Bwade
I'm looking for a little help in designing a dungeon's traps and encounters to sap my PCs of all their wonderful casting, but not be too terribly frustrating or time consuming. The setting is an ancient temple which can only be opened for a distinct period of time. The PCs will be forced to rampage through the temple to reach the prize and still have time to get out, but the Prize Room will have a trap/encounter which will be painful but not fatal to get past without the casting of spells. Now, I could go ahead and just put the entire room under an Antimagic field, but that'd be cheating, no? Basically, I'm just looking for small ways to nickel and dime away the party's spellcasting abilities, since the party is composed mostly of spellcasters (1 wizard/sage, 1 artificer, 2 clerics, a rogue and a monk). The temple is built into the side of a live volcano, if that gives anyone thoughts to spring from.
Comments
My first thought is a summoning trap a room or corridor with several glyphs that summon creatures who attack the party until the glyphs are disabled. Each of the glyphs can be overloaded by channeling some number of total spell levels into them (maybe a spellcraft or knowledge check to reduce the amount they need to spend) or disabled by the rogue. I'd say make some glyphs arcane and some divine, so the party has to allocate the correct resources to disabling them, as well as deciding who should fight off the beasties and who should deal with the trap.
Another possibility is a big room with strong enemies (magic resistant?). The party could win in a straight up fight but it would be hard -let them find several big weapons or traps in the room that they can activate with spells to devastate the enemies. That gives them the fun of kicking serious butt, while accomplishing your own objective. Just have a plan in place for when they inevitably try to take the weapons with them.
When I want to devise puzzles for my players, I often make use of logic puzzles or riddles and then work them into the game world. (e.g. in a beholder's lair, my players stepped onto a series of floating platforms that comprised a sliding block puzzle. In order to get across a subterranean chasm, they had to shift the blocks until the proper one was released to float across. Depending on the type of puzzle you use, you could require a spell to power it up, to retrieve components etc.
They could devise something on their own (you said they have an artificer- maybe a magical device) that perhaps is powered by spells or mana to help them breathe. Or with some creativity they could come to the conclusion that they have to create water, move it around with them, and breathe in it in order to avoid a certain level/ hall/ inferno room etc. That would be create water (or wall of water), tensors disc or telekinesis, and breathe water at the very least.
If the water started to get hot enough to scald they would have to keep it cool via cold spells/ cone, wall of ice, etc.
Thanks. :)
Efficient but attractive mapping is one of my ongoing frustrations. I LOVE making maps, but have not yet settled on a technique.
That being said, the choice to include puzzles like these should definitely be based on the personalities and roleplaying styles of your players. In my case, I have several who love solving them and some who take bathroom breaks every time one appears. Also, apparently one of my players is a world-ranked Rubix Cube solver, so I find I actually have to step up my game when designing this sort of encounter.