Pathfinder 1E Are you obligated to trigger the trap?

[Fauchard1520]

Sometimes the trap is obvious. You know that it's a bad idea to grab for the treasure, try to free the hostage, or [insert temptation here]. But because you're a noble paladin or a greedy rogue, you just can't help yourself. The pressure plate will trigger; the innocent maiden will be revealed as a fiend; the treasure is only gold leaf.

Are you obliged to "just go for it" when it's in character? Or is it the clever player's job to find a justification for avoiding the "it's what my character would do" line of thinking?

(Comic for illustrative purposes.)

 

[payn]

So, this trap cant be disarmed?

 

[aco175]

I think most people try to play along and wait for the "I knew it." moment. My group was just playing Forge of Fury and me the succubus, but was not attacked and all the players thought it was a trap but played along and kept one eye open for the Wisdom save. The offered to bring her to town to help her out. So she went with them to now take over the town instead of fight a party of well-armed adventurers.

 

[payn]

I think most people try to play along and wait for the "I knew it." moment. My group was just playing Forge of Fury and me the succubus, but was not attacked and all the players thought it was a trap but played along and kept one eye open for the Wisdom save. The offered to bring her to town to help her out. So she went with them to now take over the town instead of fight a party of well-armed adventurers.

Nice. In the past, I had a relentlessly awful GM that would punish you if you didn't take the most extreme measures in any given situation. If the trap wasn't completely and totally necessary to encounter, you absolutely should leave it alone. It killed any setup (not that this GM ever really wanted to do any) and curiosity in the players to the point the game was purely about survival.

 

[Fauchard1520]

I think most people try to play along and wait for the "I knew it." moment. My group was just playing Forge of Fury and me the succubus, but was not attacked and all the players thought it was a trap but played along and kept one eye open for the Wisdom save. The offered to bring her to town to help her out. So she went with them to now take over the town instead of fight a party of well-armed adventurers.

I quite like the idea of the "I knew it" moment. Yeah it's obviously suspicious, but you believe that you're capable of overcoming the danger. That bespeaks the sort of swaggering confidence that I like in my heroes.

 

[Voadam]

I usually try to think from the perspective of the character, who is usually trying to be cautious about dangerous things.

However I personally usually fall for a lot of setups by bad guys who first appear as good guys, so I get shanked a lot when they do their heel turn.

This is part of the fun for me. I love personally figuring out and cleverly avoiding traps and such. I love having a grudge against a villain I had actually trusted before who then betrayed me.

I like first person immersive roleplay a lot. Divergences between the character and my own thought processes can be annoying. I prefer to not be told out of character stuff and then have to roleplay not knowing it.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

If the character is one who would go ahead despite knowing (or suspecting) that there is a trap, then that's the easy version to play. Playing a character who is ignorant or trusting when I am not is the hard version. My character exists in a world where traps are a thing; why wouldn't he suspect that this was one of those traps?

Not a rhetorical question; there may be a good answer. But unless there is a good answer, I'm going to balk at having the character naively trigger the trap. A part of the fun of playing RPGs is being a character who doesn't do the boneheaded stupid things that characters in read-only fiction often do.