Trap Crafting

[J-ser]

Thunder Pants - 6/29/2006  7:44 AM
the main reasons set trap is hardly used is actually 2 fold, first off, with the exception of a few places there are few strong traps aquiring to use, and the trap crafting currently requires a slightly rediculous amount of ingots (which most rogues can't mine due to lack of STR and weapon feat)

Faldred - 6/29/2006  8:08 AM
As for trap crafting, that goes into CNR discussion -- if the availabilty of traps is really what's keeping people from using them, rather than playing style, then changes can be requested to make traps easier to obtain -- either via stores, CNR recipe changes, or drop frequency changes.

Both true, just thought I would move them over here to see what the rest of the community thought.

[crazedgoblin]

ive allways thought the traps were abit to much hassel to make them

[darkstorme]

Agreed.  The number of wires and gears and whatnot required is a bit ludicrous, when a simple snare can be made using twine and a treebranch, or a tripwire (1 wire!) and a heavy weight.

As the trap sophistication (difficulty to disarm) goes up, it makes sense that the complexity of the trap itself would go up, but simple traps should be fairly straightforward to produce.

[forsettii]

Back in the day.  Traps were abused.  Certain people laid way to many of them and were killing creatures way above what they should have been killing.  Trap Crafting is good for Role Playing Purposes but not to be used for excessive placement.

[Lord of the Forest]

An example for abusing traps...  
[img=http://www.secretforest.de/traps.jpeg]

Was taken on a LAN-Session with my neighbour

[Fian Bearsark]

Just a thought, maybe the traps' weight could be increased, that way rogues won't be able to carry as many at once, or at least be less inclined to load down with a bunch. I can completely understand how some might abuse trap usage, so it is a big concern, but playing a rogue it would be nice to somehow get more practical use out of Set/Disable skills while hunting in a group.

I suppose the argument to this would be that other characters with better carrying capacity could carry them for the rogues. I guess there is really no way to prevent this from happening. But if each was say 10-20 pounds, it could make people think twice about planning trap overkill.

[forsettii]

That really is not a deterent.  Heck with all of the Bags that reduce weight it really doesn't matter.  They only weigh a fraction of the weight.  That would just be a minor weight issue.

[Diablo_68]

Why not increase the chance of trap failure or that on trap failure it triggers in your hands?

Or if a trap failure occurs whilst being placed within a certain distance of other traps they all go off.

[darkstorme]

Diablo_68 - 8/8/2006  10:49 AM

Why not increase the chance of trap failure or that on trap failure it triggers in your hands?

Or if a trap failure occurs whilst being placed within a certain distance of other traps they all go off.

While the former could be done (probably), the latter would require a lot of very expensive scripting.

And I would argue that traps are INTENDED to allow people to kill things they couldn't take on with their bare hands.  Traps are ambush weapons.  You set them and then lead the enemy into them.  Abuses like the screenshot outlines ought not to be possible in Layo (with the possible exception of those people who can move invisibly), because most combat is not dialogue-triggered.

I think relegating traps to the status of RP-only removes (again) a large part of the Rogue/Ranger class' "feel".  Rogues are the trapspringers and the trapsetters - much as Sneak Attack can give them a bonus, they're NOT front-line fighters.  A non-swashbuckling rogue leading the party would ideally strategize thusly: "Okay, I'm going to head forward, grab the ogres' attention, and lead them back to this deadfall.  Those that aren't finished off by the rockfall should fall readily to your blades.  Wait in ambush for my signal.  Everyone clear?  Excellent.  Ready your weapons, then, and hide."

[Faldred]

darkstorme - 8/8/2006  11:27 AM

A non-swashbuckling rogue leading the party would ideally strategize thusly: "Okay, I'm going to head forward, grab the ogres' attention, and lead them back to this deadfall.  Those that aren't finished off by the rockfall should fall readily to your blades.  Wait in ambush for my signal.  Everyone clear?  Excellent.  Ready your weapons, then, and hide."

And, of course, any Lawful characters in the party should object very forcefully to this type of "dirty" tactic.  

[darkstorme]

Oh, no, the Lawful characters would have already walked up to the ogres, introduced themselves, stated their intentions, allowed the ogres to properly prepare for honourable battle (including a balanced meal - no sense fighting on an empty stomach), made sure they had time to call up any re-enforcements they had available, arranged for childcare/widow support for the eventual loser, and pointed out all of his own party's assets, so there would be no dishonourable surprise attacks.

"Paladins®!  If you haven't provoked at least one alignment violation from your party's Rogue today, you're not trying hard enough!"

[Stephen_Zuckerman]

Hey, Lora's Lawful. Part of Law is holding to your own code of honor - smart tactics make for a very useful code of honor.

[darkstorme]

Regardless, back on topic, while traps needn't be the simplest things in the world to make, they ought not to require as many materials as they do.  The alternative is to make them deal obscene amounts of damage, to make the effort/trap worthwhile.  That might, in fact, be the better approach.  It encourages strategic placement of the trap by making blanket-trapping not cost effective, and it makes traps much more one-shot (ie. you invested time and effort in the trap, so you're not going to use it on just anything.)

