Quote:
Originally Posted by William
I did have one dungeon setting in which I used traps extensively, but there were a number of conditions which I felt made them sensible. They were mostly magical traps; it was a single mage, whose talents leaned more toward crafting than to summoning and binding; and he was in an isolated area, where reliable mercenaries were in short supply. Finally, he was defending a position which was short on most resources, except time. So naturally his defenses would be constructed and laid over a long period of time: symbol spells, guards and wards, and other static magical defenses.
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If I ever finish work on it, my Oubliette setting for GURPS DF* will have dungeons that make heavy use of traps, but most of those (~5/6) are sublethal, intended to restrain or incapacitate delvers, allowing the monsters to capture and lock them up in one of the dungeon's functionally-inescapable (without outside help) gaols. Dungeons in that are themselves magical, and part of a complicated system-gaming ritual to generate copious amounts of energy; people delving (even destroying, provided it's sufficiently matured) dungeons actually contributes to the energy generation, as does having the dungeon terminally corrupt people from outside of it (hence the emphasis on capturing rather than killing, although the result of terminal corruption is either death or a fate arguably worse). Some of the traps are elaborate - one is a room that seals off and lowers down (to prevent delvers from just bashing the sealed door down) once someone inside messes with the treasure chest in the center, then gets flooded with monsters.
*Magic will largely function differently from GURPS DF - I haven't decided yet if delvers will even be
able to cast spells and the like, but if they are I'll be using some sort of Magic as Powers system, like Sorcery (if not, the closest you could get to a mage would be someone with magic items that approximate such).