The Firebird's latest activity

Not all traps have to be deadly. The best traps IMO are those that aren't deadly but cause the PCs serious headaches now or later...

Characters getting into the habit of looking in every spot isn't bad design philosophy in the slightest: if it's what the characters...

Even from a game-play perspective, a tell isn't always necessary; sometimes the point isn't the choices to be made as to what to do...

Sure. There are some circumstances where that absolutely works. Traps that are old, not well maintained, abandoned, etc. But that's not...

You can have both easily enough. Even a well-designed and well-hidden trap might be given away through the inevitable decline of...

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

Yes and no. It depends what you’re using them for. But the essence is that a trap is meant to be interacted with. That’s the key thing...

I recently watched Matt Colville's long video about finding an online community in the TTRPG space, and I wanted to share a thought I...

Whether traps have tells is an unrelated tangent. Kindly take that elsewhere...

In D&D as a player I generally expect there might be both traps I cannot see that I trigger and ones that I can figure out to avoid...

The first one; it seems to preclude the idea that there are good traps. Suppose the players got enough money to build a fort and added...

i agree, but a more important factor than the characters being connected to each other is i think them having some anchoring connection...

okay, i will admit i've never even made gestures at reading GwtW, i just pulled it's name as an example because it's a big famous book...

Well-said. I would add a small extra though: Tell your prospective players, "Please don't start building a character until we meet up...

Just to clarify my point. The OP talks about how he finds it jarring that groups do not reflect the campaign setting. My solution to...