Search and taking 20: the problem

[Pielorinho]

Ad hominem = to the man. It's a type of logical fallacy in which, instead of debating the topic at hand, you substitute attacks on the character of your opponent, such as saying that they don't understand, that they're just unhappy that nobody agrees with them, that they must not be a good DM, etc.

As for trying to keep on the subject, as Herodotus said, Do, or do not. There is no try! I'll be happy to continue the discussion once you promise.

Daniel

 

[Abraxas]

Questions for Pielorinho
When do you determine that the rogue character makes a disable device check for a trap?
Does the player have to announce the decision to make a disable device check when examining an object/area/item before touching it or do you call for a check after they touch the trapped object/area/item?

Oh, as an aside how do you deal with secret doors that the high search character will either find or not find, based on the DC, when using T20?

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

See, this is the difference. Some folks start off by what's "fair" within the game; I start off with what's interesting within the world.

If you start off from the rules and work backwards, then of course you end up not wanting to change rules: it's unfair.

I don't care about fair. I care about creating an exciting, interesting, unpredictable story with my players. If something makes sense within the context of the story, I'll find a way to model it with the rules, not vice-versa.

I suspect we do not end far from the same place.

I advocate for the rules as written, not because I think the DM should never bend them, but because I want to emphasize they are perfectly playable as is. There is no 'problem'.

I, too, believe the DM should emphasize making things interesting over the niggling details of the rules. That said, it is very easy for changes in how the skills work to undermine the Rogue as an effective class because they are uniquely dependant on skills to make them viable. Already magic such as Detect Magic, Detect Thoughts, Charm Person, Spider Climb, Fly, Dominate, Suggestion put the necessity of skills in question.

Traps are a particularly important issue because if the Rogue is reduced in their ability to detect traps, their suitability as the classic dungeon crawl scout is severely hampered. Rogues are notably weak in hit points and Fort saves, and therefore the 8th best core class for surviving a trap. If a very high Search skill used intelligently cannot detect the presence of traps (almost) without fail, then they should go out of the trap business altogether. To my mind that would make the game less interesting.

But I'm not screwing with the search rules. There's nothing in the rules that suggest you can see things you can't see, or to suggest that things you can't see inevitably give clues to their existence as long as you're within 10' of them.

Ridley, how do you interpret the spy's letter situation?

I would not let the Rogue see things they can't see, in general. I do not see a problem with allowing it in some cases, such as for traps. The distinction between very high skill and magic is artificial -- it is a convenient convention for making rules clear cut rather than an in game necessity. Search could be thought of as a gauge of a quasimystical Rogue ability, as Perform was used for 3.0 Bards, for all I care.

Keep in mind that most traps will hint at their presence from the behavior of the informed locals avoiding them. So, yes, they can be noticed without being seen. Does foot traffic stay to the right in this passage? Do they open the door left-handed, indicating they are reaching somewhere with their right? Do they slow and pause before the glyph, then scurry nervously through? It is only in centuries old dead tombs that we have to stretch this concept at all.

In typical situations, yes, you need to open a backpack to Search it (unless we are talking Epic skill levels).

I strongly believe that it will be more interesting to give the Rogue pause over attempting to disable a trap, than having the Rogue blunder into it.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Wow, straw man much, people?

Wow. Make up crap much? In order for something to be a straw man, someone has to put words into your mouth. Right below, you pretty much prove that people haven't done that

First, some things I'm NOT advocating. I've already listed these, but some of you prefer to ignore them in favor of attacking easy (though fictional) targets:
-I'm not advocating making the search skill useless.

-I'm not advocating requiring the player to describe exactly what technique he's using to disable a trap.

-I'm not advocating designing traps that are perfectly undetectable.

-I'm advocating the idea that some traps have absolutely no clues detectable with a non-epic search check made visually within 10' of the trap. (Non-epic listed in order to exclude those rogues who can see banana molecules wafting from the trap).

Doesn't this last point basically nullify your "I'm not advocating" bits?

If traps cannot be found simply using the search skill - doesn't that make the search skill useless for the purpose of finding traps?

If traps cannot be detected without some player-decided action taking place prior to the search, isn't that saying that the player has to describe some action in order to find and then disable the trap?

