Trap triggers

Aww. Reasonable chance of disarming them? That's no fun.

I was thinking that it would be truly vicious to set a tensioned trip wire, so that rather than activating when the wire was pulled, it would activate when the wire was cut, releasing a spring loaded lever arm to close a contact on an alarm or something.

Of course, the next level of heinous would be to set it up so that The trap would activate if the wire was pulled or cut. And then put in a tilt based anti handling device. Then install a spring trap under the anti-handling device that would fire off a camera flash if disturbed. And place a photosensitive massive damage trap in the rafters above the whole aparatus. And set the massive damage trap up to set off an air horn connected to a small pnuematic automata that would appear at the front of the cabin and play 'Revele'.

Dum de dum dum dum.

On a slightly more serious, less heinous note, I used a disposable camera and a coat hanger to make a flash trap. Take the back facing off of a camera and you'll find that you can re-set the shutter mechanism even after you remove the film. So you can activate the flash, re-set the shutter, and then use the coat hanger to fashion a small lever arm trigger and a gimble to mount it to the camera housing. You hot glue the trigger to the camera's shutter button, fix it to one end of a door frame, run your trip wire, and when someone comes through they get an unexpected flash. It's fairly cheap, too. I think you can get a disposable camera for about five dollars these days. Plus you can develop the film afterwords and see the look on the thief's face when they realize they're about to go boom.

I get the argument for having reasonable traps, but I also find the idea that I can actually make functional trap devices inspiring, and I've got a powerful urge to manufacture the most complicated, devious, evil device ever to be labeled 'Front towards enemy'. I suppose the polite thing to do would to be put all of my best tricks into one large chest, fill it with gold, and post a polite note explaining that anyone who can actually get the thing open without perma-killing themselves is welcome to the contents.

Oh, and on the subject of pre-modern mechanical marvels, Wikipedia!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton

Several places around the world throughout time manufactured truly amazing devices using only clockworks, water power, sunlight, and mechanics. Everything from simple robots that could serve tea or dance (Japan 1700's) to a stellar computer (Greece, 100?BC) to every kind of clock you could imagine. Things like mercury tilt switches are relatively new, but mechanical devices that have similar function as old as the world.
 
Ooh! Ooh! oh my god, you could totally make an entirely mechanical light sensitive switch or trigger! It would never work because you'd need to have the thief trigger it at the perfect time of day, but whatever!

Okay, so the basic premise rely's on something called Field's Metal. It's a special alloy that meltss at very, very low temperatures, in this case 144 degrees, considerably lower than the boiling point for water. Here's the Wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field%27s_metal

What I'm thinking is this.

1. Set up a really heinous, unfair trap. Something that is just impossible to disarm by any reasonable means

2. But, attach a riddle to the top of the trap that translates out to 'Open the window at this time of day, use a magnifying glass to focus the sun on this thing, and you'll get the loot.

3. The solution would be to use a magnifying glass to concentrate light on the piece of field's metal, melting the metal and presumably detonating all the traps from more than five feet away.

It all falls apart because I can't think of a reasonable way to get the field's metal to 144 degrees without using fire or a high energy laser pointer. Fire is against the rules of safety and common sense, and giving the rogues high energy lasers would just be madness.

4. Okay, I have one idea. Set up the trap so that there is one tensioned wire that will release all the traps, but it runs through a tube to the outside of the cabin. The trigger string is run through a plug of field's metal so as to be encapsulated completely within the tube or pipe. The solution would be to use a lens to focus light on the fields metal, melting it and releasing the string, which would activate the traps while you are still a safe distance away.

It has some other uses that I can think of, too. You could cast the Field's Metal into the shape of a little idol with a valuable item buried inside it, and the PCs would have to immerse it in boiling water to get the goodies out. Or use a thin sheet of the stuff to obscure a lock or hide a secret compartment.

Another idea might be

1. Make a chest with a latching mechanism that, when turned, pushes a rod with a nob on it inside the chest.

2. When the chest is in the closed position, the nob extends into the end of a tube. lock the chest, then pour liquid field's metal into the tube.

3. The tube extends out of the top of the chest. The solution is to pour a hot liquid into the tube to melt the field's metal, freeing the nob and allowing the PC to turn the latch.
 
