ThirdWizard said:
I can't possibly see how pulling a lever would be more dangerous than walking through a doorway.
Because a monster has to live in his own dungeon. Granted, the DM can just handwave away the issue. But in terms of realism, if you trap a doorway in your house, one time you're going to forget and walk through it and get blasted by your own trap. It's a lot easier to remember not to pull a lever. So if you look at what's best to trap from a dungeon-dwellers perspective, IMO it tells you what's most dangerous.
ThirdWizard said:
The swirling dirt wasn't a trap... And, that makes no sense to me whatsoever. You're saying a lever is more suspicious than an elemental supernatural effect? What? What if it were a swirling pool of black energy? Would a lever be more frightening than that?
In a dungeon, a lever fits a number of purposes, some of them can be flat out harmful. The difference between a swirling pile of dirt and a lever is that you know that pulling the lever has to have
some effect (or it's broken - which can also be bad). Levers do things. A swirling pile of dirt can just be some left-over telekinesis, or the outer-part of a gate to the Elemental Plane of Earth. In fact, touching earth pretty much has no harmful effect in the standard rules in terms of monsters and such. Meeting gazes, breathing in green gas, those things are a heck of a lot more likely to petrify you from a core rules perspective. And the "black energy" thing is another matter obviously. Touching fire burns, obviously, I'm sorry if I didn't acknowledge that before but I didn't know it was one of the situations under consideration.
And really, I wouldn't touch anything with my hands in a dungeon. I don't actually want to know what stuff feels like in a dungeon (except for gold). That's what they make 10 ft poles for. Or I'll find the arm of a skeleton of someone who didn't follow this advice further back in the dungeon and use that.
I'm serious, I don't come from the "heroic" school of fantasy adventuring.
List of senses least likely to be used by me in a dungeon on purpose: touch, taste, smell.
Secondly, if you're dealing with intelligent dungeon inhabitants, you know that they know that people pull levers. If you're going to put a magical trap on something, you trap the lever, not the dirt. It's only when the inhabitants of the dungeon don't know I'm coming, and the lever is part of an obvious mechanism that the dungeon inhabitants use regularly that I'd feel comfortable in pulling a lever. Otherwise I'm ready to make a save, even if it's just to jump out of the way of a portcullis because the lever mechanism is broken. I'd probably use a rope, because even if the save is fair, I don't want to find out. I don't even like fair saving throws.
Neither do my players, using a rope or summoned monster to pull a lever is pretty standard operating procedure in my campaign.
So in terms of ranking the following:
> touching swirling pile of dirt
> touching a greenish colored slime
> breathing in a colored gas
> freeing an NPC captive in a dungeon
> kissing an attractive female met in a dungeon who has wings
> pulling a lever
> drinking/eating something you found in a dungeon
> walking into a room full of skeletons just "laying there"
> sleeping in a room of statues
I'd put the swirling dirt at the bottom of the list of risks. YMMV of course, but I just think it's the particulars of my experiences.