Fantastic Snares and Where to Place Them

or, “I wanted to play Orcs Must Die but it was a Pathfinder night”

 

Introduction

The Pathfinder 2e snare system is robust, varied, and has a nice array of feat support (especially with the release of Guns & Gears). More than ever, it’s viable and potentially even powerful to roll a character revolving entirely around the creation and use of snares. 

This guide aims to help you understand exactly how snares work, which options you have for specialising in their use, and which particular snares you might find worth using.

I will aim to keep this updated with new snares, feats, etc. as they come out. If you think there’s anything missing from this guide, please feel free to contact me on Discord at wealthbeyondmeasure#6143.

 

So just what is a snare?

The Snares section of the rules describes snares as “small annoyances and simple traps”. This is largely accurate, but it doesn’t quite capture the full picture of what a Snare can offer.

A snare is a trap that is laid in a single 5-foot square. Once the snare has been built, it remains in its space indefinitely until triggered. By default, the snare triggers when a non-Tiny creature enters its space, at which point its effects occur and then the snare disappears.

Snares are not technically hazards, although they do follow some similar rules. Snares can be laid by your character, by other characters, or by enemies. 

 

Detecting Snares

Much like hazards, you need to spot snares before you know they exist. Also just like hazards, characters will roll a secret Perception check when they enter an area where they could spot the snare. However, instead of having their own Stealth DC in their textbox, their Stealth DC is instead determined by your Crafting DC. This means that bonuses to your Crafting skill are valuable for a snare user. 

There is an extra twist on top of this: as your Crafting proficiency goes up, enemies will have a harder time finding the snare. At Expert and higher, they have to actively search to find them, meaning that the vast majority of the time they will go undetected.

Enemies also require a specific level of Perception training to even have a chance at succeeding, equal to one lower than your Crafting training. If you’re an Expert, then they need to be Trained; if you’re a Master then they need to be Expert, and so on.

This may be of variable use. The guidelines for GMs on monster proficiency indicate that “many” creatures have Expert Perception, improving to Master and then Legendary at earlier levels than you can even match that with your Crafting proficiency. In general you should assume your targets have a chance to find your snares, although depending on GM fiat certain mindless or low intelligence enemies like zombies or animals may not.

 

Disabling Snares

If a creature’s secret Perception check beats the snare’s Stealth DC, they know your snare is there and can attempt to disarm it. This is a Disable a Device action against your Crafting DC, meaning that only creatures trained in Thievery can attempt it. 

Much like the above detection rules, enemies also need a minimum rank in Thievery to disable your snares depending on your own Crafting proficiency – Trained if you’re Expert, Expert if you’re Master, and so on. In practice, like the detection rules, any enemy trained in Thievery is assumed to grow over time at a rate that roughly matches your own proficiency. For example, if you take Master proficiency in Crafting at level 7, usually the earliest you can get it, enemies with Thievery will have already reached Expert proficiency at level 5. This is slightly more useful than the detection rules, in that it makes it impossible for much lower level creatures to disable your snares… but it scales with your Crafting DC anyway, and they would have a poor chance of detecting it in the first place, so they’re probably just going to walk into it and trigger it.

 

Snare Traits

All snares have four traits in common, and sometimes a couple of additional traits depending on their type.

Trap: simply means that it’s a trap. This has very few gameplay implications. However, the rules for Damaging a Hazard do state that damaging a “mechanical trap” will trigger it unless it ends up Broken. Whether or not this applies to snares is unclear, but given the existence of the Remote Trigger feat (which would be worse if you could always shoot snares) my answer would be “probably not”. Check with your GM for a final decision.

Mechanical: means that it’s a constructed, physical object. Again, little effect in the rules. This trait doesn’t mean it’s metallic – for example, an ooze wouldn’t necessarily dissolve it if it normally dissolves metal.

Snare: simply indicates that the item is a snare for the purposes of Snare Crafting and so on. No mechanical effect other than the general Snare rules.

Consumable: means that the Snare is destroyed after activation. There is potentially an interesting interaction with this trait – see the Cheese section for details.

 

All well and good, but how do I use snares?

Requirements

To begin your journey into the exciting world of snares, you’re going to need three basic things: 

• At least Trained proficiency in Crafting
• The Snare Crafting skill feat
• A Snare Kit, either worn on your body or held in your hands

All three of these things can be accessed at a very early level. You can become Trained in Crafting at level 1 through normal skill choices or your background. Snare Crafting can be taken at level 2 with your default skill slots, or at level 1 if you are a Kobold (via the Snare Setter ancestry feat or the Sewer Dragon background, although the latter is from an AP). A Snare Kit costs 5gp, a third of your starting wealth at level 1, and is a common item that should be available pretty much anywhere.

 

Costs

Now that you have the required skills and equipment, the first issue to be aware of is that you can never actually craft or own an assembled Snare in your inventory. You can’t build an Alarm Snare then carry it around until you’re ready to place it, for example. Snares must be built on the spot where you intend to use them.

Instead, what you carry on you are raw snare materials, an abstract representation of how many bits of metal, bones, wire, springs, fangs, dead racoons etc. that you are hauling around with you. Your amount of materials is measured in gold value, and you subtract from this value when you Craft a snare. Exactly how you acquire these materials is left up to the GM, but since they’re basically just a pile of miscellania, you should be able to purchase them at cost from towns, or loot them from any scrap heaps or animal carcasses you come across.

A few snares also require specific materials, such as a Lesser Thunderstone for the Thunder Snare. This specific material is spent on top of the raw materials and does not count towards the raw material cost (e.g. the Thunderstone doesn’t knock 3gp off the 6gp cost of the Thunder Snare, so you’re spending 9gp worth of stuff total).

Like normal crafting, you must also have the formula for the snare that you’re going to craft. You get four common formulas for free when you take Snare Crafting, and can acquire others in the usual manner. Several snare-related feats also grant you extra formulas for free.

Although you can learn formulas for higher-level snares, you can’t craft them until you meet their level. 

 

Crafting the Snare

Once you find a spot where you’d like to build a snare, you can begin the Craft process. Pick a 5 foot square and either stand in or adjacent to it (don’t worry – leaving the square can’t trigger the snare, so you’re safe to build it under your feet).

Unlike normal Crafting, it takes 1 minute to complete the Snare. You can then, if you so choose, follow the normal Crafting rules and spend additional days making Crafting checks to get a discount or even eventually make it free. This is pretty impractical in most situations where you’d be using snares, but if you want to defend your lair or something you could spend your downtime laying out a few expensive traps for cheap. If you don’t spend the extra time, then you subtract the full cost of the Snare from your raw materials and spend any specific materials.

Congratulations – your snare is now placed. If you change your mind, you can automatically disarm your Snare from an adjacent square with an Interact action. RAW this simply destroys the snare, although a kind GM might allow you to get a few raw materials back.

 

Quick Deploy Snares

As you might imagine, buying formulas and constantly spending materials on disposable snares you can’t get back can become a bit taxing on the wallet, especially at lower levels. If you want to focus on using snares in combat, it’s practically mandatory that you take one of the many feats and/or archetypes that offer quick deploy snares, such as Snare Specialist.

These feats work a little like infused reagents for the Alchemist; at the start of each day, you can prepare a number of snares in advance for quick use. These snares cost no resources (depending on your GM, this may also includes specific material costs) and can be deployed using only 3 actions, rather than requiring 1 minute. You need to pick exactly which snares you’re preparing, however, so like an Alchemist it’s worth putting a bit of thought into the day ahead.

This makes them much more viable for use in combat, and more importantly will save you a substantial amount of gold over time. At level 3, for example, quick-preparing 4 snares (the amount you get from Snare Specialist) will save you up to 36 gold a day. Compare this to the Treasure by Level table, where in a 4 person party you’re getting 125 total gold value each at level 3. Spend just 4 days using your free snares and you’ve already saved an entire level’s worth of treasure!

Another important aspect to keep in mind as you build your character is that there are many different feats that offer quick deploy snares, and they all stack. At a certain point, if you’ve built for it, you can quite reasonably expect to get through a day without spending a single gold piece on actually building a snare.

 

What are my character options?

As previously mentioned there are plenty of options for a character interested in using snares; in fact, with the release of Guns & Gears, it’s possible to fill up every class feat choice with snare-related feats, to say nothing of Free Archetype characters.

The following feats and options will be evaluated using a 5-star system, where ★☆☆☆☆ means “this has very little use, even for snare builds” and ★★★★★ means “universally useful for snare builds”. Outside of the context of a snare-using build, you might find some of these options are less useful.

I will also make a note underneath the name of relevant feats if they offer quick-deploy snares (QDS for short) and how many, which should hopefully make it easier to decide which ones you want.

There’s really only one main class that really supports the snare-using fantasy, and that is…

The Ranger

Level 2: Snare Hopping, ★★☆☆☆

This feat grants you a focus spell which allows you to teleport one of your deployed snares to another position. The range is fairly weak at low levels and it takes two actions to use, eating up most of a turn. The requirements for the feat are also fairly awkward as you need to already have a warden spell, meaning if you want to take this at level 2 your level 1 class feat is locked into Gravity Weapon or Heal Companion. Gravity Weapon isn’t bad by any means, but it’s not useful for all builds; it’s hard to dedicate feats to an animal companion if you’re also taking snare feats (and they can trigger your snares), so the latter is a weak option. 

It does help to avoid having wasted snares at the end of a fight, but with the addition of Recycled Cogwheel from G&G, you can always pick those back up anyway.

There is one nice thing about this feat, which is that it expands your focus pool to 2 points at level 2.

 

Level 4: Snare Specialist, ★★★★★ 

(4/6/8 QDS)

Somewhat unsurprisingly, this is one of the most important feats for snare builds. Firstly, you gain some free formulas, which can include uncommon formulas – actually quite important given how many uncommon snares there are.

The number of free formulas scales with your Crafting proficiency, and this does not specify that it only occurs when you take the feat. This means that as soon as you get the next level of Crafting proficiency, you will immediately learn another three formulas, meaning you can grab level appropriate formulas as and when you come to them.

The second effect is that you gain 4 QDS, increasing to 6 at Master and 8 at Legendary. Every one of these feats you can stack is exponentially better value for you.

