Enthusiastic Amateur

Following on from Tuesday I will say that there’s one time in Dungeons & Dragons you should always include a trap; in an intro adventure. Intro adventures are cool beasts designed for new players to teach them the game mechanics, but also give them a feel for what the game is about. A good generic intro adventure will combine all the elements of Iconic Dungeons & Dragons; a meeting in a tavern, goblins, skeletons, an actual dungeon, at least one Rust Monster or Gelatinous Cube and, of course, a trap. Traps are, despite my distaste for them, a part of the fabric of D&D, and if you want to give your intro party a taster of the D&D the might recognise from TV then you better be prepared to throw one in there. So which one? On Tuesday I talked about traps having a negative impact on my own party’s play experience and the last thing you want to do is have someone’s first experience of D&D be them falling in a pit and struggling to get out. So, what trap...

I’ve been away dealing with real life and as such I’ve had decidedly less time to be Enthusiastic recently (I remain, as ever, unfailingly amateurish). However we’re back with an exciting Tuesday mini-blog, today talking about Traps in Dungeons & Dragons. Traps are an essential component of Dungeons & Dragons. Pit traps, poison darts and leering demonic faces are as core to the experience as Goblins and +1 Swords, that said they’re a component I tend to use infrequently. Why is that? If you’re not familiar with Dungeons & Dragons  let me explain; a trap is most commonly a static feature with a specific trigger that injures or inconveniences the player characters in some way. A pit trap with a covering that falls away when stepped on, for example. The problem with traps is that You either spot the pit and avoid it, or you miss it and fall in. Dungeons & Dragons is based on a simple binary success/failure state but, there’s something about traps that flips...