#RPGaDay2021 - Day 17 - You're at the Wrong Ambush Site!

Day 17 of #RPGaDay and the primary word is a classic of fantasy role-playing games: "TRAP."

I'm not necessarily a Grimtooth-type of guy, so this one took a bit to mull over. Then I happened to watch one of my favorite movies of my youth, Heartbreak Ridge with Clint Eastwood.

 
The idea of Clint transforming a misfit bunch of Marine Recon into a fine fighting force, all the while battling with an arrogant and obnoxious Major Powers is pretty much standard Hollywood fare.

As Gunny Highway whips his men back into Marines, there's a scene where he discovers the unit always dies in the same "loud grotesque manner" at the same ambush site each time they're playing war games with 1st Platoon, led by Powers.  Highway decides to change that up and the results couldn't be any more different.  

In a month where I've already extolled my love for the virtues of SWAT-style textbook execution of dungeon crawler, I'll reverse course and say, that sometimes things shouldn't be as cut and dry as possible.

At some point in the construction of some evil lair, the overlord is going to realize that if anyone with half a brain or twice the experience charges forth, they're going to look out for trip wires and spike pits in the obvious location, as well as the kobold guards sleeping around the same card table that every dungeon has (Are they Ikea?)

Mixing things up is a logical progression in the lifespan of a dungeon. You can only reset so many tripwires, fix broken crossbow traps, and renovate the same treasure room, when moving it to another location makes more sense, be it convenience or expansion.