During my table’s test run of Pathfinder, I came across a new way of thinking of traps in RPGs that I feel like a fool for not having considered sooner. In Pathfinder, traps have legitimate statblocks, like a goblin or bear or other monster your party would encounter in battle. A “complex hazard” will usually have a reaction to some way the players can interact with the environment nearby, and then they will roll initiative. The players can then attempt to hack away at the mechanism until it breaks, or find the device and disable it before it continues to affect them. A series of traps can become a full blown encounter this way, and I’d never thought to use them as such!
So, while we’re still playing D&D to finish out my current campaign, I decided to give this idea a go. My party is currently exploring an ancient wizard’s laboratory, and the first room of this delve I devoted entirely to a “trap encounter.” I found this map, the Mad Lich’s Crypt, on talestavern and stocked it for my purposes, so thank you to user JustcallmeWendy!
Now, onto the encounter.
The Room
So, the party began their exploration into this ancient and buried laboratory. A warning in an ancient dialect on the statues near the door gave them little pause, and the entered the first room. There, our fighter noticed a little barred grate near the floor that allowed them to see the blue brazier beyond. Just as he mentioned it, however, the party moved into the room itself, a hidden gate slammed down between them and the entrance, and I asked them to roll initiative.
These red, glowering grates in the floor I made the origin for a 3rd-level Fireball. A rune would explode twice a round, once at its initiative rolled, then again ten steps down in the order, always exploding where it would hit the most people. This encounter also involved a bit of a puzzle, with these levers needing to be thrown within the same round to lift a wall to allow them to even get near the blue brazier that kept the traps active. Because of the order of events, our cleric player cast a True Seeing spell before the first fireball exploded (worried an invisible enemy may be in the room), and noticed that the floor before the lever closest to them was merely an illusion, just in time to warn the fighter not to cross it!
Once a lever was flipped, it lit a torch beside the wall that would rise. However, after 1 round, the lever would reset unless held down by someone. Holding a lever down also caused a burst of cold damage (4d8) to whoever decided to do so, and thus the party was split, three members in the tunnel, and two left by the levers.
Also, while the wall was raised, a lightning ballista became active, firing a 10-foot-wide 3rd-level Lightning Bolt down this corridor. But, the party managed to access the blue brazier and extinguish its flame, turning all the traps off before anyone get too damaged (they are 19th level, after all). With the fire extinguished, they found the gate to the entryway reset, the wall raised, and the gate blocking their path forward opened.
I enjoyed this style of dungeon trap immensely more than the basic binary “I check for traps” rolls would usually fall into. I don’t enjoy overly punitive design, and hitting my players with a load of damage for failing to essentially bookkeep their progress through a dungeon never sat right with me. I still have a few things I want to improve on for this style of trap encounter more – a handful of which are explicitly in Pathfinder’s rules. I have further instances of traps being involved with and being full encounters in this dungeon, so I’m excited to keep honing the system further.
That’s it for this post. Thanks for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.
Ben Stovall Blog 
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