awayfarer
First Post
My players have recently entered the first decent-sized dungeon crawl of the campaign and something occurred to me: do you, or do you not dole out XP for encountering traps?
My gut reaction is no because...
1: Traps are generally only going to be encountered and dealt with by the party trapfinder. This assumes that you're sending the poor sod off alone to take a peak at things.
2: A heavily trapped area would send their XP skyrocketing, assuming CR appropriate traps. You're generally not going to lose anywhere near as much in the way of HP, spells and resources when dealing with a trap as you would be with a combat.
The reason I'm curious is simply that the traps are assigned a CR. I'm guessing that this is not for XP purposes but only so that you understand not to put level 2 PC's in the crushing room with the poisonous spikes that is slowly filling with acid and half green dragon piranhas. (Presumably, at that level you want to do something really nasty but not life-threatening, like putting miracle whip on their sandwhiches. *shudder*)
My gut reaction is no because...
1: Traps are generally only going to be encountered and dealt with by the party trapfinder. This assumes that you're sending the poor sod off alone to take a peak at things.
2: A heavily trapped area would send their XP skyrocketing, assuming CR appropriate traps. You're generally not going to lose anywhere near as much in the way of HP, spells and resources when dealing with a trap as you would be with a combat.
The reason I'm curious is simply that the traps are assigned a CR. I'm guessing that this is not for XP purposes but only so that you understand not to put level 2 PC's in the crushing room with the poisonous spikes that is slowly filling with acid and half green dragon piranhas. (Presumably, at that level you want to do something really nasty but not life-threatening, like putting miracle whip on their sandwhiches. *shudder*)