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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Someone" data-source="post: 3027206" data-attributes="member: 5656">But you´re talking about absolute proof of a negative proposition, which is impossible. Nobody is discussing that. There´s no way that you can be 100% sure that there´s a trap on the lever, sort of the player character activating it; after all, it may be constructed not to react to summoned critters or magical forces, and to foil divinations. Going into the dungeon with that mentality would lead to, well, not entering the dungeon at all.The catch is, if you don´t have 100%, you must risk with 90%, or 95%, or 99%. How much you do perceive to be the risk and how much risk you´ll accept depends on many things. The trap expert searched carefully the level, inch by inch and then again, and arrived at the conclusion that it wasn´t trapped. That´s what "take 20" means. It means that you´re taking 20 times the time needed to examine the trap, to make sure no tiny detail escapes your attention. Also, the traps´location wasn´t the most logical to place a highly complex trap, so what they are saying is that the perceived risk here was minimal, once the lever was examined by the trap expert. This is because they are thinking like their characters would do, and reasoning supposing there´s a certain logic in the dungeon´s construction: that it was built for defense, thet the builder maybe had limited resources, and that he would put his most deadly means of defense defending the important bits, not a random lever somewhere.However, if you think like players would do, you know that DM´s like to put traps on seemingly innocuous places, because it´s sort of a competition to see who outsmarts who. dungeon logic has nothing to do here. In that case the perceived risk is much, much higher, because a lone lever screams TRAP! as much as if he had a sign of a skull and crossed bones. So, IMHO, if the game is one of DM vs players and the players know that, the trap is fair. If not, it´s unfair. As you can see, I´m partial to the later, as I would prefer to remain in my house solving sudokus to be in a game that´s essentially the same thing.</blockquote>

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