What’s a Dungeon without Random Traps
May 19, 2009 by shent_lodge
Filed under 4e, Game Design
My dungeon is done, the plot is filled, I have everything I need to make a 2e or 3e dungeon work without having to buy a module or search the Internet. Unfortunately, when I try to apply the same dungeon to 4e rules, it falls apart the moment I try to randomly fill the dungeon with treasures, objects and traps.
The new 4e books lack decent random tables, which is frustrating if you are the DM and you want to make your own dungeon. I can build a dungeon fast and then create story to hook the players; here the 4e core books do help in all kinds of inspirational ways, except for random tables. RPGpundit ranted about 4e random table weakness back in 2008, I did not really notice the problem, or actually I should say I did not pay it much attention until now, because I had not really made my own dungeon, I was still running games cheesing off the first three published modules for the 4e rules. Yes the caves near Yates Hill were a compilation of encounters and ideas from Keep on the Shadowfell: Adventure H1, Thunderspire Labyrinth: Adventure H2, Pyramid of Shadows: Adventure H3. This last month was my first real foray into building a dungeon from scratch for 4e and it was painful.
I really wanted to throw in random traps, but there is no table for that in 4e. I did a quick search of the web and pulled up nothing immediate with google. I found all sorts of links for 3e and earlier random trap generators though.
Some of the best games I ran, started with players asking “is the door trapped?” I would roll a die 6 and on a 1, it was. I used to go quickly to the random trap table and roll –Ah, poison needle; done. The players didn’t mind that it was spur of the moment, they just adjusted and either cleared the trap, left it alone or set if off. Anyway, no random traps in 4e boo. I supposed I can just pull out my old 3e books and roll off random dungeon tables and check the results against the 4e books to see if I can use it against the party… grrr. What’s a dungeon without random traps? From what I have seen, it is 4e prefab module… Boring and predicable.
At least Asmor.com has random treasure help. Yeah!
This is the random treasure generator I use for creating 4e dungeons from Asmor’s site.
Quartermaster
Hey if you old school it, try Jeff’s The Miscellaneum of Cinder at Jeff’s Gameblog. He has some fun random tables on his blog and it looks like he just made a book about them.
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I love Asmor’s random treasure table. Great stuff.
See, I have to disagree… why randomly place traps? It doesn’t make sense.
From the in-game perspective, any trap in the place will have been put there by either the original builder or the later residents for some purpose. It will not be random. It will be put somewhere the trapmaker wants to keep others out of or away from. It won’t be somewhere the trapmaker and his/her/its friends need to frequently travel, unless it’s a magical trap that can be “keyed” to not function against them.
From the out-of-game perspective, if you’re designing a dungeon, isn’t setting down traps a part of that? Why on earth would you let it go until the party is actually inside and then leave it to the fall of the dice?
From the system perspective, 4e made a conscious choice to make traps less “wandering damage table” and more an actual part of an encounter, so random traps don’t really fit its philosophy. That said, there’s nothing preventing anyone from working up their own table to whatever standards work for them, if they so desire.
@Scott You are right about using random traps without thought; that would be bad. My example represents how I could use the random trap table to interact with the players when the game advanced beyond the scope of the written dungeon. In my home game, because it follows a player driven story line, this happens often. The random tables kept the play going and helped bring fresh ideas into the game. And yes sometimes the results were nonsensical, but it is a fantasy game, and sometimes those odd ball random results ended up in a brand new plot arc or a least some chuckles from the players.
I really liked the random tables in earlier versions D&D, because they were useful for building a dungeon without too much effort (and without a computer). For eight years under 3e, I had to come up with dungeons for my players and honestly I am not that creative, so those random tables really helped to inspire me. My solution is to keep the old rule books handy and adapt the results to 4e. I also will look to other resources like Jeff’s little book.