Ye Olde Inn

G'day all,

A few questions and thoughts on adding traps that are especially hard to find with an automatic search.

I know other people have added 'checks' to searches - rolling a die to see if you succeed in finding the traps. Sometimes this is linked to Mind Points.

However, I'm a bit hazy on how this works in practice. If a Hero fails a 'search check', won't the next Hero just search again instead? I'm picturing a bit of a speed bump as the Heroes stop and do nothing but search and search and search until they finally pass the check and find out for certain if there are traps in that corridor.

Do you put pressure on them by having other threats (like monsters) around, giving them a limited time in which to check for traps before they move on?

Or do you not tell the Hero that whether they've passed or failed the check? (Rolling behind the Morcar screen a la D&D?) Do you just say 'You find nothing' and leave it to them to decide if that actually means the corridor is safe?

I had an idea of my own (which I used in one of my preview Quest Packs, but it unfortunately hasn't been playtested yet). In the Quest Notes, I marked certain traps as only discoverable if the searcher had a certain number of Mind Points.

No checks - it just depended on who was doing the searching.

For instance, one secret door could only be found by someone with Mind 3 or more, so the Barbarian wouldn't notice it.

Another was an extremely realistic magical illusion (a fake treasure chest poised over a hole in the floor) that only Mind 4+ characters (Elf or Wizard usually) could spot.

The Morcar player didn't tell the Heroes if they lacked the Mind value to find anything--they just said 'you find nothing'. They also didn't ever explain to the Heroes that some traps relied on Mind points. This was to keep them guessing as to why they sometimes stumbled into a trap in a room they thought they'd checked.

However, the Mentor parchment did warn the players that the Quest included especially well-concealed traps.

The thing is, this only works as long as the Heroes aren't told that Mind points are being used. If they knew that, they could just get the Wizard to do all the searching. (If they eventually figure it out for themselves, though, that would be fine.)

Do you reckon this is playing fair?

Well, every GM can have his own rules on his table, and even different rules for each quest. He could say “secret doors can be found from only the one side of the wall for this quest”... So I believe it’s a good idea, but only for special rooms, not for simple traps and treasures. For simple traps the wasting of one round I think is enough, especially for those how play the searching for traps and secret doors as two different actions (I play it as one same action). But for rooms, with marks on the walls and strange mechanisms, where if you press wrong button the floor collapses and takes you to another room on the board, this sounds a very good rule.

The rolling of dices sounds better to me. You could write on a paper “you succeed with a skull”, or a white shield (if it’s hard), or a black shield (for very hard), and make them all roll dices for their Mind value, and after that show them what was written on the paper. Each time we change the rules and put different challenges people have fun, so why not?

I'm one of those you have described who wants to let the Hero player roll a die to find traps. My preference is to give the Hero players more gameplay control through rolling at the expense of game knowlege. The mechanic is to roll a combat die: If a skull is rolled, nothing is found, but a retry is possible on a future turn; if a white shield is rolled, any traps are found; and if a black shield is rolled, a trap isn't found and that Hero may not roll again to find one in the room or corridor he is in.

I'm planning on making it even tougher to find a trap if a move is combined with the search. In this case the effort is rushed, so a successful white shield must be rerolled. If the reroll is a skull, then the successful result is cancelled.

A third wrinkle I want to incorporate is consequences for failing to successfully search for a trap before making a search for treasure or secret doors. Those other searches will also require the same kind of combat die roll, but if an undiscovered trap is present and a skull failure was rolled, then the searching Hero is placed on the trap (or the nearest one) and it is automatically sprung.

To counter endless attempts to roll a white shield and gain certainty, I am working on a Morcar/Zargon Deck. Each Morcar/Zargon turn a card is drawn that may work against the Heroes in some way. If I get it right, Hero players will have to play tactically and decide how much penalty they are willing to accept in the future for a more certain search result. The price of this tactical control over luck is a slowdown of gameplay. Playtesting will be needed to find out how much penalty is needed to keep the Heroes moving, as well as to learn if all this detail is more fun or not. Yet another set of house rules to vie for attention here at the Inn..

I have two suggestions for the "endless searching" problem.
1 - Each hero gets one search - after the first search, the Evil Wizard starts checking for a wandering monster
.....which would involve rolling a combat die - You could start out looking for a black shield, then the second roll
.....look for a white shield, and then the third roll and on you look for a skull.

2 - Each hero gets one search. I believe the rules actually state that each room can be searched for treasure once
....anyhow, so it would make sense that any other searches would allow only one search.

One exception for this is if you have separate things to search, perhaps if you allow a room search and a separate
furniture search.

Lately I've been playing a lot of HeroQuest, which means rolling a lot of combat dice, and I'm just not inclined to add any more than what the rules call for. I let all searches be successful the way the rules are written. There are still times the heroes are careless and even if the traps don't clobber them, something else always will. There's a certain beauty in simplicity.

As I have posted elsewhere I approach this from a different angle, finding traps isn't a problem, just wander around the dungeon with your eyes closed and you'll find them automatically - the hard way - the challenge is really the opposite, how do you find them and make them safe without setting them off, and under my ruleset that is where the roll comes in. 5+ on a D6 when you step onto a trapped square (or open a trapped chest or door) means you have found and disarmed the device, otherwise you have triggered it. Dwarf as Trap Master gets +2 and anyone with a Tool Kit gets +1 to their total.

For hard to find / well concealed traps that 5+ just becomes a 6+, simple!

This way, by combining the "find" and the "disarm" into a single roll, you get to base the outcome on a roll, either you find and successfully make it safe, or you don't and it goes off (it makes no difference whether you fail to spot it, so it goes off, or you spot it but fail to disarm it, end result is the same) but you don't have to add more rolls (standard rules you roll to disarm or jump anyway) and you don't have to allow multiple attempts to search for the same trap which just slows things down.

The first undetectable traps* actually appeared in Kellar's Keep (the giant rolling boulder), but most remember them from Frozen Horror and Mage of the Mirror. The rule is that you can't detect them by searching. The Potion of Vision doesn't reveal them either. So if following rules as written, these traps are not discovered until a hero (or mercenary) triggers them, that's it.

I never liked that, feeling it was "cheap" so my compromise is to say that when they search for traps in the proper corridor or room I say they sense danger but don't tell them which square. This at the very least, gives them the opportunity to start guessing and jumping over squares (I also implement the "blind trap jumping" mechanic from the draft notes for EQP/BQP).

And I would also allow someone who has the "Potion of Airwalk" active to float over these squares without triggering them (though I don't actually have to tell them which square it was, since someone else could also step on it later and trigger it!).

So yes, I homebrew it, but I still retain these "special" traps that are so well disguised that they can't be detected (and possibly disarmed) by searching.

*Technically all the way back in the game system we had "undetectable" traps when you consider that the Hazard cards in the Treasure Deck were originally called "traps" (in the EU editions) and could be drawn even if you had searched the room for traps and found nothing (or disarmed any that you did find already). So sometimes the game does give you random "cheap" hits, for storyline sake or just for random challenge!

I think that the OP was talking about traps that are harder to find than standard ones, some quests have special rules, like only being able to find the nearest trap and so on, and how that works with people's own homebrew trap rules. Traps that are impossible to find are much easier to handle in any ruleset, you cannot find them!