Go to Part 1

Almost certainly the most famous sequence featuring traps is the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So, bearing in mind The Principle of Using Linear Mediums as RPG Examples, let’s take a look at what makes the sequence work.

TRAP 1 – COBWEBS. The first trap we see are the cobwebs filling the entrance. This an example of a naturally occurring trap (as opposed to one that was built). It’s also, perhaps surprisingly, a dynamic trap. Rather than simply dealing damage, it instead releases monsters for Indy to deal with. In this case, the monsters are spiders:

In D&D we might imagine swapping these out for giant spiders, but it’s really not necessary: What you have here are a bunch of spiders crawling over the PCs and they need to figure out how to get them off before getting bitten and poisoned.

TRAP 2 – SPIKE TRAP. Next up is a spike trap that shoots out from the wall to impale its unlucky victims. Somehow triggered by interrupting a beam of sunlight, this is clearly a magical trap and you’ll need to use your Intelligence (Arcana) skill to detect it.

Indy “disables” this trap by triggering it in a controlled way. (Player expertise trumps character expertise and bypasses the normal mechanic.)

The spikes contain the corpse of a former explorer, telling the story of what has happened in this dungeon before.

The spike trap also has an ongoing effect: We know it has a delayed reset because Satipo, Indy’s companion, triggers it while running back down the corridor later.

TRAP 3 – PIT TRAP. Next up we have a classic pit trap. This is actually an open pit, demonstrating that a trap doesn’t necessarily need to be hidden in order to pose a dilemma for the PCs to overcome. (This conceit is probably underused in D&D. It’s obviously not a one-true-way thing, but it can also be a self-diagnostic tool: If it would be pointless for a trap to exist if the PCs automatically spotted it, that may be a good indicator that the trap isn’t interesting enough.)

Instead of somehow disabling the pit, of course, Indy solves the problem by using his whip to swing across it. He easily makes his Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, but Satipo flubs his. Rather than immediately dropping him in the pit, however, the hypothetical GM uses fortune-in-the-middle to leave him dangling helplessly. Indy has to leap in with a Strength (Athletics) check to haul him in.

TRAP 4 – DART TRAP. Next we have the (probably poison) dart trap. Indiana Jones succeeds on his Intelligence (Investigation) check to find the trigger. Once he’s identified one trigger (camouflaged with a covering of dirt), he can easily recognize the other triggers in the room. This is somewhat compressed, but still demonstrates a local theme.

Jones once again decides not to disable the trap and instead makes a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check to make his way across the room.

TRAP 5 – THE IDOL’S PEDESTAL. Everyone knows this one, right? Even if you haven’t actually seen the movie, I feel like you already know this one: Indiana Jones tries to replace the idol with a sand-filled bag of equal weight to avoid triggering the trap.

(And if you haven’t seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, I really can’t emphasize enough how you should immediately stop reading this article and go do that. Not because of spoilers – we’re just discussing the first scene here – but because you’re missing out on something awesome.)

Something to note here is that Indiana Jones very specifically filled the bag with sand outside the temple. He knew this trap would be here. Remember when I said that you’ll know you’ve gotten the balance right when the PCs start actively trying to collect intel on the traps they might encounter? And the pay-off will be memorable problem-solving (that, in this case, will resonate through a bajillion homages)?

Yeah. Like that.

The idol’s pedestal also features a delayed onset. This is another technique you can use for fortune-in-the-middle resolutions.

This is also the first trap-related skill check Indiana Jones has failed. Notice that the failure doesn’t zap him for damage!

Instead, we then have one of the greatest dynamic traps of all time as the entire temple begins to collapse! A whole new problem that prompts both Satipo and Indy to flee back out of the temple, retracing their steps through the same traps they came through to get here.

This is where the specificity with which the previous traps were detected and dealt with pays off a second time. This is why you want to avoid the simplicity of “a successful Disable check = the trap no longer exists.” For example, if Jones had taken the time to disable the dart triggers as he entered the temple, he’d now have a clear path to exit. But he didn’t, and now he doesn’t have time to carefully pick his way through the traps.

His only option is to try to run out of the room so quickly that the darts can’t hit him. We might model this as a Jones taking a Dodge action (so that the darts make attack rolls at disadvantage). Or maybe it makes more sense for Jones to make a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check at disadvantage to see if he can move fast enough.

(Notice how the same trap can be dealt with in different ways – both in the fiction and in the mechanics – because, once again, the nature of the trap is specific.)

We return to the pit. Because Jones specifically left his whip in situ, Satipo can use it to swing across. This time he makes his Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, but pulls the whip after him.

Now things get interesting, as Satipo demands that Indy throw him the idol before he’ll throw him the whip. This is an example of how traps can be incorporated into non-combat scenes: This is a social dilemma and negotiation which is entirely predicated on the presence of the trap!

(We might ask ourselves how often this sort of thing really happens. But in pulp fiction? It happens all the time. When in doubt, dangle a loved one over a cauldron of boiling oil. Or negotiate a terrible price for the antidote to a poison dart.)

Satipo reneges on the deal, drops the whip, and leaves. “Adios, señor.”

Indy takes a running start and makes a Strength (Athletics) check to just leap across it.

(What’s that? 5th Edition uses flat jump distances instead of making you roll a check for it? Well, that would certainly make this moment incredibly boring. But it’s not like D&D is based on pulp adventure stories, so I’m sure perilous leaps won’t come up that often and it therefore makes perfect sense for that to be the rule… Anyway, I digress.)

Indy fails his check, but the GM once again uses a fortune-in-the-middle technique (possibly prompted by a partial failure) and has him land on the far edge of the pit. He’s going to have to try to climb up by grabbing a vine.

Another partial failure on the Strength (Athletics) check! He manages to grab the vine, but it’s not secure and he nearly slides back into the pit before catching himself!

Here we see multiple traps being brought together for a combinatory effect: Not only is Jones trying to get past the pit trap, but there’s a wall descending that will cut him off from the exit. He’s only got 3 rounds before his exit is cut off, and he’s burning through them with these failed checks!

Indy, of course, finally makes his Strength (Athletics) check and scrambles under the door, managing to grab his whip at the last minute. Running down the corridor he discovers that Satipo has, as we mentioned before, (a) made the strategic decision not to search for traps because the temple was collapsing around him and (b) failed to remember (via player expertise) that the spike trap was there.

(Once again, if they had disabled this trap instead of simply bypassing it on their way in, this would have played out very differently.)

This, of course, brings us to the other great iconic trap from this sequence:

TRAP 6 – BIG-ASS BOULDER. This may or may not be a new trap, actually. It’s quite likely that the boulder is triggered by the idol’s pedestal, being an example of a trap having a non-local effect in the dungeon and just one more step in the trap’s wide-ranging “seal the temple” schtick.

Alternatively, it’s possible that Indy did something to trigger the boulder as he was exiting. If so, this trigger probably only becomes active as a result of the trap on the idol’s pedestal being triggered. (We didn’t specifically discuss triggers that are only conditionally active, but it’s a subset of trigger uncertainty.)

