Rechan said:
Because the archers live there. Come on. Where else are you going to have traps but in something's hideout.
So they repair the floor afterwards. And maybe they repaired it beforehand as well, after the last wandering monster came by. For heaven's sake, it's not like a hole in the ground disguised with some dirt, rocks and planks is a difficult thing to conceive of.
The way you're making it sound, it's the equivalent of the medusa in one room of the dungeon and a beholder in the next and a hydra in the next with no sense as to the how or the why.
What?
Here, let me spell it out:
I want encounter traps to make sense. Every environment, every dungeon needs to me. A pistoning ceiling with winding gears doesn't go in a cave with half a dozen goblins. The goblins need to get past whatever Encounter Trap is going on.
Nobody said anything about a pistoning ceiling. It can be as simple as a cavity in the ceiling filled with rocks and held up by some planks, which is activated when someone yanks a rope or trips a tripwire. And after the goblins get rid of whatever got crushed, they just load the rocks back into the cavity and reset the tripwire.
Or maybe the hole in the floor is just a known hazard in the cave, which the goblins were aware of and made a point of avoiding. It's not their problem if some blundering adventurers happen to break through the weak floor which the goblins knew about but didn't bother to tell anyone. Ditto quicksand, unexpectedly fast-flowing streams, etc.
Because that's the whole point. Traps=encounters. That's the whole philosophy behind how they're being treated.
A trap is a self-contained encounter in 3E. This may or may not continue to be the case in 4E. I am all for treating them as just components of an encounter, as said previously.
If the wizard can't even accomplish a levitate or a fly, then they're not much of a wizard. It's fairly ludicrous to say "We don't know they'll have any utility magic that's actually usable".
Up to 4th level in 3E, a wizard can't cast fly. Are they not a wizard? Up to 8th level, they can't cast teleport. Are they not a wizard?
Besides, fly and levitate affect one person only. So the wiz can fly to the other side of the hole in the ground (IME, it's a long time before a wiz has more than 1-2 fly spells available at a given time, whether prepped or as scrolls/whatnot). You tell me if this is a smart move.
No, not a "natural cave system", but a crude place. Cave is just an example of "Things in here can't build the place from the ground up to encorporate a room-sized trap". And you cancelled out your own examples.
No, I pointed out that traps/encounters that just sit there waiting for the party to come to them are, by their nature, of limited use past a certain level. This has exactly nothing to do with whether those traps/encounters are reasonable things to meet in the course of the adventure.