If traps cannot be found using the search skill - isn't that perfectly undetectable?

Or maybe you're just being really, really unclear, and your entire argument is that the search skill requires direct interaction with a trap. Which is probably a valid stance, but is certainly directly against the rules as written, which makes no provision for the possibility that a trap could be triggered merely by searching for it.

Take 20 would only find the obvious trap unless the rogue specifically declared that they would continue searching after finding the trap. (Insidious, ain't it?)

No, it's just as bad as changing the rules - take 20 means they got the best that they could, and found everything it was possible for them to find under the circumstances.

Otherwise it would seem to me that take 20 would have a variable time requirement.

I could see, however, having two traps colocated, and telling him that "there are two traps, which do you disable first - trap A or trap B?". Trap b is rigged to go off when trap a is disarmed. Making the wrong choice could be nasty.

I think that the ability to work out exactly what a trap does is included under disable device - after all, it has the text about how a disable device roll 10 above that required allows the rogue and her companions to bypass the trap without disabling it.

So - the rogue could make a disable device check to work out which trap to do first.

So - green wire or blue wire?

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I would not let the Rogue see things they can't see, in general. I do not see a problem with allowing it in some cases, such as for traps. The distinction between very high skill and magic is artificial -- it is a convenient convention for making rules clear cut rather than an in game necessity. Search could be thought of as a gauge of a quasimystical Rogue ability, as Perform was used for 3.0 Bards, for all I care.

I like this idea. Think of it as paranoid intuition...the rogue's getting and acting on information any non-rogue (well, non-trapfinding person) could never have. After all, when you're getting into the high-DC traps, and making those DCs reliably. you've seen so many traps already that you can easily get an idea of what should be there (or what you'd put there).

Brad

 

[da chicken]

A level 10 ranger should have no trouble tracking a housecat 5 days ahead of him after a fresh snowfall (10 + 13 ranks + 2 Wis + 4 synergy vs DC 29).

Why is it less believable that a rogue can sense a trap that you and I cannot?

 

[Wish]

It seems that a lot of the DMs around here don't consider skill points to be a resource. None of you complain when your PCs just take the hp damage from the trap and heal it up. Or make the save and ignore it. Why complain when they use skill points instead? Characters have a finite number of things they can do. By choosing to play a rogue rather than a monk (for example), a player has given up saves, movement, hit points, and a host of combat abilities. But he get skill points. It's what a rogue does - he uses skills. But even so, he doesn't get an infinite number of skill points. Each point in Search and Disable Device is a point that's not in Tumble or Diplomacy or Hide. If players choose to spend their character's resources on finding and disabling traps, you're doing them a disservice if you render that resource expenditure invalid on nothing more than a whim.

 

[dcollins]

Elder-Basilisk, thanks for responding again.

In the T20 only on obvious portals and T10 everywhere else, the rogue will find all the traps he can find in the obvious places but may miss traps he could have found in the not-so-obvious places.

I'm not sure I see a big distinction here. It's still entirely predictable whether any particular trap is found or missed. There's just now two cases to the "all the traps he can find" categorization.

However, from the sounds of things, your rogue player is somewhat like the rogue in my hypothetical example: he's maxed out search, he's probably got a good int, he's got a lens of detection, and he may even pop potions of vision every now and then. He might even take Skill Mastery: Search so that he can take ten even when a couple orcs are shooting at the party. So, it's quite possible that he can find any reasonable trap by simply taking ten...

That's totally spot-on, you've described this sample rogue precisely.

So it's not really a problem with taking ten. It's a problem with your rogue being so good that he (quite reasonably) doesn't expect traps to give him much of any difficulty very often.

Well, I still have to point a finger at Take 10. I'm unhappy that trap-finding is either 0% or 100% (again, the starting point of the thread). I wish I could place some really dastardly hard traps that other rogues couldn't possibly find and this specialized rogue has a 60% chance of finding (for example), but because of Take 10 it won't ever happen. If there were some tactic in combat that made AC levels a binary automatic-hit-or-miss affair, I'd think it was degenerate in just the same way.

In that case, they should expect monsters in other parts of the dungeon to hear the ruckus in their part and react to it--something which isn't conducive to spending five minutes searching after entering each room. By that time, the monsters will have made any preparations they were going to make.

