The Firebird's latest activity

Yeah I like games with those kinds of rules, too. Or even just notes to that effect for a particular adventure. I like to write room...

A "tell" doesn't have to mean the trap as poorly implemented. A tell (or telegraph) is anything that causes the players to spend time...

Although I think it was my post in another thread that started this, reading this thread I'll acknowledge (top of the hat to @Lanefan...

Of course. But traps don’t have to be perfect to be effective. Also not every single trap is going to be so badly made that it provides...

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...