Indy then leaps through the spider webs (which have apparently not reset with more spiders) and hurtles out of the temple.

End of sequence.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Is this an example of a good D&D dungeon?

Probably not. It’s too linear even for a short dungeon, in my opinion. (Although if you do have a relatively linear sequence with a lot of traps that you’re going to force the players through, the fact that so many of the traps are immediately obvious or already known to Jones before he enters the dungeon – the webs, the pit, the idol’s pedestal – may be a good tip: Put the interest on what the PCs do about the traps instead of whether or not they find the traps; and if there’s no interest to be found there, then you probably need to fix that.)

But the point of the exercise, of course, is not the totality of dungeon design. It’s about how we can bring cool traps to our tables. In this, I think, Indy has successfully given us some insight.

Back to the Art of Rulings

Go to Part 1

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: LOCAL THEMES

The traps in a particular complex (or in one section of a larger environment, like a megadungeon) should follow certain patterns/themes/principles: The kobolds cover their pit traps with woven grass mats. The archmage painted rooms in his sanctum containing magical traps purple so that his servants would know to avoid them. Traps throughout the Storm Lord’s stronghold can be bypassed using the current passphrase. The smell of gas warns of the risk of explosion.

In terms of the game world, this obviously makes sense: The kobolds use the materials they have available. The archmage and the Storm Lord have practical considerations. The threat of gas usually threatens an entire mine or cave complex.

In terms of game design, these patterns allow the players to learn from their experiences. As they learn the patterns, the players are gaining expertise which they can then use (either to activate their character’s expertise or to trump it). “Do I see any black rubies inset into the walls? No? Okay, we’re probably fine.”

When executed well, this technique can shape the entire experience of a dungeon, creating interest even in areas WITHOUT traps. For example, I had a dungeon filled with sideways-gravity pit traps (that looked just like side corridors until you walked in front of them and then— Ahhh!). Once the PCs knew they existed, they had to (a) figure out how to get people out of them, (b) figure out how to get across them safely, and (c) spent the rest of the dungeon paranoid about every side corridor they came to. This particular group figured out that they could tie a weight to a rope and throw it into an intersection to see what would happen. Later, when they were running from a monster, they saw an unexplored side corridor up ahead and suddenly had a unique dilemma to grapple with.

Once you set these patterns, you can also play with them through variations and red herrings: We know that rooms with black rubies set into the walls are dangerous, but now there’s a room with red rubies. Is it safe? Will the red rubies have some different effect?

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: FORTUNE-IN-THE-MIDDLE

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how traps can be detected and disabled, but what happens when they actually get triggered?

Design traps that are more interesting than “single mechanical interaction = damage or no damage.”

Framing trap interactions using fortune-in-the-middle techniques can be useful here:

• “You hear the click of a pressure plate under your boot, what do you do?”
• “Suddenly arrows start shooting out of the walls! What do you do?”
• “There’s a sharp hiss and green gas begins shooting out of nozzles in the ceiling. What do you do?”

Even if the ultimate outcome is still damage-or-no-damage (as with the arrow trap), giving the players a chance to actively react to the trap as it’s being triggered makes the trap more interesting and engaging.

I find this to be true even when 95% of the possible reactions are likely to end up being mechanically modeled the same way: Drop to the floor, dive for cover, raise your shield, try to grab the arrow out of the air… It probably all boils down to a Dodge action that gives me disadvantage when making the attack roll for the arrows, right? Despite this, the player is actively engaged with the game world and a vivid picture is being collaboratively painted.

Random Tip: In situations like this, have the player roll the disadvantage d20 they’ve created. I’m indifferent to doing this in actual combat and it’s statistically irrelevant, of course, but it’s another way of getting the player engaged in the trap’s resolution.

This technique can often be particularly effective if the player has incomplete information on what they’re reacting to: They hear a click or a hiss; or there’s a sudden change in air pressure; or the sound of clockworks ticking down behind the wall. Do they freeze? Do they turtle? Do they run? Which way?

You might notice that any trap is resolved using a fortune-in-the-middle technique when it’s found before triggering: You’ve found a pressure plate in the floor… how do you disable it or bypass it?

Fortune-in-the-middle is also one of the reasons why the classic pit trap remains so popular: If you trigger the trap and fall into the pit, you are immediately faced with the question of how you’re going to get out of the pit. (And this can range from a relatively simple solution to a fiendishly difficult one depending on the nature of the pit.)

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: DYNAMIC TRAPS

Any trap that presents the PCs with a new situation or dilemma is gold, and you can extend that response/problem-solving interaction beyond a single resolution point with dynamic traps.

Pay particular attention to traps that create or change the environment. Classic examples include flooding rooms (which you can extend to flooding an entire dungeon), confusion gas that turns friend against friend, or a trap that releases monsters that the PCs now have to fight. The trap is merely the instigation for a larger and more involved interaction.

Another example are the old school traps that teleport the entire group (or a single PC) to a different location: Not only do they create the immediate, ongoing, short-term complication of needing to figure out where you are (and how to get out!), but in the long-term such a trap can actually turn into a resource (with the PCs using it to quickly move around the dungeon).

Also: Traps that result in one of the PCs getting stuck immediately compel the group to figure out how to solve the problem. Consider a trap that causes anyone walking within a 10-foot square to fall into a magical coma. Somebody walks in and falls unconscious. Somebody goes to help them: BAM! Also unconscious. Can the rest of the group figure out how to get them out of there without succumbing themselves?

(You’re thinking of solutions right now, aren’t you?)

A variant of this is the trap wall that slides down and seals off a room or corridor. This one is interesting because its effect can vary greatly depending on how the PCs trigger it (and combines well with trigger uncertainty): If the scout triggers it, they’re now trapped on the far side. Or it might split the group in half. Or the whole group might get through and the net effect is that they can no longer backtrack (unless they reverse the trap or tear down the wall).

On that note, clearly triggering something and then not knowing what the trigger did is a great away to get the players engaged in paranoid speculation and anxiety. Maybe it’s just a broken trap. Maybe it caused walls to shift positions throughout the dungeon. Maybe it was an alarm summoning monsters from afar.

On the other hand, a non-obvious trigger with a non-local effect can create satisfying puzzles for the PCs. It may take them a long time to figure out that the walls are shifting every time they walk across the cartouche of the Grey Emperor.

So, to briefly sum up, think about traps that:

• Create new situations/dilemmas.
• Change the environment or create a new environment.
• Can also be a resource for the PCs once they figure it out.
• Endanger or imprison the victim of the trap.
• Have varied effect depending on position/circumstance.
• Have non-local (possibly wide-ranging) effects when triggered.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: ONGOING EFFECTS

GMs often fall into thinking of traps as bang-bang interactions. (Pun intended.) You hit the tripwire, an arrow fires from the wall, and the trap is done.

