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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8398297" data-attributes="member: 75787">I guess they can. If you make a custom one for some reason. But the ones that are given as examples in the book aren’t, and neither are any I have encountered in 2 APs and maybe 30 PFS games.Of the twelve traps in the book that are level 10 or less, 8 can be detected by a person only trained, and 6 can be disabled by a simple trained character. Most of the ones that require expert level are magic and can be dispelled by an untrained magician.At 10+  levels, where you’d expect to see experts in most skills being attempted, the pattern is similar. “Generally” you will be able to detect a trap, and “generally” you can either dispell it or disable it with tier-appropriate skills.Absolutely if you have a 5 person party, none of whom has taken any training at all in traps, you will find traps you cannot disable. In a game where traps are a trope and an expected part of the game, that seems pretty reasonable to me.OK, here is where we see a fundamental failure of understanding. You can indeed have a 50% chance of failure — but that’s per action! You can keep trying without cost until you either succeed or critically fail. So if you have a 50% chance of failure per action, you can only crit fail on a 1, and so have a 90% chance of success! if you have a hero point in hand, you have a 99% chance of success!please point me to the trap in the core rules book that can “easily down multiple members” of a party at full health. I just don’t see one.This is indeed a fundamental issue with traps. I remember I played in a 3.0 D&D campaign and my wizard / barbarian character was the main trap finder. I never took any skill, just walked into all the traps, took the damage and was healed up with a cure wounds wand.Traps are tricky to make interesting in any system. I personally think the ones that are best are the ones that give a status effect that will last multiple scenes; like the Pharaoh’s Curse trap in the Core Rules. Solo traps that just do hits are irrelevant. They never can do enough to kill anyone from full, so they just either cost you an hour of time or use up your healing supplies. Boring as heck in every edition since at least AD&D.Agreed. I’ve had a lot of good GMs, but if you are new, the support for haunts is weak. Much like 4E skill challenge, the base rules are too easy to use in a way that is unrealistic and annoying. A section on running haunts effectively would be great.Well, in the last couple of encounters (caveat: with good GMs) it’s been one of these ways:A) attacked, rolled high, no effect. GM says “your attacks appear ineffective; it doesn’t look like you can just kill this”B) On first round of combat, made a knowledge check as per usual and got the infoC) GM straight up told us it was a hauntI’m a big fan of making knowledge checks. Especially in the 3 action economy, it often is the most effective action you can take, so my favorite of the above is (B). If characters aren’t taking the time to assess the situation, then honestly, a few failed (A) type activities seems ok to me.But I agree it might be nice to have some solid guidelines for newer GMsYup, i have been in situations like this where we failed our skill checks (or had a GM who didn’t allow me to use “spirit lore” to work out what the spirits wanted … sighs) and were flailing around wondering what to do.My suggestion when running haunts is simply to be generous with skill checks and keep hinting to the players that you can use them. Once initiative starts, even if players miss on an attack, I’d suggest lettting them know their attack seems ineffective.In future revisions, my thought is to make haunts more like social encounters (they kinda are, as your goal is to placate and persuade) and allow players to make checks to discover what skills work.Yup. unlike traps, which I have had a fundamentally different experience from you — enough to wonder if you’ve been playing mostly with non-standard traps — I agree that haunt encounters have tended to be gamey and annoying. Definitely heads up that if you see one as a GM, go ahead and modify it or make up stuff so it’ll be fun. Don’t just run it by the numbers …</blockquote>

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