Traps in Dungeon World

#1

I’m listening through the back catalogue of Discern Realities, and there are a number of moments when the Thief’s find traps move comes into play. I have a thief in my current dungeon world game, and I have some questions about the move.

The thief has to actively search for traps to use the move. But presumably the traps have to be pre-placed in the environment. So are we back to the old dnd paradigm where the thief needs to say “i check for traps” every time the gm describes something? That doesn’t seem desirable. Do we just assume the thief is constantly looking for traps and only ask for the roll when a trap is actually present? What is the gameplay here?

3 Likes
#2

Probably depends on how you run your dungeon. If it’s room by room, it could get boring for the thief to describe the search for traps over and over again - maybe you grant them a spider-sense ability to feel that something is wrong or you direct your description of the room/hall to the thief’s player). In the Discern Realities podcast the assumption is that the dungeon is abstracted to a certain degree so everytime we zoom into a specific location (and we zoom for dramatic reasons) the thief get their cue to assume something is afoot.

5 Likes
#4

How I normally handle traps is either place a prompt to trigger the thief to ask and give them the spotlight. It’s also a soft move setup, maybe on a 6 minus, or a 7-9 roll, I’ll tell the party about some detail that will suggest it and then ask them to tell me what kind of trap it is

8 Likes
#5

I think allowing one search per major area is probably the right call. That way they are not constantly looking for traps and triggering the move every few feet.

4 Likes
#6

It’s kind of a crummy move. I’d like to think that it’s an opportunity to spotlight the Thief and introduce traps to a dungeon, without the need for the GM to “pre-fill” it buuuuut there’s no incentive there for them to do that. I think the move would be more interesting if a Thief could say, “There’s a trap here, and it’s guarding something beneficial!” Say a shortcut, a treasure, a secret door, etc. On a 10+ they can disarm it without issue, on a 7-9 they’ll have to contend with it more directly, and on a 6- they kinda found out too late. If you don’t have a thief, and want some traps, there’s plenty of GM moves that point to that (Dungeon moves, announce future badness, separate them, etc.) which you can describe as traps.

6 Likes
#7

I have always seen this played very differently.

Namely: if you do not have a thief, then traps are tremendously less important to the game world. If you do, the Thief’s player is announcing that traps are relevant. This is more nuanced than this, but still.

Then, the action of searching for traps causes there to be traps and other interesting outcomes. It isn’t the case that a trap exists (though, if the characters are intentionally being dumb, then sure through some at them), but that oking for traps the game world changes.

5 Likes
#8

I very much agree with @William_Nichols. I like the Move a lot for these reasons:

When I’m a Thief, I want there to be plenty of traps in the dungeon or wherever. I want stories around finding traps, running into traps and so on. Asking for this Move to be rolled makes the story more about Thief things and interesting in many ways.

By allowing Thieves with this Move to bring traps into the game whenever they want, I put the responsibility for this aspect of a dungeon in the right person’s hands.

Given the probabilities of PbtA (i.e. usually a 2d6+2, and on a 6 the chance for Help) the possibility of a miss is very low and the Thief can very likely shine in their element.

5 Likes
#9

Yes! And also: The rare time the Thief rolls a 6-, there’s the Fruitful Void. The character sheet says nothing, so there should be as hard a move as the GM wants to make.

Which doesn’t mean making the Thief seem like a bad thief, as that’d be in violation of the GM principles. Instead, making Dungeon World unexpected, alive, and dangerous.

6 Likes
#11

@HorstWurst and @RedMagus77 describe how I generally do it:

If you’ve decided in advance (days ago or seconds ago) that there’s a trap in a particular location, then when they get to that location you make a soft move that hints at the trap’s presence. Ask “what do you do?” and run with it. Here’s my big old write-up on how that works:

Also, you might reveal a trap (one that you had pre-planned, or one that just occurs to you on the fly) as part of a miss or a 7-9 result, or even as an on-the-fly answer to a Discern Realities question.