But it’s also possible for a trap to pose an ongoing threat or hazard. For example, if a non-drow enters the sacred hall, the statues of Lloth in the entryway activate and begin filling the entrance with webs while an alarm sounds. Or the turret of spinning blades that rises up into the room, once activated, continues  spinning for an hour.

Obviously such traps are often dynamic ones, with the ongoing effect creating the new situation or dilemma for the PCs to solve.

This can also include traps that reset. Traps that instantly reset (and can trigger every time someone walks over the pressure plate, for example) are fun, but traps that take 2-3 rounds to reset (so that you might think it was a one-shot trap only for it to reactivate and zap you again) can be devilish puzzles for the players to figure out.

Longer reset intervals are also possible, but are generally only meaningful in xandered dungeons where the PCs are likely to come back to the trap later. Longer intervals might also mean a trap that needs to be manually reset (i.e., the monsters have to come by and do it), and this can even include traps that have been disabled by the PCs (i.e., the monsters find their sabotage and repair it).

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: TRAPS AS COMPLICATION

Traps don’t have to be isolated encounters. They can be incorporated into larger, more diverse encounters to add interest and complexity. For example, fighting an ogre chieftain in a big room is fine. Fighting an ogre chieftain in a big room filled with pit traps (that the chieftain knows the location of, but the PCs don’t!) is a very different and very memorable encounter!

This can be particularly true with dynamic traps and traps with ongoing effects. A trap that can be triggered halfway through an encounter and completely changes the character or tactical situation of that encounter is a great way to spice up a battle. Such trap-like effects can also be deliberately triggered by the bad guys (they don’t have to wait for the PCs to trigger them accidentally!).

Running the dungeon as a theater of operations is great for this technique because any trap can dynamically become part of the tactical situation. Plus, once the players have learned to think of the dungeon like this, they’ll start using the traps they find to their advantage! “Let’s lure them back to the hall of alchemist’s fire and then pull the pin Diego used to jam the triggering mechanism!”

We’ve been talking about traps being integrated into combat encounters, but that’s not the only option. For example, traps can be combined with other traps to create cool, combinatory effects. A simple example I’m particularly fond of are pressure plates on the opposite sides of pit traps: You jump over the pit trap or climb out of it or disable it and walk across it… and then immediately trigger a trap on the far side.

(A Bigby’s hand that shoves them back into the trap they just avoided is always hilarious if used sparingly.)

Keep in mind that such interactions can be themes in a particular dungeon: The players can learn to be cautious of the far side of pits in Leopold’s Lair.

And what about other types of encounters? Could a nobleman lure victims into a charm person effect when negotiating? What about trying to solve a puzzle while an ongoing trap spits fire at you?

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: NATURALLY OCCURRING “TRAPS”

We have a tendency to think of traps as designed mechanisms: Someone intentionally made the trap as a security measure.

But trap-like interactions can also be naturally occurring. Quicksand is the pulp classic, along with giant entangling lianas, spouts of lava, and icy crevasses covered by thin layers of snow.

If you’re having difficulty getting into this mindset, think about how the effect of a designed trap could naturally occur:

• A pit trap might be floor or rock ledge that has become unstable.
• A sleep spell that targets everyone in a room might be a cavern filled with soporific fungus.
• A fireball trap can be a cavern filled with explosive gas

A related technique are dungeon features that were designed for a practical purpose, but which can be traps for the unwitting or unwary. (“What does this lever in the old dwarven forge do? Ahhhhhh! Molten lava!”) You can also have features that have been broken down and become hazards due to neglect and the passage of time.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: BROKEN & SPENT TRAPS

Traps themselves can break down over time. The PCs can find their shattered and spent remnants as they explore the dungeon.

If you’re running an open table, this sort of thing is happening organically all the time, with groups coming across the wreckage left by previous expeditions. In any case, these scenes often paint a story of what came before: The skeleton at the bottom of the open pit. The flame spout hacked apart by a magical blade. The arrow hole with a piton spiked through it.

As such, these are cool dungeon details. But more than that, they are an opportunity for the PCs to learn about the types of traps that might be found in the dungeon. They’re an opportunity to gain expertise.

In many cases, traps don’t actually need to be broken in order to contain (or be surrounded with) evidence of the carnage they’ve wrought in the past. (Or, conversely, the absence of any signs of activity in an otherwise busy complex can itself be a clue.)

Go to Part 3: Traps In Practice – Raiders of the Lost Ark

People have a problem with traps: They’re boring.

Not only are they boring when they’re triggered — with the DM arbitrarily telling you to make a saving throw at the penalty of suffering some minor amount of damage — they engender boring play by encouraging players to turtle up and methodically, laboriously, and excruciatingly examine every square inch of the dungeon in torrid bouts of pace-murdering paranoia.

And if you feel this way, you’re in illustrious company. Here’s Gary Gygax giving some of the worst GMing advice you’ll hopefully ever read (Dungeon Master’s Guide, 1979):

Assume your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists, despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checks for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: “You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far—” might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full of silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures.

Uh… yeah. Do literally none of that.  But you can feel Gygax’s palpable frustration with the style of play his own killer dungeons had created boiling off the page.

Despite this, traps are a staple of Dungeons & Dragons. They date back to the earliest days of the hobby and they remain a prominent part of the game’s culture and its adventures. In fact, if you go back to the ‘70s and ‘80s you’ll find that traps weren’t just tolerated, they were gleefully celebrated.

Is that because people were clueless back then? They were just fooling themselves into thinking they liked traps?

No, in fact. It turns out that traps used to be different.

We’ll start by looking at how they were different, and then we’ll talk about why that’s important.

QUICK HISTORICAL SURVEY

If you look all the way back to the original edition of D&D in 1974, there are three things to note:

1. Thieves didn’t exist yet, and there were no skills (or other checks) that could be used to find or disable traps.
2. Traps did not automatically trigger. Instead, they triggered on a roll of 1 or 2 on a d6. (In other words, any time someone walked down a hallway with a trap in it, there was only a 1 in 3 chance the trap would actually go off.)
3. Carefully searching an area for a trap took 1 turn. This was a substantial systemic cost, because the DM made a wandering monster check (with a 1 in 6 chance) every single turn.

In Supplement 1: Greyhawk (1975), the thief class was added. There was now a skill check that could be made to find and disable traps.

AD&D (1977-79) dropped the 1 in 3 chance of a trap triggering. This mechanic was still commonly found in published modules of the era, however, and, therefore, remained part of the meme-sphere for a time. However, as play moved away from open table megadungeons and DMs increasingly ran disposable dungeons designed for a single traverse, the 1 in 3 chance meant that some traps would never be encountered. The idea of PCs not seeing every single scrap of material in a scenario became a sort of heresy, and this mechanic phased out.

The use of wandering monster checks also became deprecated. First by significantly reducing the frequency of checks and, later, often eliminating the wandering monster check entirely. This eliminated the system costs associated with searching anywhere and everywhere.

