How do you handle this situation?

[Jhaelen]

What is the point of such test ?

Why one would test low level adventurers with a dungeon which is so expensive to set up ?

The 'point' is for a DM to have an excuse of creating a dungeon that will be fun to play.

It's an old-school tradition and the favorite pastime of mad wizards with demi-god status to create this type of dungeons.

Edit: Also, if done right, while it may be expensive to set up, it might actually allow you to make money. It's the fantasy equivalent of Disney World.
Remember the infamous teleporter trap in 'Tomb of Horrors'? It teleports the party out of the dungeon, while all of their equipment is teleported into Acererak's treasure chamber. Isn't that a very convenient way to get stuff?

Also, please note I'm just playing the devil's advocate here:
Personally, I don't particularly like this kind of thing (at least not in an ongoing campaign).

Inexplicable traps or traps in general imho often offer a dubious benefit to their creator. The 3e trap-building rules were particularly ridiculous: Creating a CR 10+ trap could cost over a million gp only to end up with something that would at most be a minor inconvenience to a character of a similar level.

I _also_ don't care for the kind of overcomplicated 'room-traps' that seem to be a staple of the 'Indiana Jones' movies. There's a billion easier ways to prevent nosy adventurers from sneaking into your carefully maintained dungeon*.

*: Oh, did I mention I _also_ don't particularly care about the idea of 'dungeons' existing in the first place?
Still, they're a staple of old-school fantasy rpgs and dungeon-delving is a popular and valid theme.

 

[Wik]

I generally don't care too much about the plausibility of traps or rooms like the one I detailed, for a rather simple reason - my players aren't going to search for it. If I come up with this totally good reason why it's there, my players probably won't find out why it's there, and my time has been wasted.

Or, if they DO try to figure out why it's there, they will start discussing options amongst themselves, and will probably fall upon a reason that works and makes sense - and then all I need to do is nod and say "ah! You got it right! Didn't think you guys would be clever enough to figure that one out!" and on to the next thing.

Besides, when you spend all your time trying to figure out all those logical reasons for everything, it kind of denies the game a bit of wonder. Besides, there are plenty of places in our own real world that a GM might say "well, that makes no sense". And the fact is, sometimes the world doesn't make sense.

For what it's worth, the dungeon I'm detailing does make sense, for the most part. It has a history, and the dungeon dressing makes sense. But I'm willing to let realism slide a bit to include crazy tricks, violent traps, secret doors, and big monsters in small rooms. Because, well, that stuff is fun.

 

[Hautamaki]

Any world that has a history of thousands upon thousands of years doesn't need to explain itself. Literally anything could happen in a timespan like that; all you need to do is establish for the characters that they are exploring something ancient and abandoned and forgotten and they know that anything can and will go.

 

[Heathen72]

Any world that has a history of thousands upon thousands of years doesn't need to explain itself. Literally anything could happen in a timespan like that; all you need to do is establish for the characters that they are exploring something ancient and abandoned and forgotten and they know that anything can and will go.

I agree. Sometimes people seem to forget that they are playing in ancient fantasy worlds populated by cultures alien to our own (and not just the cultures of the non-humans, either) and fail to acknowledge that they might behave in a way that fall outside the realm of our expectation.

This is not to say that I think the imaginations of people who prefer 'realistic' games are somehow limited. It's much easier to relate to and play characters in a world where the motivations and cultures of those characters are not so different to your own -and for some people, it's more fun, too. I do think, though, that to claim something is not realistic because it does not conform to your view of what is plausible on earth is at the very least doing yourself a disservice - you're closing yourself off from some really fantastic ideas and worlds.

The sad thing is that some fantastical ideas are quite 'realistic' - if you just take a bit of time to explore the possibilities, and often things in the 'real world' seem so implausible that you might not believe in them - had they not existed your whole life. Things in our world gain instant credibility because they are, well, real - but consider how outlandish these things might sound if your GM had just come up with them for his world

• 5 thousand years ago, in one of the earliest known societies, thousands upon thousands of slaves spent over a decade creating truly a colossal quadrilateral tomb for their the kings. It went so well they decided to keep on doing it. The largest was made of 1.3 million, 2.5 ton, limestone blocks and was almost 500 foot tall.
• On the other side of the world, similar structures were built (by a society with no contact with the first) and used as the site of mass human sacrificial ceremonies. At one ceremony, thought to span 4 days, over 80,000 people were said to be murdered.
• In a distant land, a bizarre mammal-like water creature has warm blood, fur and expresses milk, but it also lays eggs, has a bill and it's webbed feet have poisonous spurs.
• Under the feet of everyone who lives on the world is super-heated metal and rock. Every so often this spews forth from the tops of mountains and flows down the hills in liquid form killing everything in it's path. People still decide to live alongside these mountains
• Millions of people spend part of their weekly income tickets in a regular competition based on the random selection of a series of numbered table tennis balls. This is despite the odds of an entry claiming the biggest prize being 1 in several million.
• There are so few grains of sand on the beaches of this world that they are outnumbered by the number of Stars in the universe around it. The GM explains that this is partly due to the relatively large size of the universe - 9.3 × 10^10 "light years"(a term for distance, apparently). It seems a bit further than "a walk down to the chemist", but you would have to think that there aren't many beaches on the world.

Look, I could go on. So many things that are real seem so unreal. Some are mind bogglingly incomprehensible - and that includes the insane and bizarre things people do to each other (or themselves) in the name of their country, their king, their god, and so on. I avoided mentioning these on the whole because I don't want to derail the thread, but seriously, people do the oddest thngs. Especially when they are super rich, or when they are grouped together.

On top of that, other people then come along who spend their whole lives exploring and investigating these things, dedicating themselves to some subatomic particle, a genus of of insect that only lives in a particular patch of desert in the middle of nowhere, or the varnish on a brand of violin. This is quite odd too, when you think about it, but real as well! These people do because they dedicated to figuring out what makes the world works. What makes people tick. Where we come from. They have inquiring minds.

So, if you come across something a bit unrealistic - in your GM's game, or in a post on ENworld, may I suggest you take a leaf out of their book and take just minute trying to work it out for yourself. Don't rely on the GM or other posters to do the work for you. Come up with a reason yourself. And given that we are discussing a game, try to focus not on proving something to be wrong, but instead look a reason why it might be right.