Should traps have tells?

[Bill Zebub]

I hope you'll indulge me quoting from the other thread. No, I agree with your broader understanding of tells. But it's the same issue for me--that just wouldn't always happen, and if I always had a clue it would start to feel less immersive and more like a puzzle game.

I get what you mean about a "puzzle game". Or....a detective/murder mystery game, which is a particular flavor of RPG that bores me to tears. Which is one reason I typically go pretty light on "hard to find, easy to avoid" traps and prefer "easy to find, hard to avoid" types. E.g., you look down a corridor and you know it's trapped (skeletons with steel bolts in their skulls, maybe), so how do you get down it?

At the same time, I have come to find dice rolling for traps (and secret doors) to be "board gamey." Whether it's "Ok, I need a Perception roll from everybody" or "I search for traps"/"Ok, make a Find Traps roll", I just don't find a reduction of the story down to a single roll with a binary outcome to be very interesting or engaging. YMMV.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Traps might be designed to make some sort of sense in the world, but they are really the ultimate expression of D&D being a game, not a world simulator or a story engine. Traps exist for essentially purely gameplay reasons.

Agreed.

So the function a given trap serves in the gameplay should determine its tell, if any. Traps designed to whittle away hit points or other resources in order to balance the boss fight (or whatever) should not have a tell -- or if they do, it should still require some sort of resource expenditure to bypass it. In most games, skill checks so not eat resources (Gumshoe is an exception I can think of off the top of my head) but failed checks might eat some sort of metacurrency to negate that failure.

Agreed again, but...I don't personally like games, or adventures, where "whittling away at hit points," without it being a consequence of player decision-making, is part of intentional design.

As an example, although I really want to like The One Ring, its Journey rules (I'm describing 1st edition here) don't actually present players with hard decisions/choices. The LM rolls dice to find out what flavors of Hazards the party faces, including who will have to make what sort of roll, and if the roll is failed what the resource cost is. Sure, it's jazzed up with text flavor, but...it's a board game. (Which makes sense: the author is a well-known board game designer.)