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[Farmerbob]

  Most designs for dodge-me traps over long falls tend to be indoor with lots of mining and digging involved.

  Why not build it outdoors?

  Most forts after a relatively short time start getting buried in excessive rock, so use the rock!

  Basically I'm thinking to create a secondary entrance into your fort, and building two towers with a fairly long bridge between them loaded with wooden junk weapons.  Tower 1 takes enemies about 10 tiles up, then releases them onto a 10 tile long 1 tile wide floor with a cheapo weapon trap every tile (wooden spikes?)  Tower 2 leads down to a very long path into your fort with lots of traps and whatnot that you can build at your leisure, or simply generate redirects that will eventually send the enemies back out.

  Basically this would:

1) Allow building of a highly effective low tech defense without taking your miners off exploration mining, or metals gathering.
2) Use extra rock, rather than creating it.
3) Generate fortress wealth
4) Allow you to create a refuse pile under the pit trap, where the bits and pieces will rot away and not generate miasma.
5) Allow you to keep your dwarves from collecting the items by telling them to ignore things outside.
6) Reduce bloodsplatter in your fortress.

There's nothing to say that you couldn't, at a later point, install cisterns for hot and cold flowing destruction when you have time for a megaproject, or take it down because it's just too simple.

You could even build it from wood, in order to promote a proper relationship with elves.

[Hyndis]

Why use wooden spikes? Load it up with steel or iron spikes. Those that don't dodge are impaled. Those who do dodge explode.

[Farmerbob]

Why use wooden spikes? Load it up with steel or iron spikes. Those that don't dodge are impaled. Those who do dodge explode.

You could certainly use steel, but dodge me traps don't need them.  Enemies try to dodge, and fall off the narrow path onto the ground far below.

This is meant to be a very simple trap system.  It is of course perfectly acceptable to make it FAR more complex, just because you can 

[Urist McKiwi]

Indeed. You could make the towers a lot higher, with the path zig-zagging between them on bridges, each one with fun and interesting weapons traps. After bridge number 5 or so, most things should be dead. Then you can set up an atom smasher or something to take care of the rest.

[Farmerbob]

For a minor megaproject:

Or you could put a ballista on the fortress side, and have an enemy triggered pressure plate hatch 21 tiles away.
One Ballista, single tile wide path.

Make the rest of the bridge 50 tiles long 1 tile wide.  First enemy hits the hatch, and then the ballista gets the order to fire...  Perhaps an entire siege killed with a single ballista bolt.

And it's all outside, where you can tell your dwarves to ignore the items

[Eric Blank]

This reminds me I need to redesign my own dodge-pit trap to deal with the miasma problems. Hmm...

[Wastedlabor]

One word: Volcano.

[Hyndis]

One word: Volcano.

If you drop small amounts of water onto the surface of the magma in the volcano, it will form obsidian, which will then instantly cave in, plummeting into the magma ocean far below. The cave in will drag everything within the blast radius along with it.

While this is absurdly effective, you won't get any goblinite, and you will need to edit the announcements so that cave ins are ignored. It also requires a very specific sort of embark area. A replenishing source of water and a volcano breaching the surface are both required for it.

[Wastedlabor]

What, no. I just placed the traps in the 1 tile obsidian ledge and made them dodge into the volcano. Totally worth the wasted goblinite.

[raptorfangamer]

you could also make a multi level dodge trap that resets their path if they survive the fall, I used to do those.