Over the course of 2^nd Edition, modules slowly standardized trap stat blocks. 3^rd Edition then incorporated these into the DMG (actually presenting the most extensive resource of pre-built traps seen in a core rulebook up to that point). Whereas previously the presentation of traps had been organic and narrative, it was now largely formalized into a check-or-damage mechanical format.

3^rd Edition also substantially reduced the amount of time required to search an area for traps from 1 turn (10 minutes) to, generally, 1 round.

Jumping to 5^th Edition, we discover both the worst advice and some good advice for running traps jammed together on the same page.

The worst advice is the mechanical structure: Passive Wisdom (Perception) checks determine whether anyone notices the trap. If they do, an Intelligence (Investigation) allows the character to figure out how to disable it. And then a Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) check determines whether they can actually disable it.

In other words, by 5^th Edition the mechanical resolution of a trap has devolved into an entirely automatic sequence of mechanical interactions which the players neither initiate nor make meaningful choices during.

No wonder people think traps are boring! You could do this with ANY element of the game and it would be boring! Imagine if every social interaction was resolved with a passive Charisma check to initiate the conversation, a Wisdom (Insight) check to determine what you should say to them, and a Charisma (Persuasion) check to see if you say it successfully.

Both the fiction and the mechanics have atrophied, and the fiction-mechanics cycle has broken down.

The good advice is this bit:

Foiling traps can be a little more complicated. Consider a trapped treasure chest. If the chest is opened without first pulling on the two handles set in it sides, a mechanism inside fires a hail of poison needles toward anyone in front of it. After inspecting the chest and making a few checks, the characters are still unsure if it’s trapped. Rather than simply open the chest, they prop a shield in front of it and push the chest open at a distance with an iron rod. In this case, the trap still triggers, but the hail of needles fires harmlessly into the shield.

Why is this good advice? And what does it mean to actually put this advice into practice?

HOW TRAPS WORK

Let’s briefly sum up how traps used to work:

1. There was a cost associated with initiating a search, so players had to make deliberate and specific choices about when and where to look for traps.
2. The 1 in 3 mechanic made the outcome of even identical traps less predictable: It wasn’t always the guy in front who triggered the trap. Sometimes it would be the last person in line. Or maybe the trap would go off in the middle of the group. Or you might walk past it safely on your way into the dungeon only to trigger it as you were desperately trying to run back out again. Completely different dynamics (and experiences) in each case.
3. There were no mechanics, so players had to creatively interact with a trap in order to both find and deal with it. And, on the flip-side, this also forced DMs to creatively define the nature of the trap beyond skill check DCs.

Let’s start with the cost. If you want to avoid every expedition being slowed to a snail’s crawl by paranoia (or players simply feeling resentful that they have to choose between having fun and avoiding an intermittent damage tax), then there needs to be a cost associated with searching so that the players have to strategically decide when it’s worthwhile to pay that cost. In other words, the cost forces the players to make meaningful (and interesting) choices.

This cost will usually take the form of time: Time wasted searching for traps makes you vulnerable to other threats. Wandering monster checks are one way of modeling an environment filled with active threats that can find the PCs. Adversary rosters are another. Any form of time limit can be effective, however, as long as the searching chews up meaningful chunks of that time.

Alternatively, recognize that there is no cost in the current situation and, therefore, no reason for the PCs to not laboriously search every inch and be as safe as possible. This usually means that no meaningful choices are being made during these searches, which is what The Art of Pacing describes as empty time. You want to skip past that empty time and get to the next meaningful choice. I recommend using Let It Ride techniques here.

Note: This may not always be the right call. If the players are having fun making those meticulous decisions, then they ARE meaningful choices and it’s OK to live in that moment. Similarly, these choices can also be used to effect. I’ve run horror scenarios, for example, where the fact that the PCs have been reduced to terrified paranoia is 100% the desired emotional space, and cutting past those moments of paranoia wouldn’t be the right call. The thing you’re trying to avoid here is boredom.

Next let’s talk about the trigger uncertainty. I don’t think it’s universally true that traps should have unreliable triggers, but it’s a concept that’s worth playing around with if you haven’t tried it. There’s a lot of fun stuff to be discovered in play here. To a large extent, you can just graft the old 1 in 3 mechanic back in. (Or use slightly different odds, like a coin-flip.) Alternatively, you might have a trap trigger 100% of the time, but randomly determine which party member or rank in the marching order it afflicts.

Finally, there’s creative engagement with the players. This is vital. If all you can do with a trap is make a skill check to Search for it, make a skill check to Disable it, and/or make a saving throw to avoid taking damage from it, then the trap will be boring. The players have to be able to creatively engage with traps the same way they can creatively engage other aspects of the game world.

However, achieving this does NOT require you to simply throw out the mechanics.

PLAYER EXPERTISE

In The Art of Rulings, I actually use a trapped chest to demonstrate the fundamental principles of making a ruling in an RPG because properly adjudicating a trap is an almost perfect example of how a GM can use the mechanics of an RPG effectively. To briefly review:

• Passive observation is automatically triggered.
• Player expertise activates character expertise.
• Player expertise can trump character expertise.

If we look at 5^th Edition’s mechanical method for traps, it exists entirely in the first two categories: Traps are detected through passive Wisdom (Perception) checks that do not require a declaration from the players (i.e., passive observation is automatically triggered). Analyzing the trap and then disabling it presumably require player declarations, but the rote formulation is the most basic example of player expertise activating character expertise. It requires no meaningful decision-making on their part: You detect a trap, you say you’re analyzing it, and then you say you’re disabling it.

To make traps more interesting, what we want to do is push that entire interaction up the hierarchy: Instead of starting with passive observation and ending with shallow declarations of player expertise, we want to start with the players making meaningful choices and end by opening the door to players creatively figuring out how to trump the basic skill check.

Start by requiring player expertise to search for traps. You can use 5^th Edition’s rules for passive checks if you want (I’m not a fan), but it should still require the players to say, “I’m going to check for traps.” As we’ve discussed, of course, there has to be a cost to this declaration for it to be meaningful. Otherwise it’s just a rote catechism of dungeoncrawling (make sure you say it or the DM will getcha!). What you want is for the characters to be making broad strategic choices about when and where and why they’re choosing to search (and, conversely, when and why and where they choose NOT to search).

In order for this to be effective, the placement of traps has to make sense. As the 3^rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide says:

The solution is to place traps only when appropriate. Characters and creatures put traps on tombs and vaults to keep out intruders, but traps can be annoying and inappropriate in well-traveled areas. An intelligent creature is never going to build a trap that it might fall victim to itself.

If the placement of traps is random or capricious, there’s nothing for the players to base their decisions on. The result will be either frustration or resignation.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll know you’ve gotten the balance right if the players start actively trying to collect intel on traps. (They might question prisoners, check blueprints, cast auguries, etc.) If they’re doing that, then they both value those strategic decisions AND have faith in the logic and consistency of the game world.