 

Level 6: Quick Snares, ★★★★☆

Quick Snares is a sort of “QDS-lite”; you get to deploy all of your snares in 3 Interact actions, just like your QDS… but you still have to pay the full cost if they weren’t prepared. This makes you overall much more viable in combat if you’re focusing on snares full-time and you’ve run out of QDS, but your overall costs will skyrocket. Don’t use this as an excuse to spam traps every turn or you’ll have to start begging your party members for pocket change.

 

Level 8: Powerful Snares, ★★★★★

Substitute your Class DC for a snare’s saving throw DC if it’s higher. Reason one this is useful: certain same-level snares have lower DCs than your class DC, usually to compensate for powerful AoE damage, so buffing that up can represent a substantial increase to deadliness. 

Reason two is that it makes many of your snares useful for your whole career. Although damage-dealing snares will fall off (since their damage doesn’t scale), and this feat doesn’t buff secondary DCs like Escape DCs, there are still a wide range of secondary effects which you’ll want access to from levels 1-20. A Stalker Bane Snare, for example, is a powerful counter to invisibility with a DC20 Reflex save which would rapidly stop being useful without the DC buff. 

 

Level 9: Nature’s Edge

Not actually a feat but an inherent class feature of the Ranger, hence the lack of rating. Any enemy standing in difficult terrain from a Snare (as well as natural difficult terrain) is flat-footed against you. Great little perk for anyone who wants to bombard their targets as they trudge through lines of traps.

 

Level 12: Lightning Snares, ★★★★★

Quick Snares was pretty good, but this is probably the main reason you take it, since it’s a prerequisite. It works just like Quick Snares except you only need to take 1 action (!) instead of 3. Importantly, it also applies to your QDS, significantly upgrading your flexibility in combat. If someone’s up in your grill, you can drop a Snare in your space, move away, then Strike, making you a painful guerilla opponent to deal with.

There are also a number of snares that require an action to deal with (usually by requiring an Escape action); making your snares a 1:1 trade of actions makes these much more efficient.

 

Level 16: Ubiquitous Snares, ★★★★☆

(+4/+6/+8 QDS)

Double your QDS from Snare Specialist, putting it at 16 assuming you’re upgrading Crafting as every chance. Very nice for snare builds, if a little one-dimensional.

 

Level 20: Impossible Snares, ★★★★★

Once a minute, duplicate one of your prepared snares for free. It only lasts for 10 minutes, so no spamming 1,440 traps a day and turning your party’s lair into an impregnable hell house. Combined with Lightning Snares, this means you will always have a copy of your strongest snare ready to drop at the beginning of combat.

 

Snarecrafter

The Snarecrafter archetype replicates many of the Ranger feats, making it better for other classes looking to get into snare builds. However, most of these do stack with the Ranger equivalents, so you can combine the two to hyper-specialise.

 

Level 2: Snarecrafter Dedication, ★★★★☆

(4/6/8 QDS)

This works almost exactly like the Snare Specialist feat – to the point that it works as a prerequisite for the same feats – except you don’t get any free formulas. That’s enough to knock off a star, since early on that only leaves you with the 4 formulas from Snare Crafting.

 

Level 4: Surprise Snare, ★★★★☆

Spend three actions to drop a snare underneath an enemy’s feet and instantly set it off. Even with the -2 DC penalty (which, in some cases with Powerful Snares, will just be baseline anyway) this can be extremely worth it, but you need to be careful as you will be unable to move away or do anything else unless quickened. This is also a Manipulate action and so will trigger Attacks of Opportunity.

Once you get Lightning Snares, this drops off in usefulness as you have the option to drop a Snare in your square then Stride away. 

 

Level 6: Remote Trigger, ★★★☆☆

Shoot a friendly or enemy snare to set it off. The friendly trigger has some limited applications for particular snares (for example, preemptively creating 9 squares of slippery difficult terrain with a Torrent Snare on a chokepoint) but since most snares only affect their own square, and will already have triggered if someone is stood on them, it’s a situational benefit at best.

On the other hand, if you take a lot of AoE snares, this might be worth it. AoE tends to suffer from the piecemeal movement that occurs in encounters, often only hitting one target since they have to move ahead of their group to trigger the snare on their turn. If, however, they happen to miss the snare (either because they spotted it and walked around it, or just because you got unlucky) and end up clustered around it, you can use this to detonate the trap and hit all of them at once. Also situational, but worth considering.

How often you run into enemy snares – and spot them before you trigger them – is campaign and GM dependent, but it could come in handy if choke points are trapped and you don’t feel like you can walk in to disarm them.

 

Level 8: Quick Snares, as above

 

Level 10: Powerful Snares, as above

 

Level 10: Giant Snares, ★★★★★

Prepare two of your QDS as a single giant 2×2 snare. It still counts as one snare, but it triggers when any square is entered and applies its effects over the whole area. It’s a little unclear how this works with area effects – see the cheese section below.

Even without that little issue, this is still an excellent feat. If you’ve been taking the appropriate feats you should have plenty of QDS, so you should be able to prepare a few of these each day and still have several singles left over.

 

Level 12: Plentiful Snares, ★★★★☆

(+4/+6/+8 QDS)

This works just like the Ranger’s Ubiquitous Snares but for your Snarecrafter QDS, although an entire 4 levels earlier. If you take one you may as well take the other.

 

Level 14: Lightning Snares, as above

 

Trapsmith

New to Guns & Gears, Trapsmith is basically a collection of extra feats for Snarecrafters. You can take the Dedication without having 2 other Snarecrafter feats, and the Snarecrafter Dedication is one of the possible pre-requisites (the other being the Ranger’s Snare Specialist). The benefits within offer a lot of interesting enhancements to your QDS.

However, the tremendous number of feats between Snarecrafter, Trapsmith, and the Ranger might make it difficult to find room in your build. Trapsmith may be something of a luxury you add in if you’re running Free Archetype.

 

Level 4: Trapsmith Dedication, ★★★★★

You can build your snares with gears; if you do, you get a useful dazzle-esque effect on every failed save. Since there doesn’t seem to be any reason to not use gears, this is just a straight upgrade to every snare you ever construct.

 

Level 4 (Skill): Gear Gnash, ★★★★☆

Creatures have to roll an extra Thievery check to disable your gear snares, essentially rolling with disadvantage, and taking minor bludgeoning damage if they fail. It’s a little situational; it’s not all that common that enemies will attempt to disarm your snares in the first place, and RAW the extra damage only triggers on the second roll.

That being said, it’s another free upgrade to all your snares, so all you’re spending is the feat – and this is a skill feat, so it’s not even eating a class slot!

 

Level 7 (Skill): Propeller Attachment, ★★★☆☆

This allows you to place your snares in mid-air or underwater, but they’re “usually obvious”, stripping them of much of their utility in ambushing enemies. In addition, since these are 3D combat spaces, it’s usually simple for an enemy to move around them. It’s nice to not be completely stripped of your build in certain scenarios, but they are unlikely to come up enough to matter.

On the plus side, it’s another skill feat, preserving a class slot. If it wasn’t, this would probably be 1 or 2 stars.

 

Level 8: Recycled Cogwheel, ★★★★★

Pick up your unused QDS and carry them around with you for later redeployment.

This is amazing. Although in theoretical perfect circumstances you will always place snares in effective locations, in practice there will always be contingency snares that never quite manage to go off. Being able to grab them and take them with you will help extend your QDS stash even further. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with your non-QDS snares.

 

Level 10: Repurposed Parts, ★★★★☆

Turn any two of your prepared QDS into any other snare you could craft. The only issue you ever really faced as a snare build with plentiful QDS is not having the right stuff ready, and now you can ensure that never happens. However, this falls off in usefulness when you get Quick Snares and even further when you hit Lightning Snares, allowing you to place any snare you want anyway. It’s still a useful cost saver, though.

 

Level 12: Finessed Features, ★★★★★

Customise your snare triggers to whatever you want, although it has to be visual. Want a trap that only works on ginger people? Now’s your chance.

The most practical use for this feat is to allow your snares to trigger on Tiny creatures, which they couldn’t before. You could also ask all your party members to wear a specific symbol, like a badge, and set the snare to trigger on anybody not wearing it, removing the possibility of friendly fire. Combine the two for a simple, universal upgrade to all of your snares.

 

Game Hunter

Released as part of the Quest for the Frozen Flame adventure path, the Game Hunter archetype is full of flavourful feats for ranger-types who want to specialise in taking down big animals. For the purposes of a Snare build, however, there’s one particular feat of interest.

 

Level 4: Big Game Trapper, ★★★☆☆

Each time you set a trap, you get to specify a minimum size for the trigger, from Small up to Huge. Anything below the size you pick won’t trigger the trap.

This is sort of a diet version of Finessed Features. In situations where you know you’ll be fighting a larger creature, you can make sure your party members won’t set off any of your snares, or prevent smaller minions setting snares off early before their big boss arrives. Apart from those scenarios, however, it won’t offer much for your average day-by-day adventure. I suppose this could be pretty fun if your entire party is made up of Small ancestries.

Is it worth taking Big Game Trapper just for this? Probably not. If you’re taking Big Game Trapper anyway? Sure, go ahead, if you can find the room in your build. You’ll want to retrain out of this as soon as you get Finessed Features, however.

Kobold

Kobolds are the only ancestry with specific snare support, but what support it is! If you want to build a snare-centric character, then there’s nobody better than Kobolds.

 

Level 1: Snare Setter, ★★★★☆

Gain a skill of your choice, the Snare Crafting feat, and access to the uncommon Kobold snares, of which there are currently 3.

None of this is essential, but it’s nice to get Snare Crafting out of the way and the Kobold snares are decent.

 

Level 5: Snare Genius, ★★★★★

(3/4/5 QDS)

Gain a few extra QDS, and any creature that critically fails versus one of your damage snares becomes flat-footed until the end of its next turn. Any option that adds extra effects to your snares is always helpful, and flat-footed is useful for, say, a Precision Ranger who wants to plant a big attack in between traps. The QDS are just gravy.

