Making Traps Fun

Traps are a dungeon crawling staple and honestly, usually not very fun. Your classic traps like poison needles, spikes, swinging blades, and pits are iconic but serve a very specific purpose of forcing the party to be cautious as the explore. They deal damage and your reward for foiling them is that you're not maimed or dead.

That's boring.

Pain is fleeting and uninteresting. Obstacles are engaging. Instead of just doing damage traps should change the game by altering how the players can interact with an area. They should do something beyond grinding the party down.

When you write traps try creating ones that:

• Have a reward beyond survival. If you manage to not die you can find bits of loot and interesting things left by or on previous victims, or the parts of the trap itself might be useful (or valuable).
• Add structural interest to the dungeon. Let traps act as new paths or access points for secret areas once they're tripped. (Ex: Pit traps that have an access door at the bottom for cleaning crews to enter. Deadfall traps that have something behind them in the space where the "fall" material came from. Arrow slits and murder holes that you can see through once you find and deactivate them.)
• Move the party unexpectedly to another section of the dungeon. Elevator rooms that drop you down levels, stairs that turn into chutes and slides, and walls that drop to split the party are classic examples. These introduce the same "will we have enough resources?" tension as a damage-dealing trap, but are more interesting because they create a new situation instead of just pain.
• Can be reset and used against enemies or have an interesting effect the party can play with. (Ex: Gravity tricks with a magic fall-up pit trap.)
• Confine but don't injure the person who trips them. (Ex: Falling cages or barred gates over doorways.) The party's unharmed but now they have a new problem to solve.
• Sound alarms (either audible and obvious or silent) and alert the dungeon inhabitants to the party's presence.
• Are clearly telegraphed as dangerous, but exactly what they do is unclear so the party goes "What the hell is that?" and has a chance to figure it out.
• Have bizarre effects like teleporting victims away or forcibly astral projecting them. Something that's just part of the dungeon's tech and is only dangerous because the party's not trained to use it.

There's so much potential for adventuring shenanigans with unorthodox traps. Embrace it. Make them entertaining to interact with and figure out. Make them cause unexpected, unpredictable, immediate problems to deal with beyond massive bodily trauma. (Unless you're Luke Gearing, then keep doing what you're doing. That hallway is beautiful.) Have fun.