Taichara makes some good points about the drawbacks of traps.
The upside is… They add a rules consequence to diegetic engagement. Those first couple of rooms in B4 The Lost City (B4 is a great starter module for new DMs and new players) are a master class in teaching how to run the game as a DM and how to approach and describe your movements, exploration, and actions as a player. Especially if you do it “old school primer” style and not “lol you failed your automatic trap detection roll, you’re dead”. If you really do navigate the rooms carefully.
It’s the dream of the diegetic/symbolic braid finally actualized fully. You’ve got to say what you do in the game world or numbers will go down (probably fatally) on your sheet.
Taichara wrote back:
Yes but you assume I care about things like “diagetic engagement”, and I absolutely could not care less about jargon-laden analysis of my hobby time.
The point isn’t the jargon (which I agree is a bad thing but language is such a limited tool, map not being the territory and all, and English isn’t my native language so it’s not always clear to me when something is jargon or if it’s natural) or the analysis (even though I think analysis is fun and helps us make better games), the point is how we actually play and that traps, for all the downsides you pointed out that I did acknowledge, have the upside of helping us roleplay what we do in the game world. To be like “OK, I carefully open the door—with my left hand!” in a way that no other game can.
There are ways to do that without traps, and that’s great for all the downsides of traps, but traps is one of the best ways that we’ve found so far. And if we wanna find some other ways to achieve the same benefit, analysis and jargon is one way to get there.
No.
They may be one of the best ways /you/ have found for what you want to play.
I dislike them. My players dislike them. You and your preferences do not speak for us or for some universal truth.
I never meant to come across as attacking you and the sharp rebuke in this and the previous reply honestly surprised me. I meant to be “yes but” rather than “no and”. Like, “yes, traps have their issues, great post, but here is one li’l silver lining to them that maybe we can salvage” is what I thought I was saying.
Yes, I do say that that I currently believe that it is a universal truth that one of the unique and special things about RPGs is how they can blend free-form description and narration of the game world (if you don’t wanna call it the diegesis or the story world or “the fiction”) and of the player character’s exploration of that world, with game-mechanical consequences. “I carefully pour out some water on the corridor floor… What do I see? Is there a lean?”
I interpreted you as if you were the one that was stating some assumptions and some universal truths when you wrote:
You avoid the trap (whether by not stumbling onto it, disarming it, or steering clear of it) or you get nailed by the trap. NPCs and critters and the like might chat or fight or bargain or need help or be planning a betrayal or nearly anything, but a trap is a trap.
I had already acknowledged three times traps have their downsides, earlier in this reply was a fourth time, and here’s a fifth time:
NPCs are fun because the DM gets to roleplay a real being and gets to talk and act and do their motivations in a way where with traps you’re expressing and roleplaying the environment which can be more limited.
An even bigger downside for me is that traps usually also come across as punishing or all negative. They’re more stick than carrot. I don’t want all exploration roleplay to have to be about navigating dangers and harm and injury and death. Hence all the jargon and analysis—I went there because to figure out some way to learn from the benefits of traps and apply that to other types of games where there’s the same detailed back-and-forth about the shared imaginary space but for positive reasons rather than harm.
But I do strongly disagree that “you avoid or you get nailed”, “a trap is a trap”. That binary model. That is you making assumptions and speaking about universal truths that doesn’t apply to other groups, not the other way around.
Yeah, there are some bad rule systems, like I have that old Castle Ravenloft boardgame and some traps in that board game are kind of like that, you just stumble into an arrow turrent or whatever; a bad card draw and die roll equals ouch and it’s painful for the character and it’s pretty uninteractive compared to NPCs. (Although even then you still get some options on whether to try to disable it or just run away.)
But good traps as I’ve encountered them they’re way more nuanced than that. They have the power to make you care about where the hinges are on a door, what the handle looks like, heck, the entire reason I’m still into RPGs to the extent that I am is because of a trap, a cursed mirror. Carefully navigating what was in that room, and scaredly putting my hand under that cloth to feel that it was cold glass—all this was done via me telling the DM what I did, and the DM telling me what was there and what I saw and felt, not via a save—I felt like I was transported to another world, figuratively speaking.
Traps that are like “make a save or the floor gets electric”, yeah, OK, I can get behind criticizing those kinds of traps. I’m with you there.
I try to fathom how a dungeon’s inhabitants function at all
Yeah, I can agree that there have been plenty of unbelievable traps published over the years. But just as you say when you include other kinds of hazards, which I agree with, what seems like a “trap” to an explorer might not be designed to be a trap. Like a car road is dangerous and we’re taught again and again to be careful and not step in the road and even so horrific accidents happen way too often (and I’ve lost friends to car accidents. Car culture sucks). If an elf or hobbit were to come visit our cities, those roads would be like “traps” to them since they hadn’t been taught to avoid them. Yet the roads were designed not as traps but as tools. Same goes for that dangerous mirror for that matter.