haltzief

Thanks for the thorough report, sounds like it was quite successful in making an interesting trap.
Now I am interested to check how this hazard is described in the beginner box. I believe I got it in a Humble Bundle once, but I did not take the time to read it.

That sounds interesting, and an approach I have not seen before. But the increased potential for interaction and reaction here sounds quite interesting - although I am not sure if initiative would slow it down too much for my tastes.

Did you apply these way of approaching traps and hazards in play yourself? What was your experience?

Thanks for sharing! I was not aware of The Angry GM, but this article looks pretty well thought out at first glance. Will add it to my reading list!

That's an apt observation!

I struggled with traps a lot in the past, both as GM and as player, because the "Oops, your forgot to say..." you describe just never felt like an interesting or satisfying outcome, and handling traps speculatively dragged the pace down and distracted a bit from the core of what's fun for my groups.

What opened my eyes was Chris McDowall (of Into the Odd & Electric Bastionland), saying that how one reacts to obvious danger, so to paraphrase: taking decisions on known and open ended problems, is one core element of RPG gameplay. You cannot make useful decisions, if you are missing too much info, otherwise it starts becoming gambling. And this really turned my mind around on using traps. I generally try to follow these recommendations from old-school or old-school adjacent games:

• Characters generally see signs of traps, if they are not running, distracted, etc. So for example: obvious holes in the wall, prior unlucky adventurer's remains with and obvious appropriate wound, etc.
• Taken from old-school DnD: traps do not trigger reliably, but only on a 33% or 50% chance.
• Traps mostly cannot be disarmed by character skill alone, but rather the players should figure a way around it.

And in my experience, this transformed the "Oops, Take 2d6 damage!" into a fun bit of "How do we best get through this hall of spears, without getting skewered?" problem solving.

When I first started DMing, I focused a lot on maintaining a captivating pace at the table, and also had a few story beats that I wanted to hit, and kind of nudge the players towards. This meant I was able to pull off some gratifying one-shots, or short arcs, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but longer adventures started to become too stressful to properly maintain. Especially if there is a larger connecting world or lore in place beforehand, that felt more constricting as the campaign went on.
Practically it felt like being a filmmaker and making every session sensational. And when it worked, it felt awesome. If a session did not land properly however, I felt quite discouraged afterwards.

Then I discovered: hey, I want to be surprised as much myself by the events as the players at my table. I don’t want them to follow my pre-existing story beats. Rather, I want to be an impartial arbiter and just see how the players react, and especially interact.
Want to kill a key NPC? Sure, you can try, and if you manage to do it, the world will react accordingly.

Three things I employed to make every session much more enjoyable for myself:

• Adventure Design. I build adventures and campaigns “bottom up” (instead of top-down, where you do a lot of worldbuilding before play starts). Basically it means I have smaller sandboxes, with a few hooks, that might not even be backed up by anything yet, and just see what the players engage with and what sticks. Check out this Matthew Colville on Youtube, that explains it way better than I could.
• Powerful Tools. I like giving the players meaningful powers and abilities, that are powerful, but also have some drawbacks. Not talking about the default “+1" magical items, but more like “you are invisible while you play this flute loud enough” or “With this ring you can breath under water, but you dry up if you don’t submerse yourself in water once a day.” And as soon as they earn such abilities, I just let them use it. Bypass substantial parts of the adventure? Well OK, you earned it - even if it’s hard in the moment to accept as a DM, I err on the side of just allowing it, because it feels awesome as a player to just be allowed using ones tools successfully.
• Random Tables. I was very reluctant to use it at the table, because I did not wanted to drag the pace down and maybe “misinterpret” or tank the pace of a session. Sometimes I even rolled on random tables before a session, to “prepare properly”. But as soon as I committed to trying using random tables during a session, I noticed, that these sometimes quite improvised elements, caused the most fun on the table overall. And I just like being surprised by these twists and turns they might offer, how I can interpret them, and especially how the players react. And more often than not, they cannot even tell afterwards, what sprung from a random table, and what was planned beforehand.

tl;dr being surprised by the twists and turns in the narrative I did not expect myself