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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6099601" data-attributes="member: 4937">In the hands of a good GM, anything can be made fun.  I have very definite opinions about traps:a) They need to be believable.  Grimtooth instead meta-games against the players creating absolutely unbelievable situations.  So many Grimtooth traps, like say the rotting boat in that dungeon you are talking about, depend on trigger conditions that are exactly balanced for the moment that the PCs arrive.  The author didn't even so much as provide an excuse, like saying the boat was cursed - probably because curses are detectable.   So you end up with traps that always test as safe except when they don't and traps that are balanced on the point of a needle, and the slightest vibration sets it off that are waiting hundreds of years for that slightest vibration.  And so forth.  Or you have death traps in well travelled corridors.  Grimtooth puts a very high value on challenging the players, to the exclusion really of thinking about placing the trap sensibly, matching the trap to the resources of its builders, or anything else.  So as a result you have kobold lairs filled with dozens of perfectly smooth and polished silvered glass mirrors to allow for the popular optical illusion traps, with no sign anywhere of the glass rolling mills that built and replace these wonders of medieval technology (each of which is worth hundreds of days wages) much less say the silver mines that let the kobold tribe invest in and pay for these things (because thinking about any of that would give the players resources to work with).b) Traps need to be not only defeatable but fair: The idea trap represents a puzzle of some sort.  Even Grimtooth seems to recognize that that is the real interest in a trap.  But Grimtooth gets so invested in beating the players, that once again it becomes all metagame.  Grimtooth becomes invested in traps that punish the players using reverse pyschology and double reverse psychology, and unpredictable results and methods that thwart any attempts even to detect them.  It's really easy to make undetectable death traps, but its not really that interesting to do so.  Grimtooth would have served the game better to present a couple of examples of absolutely undectable grossly unfair death traps and then say, "Don't ever do this.  This is bad design this is why.", and then proceeded to give a list of well designed traps.  Instead, Grimtooth goes into all out antagonism mode right from the start, using unlimited resources to go after players as if this was 'out thinking them' and proved anything.   Consider for example a very stock trap like, "There is a trapped door, when opened a spear is launched from a mechanism behind the door and may strike anyone in its path."  This trap is easily defeatable in any number of ways - including detecting it and disarming it - and notably, almost every trap in 'Tomb of Horrors' is quite like this.   However, suppose we instead describe this, "There are three lead doors bound in admantium which are otherwise normal but which make an airtight seal with the surrounding walls.  Affixed to the exact middle of two is a taunt steel chain, which on the other end to the trap mechanism.  The chain has been detected so as to be immune to spells of the divination school, including detect magic.  The doors are immune to magic, and affixed with admantium hinges that can only be reached from the other side.  If beaten on with sufficient force, they will dent and bend, slacking the tension in the chain and setting off the trap.  The walls of the room have hardness 100.  The trap cannot be detected by inspecting this side of the door.  If the heavy door with the attached chain is opened even slightly, it pulls the chain sufficiently to activate the trap.  If the trap is activated, the entire dungeon instantly collapses, squashing everything in it to jelly.   However, if the correct door is opened, it leads to the treasure chamber.  The gelatinous cube in this room keeps it completely swept clean, so there are no clues as to which of the doors is correct."  That trap is completely uninteresting.  It depends not on player cleverness, because it deliberately shuts down any resources that the players might have.  Players can't solve the problem 'creatively' or through 'reason' because it has been designed to preempt that.  The correct solution can't be determined, but only stumbled into.   That's the sort of design that Grimtooth promoted.   The idea seems to be, "Whatever happens, the trap must go off, other wise it isn't fun. Don't let players use their silly resources to avoid the trap."  The trap had a 'solution', but it was not based on players recieving evidence and then devising a plan.  It was pretty much always based on guessing the right 'correct' action in the absence of evidence, where the DM wasn't playing 'fair' because he was jumping between reverse psychology and double reverse psychology to ensure that no matter what the player's guessed, they'd usually be wrong.  By comparison, note that Tomb of Horrors almost NEVER uses reverse psychology.  Trying to avoid the trap in an obvious fashion makes the situation better, not worse.  Almost every trap is detectable by simple inspection, and those that aren't are avoidable by simple expedients like having the thief scout ahead with a rope tied to his waist that the rest of the party can pull him out of trouble with.What's really bad about the Grimtooth approach is that it seemed to encourage placing Grimtooth styled traps not just in 'Tombs of Horror', but randomly about the game world.  As a result, it forced players to spend the game as if the whole world was a death trap, and had to be meticulously inspected using the full panapoly of anti-trap defeating patterns all the time.   As a result, games would slow to a crawl and become basically games of 'GM may I'.  The book can't excuse itself.  Because it never steps out of its declared stance and examines its suggestions critically.  It doesn't provide the means for actually teaching the DM.  It tries to excite the reader about using these traps.  It makes it seem like this is the normal desirable path of normal play, and not a potentially deginerate tangental side path.   It's proposing to teach GMs about traps, so you can't blame the students for absorbing the lessons.</blockquote>

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