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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4679982" data-attributes="member: 4937">The trick to introducing these sort of things is to very clearly demarcate from the context where the tricks begin, and where they end.The trick must believably exist in the campaign world.  If the players are walking around in a human town, and suddenly the road opens up and they fall into a 30' deep pit with spikes at the bottom, they are probably going to be outraged and my opinion will have good reasons for being outraged.  Afterall, plenty of people presumably walk along this road, there are businesses and homes along the road, and so forth.  Why did they put a trap here and how do they manage to live with it?  If there are death traps randomly scattered about the city, this would seem to greatly impact how the city operates - they would probably have at the least been warned not to wander about without a guide and there would probably be contextual clues that this particular section of street was lethally trapped.The same in my opinion must be true of a goblin city.  A bad example of the first edition play style that I've run into on several occassions is death traps in well travelled corridors of a dungeon, lethal traps in the BBEG's living quarters, fatal contact poison smeared on the doorknob between inhabited sections of a dungeon, and so forth.  This is in some ways worse than finding a collosal red dragon at the bottom of a dungeon where the only access or egress is through a 3' wide 8' high door.  Lethal traps represent a great expense to create and are dangerous to live with.  A trap building society might have them on unused 'entrances' they never use, on dead-end corridors no one ever goes down', or possibly in rooms that are entered only on very rare occassions and only with great ceremony, but they won't just be randomly scattered about.  The society will be adapted to live with the traps and the tools to bypass them when necessary will be handily nearby.But on the other hand, if the PC's open a tomb which has never been entered since it was sealed up a thousand years ago, then I expect them to immediately shift to 'Tomb of Horrors'/'Indiana Jones' mode because the presence of cunning death traps is a given.If the PC's are exploring some ruined dwarven city now inhabited by goblins, and they find themselves leaving the goblins living and working areas and entering the reliquery of a Dwarven temple that the goblins never dare to tread in, then contextually, the amount of caution they are expected to use changes as well.  Similarly, if within the city, they raid the treasury of some powerful wizard, again, the amount of caution required changes contextually.If the PC's encountered an ornately fashioned iron door deep within the crypt of an evil temple that is covered with various signs and devices of warning, and on the lentil of the door is written, "Death awaits any who dare tresspass", if they are outraged because opening the door sets off a lethal trap and reveals a horrible monster, then they've really no business playing D&D in my opinion.</blockquote>

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