Why don't traps have a CR?

[pibby]

So I got my hands on a DMG and upon skim reading the traps section there appears to be no way to calculate traps into a CR value. In fact, the traps section of the DMG is pretty vague as far as rules given to homebrew traps. All it gives you is how much damage a trap should do depending on how dangerous you want it to be, and samples of traps that do more than just damage. And then it just gives you ideas on what kind of traps you could make.

This is a problem for me since I'm trying to make an outdoor dungeon where there are plenty of traps and harpies that are meant to pull PCs into said traps. Do any of you playgrounders have an idea of how I can measure the difficulty of traps as a CR incorporated with monster CR instead of just three broad categories?

[jazzymantis]

It does give you the damage severity by level, and DCs for various difficulties of traps.

Getting the average CR of a trap is going to be hard though. The players real life intelligence is going to play a big part of it, even if your wizard has an INT of 20, your player might not be that smart. If they were actually smart and roleplaying like they weren't , then the typical award for that would be inspiration or something to that effect.

Set difficulties of traps to how difficult you think they would actually be to solve. Award XP based on similar dangers such as monsters

Why do you need a CR?

[eastmabl]

I could imagine including a trap as part of an encounter with monsters and needing to know what affect the trap has on the fight.

But largely, a trap on its own gets some XP that you decide is appropriate. Look at some of the prewritten adventures for examples of XP.

[Occasional Sage]

I could imagine including a trap as part of an encounter with monsters and needing to know what affect the trap has on the fight.

In which case I'd treat the trap as terrain highly favoring the monsters and increment the difficulty of the encounter by a level (or two if the trap is particularly nasty), as suggested in the DMG.

[pibby]

In which case I'd treat the trap as terrain highly favoring the monsters and increment the difficulty of the encounter by a level (or two if the trap is particularly nasty), as suggested in the DMG.

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't read the whole DMG yet. Although doing it this way I'll need to ballpark the dungeon's overall difficulty and test run it with a friend not in the campaign, which was what I was hoping not to do since said friend could potentially want to campaign in it as well.

[Gritmonger]

I ended up not assigning a CR, since these were more obstacles to getting to things, and just rolling them into the adventure, but I'd probably go to the monster building guide in the DMG to look for similar "monsters" in terms of damage CR -

A monster that gets one attack, has a special ability (hiding, automatic initiative on attacks), is immune to most things that constructs are also immune to, and is (usually) immobile (move0) as well as mostly blind to range (blindsight 0' or 5' depending). So depending on the damage, most traps would probably scale based on the straight damage due to the advantages and drawbacks, but consider the CR should probably be balanced more on a "group" of 1 (1/4 mean party level) so 1/4 at first level, 1/2 at 2nd level, 1 at 4th level, and so-on.

[eastmabl]

In which case I'd treat the trap as terrain highly favoring the monsters and increment the difficulty of the encounter by a level (or two if the trap is particularly nasty), as suggested in the DMG.

Seems wise. I haven't committed much of the DMG to memory yet, so there are frequently things that pass me by.

It's part of the reason why I visit the boards.

[Occasional Sage]

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't read the whole DMG yet. Although doing it this way I'll need to ballpark the dungeon's overall difficulty and test run it with a friend not in the campaign, which was what I was hoping not to do since said friend could potentially want to campaign in it as well.

Nah, it's part of assigning difficulty to encounters; no need to calculate the whole dungeon.

Run the individual encounters which feature trapped terrain through the Danger Threshold calculator on DMG82, then flip over to Modifying Encounter Difficulty on DMG84-85.


Seems wise. I haven't committed much of the DMG to memory yet, so there are frequently things that pass me by.

It's part of the reason why I visit the boards.

Me too!