How should I account for traps when calculating the adventuring day budget?

Question

I'm wondering whether a trap should be considered an encounter and how should they be rated in terms of easy/medium/hard/deadly.

This is not a question about whether traps should award PCs experience, but about how they factor into planning the adventuring day as a whole. For example, should a corridor with a dangerous trap be considered a hard encounter?

It does have the potential to use player resources, from healing potions to recover lost HP to spells to avoid or disable it. On the other hand there are no clear guidelines about estimating difficulty: the DMG lists them as setback/dangerous/deadly. I'm inclined to say: Setback = Easy/Medium, Dangerous = Medium/Hard, Deadly = Hard/Deadly but that's just a hypothesis.

Related questions:

• I've found this question - How do traps affect encounter design budgets? - but it's about adding traps within an encounter, not having only traps as an encounter (and it doesn't seem very precise). My question focuses on how a trap-based encounter can be accounted for when calculating the overall XP budget of the party for the purposes of an overall adventuring day.

• There's also this question - How should I award XP for traps? - but it's about actually awarding player XP, and the answers focus about whether and how (milestones/non-combat) XP should be awarded, not about estimating the difficulty of the trap in terms of easy/medium/hard/deadly encounter.

Answer 1

I personally look at the resources that it will take to overcome the trap

I unfortunately don't have any numbers, and actually doing this kind of maths is on my to-do list for a campaign I am writing, but basically I look at what resources are expended on average during a combat encounter, and then look at what % are likely expended in order to deal with the trap.

This takes into account things like HP, consumables, spell slots. Using a rope to swing over a pit isn't even worth considering unless I am planning to make a dungeon where lacking a rope further in is going to be an inconvenience.

Examples: Lets say an easy combat is worth 100xp (No idea how accurate this is without my books on hand, but it is a nice number to work with). During this encounter we expect the enemies to deal 20 damage across all party members, and take 2 1st level spell slots to defeat. If the spell slots are ramped up then the HP damage received is likely decreased, but we are looking at an average.

I would then look at the trap and balance it accordingly.

• If it was going to use 1 spell slot to get most people across safely and the rest would take an average of 10 damage between them we have half the resource expenditure so 50xp.

• If it was going to require 3 or 4 spell slots or cause significant damage it might come out closer to 100xp or even more.

I then count that XP towards the daily budget as normal for any kind of encounter.

An incredibly complex trap that is going to take huge ingenuity from the party but not resource (Though a trap that didn't at least eat HP would be unusual) would award XP, but I wouldn't count that into the daily budget, I would instead treat it like a social encounter (IE: Free XP). The key being that I only count it in the XP budget if resources are going to be expended.