Like many GMs, I like giving my players interesting, visceral descriptions of what their characters do. This is usually easy, but I am at a loss when it comes to trapfinding and magical traps.
The only ways to bypass a magical trap are a dispel magic spell or to have a class with trapfinding. If you have the right rogue archetype you can take this a step further and even reprogram magical traps completely.
My question is, in a non-numbers, description for players kind of way, how does that work? The best I've heard a GM try and explain it is "You smudge the chalk drawing on the floor," but that doesn't really work when you're trying for an immersive RPG experience: if it were that easy, why are spell traps and magic item traps so hard to detect and disarm, and why can only a small number of characters do it?
Has this been addressed, maybe in a Pathfinder novel or bit of flavor text? And if not, how do you describe it in your games?
I tend to simply describe the trap the rogue has found. I try not to tell my players what their characters do or how they do it.