Traps:
When creating traps, do you usually bake some sort of saving throw into the fiction if it’s tripped? Do you like to make a custom move for each? If a custom move, do you ask for one roll or one from each player?
Making my first adventure a trap or two and am wondering what best practice is.
Well
When you suffer a calamity
You roll defy danger. That means you should get a defy danger a lot of the times after a trap has been strung. The 7-9 will probarbly still be pretty harsh.
Players should look out for traps. Wandering into a room without some preparation definitely is a golden opportunity for a hard move. So you probarbly only roll defy danger to don’t get hit extremely hard but only get a glancing blow (but a blow nothertheless)
What Tim Franzke said. The “saving throw” for triggering a trap can often be Defy Danger. DD in intended to be a catch-all Move, so why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to?
That being said, there is nothing wrong with making custom Moves for unique traps. Though I think I would only do that for especially big, unique, or intetesting traps.
Lastly, my advice is to not worry about how the trap is defeated. In other words, don’t bother coming up with a “solution” for your traps. Just figure out what triggers them, and what they do when triggered. Not having a solution makes it easier to “Yes, and” when the players come up with an awesome solution you’d never have thought of. 🙂
To answer your other question, I only call for a Defy Danger roll from characters who could be affectedby the trap. Poison needle? Only the person who opened the chest rolls. Falling ceiling? Everyone in the room rolls. It really depends on what the trap does.
Like say you wander unto a trap door. You would roll defy danger to not hit one of the spikes on the ground but you would still fall down it.
Got it. I was tending to think of defy danger as not a reactive roll, but that makes perfect sense.
The trigger allows it to be used reactive lay but a player would still have to describe it. It’s not automatic. When I describe you falling down towards the spikes and you just shrug your shoulders then its deal damage time. (Or using up a lot of your resources)
If you describe trying to fall so that you don’t hit the spikes then you roll defy danger. Even when you use it reactively there still needs to be some kind of action. Is this understandable? You need to tell us how you are defying the danger.
Yeah. Tim’s right there.
You should narrate the trap triggering and then ask the players what they are going to do to avoid their imminent demise. Defy Danger is triggered by their aren’t to avoid or react to the trap, not the trap itself.
My favourite 3 words!
I demand a recount! 😉
Drums in the Deep? That’s totally a “Point to future badness” hard move. Good one, Mathew Mailer .
Sometimes my favorite hard moves are the ones that seemingly have no effect on the PCs right then. Like ticking down a Grim Portent, or having some beastie further down in the dungeon set up an ambush. The looks on my players’ faces when they get a 6 but nothing bad immediately happens is great. >:)
Ex-freaking-actly Mathew Mailer .