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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 5742483" data-attributes="member: 1165">It's a fun issue. Stumbling in the dark isn't fun. This was especially true in 3.x, where rules for darkness and blindness were confusing and not following the "core mechanic". (That's why Improved Invisibility was broken IMO. Unlike casting most other spells, you had to dig into the combat chapter to figure out how to spot an invisible character.)Dis. Agree.The problem is using traps to sap resources. A pit trap, standing off in a hallway by itself, isn't fun. As you've identified, someone loses a healing surge, and 5 minutes later they've already forgotten it.You can make that trap fun by putting a soundmaker on the bottom though, along with nearby guards who can hear that. Now somebody falls down the pit, and maybe they only lost a healing surge's worth of hit points, but they're still stuck in a pit, and now the guards are rushing in! Maybe they're carrying oil to pour on whoever is stuck in the pit. The PC party is missing a member, and has to either spend actions pulling that person out, or fight with an important PC missing. (It sucks when the cleric is down there. Or fighter. Or rogue. Or...)Late 3.x and later traps give PCs other than the rogue something to do. The rogue usually has to spend several actions disabling the trap, which means they aren't stabbing things to death... or they can choose to stab things to death, in which case the trap is dishing out damage every round. No matter what the rogue is doing, the trap is having some kind of effect. In addition, other PCs can now work on traps. Wizards can use Arcana to disable magic traps. Clerics can dismantle piles of undead that use the trap rules. Fighters can smash turrets. The entire party could spend a round taking out a trap using their various techniques, but that's a full round that the monsters who built the trap have, dishing out the hurt.I think previous editions of D&D did very badly when it came to traps, and I'm sad to see this negative legacy persisting.D&D is not the only game system that has done traps badly. I'm sure there's a trope for this on TVTropes. Resident Evil was a game that did traps badly; the traps would realistically unleash on mooks! Can you imagine if, every day at work, in order to go to the lunchroom, you had to do a puzzle that would kill you if you failed? Some D&D adventures had traps like that. "Non-combat traps" don't really make sense.As newer editions avoided random encounters, DMs (especially newer ones) have either lost the skill in using them or have never learned them in the first place. This is unfortunate. Random encounters don't need to "wander a dungeon" though; the new emphasis on dungeons that make sense tend to eliminate this. Instead, random encounters are used to punish the 15 minute adventuring day you just described.One DM somewhere on this forum said his PCs (in 4e) always face 3 or 4 encounters a day. If they take an early rest, they'll face the skipped encounters all at once that day, probably while asleep and without armor or some dailies.If you're trained on a previous rule system, it's not easy to switch. WotC has not done a good job of teaching DMs how to make this switch.</blockquote>

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