into the wall and well that's a pretty neat combo trap right?)
I had a dm do exactly this but the floor I front was also and illusion. It was a very good dungeon
I had what I think is a pretty fun idea. I made a dungeon named Trap Emporium. It looks like any dungeon at first, though when you enter there is a reception desk, empty. Then a corridor that leads inside the dungeon. It's trap after trap after trap, no monsters really, just traps. At the end multiple chests, that are all trapped and empty. Frustrating ? Yes. Thing is, that's not all the dungeon. In fact there is a secret corridor that leads to hidden viewports to watch the trap rooms, there is a hidden door in the reception that leads to this corridor. This is a show dungeon where Kobold trap engineers demo their creations. But find the passage and you'll arrive in the trap boutique where a few Kobolds watched your group suffer each trap...
Love this for them
A fun parallel trap that I made once was in a tower that was taken over by goblins. I should note that my party is pretty cautious usually, so this trap is actually four traps in one.
There was a staircase upwards. At the bottom of the stairs were poisoned caltrops, fairly obvious to spot, but underneath an open window, should the players decide to try to enter that way.
At the top of the staircase was a large totem with multiple drawers inside. Inside one of the drawers was a swarm of spiders. The idea of this totem is to distract them from any other trap, moreso than the swarm itself.
Near the top, one of the steps had a small pressure plate on it, releasing a home-alone style bucket full of acid from the top.
The next step had the exact same thing. This last trap works because they're expecting that they've set off the trap already.
It's important that each step is avoidable if they're careful enough. The caltrops are easy to spot, the totem is easy to spot. If the players took a moment to check underneath the stairs, they would have found hidden ropes from the pressure plates to mechanisms that release the buckets.
One of the best traps I've ever seen in a module was also a pun.
It was a normal spiked pit trap, but once a player feel down them the large spider waiting inside the pit climbs up to push the door closed and web it shut to prevent the victim from escaping or getting help!
The experienced player was the one who's character fell in, and the look of FEAR on his face when I described that happening was amazing!
ooooh. Trapdoor spider. I love it. Perfect for a forest dungeon
You could also make a trap with a triggering mechanism ten feet in front of the damage. That way you either hit the trigger with a ten-foot pole and get hit or the tanks run ahead and the squishies get hit with the trap
wouldn't that be the trigger is 10ft *behind* the damage?
I had a great one that fooled some very high level players! I made a puzzle hallway where they had to find the pattern of tiles to get across without being teleported back and shot at by a spell. This took them about 1.5 hours to figure out. Then at the end there was an elevator with button that looked like it would rise 15 ft and then go sideways into an open tunnel, progressing the dungeon. However, the elevator was nonfunctional, and the button activated reverse gravity, which threw several players into the cardboard ceiling which hid poisoned spikes above it.
They were like "well this hallway is finally done let's press the button and move on" despite all of them having flight or climb speeds, they would've been easily able to just get up to the tunnel themselves. Maybe they thought it would mark them as non hostile for later traps?
Was a really fun moment to see them go "oh we really messed up now" after having done the hallway with mostly bruteforcing.
I thought of a neat combination: caltrops in front and behind a pit trap. If you want to jump over the pit trap, good luck with those perforated feet.
That npc karen might have to appear in my games now XD
Great video and definitely gonna use some traps in parallel in my next game. Got a group of paranoid mercenaries it would make perfect sense for 8D
I had to pause and reset just to see if I read right XD.
Also I can imagine on the way I plan to make king NPCs (20 lvls above everything because D&D is a cruel place, princes are glass canyons or lvl 21 barkeeps depending on their age). Even kings fear Karen NPC
I had a pit trap where the mechanism that hid the trap has gone awry because of a cave in, so it wasn't hidden, just a hole with some spikes and water at the bottom.
However, further ahead was a trap that caused fear in the party. Moderate DC because of in world reasons. But all it did was make them run away... And then they had to jump over the pit trap.
Suffice to say that I wore their equipment and patience down on that session.
“Yes, but what about second traps?” “I don’t think they heard of second traps.”
I love it, double traps. Traps in sequence are much more interesting. Now that I have found you, please keep making videos. Finally someone being a bit different in the D&D and RPG UA-cam Channels. The illustrated demonstrations are great. I think you should talk with Wally DM and a few others D&D UA-camrs.
I think he only outcome better than a character jumping over the first pit trap only to land in the second, is if they fall into the first pit trap only to climb out and fall into a second, worse one
Hello MTD, great video and topic! Really appreciate your guys videos 😍. The double trap idea is epic. A flooded double pit trap with a small tunnel connecting the two pit traps and one swarm of quipper fish.
There is about 25+ D&D YTers doing co-op videos. I got asked if there is any YTers that I want to see doing these DM roundtables. I suggested you guys. So hopefully somebody contacts you and hopefully you will have the time for these DM roundtables.
Thanks MTD, you have a wonderful day!
Wow, thanks for the recommendation!
It took me a while, but I found them and I want them to join the DM Round Table for sure. The schedule is looking very full right now, but I will not forget.
Once I made a acid ceiling trap that occupied 3x6 sq, it would pour a acid rain and damage the players if they step on some pressure plates right below it. One of the 3 tiles in each row would not trigger the trap (due to malfunctioning). So my players were scouting for those by elimination, if two plates triggered the trap, the third was safe. However, the last two rows had the 3 tiles functional on the logic of being less used. It was pretty funny XD.
Great video! Keep up the good work!
Did they atleast use rocks or something to trigger the plates from range, or were they idiots who manually pressed a plate then jumped back to safety?
