[Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Traps is the IQ/A TL skill for both building and dealing with traps. The defaults are IQ-5, Lockpicking-3, and a special default of DX-5 for disarming or resetting a trap, but not for building or detecting them. A Per-based skill roll is normally used for detecting traps. The skill appeared at GURPS 1e.

Detection devices count as "traps", so this skill covers security cameras and the like at appropriate TLs. On a success, you can build a trap, given time and materials, detect an existing trap, disarm a trap to allow passage, or reset a trap after passing it. The main GURPS FAQ has more details on the relationship and overlaps between this skill, Electronics Operation (Security) and Lockpicking. The time required is as per Lockpicking, which I suspect doesn't apply to building traps.

Modifiers depend on the specifics of the trap, and the GM is encouraged to be creative and vary his trap concepts. B503 has some useful guidance. Like many things in GURPS, this is a lot easier with some understanding of how real traps and alarms work. Equipment modifiers apply for setting and disarming traps, but modifiers for good or bad senses usually only to detecting traps.

Explosive traps are set with Explosives (Demolition), although they're apparently still detected with Traps, and disarmed with Explosives (EOD). You can use Traps-5 to try to trap wild game as a substitute for Survival, and a Work By Touch technique to buy off darkness penalties is possible.

Traps is a common option on templates for thieves, intruders, bomb-makers and scavengers. Action has comprehensive rules for modern settings, where you use Traps as a detection option, and for disabling mechanical and electrical devices. Electronic devices call for Electronics Repair (Security), or Electronics Operation (Security) if you can get at the controls. Tripwires are Traps, and the skill is useful as a complementary skill when rigging elevators, power lines, and other machines to do harm. Use Camouflage to conceal traps outdoors, or Smuggling within vehicles or buildings. A simple grenade trap can be set with Soldier, and disarmed with Traps+4. After the End has the same rules as Action, and adds more for the demands of its setting. Many templates with Traps don't have skill levels that you would want to bet your hands on, but Banestorm: Abydos has a master of the art. DF uses Traps for finding and opening secret doors, setting noise-makers as alarms when camping in a dungeon, using traps in an ambush and for opening trapped locks, with the lower of Traps and Lockpicking. Spotting traps is at -5 when fleeing, and is quite important when advancing: a high-Per fighter with Traps skill looks plausible. DF2 and DF16 have plenty of traps to build, and Artificers do that best.

High-Tech has plenty of ways to make traps, and Infinite Worlds has a good one built into Infinity's palmtop computers. Locations: Hellsgate has some nasty traps, and St George's Cathedral has hidden places that you need Traps to find. Low-Tech has several traps, including ones built into simple locks, and LTC3 has trapping for meat. The Power-Ups series has a couple of Talents, a Quirk, and quite a lot of Wildcard skills for Traps, and Powers: The Weird reckons the skill becomes available at TL1, which I'd dispute: pit traps and snares for game are surely TL0. Thaumatology has a ritual that boosts this skill, and a spirit-vessel package for Coyote, who's good at it, but since he's TL0, he shouldn't get far with the traps in Ultra-Tech.

Damaging traps are very important in some genres of adventure, but very rare in others. In realistic games, they're only really practical in places where nobody normally goes, since the need to bypass a trap routinely will cause regular accidents. Alarms are far more practical, especially once electricity becomes commonplace.

I don't think I've ever used this skill in GURPS as a GM, and as a player, I remember rigging one grenade trap, and disarming it later. What have you done with this skill, as GM or player?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

I had a character once who used this skill as his intended go-to skill, along with Lockpicking. The GM expected me to also toss in Filch and Pickpocket, but as I remarked ICly, "I am a professional treasure hunter, not a mere undersized burglar!" :)

Of course, the GM also tended to not throw in many traps, sending us against hordes of goblins and orcs in a crawl. She didn't actually like it when I used the "set traps" clause to even our odds against these hordes either. Caltrops and tripwires, not to mention flammable oil flasks, make great traps.