 

Level 9: Snare Commando, ★★★☆☆

When someone fails a save versus your snares, you can either Create a Diversion or Demoralize against the triggering creature as a reaction. Although this is a nice option to have, Deception and Intimidation aren’t great fits for a snare build; you’re already devoting several skill increases to Crafting and Stealth is usually a more complementary option. If you do happen to be doing an Intimidation build (I suppose Frightened would be good for imposing penalties against your Snare DCs) then this might be more useful for you.

If you’re melee, consider Between the Scales instead; this gives you a nice way to exploit the flat-footed from Snare Genius.

 

Level 13: Vicious Snares, ★★★★★

Add an average of 3.5 damage to all of your  damaging snares, increasing to 7 when you hit Legendary Crafting at 15. The dice increase is only two levels away, so you won’t have to wait long. Although it becomes a little outclassed as you level up (with some snares doing an average of 85.5 damage at level 16, for example), extra damage is always nice, and it helps make your more utility-focused snares like Stunning Snare more useful.

It also applies to AoE snares, getting extra value out of things like Hail of Arrows as you get more targets.

Misc

There are a couple of general options that anyone can take which might be helpful for a snare build as well.

 

Level 1: Speciality Crafting, ★★★☆☆

This one is a little bit odd. Pick a particular speciality from a pre-approved list, such as Tailoring or Stonemasonry, and you get a circumstance bonus to your Crafting checks when crafting that type of item.

It’s very unclear how this would apply to snares. Certain snares do specify a few details about their composition – for example, a Striking Snare states that you use either wooden stakes or stones when you build it. Does that mean you’d get a circumstance bonus if you took the Woodworking specialty? 

If your GM allows it, and you can fit it into your build, then this might be a decent pickup. Your Crafting DC is very important because it dictates how easy your traps are to spot as well as how hard they are to disarm, and it’s not that easy to come across other sources of Crafting circumstance bonii.

 

Level 7: Inventor, ★★★★★

Spend your downtime creating new formulas, following the normal Crafting rules.

This feat is excellent for a snare build. Although you get some free formulas from Snare Crafting and various other feats, these aren’t nearly enough to keep up with the number of snares currently available. This is especially important if you want to focus on damage snares, as there’s no way to make them scale up from low levels and therefore you need to learn the formulas for each upgraded one as you level.

Snare usage is already money intensive, and if you constantly drop cash on new snare formulas as well you’re very rapidly going to be out of pocket. Inventor help ease that burden by allowing you to directly invent new formulas, easing costs and removing any need to find an urban centre with an appropriate teacher. Use it and love it.

 

OK, OK, that’s enough about feats. Tell me about the snares themselves.

Rather than list out every single snare in level order, I’m going to split the snares up by type and talk about your options for each category as you level up. The Snarecrafter’s strength is in their versatility of options, so you should aim to have at least a few from each different category, rather than hyper specialising into damage snares or whatever.

 

Informational Snares

These snares are purely tactical, generally acting like early warning systems for ambushes or pursuers. Usually useless in combat, but nice for exploration purposes (such as defending your camp).

 

Level 1: Alarm Snare, ★★★★★

Simple but extremely effective, this snare will probably come in useful for your entire career. Place this in a square and anyone stepping in it immediately triggers a loud noise in a customisable radius, with no save or any way to avoid it other than disarming it or not stepping in the square. As a level 1 snare it only costs 3GP, so at higher levels you can spam these at a minimal cost without draining your QDS.

The only downside compared to other informational snares is that the noise is audible to all creatures, so ambushers will know that you know that they’re coming, and you could potentially draw unwanted attention from anything else nearby.

 

Level 1: Appetizing Flavor Snare, ★★★☆☆

Spray a creature with musk until they take a minute to wash, doubling the range at which predators can detect them with scent and making it more likely for them to approach.

It really doesn’t do anything in combat or even outside of combat. The wording is a little vague, but if your GM is nice they’ll give you extra range on your own imprecise scent if you have it. Which is still fairly niche.

So why three stars? It’s the last line about making predators “more likely to approach”. Again, it would require a cool GM to play along, but I really like the idea of starting off an ambush by attracting a big pack of wolves or whatever to attack your targets. 

Am I rating this a bit too highly? Probably. But it’s a fun idea.

 

Level 1: Signalling Snare, ★☆☆☆☆

This snare has no effect whatsoever except telling you that it was tripped if you come back later and look at it… which is exactly what every other snare does anyway. Since there’s no mechanic for snares decaying, the only way they disappear is if they’re triggered. 

There’s also no way to know what triggered the snare and when, so you don’t know if it was a wandering badger or a horde of ravenous goblins. 

It’s hard to think of many situations where this would be any more useful than an Alarm or Warning Snare.

 

Level 2: Marking Snare, ★☆☆☆☆

This snare gives you a bonus to Track the triggering creature for a day, with a small chance for a round of blind. Unfortunately it has extremely limited applications. You’re very unlikely to use it in combat, so the blind is irrelevant; if you’re pursuing someone, you’re not going to have the chance to drop this in front of them and make them trigger it. The only way I could see you using this is in a situation where you know a creature is coming and you know it’s going to try and get away and, for some reason, you don’t want to just kill it with one of your much more effective snares instead. Maybe if you’re trying to capture a werewolf?

 

Level 2: Clockwork Monkey, ★★★☆☆

Drop one of those evil cymbal monkeys in a square, and when someone moves next to that square, it triggers, clings to an enemy and makes a loud noise. The Escape DC and/or the monkey’s stats rapidly fall off as you level up (and can’t be enhanced with Powerful Snares), so it becomes easy to negate. It’s also very unclear how much noise it actually makes other than “raising a racket”.

This might be an OK substitute for Alarm Snare if you don’t need the 100ft+ range, for example if you’re placing it very close to your camp; it covers a larger area, gives you a rough idea of where a moving enemy is, and forces the enemy to waste at least one action removing or destroying it.

 

Level 2: Flare Snare, ★★★★☆

This is something like a visual version of the Alarm Snare, giving you information from up to 5 miles away (!) as long as you can see the sky. Situations where you’ll want to know about someone stepping on a particular square at that distance are unlikely to come up often, but if you’re creative I’m sure you can come up with a use. This is also even more likely to draw unwanted attention.

You could theoretically use this like a flare gun to send signals to allies as well.

 

Level 2: Thunder Snare, ★★★☆☆

Deal a point of sonic damage with a loud bang audible 1,000 feet away, as well as potentially deafening the target.

In theory this could be a replacement for the Alarm Snare, if it wasn’t for that pesky material cost. Unless you carry around dozens of Lesser Thunderstones (or your GM waives specific material costs with QDS) this gets expensive quickly, which kind of defeats the point of the Alarm Snare. Also, how often do you need to be alerted of something at 1,000 feet where 500 feet wouldn’t have done?

The sonic damage can basically be ignored, and Deafened is a non-issue for most combatants.

 

Level 3: Clockwork Chirper, ★★★☆☆

This works a bit like the Clockwork Monkey: as soon as something walks underneath its perch, it follows them and makes a loud noise. It doesn’t cover as many tiles, and you need to find a tree or archway or something, but at least it tells you its audible range and actively works to stay outside of melee range. 

 

Level 4: Warning Snare, ★★★★☆

This is essentially an upgraded Alarm Snare with double the maximum range and a personalised sound that only you can hear, handy for preventing unwanted attention.

Why isn’t it 5 stars if it’s strictly better than Alarm Snare? Simple: it’s level 4 where Alarm Snare is level 1, and therefore costs 15 gold over 3. Alarm Snare’s utility comes from its low cost making it extremely spammable; a couple of upgrades aren’t worth the inefficiency of paying 5 times as much. You also don’t want to be wasting your QDS on these unless you’re in downtime and certain you won’t need them for other purposes.

There also might be times where you can’t communicate with the rest of your party – if you’re scouting ahead, say – so the alarm only being audible to you could be a downside.

 

Counter Snares

These snares exist to counter specific types of enemies or abilities like invisibility.

 

Level 4: Stalker Bane Snare, ★★★★☆

Spray the triggering creature with powder like a packet of bank dye, preventing the full benefits of invisibility; on a critical failure it’s also blinded for a turn. 

Like other counter snares, this is a lifesaver when you need it and absolutely useless in every other situation. If your caster doesn’t have Faerie Fire then this is the next best thing. Unlike some snares, this still has a decent effect even on Success, meaning you’re very likely to get value when you do use it. Don’t ever plan around the blindness effect, though; it’s icing on the cake, not the point of the snare.

Funny enough, there’s no duration specified for the invisibility debuff; I don’t think it would be broken to say it lasts for the whole combat or until they have a chance to have a good wash.

Oh, and also make sure not to use Finessed Features with this snare. Since it only operates on visual features, it will never go off versus invisibility and your snare will be a dud.

 

Level 4: Glittering Snare, ★★★★☆

This glitterbomb works just like Stalker Bane, and even has a similar effect on invisible creatures. The difference is that the invisibility counter is one degree of success lower (i.e. turning invisible to hidden at Failure rather than Success) and they also take a penalty to all Stealth checks until they spend 1-3 actions to remove the sparklies.

It’s debatable which one is better here. In situations where you’re certain you’re facing invisible creatures, Stalker Bane Snare should probably be your go-to. However, if it’s unclear that invisible enemies will be present, or you know you’re being stalked by stealthy enemies, then consider the Glittering Snare.

 

Level 8: Spirit Snare, ★★☆☆☆

This snare is fairly straightforward: immobilise the target for one round on failure or one minute on critical failure, with a DC26 Escape check. The catch is that this only works on incorporeal creatures. It’s basically a Muon Trap from Ghostbusters.

There are a few problems here; firstly, this is a Rare snare, making it difficult to acquire even in games where the GM is allowing access to Uncommon snares by default. Secondly, it’s extremely situational. If you don’t know that you’re going ghosthunting today, preparing this snare is a complete waste, even more so than the Stalker Bane since it doesn’t even trigger on corporeal creatures. At least if a Stalker Bane goes off they can’t whip out an unexpected Wand of Invisibility, and if you have bonus effects like flat-footed from Snare Genius they’ll still apply. This snare will simply sit on the floor, useless.

That said, in those situations where you ARE busting ghosts, this prevents your snare feats from being useless; incorporeal creatures can usually move through objects, preventing them from being held in place by, say, a Grasping Snare, and they have high resistances to your snare damage since they’re non-magical. This at least gives you an option.

