Ourph said:
In this case, the choice IS the encounter. For some types of players, this is one of the most interesting kinds of encounters because it cannot be solved by straightforward thinking. Games of cat & mouse logic are a big part of the fun for the groups I play with.
Then you can see how this is really player vs. dm logic. Who is more devious, who can one-up the other, can you outsmart the placer of traps or do you become a victim of them?
It's fine, but it's no kind of game I want to play, and it's certainly not what I expect when I sit down to play a game of heroic fantasy. I'm not trying to outsmart the DM, I'm trying to be Lord Albright the Dragonslayer. I don't want to have my personal intelligence pitted against the DM's personal intelligence, I want Lord Albright's cleverness to be pitted against the dragon's cleverness. If Lord Albright fails, I expect it to lead to interesting and challenging scenarios, not his untimely and unavoidable death. The simple reason is that facing challenges is heroic and fantastical, while dying is neither.
It's fine to play the game a different way, but it would be
nonstandard. Which means that, sure, in a nonstandard game there might be room for such a thing, and if your personal games are nonstandard in this manner then your personal feelings would be different. You're playing it different, but you're having fun, and that's what's important. You can't be too flabberghasted that it's a minority way of precieving things, though.
Why would someone create a trap that is troublesome or inconvenient but non-fatal? Isn't the idea of a trap that it prevents you from going someplace or doing something by killing you in the most efficient way possible if you try to go where or do what you aren't supposed to?
If it's a question of verisimilitude, it opens up a can of many worms that the OP isn't answering. Who IS supposed to go there, how do they do it, why would they want to stop others from doing it, why would they hide the trap, and how did they become so extravagantly rich that they spent so much gold on one lever?
See, if your goal is to stop people from going somewhere, you've got a lot of tools at your disposal before you even have to resort to traps. A wall would do the job...heck, an illusory one would probably still cost less. Various spells (like
glyphs and wards) are made from scratch to do such things. If you're only trying to prevent most people from doing it, spreading rumors around town about the dangerous monsters and dressing up scooby-doo style will do it quite nicely. A simple poisoned dart would be very cheap and work well enough for most purposes. If you were watching out for heroic adventurers, monsters do the same trick for a lot less money, normally (you guard the mcguffin with a BBEG).
A death trap itself has all sorts of security holes. If you're making it that powerful, how can you guarantee a lich or vampire won't try to do it? What about tying a rope to the lever, how do you fight against that? What if they have access to resurrection? What about the SECOND person to pull the lever? How, exactly, is that doing a good job of protecting your whatever?
An invincible death trap would simply be out of the realm of believability in the first place. It screams of lack of imagination -- a DM who just wanted to dangle a baited hook to revel in his omnipotent DM powers of life and death over imaginary heroes.
If verisimilitude is a problem with a less leathal trap (though it usually isn't, as I've shown above), it's an even bigger problem with a trap this pointlessly lethal.
If your job is to take RISKS (underlined, exclamation point) then shouldn't you expect the consequences of taking RISKS (underlined, double exclamation point) to be RISKY (underlined, bolded, quadrulple exclamation point) rather than just inconvenient or troublesome? You seem to be implying that adventurers should be the type who laugh in the face of danger, but what you're really saying is that adventurers in a D&D game are the type of laugh in the face of the thinly veiled illusion of danger because they know that no matter how incautious or unprepared they might be the danger will never be anything more than a temporary setback. WOW! How brave!
You're setting up a strawman. I'm saying the danger should be fair. It'd also be nice if it made sense (the death trap does not). Because this is made to be a game of fantasy adventure, not a game of DM/Player one-upmanship, it's not unreasonable to expect that. Heroes laugh in the face of danger, they don't die from touching levers. They sometimes fall into pit traps filled with thousands of venomous scorpions from touching levers, or open the door to the sleeping monster by touching levers, or release the tainted black evil cloud by touching levers, but all those are interesting challenges where survival depends on strength and skill, not arbitrary punishments for arbitrary descisions.
