I will confess to having had other questions with waiting follow-ups... This one I was just actually curious what kinds of traps you found interesting enough to keep unchanged in the same location, and where foreknowledge didn't appreciably affect their impact.
Most of my traps will be complex enough that some amount of time and resources may be required even with foreknowledge. Foreknowledge may reduce the difficulty in some situations, but not others. Hazards are often in plain sight. A player's first attempt at dealing with them might be further refined in the second attempt. But again, this just reduces difficulty, potentially, and the challenge still remains. Dealing with the challenge produces the story.
As well, players are free in my game to use their skill and knowledge or they're free not to. Some will, some won't. As DM, it's none of my business either way - I'm just there to describe the environment and narrate the result of the adventurers' actions, sometimes calling for a check to decide how it goes.
I was picturing the difficulty of the task assessed as going into it. (As if one were assigning it something like a challenge rating). It didn't occur to me that it might have been the effect on the post-hoc assessment of how difficult it felt in retrospect. (As in, wow that combat was hard, we barely survived). Is the later the one you meant.
One might have an idea that a given challenge is "very hard" given its design, for example, and with or without foreknowledge, the players make certain decisions and the dice come up a certain way that reduce or increase the difficulty of the challenge. This is what I'm referring to. I hope that clarifies.
And now I'm left with the dissonance of being one of those who thinks OOC knowledge use is bad because it breaks role-playing, but never having considered the obviously gamey "knowledge check to see if I recognize the house" was substantially lesser in terms of role-playing from stating it in character. [insert chagrined look] Something I will definitely work on next time I play. Thank you.
This might be an issue of "metagame" versus "metagaming." A lot of people who don't like "metagaming" are perfectly fine playing a good portion of their sessions in the "metagame." My table rules combined with the rules of the game tend to reduce that sort of playing in the "metagame" and takes no position on "metagaming" except that players are advised it's a risky move.
Do you change the lore in the campaign and/or have a huge variety of monstrous strains with different attributes?
I don't change lore that is already established and I change monsters from time to time to suit whatever challenge I have designed. I don't do it to combat "metagaming" which I don't care about, but it does it all the same.
Oddly, most of the people I've played with or talked to who really do care about "metagaming" don't do this. It has the look of the game in effect being a test to me in that the DM sets the conditions for "metagaming" to occur and then the group visibly works to not do it, thereby reinforcing their group identity via the social contract. They're showing they're not "cheaters" instead of the DM just removing the ability to "cheat" or at least some of its efficacy in the first place. I just don't think the approach is well thought-through, particularly in the context of a game that doesn't support it very well.