If you have a Thief in the party and they survey an area for traps, and you hadn’t planned on there being a trap there, you might decide that, yeah, a trap here would be dope. A strict reading of the move’s trigger (“When you spend a moment to survey a dangerous area”) means that they roll the move even if you decide no, no traps (unless you’re sure that the area really is safe, but you’re Thinking Dangerous, right?).

Personally, the trigger of Trap Expert has always bugged me and in my hacks, I change the move to something like “You can always ask the GM ‘is there a trap or ambush here?’ If the answer is Yes, roll…” I really like this, because it’s not super-intrusive (like a die roll) and if you don’t want to put a trap there, it gives the players peace of mind that they can stop fucking about looking for traps. (Though in my home game, we’ve been joking that we need to make our Thief one of those auction-hose paddles with “Is there a trap or ambush here?” on it.)

9 Likes
#12

This is really interesting to me. Now I sort of want to rework it into two thief moves.

Keen eye
When you are in the presence of a trap the MC will tell you.

Trap Expert
When you assess a trap, roll +dex/wis. On a 10+ hold 3, on a 7-9 hold 1, on a 6- hold one anyways, and expect the worst.

  • What activates the trap?
  • What does the trap do when activated?
  • What else is hidden here?
  • What does this trap tell me about the trap maker?

So I also slightly modified Trap expert, using Dex/Wis instead of just Dex, and added a 4th option.

Now there is no looking around constantly, if there is a trap there is a trap. If I were the MC and wanted to spring a trap because of a hard move elsewhere I’d tell the thief there is a trap and it is about to be activated, have them roll, and give them an opportunity to intervene.

11 Likes
#13

Nice.

I gotta say, I really do like having it be on the player to ask “Is there a trap or ambush here?” It puts the onus for remembering the move on the player, who has way less cognitive load than the GM. If I have to remember to tell the player that there’s a trap, I all but guarantee that I’m going to get caught up in a scene and forget and spring a trap or ambush and then the player is like “but my move!” and then I’m all like “crap, okay I guess what happened instead is…”

Here’s the full text of the move I use:
image

6 Likes
#14

I’m a little late to the discussion on traps, but wanted to mention an excellent resource for traps you can add to your dungeon delves in DW.

Testament of Malice. Free to download, ko-fi if you’re feeling generous. One hundred traps across ten categories. All of them focus on player choice.

Available at https://www.sersavictory.com/

10 Likes
#15

I really don’t get it.

If there’s no Thief, there’s no traps, because no one was interested in interacting with traps. Fine.

But if you do have a thief, they will occasionally make a check for traps roll, which both creates a trap and (usually) deals with it?

I might be missing something but this reads like the player is saying, “I want to deal with a trap now,” and the GM is saying either “You rolled good, so you deal with the trap,” and then moving on with the trap largely irrelevant, or “You rolled bad, so now bad stuff happens.”

I guess I don’t see what the player, and the rest of the group, is getting out of this exchange. The former is a pat on the head, the latter is actually making life worse for the group. Is there some element of player agency I’m missing?

5 Likes
#16

Trap Expert has always struck me as one of those weird DnD holdovers within Dungeon World that only really works to make people feel like the game is “essentially DnD.”

What I think could go a long way would be focusing the move on the procurement, placement, and reconfiguring of discovered traps. e.g. If a trap is successfully detected/disarmed, the Thief may choose to change the trigger (to potentially catch the dungeon’s inhabitants) or pocket the device or a component of it for future reconfigurements or sale.

This makes the incentive way more interesting to the player, enhances the characterization of the Thief, and gives the player agency for creativity.

6 Likes
#17

In my games, the placement of traps is specifically a GM move, but once the trap is in place, this is ANNOUNCED. Whether or not a trap is then detected, disarmed, or simply deals damage, is up to the players and the dice. My traps then fall into categories, which are determined randomly and addressed with tags: magical, deadly, slow, etc.

3 Likes