Also, in a cyberpunk setting, I essentially recycled the character, only this time I used monowire tripwires. o/`

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Yes, but as you note, "You can use Traps-5 to try to trap wild game as a substitute for Survival," which implies that the normal skill for pit traps and snares is not Traps, and in fact that it's Survival. So at TL0 you use Survival to make snares, and you can't do traps to safeguard a temple or fortress or what have you; at TL1 you use Survival to make snares, but you can default it to Traps-5, as the skill is now available. At least, that seems to me to be the rule that best saves the appearances.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Fair enough! You can also make pit traps for humans on the approaches to your Neolithic hill fort, but I don't know if this ever actually happened.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

When I first encountered this skill, I thought it was a silly hold over from fantasy games with implausibly ancient and intricate traps worth more than what they guarded. I promptly ignored it.

Then someone pointed out that Traps covers modern security alarms, bomb triggers, and other hostile sensors. And suddenly the skill gained much relevance. I like to put it on appropriate characters.

It is a touch cinematic, as it covers ALL traps, from covered pits to heat detection technology.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Low Tech clearly places uses of the Traps skill at TL0 on p122-123, and LTC3 uses Traps without penalty for trap-based hunting (though unpenalized Survival is also allowed in some cases).

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

I'd assume basic dead falls, and pits "fall" under Survival if only because it's how Les Stroud from his show Survivorman catches animals in the wild.

Traps is enormously broad of a skill just like many in Gurps as they're generally meant to confine a motif for gaming. I bet every writer here has said how this game isn't meant to be simulationist at least a dozen times by now. ;)

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Well, it came up today (an improvised electrical trap on an abandoned spacecraft) but it's not a common skill in my games.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Its a great skill that can be completely deadly in the hands of a chemist (who has the right knowledge)

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Wouldn't that be Poisons?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Chemists can make explosives, corrosives, tear gas, etc., not just poisons.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

I was thinking more like MacGyver that used basic chemistry for traps in a few episodes.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

My primary point was that poisoning someone called for Poisons skill rather than Traps skill. I suppose you could use Traps for a delivery system, but making a poison that worked would call for Poisons.

My secondary point was to question using Chemistry to do poisons at all. The Basic Set says that Poisons defaults to Chemistry-5 or Pharmacy-3, which seems to say that though anyone in those professions will know a little about toxic effects, details like taste, dose, detectability, and concealment may be outside their competence.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Your the first person to mention poisons, so you questioning it's utility for making Poisons sounds odd.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

What other purpose would Chemistry have with regards to traps other than poisons/toxins of some sort?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

d10 said, and I quote, "Its a great skill that can be completely deadly in the hands of a chemist (who has the right knowledge)." That sounds like poisons to me.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Whether d10 meant poisons or not, Humabout presented a list of non-poison deadly chemistry...

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

There's no need to set verbal traps for each other, guys.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Here are a few ideas, Explosives, triggers, timers, adhesives, lubricants.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

One thing that's a bit irritating about Traps (and to a degree it's close relative Lockpicking) is how poorly it fits in with the rest of GURPS tech skills. I tend to think of it as a slightly odd version of Mechanic, which I also consider the appropriate skill to build or sabotage a machine, but then people use it for design too, so maybe it's Engineering?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Explosives don't use Traps skill, either.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

No but the mechanical elements of a booby trap probably do.

For instance in one Robb White juvie, the chief at a UDT school did not use explosives in the bombs he made for the hapless recruits because that might kill someone and waste the navy a lot of money. He did however use electric shock charges where the explosive would have been. The rest of the stuff he made was in fact the same as it would have been if he had made it and the same as some enemy devices if I remember the book. That chief had Traps to a high degree. He probably had explosives too but that was not relevant.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Yes, but that's an artificially contrived situation that's dramatically interesting precisely because it's unusual. And you can handle such situations in GURPS by saying, for example, "Okay, in this case you can roll versus your Explosives skill to set a non-explosive trap, because it's a simulated trap that works the same way as a real explosive trap." That doesn't mean that either skill can substitute generically for the other.

