Should traps have tells?

[Bill Zebub]

Yes, you can manipulate the numbers to produce whatever result you wanted. Congrats.

Happy to use any numbers you want. The math is pretty straightforward. The point is that a 33% casualties does not mean a 66% trap detection rate. Assuming the traps are deadly and effective, it suggests a very high rate of detection.

Curiously, @Celebrim came up with very similar numbers, although more analytically. He figured 60 traps per career, whereas I just took a stab at 50. If it's sixty traps then the final figure is....well, a tiny bit closer to 100%.

EDIT: And really the whole point of this exercise is to demonstrate the futility of citing realism in RPGs. Design it the way you like, the way you have the most fun. Realism is quixotic.

 

[GMMichael]

I do have to wonder what percentage of traps a dedicated "tunnel rat" from the Vietnam era would spot.

I bet it's much higher than the chance of spotting a trap in D&D. If it were the same chance, no tunnel rats would have survived the war.

Wouldn't a "realistic" system give a thief character a similar chance?

It's a tradeoff. You can have 100% chance of detecting traps, but then you move slowly and don't detect enemies. The other end of the spectrum is 0% chance of detecting traps, and just hoping you don't walk into one, while being ready for battle and avoiding pursuers.

A realistic system would have a pretty narrow focus to allow thieves the same odds as Vietnam tunnel rats of detecting traps.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It's a tradeoff. You can have 100% chance of detecting traps, but then you move slowly and don't detect enemies. The other end of the spectrum is 0% chance of detecting traps, and just hoping you don't walk into one, while being ready for battle and avoiding pursuers.

Yeah, while I will often grant automatic success to a Thief (I mostly play Shadowdark) using his crawling turns searching, all bets are off when they are fleeing the Minotaur.

Mwuhahahaha....

A realistic system would have a pretty narrow focus to allow thieves the same odds as Vietnam tunnel rats of detecting traps.

As noted above, I think it's pointless to chase 'realism.' Usually what 'verisimilitude' and 'realism' end up meaning is 'the very narrow set of features I care most about'. Which is fine.

 

[pemerton]

I think that poster meant a trap doing 2d6 damage, averaging 7.

Yes, but what does that mean in the fiction? Like, what is the trap designer thinking in saying to themself, "This will kill Kobolds, but not 2nd-level adventurers"?

 

[Bill Zebub]

Yes, but what does that mean in the fiction? Like, what is the trap designer thinking in saying to themself, "This will kill Kobolds, but not 2nd-level adventurers"?

Oh, that's just another one of those unanswerables inherent in level-based games.

 

[Fenris-77]

Realism doesn't have a ton to add to the trap conversation IMO. They are more fiction than fact, and also heavily tied to the idea of a resource management loop. Obviously someone can certainly take the idea and make the damage or whatever more 'realistic' but Im not sure what that move is in aid of. I suspect that it has more to do with the GM and their ideas about simulation than anything actually aimed at an improved game experience.

 

[Peter BOSCO'S]

From a game perspective, yes, of course traps should have tells. These are games about choices. Without choices to make, traps are just time/resource sinks.

From a verisimilitude perspective, no, of course traps should not have tells. Traps are placed to scare, harm, and hinder people. Giving them tells defeats the entire point of traps.

It's all down to which of those is more important to you. Game play or verisimilitude.

You can do both IF the tells are hard to spot. Most people don't notice them, and they work as planned; but some people (some PC's) are good enough, or lucky enough (i.e. they roll well enough) to spot them. Maybe making spotting traps an average of about +5DC over neutralizing those traps, once spotted.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, I imagine a lot of those casualties were not from traps but from engaging the enemy.

But let's pretend the 33% is solely from traps. Which means 66% were never badly injured or killed by traps. Since those traps are designed to seriously wound or kill, and soldiers don't have "hit points" that heal in 24 hours, I am guessing that it only takes one bad mistake....maybe two if you're lucky....to get taken out of the war.

Assuming that "only" 33% of tunnel rats got wounded or killed by traps, it's pretty easy to do some math showing the relationship between the number of traps encountered, and the frequency at which they were avoided. Or not avoided.

For example, if on average a tunnel rat encounters only 10 traps total, over their course of their deployment, and the chance of detection a trap is N%, then N^10 = 66%, and N is ~96%. That is, if tunnel rats have an 96% chance of detecting a trap, and they encounter a total of 10 traps each, expected survival rate is 66%.

From your description, it sounds like they encounter a lot more traps than that. Let's say 50. And now let's just guess that only half of those casualties are traps, which we'll round up to 17%. So now we need detection rate that, when raised to the 50th power, equals 83%.

Drumroll....

~99.6%

So if we are going for realism, and using Vietnam as our archetype, delvers with expertise in trap detection who are actively looking for traps should have a success rate nearing 100%.

Depending on how one writes one's adventures, the PCs could easily hit 50 traps over the course of their careers. If the expected casualty rate due specifically to traps is an aggregate 33% over that time, if the party averages six PCs that means over the long run traps will kill two of them.

And you know what? That sounds about right. As causes of PC death go, traps aren't high on the list - melee, spells, and friendly fire are way more frequent killers - and two deaths over a campaign is fine.

What's harder to determine is how many "assists" traps get, i.e. how many characters die because something gets them after they've been weakened somehow by a trap.

 

[Retros_x]

All pre-published campaigns are a starting point for me not the end.

Yeah, that explains it, our DM was always quite true to the book.

 

[TheSword]

Yeah, that explains it, our DM was always quite true to the book.

I think that dungeon potentially has a lot of moving parts - withers and wandering monsters in particular and I think the those two things can be used to make the traps far more interactive.