1.22 Trap and Door Porn

bryce0lynch

bryce0lynch

i fucking hate writing ...
Staff member
There is a common area in which overwriting abounds: the description of secret doors, traps, machines, and the like. There can sometimes be a some creeping simulationist text in these sorts of encounters, a desire to point out how they work and every little details about them. Exact dimension, how they work in every detail, how to open, close, detect, disarm, interact with them. Certainly, in some cases, it may be necessary to detail the inner workings of one of something, or at least an aspect of it, but it's important for the designer to take advantage of the best resource they have: the DM. Allow the DM to fill in; the description just needs to be enough to get them going in the right direction.


Gravelbeard's Quest, a fantasy adventure by Loremasters, is a short adventure in an old Dwarf mine. One of the rooms has a pit trap with a creature at the bottom, the entire thing covered by an illusion of the floor. This feature takes an entire page column of text to describe. A description of the trap takes up the first sentence, and could have been stopped there. Then comes a section on noticing the trap ... which repeats some of the information in the very previous sentence. Then another entire section on interacting with the illusion. Then ANOTHER section in whats in the pit. Then ANOTHER section on falling in to a pit. And all of this in spite of the fact that a pit trap may be the single most common trap in all of fantasy gaming, almost certainly outnumbering all over traps, combined. The emphasis on mechanics and describing every little aspect of the trap detracts from the actual ability to grok the trap and how to run it.

Fate of the Ruthless Wizard is a self-published DCC adventure from the Out of Curiosity blog. There's a corridor with a trap in it. Note how the description tells us they triggered by stepping on a special floor board of a slightly darker color. This is ALMOST enough to run the trap. It gives us some feedback to relate to the players in case they ask about the hallway. "Yes, one of the floorboards has a slightly darker color." This should be enough then for the players to follow up on,. IE: Up until this point the description is encouraging the back and forth interactivity between the players and DM that is a hallmark of a good game. But then it continues, taking up two decent sized paragraphs to noter EXACTLY where they are, how the players detect them, what they are made of, the roll to avoid and the damage taken ... and then what happens next.

The Unseen Vaults of the Optic Experiment, by the Stockholm Experiment is for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It goes out of its way to describe the latching and opening mechanism of every secret door in the dungeon. Note the detail of the description. Pushing one stone, then another stone a meter away, then hear a click, now you can push on another wall, a heavy cumbersome stone. Ok, so, it's a secret door then?

-optic experiment
-ruthless wizard
--gravelbreard
 
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squeen

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
Yeah. Guilty.

I think the temptation is---if you are writing an exploratory type of dungeon---thinking this is where the action is, i.e. unwrapping the secrets of the place.
 
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Slick

Slick

*eyeroll*
squeen said:
Yeah. Guilty.

I think the temptation is---if you are writing an exploratory type of dungeon---thinking this is where the action is, i.e. unwrapping the secrets of the place.
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There's a difference between detail that's flavorful/useful in play, and mundane detail which is what Bryce is concerned about. Say you have a section of a room with a statue of a crow and an empty bird's nest beneath it Placing a shiny object inside makes the statue spread it's wings and fly upward, lifting that section of wall to reveal a secret passage. That is fine to include, but a paragraph about how the statue is attached to a rope with a counterweight that slides the door along the grooves in the wall after the magical light sensor releases the latch? That's unnecessary.

EDIT: Bryce there's a section in the book about not wasting time on the mundane, right? It's mostly a concern with regard to room contents but I'd argue the trap description issue fits under that same topic.

EDIT2: Yeah section 1.6, so maybe this immediately follows?
 
squeen

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
@Slick: You are 100% right---but what confused me is that in Bryce's examples, he is critical of an adventure (Unseen Vaults) that gave too much detail on how to unlock/open the secret doors (e..g. pushing two bricks, etc.). That's detail tied directly player action. It made me momentarily think that "all that" should be hand-waved: e.g. Player: "I look for secret doors.", DM: (rolls) "Ok, you find one."

That play-style goes contrary to an explicit example in Finch's"Old School Guide" in that it's player skill, not character abilities that set the tone. While you can say those secret-door mechanism details are pretty boring and should be hand-waved, my point (if I have one) is that if you are focusing on exploration---isn't that stuff kinda front-and-center?

Does this all just fall within the Puzzles category (which some people definitely hate)?

I dunno.
 
Slick

Slick

*eyeroll*
It might be because depressing a special stone in the wall is the "default" secret door mechanism in the greater cultural consciousness of dungeon tropes? Right there next to pulling one of the books down to swing open a bookcase door. In the same way that the default pit trap is one that is triggered by the weight of an average person stepping on it, with hinged doors that swing open and drop into spikes. If no special detail is present to deviate from that then there's no point going into the specific mechanics. Unless there's evocative flavor involved in the secret stone door (i.e. the stones are shaped like a demon's face, you push the eyes, then the ears, then the mouth and it shrieks when you do), then it doesn't exactly matter which particular stones need to be depressed in the wall, the DM can figure that much out.
 
DangerousPuhson

DangerousPuhson

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
A lot of it I believe ties into the sort of "pixelbitching" from the original game.

Classic example: Tomb of Horrors, especially the area of back-to-back secret doors that had to be opened a particular way (open this door by lifting it, this one by pushing it from the top, this one by taking the pins out of the hinges, etc.). People would say "Tomb of Horrors was so famous/good that it made all the Top Dungeons lists and you had bragging rights if you beat it... therefore Tomb of Horrors must be the ideal way to design a dungeon."