 

Control Snares

These snares alter the battlefield or directly apply mobility/action denial effects to enemies.

 

Level 1: Caltrop Snare, ★★★☆☆

Drop caltrops either in the triggering square or an adjacent square when triggered. As a reminder, caltrops deal minor piercing and bleed damage and inflict a 5ft speed penalty as long as the bleed damage persists.

The DC14 Acrobatics check is tied to the caltrops rather than the snare itself, so you don’t get any benefit from Powerful Snares. That being said, it can be deceptive; creatures that aren’t trained in Acrobatics will have to roll with their raw Dex stat, which can be as little as +5 even at level 20. Drop this between you and a nasty melee brute, and if you get lucky the speed penalty will prevent them from reaching you, forcing them to waste extra actions on movement. However, the damage is minor even at level 1 and you will quickly find better options for controlling movement.

 

Level 1: Hampering Snare, ★★★★☆

Create a 2×2 area of difficult terrain, which also affects the movement that triggered it. 

This is already much better than the Caltrop Snare. The target has no chance to save against the effect, and by the time it triggers it’s already penalised them for at least 5ft worth of movement. The effect persists for 1-4 rounds, so unlike many snares it can affect a whole group of enemies as they all filter through a chokepoint. They can spend actions clearing out the difficult terrain square by square, but forcing them to waste an entire action instead of striding is an even better trade for you. Also, since it’s cheap, you can easily set up entire lines of these along walkways or through narrow ravines to make traversal a nightmare for enemies. The only reason this doesn’t get 5 stars is that there are other snares that offer larger areas of difficult terrain with secondary effects on top.

 

Level 3: Rock Ripper Snare, ★★★★☆

Speaking of which, we have the Rock Ripper Snare, which drops a bunch of rocks on someone’s head, creating a 3×3 area of difficult terrain centered around the snare along with some minor bludgeoning damage. It’s not terribly likely to kill someone, but every little helps and the difficult terrain has all the same advantages of Hampering Snare, simply in a larger area. Think of it as a slightly less spammable upgrade.

 

Level 3: Torrent Snare, ★★★★★

Rock Ripper’s big brother. You don’t get to deal damage, but instead prone the target, potentially move them into an adjacent square (which will trigger any other snares you have set up there) and create 9 squares of slippery difficult terrain.

The slippery part is important – although it’s not exactly specified, the only other place where slippery terrain is talked about is under the Ice section of the environment rules. Ice is defined as being both difficult terrain and uneven ground, which fits the idea of Torrent Snare making the ground into a slippery mudfest.

This is very powerful because now, not only are you forcing enemies to wade through a chokepoint at half their speed, they have to make Balance checks to keep their footing, keeping them flat-footed the entire time and potentially causing them to fall prone or even plummet if they’re close to an edge. In addition, every time they are attacked, they have to make a Reflex check or fall prone again.

That being said, this is a snare from an Adventure Path, which tend to have slightly sloppier rules, and the slippery interaction might be unintended as it makes this snare extremely powerful. If your GM runs this as creating normal difficult terrain instead, it’s still great, but not quite as busted.

Level 4: Hobbling Snare, ★★★☆☆

Inflict a speed penalty between 5 and 20 feet depending on the target’s degree of success on a Reflex save. This lasts for a minute or until they drop an action on Escaping. 

This is decent, but not amazing. It’s nice that you still get a minor penalty even on a success, and you might potentially cause an enemy to waste their turn if their Stride ends up too short to reach you. The Escape DC doesn’t work with Powerful Snares, so at later levels they’re pretty much guaranteed to succeed. It’s still a wasted action; if you set this up in advance of combat, that’s basically a free action denied, but if you spent the 3 actions to deploy this with QDS or Quick Snares it’s not a good trade.

 

Level 4: Trip Snare, ★★☆☆☆

Basically a tripwire. The target is flat-footed on a success, prone on a failure, and takes a little extra bludgeoning damage on a crit failure – almost exactly like the Trip action.

This works a little differently than most other snares, in that it only works on Medium or smaller creatures, as opposed to the usual Small or larger. If you want to trip something larger, you need to line up multiple Trip Snares next to each other, as if making a longer tripwire.

This is an awkward snare without much of a payoff, and to make matters worse it rapidly becomes outclassed. Getting flat-footed even on success is nice, but a little redundant with the Kobold’s Snare Genius and later snare options. If you make a long tripwire, the target has to hit all of them at once for it to work, otherwise they’re triggered with no effect; in other words they’re only reliable in corridors. That’s three level 4 snares you’re spending on something that might work. 

 

Level 8: Grasping Snare, ★★★★☆

Pretty much an upgrade to Hobbling Snare, you exchange the 20 foot speed penalty for the chance to immobilise enemies plus a minute long 5 foot speed penalty. The critical effect is extremely nasty at the level you get it, potentially locking down an enemy for an entire combat if they get unlucky on their Escape rolls. Later on, even though the Escape DC doesn’t scale, many enemies hate being immobilised and will immediately spend at least one action busting out. Imagine a turn where an enemy Strides towards you, hits this snare, becomes immobilised, and has to spend their next action Escaping. That leaves them with 1 action to Stride towards you and do nothing, or to throw out a ranged attack with MAP from their Escape attempt. Turn entirely wasted. Once again, however, it’s better when set up in advance compared to in combat in terms of action efficiency.

 

Level 10: Binding Snare, ★★★★☆

This is one of the reasons why Trip Snare rapidly falls off. Deal some very minor damage (the average is less than even snares from 5 levels ago) alongside a combined prone and immobilise, upgrading to restrained on a crit fail.

The combination of prone and immobilise is what makes this painful for your enemies. Standing up is a Move action, so the enemy is completely unable to remove the prone until they get rid of immobilise, either by waiting a turn or by managing to Escape. If they crit failed and ended up restrained, they have no option at all except to Escape, since they can’t use any other attack or manipulate actions.

Either way, that’s at least one turn completely gone, and potentially two if they get unlucky on the save or their Escape attempts.

The only downside is that you only ever get one turn out of the immobilise or restrained compared to the potential minute of Grasping Snare.

 

Level 10: Mudrock Snare, ★★★★★

Soak an enemy in frost dragon blood-enhanced mud, Stunning them and inflicting severe speed penalties until they Escape.

Incredibly nasty, and by itself a good argument for playing a Kobold. This is guaranteed to waste two turns on a failed save; Stunned 2 means they immediately lose the remainder of the turn on which they triggered the snare, then lose 2 actions from the next turn, leaving them with a grand total of 1 action with a 10 foot speed penalty. They probably want to Escape to remove that, so that second turn is completely gone. Think about how Lightning Snares lets you place snares as 1 action, and how much potential value you can get out of it.

This is also a Fortitude save, unlike the usual Reflex save of most snares, making it better against quicker, more agile enemies – exactly the type who are most likely to speed ahead of their pack and trigger your snares, and exactly the type you want to lock down.

The trap does have additional costs, as you need to supply 75 gold’s worth of refined blue dragon blood per snare… except Snare Specialist allows you to ignore all resource costs for your snares. I guess if you can’t get store-bought dragon blood, making your own is fine too.

 

Level 12: Stunning Snare, ★★★★☆

Deal a small amount of bludgeoning damage and Stun an enemy on top of a longer-lasting flat-footed effect.

Before the introduction of the Mudrock Snare above, this was the first (and only) snare that allowed you to stun enemies, easily making it a 5 star snare. 

It still has a niche, as even on a successful save the target is still Stunned 1, making it an even trade when used with Lightning Snares. That means you are pretty much guaranteed to get value on every use. If you’re up against enemies with good Fortitude saves you might want to use this over Mudrock, but otherwise this has become a little obsolete.

 

Level 14: Engulfing Snare, ★★☆☆☆

Lock enemies in a cage, keeping them prone and immobilised until they escape or break the cage.

Which is… not difficult. The cage’s stats aren’t exactly stellar, so a lot of stuff can destroy it quickly, even with the prone penalty to attack rolls. You should definitely have Powerful Snares by now, but if you don’t it also has a lower DC than the other snares at this level for no particular reason. The prone/immobilise combo is nice as mentioned above, but you get basically nothing out of this snare that Binding Snare wouldn’t give you.

 

Debuff Snares

These snares primarily apply conditions, afflictions, or other “soft” debuffs to enemies, usually alongside some minor damage.

 

Level 2: Static Snare, ★☆☆☆☆

Impose a minor debuff against electricity effects, alongside some minor persistent damage.

This also has an anti-invisibility effect on critical failures, which is fairly pointless.

It is extremely difficult to think of a use case for this snare. If you want to use it to prep a target for another electrical snare… well, there are only 3 other snares that have that trait: the Wet Shock Snare (decent), the Spirit Snare (extremely situational, as mentioned above), and the Death Coil (level 20, by which time you have much better options for reducing a target’s saves).

I would love to see someone prove me wrong about this snare with some sort of electromancer build. Let me know!

 

Level 2: Deadweight Snare, ★★★☆☆

Magnetise an enemy to the floor like Face/Off, inflicting a status penalty to attack rolls and potentially forcing them to drop their metal objects.

This is the first Kobold snare, and it’s an interesting one. An entire minute of attack rolls is a juicy defensive buff for your team. Unfortunately, it drops off very quickly. You start to get snares that inflict more useful conditions that also have a status attack penalty (such as Nauseating Snare), and the Escape DC doesn’t scale with Powerful Snares, so you’re generally not going to see it sticking around for very long. 

The ability to disarm your opponents is unique among snares, although its practicality is debatable. You generally aren’t standing next to someone when a snare goes off, so you’re unlikely to have the chance to steal the weapon before they can pick it back up.

In theory, if your opponent has two metallic items it really wants and it wants to remove the attack penalty, you could force them to waste three whole actions on picking up objects and Escaping. How often that will actually happen, and how worth it it might be versus your other options, is questionable. 

I’m sure there’ll be one time where a bank robber is escaping with a precious artifact or something and this snare comes in clutch. Feel free to let me know if you’ve tried it and gotten good value out of it.

