Training Players On Owlbear Traps
A million years ago – oh wow, 2019? Okay, sounds fake, but whatever – I wrote an article about the idea of owlbear traps. Owlbear Traps are the D&D-specific notion of gameplay elements where a player can be tricked into doing something that’s bad for them or unsatisfying without having actually done anything wrong.
Owlbear traps are some of your basic ingroup-outgroup problems, and it’s very important to know that an owlbear trap is not the idea of unbalanced design; where you make a design and don’t quite realise how good it is, or how bad it is, and so players who choose one option over another wind up unsatisfied because of the power difference. An owlbear trap is intentional.
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