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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3039416" data-attributes="member: 18280">Agreed.What this means is that any creatures colonizing the area are either somehow immune to the traps (vermin, for example, do not pull levers) or smart enough to discover/disable/work around what traps there are.  Or, as you say, they would probably die.  In fact, the PCs should eventually be able to tell which areas are likely to still contain traps simply because the current inhabitants do not use those areas.  An otherwise empty room would be a dead giveaway (pun) well before the dungeon was cleared.Even goblins could survive in such a place, if there were safe areas and paths (which seems likely), they had the numbers to withstand initial losses of exploring the place (and the rewards were high enough), and the inhabitants have enough intelligence to memorize the safe places/routes by adulthood.  Canny inhabitants would intentionally lure invaders toward the deadlier traps.  Careful observation of the inhabitants would, in fact, allow the PCs to bypass most (if not all) of the traps.It is logical, following this reasoning, to assume that the party will know or should know that they are not dealing with a level-appropriate dungeon (depending, of course, on what you view as level-appropriate  <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=";)" /> ).However, the assumption that the inhabitants would have marked the room somehow to remind themselves not to pull the lever by mistake or when drunk is not well founded IMHO.  The likelihood is higher that they would confine drunkeness to certain safe areas.  After all, presumably you accepted the dangers of those traps initially because they afforded you a certain level of security.  Any system that would warn invaders removes this benefit.  Placing warnings on traps is only advantageous if the "trap" is intended as a warning itself, to modify or prevent certain behavior (as a security camera does, or the note that an alarm will ring if you use the fire exit).It is also true, in real life, that people can, have, and do live in all sorts of dangerous situations where knowledge of the dangers renders the inhabitants to take a fairly casual attitude about them.  People cross the road in traffic all of the time.  When I roamed the woods as a young kid in bear, lynx, and timber rattler country, the admonitions I received were all verbal, and this was an area where there were bears living quite near.Pre-literate and early-literate peoples often can demonstrate impressive oral memory.  Admonitions about the traps would probably take the form of a system of taboos:  Do not pull levers, stay away from the Room of the Howling Jackal, in the Hall of the Dead God, you must take three steps to the left for every three steps forward, then three steps to the right for the next three steps, and so on.  In some cases, the common inhabitants may no longer know what the taboo safeguards them against.Taken in isolation, the trap is obvious.  If you assume, instead, that the trap is part of a "fair" complex (rather than simply assuming it is there for no reason, which is a condition not existent in the OP), then it is perhaps even more obvious.  Which, agreed, makes this less than ideal as a trap...but a trap which, I would argue, as a direct result of being less ideal is also more fair.RC</blockquote>

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