Design Note: You can also explore – possibly at the prompting of your players – resolution options somewhere between not searching and detailed searching. An old school example is tapping a ten foot pole in front of you while walking down a dungeon corridor. This standard operating procedure probably doesn’t reduce the party’s speed, but still has a chance of prematurely triggering a trap before someone walks into it. This synced well with the old 1 in 3 chance of triggering a trap: The GM could simply add such a check for the pole-tapping (or perhaps a 1 in 6 chance to reflect that the pole was less likely than a full-grown person to effect certain triggers).

The method thus had a significantly reduced cost (in gold and encumbrance costs for the pole itself, plus a penalty to stealth tests from the tap-tap-tapping), but a similarly reduced efficiency in terms of actually detecting the trap.

If the players are expressing a desire for some sort of “extra caution, but not so extra that we have to pay the normal cost for a detailed search,” ask them what that looks like. Maybe they’ll come up with pole-tapping. Maybe they’ll come up with something completely different! Then see if there’s a way you can model that with a minor cost and/or minor benefit.

Another option is Matryoshka search techniques coupled to passive observation. Rather than saying “you found a trap,” you can instead use 3^rd Edition-style Spot checks or 5^th Edition-style passive Perception checks to incorporate details into your description of the dungeon which, if investigated in more detail, would reveal the trap. (For example, you might mention the line of decorative holes running down the length of the hall… which turn out to be the firing tubes for an arrow trap.)

PLAYER CREATIVITY

When it comes to the trap itself, the description of the trap should not be limited to a mechanical effect. Understand how the trap works and communicate that to the players (either in response to their search efforts or when the trap is triggered). It is these details which allow the players to engage the trap creatively – to “get their Indiana Jones on.” This is what begins to move a trap away from being a rote mechanical interaction and turns it into an interesting and interactive experience.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule for this, but if the PCs start doing stuff like scavenging the tension ropes that reset a spike trap in order to tie up a kobold prisoner or draining the alchemist’s fire through the nozzles of a flame trap to pour down the arrow holes of another, then you’ve nailed it.

You’ll also start seeing the PCs thinking about ways to bypass the trap, often in ways that also bypass the mechanical resolution of disabling the trap. (This is where player expertise trumps character expertise!) For example, they might use chalk to outline a pit trap so that everyone can walk safely around it. Or put a board in front of the arrow holes in the wall. Alternatively, some of these solutions might simply shift the mechanical resolution: Placing a board across a pit, for example, might require Dexterity (Acrobatics) checks for everyone to walk across instead of Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) to disable.

And if the PCs do disable the trap, I recommend asking them how they actually do it. (Or, at the very least, describe it specifically when narrating resolution.) When they disable the pit trap do they wedge it open? Do they nail a board over the top of it? Do they wedge it with spikes so that it can support their weight one at a time? The difference will matter if they end up getting chased back down that hall by ogres!

Getting this type of specificity can sometimes be challenging with magical traps. Check out Random GM Tips: Disarming Magical Traps for some thoughts on how you can make these more interesting than just saying, “It’s magic!”

Go to Part 2: Advanced Techniques

The first sanity mechanics appear in Call of Cthulhu in 1981 and, in many ways, it remains the definitive mechanical model: The character is confronted by something unnatural, stressful, or terrifying. They make a check using their Sanity attribute. If the check succeeds, everything is fine. If the check fails, they take damage to their Sanity attribute based on the severity of the event that triggered the check. If the damage is sufficiently large (either immediately or in aggregate), they suffer some form of temporary or indefinite insanity. These insanities often force a particular action on the character (fainting, fleeing in panic, physical hysterics, etc.).

We can identify three distinct elements in these mechanics:

• The trigger which requires a sanity check.
• The check to see if the trigger causes harm to the character’s sanity.
• The reaction of the character to the trigger (usually due to a failed check).

This is a fortune at the beginning mechanic: You make the sanity check and THEN determine what your character does based on the outcome of the check. It is also a reactive mechanic, by which we mean that it is used in response to a triggering circumstance rather than resolving a statement of intention.

(Thought experiment: What would a non-reactive sanity check look like? It would probably be part of a wider array of personality mechanics which the player could use to interrogate their character’s state of a mind; a very non-traditional form of player expertise activating character expertise, with the player essentially “asking” their character whether they’re scared or aroused by Lady Chatworth or tempted by the devil’s offer. But I digress.)

RESOLUTION SEQUENCE

In my experience, most GMs resolve sanity checks in the same sequence listed above: they describe the trigger, make the check, and then determine the reaction.

GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! Make a sanity check!

Player: (rolls dice) I failed!

GM: You take (rolls dice) 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?

Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!

In this, they are usually mirroring how the mechanic is described in the rulebook: this is what this rule is for (the trigger), here is how the mechanic works (the check), and here is the outcome of the mechanic (the reaction).

This all makes sense.

But in my experience, it’s not the most effective way to run sanity checks. Instead, you usually want to invert the check and trigger, like so:

Player: Bertram very carefully turns the handle and eases open the closet door.

GM: You peer into the closet… There’s… Yes! There’s something moving in there! Give me a sanity check!

Player: (rolls dice) I fail!

GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! You take 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?

Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!

It’s a subtle distinction. What difference does it make?

First, the mechanical resolution now functions as foreshadowing: While the check is being made, tension builds at the table as the players anticipate whatever horrific thing might be triggering the check. (What’s in the closet?!)

Second, by resolving the check before describing the trigger, you allow the players to have an immediate, immersive response to your description of the trigger.

Which makes sense, right? When Bertram sees the tentacular thing he immediately wants to scream and run in terror. He doesn’t want to wait a minute while dice are being rolled.

So, in short, you heighten the emotional engagement of the moment both coming and going.

In my experience, the exception to this is when the trigger for the sanity check is generated by a different mechanical interaction. (For example, watching your friend’s brains get sprayed across the wall by a sniper’s bullet.) This is more a matter of practicality than effectiveness (unlike the tentacular horror slithering out of the closet, the GM doesn’t know whether or not the bullet will hit their friend until it does, and the whole table often learns that simultaneously), but does serve as a reminder that the “proper” ruling in an RPG is rarely a simple black-and-white affair.

TRAIL OF CTHULHU – LIMITS OF SANITY

In Call of Cthulhu, PCs start with a fairly large amount of Sanity and usually lose fairly small quantities in each session of play. There’s generally no way to recover lost Sanity, so over the course of a campaign, their Sanity is slowly eroded away by the horrors which they’ve seen, until finally the last few points are taken away and they are left permanently mad and broken by their experiences.

This is very effective at evoking the slow, inexorable destruction of Lovecraftian fiction. But, like hit points in D&D, you generally don’t feel actual risk until near the end of the process. There are some mitigating factors, but this can easily have the effect of reducing the impact of Sanity losses.

In Trail of Cthulhu, Kenneth Hite does a very clever tweak on this system by splitting it into two separate tracks: Sanity and Stability.

As in Call of Cthulhu, Sanity generally can’t be restored once lost. However, you also don’t lose it directly. Instead, you usually only lose Sanity as a result of your Stability meter hitting 0.

The Stability meter CAN be restored when depleted, but it’s limited enough that it can easily be wiped out in a single session (which would result in Sanity getting hit).

