Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm
Sure, but I think it's essential to accept that in settings with gods, magic, and wonder materials, "silly" traps are exactly what you're talking about: They're a small facet of a broader effort to say that, for consistency's sake, all those spells, miracles, and extraordinary substances must change the face of economics (e.g., a cash economy at nominal TL3, and even the poor trading in minted silver and gold) and technology (which ends up pushing TL(3+1)^ or TL(3+2)^). They can't just result in fireballs, healing spells, and mithril armor for adventurers.
The traps are part of "changing technology." They're internally consistent with healing potions and elven carriages, no doubt. It's just that it's a ton of work to map out exactly how one leads to the other, and what the precise made-up pseudoscience and wild technology underlying them is. I firmly believe that GMs with limited time budgets and authors with limited pages can be excused for hand-waving this mapping as part of the +1)^ or +2)^ that I mentioned. Standing in the real world and trying to define exactly how divergent and superscience tech works is a bit like standing in the present and trying to predict the future: If you could really do it, you'd have that tech in the real world! But you can't.
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This is all fair, but it runs into trouble when trap technology can do things non-trap technology can't. Fair enough to have unreasonably effective poison traps if assassins are smearing the same poisons on their knives, but why (in some settings) is the perpetual motion technology that seems to power certain traps never used elsewhere? And this does nothing to address the other half of this problem—the fact that some dungeon layouts seem to imply inhabitants who can teleport so long as no player character is within 500 feet.