Functional Craft Trap (3.5e Variant Rule)



Has anyone actually attempted to craft traps in game? It turns out its nearly impossible. Progress in silver pieces? Has anyone seen the price of traps? Not to mention some absurdly simple traps costing a minimum of 100g, and that just won't do. And frankly, it just takes forever. So, let's fix that.

Functional Craft Trap
First thing is, some traps will be free and quick to make. The water bucket over the door, when you have a bucket of water and a door. That's free, maybe a few rounds. Contact poison smeared on X. If you have the poison, it doesn't cost any more than that, takes you 1d4 rounds. You just need to make a DC 15 Craft Trap to "set it up right" for the basic, no frilled trap of these kinds. Failing means the rock's not stable, the poison isn't smeared well, and so forth.

So what about everything else, specifically traps with moving parts, fancy exploding doors, and all of that? The formula is now a minimum of DC 15 to set up the trap, anything less and it doesn't work. Your progress on the trap is as follows:

Your result squared = the amount of progress in gold per day.

When you reach the market-price of the trap, the trap is complete (you still only pay 1/3rd the cost of the trap in actual gold). For example, if you roll a 20, that is 20x20, or 400 gold progress per day. If you roll a 30, that's 30x30, or 900 gold a day. Roll a 100, and you're making 100x100, or 10,000gp a day. So a trap which costs 21,600 gp might take 3 days for a high level character, and a lot longer for low-level characters to construct. It will cost you 7200 gp out of pocket to build. Remember, you still need to make DC 15 minimum to make any sort of trap, so you will be making at least 225 gold in traps a day.

Effect on the Game
Now that trap making is faster you may want to speed up the crafting of other items too. The rule assumes you are playing a campaign with actual markets (and thus supply and demand) rather than a video game where someone is always willing to purchase something at full price, so PCs cannot simply run a business on trapmaking alone. Only kings, unusual characters, and other such beings have a need for traps, as well as PCs interesting in arming a recently gained stronghold, or attempting to ambush an enemy.