06-09-2021, 03:47 PM | #21 |
Join Date: Nov 2004
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Re: When did traps get silly?
Of course, there's also the very common sorts of low-tech traps for hunting: snares, deadfalls, tiger pits, etc. Those might well be found in an inhabited dungeon, and sized for humanoids if the residents are anthropophagus. Dungeon crawling has always elided the difference between tomb complexes with area-denial traps and inhabited tunnels with defensive or hunting oriented traps. The latter ones are checked regularly and reset as needed because they serve an important function for the residents. Falling ceilings, rooms full of poison spear launchers, etc. are a whole different sort of thing. For those sorts, "a wizard did it" pretty well covers questions of how they work/stay working/reset/etc.
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06-09-2021, 05:27 PM | #22 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: When did traps get silly?
Perhaps I am simply not reading the right old adventure modules. Do any of the old hands on the forum happen to remember particular adventure modules where the traps have a much more Indiana Jones flavor than the ones in Temple of Elemental Evil?
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06-09-2021, 06:29 PM | #23 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: When did traps get silly?
Remember that the typical early gamer was a teenaged to 22 year old boy. Bizarre deathtraps appeared so early because they are cool!
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06-09-2021, 06:58 PM | #24 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: When did traps get silly?
One pattern I have noticed in early modules is traps placed at a dead-end within the dungeon, empty room, or similar, with no reward whatsoever for overcoming it. This is very odd if you are used to more recent dungeon designs, but makes perfect sense if you are trying to adopt the mindset of a sane person building a fortress—invaders won't necessarily know there's no reason to go down the dead end, whereas as the fortress owner it's easy enough to tell your minions that so they won't trigger the trap. In one case there's even a fake door to lure PCs into the trap! I believe trapped dead-ends were used in real life by Vietnamese guerrillas in their underground bunkers.
I do think silliness is a matter of degree. The traps in the early modules I've read feel analogous to Bond's briefcase in From Russia With Love, while traps in more recent modules feel more like Pierce Brosnan-era gadgets. |
06-09-2021, 09:18 PM | #25 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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Re: When did traps get silly?
According to my quick search, Temple of Elemental Evil was first published in 1985. The oldest module I own is Dragonlance Classics which was first published in 1984-1986. Due to the fact it has several authors, the tone is a bit uneven. It does have a number of quite silly trap-dungeon bits, though.
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06-10-2021, 07:56 AM | #26 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: When did traps get silly?
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Now this I can absolutely get behind. Veteran warriors end up stronger and more resilient than their bodies physically should be capable of, master thieves can somehow sneak through well-lit open rooms, and so forth. This needn't be explicitly magical/supernatural (in which case it would be negatable with antimagic, no mana zones, or whatever means are available in the relevant system/setting), just part of the way the world works.
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06-10-2021, 10:25 AM | #27 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
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Re: When did traps get silly?
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.
Once the players encountered a few of them, got the pattern, and handled a couple, I elided the rest and they moved on to the next phase of the encounter. |
06-10-2021, 10:50 AM | #28 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: When did traps get silly?
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*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).
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06-10-2021, 12:28 PM | #29 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: When did traps get silly?
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And is a part of why I care so little for said genres.
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06-10-2021, 03:08 PM | #30 | |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: When did traps get silly?
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The traps are part of "changing technology." They're internally consistent with healing potions and elven carriages, no doubt. It's just that it's a ton of work to map out exactly how one leads to the other, and what the precise made-up pseudoscience and wild technology underlying them is. I firmly believe that GMs with limited time budgets and authors with limited pages can be excused for hand-waving this mapping as part of the +1)^ or +2)^ that I mentioned. Standing in the real world and trying to define exactly how divergent and superscience tech works is a bit like standing in the present and trying to predict the future: If you could really do it, you'd have that tech in the real world! But you can't.
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