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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7162601" data-attributes="member: 6775031">If you walk down a hallway and then die, then it doesn't feel like your choices mattered at all, and then what's the point of even playing a game? A big part of the expectation for how an RPG is played is that your decisions actually matter in determining what happens."If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are... a different game you should play." RPGs may not have formal win conditions, but dying unceremoniously is widely taken as a loss."Gotcha" is gamer jargon for a specific type of surprise, which is particularly surprising and overwhelmingly bad. To the best  of my knowledge, "surprise" is just a normal word with its typical  meaning.An anecdote from an early play example describes a player character walking down a hallway, and then opening a door. Upon opening the door, a ghoul reaches out and paralyzes the character, who is then dragged into the room and devoured. That's an example of a gotcha trap, because there's no way that the player could reasonably have seen it coming, and the only way to avoid it would be through an extreme degree of paranoia (e.g. opening all doors from twenty feet away).  If the door smelled faintly of death, or if there were claw marks around the door handle, then it would no longer be a gotcha because it wouldn't take an unreasonable degree of paranoia to suspect something dangerous nearby. Likewise, if ghouls had previously been spotted in the vicinity, it wouldn't take an unreasonable degree of paranoia to expect them somewhere. If the ghouls were on the other side of the room, and the character had a chance to react before being instantly paralyzed, it wouldn't be a gotcha.Another example of a gotcha trap is the rot grub, which is a tiny little maggot that hides in dark places and kills anyone who touches it, because again, the only way to avoid it would be through an extreme degree of paranoia (e.g. never touch anything that you can't clearly see and examine for several minutes). A third example is the illusionary false floor, which can't be detected until you're falling through it. Cursed items can also fill this role, if there's no way to discover the curse beforehand and no way to end the curse before it kills you (necklace of strangulation).If the DM includes those sorts of traps in their game, then the only players who survive for very long will be the ones who spend an hour to examine every empty room, and the end result of that is you spend a four hour session in examining four rooms of which one might contain an object of note. By not including those sorts of traps, the players get to move through the environment more quickly, so you can spend more game time on the interesting things and less time just trying to stay alive.</blockquote>

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