Duke Frost said:
I miss weapon traps that actually had moving parts and would swing down and hit people. We used nerf crossbows as traps a long time ago. They were awesome.
When I run through dungeons in Skyrim, I think how cool a giant foam log swinging down and doing the undefined "massive" damage would be. Or swords or pendulums swinging down across the corridor.
Scott
I've built maybe a dozen of these, and a hundred or more traps for Alliance. Every time that a rules change goes through that cripples traps a little more, it makes it really hard to be motivated to continue building cool traps. Those Nerf Crossbow traps aren't legal anymore. Getting hit by a flying bolt doesn't do anything, and they're illegal weapons. All of my "Shoots things/fires things" traps no longer do anything because a moving weapon does nothing. You can get hit by a swinging weapon from a trap, and according to the current trap rules, nothing happens. If you set off a weapon trap, you automatically take the damage, regardless of who gets hit by any such 'flying/moving' parts. This seriously crippled 'home defense' traps, which is really the only place that traps had any hold left in the system. I've actually build 'ballista-themed' traps to shoot people coming into my unwarded building, but they're not legal any more, and any sort of 'siege weapon' that people load and fire based on weapon traps aren't legal for the same reason.
Traps aren't really something that the system encourages PCs to use. Every trap requires a Hold, and in a big combat (or even a small one), it's a serious pain to have to resolve a trap going off. This is why traps only go off on the setter if they're interrupted, why you can't 'hand grenade' traps anymore, why you can't move traps very far, etc. Those things are all there intentionally to prevent them from being used in combat. The fact that they've been made progressively harder to use as defensive measures makes me think that they're really not intended to be used by PCs at all. In fact, after submitting 5 or 6 ways to alter the trap system that got absolutely no traction, I started advocating the removal of traps as a PC creatable object, since that seemed to really be the intent. At the time, there was only about a half dozen people in the alliance that had the skill "Create Trap," and I'd bet that the number isn't significantly larger today. Traps need a serious overhaul one way or another, and while there are a lot of people that like them (I do), 95% of the time they're used in a fun, effective way is by the plot team to create an enjoyable encounter.
A good trap mod takes several hours to set up, and to really make the time, effort, resources, and people to set them up worthwhile a lot of story work has to go into making sure enough people get to experience it to justify all the input. That can be by making the module repeatable, making lots of people required to complete it, etc. Those things don't always work into the story, and since it's usually just a small group of people who will interact with a trap mod, it's hard to justify when that time could be spent entertaining more people with less time/money/effort/NPCs. I still like running trap mods, and I plan on making a number of "We will be using non-standard traps" announcements at our next event, but the system that we have doesn't really support them.