Puzzleꦑs and traps are a huge part of , and they can add some variety to a camp🦋aign if you pepper them in between killing monsters and looting treasure. Still, there is more to incorporating traps and puzzles than just punishing your players for opening doors and chests. Here are some tips for incorporating them smoothly into your campaign.

Balance Consequences

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When it comes to ൲traps, it is important to balance the consequences of traps with the level of the party. The best way to design traps that work with your party is to consider two things: what the trap will do and what it will take to resolve it.

Many DMs like to set traps that deal damage, but these 𝕴are hard to balance. Too weak, and the damage can be undone by a simple healing spell that most parties will have access to. Too strong, and you risk killing party members.

Try consequences other than damage. Instead of aꦚ trapped chest firing an arrow at an adventurer, it could curse them with blindness or another status effect. It has larger long-term effects than damage and requires more resources to resolve, but won’t ever kill the adventurer because they failed a s💃leight of hand roll.

Discourage The 10-Foot Pole Technique

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An unfortunate side effect of adding traps to your campaign is that after a f꧃ew times your party falls into a spike p♔it, they start to become paranoid. This can lead to parties moving through every dungeon incredibly slowly and poking anything suspicious with a 10-foot pole. This will protect them from traps, with the slight downside of not being fun for anyone involved.

There are several ways tha𝕴t you can avoid this. One way is to avoid blindsiding your players. While it can be fun to surprise your players with traps when they least expect them, it only trains them to always expect traps, even when there aren’t any. In addition, placing traps where it doesn’t make sense for there to be traps breaks🍨 immersion.

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Adding a sense of urgency to your encounters can also help you avoid this issue. If players feel like they have a time limit, they’re more likely to work smarter, not harder, when dealing with traps. This can be accomplished with the design of the trap itself – for example, a ceiling lowering in a room – or the overall arc of your adventure. Adventurers who are racing agains♔t time to stop a ritual are less likely to spend five hours checking every hallway for pressure plates.

Integrate Puzzles Into The Story

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Puzzles are such a classic part of D&D that DMs often don’t think about why they add th♐em into adventures. There is often a reason for combat encounters; the world is full of people and creatures, and not all of them are friendly. But all too often puzzles are incorporated into adventures purely to have a puzzle there.

Think about what purpose a puzzle has in your dungeon. If it is to keep outsiders out, why would the dungeon’s owners ♐invest in installing a puzzle instead of, say, a lock. Do they only want to keep out people who are bad at puzzles? Maybe the puzzle has a ritual purpose.

You can further integrate your puzzles into your story by having them be part of your broade𓆉r campaign. Try to shake things up by varying from the standard “crawl through a dungeon until a puzzle blocks your path” format. Think of how puzzles can be used in your storytelling. Maybe someone was murdered and the adventurers have to solve the mystery. Maybe there’s something wrong about the whole town that they stop in for the night and they need to figure out what. Widen your scope from just puzzles that block your party’s path.

Have A Plan For Failure

No matter how expertly you design your puzzle, sometimes your players just won’t get it. Maybe they had an off day, maybe they got stuck in an unproductive line🦂 of thinking, maybe playing a 10 INT barbarian is starting to rub off on them. Either way, you need a well-designed fail state to your puzzle.

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For some puzzles, this is easy. Traps, for instanc🍒൲e, fail when the trap goes off. For other puzzles, especially ones that block the party’s progress until solved, failure can lead to a stalled campaign as your party loses momentum and grinds to a halt.

One way to get around this is to be flexible. Your puzzle should ideally have three solutions: intended, unintended, and brute force. Intended solutions consist of just solving the puzzle. Unintended solutions often involve lateral thinking or the use of your party’s powers to get around th🌌e puzzle. For example, teleporting across a chasm instead of lowering a bridge or using ice magic to slow down the mechanisms of a device instead of shutting it off are good examples of unintended solutions. They often work as well or almost as well as intended sol♌utions, but at the expense of spell slots or once-per-day abilities.

Brute force involves just breaking your puzzle, often with heavy blunt objects. It can alsoꩵ include things like climbing above a trap or otherwise avoiding a puzzle. Solving a puzzle with brute force should have a significant♍ downside to discourage players from treating it as the default solution, but it should always be a backup for players that can’t figure out any other solutions.

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