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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 3023454" data-attributes="member: 16574">We don't know that the trap wasn't possible to detect, only that the characters in the OP didn't detect it. For all we know a find traps spell or a wand of secret door and trap detection, or perhaps even a simple detect magic spell would've detected the trap (or, in the latter case, that the lever was somehow magicked, which should be enough to make any reasonable player suspicious and cautious). (Plus, as mentioned previously, in OD&D/1E (which are the games I play, and thus the games I tend to think in terms of when responding to ostensibly edition-neutral questions like this one) thieves can't detect magic traps and there's no such thing as Taking 20, so as a player I'd never be confident that there wasn't a trap somewhere (especially somewhere that I was suspicious about there likely being a trap) just because the party's best trap-sniffer said he didn't detect one.) I don't follow the logic here. Why would a character be any less suspicious than a player? Because the player knows that random levers in dungeons tend to be dangerous (especially ones found way in the back of the dungeon in otherwise empty rooms) but the character (who does this sort of thing for a living and whose life depends on it) doesn't? If anything I'd think the character would have reason to be a lot more cautious and suspicious than the player. My reasons as a player for suspecting a trap aren't based on "metagame" knowledge, they're based on exactly the same line of reasoning I would employ were I actually in such a situation (i.e. were I a character rather than a player). That's the way I approach the game -- I project my mind into my character's situation and try to decide what I would do were I in that character's situation. Of course not. Because most doors and corridors (especially ones that have traffic going in and out -- which is something that should be apparent to a reasonably cautious set of PCs) aren't going to be trapped. Levers are a little more of a borderline case -- as I mentioned in a previous post, if I come across a lever in a dungeon and don't know what will happen if I pull it, I'm almost always not going to pull it unless I have no other options (and the PCs in the OP did have at least one other option -- go home with the macguffin, like they'd originally planned to). But when I do come across something that seems likely to be trapped (and the situation described in the OP definitely would've seemed to me like something likely to be trapped) yes, I'll take precautions and, if it isn't something crucial to my mission (as the situation in the OP wasn't -- they'd already recovered the macguffin) more than likely I'll just leave it alone. That's the way I've played the game for years, and that's honest-to-goodness what's fun to me -- knowing that the DM was trying to kill my character but I was clever and cautious enough that I managed to survive, and even prosper; that I took all the necessary risks but no unnecessary ones; that I accomplished my mission and avoided getting distracted by red herrings (and maybe, just maybe, that some other players weren't as lucky or clever as me -- but that's not something that's usually admitted out loud <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ). This sort of may not sound like fun to other folks, and in that case all I can say is that it's probably for the best that we're not playing at the same table. But even so I'd hope the hobby would be big enough for both approaches -- that Tomb of Horrors and Dragonlance can both exist, and both find an appreciative audience, and that we could focus on the common-ground rather than the differences.</blockquote>

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