Occams Razor

Hi all! I'm coming back to the Accelerant LARPS after a grad-school hiatus, and I've been wanting to try my hand at trap disarmament ever since I ran across this in the rules. Sadly I never got a chance in Endgame (too many monsters trying to eat my face off); does anyone have some advice for a newbie in the field of de-trapping? I'd especially like to know what constitutes a set of disarm tools so I can start putting stuff together now...

Welcome! Or welcome back?

Ive seen people use a small pair of scissors (tripwires), flashlight (to make sure you got them all), GLOVES (contact poisons), and extreme caution.

I'm gong to entrust you into the tender mercies of Elizabeth.

It was nice almost meeting you... poor sap... trapped a bastards shoes once...

So with the caveat that I've disarmed about 2 traps in my life, here are a few common things I've seen:

Tweezers, forcep, hemostat, small clamp, etc (something to grip with)
Flat piece of something rigid (good for holding down a trigger while opening a box)
Small Scissor
Small wire cutter (only if they being really mean, happened at CW (another Accelerant Game) during the one day though so just in case)
Small mirror (I mean really small and on a stick, like a dental mirror)
Gloves (contact poisons are somewhat rare as they're a pain to clean)
Flashlights (particularly small ones with adjustable focus)
Lockpicks (not just useful for picking locks!)

All of these might be overkill, but I'm slowly collecting a kit for CW and this is my guide list.

As for good advice for a starting trapper, I will pass along the advice I got: NPC and tag along with NPCs setting up trap mods. You'll get to see the inner workings and help reset/disarm traps after a run.

Hope this helps!

Thanks! I might have some difficulty finding actual lockpicks (of course, that's what the internet is for ) , but the other stuff should be easy to get ahold of. And yeah, Elizabeth has mentioned that traps are her playthings. How did that phrase go? "We who are about to die, salute..."

I know that Cottington Woods tends to have traps, since their GM is an old school trap-rogue.

For lockpicks, take a look around on the side of the road for broken off street cleaner bristles. They're thin, slender, and made of spring steel. A little work with a dremel and you can make your own set rather easily. Not that I've done it myself or anything...

Another sneaky useful tool is something called a "spark gap tool". It's a little folded widget that has a stack of metal sheets of varying thicknesses. It's really meant for measuring the gaps on spark plugs, but the applications of a near paper thin peice of metal when disarming a trapped box cannot be understated.

That being said, having something like an old credit card is good too, because it's nonconductive. Last thing you want to do is bridge those two contacts with your probe and hear the dreaded buzzer of doom.