A gag is a gag but, once upon a time, it was established that Belkar can’t track for shit. Miko was actually better equipped to follow a trail using her Wisdom score bonus because Belkar never put any points into tracking (or survival or whatever it uses). Also, his Wisdom score is trash. Like Haley with trap detection, it was a joke that these people regularly neglected some of their core skills. Yeah, at some point he started to get his shit together but it’s not as though they’ve leveled up a bunch of times since the desert to make up lost ground.
In my game last night, the rogue was inspecting a chest for a trap. The barbarian wisely stood back in the entrance to the room in order to stay out of the trap’s blast radius.
The rogue successfully disarmed the trap, which was good–for the barbarian. The trap was an enormous slab of rock that would fall to block the room’s entrance, right where the barbarian was standing.
I guess I’m saying that where a trap triggers is not always where a trap activates, and it’s possible that the runic tripwire activates something elsewhere, so the activator never realizes what happened.
I’m wondering where MITD has been during all this. Seems like there’s a shoe to drop there.
Good point. Your post inspired this idea: The walls around the Gate are all moveable and tied into the runic tripwires of at least two and perhaps more entrances. When one of those are triggered, there’s a mechanism to shift the walls so that the gate is not in the dungeon where the runes were tripped. For the other entrance tripwires, something else happens that’s not obvious to the party, such as shifting some other wall to bring more monsters to that dungeon. So any party that never notices the tripwires will never find the gate.
One wonders if Redcloak, Xykon, and Oona weren’t confused by not finding Durkon and Minrah to have been slowed down by the trap they should have sprung.
I like this, as it would be a good way to make it all a shell game, without having to have some other entrance somewhere else that could be found. And, the way you say it, finding the trap alone wouldn’t be enough to find the gate, either, so they’d still be hedging their bets.
I’ll add this: perhaps you have to be at such a high level to even notice the traps that you’d be able to take whatever additional monsters show up. So they expect that you’ll stop bothering disarming the traps eventually, meaning you won’t disarm the one that lets you get to the gate.
I also suspect that the gate itself isn’t obvious–where only those knowing they need to find gate would know it was there. Or, at the very least, it looks like it’d be worth a lot of gold, so no one would try destroying it.
This is great, seems like a very Burlew twist, and you get massive amounts of Internet Points if you’re right.
I wasn’t the only one to think of it. Somewhere around the fifth post on the strip thread in the GitP forum, someone suggested the tripwire rearranges the walls of the dungeon. Various other theories, some much more complicated, are being are being suggested there as well.
What if it’s not a trap per se, but something you are supposed to trip in order to get to the gate? Everyone, especially rogues, will always disarm it. And will never get to the gate because of their caution. It would be great if the “Trap” was designed to be challenging but the rogue was always able to defeat it somehow.
The way skills work in 3rd edition, you don’t need very many level-ups to catch up on even badly-neglected skills. Rangers get 6+int skill points per level, and Belkar probably has an Int bonus (poor Wis and Cha, but he’s known to be cunning). So two levels of ranger could take him from 1 rank to 15 or more.
Since I don’t play 3.5, I’m hazy about how you find traps in it. Is it likely that, for the trap Haley noticed in passing, the trap DC is still high enough that neither TE looking for traps (though not having a Rogue), nor any Bugbear party from the village, would have discovered such a trap?
I can easily imagine the Bugbear parties not having Rogues. For one, what is there to steal, living in their very isolated village? Wouldn’t any Rogue have picked up and left to the city to practice their trade and improve their skills?
What I can’t see, however, is any prior adventuring party, skilled enough to think about tackling Monster Hollow, not having a Rogue with a better Search skill than Haley. Especially when any other party, thinking of entering a Rogue-designed dungeon, is at a minimum, going to have their Trapfinder take 10 before anyone walks through that open door. So, maybe the Order is the second serious adventuring group to ever visit?
Portals of Teleport solve a lot of logistical problems with the Hollow as shown: the lack of 3-d space to fit all of the tunnels, the lack of aggro’d monsters chasing adventurers out of the dungeon (and into the nice, tasty village upstairs), the possibility to shell game the Gate location with none of the portal dungeons leading to the actual Gate.
There are other rogue “archetypes” besides thief, some of which might work for their situation, like scout.
I say “archetypes” in quotes because I mean the general concept, not the 5th ed subclasses.
I can see that, albeit Ranger does a lot of that already. Have to get pretty high level though before things like Camouflage, or Hide in Plain Sight, kick in. They do get Hide and Move Silently as class skills like Rogues do.
I am surprised that setting simple snares or traps wasn’t a skill given to Rangers though. Rereading the SRD, just how do you set traps in that game?
With more rereading, it takes a big (10 over the Trap DC) Disable Device roll to bypass the trap. Which means Haley simply noticing the trap, and being able to bypass it, implies the Trap DC for either Search or Disable Device doesn’t sound very high. If the runes are classified as a magical trap, it takes a Rogue to even be able to see them.
Adding all of this together, I am wondering whether there are no obvious magical traps in any of the dungeons. ‘Obvious’ in that they spring with some flashy, nasty effect. If there are no magical traps, and all other traps in the dungeon are such that may be spotted by a Ranger’s Search skill, I think would have conditioned the multitude of Bugbear parties to not need a Rogue. Without a Rogue, you walk over the runes and nothing obviously happens. There isn’t a save check, and I guess Spell Resistance, if the runes have a Teleportation effect, doesn’t apply.
With a Rogue, you see the runes right away, though, and that doesn’t make sense. If Haley were allowed the time ahead-of-time to take 20, I could buy the theory that, yeah a Rogue can see the runes, but s/he needs to be really high level. Which would take care of the hypothetical Bugbear Rogue spoiling the twist early.
A bugbear’s favored class in 3.5 is Rogue, so a Bugbear village with no rogues is a bit like an elf town with no wizards or an orc camp with no barbarians.
(Johnny Carson), “I did not know that.” (/Johnny Carson)
Well, scratch that idea then. A village with even a few Rogues should have seen the runes and tried tinkering with them at some point. Bummer, it would have answered a few questions about this setup.
Haley hasn’t been keeping her Search skill maxed, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not still very good. It’s low enough to have a chance for failure (against epic paranoid trap-setters like Girard), and so using the kobold as a trap-finder made sense (in a dark, cynical way). But it’s still very high. Compare Haley’s performance inside the pyramid to Sabine’s (who really has been neglecting her roguish skills in favor of, ahem, other skill sets).
Plus, of course, anything that she can do by taking 20, she can also do quickly in a single action… sometimes.
Back to the last one, why exactly were they looking for a recently-entered door? They had decided on the plan of hiding from Team Evil (for now), and they knew that Team Evil had gone into one of the doors-- Shouldn’t they have been going for a door that hadn’t been recently entered?
But meanwhile, with the floor changing colors, it’s looking very much like @dtilque’s post had the right idea.
If they open a door that hadn’t been recently entered, they’ll sweep off the snow in front of it and thus give a clue they went in it. Also, a door that TE has recently entered is most likely to have already been cleared of monsters. They’re not looking for random encounters here.
Yes, something like that. Or maybe something more complex/unusual. There were many theories about what the runes did in the GitP forum; rearranging the walls of the dungeon was among the tamest of them. The others usually started with teleportation or gates and got weird from there.
Anyone else notice they forgot to recall their lookout? I wonder if that’s going to be a key point going forward or if it was just an oversight by the author.
So when Haley “disabled” the trap, the floor changed. Makes me think that I’m right about it being something that you’re supposed to trip in order to reach the gate.