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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaculata" data-source="post: 7165395" data-attributes="member: 6801286">I think several people in this thread are mistaking telegraphing for telling players where the traps are. These two things could not be more different. The goal of telegraphing, is to make a challenge fair, to allow your players to make informed decisions, and to limit the classic "search for traps at every step" kind of gameplay. Just because a player is given a hint to pay attention, does not mean he is told a trap is present, nor where it is. A good example of this would be the following scenario (which occurred in the campaign I am currently running):"The players crawl through a network of narrow tunnels, with the floors littered with human bones. But one tunnel surprisingly has no bones on the floor. It is oddly clean, with barely even any sand on it. What do you do?"You might presume there's a trap in this hallway, and you would be right. But even then, how you go about confirming your suspicions is critical. Poking the floor for a trapdoor, reveals nothing. But this floor trap is specifically designed to tilt down under the weight of 2 or more individuals, sliding them straight into a pit trap that is hidden underneath the floor. The description of the environment gives a clue towards the tilting nature of the floor, without explicitly explaining how it works. It is just enough for the players to be weary and proceed with caution. There is no guarantee that the players will figure out the trap without triggering it by accident, but the DM is not dropping them into a spike trap out of nowhere, and THAT's the difference.If I wanted my players to fall into a deadly spike trap, I could simply make it happen. But that creates zero tension, and in the worst case, it creates frustration. Telegraphing a danger, how ever subtle, creates suspense. All of a sudden the players are on high alert, which is way for exciting than actually falling into the pit. And as Iserith explained earlier, it also feels rewarding to discover a trap by paying attention to the hints that the DM gives in his description. It gives the players a feeling that the world behaves to logical rules, that they can make clever use of, if they pay attention.And this need not apply only to traps. I had a combat encounter in my campaign, where I described an interesting terrain feature: An old stone bridge that looked feeble. The players asked: "Could we blow up the bridge, and separate the enemy forces that way?". "Well, you could sure as heck try", I replied. In this case I had deliberately designed the encounter to include such strategic elements. But it feels rewarding for both the players and the DM when they pick up on that.</blockquote>

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