 

Level 4: Tar Rocket, ★★★★★

Inflict a round of flat-footed and a minute of Clumsy 1 until the target escapes. On a critical failure, you inflict a bit of bludgeoning damage and push the target 10 feet in a direction of your choice.

The normal failure effects are pretty decent. Clumsy 1 reduces Reflex saves, making this a good preparation snare for your other traps, at least until you reach Nauseating Snare.  Flat-footed is nice but easily achievable if you have Snare Genius.

However, the Critical Failure effect is what you’re really here for. This is the first snare that offers controllable forced movement (Torrent Snare gives 1 square of movement, but it probably isn’t up to you which direction they go). The reason this is powerful is that snares also trigger on forced movement. Prior to this snare being added to the game, you had to rely on a friendly melee using Shove every now and then; now you have the ability to force enemies into snares through no error of their own. 

This is a boon to a creative mind. Anyone who’s ever played Evil Genius, Orcs Must Die, or Deception knows the power of being able to force enemies into trap combos of your choice. The fact that the Clumsy effect also reduces their chance of saving against subsequent traps is just the icing on the cake. In theory you could even ping-pong enemies between multiple Tar Rockets to throw them off a cliff fifty feet away.

Of course, this all only happens on a critical failure. Everything you can do to reduce an enemy’s chances of making the save will help out a lot here. The upcoming Nauseating Snare would be a good choice.

 

Level 5: Tin Cobra, ★★★☆☆

Do some minor poison damage and inflict Sickened 1-2 on a failed save.

Sickened is a great condition, especially in the context of snares where it’ll make every other snare more likely to land. If you didn’t have other options then this would be much better, but exactly one level later is the Nauseating Snare – even though it doesn’t do damage, the increased effectiveness in inflicting Sickened is much more valuable for you. Sadly obsolete the moment it was added.

 

Level 6: Nauseating Snare, ★★★★★

Inflict Sickened 1 on a success, 2 on a failure, and 3 on a critical failure on a Fortitude save.

Absolutely the gold standard for debuff snares. If you’ve got a chokepoint that you want to defend, this should be the primer; every subsequent snare they run into will be between 10-30% more effective.

Not only that, but Sickened is just as powerful as Frightened, reducing both enemy defense and offense. Even if this was the only snare you used, you’re essentially giving everybody on your team a massive buff versus a target for the rest of the combat.

The only counterplay the target has is to spend actions retching to reduce the Sickened condition by 1 each time… except they need to beat the same Fortitude check each time they try, and that DC scales with Powerful Snares, so either they’re trying to beat an on-level DC, wasting at minimum three actions and possibly more, or they’re sitting with a debuff for the entirety of combat.

As if that wasn’t enough, this is a Fortitude save, not a Reflex save like most snares. As noted in Mudrock Snare above, the enemies that are mostly likely to trip your snares are faster and more agile, exactly the type who are most likely to have bad Fortitude saves. For a really fun time, try putting the two next to each other.

 

Level 6: Mirror-Ball Snare, ★★★☆☆

Inflict Dazzled in a 10 ft radius, 1 round on a failure and 1 minute on a critical failure.

This would be much better if the Trapsmith hadn’t been introduced at the same time. The Trapsmith Dedication gives this snare’s failure effect to every snare you build, making it mostly obsolete. Which is a shame, because the critical failure effect is really good – an entire minute of dazzled is effectively a 25% miss chance for the entire combat. If you’re not convinced now, you will be the next time you cause a Finger of Death to whiff.

If you’re not taking Trapsmith, or you like to gamble,  this might still be worth a shot.

 

Level 7:  Envenomed Snare, ★★☆☆☆

Deal moderate damage (the type is unspecified, but assumedly piercing since it’s described as needle-tipped) and expose the target to Giant Wasp Venom, dealing additional poison damage and Clumsy for up to 6 rounds.

This snare has a few issues. Firstly, although the save DC scales with Powerful Snares, the Fortitude save does not. Unless you also happen to be a Toxicologist Alchemist…

…except even that wouldn’t give you a reason to take this snare, because RAW you can already apply contact poisons to all of your snares, since they’re physical objects that contact enemies to apply their effects (hence why they don’t work so well on incorporeal enemies). 

On the other hand, Giant Wasp Venom is an Injury poison, so also by RAW you can’t apply it to your snares since those can only be applied to weapons. If you’re desperate to apply this specific poison to your snares, go ahead and take it, I suppose.

Yet another issue arises when you consider the additional cost of 2 Giant Wasp Venom doses. RAW, you can ignore this with your QDS. However, it would be perfectly reasonable for a GM to decide that was an oversight and still ask you for specific components. If you are asked to provide these, each dose of Venom costs a whopping 55gp each, putting the total cost at 170gp – for which you could be placing a level 10 snare instead. Of course, an alchemist could ignore that extra cost.

TL;DR: not worth it unless you happen to be a Toxicologist desperate to find new ways to apply your venoms.

 

Level 9: Puff Dragon, ★★★★★

This magic little dragon pops when someone steps in its square, dealing minor poison damage in a 10 foot AoE and applying Sickened on failed saves.

This is your only option for applying Sickened in area, which by itself affords it at least a 4-star rating. The damage is nothing to write home about – doing the same as a Tin Cobra from four levels ago – but hitting a group of enemies with Sickened can make a big difference for all the reasons outlined in Nauseating Snare above. Plus, it targets Fortitude again. Basically your Nauseating Snare option for larger groups.

 

Damage Snares

These snares are built for raw damage, sometimes with minor conditions as a secondary effect. Since damage snares don’t scale with Powerful Snares, you will need to keep learning new ones as you level up.

To save time repeating myself in the comments, I’m going to note the average damage of each snare next to its rating. I hope this helps you out with picking your damage snare. Please note that this doesn’t involve any complicated maths with your crit chance or the save DC or anything like that – it’s purely an average of the damage dice. AoE snares are average damage per creature; snares with persistent damage assume one instance occurs before it ends.

 

Level 1: Spike Snare, ★★★☆☆ (average 9 damage)

This is basically the blueprint for all the hardest hitting damage snares for the rest of your career: hit a single target with powerful physical damage, with a Basic reflex save.

If you’re starting fresh at level 1 and want to start using snares immediately, this will probably be in your toolbox. There was a time where this was your hardest hitting damage snare until level 4. However, with the addition of Detonating Gears and Fire Box at level 3, you now have real contenders much earlier and this snare loses its value much more quickly.

If you’re starting at a higher level, won’t be using snares frequently at level 1, or know you’re going to be levelling fairly quickly, then you probably want to skip this in favour of utility snares.

 

Level 2: Noisemaker Snare, ★★☆☆☆ (average 4.5 damage)

A sort of combination damage snare and Alarm Snare, this snare detonates with an explosion audible from 200 feet away, dealing fire damage and potentially deafening its target.

This snare is stuck in a sort of awkward halfway spot. It does less damage than the earlier Spike Snare, but the informational aspect isn’t as good as Alarm Snare or Thunder Snare. In my opinion, the versatility isn’t worth the reduced effectiveness. Deafened is a pretty poor rider as well.

 

Level 3: Fire Box, ★★★☆☆ (average 14 damage per creature)

This snare sprays a 15 foot cone of fire in a random direction, but always hits the creature that triggered it.

You wanted damage? Here’s some damage. The expected damage per creature is competitive with other single-target snares at this level, but if you hit 2 or more your DPS is going to skyrocket.

There are two problems with this. Firstly, like most AoE snares, the Reflex DC is 2 lower than expected at this level, meaning enemies are more likely to save and reduce the damage. Secondly, the cone’s direction is completely random and determined by your GM. This makes it somewhat unreliable for dealing AoE damage, and if you’re only hitting one target with the lower DC then it’s not really worth the bother.

 

Level 3: Detonating Gears Snare, ★★★★★ (average 16.5+ damage)

Deal piercing damage and persistent bleed to a single target.

The expected returns on this thing are great. Even assuming the target immediately saves against their bleed damage, you’re looking at a pretty hefty hit, and if they can’t stop the bleeding you can even outclass some level 5 snares. This is your first really good damage snare… at least until the next one on this list.

 

Level 4: Acid Spitter, ★★★★★ (average 15.5+ damage)

This one is pretty interesting – instead of triggering on its own square, it triggers when anyone moves into an adjacent square, giving you a full 9 squares of coverage. Just like Detonating Gears, it applies a first hit of damage and then some ongoing, although in this case it’s weighted more towards the persistent.

If you have any sort of misfortune effect, or you’re just lucky, then this can outscale Detonating Gears after a round or two. Acid is also a rarer damage type compared to piercing, making it more useful against a wider range of targets. Maybe learn both and swap between the two depending on resistances.

 

Level 4: Biting Snare, ★★★★☆ (average 17.5 damage)

Yet another competitive damage option, this snare deals heavy piercing damage with a lingering 10 foot speed penalty until the target heals.

If you don’t get any extra ticks, this snare just outdamages the previous two on average. The speed penalty is also quite nasty, as it can’t be removed until the target heals at least one hit point. Many enemies do not get any healing mechanics, essentially making the penalty permanent for them.

Unfortunately, and for no apparent reason, this snare has a lower DC than any others around its level. Since the speed penalty occurs on a crit fail, you’re less likely to get it, and enemies are more likely to succeed on their save and only take half damage. If that wasn’t an issue, this would easily be another 5 star option. Levels 3-4 are packed with them for some reason.

 

Level 4: Boom Snare, ★★☆☆☆ (average 14+ damage)

Deal a mix of fire and sonic damage in a 5ft radius, adding on Deafened and some minor persistent fire on critical failure.

Not particularly great. The damage is a bit low for this level unless you get a crit for the persistent damage (and, well, other snares will also do a lot on a crit). The radius is tiny, smaller than any other snare, making it even less likely to hit multiple enemies than most AoE options. As mentioned above, Deafened isn’t worth a tremendous amount either. 

On top of that, it costs 18gp baseline, more than most at this level, and requires two specific ingredients (a lesser Alchemist’s Fire and a lesser Thunderstone). If you’re not playing with free specific ingredients, that brings the cost up to 24gp, the most expensive snare so far. 

This feels like an attempt to make Alchemist Snarecrafter a bit more viable, but unfortunately it just isn’t quite strong enough.