Here's the thing though: we want Tomb of Horrors not because it was a good dungeon, but because it represented the absolute challenge of the game; it was the Final Boss of original D&D, so to speak. All games need a goal, something to work towards, otherwise you just have the feeling of spinning in circles. Imagine Chutes & Ladders if you just wrapped around to the start of the board when you got to the end - nobody would play it. All games have an objective.

PnP TTRPGs, by the very definition of their freeform nature, obscures the objective. What you could call the objective is set by the DM, but it's subjectively arbitrary to the players, it had no bragging rights like Tomb of Horrors. Nobody but the folks who play with DM Steve give a shit that you made it to the top level of Chateau d'Steve. That's easy, everyone knows Steve fudges rolls and designs the lamest traps. But you beat Tomb of Horrors, everyone understands that's a rare feat. And what made Tomb of Horrors so tough? Pixelbitching - poking every 5' square of space with a pole, tapping at every wall for hollow spots, and pouring water under every door.

Problem is, people confuse the anal-retentive pixelbitching required to crawl through ToH at a snail's pace for "intelligent problem solving". If you got through the door puzzle, you must be a genius right? Because the answer isn't obvious, right? Nope, just brute-forced pixelbitching. It doesn't take a special mind to push at the bottom of a door instead of pulling on the handle (at least, if there was no subtle clue alluding to it as the solution). But for whatever reason, people think only a basement full of bored engineering students in thick glasses could ever have worked it out. So they equate the pixelbitching with puzzles that require intelligence, they equate ToH as the pinnacle of dungeon design, and they continue to include pixelbitch components to their traps into their own dungeons.
 
Beoric

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
squeen said:
@Slick: Does this all just fall within the Puzzles category (which some people definitely hate)?
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It does, but this kind of puzzle I like.

To be clear, the type of trigger to open a secret door needs to be specified only if it is interactive. If unspecified, the function of the trigger is to make the players decide whether to take the time to find it. I'm not sure everyone plays this way (although it is in the 1e DMG) but finding the door does not have to be synonymous with finding the trigger; after the elf detects the door you still need to take a turn to find the trigger, resulting in a wanderer/hazard die roll.

The actual trigger only matters if it matters, such as if finding the wrong trigger or manipulating it the wrong way can trigger something else, or if there is a trick to using the trigger, or if using the trigger is risky, or if the trigger reveals something about the dungeon.

Examples:

Two torch sconces. Pulling left one opens the secret door. Pulling the right one triggers an acid trap. The stone around the right sconce is pockmarked.

Trigger is a statue, which you turn. There is a ring of dust around the base of the statue, and the stone where is attaches to its base is chipped and uneven.

Trigger is a magic mouth with warts, peeling cold sores, rotting teeth and putrid breath. Mouth speaks several languages and will carry on a conversation. Mouth tells you it will open the secret door if you give it a kiss, and puckers up.

Trigger is a pressure plate on the floor, requiring 150# of weight to be placed on it to open the door. Door only stays open as long as the weight remains on the plate. You have not yet encountered any (obvious) sufficiently heavy objects in the dungeon.

You find a secret door. After a search, you find a secret panel. Inside are the words "push up to open, otherwise face certain doom", and a lever. If you push the lever up, a block falls on you. If you push the word "up", the door opens. Each word is written on a different brick, and the edges of the "up" brick show signs of wear.

Trigger is a torch sconce to the left of the door. Form of trigger has no significance to this door, but hints that sconces can be used to trigger doors or other things elsewhere in the dungeon (including secret doors you have not found yet), and that where multiple sconces are found, the one on the left is the one that will work.
 
grodog

grodog

Should be playing D&D instead
Beoric said:
To be clear, the type of trigger to open a secret door needs to be specified only if it is interactive. If unspecified, the function of the trigger is to make the players decide whether to take the time to find it. I'm not sure everyone plays this way (although it is in the 1e DMG) but finding the door does not have to be synonymous with finding the trigger; after the elf detects the door you still need to take a turn to find the trigger, resulting in a wanderer/hazard die roll.
Click to expand...
Agreed: I think that part of the fun of both secret doors and traps is that they're a two-step process: 1) to find/identify that there is a secret door or trap to deal with, and 2) to find the opening mechanism for the secret door, or to remove/disable/avoid the trap.

As much as I love secret doors (which some of my level maps are over-loaded with), the details of how a secret door opens are usually not all that useful in play. Providing some flavor description is nice, but it's not necessarily useful at the table unless and until the PCs accidentally trigger the opening of the secret door by twisting the candlestick/whatever without knowing that the secret door is already there. That use-case is part of why I provide some detail about secret doors in my notes when I'm writing for publication (but I also provide extraneous info that's color sometimes too---I think the secret door in the pit in Hyqueous Vaults was like that now that I'm thinking about it more).

Traps, on the other hand, generally don't seem to warrant the same treatment in my mind: I don't need to detail the Grimtooth physics of X, Y, and Z for why/how a trap functions, I just need to know the effects/consequences as a game mechanic when it's activated. The DM can add flavor/details as desired, based on the outcome of the trap effect (how much damage is taken within the overall range of damage, whether the saving throw is made or not, etc.).

Allan.
 
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