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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Starfox" data-source="post: 6097848" data-attributes="member: 2303">I'll make a case for all GMs being entertainers - role-play is a social activity, and the point is to have fun, whether this is "nerve-cracking deadly game of wit"s fun or "spoofy romantic comedy fun". It seems you and your players have a different idea about what you want to play. They seem to want a dungeon adapted to their playstyle and resources. Adapted to what they find fun, quite simply. You want a competitive, deadly environment for them to explore with you as a neutral arbiter. It seems to me you need to establish a common ground here, decide what it is you all want out of the game experience.This is not an uncommon situation. Expectation management is hard. As a game master, you create the game you'd want to play, not necessarily the one your players want to play in. This is further complicated by that many of us want different things as players and as a GM. Nobody is wrong here, it is a matter of taste. If finding a common ground means you need to eliminate/simplify 90% of the traps, perhaps it is worth it. Because your players simply don't seem to enjoy that part of the game. If nobody wants to be the trap monkey, maybe you have to have an out of game talk and make a out-of-game decision to cut down on traps, even if it hurts your feeling of verisimilitude. After all, role-playing is just a social activity. There is no real objective besides having fun together. Forcing someone to play a trap-monkey when they don't want to is not fun.  In-game you can motivate this by saying whoever built the dungeon employed a lousy engineer, so that all the traps are much less effective than expected. Or you could simply omit them. For humor and "gotcha" value, you could keep the traps, and either make them mostly harmless (1-3 points of damage), but the players will still know a trap was there and that they could have suffered. Or make them very easy to spot but still lethal, changing the challenge from one of surprise to one of wits as the players try to work around the problem.This is all quite separate from the rules. Maybe technically one of the players' characters in-world would be an excellent trap monkey, he could even be a rogue, but the player is simply uninterested that kind of play, uninterested in describing how his character constantly probe for traps. Forcing the player into that role is no fun, even if the character would be competent at it. The best you could get is some mechanical dice rolls and a player stating "I always move ahead of the party, taking 2 minutes to take 20 on Search check for every square" - and then thinking no more on the matter and playing as if the above were not true, but refer to this general statement as soon as you start mentioning traps. After all, in-game time is cheap. It matters little if it takes 1 minute or 2 hours to move down this hall (the difference between moving 300 feet normally or by taking 20 on Search each square). And since nothing interesting happens, your players are all right to gloss over the event.  That said, you need not cut ALL traps. Having the occasional trapped area can be a fun change of pace, as long as the players have some kind of warning so they have an idea how to play it. If their characters lack the usual trap skill, they will have to bypass the traps using unconventional methods, which can also be fun as a novelty. But for a group with no interest in being trap monkeys, I suggest you make such challenges rare and unusual, reserved for special places.</blockquote>

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