This allows the system to create a mechanical sense of risk that builds over the course of each session (as Stability is depleted), while ALSO capturing the long, slow, inexorable, and irreversible destruction of a character’s psyche (as Sanity is depleted). It allows characters to brush up against madness without being permanently broken.

If you’re a Call of Cthulhu GM coming to Trail of Cthulhu for the first time, you’ll want to consider how the hard limits in each system are different. This will affect both scenario design and the pacing of individual sessions. In some ways Trail of Cthulhu is more forgiving (because Sanity is “shielded” behind Stability), but in other ways it is considerably less forgiving (because it’s relatively easy to completely blast through Stability in a single session).

The game is fairly well-tuned so that in a typical scenario some or all of the PCs are likely to feel the risk of running out of Stability, but it won’t actually happen in every single session. (Which is also good, because if it’s getting hammered so hard that it IS happening like clockwork every single session, that also deflates tension.) But this is something you’ll want to monitor and adjust in your scenario design and rulings: If their Stability is rarely or never at risk of running out, check to see if you’re not calling for Stability tests as often as you should. If their Stability is being sand-blasted away, see what you can tweak to get a more balanced result.

UNKNOWN ARMIES – A MULTITUDE OF MADNESS

Unknown Armies by John Tynes and Greg Stolze has several more features in its sanity system (which, in the first edition, was called the madness meter and was resolved using stress checks).

First, instead of having a single track, the system has five separate meters, one for each type of psychological stress the character might experience:

• Helplessness (unable to take action you feel is necessary)
• Isolation (when you’re cut off from society or loved ones)
• Violence (pain, injury, death)
• Unnatural (challenges to your perception of reality)
• Self (violations of your deepest beliefs)

This paints a more evocative picture of a character’s psychological state. It also allows the game to track separate effects for each type of trauma, while still measuring overall psychological stability across all the meters.

Having these separate meters also allows Unknown Armies characters to become hardened: Each stress check adds a hardened notch to the associated meter. Each trigger is rated by its severity, and if a character has a number of hardened notches in a meter equal to or higher than the rating of the trigger, then they don’t need to make the stress check. (They’ve seen so much Violence, for example, that someone being punched in the face no longer has a psychological impact on them.)

Systems that harden you against tests can suffer from a “plateau effect” where you reach a certain level equivalent to whatever style of play you prefer and then stop rolling checks (see Katanas & Trenchcoats). This also happens in Unknown Armies, but it sidesteps the problem by having the five different meters: You can plateau in one, but the character will remain vulnerable in the other meters (and realistically can’t plateau in all of them because there are cumulative psychological consequences based on the total number of hardened notches the character has).

Unknown Armies also does something interesting with the reaction phase of the resolution: If the PC fails a stress check, they have to choose fight, flight, or freeze – in other words, is the character’s reaction to furiously attack the source of psychological stress, flee from it in a panic, or simply lock-up in indecision, terror, or a “deer-in-headlights” effect.

The cool thing about this mechanic is that, although the failed check constrains the available options, the player still remains in control of their character. Conversely, even succeeding on the check gives a roleplaying cue (because becoming psychologically hardened is meaningful) that the player can pick up and run with.

SANITY CHECKS FOR NPCs

Something which many games with sanity mechanics miss (and which, in my experience, many GMs ignore even in the games which do include support for it) is to also make sanity checks for the NPCs.

If you aren’t already doing this, it’s well worth exploring. It can really push the narrative in cool and unexpected directions.

It can also emphasize how dangerous and unusual the PCs’ lives are (and, therefore, how extraordinary and meaningful their actions are). It can also remind them why they need to be the ones to solve the problem and that it may be a very, very bad idea to call in people who aren’t prepared to deal with it.

On that note, remember that NPCs will generally only have a fraction of the screen time that the PCs do, and, therefore, will only have a fraction of the opportunities to make sanity checks. Don’t load ‘em all up with the default maximum Sanity ratings for starting PCs. Seed in a broad range of Sanity ratings, from those who are fairly robust (at least to begin with) to those who are already psychologically unsound.

A DIGRESSION ON MYTHOS MADNESS

So it turns out that there are aliens. And some of them have visited Earth. Maybe they’ve even been involved in genetically engineering human beings.

… why is this driving me insane again?

As Unknown Armies demonstrates, sanity mechanics are not ineluctably linked to the Mythos. But they did originate there, and so pervasive is the influence of Call of Cthulhu that any Mythos-based game seems almost incomplete without them. So this feels like an appropriate time for a brief digression on why Mythos-inspired madness exists.

Partly this is just cultural dissonance: At the time Lovecraft was writing, these things were not part of pop culture, so it was possible to believe that people would find their existence unsettling to their settled views of the way the world worked. The understanding of how insanity worked was also different in some key ways. And, of course, Lovecraft was a huge racist and had a plethora of mental issues himself, so there is some projection of his own preexisting mental infirmities into the mental state of his characters.

So, to a certain extent, it’s like wondering why women faint all the time in Victorian literature.

On the other hand, there’s a bit more to it in terms of the time when the “Stars Are Right,” which suggests a fundamental reordering of the laws of the physical universe. The creatures of the Mythos literally belong to a universe incompatible with the universe we think we live in. To put it another way: We live in a little tiny pocket of abnormality which uniquely makes it possible for human life and consciousness to exist and/or prosper. The idea that at some point the Earth will leave our zone of grace, the stars will right themselves, and our little epoch of abnormality will come to an end can be rather unsettling in a way that “there are aliens” isn’t.

But more than that: The creatures of the Mythos are a living connection to the way the universe is supposed to work… and the way the universe is supposed to work is inimical to humanity. At extreme levels it can be like trying to run COBOL programming through a C++ compiler. At lower levels it’s more like trying to run a program through a buggy emulator. It’s not just “that monster is kind of creepy,” it’s “that monster has connected my brain to a place where my brain doesn’t work right.” (This idea also works in reverse: Mythos creatures are operating in a semi-insane state within this period of abnormality. That’s why Cthulhu is lying in an induced coma below R’lyeh… he’s trying to minimize the damage.)

But even more than that: The damage being done to your mind is actually a direct result of the mind desperately trying to rewrite itself to cope with the true nature of reality. Mythos-induced insanity? That’s not the mind breaking. That’s the mind trying to fix itself. It just looks like insanity to us because we’re all broken.

Back to the Art of Rulings – NEXT: Traps

In the last Rulings in Practice I mentioned that the techniques used for resolving perception tests can be contentious and result in a surprising amount of rancor and anger.

But social skills are where the long knives come out.