Wraith said:
See, I really dislike using things like mercury switches or light/motion sensors for traps in Alliance games. We don't have access to modern electronics, or magic to duplicate them, for anything else, so why should traps be different?
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I've done a lot of disarming of traps on mods and stuff over the years. It's my favorite part of the game. I like to think I'm pretty damn good at it, and I gotta agree--I hate these traps that use lights, batteries, etc. It seems so out of place in a game like this. I don't find them any harder to disarm and I almost always know what to look for (thanks to years of mess-ups :lol: ). I just think they should avoid traps that use modern technology.

Either way, you build it and I'll disarm it. ;)
 
Gee-Perwin said:
and I gotta agree--I hate these traps that use lights, batteries, etc. It seems so out of place in a game like this. I don't find them any harder to disarm and I almost always know what to look for (thanks to years of mess-ups :lol: ). I just think they should avoid traps that use modern technology.
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IMO, there's no difference setting up a 'medieval mercury switch' - which they had all the way back in the days of Greece - to a buzzer as there is a snap to a mousetrap. I could easily set up that same switch to smash a bottle of gas but figure that would be bad and hard to reset. Now, one type of trap I found out wasn't really liked was the ol' spring snake. Well not liked by the person disarming the trap. The rest of us had a hoot. :)
 
I like to use tension in strings as trap triggers. It's particularly fun when a rogue finds the "trap", cuts the string, and THEN the trap goes off. They can be attached to anything that can be set off, really. Even more fun is opposing tension in double lines. Give them just enough slack, but then which do you cut, and which do you leave?
 
Zymm said:
I like to use tension in strings as trap triggers. It's particularly fun when a rogue finds the "trap", cuts the string, and THEN the trap goes off. They can be attached to anything that can be set off, really. Even more fun is opposing tension in double lines. Give them just enough slack, but then which do you cut, and which do you leave?
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I like that one.

I suppose, in my mind, there's too kinds of traps. The first one is the more practicle game one, the trap that is supposed to act as a simple obstacle for thieves, provided they have the right gear. The other kind of trap I have in my mind is something more like the New York Times crossword. You know there is a solution, so you can challenge yourself to work it out. It's like a riddle, except it's mechanical instead of word based.

On that note, I'd love to make a trap that looked very, very heavily trapped, with lots of bells and whistles and gears and pegs and sprockets that would all go off if you even touched them. The trick would be that the trap was set up so that the only way to open the chest without setting something off was to simply open the chest, without fiddling with any of the traps.

I lurve this game.
 
Zymm said:
I like to use tension in strings as trap triggers. It's particularly fun when a rogue finds the "trap", cuts the string, and THEN the trap goes off. They can be attached to anything that can be set off, really. Even more fun is opposing tension in double lines. Give them just enough slack, but then which do you cut, and which do you leave?
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It's a rookie mistake if you go around cutting strings without first looking at what it's connected to. ;) I love setting traps up like this, too, though.
 
FrankManic said:
Zymm said:
On that note, I'd love to make a trap that looked very, very heavily trapped, with lots of bells and whistles and gears and pegs and sprockets that would all go off if you even touched them. The trick would be that the trap was set up so that the only way to open the chest without setting something off was to simply open the chest, without fiddling with any of the traps.
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It's already been built, many years ago. We dubbed it "fighter's revenge" in memory of all the big dumb stick jocks that just walked up and opened it looking for shineys and got blowed up over the years (yes, we've all seen em bless their little RPing hearts).
 
My favorite of all time was one I set up in a cabin that was basically a delaying module designed to tie up people and let em have a good time trying to get though it. We had a cabin set up with 117 trip lines strung across it in crazy zig-zags and criss-crosses with only four actual traps set in the whole building. One of those traps was a crossbow (a real, 20lb rubber dart firing crossbow unloaded but with the string cocked and ready to twang) anchored to the table facing the door with a string leading to the knob, looking like a standard weapon trap. Problem was, the crossbow string had fishing line tied to it and run under the table through fisheye screws in the floor to an explosive trap set just above the door. Adventurers look in, see what they think is a weapon trap (but is in fact part of the triggering mechanism for a separate trap) and figure "no problem, I'll take the bolt on my shield", open the door, crossbow fires, pulls the fishing line which is attached to a clothespin on a mousetrap trigger above the door, BOOM. Muahahaha...
 
We used to have trap practice at my old apartment. I'd set up a room with assorted strings set around the room, some with traps, some without. The person going in would be blindfolded, while another person would have to stand at the doorway and talk them through it. Holly later used that setup for what I am told was a nifty lair-mod.

Then there was the trap Elryion brought into the tourney of Champions, followed closely by Polare's own version... too funny.

I love traps.
 
Have I mentioned that I love you guys? Because I think I love you guys.
 
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