 

Level 4: Clinging Ooze Snare, ★★★☆☆ (average 14 damage) 

Hit a single target for a mix of bludgeoning and acid damage, giving them flat-footed on fail and immobilising for a round on a crit.

The damage is a bit lower than other options at this level, without even the chance for persistent damage or multiple targets to enhance the expected returns.

In exchange, you get to apply flat-footed until the start of their next turn, with a chance to immobilise them completely. It’s not an atrocious effect to apply, but a little bit redundant with effects like Snare Genius or Nature’s Edge if you’re only thinking about your own strikes.

This might be good if you really want a damage snare and have allies that are really thirsty for flat-footed targets, like rogues. If you’re just after the flat-footed effect, think about Tar Rocket Snare instead, also at this level. 

 

Level 4: Fang Snare, ★☆☆☆☆ (average 10 damage)

Deal minor poison damage. That’s it.

Fang Snare sucks. The damage is lower than nearly every other option around this level and you don’t even get any rider effects to compensate.

You might think the Poison damage is a possible upside… except Poison is one of the most commonly resisted damage types, there are a whopping 280 creatures completely immune, and exactly 0 creatures weak to it. Yes, that’s right, zero. You can’t even use this as a back pocket weakness exploiter. Bad. Useless.

 

Level 4: Ice Slick Snare, ★☆☆☆☆ (average 7 damage)

Deal minor cold damage. 

That’s it. If you check the Archives of Nethys entry linked above, it mentions making a Reflex save, and the flavour implies it would create some sort of difficult terrain or prone enemies or something. I suspect either the snare was misprinted in the Fumbus comic itself (which has plenty of other editing problems) or the Archives of Nethys team hasn’t transcribed it correctly, probably the former. If anyone has the physical source and would like to confirm for me, that would be grand.

Either way, until a corrected version is released somewhere, the version as printed is almost entirely useless. 

 

Level 5: Flame Drake Snare, ★★☆☆☆ (average 21 damage per creature)

Shoot a cone of fire in the direction a creature entered the square from.

This would be a good upgrade to the Fire Box, especially because the cone is almost guaranteed to fire in a useful direction.

Unfortunately, it is completely hamstrung by one thing: the cone doesn’t include the snare’s square. As per the cone rules, it must originate from a corner or edge of the square which the triggering object rests in. Fire Box gets around this with a specific clause stating the triggering creature is included; unfortunately Fire Drake has no such thing.

As such, it’s almost unusable. Even when you’re fighting a group of enemies, the fact that each one will move individually means one will usually move ahead of the group, set off this snare, and have it completely whiff, unless you somehow managed to set it up exactly 10 feet in front of their entry point.

 

Level 5: Pummelling Snare, ★★★★★ (average 27 damage)

Drop a bunch of rocks on someone, dealing some hefty bludgeoning damage.

Another simple damage snare, but an effective one. The DC stays on curve, and the damage is the highest of any snare so far (and will be until level 8). If you want to hurt someone, here’s your best option at this level.

 

Level 5: Wet Shock Snare, ★★★★☆ (average 18 damage)

Trick someone into stepping on a big pile of eels, shocking them with electricity damage and stunning on a crit fail. 

This is better than I thought on first glance. Although the damage is lower than Pummelling Snare, you’re making the trade for a rarer damage type and the possibility of some nasty action denial. Although you can’t rely on it, the possibility of landing a stun during a creature’s own turn (which immediately ends it) is hard to pass up.

You should probably use Pummelling Snare as your main damage dealer at this level, but keep this as a backup for anything that resists physical damage.

As a bonus, the eels always survive. It’s cruelty free!

 

Level 8: Bomb Snare (average ??? damage)

Rig up three bombs to create a blast, hitting all adjacent creatures with triple the damage of a single bomb, plus whatever other effects it might apply.

You might notice that I haven’t rated this snare. That’s because a lot of it is up to interpretation and your build, and honestly it can oscillate between 1 and 5 stars based on those variables.

First off: the cost. You need to supply 3 identical moderate bombs, which dictate the effects of the snare. Each bomb will cost roughly 10gp, putting the cost at around 115 gold pieces per snare.

Whether or not this is an issue for you depends on whether your GM allows you to ignore crafting requirements. If they don’t, this gets very expensive very quickly. If they do, then this might be manageable.

However, allowing you to ignore the cost means you can basically make the bomb snare out of anything you want, making this the most versatile snare in the game. You could be doing anything from fire to poison to positive to cold damage, plus any number of weird and crazy rider effects. Simply decide that this time the snare will be made out of Ghost Charges and you can deal with undead – no need for that rare Spirit Snare! It’s almost too versatile, and potentially a good argument for disallowing free specific materials.

 

Level 8: Striking Snare, ★★★★★ (average 40.5 damage)

Deal hefty B or P damage to one target.

3 levels later, here’s your replacement for Pummelling Snare. This one comes with the option of bludgeoning or piercing damage, which is a helpful little bonus. It won’t help against anything generally resistant to physical, but you should be able to effectively hit more targets than usual, putting it a notch above normal single target damage snares.

 

Level 9: Frost Worm Snare, ★★☆☆☆ (average 35 damage per creature)

This works just like the Flame Drake Snare above, except it deals more damage, it’s cold, and it’s a 30ft line instead of a cone.

This suffers for all the same reasons as Flame Drake. I suppose a 30ft line is marginally more likely to catch someone behind the triggering creature, as long as they’re in the exact orthogonal direction the triggering creature entered from. Pass.

 

Level 10: Burning Badger Guts Snare, ★★★★☆ (average 31.5+ damage per creature)

Hit the triggering square and up to two others adjacent with a chunk of fire damage, some persistent burning, and Sickened.

Another unexpected winner from Grand Bazaar. It’s not quite as hard hitting as Striking Snare from two levels ago, and the AoE is fairly unlikely to hit multiple enemies, and the DC is lower than expected… but you still get a neat package of effects together.

Powerful Snares makes up for the DC issue, and by this level you should definitely have it. Plus, it’s another Fortitude check. 

The damage is better than other snares with similar effects (31.5 vs. Puff Dragon’s 10.5), and Fire is a nice option to have in your back pocket – although it’s one of the most resisted types of damage, it’s also the second-most common weakness. 

It also has all the usual benefits of Sickening someone. All in all, a nice combo that doesn’t give up too much in exchange.

 

Level 10: Raining Knives Snare, ★★★★☆ (average 49.5 damage)

Deal heavy piercing damage to a single target.

The next step in your single-target damage tree. There’s really not too much to say about this, although it’s a shame to lose the B/P versatility from Pummelling Snare. It’s up to you whether the +9 average damage boost is worth spending one of your formulas on – you could always wait until level 12 where you get a more substantial boost.

The flavour is kind of fun, though. Feel free to yell MUDA MUDA every time this triggers.

 

Level 10, Snagging Hook Snare, ★★★☆☆ (average 45 damage)

Deal a mix of Piercing and Slashing to a single target, with a chance for Immobilised on a critical failure.

Whether you take this snare or not is a matter of preference. It only does 4.5 more average damage than Striking Snare from two levels ago, and the mixed damage is more likely to hit a resistance, meaning you’ll only do partial damage. To make matters worse, it has a reduced DC, making the critical failure effect much less relevant. There are other snares that do a much better job of movement denial than this.

That being said, Slashing is a surprisingly rare damage type for snares up until this level. If you’re fighting something that’s weak to Slashing specifically, and you have Powerful Snares to make up for the DC issue, this could potentially be worth a try.

 

Level 12: Bleeding Spines Snare, ★★★★★ (average 45+ damage)

Stab an enemy with a cavalcade of repeating spikes, dealing Piercing and Bleed damage. Uniquely among snares, this stays active for an entire minute, triggering again on every creature that enters the square or ends its turn there to save again.

Really, really good. Even assuming a worst case scenario in which you only hit one creature, this still does competitive, if not spectacular, damage. Assuming a non-worst case scenario, which shouldn’t be difficult to imagine, your expected returns will skyrocket. 

This snare solves one of the frequent problems that all AoE snares face, which is a single enemy moving over your snares with none of their friends in range. With Bleeding Spines, however, that square is essentially a hazard for the rest of the battle. In some ways, despite only doing damage, this is also a control snare.

Even though the snare is probably pretty obvious – it is an entire square full of bloody spines shooting in and out, after all – and therefore easy to walk around, you and your party will have methods to force enemies into it anyway. Place it in a good chokepoint and you can expect to hit, at the very least, two units. 

And that’s not to mention the potential for repeated hits on the same target. If you have a friendly melee who can force movement (for example, a Fighter with Aggressive or Brutish Shove, or someone with the Mauler archetype), you can bully a target back into the square over and over again, forcing constant saves and reapplying the bleed. Great for boss fights.

 

Level 12: Scything Blade Snare, ★★★★☆ (average 63 damage)

Hit a single target with a hefty chunk of Slashing damage, with a basic Reflex save.

The existence of this snare is one of the other reasons that Snagging Hook Snare is so mediocre. This has nearly 20 more average damage, and it deals Slashing damage, making it less likely to hit a resistance than the mixed damage type of Snagging.

There’s not too much else to say about it, really. Get it if you want to keep up with your single-target damage snares.

 

Level 14: Chopping Evisceration Snare, ★★★★☆ (average 72 damage)

Hit a single target with a hefty chunk of Slashing damage, with a basic Reflex save.

You may notice I copy pasted the description from the above snare. That’s because this literally does exactly the same thing, just with 2d8 more damage. Even the damage type is identical.

That being said, this represents a much less hefty jump in damage across the two levels. The jump from Raining Knives Snare to Scything Blade Snare was 13.5 average damage, while Scything Blade to this is only 9. It’s still a bump, but you’re not getting quite as much value.

Just like before, pick this if you really care about keeping up with the damage curve.

 

Level 14: Rending Snare, ★★★★★ (average 52+ damage per target)

Deal a single hit of Piercing damage, ongoing Bleed, and inflict Clumsy 2 for up to a minute on a failed Reflex save.

This is a bit more interesting than your standard damage snare. Even including a round of bleed, the damage is decent but not on curve, being only a little better than a level 10 damage snare. You would need the bleed to last for at least four rounds to match the damage of a Chopping Evisceration Snare at the same level. 