@@jasonreed7522 they used rocks lol
Another example: Sideshow Bob + garden rakes
"Neeughughugh.." *steps on another rake*
You jump over the banana peel and land on the marbles. Truly devious.
before watching this video i almost thought it was something more like "multiple different traps in the same position", having watched it the truth makes a lot more sense. although i still kind of love the idea of a snare positioned over a pit trap, or something along those lines
I did a trap once that had two pitfalls next to each other like this, but with a twist. The first, very obvious trap was actually not even a trap at all, but an illusion of one. When one of my players jumped over it, he fell into the real trap behind it. My players knowing that there was no way they could running long jump 20 feet of floor space then decided to throw a rock onto the first "trap" and figured out it wasn't really there when the rock they threw just kinda "floated in the air" after making a clacking sound.
I love the idea and the video. It's an interesting topic covered very succinctly.
I do have a question, though. I'm curious why you used the phrase "in parallel" as opposed to the phrase "in series". If they're "in series", then wouldn't you run into both of them while walking the same path, as shown in the video. Wouldn't "in parallel" traps be traps that you place on different paths in order to defeat players that choose different traps. I guess I'm thinking of this like it's an electrical circuit. So maybe I'm entirely off-base. I'm curious if there's good cause to make a video of the other variety.
I like the idea of a cascading pit trap. The trap is a deeeeeeeeep pit, but with false "floors" which have a weight limit. This means a small, lighter target will take only a little damage (1d6), but a heavier target will blow through that floor and fall farther. It also ends more than one party member entering a pit to get the other out or to assist them.
The tandem pit mentioned at the beginning might even have a *false* pit. It's simply an indentation with two "obvious" trap doors covering it. If the players open the trap doors, they'll simply see stone. The *second*, better hidden pit is the real trap.
Worse, the second trap being triggered might unlock the "fake trap" as something else.
I'd like to add here that pit traps with teleportation traps linked to the bottom are a fantastic way to re-route players. Or traps linked to chutes that lead elsewhere, or pit traps with locking trap doors.
This way, you can take elements from movies like "Alien vs Predator" to separate the party intentionally, maybe as a plot point for further complications. This is also useful to do if you have players missing out on a session. Now you can run who you have, and maybe do a mini-session for the missing player when they return.
The scariest thing i’ve seen on this channel? This face at 1:53
"Oh I'll just disarm this one obvious rope tripwire." **"Disarms it" by literally cutting it** *The GM takes a deep inhale to hold in that audible sigh.*
I swear I literally heard "LEEEEROYYY ah-JENKINSSS!!!" as I was watching this. Also, I'm now terrified of pscyho MTD DM from the beginning of this video.
This gimmick I'm not as much a fan of, as it seems rare that it feels less meta than practical. Especially when it's two of the same trap. What seems to be a better setup of parallel traps is when the easiest means of avoiding the first trap puts you at a higher risk of triggering the second, so that even if the party spots both, how to get around both becomes a minor puzzle to solve of "If we can't disable Trap A, how to we get around A without triggering B since we can't get in a position to disarm B without likely getting caught in A". For instance, a weight sensitive trapdoor trap with an elevated trip wire over it; if you spot the trapdoor but not the tripwire, jumping over the trapdoor is going to hit the tripwire, triggering the damaging effect in the area past the trapdoor. If the party spots both, you have to work out how to get over the trapdoor without reaching the elevation of the tripwire. Part of the beauty there is if they spot neither, the first person falls into the trapdoor trap, takes damage, gets rescued, and likely someone else makes the first jump to trigger the second, and the party can see that even if they had spotted the first, there was a backup trap.
If you're going to have a "decoy trap", the decoy possibly shouldn't even be a trap at all, but simply resemble one enough wary enough of it to miss seeing the real trap. The problem then with decoy traps is that they can be a real slippery slope to trap paranoia, even in moderation. All it takes is one or two such encounters without a very clear "this is why this was set up like this" for players to suspect every trap has a parallel.
These videos are great, keep up the amazing work! It's given me some inspiration to take for some of my future videos!
I used an obvious pit trap. The player jumped over it, landing on the hidden pit trap behind it.
How would you have monsters bypass the traps? Take the employee entrance? Fly?
a subtle piece of tape in between the two traps that indicates a safe zone
It feels like these traps are in series not parallel.
I discovered this channel from your recent vid and have been binging the whole lot.
When you say kill an injured, over confident member. Do you deal 1/4, 1/3 Max HP?
This stuff reminds me of Grimtooth's Traps, albeit less sadistic and cruel in design.
Grimtooth's Traps always seemed like they were firmly out to kill your players. We just want to maim them.
DnD is about resource management, from the meta perspective of the DM the point of traps is to widdle away at party resources like HP, spells, time, ect. (Also for telling a story through the environment)
Traps shouldn't be lethal to players because they are realistically only meant to soften them up so the big bad can kill them (dieing in glorious combat is a lot less horrible than to a humble spike trap)
Of course having some chests in the tower of a lv 20 wizard who is paranoid and into unethical magic all be trapped with power word kill on failure if the 2facter authentication with thumbprint and retinal scanner that checks for aliveness is telling a story. (And the players that this loot is probably not worth it cause this dude was nuts and everything if value is behind a dc25+ lockpick with power word kill on failure and the guy is dead now)
Just one question.
My party "average" health is a jumbled mess.
The Hill dwarf warrior has 99HP, and the half elf sorcerer has 56. Cleric and warlock are somewhere in between there.
What balance could I keep in mind??
Add it all together, divide by 4. That gets the average. Or just make the max damage be like, 30 or something. (Or 55 if you wanna be cruel)
I don't know, this seems either kaizo or mean spirited...