Quote Originally Posted by ciopo View Post
GM didn't like I was doing a no sell on traps, and so raised the DC, an OOC talk ensued and I scaled back on no-selling traps.
This is the first problem. GMs should never do this. If a player creates a build that is specifically about preventing something from being a huge problem, the GM needs to allow that. Your experience highlights an issue which I've touched on in the past. The GM can always "rig the game". It's something that GMs need to be highly aware of, since there will be a tendency when writing/running a scenario to think "this is what I want to have happen", and then looking at the characters being played, and "adjusting" things to make that outcome happen.

As a GM, it's important to balance what you want to accomplish with the scenario and what the PCs bring to the table. If anything, and the GM is going to fudge things at all, they should be fudged in favor of ensuring that if a PC spent resources/build/whatever on something, that you make that "something" be relevant during play. A good chunk of this is session zero stuff. If you know your entire campaign has no undead, maybe warn off the player who is building an "undead killer" character. If you allow that build, then you maybe should make sure to put some undead in there, right?

As a general rule, as a GM, if you are going to adjust things in response to character builds/personality/whatever, you should always adjust things in favor of making the game more fun for the players. You should not treat it as a competition that you need to "win".

As a side point, I'm not sure why any GM would find traps to be so important to their game, as to make such an adjustment in the first place. I find traps to be a pain in the butt in the first place. I rarely put them into my games. When I do, you can bet there's a very very good rationale for why it exists, how it exists, how/why it's still functional where it is at the time it is (traps are a heck of a lot trickier than most think). And yeah, the problem of "how do I put something in that will be tricky to manage, but not just arbitrarily kill characters" is always at the forefront of my mind.

Someone coming up to me with a "I can spot traps easily" build, would result in a sigh of relief from me. Great! Now I don't have to worry about accidentally killing someone's character. Thanks player! If anything, I'd be concerned that the PC has overly built in this area and wont make much use of his skills (though, the same skills for spotting traps may be useful for spotting/detecting other things so...). The last thing I'd want to do is mightily work to thwart that build and make sure my traps hit the PCs anyway. That's just... strange.