In exchange you get a nasty debuff that can potentially last for an entire minute with no escape mechanism. Clumsy 2 is essentially a second, stackable instance of flat-footed. This leads to some excellent synergy with Kobolds in particular. Since this is a Kobold snare, taking the Snare Setter feat gives you access to this normally Uncommon option, guaranteeing you’ll be able to use it. Once you hit level 5, the Snare Genius feat means any critical failure versus a damaging snare also inflicts a turn of flat-footed. 

A combination of flat-footed and Clumsy 2 is essentially -4 to AC, giving you and your other damage dealers an easy nova round. As a bonus, Clumsy 2 will also reduce Reflex saves, making the target more vulnerable to most of your other snares for a whole minute.

A must-have for any Kobold, and a serious contender for anyone else. Consider setting up for this with other preparatory snares like Nauseating Snare.

Level 14: Shrapnel Snare, ★★★☆☆ (average 49+ damage per creature)

Deal major Piercing damage and a moderate amount of persistent Piercing damage in an AoE, as well as inflicting Deafened.

The damage here is decent, and obviously gets better when you catch more than one target, but it runs into the same issue as most AoE snares regarding the likelihood of hitting multiple enemies. 

The Deafened effect is rather anemic. It doesn’t do anything useful for your snares or your party’s combat effectiveness; the only potential use is reducing Initiative checks if you get this to go off before combat starts.

It’s worth noting that this is one of very few sources of persistent Piercing damage in the game. It’s rare to find something with a weakness to a specific physical damage type at this level, but I suppose it could come up.

Overall a little “meh”. That being said, it is the first proper AoE snare in 4 levels.

 

Level 16: Hail of Arrows Snare, ★★★★★ (average 63 damage per creature)

Re-enact the end of Hero by unleashing an enormous volley of arrows, hitting all enemies within a 20 foot radius with heavy Piercing damage. It’s around this point that your snares turn from “powerful mechanisms” into “hammerspace bullshit”, and it’s great.

This snare gets around the AoE problem by being absolutely bloody enormous. A 20 foot radius covers 63 squares; in a theoretical best case scenario where every square is occupied, that’s a damage potential of nearly 4000, by far the highest of any snare. Of course that isn’t actually going to happen in any real campaign, but hopefully it illustrates the possibilities this snare offers. As long as you’ve placed it anywhere vaguely near the enemy group, you’re going to get at least two hits off.

Uniquely among AoE options, this uses the same DC as single-target snares. Why? Who knows, but it’s just gravy on top. Overall, just a top tier damage snare, and your best option for AoE for the rest of your career.

 

Level 16: Omnidirectional Spear Snare, ★★★★☆  (average 85.5 damage)

Impale an enemy on a dozen spears like a Dwarf Fortress danger room gone wrong, dealing major Piercing damage.

You know it, you love it, it’s the single-target damage snare. This is a bigger damage jump from Scything Blade than Scything Blade was from Raining Knives, so if you’re trying to stay on curve this might be worth the buy.

That being said, Hail of Arrows is so good that it might actually be worth skipping this and just relying on Hail instead. Up to you and how many formulas you feel comfortable buying or inventing.

 

Level 18: Avalanche of Stones Snare, ★★★★☆ (average 99 damage)

Rocks fall and your target dies, or at least takes a bunch of bludgeoning damage.

Straightforward as it is, this snare is a welcome addition from Grand Bazaar – before this, the next single target snare was at 20, leaving a bit of a long wait for your next upgrade. Now anyone trying to stay current with their single target snares has an in-betweener to use.

 

Level 20: Death Coil, ★★★★★ (average 45.5 damage per creature)

Set up what is essentially a tesla coil. This is a smart snare and waits until there’s either 3 suitable targets or one lingering target, then unleashes a huge AoE of Electricity damage with a chance to stun.

I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed with this snare at first glance, despite the amazing name. The damage is fairly mediocre, about on par with Shrapnel Snare from six levels ago, and there are few creatures weak to Electricity. 

Then I thought about it some more, read the text again, and realised that Death Coil is fucking awesome. 

Point one: the AoE is gigantic, just like Hail of Arrows. Nice, especially in combination with the following points.

Point two: it’s a smart snare and is nearly guaranteed to only go off when you have at least three targets, completely solving the AoE snare problem. Since it will almost always hit three creatures, the average damage could more accurately be stated as 136.5, completely outclassing any other option on the snare list. 

That being said, since it always triggers when three creatures are in range, it’s going to be a little difficult to hit more than three targets. Perhaps with the help of a Wizard?

Point three: it stuns. Stunning snares are excellent for all the reasons previously described, and this is the only snare that allows you to stun multiple targets at once. Stunned 2 is great, depriving the triggering creature of its turn and all creatures in the AoE of their next two actions. However, the Stunned 4 on a critical failure is the really juicy part here. That means that whichever creature triggered the snare is losing three turns to this baby, while the other targets lose two.

Point four: this is a Fortitude save rather than Reflex, which is good for all the reasons outlined previously.

Point five: it’s a frickin’ tesla coil, what else do you want?

Now there are a couple of caveats here. For one thing, the snare specifically states it can’t be used with things like Surprise Snare, making it slightly harder to use in the middle of a fight (although you can always drop it with Lightning Snares than Remote Trigger it if you don’t mind being in the blast zone).

Secondly, it is Rare. Even in games with permissive DMs, you’re far from guaranteed to have access to this thing, and you will probably have to jump through some hoops to get your hands on it. It’s well worth the effort, though.

Thirdly, it’s described as being three feet tall – how the hell do you conceal this thing?

 

Level 20: Flying Blade Wheel Snare, ★★★☆☆ (average 36 damage per hit)

More like a summon trap than a snare, this creates what is basically a possessed buzzsaw that you can command to chase after the triggering creature, attacking it for moderate Slashing damage.

This is a weird one, but potentially decent. This is the only snare that makes Strikes and therefore it targets AC, making it great against some enemies and awful against others. An attack bonus of +33 is reasonable but not amazing (for comparison, a level 20 ranger with a +3 weapon and proper stats will have an attack bonus of +35, so the snare is a proficiency level behind most martials) and the damage for each individual hit is worse than some snares from 11 levels ago.

Like Bleeding Spines Snare, the value here comes from persistence. The wheel is pretty hard to destroy (even at level 20, 200 hit points with object immunities and Hardness isn’t trivial to get through), and if they’re hitting it they’re not hitting your party. If they try to run away, the wheel moves 60 feet per turn if you’re commanding it, so they’ll probably have to Stride at least twice to evade it. Once again, that’s actions that aren’t being used against you. 

There is a bit of a problem in that certain enemies will just ignore it and wail you on instead. If you have some high AC goon in your face slapping you, spending one of your actions to try and hit it for a bit of slashing isn’t going to feel all that good, and you need to land at least 4 hits to beat the expected damage return of the level 20 single-target damage snare.

You also can’t swap targets; RAW, it can only chase and hit the target that triggered it in the first place. I guess it’s a Final Destination situation where they once escaped death in a sawmill or something.

On the plus side, it’s not like a real summon where you need to Sustain it or it disappears – the wheel will happily wait for you to command it again, so you don’t need to commit to the action tax if you don’t want to.

 

Level 20: Instant Evisceration Snare, ★★★★☆ (average 108 damage)

Stab someone a bunch with a lot of Piercing damage.

To be honest, this is a little disappointing for the level 20 single-target damage snare. I would have thought by this point you’d get some more exotic damage types or something. But nope, here it is, just like the older damage snares but with higher numbers.

The numbers are very high, though. As you would expect, it hits harder than any other snare, dealing 9 more damage on average than Avalanche of Stones. And… that’s it. Not much to say, especially next to exciting options like Death Coil. The Core Rulebook snares are all a little vanilla, in my opinion, so it’s great that we got some more exotic options with the latest releases.

 

Wow, that was a lot of snares. I have questions.

Understandable. 

Cheese

While snares are a great addition to Pathfinder 2e and I love them dearly, there are undeniable oversights in the rules which can lead to some quite broken interactions. I do not endorse the use of these interactions in your games, unless you’re doing some sort of “R&D’s Secret Lair”-style cheesefest.

Instead, I list them here so that you and your GM can be aware of them before they become a problem. I also offer solutions for handling each one.

 

The Consumable Trait

Problem:

All snares have the Consumable trait, indicating that it can only be used once before it’s destroyed. However, the Consumable trait also has some additional rules text. Can you guess which part poses a problem?

“When a character creates consumable items, they can make them in batches of four.”

RAW, every time you craft a snare, you in fact create four of the same snare at once. This means every time you lay a trap you can always cover four squares at once, massively increasing your coverage and turning every battlefield into a nightmare hellhole from which there is no escape.

Needless to say, this is a little broken. 

Solution:

Add a line of rules text under Snares that says the following: “Even though snares have the Consumable trait, they cannot be batch crafted.”

This is clearly RAI and fixes what is an obviously unintended interaction. 

 

Giant Snares

Problem:

The Giant Snares feat states the following:

“A giant snare can trigger from a creature entering any portion of its area, and all its effects apply over the full area.”

What’s unclear and potentially broken here is the second half. Although this feat makes sense with the vanilla snares that only do damage or applied a condition to a single target, what happens with other snares that do AoE damage or apply more esoteric effects?

If, for example, you place a Giant Hail of Arrows Snare, does each different square trigger a separate AoE, hitting each target four times? That’s what the rules seem to say. What about the Flying Blade Wheel – do you get four different wheels on the battlefield? Does each square of a Giant Burning Badger Guts Snare add an extra two squares? The feat doesn’t say.

Solution:

For simple Radius snares like a Hail of Arrows or a Puff Dragon, Giant Snare should simply work like a Large creature doing an emanation – it counts the four squares as the origin and does a single AoE from them. Do the same thing with any terrain affecting options like Rock Ripper Snare. This still gives Giant Snares value as an AoE increaser, but doesn’t allow the cheese.

Other AoE snares – like the cone from Fire Drake or line from Frost Worm – should stay at a normal size and fire from the square that the Snare was triggered from. 