And, despite all this, I'm going to continue to call on lower-level traps to be brought down in terms of material components, to allow novice Rogues (as Kell will doubtless remain for the duration of Layonara) to make and use their own traps once in a while, since they would be hard-pressed to get their hands on the materials for traps as they stand.

[Dorganath]

Put enough low-level traps together, and you can get the effect of a high-level trap. Again, stop looking at what is "realistic" and take a moment to consider the problem of abuse, which is a key part of why things are they way they are today.
  Come up with a better solution to prevent/limit abuse and we might have a starting point.

[darkstorme]

Well, I'm willing to give up on low-level traps altogether, then (though they should have a correspondingly low reflex DC to save, so really, they ought not to have the same effect as a high-level trap), in favour of the idea I proposed in my earlier post - make the expensive-to-make traps worth it.  If they do large amounts of damage, and are intricate enough to be difficult to avoid/disarm, then they might be worth fetching all the components for.  The quantity of components required would still prevent trap grinding by all but the most determined of individuals, but there would be a point to making them again, rather than being overlooked since - by the time a character is high-enough level to gather all the required materials by one means or another - any spellcaster can do more damage with less risk.

As indicated in my 1:10 post, I understand that blanket-trapping is a concern - but if traps are to be used primarily for RP purposes, it would be as simple to make the easily-craftable traps trivially easy to avoid and capable of dealing cantrip-level damage - less even than alchemist's fire, say.  Then traps would be more widely available for RP purposes, and the higher-level traps could maintain the property of actually being worth the crafting time.

It also occurs to me that forcing another decision to be made when splitting skill points is a good thing as well - so allowing more widespread use of traps would encourage placing those valuable points into the Set Traps skill.  In addition, diablo_68's idea is a good one.  If the chance for Spectacular Failure were raised higher (not sure about feasibility) or, better still, if it were extended to setting traps even when out of combat (also not sure if that's possible, or an in-built feature of the engine), then users would be disinclined to blanket an area with traps, as one or two high-damage traps going off in their hands could finish them.  (Skill Mastery could avoid that, but that's high-level Rogues only, and Layo doesn't have many of them (for good reason!))

To be clear, I'm neither trying to be obstinate nor argumentative (except in a good way, of course. ), but the NWN engine is not geared towards one of my two favourite styles of PnP roleplay - that is to say, the art of stealth.  A character should be able to make his way in the world without having to face too many enemies toe to toe, even if he's not a spellhurler.  As it is, outside of quests, a character cannot sneak his way by a horde of enemies and expect any XP for his pains.  Traps, while not ideal, do offer a compromise.

[Leanthar]

@darkstorme, yes they should be for RP reasons. But they are not used that way when they are easier to craft (and abuse). It was that way for 2 years untilwe actually ripped trap crafting out entirely. Then a little over a year agowe put it back in but like it is now. Players (quite a few but not all) tend to find the easiest path to resistance and traps are definetly that when not in the way we have them now. Then we have the whole traps are part of the built in NwN system and much of it can not be recoded. Then we have AI issues.

Why did I make the changes and remove the traps at one time you ask? Because even with a much smaller community (we had less than 10% of the players that we have now) the amount of time the team and I had to spend on TRAPS was ludicruous. Players abused them and 'claimed rp' and no amount of reasoning would show them the light of day. So I gave up. Again the few ruined it for the many. Only so much we can do when fighting an up hill battle like traps and how they are coded in nwn.

I do know what you are talking about and so does dorganath. But it just is not going to happen for a long while and certainly not in nwn1 (if ever).

[darkstorme]

Ah, understood.  I can particularly see where the AI issue would be a problem.  I don't think even the most clever enemy AI scripts on the vault currently do anything with traps.  So the enemy chasing you might spot the trap you set, but would walk over it anyway.  Hrm.  Well, Kell may wind up doing most of his work in quests, then, rather than any regular prescence IG.

Additionally, abuse of a ton of lower-level traps would be a nightmare, lag-wise, so I can see the issue there as well... (this does not, however, mean I'm not going to open up the toolset as soon as I get home and design a PW-friendly trap. *chuckles*  You'll see, you'll all see!  *maniacal laughter*)

Thanks for the clarification, Leanthar.

[Stephen_Zuckerman]

Perhaps if there were a way to limit the number of traps a person could have active at a time?

[Diablo_68]

I know nothing about the code that would be required but.

+5 dc ontop of the set trap DC for each additional trap?

[Fian Bearsark]

This may be completely stupid, but I was using my ox the other day and received the message at one point: "You may only have one henchman at a time". What if when you deploy a trap it becomes a Henchman? Then, until it is detonated or picked back up, you can't deploy another one? I don't even know if its possible to assign this trait to an object like a trap, but it might answersome of the ongoing problems with traps here.