Which Is More Annoying?

[Kaizy]

One good thing with poofers, if you use them periodically, and then place a real monster after those, you'll "trick" the player into thinking "oh, nother poofer", and when they'll walk into it... you get the idea.

Honestly, that's not a good thing because then you just feel lied to. Poofer after poofer causes you to just run around without a care in the world, and then the creator decides to add a real one, which at that point you think it's a poofer and it's not, and it kills you. That's just unfair, it's punishing the player for the creator's mistake of using poofers to the point of desensitization. I find nothing fun in that and it happens in so many of these custom stories I play these days.

Honestly, look at The Dark Descent. How many poofers can you recall? Like one, maybe two (I only ever encountered one), but that one poofer was done well enough because TDD had such a focus on atmosphere, so it wasn't a problem. If you have to toss numerous poofers into a story and then have to add a real monster in order to try and generate anything "scary", you probably aren't building your atmosphere/scares correctly and should just throw up your hands and fill it with more poofers and TNGs.