Snares that “summon” – like Flying Blade Wheel or Clockwork Chirper – should still only create one entity. Giant Snare would simply increase the area in which it can trigger.

Snares that care about adjacency, like Clockwork Monkey, should count all squares adjacent to their larger trigger, but otherwise work as normal.

In any other case where snares would behave strangely or become overpowered, Giant Snare should simply increase the size of the trigger. 

 

Snare Stacking

Problem:

The rules don’t offer any clarification on how a snare occupies its space, and they don’t forbid you from placing another snare in a square that already has one. In theory, you can spend a day placing 100 snares in the same spot; as soon as someone walks onto it, they’re basically guaranteed to die instantly. 

Solution:

Snares don’t occupy their space for the purposes of creature movement, but each square can only have one snare in it at a time. If you want to put another snare on a trapped square, you need to disarm or trigger the original first.

 

Infinite Snare Works

Problem:

The QDS you get from Snare Specialist, Snarecrafter et al do not specify any sort of expiry date. Compare this to the Alchemist’s Infused Reagents, the Talisman Dabbler, or the Scroll Trickster, all of which offer similar daily items; each one specifies that its item is destroyed or otherwise stops working as soon as you make your next daily preparations. QDS have no such text.

This means that, in theory, you can save up your QDS on every day of downtime without deploying them; by the time you do go on an adventure, you can have hundreds or even thousands of QDS and never have to worry about gold again.

Solution:

Add the following rules text to any feat or feature that gives you QDS:

“Your quick deploy snares are unstable as a result of your modifications. Each time you make your daily preparations, any quick deploy snares which you haven’t laid fall apart and become unusable”.

 

FAQs

Where should I be placing my snares?

Since your snares only cover one square (usually), for maximum efficiency you need to find a spot that an enemy is most likely to walk through.

Your number one consideration needs to be chokepoints. Doorways, narrow ravines, bridges, rope slides, ladders – anywhere that forces an enemy to walk through a particular area.

Number two are your “soft chokepoints”. These are areas where enemies are encouraged to move, even if they’re not forced to. Consider a clear trail through a forest thick with undergrowth. Are your enemies going to move through the difficult terrain, or are they going to take the path? Although they could pick both, they’re more likely to choose one than the other, and that’s where you want to trap.

Number three is aggro. One of the tricks of being a good snare user is making sure that you yourself still pose a threat, not just your snares. A snare Ranger, for example, should probably grab at least one or two feats to boost their ranged damage. If you’re sitting in a bush sniping people with headshots, they’re going to want to close in on you to stop that from happening. There are only so many paths they can take when trying to reach you, and that’s where you need to place your snares. Even before combat starts, if at all possible you should be thinking about where you want to be.

This also holds true for your allies. Although it’s harder to control what your party members do, you should know who the most valuable targets are and, with some coordination, you can effectively protect them and lure enemies into snares at the same time. 

 

Can enemies see my snares if I deploy them in combat?

RAW, no. They work just like normal snares in that they require a Perception check and/or Seek action to find. The enemy will know that you did something, but not what.

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend changing anything about this. As a Snarecrafter or Snare Specialist, you’ve specialised in creating snares that are hard to spot and quick to deploy, and I don’t think it’s unrealistic to, say, drop a bear trap and quickly conceal it. Play it off as being a genius chessmaster who set up the entire area in advance and is just revealing their already-present traps, if you like.

This is especially true in the middle of a chaotic combat (remember that all turns are taking place nearly simultaneously over 6 seconds) where not every enemy is going to be paying close attention to you. 

From a game balance perspective, snares aren’t exactly in need of a nerf, so there’s no reason to penalise someone who’s specialised in using them. That being said, intelligent enemies should probably realise something’s up, especially after your other snares start triggering, and begin using more Seek actions as they advance.

 

What exactly is the crafting DC to set up my snares?

Crafting an item uses Level-Based DCs and depends on the level of the snare you’re trying to place. A Level 1 Alarm Snare has a Crafting DC of 15, for example, while a level 20 Death Coil has a DC of 40.

 

Can I get my placed snares back?

No, not by default, although you can disarm them if you don’t want them laying around.

If you have the Trapsmith Archetype and you take the Recycled Cogwheel feat, then you can pick up any quick deploy snares that didn’t go off.

 

When do my placed snares decay?

RAW, never – they exist permanently, waiting patiently to ruin someone’s day. Your GM may decide differently based on common sense; a random rope trap in the middle of the forest will probably rot away after a few weeks, for example. On the other hand, turning your lovely fantasy kingdom into a minefield-riddled hellscape could be pretty funny.

 

Can I poison my traps?

RAW, the only types of poison that you can use on your traps are Contact poisons, since they work on touch and most snares physically contact people. Injury poisons cannot be used with snares since they only work on weapons. 

To be honest, poisoning snares is a bit of a headache (how does a contact poison work on a Hail of Arrows Snare?) and it might be better to avoid it entirely, lest you piss off your GM by having to make and remember individual rulings on each different snare’s poisonability. 

 

How many QDS can I get if I take all the feats? 

Let’s add it up.

• 16 from Snare Specialist + Ubiquitous Snares
• 16 from Snarecrafter Dedication + Plentiful Snares
• 5 from Snare Genius

That adds up to 37 per day total, more than enough to get you through with only minimal cost. The only problem is deciding which ones to prepare!

 

GM Recommendations

If you’re running a game and one of your players has a dedicated snare build, there are a few things you’ll need to keep in mind. The below are my recommendations for keeping things fair and balanced for everybody. 

 

Rarity

I recommend ignoring the Uncommon tag and giving your player access to the full range of (non-Rare) snares whenever they get to invent or learn free formulas from a feat. About 60% of snares are Uncommon, so a dedicated snarecrafter will have much fewer choices per level and probably have less fun as a result if you don’t. 

Originally, I talked here about Rare snares being fairly unique. Since the first version of this guide, there have been several more released, bringing the count up to 6. None of the new ones are particularly game breaking, so at this stage, the Rare snares aren’t that much more special than the Uncommons and I might recommend giving free access to them. 

The only exception is Death Coil, which is incredibly cool – perhaps consider giving the player a quest about researching and developing this snare, building up to making it available towards the climax of the campaign? It would be a great payoff for 20 levels of snare crafting.

 

Loot

You should mix in formulas, raw snare materials, and plenty of gold into your loot piles for your resident snare crafter. I promise you the prospect of having a cool new snare option will excite them more than many magic items (don’t neglect the basics, though – they still need to do things with their own character too).

You should make sure to frequently scatter in Uncommon formulas as loot based on whatever makes sense in your world.

A Specialist Snare Kit, as well as any other items that can offer boosts to Crafting, will also be appreciated.

 

Shopping

Your snare crafter will need to regularly stock up on raw snare materials, at least early on in their career. If they don’t get these, they can’t use their snares at all, so I recommend making this easy to access. Since snare materials are so abstractly defined, it’s hard to say how much they should be worth. If you’re feeling nice then I’d just say they can be purchased at cost (e.g. 100 gold for 100 gold’s worth of snare material) since they’re essentially just a big gold sink for no immediate payoff.

Formulas should also be a regular shopping option. Common should be available nearly everywhere, Uncommon wherever you feel makes sense. 

 

Monster Perception and Thievery

To quickly recap the snare rules: a creature needs a proficiency at least one level behind the snare crafter’s to attempt to spot or disarm a snare. The guidelines for monster proficiency state that monsters level their skills and perception at a rate just behind the player’s.This means that all monsters of a suitable combat level will be allowed to attempt to spot and disable a player’s snares, basically making that part of the rules pointless.

My recommendation is that you should play a little more loosely with the rules and only make certain creatures in each encounter capable of doing either one.

For example, if the players are fighting a group of orc soldiers accompanied by goblin scouts, the scouts should probably have the required perception to attempt to Seek a snare, as well as enough Thievery to try to disarm it; meanwhile the orcs wouldn’t have the chance for either. An encounter with a gang of thieves should allow everyone to try and disarm traps, but only the lookouts would have sufficient perception to spot them. And so on.

You will know your world and the enemies you’re using the best, so you’ll be able to make the call the best. Just avoid making everybody universally able to spot and disarm and your snare crafter player will have a better time.

 

Shooting Snares

Given a certain reading of the rules, in theory anybody can trigger a snare by shooting and damaging it. However, this makes certain feats, like Remote Trigger, less useful. My recommendation would be to read the rules the other way and disallow shooting traps to trigger them early.

 

Specific Components

A few snares ask for specific components in their creation – for example, the Mudrock Snare asks for “75 gp worth of refined blue dragon blood”. All well and good, and these can make for good pieces of incidental loot.

However, feats which offer quick deploy snares, like Snare Specialist, specify that they “don’t cost any resources to craft”. RAW, this means that these snares can ignore specific material costs.

It’s unclear if this was intended or not, but in the interests of fairness and consistency, you should make a decision on whether to allow it early on. It doesn’t make an enormous difference either way, but your snare crafter will have a harder time using some of their learned snares if you do ask for specific components.

 

Encounters

If you constantly spring surprise encounters on your players, your snare crafter will be miserable. If you constantly run encounters in flat boxes, your snare crafter will be miserable. If you ask your players to constantly be on the offense, your snare crafter will be miserable. 

For best results, sometimes give your party prep time and allow them to fight defensively. For example, have them defend a small fort from an impending orc assault. This will give the snare crafter time to shine and show off all the options they’ve been investing their precious feats in.

Alternatively, give the players a chance to ambush enemies. If they know someone’s coming along a road, the snare crafter will be salivating at the chance to lay a proper ewok-style ambush.

Try to make sure your battle maps have at least one interesting feature, or, at the very least, some sort of natural chokepoint. Even if you’re just standing around in a forest, have spots where the trees cluster closer together, or have a small stream that’s difficult terrain. Anything that lets your player think tactically.

Basically, give your players something to think about, anything at all that they can possibly exploit, and your snare crafter should have fun. It takes a certain type of player to pick a build like this, after all.

 

Thanks!

Just to say thank you for reading, especially if you read through the whole thing. I hope this was helpful for understanding snares and their role in Pathfinder. More importantly, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I liked writing it. See you in the next game.

Check out my new guide, Polyarmoury, here.

• Cassie