There are three main reasons for this:

• Social skills can be used to take control of a player’s character away from them. Players tend not to like this, and it’s particularly disruptive for any players with a strong sense of character ownership and immersion. The mechanics can actually violate such characters, having a permanent negative impact that lasts long after the immediate interaction has been resolved.
• Many players put a very high premium on playing out high quality social interactions as their characters. They often come to not only associate but to equate these social interactions with roleplaying (leading, for example, to memes like “roleplaying vs. rollplaying”), and because it can often be hard to find groups that truly commit to these interactions, players who value them can be very protective of them. Social skill tests can be used to bypass these imaginary social interactions.
• Many published games are very bad at handling social skills, contributing to the belief that social skills not only CAN be used in these ways, but MUST be used in these ways. Ironically, it has often been the case that the more a game system attempted to focus on social skill resolution, the worse its actual handling of those social skills would be (because, apparently, attempting to codify the complexities of human social interactions with a couple of polyhedral dice is a tricky proposition).

Generally speaking, I’m of the opinion that social skills (and other social mechanics) can be used well. I’m also of the opinion that, when used appropriately, social skills can actually enhance and improve the aspects of the game that they so often harm instead.

THE SECRET OF SOCIAL SKILLS

The secret to handling social skills is to treat them exactly like any other skill:

• State intention
• Make the check.
• Narrate result.

For example, you would never do this:

Player: I jump up, grab a branch, and quickly make my way to the top of the tree. Once there, I leap to the balcony, pick the lock on the door, slip inside, find the secret papers in the lockbox on the princess’ dressing table, and sneak back out without being noticed.

GM: Make a Climb check. (it fails) Okay, I guess you didn’t actually do any of that stuff.

So don’t do it with social skills, either. Don’t play out an entire conversation and then say, “Okay, let’s go back to step one and see if any of this actually happened.”

Instead:

Player: I want to convince this guy to spill his guts.

GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it succeeds)

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”

GM: “I don’t know! I never knew! Never! They went to some guy for a couple of days before they went to the dealer. There was something else in the drugs. Something hidden!”

Or:

Player: I want to convince this guy to spill his guts.

GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it fails)

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”

GM: The guy chuckles. “Nobody’s going to tell you nothing. They’re wise to your act. You’ve got rules. The Joker… he’s got no rules. Nobody’s going to cross him for you.”

Note that the out of character declaration of intention isn’t essential here. This would be an equally valid declaration of intention:

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”

GM: Make an Intimidate check.

Or this one, if the player and GM aren’t on the same wavelength:

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”

GM: What reaction are you looking for here?

Player: I’m trying to convince this guy to spill his guts.

GM: Make an Intimidate check.

What you’re actually looking to avoid here is mistaking the declaration of intention as a fictional truth: “I stab the orc with my sword!” is a statement of intention, not truth, and no one gets confused if the attack roll fails and it turns out that, no, you didn’t stab the orc with your sword. With social skills, on the other hand, people often move past the intention or interpret intentions as fictional truths; and then they get dissonance when the mechanical resolution is out of line with their intention.

The classic archetype of this is playing out a long, dramatic, and beautifully delivered speech and then rolling a 1 on the Oration check.

ROLEPLAY THE OUTCOME

A major stumbling block you can run into at this point is to come out of the mechanical resolution and remain generic or general in the narration of outcome. Instead of shifting into roleplaying, you just broadly describe the result. Like this:

GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it fails) It’s clear he’s more afraid of the Joker than he is of you and he refuses to tell you anything.

This can be okay in some situations, but it’s usually preferable to actually roleplay through the outcome.

One of the reasons players can fall into this bad habit is because it’s fairly typical for narrating outcome to be the GM’s responsibility. So a mechanical check is made, the outcome of the interaction is determined, and the GM falls into the default pattern of describing that outcome. But since the GM can’t put words into the PC’s mouth, they’re sort of “forced” into describing that outcome in a general and non-specific way.

Once you recognize the unintended consequence of following familiar patterns, it’s fairly easy to break yourself of the habit and frame the outcome in terms of strong NPC dialogue.

MECHANICS AS ROLEPLAYING PROMPT

When the player and GM both understand this paradigm, however, they can push the technique to even greater effect by using the mechanics as an improvisational cue:

GM: Okay, you find him shaking down a falafel dealer.

Player: Great. I’m going to wait until he’s a little isolated, then batarang his leg, haul him up to the roof, dangle him over the edge, and scare the shit out of him.

GM: Great. He cuts down an alley towards 6^th Street. Make an Intimidate check. (it succeeds)

Player: “WHERE WERE THE OTHER DRUGS GOING?”

GM: “I never knew. I don’t know. I swear to God—”

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!” I release him and stop him just before he splatters on the ground. Then I haul him back up.

GM: “I don’t know! I never knew! Never! They went to some guy for a couple of days before they went to the dealer.”

Player: “Why?”

GM: “There was something… something else in the drugs. Something hidden!”

The GM doesn’t have to try to bundle the entire resolution into a single line of NPC dialogue (and maybe a short summary). Instead, the GM and player can both key off the mechanical outcome and roleplay out the rest of the scene consistent with that result. This basically extends the narration of outcome and turns it into a collaboration between everyone participating in the conversation. The above example also shows how you can also think of this as a form of letting it ride: The check determined that the NPC is intimidated and will spill his guts, and that remains true as the PC continues to ask questions.

This technique isn’t appropriate for every situation, but can be very powerful in practice and result in roleplaying that’s more daring, interesting, and definitive than would otherwise be possible.

Once an entire group gets into sync with a technique like this, you may discover that mechanics-first declarations – which some would consider anathema to immersive play – can actually end up being incredibly effective at creating powerful, unexpected, and memorable moments for exploring character.

On an abstract level, what you’re doing is declaring intention, making a mechanical check, looking at the result, and then figuring out what your method is through play as a result of the check you made. It can push characters (PCs and NPCs alike) in completely unexpected directions and give space for strong, bold choices in how you play your character.

SOCIAL VECTORS & MULTI-STEP RESOLUTION

Although letting it ride is one option for a social encounter, you can also use multi-step action resolution. As with any other multi-step resolution, there are a few good practices to observe. Most notably, you want to make sure that each additional resolution point is landing at the point of a meaningful choice, a meaningful consequence, or both. Don’t just make another Diplomacy check; make another Diplomacy check because the conversation has reached some crucial moment.

For example, you should probably avoid making a new Intimidate check for every single question you ask the informer you’ve got strung up by their ankle. But it might be appropriate to make another check to convince them not to tell anybody about your conversation with them.

Similarly, during tense negotiations each point of contention in the final agreement might be determined by a different skill check. As you play through these negotiations, this also allows you to change your methods: You might use a Diplomacy check for certain points, but then let the barbarian come in with a strong Intimidation routine to close the deal.

Although they can be less clear-cut, social interactions can also be structured as vectors. Vectors, if you recall, are about figuring out how to establish a “line of sight” to your objective: You need to do X before you can do Y before you can do Z. You need to sneak up to the door before you can pick the lock before you can open it. You need to convince the frightened barkeep to let you in before you can convince the frightened villagers to evacuate because time is running out.

