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.)

 

[Jahydin]

Traps are certainly more fun when there is a "tell", especially if they have deadly consequences. Sure, the Thief gets a die roll to really point that tell out, but everyone should have the chance to point out that something doesn't seem right. Not only does it boost engagement of your wonderful room descriptions, but lessens the sting when the trap isn't found.

Nothing sucks more than:
GM: "The room opens up to a short hallway that lead to a closed door 30' away."
PCs: "Cool, we go check out that door."
GM: "You walk down the short hallway and... makes some rolls... everyone takes 13 damage from the dart trap sprung by the pressure plate. Oh, and Save vs Poison."
PCs:

 

[aco175]

The movies always have the person step on a land mine and hear the click. Then there is 10 minutes of trying to figure out how to get him off or disable the bomb. Not sure how this fits into the game with checks and players interacting with the trap.

I fell it make some situations better if the PC steps on a pressure plate and hears the click. Maybe by failing the Perception check by 5 or less.

 

[Reynard]

The movies always have the person step on a land mine and hear the click. Then there is 10 minutes of trying to figure out how to get him off or disable the bomb. Not sure how this fits into the game with checks and players interacting with the trap.

I fell it make some situations better if the PC steps on a pressure plate and hears the click. Maybe by failing the Perception check by 5 or less.

Cinematic tools for drama and tension don't really work that well at the table, in my experience. Unless you have really immersion oriented players, it still immediately becomes a gameplay conundrum and everyone looks at their character sheets for a system appropriate solution.

I think this is okay. I think we should lean into the gaminess of traps instead of trying to emulate how they apply to other media. I mean, that is true of everything in RPGs, IMO, but it is especially true of traps. If you are going to include them -- and let's be clear, no one ever has to -- recognize and celebrate that they are a gameplay construct.