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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMSage" data-source="post: 6749809" data-attributes="member: 6803552">Thanks for the feedback. Very thorough. I keep providing examples of how bad DMs run things to contrast with what I'm suggesting In my article, but people keep pointing those out saying im a bad DM. Haha. Maybe I need to make that clear that that is exactly what I'm saying and the examples are bad DMs.I have 3 issues with your suggestion on how players can find traps. For the most part I love it. That's fun stuff to happen in a game. 1) We pretty much agree on the giving clues point. As I said in the article, you start by giving a clues about the trap itself, but then make them more difficult by taking away clues and perhaps leaving only clues about it's location based on the environment. 2) If you leave the finding of the trap entirely up to the players, you have to take into account the game aspect of D&D. A player wanting to "win", will be searching for traps all the time. If you have a huge dungeon map. This can add two hours to your game of just trap searching. While it is slightly less realistic to make sure they always have clues about traps, it can give you back hours of needless trap searching. If you can handle the trap searching really quickly as a DM and move it along, then it's not as big of a deal. (it sounds like you can handle this so it's not as much of a worry in your game. But most DMs are slower)  3) People keep referring to traps in real life having no clues so it's not realistic. Most give the example of a mine field. While this is true, most traps in D&D are in inhabited dungeons. This means that the people who walk in and out of the dungeon every day, have to walk over the trap. Then the DM throws in a trip wire trap at the entrance. It makes no sense. How would the people get in and out without accidentally killing themselves every day. If there are people who use the traps location, then there are clues for the trap. A keyhole in the wall that turns it off, a path of footprints where they carefully walk around it, a place where the trap has already been triggered by a careless adventurer.</blockquote>

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