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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8871214" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>This isn't a problem with traps alone, although the sort of DM that loves traps is probably the sort that indulges the vice. The vice being fantasizing about how impressive your encounters are going to be and how much pain they are going to cause players. The same problem you describe occurs when a DM is reluctant to let the BBEG go down like a chump because of a few bad rolls or poorly accounting for player abilities on their part.</p><p> </p><p>As for trap design, I have very definite opinions on it and probably would never use a "contact poison on a handle" trap in isolation because there is nothing that can happen with such a trap that I find fun. When I design traps, they are generally much more elaborate and intended to be group encounters in and of themselves, or else they exist to kind of warn the players that much more deadly traps lie ahead and they should be on their toes. I concur with you that there is a lot of terrible advice about traps out there, and I really hate "Grimtooth" and everything such a line of adversarial gotcha GMing leads too. </p><p></p><p>That said, good trap design feels to me like a tangential topic. Fundamentally, we are dealing with what I think is one the most complicated topics in traditional gaming - "What does it mean to search something?" What does it mean to search something hits at how we deal with abstraction versus reification and how we deal with player versus character skill. Typically, in order to speed the game along to get to the good stuff, we have a tendency to prefer abstract propositions over concrete prospositions, but this runs into big problems when the specific nature of the interaction with the fiction matters. Some systems deal with this by saying the specific nature of the interaction doesn't matter and can be inferred from the fortune. Others deal with this by having a proposition filter that rejects any proposition that isn't specific enough to adjudicate. But despite the fact that this is a hugely important aspect of the process of play, a lot of GMs ignore it or are inconsistent in how they handle it leading invariably to table arguments.</p><p></p><p>And that's before we get into players with anti-social habits who will gleefully abuse any ambiguity.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8871214, member: 4937"] This isn't a problem with traps alone, although the sort of DM that loves traps is probably the sort that indulges the vice. The vice being fantasizing about how impressive your encounters are going to be and how much pain they are going to cause players. The same problem you describe occurs when a DM is reluctant to let the BBEG go down like a chump because of a few bad rolls or poorly accounting for player abilities on their part. As for trap design, I have very definite opinions on it and probably would never use a "contact poison on a handle" trap in isolation because there is nothing that can happen with such a trap that I find fun. When I design traps, they are generally much more elaborate and intended to be group encounters in and of themselves, or else they exist to kind of warn the players that much more deadly traps lie ahead and they should be on their toes. I concur with you that there is a lot of terrible advice about traps out there, and I really hate "Grimtooth" and everything such a line of adversarial gotcha GMing leads too. That said, good trap design feels to me like a tangential topic. Fundamentally, we are dealing with what I think is one the most complicated topics in traditional gaming - "What does it mean to search something?" What does it mean to search something hits at how we deal with abstraction versus reification and how we deal with player versus character skill. Typically, in order to speed the game along to get to the good stuff, we have a tendency to prefer abstract propositions over concrete prospositions, but this runs into big problems when the specific nature of the interaction with the fiction matters. Some systems deal with this by saying the specific nature of the interaction doesn't matter and can be inferred from the fortune. Others deal with this by having a proposition filter that rejects any proposition that isn't specific enough to adjudicate. But despite the fact that this is a hugely important aspect of the process of play, a lot of GMs ignore it or are inconsistent in how they handle it leading invariably to table arguments. And that's before we get into players with anti-social habits who will gleefully abuse any ambiguity. [/QUOTE]
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