As someone who always looked at the Combat Trapsmith prestige class in 3.5 and wanted to play it, I’m now starting to wonder if the rules for complex traps could be worked up into a Trapsmith Rogue archetype who constructs them or jury-rigs them (for a limited duration) on the fly, as almost a sort of non-magical version of a summoner.

I really love this. So simple and more useful than trinkets and trade goods.

That’s excellent!

I tend to regularly include likely magic item components in treasure, in part because just getting coins and gems gets boring pretty fast. A chunk of adamantium ore, a branch of soulwood, or powdered unicorn horn can still be traded for gold, but also hint at other exciting uses.

Being a parent, however, is why he’s so well-acquainted with trap rules. Especially the skill checks involving loose LEGO bricks…

I’ve tended to find that if you want item creation to happen as a DM that’s not just the totally mechanical variety, you have to build it into the game. It doesn’t have to be what the campaign is *about* but it needs to be sufficiently important a side theme to make it interesting.

In my house ruled to H-E-double hockey sticks and gone 2E game the PCs recently had what could have turned into a massive altercation with some aspis, ant-men who are highly skilled alchemists (http://www.lomion.de/cmm/aspis.php). The aspis had taken over a valley full of plants and alchemical components that some of the PCs’ allies, a village of elves, had harvested. The aspis also grown a massive plant that proved to be a potion factory. Having avoided just wiping the aspis out, which was very challenging given the communication difficulties, they now have access to the plant potion factory. They still have to get inputs to make the potions but don’t actually need the formulas themselves.

I make ingredients part of the core treasure. I did this in my occasionally running Adventures in Middle Earth game, too. The PCs raided a mine on the outskirts of Moria that they got the map to from the dwarf prospector sold as he was leaving after having been driven out by goblins. They raided it, defeated the goblins, orcs, and cave trolls inside, and found several ingots of good steel along with some refined silver and copper. One of the ingots was sufficient to make weapons of quality, which one of the characters can, potentially, do, given that he’s a trained smith.

In both cases, crafting was a substantial motivation for the adventures, especially some nifty side quests that don’t feel like the PCs are wasting their time. Crafting is a great way to have adventures that aren’t just “save the world”. If you do want “save the world” to factor in, it can, but it doesn’t have to. An example of this might be the old fantasy novel Master of Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy.

Having at least a robust skeleton in the rules to enable the DM to hold things together and spur good ideas really helps. WotC seems constitutionally unable to deliver this. In a game that accepts a good bit of DM customization this isn’t a problem, but many people really don’t like a lot of house rules or don’t have time or mindset to generate their own.

They routinely show they fail at even doing fairly basic math so I’m not surprised they can’t design a reasonable economic system.

WotC really should just contract with someone who’s an actual economist—there has to be a good number of folks with decent economic knowledge who are also players and I can think of at least one DMs Guild person they touted who used to be in finance—and have them design a decent system with a few dial settings for the DM to choose from.

It probably wouldn’t end up being perfect but it would be a lot better than the “we really don’t actually know what we’re doing” mess and the the inevitable Jeremy Crawford video where he snidely condescends to the audience who asks why they’re stupid for even asking.

I feel like that’s a cop-out and failure of imagination, especially now that I’ve seen what 4e and 5e have come up with for late-game traps. At the time, I think I pretty much accepted that argument.

The danger is designers treating specific spells as mandatory keys. For example, imagine a Poisonous Tempest where the designer forgets to allow Arcana as a possible way to break the force-warding on the locks, and stops at “you need to cast dispel magic successfully three times.”

The other thing is that I think we’ll need limited anti-teleportation functionality before long, because as I mentioned in the article, combat-range teleportation is such an all-purpose solution to a local problem.

That’s correct. I think the idea was that once characters reached level 11+, they had so many ways of detecting and bypassing traps that even the worst of them became more inconvenience than hazard.

I like that the Buy action does offer modifiers for low- and high-magic campaigns, even if that doesn’t map all that well to other actions.

Uncommon items like a +1 dagger aren’t the worst for a crafter, though the costs of the Sell action eat into your margin a bit more than you’d like. That’s kind of the issue with a fixed cost to try to sell one item, but that item’s return scales well-nigh geometrically. (I’m sure there’s a term for this in formal economics, but I am not an economist.)

I think the game loses something when players expect to treat books of magic items as shopping lists. Well, really what I mean to say is: I’ve played that game, we had fun with it in two separate editions, and now I am all tired of it and looking for a different experience. To get to the game experience that I want around reagents, there needs to be a LOT more backend work to present a semi-randomized market for rare reagents, comparatively more accessible than the semi-randomized market for finished goods.