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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5681974" data-attributes="member: 4937">Make sense?  No, of course not.  There is a reason why no real world culture has ever constructed complex elaborate traps.  I frequently wonder just what sort of machines that you could build - regardless of your technology level - which you could balance on a knives edge just before failure and then leave them in a jungle or cave with the expectation that they'd be functional centuries later.  No real world ones certainly, but this is afterall fantasy.One of my standard tropes in dungeon design is to play with this criticism in a useful manner.  Early in a dungeon that contains traps, I will typically have one or more rooms of broken traps were most or all of the traps have already been triggered, or ceased to function correctly or at all.  This increases versimiltude, so its got a nice simulationist function in the design, but it also has an important gamist function - it alerts the party to be watchful for traps.  In this way, I can control whether or not the party is spending time looking for traps.  In a sense, what I'm doing with this and other design elements is communicating, "You don't have to waste time looking carefully for traps, unless you are in a situation where traps would clearly make sense."This is not a new thing nor was it introduced.  At best, it was labelled.  Even a quick purusal of as primitive of a module as 'Keep on the Borderlands' shows traps used as parts of larger encounters.  It's pretty much de riguer for running kobolds, for example.</blockquote>

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