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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pbartender" data-source="post: 5398414" data-attributes="member: 7533">There's quite a few ways to gets tension out of traps...One can be finding the trap -- you know something's not right, but you don't know exactly what or where or how.Another is in trying to avoid or escape the consequences of the trap after is has already been triggered -- the doors are locked and the ceiling is slowly lowering to crush you!The trick is, using an active Perception roll as the first indicator of the existence of a trap often eliminates the tension entirely:In the first instance, either failing or succeeding ruins the tension, because you know one way or the other...  It's the not knowing for certain what's going to happen that provides the tension.In the second two instances, a successful roll will completely bypass the trap...  Since the consequences never come into play, the tension is bypassed as well.Certainly not, but you can use the same technique even for simple traps, for example:(DM checks Passive Perception) "As you approach the chest to pick the lock, you notice something odd about the engraving of a dragon that wraps around the keyhole."(Player roll Perception) "Alright, what's so odd about it?"(Perception fails, so DM feeds the player an irrelevant detail) "Perhaps it's just the styling...  It has that whiskered and serpentine quality you'd normally expect only from the Empires of the Far East.  It's rather unusual and elegant to see something like that adorning a pirate chest in the Western Isles."(Perception succeeds) "The nostrils of the dragon flare into tiny dark openings that you can't see the back of...  they'd be ideal for squirting acid or poison gas or something similar."You can continue the same with the Thievery check to disable it...  Success reveals the hidden catch that closes the nostril-spouts, or whatever.  But it's not a terribly mysterious or complicated trap, it just spits a simple poison gas if you try to open the lock.It's the extra ten seconds of added detail that make it more interesting than..."I search for traps." (PERCEPTION ROLL!)"You find a trap that spits a small cloud of poison gas.""I try to disable it." (THIEVERY ROLL!)"It's disabled."Boring.Especially if your traps are as uncommon as they are in the published adventures, you want them -- even the simple ones -- to be just a little more memorable than that.</blockquote>

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