(One of the cool things about thinking in terms of vectors is that you can freely swap in non-social solutions or vice versa: Maybe instead of persuading the barkeep to open the door, you just kick it open. Or instead of picking the lock you convince the security guard on duty that you left your badge up on the 6^th floor and it’ll just take a minute to go grab it. As the GM you can just say, “There’s a thing in your way,” and then let the players figure out how they want to vector around – or through! – that thing.)

Because social situations tend to be less easily quantifiable and, as a result, more malleable, they work really well with abstract vector depth: You can go into a social interaction without really knowing how many obstacles might exist between the PCs and the goal they want to achieve or what exactly those obstacles are.

What I refer to as complex skill checks, therefore, often work well for social interactions that you want to give some heft to. (These mechanics are stuff like “X successes before Y failures” or, in many dice pool systems, “continue making checks until you achieve X successes.”) Each mechanical resolution can be framed as an obstacle and the players determine how they want to deal with that obstacle, prompting the next skill check. Exactly what the obstacles are along the way (i.e., what objections the person they’re talking to has to their plan ) and how they’re dealt with will depend heavily on context and will naturally evolve as the conversation continues. (It’s not unusual to discover that a conversation you thought was about one thing suddenly becomes about something else entirely.)

The Psywar system I designed for the Infinity RPG was built on similar principles: You could influence people to do what you wanted by inflicting Metanoia on them (using the same mechanical systems that inflicted Wounds in combat and Breaches when hacking; Metanoia meaning literally “the changing of one’s mind”). The amount of Metanoia you needed to inflict was dependent on the Intransigence of the target, and that was determined by their unwillingness to do the particular thing you wanted them to do.

SOCIAL SKILLS COMPELLING PCs

Intransigence in Infinity also gave me a mechanism for giving players flexible control over how their characters would be impacted by the Psywar mechanics. As I wrote in the rulebook:

PCs can also be targeted by Psywar attacks. This means that they can suffer Metanoia Effects and, as a result, have their beliefs or actions altered.

For some players, this can be problematic because their enjoyment of the game depends (for one reason or another) on having complete control over their character. The line between what’s acceptable and unacceptable for these players can be a fuzzy one and it can also vary significantly. Some players, for example, will be okay with their characters panicking against their will and fleeing from the scene of a battle, but will not be comfortable if they are “forced” to trust someone or to agree to a particular course of action.

If your group has concerns about using Metanoia Effects on the PCs, we recommend having a frank discussion and figuring out where to draw the line. However, we also recommend that what is good for the goose is good for the gander: If, for example, NPCs cannot force the PCs to retreat, then PCs cannot do the that to NPCs, either. Keep the playing field level.

Another possible compromise is to allow players to set the Intransigence scores for their own PCs, the same way that the GM sets them for the NPCs. (These can, of course, vary based on circumstance and the Metanoia Effect being attempted.) This only works if the numbers are set in good faith, of course, but it empowers the players to make sure that the system is reflecting their sense of who their characters truly are.

Broadly speaking, this passage covers most of my thoughts on this topic.

First, social skills that compel behavior create more friction when they aren’t modeling character behavior “correctly,” particularly from the point of view of the player controlling that character. (Allowing players to set their own characters Intransigence value was a really good way of empowering them: If they felt their character would be strongly opposed to X, they could express that without vetoing the mechanic entirely.)

Second, RPGs are fundamentally about making choices as if you were your character. Therefore, a mechanic which effectively “plays the game for you” can be very problematic if it’s not handled correctly.

(The reverse argument I’ve often heard is that being forced to believe a lie against your will, for example, is not fundamentally different than being stabbed through your kidney with three feet of steel against your will. Both will remove character agency and there’s really no reason to distinguish between the two.

A more revealing example, however, is the distinction between dominate person being used to force your character to do something and a Persuasion skill doing the same thing. Why do the same people who readily accept the former object to the latter? Because one of these things is removing the character’s ability to control their actions and the other one is removing the player’s ability to control their character. That distinction doesn’t matter to some people, but it matters intensely to others.)

That’s why, when you do have a mechanic that compels PC behavior, I generally prefer a mechanic that gives a prompt to the player and then allows the player to determine what that means for their character and how it plays out. This is how I handle the Sanity mechanic in Call of Cthulhu, for example: The mechanic provides a “you’re broken now” prompt and then the player decides whether that means they’re running away screaming, breaking down into uncontrollable sobbing, fainting dead away, regressing into a non-responsive catatonia, etc.

SOCIAL SKILLS AS INFORMATION

For similar reasons, I tend to like social skills that give the PCs information rather than dictating their behavior.

For example, should the outcome of a Bluff check be “you believe the lie and you have to act as if you are completely gulled and have no doubts whatsoever” or should the outcome of a successful Bluff check be “he looks like he’s telling the truth / you don’t see any reason not to believe what he’s saying?”

To put this in perspective, imagine that this was a poker game: Someone makes a Bluff check and succeeds against your Sense Motive check. Should the mechanics force the PC to call his bet without having any choice in the matter? Or should the mechanics simply report “you think he’s got the better hand” and then let you make the decision?

(In the presence of meta-knowledge this can potentially lead to abuse, but that’s really a completely different situation that’s only tangentially related to the social skill resolution itself.)

If you’re feeling resistance to this idea, consider that it’s not really limited to social skills. For example, a PC makes a Spot check to see someone hiding in the room. The successful check doesn’t compel them to immediately attack: The Spot check provides them with information (“there’s a dude hiding there” or “you don’t see anybody hiding there”) and then you make a decision about what to do with that information. Similarly, a Sense Motive check provides you with information (“you think he’s in love with Sarah” or “you don’t think he’s lying”) and it’s still up to you to make a decision about what to do with that information.

SOCIAL SKILLS WITH MECHANICAL CONSEQUENCES

Social skills can similarly apply mechanical consequences without compelling character behavior (once again leaving the ultimate choice of how to respond to that mechanical stimulus up to the player).

For example, instead of forcing a character to retreat, a successful Intimidate check might apply a morale penalty to the affected character’s actions. The ultimate decision of whether to drop their sword and run away screaming in response to that stimulus is left up to the player.

SOCIAL SKILLS AS SOCIAL CLUE

As social skills provide information, they can create fortune in the middle resolutions: The initial social skill resolution provides clues about what approaches might (or might not) work with the targeted character: Are they susceptible to bribes? A coward who can be intimidated? Maybe you realize that they’re secretly in love with Teodora… is there a way you can use that information (or do you just tuck it away for later)?

Many social skill resolutions can actually be systemically broken down into this two-stage approach to good effect.

Flubbing the initial check, of course, is also likely to have an impact on how the conversation plays out. For example, consider what happens in X-Men: First Class when Charles Xavier – who can read minds and, therefore, has never put a single goddamn skill point into his Sense Motive skill – is suddenly faced with the need to figure out the best argument to use with a Holocaust-survivor wearing a telepathy-blocking helmet:

Charles: Erik, you said it yourself. We’re better men. This is the time to prove it. There are thousands of men on those ships. Good, honest, innocent men. They’re just following orders.

Erik: I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again.

NEXT: Sanity Checks