Traps in the media.

It's a classic image - the adventurer makes their way through the cobweb-shrouded tomb when his foot catches on a raised slab that sinks and causes doors to slam and spikes to protrude from the walls. It's so standard that it and the like appear in movies, video games and RPGs and usually we don't even think about it; well let's start.

The main problem with such devices is they're completely infeasible outside the premise of the 5-minute slot where they put a protagonist in jeopardy. They exist by themselves with no relation to anything around them and for me anyone who uses such a device is just being lazy.

The good use of traps or even puzzles is dependant on what it’s supposed to do. The “duh!” answer given by movies etc. is that it’s there to trap or kill people to prevent them getting to the shiny, shiny goal of their quest.

However consider traps placed in a working environment, perhaps a temple, a palace or even a high-tech security system would a trap that sent the entire edifice into a pit of molten lava or blew up the building be a logical step? Just imagine the High Priest/CEO trips over a shoelace, falls against the trigger, and destroys everything.

Even such devices should only be employed in a ‘it’s better destroyed than in the wrong hands’ in which case a good reason has to be provided as to why it wasn’t simply destroyed to begin with.

But movies tend to deal with long-lost temples and ruins; so this doesn’t apply does it? Well yes because unless the designers built everything with the expectation that it would be left abandoned it would be classed as a working environment and this constrains the type of traps that should be used.

A major difference in traps is whether they require constant maintenance or supply. A crossbow requires darts, tripwires need to be restrung and even pits will need to be emptied out, all this is perfectly feasible when it is expected that there will be people about to do these things, but what happens when the structure is abandoned?

The pit starts to fill, the spikes at the bottom start to rust and break from impact, the crossbow string wilts or snaps even assuming it has ammunition and that’s not to mention if the mechanisms themselves remain intact to trigger it.

Most of the traps that present themselves in such circumstances should simply not work, however that doesn’t mean an adventurer will have free run of the place – gross physical traps are still possible, but even those should be created with usage in mind.

Again the classic is the sealing of the doors, possibly with an added bonus of spikes, sand or closing walls. However in a working environment mistakes happen, or the occupants want to be able to question the intruders, or at the very least they want to be able to get to work after an intruder has been dealt with and therefore such traps must be reversible and given the inherent laziness, sorry efficiency, that people require that means it needs to be easily reversible. It might seem a great idea to suffocate any intruders in sand, but who is going to get rid of it and fill the hopper up again?

Such traps though are ideally suited to unoccupied areas and don’t require any reversibility; or do they? The problem with this type is that they work only once – the doors slam, the sand pours in, and the intruder suffocates; but what happens when the next intruder tries their luck? Rather than a trap they’re faced with a wall of stone. Breaking through, the sand pours out along with a sand-preserved body. That alone might scare some away, but hardy souls will press on through the next door and the trap has become useless except as an obstruction.

To create such a trap with an automatic reverse is difficult, but not impossible yet even here the problem lies with the age of the mechanism, the more complicated the device the more that can go wrong until it reaches the point it simply fails.

Of course all this only applies given an intelligent designer and an intelligent or, at the least, non-interfering client. Considerations of ammunition supply, rope maintenance may simply not occur to some, yet all this does is increase the probability that any such traps will simply fail either by the time the intruders arrive or after a number have attempted to gain entry.

A even worse scenario can also be envisioned when there have been a large number of access attempts as each intruder defeats one trap before succumbing to the next as the following intruder has one-less trap to deal with; the final intruder will find a hole in both sealed doors and the sand removed, the spikes jammed, the tripwire cut, and can simply stroll in to reach their goal.

This also applies to the puzzles that crop up, put the jewel in the eye of the god to open the secret tomb – fine, but once again having one intruder do so means the next doesn’t have to.

So how can this reasoning be applied to movies, books, RPGs and video games? By using the uncertainties. The doors seal, the sand pours and someone outside the trap finds the lever that stops and reverses the process, pulls it, and watches as the rotten mechanism snaps in their hand. An ingenious trap that expels a combustible fuel out of a tube and ignites it has been unused for centuries; gas builds up in the storage chamber and when an unlucky soul trips the spark the entire structure explodes. The swinging pendulum blade begins its descent, but at the point of its upswing the cord holding it snaps and the blade continues on unimpeded. For an audience that's learned the ways of the movie trap this may be more interesting than the original purpose.

For puzzles each subsequent step should reset the previous. The jewel is placed in the eye yet at the next puzzle, the jewel is returned to its original position and the way sealed off behind.

Traps and the like can be made logical for the circumstances it just requires a little thought.

[Update - The consideration of natural traps "Hey let's encourage a bunch of poisonous spiders to make a nest in our tomb" "Excellent idea now once we seal it what do they survive on?" "Um?"]