be careful what you stick in your fort. i just tried abandoning a fort and exploring it with a start now character to check out my setup. it was a 7 by 7 fort, which ran pretty good on my system, even when i had 190 dwarves and lots and lots of water moving around in pumps and artificial rivers and huge artificial underground caverns with tonnes of waterfalls and things.
it was so SLOW in adventure mode. totally unplayable.
make cool stuff for yourself as well. i left a bunch of masterwork adamantine serrated discs for the purpose of throwing at things. since my adventurer started without a weapon, as i just wanted to check a few of my things out before doing a proper explore, i ended up stabbing things with a giant cedar ballista bolt i found out the front. it was amazingly effective. next time im making up some adamantium tipped masterwork ones to see how they go.
upond arriving i heard a million giant olms, lizardmen, frogmen and snakemen cry out in terror, and then there was silence (they fell into the chasm)
and as soon as i got inside i had reports of one of my adamantium clad dwarven chapions with a silver battle axe (oops) killing massive numbers of things. and he was doing 10 or so actions for every tile a moved. all that training paid off. glad at least one survived, i was trying to get some of them to fall asleep and get stuck in cage traps by putting a squad in a locked room with them. they stayed awake for 2 years, and i had to drop food and booze in a hole in the roof to keep them alive, and eventually one got depressed and crazy... so no go there unless you have godlike patience.
summary - traps dont work at all. still dont know if pressure plates work, but adventure mode is really SLOW compared to fort mode, so dont do crazy tricks with water. and stuff manages to get absolutely everywhere, although locked doors seem to do a good job of containing creatures and items in sections of the fort. they mostly die unless caged though.
im so dissapointed my awesome tower cap filled watercaves are out of reach of even my fairly nice computer...