And when you remove poisons and explosives from the list, most of what remains in the use of chemistry in traps is materials and components that you could buy off the shelf, quite possibly at higher quality, but that for some reason you need to provide for yourself. Though I suppose there could be cases where you needed especially high purity, and where a Chemistry roll could complement a Traps roll to provide it.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Was that in question?
You could buy poisons and explosives off the shelf too, if you've got access to a shelf that will sell you hazardous materials without objection. Which sometimes you do, of course.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Sure. But it's rather more likely that an industrial supply place will sell you other sorts of chemicals without keeping massively detailed records.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

On the traps skill use: It is a skill that every party in any genre seems to have, how important it is varies a lot but not the basic need. (There are surely some settings that do not but have not played or GMed in such). In modern an UT settings it is more of detection systems, in fantasy about actual traps and secret doors and such.

Currently there are records of everything sold. A police investigation will find out the things if they have a reason to spend the massive manpower needed.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Let Familiarity B169 have its way here at least with "type" of traps.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

The detection systems is in both settings present. In UT its an infrared sensor, laser sensor, lifesign scanner, in an historic setting a snare, pressure plate, doorknob, and in a fantasy setting a spell, magical aura, etc.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Not really. Maybe for the explosives, but I can buy various dangerous corrosives and stuff far more reliably toxic than most historical poisons for cash at most any hardware or garden supply place. Many of them even labeled as intended for poisoning things, just not humans. Even in an obsessive police state that did, there'd presumably be so many purchases a week you couldn't possibly investigate everybody who had made one.

Actually at least in the US I'd bet I can get small amounts of some explosives without much more. I can't imagine the gun rights lobby would have allowed "reloading supplies" to be regulated to the point of requiring persistent records of purchases.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

whswhs was talking about industrial supply places and given that as example for Breivik the police was able to track down the purchases of fertilizer and oil he used to make his bombs despite neither of them being a controlled substance I would assume that for more dangerous substances the thing would be easier as just the safety requirements of such require more paperwork.

Basically when I have purchased lots of strange stuff over the years the suppliers have usually wanted proper documentation and things like addresses and in one case I got a retroactive safety bulletin for something by mail.

Also purchasing by cash is a lot less anonymous than it used to be due to the high number of recording security cameras in stores.

So if you buy something in a small quantity and use it to kill a single person or similar, the low resources given to such crime will likely not find you that way. But if you do a large quantity of small cash purchases and then do something like a terrorist attack with the purchased stuff the police will go out in such a force that they will likely find you buying them from several places and then suddenly your whole life is picked apart for any other proof.

That reminds me of a recent case of a bad narcotics cop(Jari Aarnio) who was recently jailed. One of the breakthroughs in the investigation was a cash purchase of two mobile phones that were later used in a major drug crime. The purchaser was identified from the photos(he was a known minor criminal) and questioned. That led them to start uncovering more when they looked closer.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Sure, but are we talking about Traps skill at this point? Surely not at the usual applications of it.

You can talk about buying chemical adhesives or other substances not directly lethal, and using them in making a trap, and maybe Chemistry would let you concoct your own. But I don't think that means that Chemistry substitutes for Traps. After all, a trap might very well have parts made of wood or metal, but neither Carpentry nor Machinist is a substitute for Traps skill.

Ultimately, I think, the point of Traps skill is not what specific materials or components you use to make the traps, but the specific intent of detecting, restraining, injuring, or killing, and the ability to look at a variety of components and materials as means to that end.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

I drew a picture of my original character making a Per-Based Traps roll to spot a trap and attempting his IQ-based roll to figure out how to safely disarm it. He's Taking Extra Time because his base skill is 12 and he doesn't have any monsters to worry about at the moment.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

I think traps is ultimately about detection technology. Its about using technology to determine when someone you don't want is in a location and then triggering something in response. In some respects its also about aligning the response with the intruder: lining up the crossbow with the door frame and so forth.

If you want to do something special, bringing in other skills is totally appropriate. Examples include explosives, chemistry, and armory (you either buy your swinging blades, or you make them with the appropriate skill).

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

Doesn't he need to make a Will-based roll because it smells so delicious or because he's starved?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Traps
 

It's a golden idol, not a piece of cheese. Evil wizard was specifically setting traps for adventurer mice.