no void crushing wall trap

[heirodule]

So the SRD has the following trap

Crushing Wall Trap

CR 10; mechanical; location trigger; automatic reset; no attack roll required (18d6, crush); Search DC 20; Disable Device DC 25. Market Price: 25,000 gp.

Unlike the crushing room trap, which is also auto-hit, this has no 2 round onset time. The SRD text calls this out as the balancing factor:

When the entire dungeon wall moves to crush you, your quick reflexes won’t help, since the wall can’t possibly miss. A trap with this feature has neither an attack bonus nor a saving throw to avoid, but it does have an onset delay (see below). Most traps involving liquid or gas are of the never miss variety.

so this trap has no onset delay, and nothing to do except get hit for 18d6 if you are not searching or traps. I guess that will teach em. Is there soemthing I'm missing?

 

[Kerrick]

When I was revising the traps system for my traps netbook, I noticed a large number of errors in the sample traps that never seem to have been caught. This is one of them - I assigned it a 2-round delay.

 

[s-dub]

Think of it as a faster version of the garbage compactor from Star Wars only for some reason most 10th level characters will survive being crushed by it.

By 10th level your players may or may not have the time/resources to neutralize it before taking damge.

On a side note, most groups with a rogue say that the are "always" searching for traps. In most cases the DC 20 for a 10th level rogue will probably be a piece of cake. The trick it to put so that when they loot something to get them to forget to look for traps.

If you have a Paladin in the party, a permanent image of a maiden about to be lowered into lava ought to do it =P

 

[Shin Okada]

That trap is usually made of stone. Well, so many rogues have stone-cunning. Even if they are not one of the underground race, they tend to get it via magic items such as Belt of Dwarvenkind by L10. That means, they are automatically searching for traps (with +2 bonus) when walking casually in a stone clad dungeon. Most DMs just let them take 10. So DC 20 means automatic detect in most cases.

And, 2 rounds are actually often enough for a party mage to use his scroll of Disintegrate and such, or a party warrior hack enough part of the wall down with his adamantine greatsword (with power attack, of course).