Finding and disabling traps

[Zenitii]

I'm curious how you, fellow game masters determine if the trap has been found and disarmed. For most of the time I've been doing it DnD 3rd edition style - thief rolled finding traps then disarming and the trap was harmless. Later I started doing it OD&D style - describe where and how you search, and if you find anything, describe how you disable it. I found it much more entertaining both for me and my players. So here is the question - thief in DCC has find and disable traps skill. If I do it OD&D style, these two skills become useless. I can of course mix two approaches, and demand both description and skill roll - but often it is illogical if the description is decent and the action hard to perform incorrectly. So here is my question - how do you do it?

[GnomeBoy]

A couple of examples from play (admittedly pre-DCC, but the same style applies):

I had a simple slab-above-door-drops-when-you-trip-the-trigger type of thing. I described what was happening ("you hear a ~shunk~ noise and see a stone panel emerging from above, dropping into place where the archway is... What do you do?"). There were two people in proximity; one said he's looking up at where the slab is dropping from to see if he can see what's going on and how he can disable it -- the other guy said, "I grab that banged up sword we found and jam it upright in the side of the archway". The upshot was that while the "Thief" was trying to examine the situation (basically watching things happen) the "Fighter" put a wedge in the works, and stopped the slab from completely cutting them off from their friends. The player of the thief was a little confused about this turn of events...

In another case (same party, btw), there was a room with statues which started rotating on their bases and moving their weapons up and down randomly, so to get through the room, you really didn't know when one of these things would be turning your way and lopping your head off. The Thief entered and despite my descriptions of what was going on, couldn't give me a good description of how he would address the problem. So I left the DC alone, and had him roll. Had he been able to say "I get a handful of sand from my kit*, and pitch it into the seams where the statues' bases meet the floor" then I'd have lowered the DC, because that could slow them down, if not stop them (and indeed, had that unfolded that way, I'd have described the statues still moving, but slowly enough to avoid). Had he come up with something that would've incontrovertibly gummed up the works, I wouldn't have bothered to have him roll anything.

Having a skill on the character sheet doesn't mean you have to use it in all cases. Make rolls whenever the outcome is in doubt or you want to "random things up". If the player's description is cool, go with it. If they can't come up with something, that doesn't mean the character can't come up with something and you can fall back on the dice. One way to approach it in a Thieves vs. Others way is that if the Thief must roll, then it's something no one else could really do. IF others must roll, the Thief can do it automatically. The Thief is always better at that stuff.


* I don't require the contents of a "thieves kit" to be listed -- anything that could reasonably be in there is okay (e.g., no anvils, sorry).

[oncelor]

When I prep an adventure, I try to define a trap in such a way that if the thief (or any character) specifically looks for a certain thing, then the trap is found automatically, but I allow thieves to use their "find traps" score to do a generic sort of automatic search. (I always roll the find traps checks myself behind the Judge's screen.) So I might say that a lock with a poison needle trap is automatically discovered if the character does something like "I shine my lantern in the keyhole and look for anything funny."