This idea has been brought up a number of times, which is reasonable at first glance, but in practice not so helpful. Most dungeon complexes are set up with specific defenses where the monsters are posted (as guards or whatever). When monsters leave a guard area to investigate, I find it usually reduces their effectiveness -- the players would usually prefer to have the monsters come to them, and in fact in that case it's the PCs who are setting up an ambush in a defensible location of their choosing, not the other way around. If these monsters are being taken away from posted rosters, it makes the dungeon exploration easier (and searching safer), not harder. I'd hate to have the game start looking like Diablo where the favored tactic is to trigger the monsters into marching through a narrow portal and hacking them down one at a time as they try to get at you.

 

[dcollins]

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'll add one more line of thinking to Take 20 (buried as it will be on page 6 of the thread). Take 20 is supposed to represent "trying until you get it right" (PHB, "Take 20"). But what if the skill by its nature doesn't give you any indication when you finally "get it right"?

In particular, this would be the case for any of the information-gathering skills -- an absence of information could mean either the information doesn't exist or you just haven't found it yet. Like any of these: Appraise, Decipher Script, Gather Information, Intuit Direction, Knowledge, Listen, Read Lips, Scry, Search, Sense Motive, Spellcraft, or Spot (12 skills). 5 of them can't Take 20 because they have "no retry" allowed. 2 can't Take 20 because they involve a penalty. Gather Information is unclear because of the time frame under "retries". I think Scry is out for multiple reasons.

This leaves Listen, Search, and Spot -- precisely a set of skills that DMG ch. 1 suggests should be rolled by the DM because the player should not know the result (3.0 DMG p. 17). Should the Take 20 rule be allowed for these? Should a PC be able to Take 20 Spot and somehow become convinced after 2 minutes that no amount of looking could help anymore?

I want to say "no". I wish that the Take 20 rule had an additional clause that went like: "When the skill being attempted carries no penalties for failure, and has a clearly identifiable end-point (excluding information-gathering skills), you can take 20." This would clear up the semantic glitch with being able to perfect a search to the point when you know that there is no danger you've overlooked anything.


In fact, as DM I'd be happy to utilize a table to adjudicate extended searches of this sort -- over the course of 20 retries, there's actually only a 64% chance that you ever roll a natural 20. I'd be happy to have a player "Take 50", i.e., spend 50 retries, and I'd roll versus the 92% likelihood to get a natural 20 in that time span. I'd tell the player "Nope, you haven't found anything yet..." and it would be up to them if they're satisfied with that or if they want to then go for a "Take 100" and be really confident (99% sure to get a natural 20). But information-gathering skills seem to break the basic assumption underlying Take 20 that you can verify that you finally did "get it right".

EDIT: For example, attached below is an Excel spreadsheet showing (at the bottom) a d20-based system for finding the highest d20 roll from a given number of retries. A similar table could be produced based on a d% roll with a little bit more work. 2nd EDIT: Updated spreadsheet to make it easier to use, and added the option to base it on a d% roll.

 

[Black Knight Irios]

It seems that a lot of the DMs around here don't consider skill points to be a resource. None of you complain when your PCs just take the hp damage from the trap and heal it up. Or make the save and ignore it. Why complain when they use skill points instead? Characters have a finite number of things they can do. By choosing to play a rogue rather than a monk (for example), a player has given up saves, movement, hit points, and a host of combat abilities. But he get skill points. It's what a rogue does - he uses skills. But even so, he doesn't get an infinite number of skill points. Each point in Search and Disable Device is a point that's not in Tumble or Diplomacy or Hide. If players choose to spend their character's resources on finding and disabling traps, you're doing them a disservice if you render that resource expenditure invalid on nothing more than a whim.

Very well said, no one complains if the group runs into the trap springs it and heals the damage, whatever, afterwards.
So why are people complaining about having the group find the trap and then disarm it, still you can't use T20 on DD checks.

It is absolutely believeable for me that the rogue has a six senth about traps, that warns him about traps, ooh he has one, the ability Trap Sense, so the question is, why can't the rogue have the intuition he has with avoiding sprung traps by finding them with the serach skill, still remember Trap Sense is an [EX] ability he gets at 3rd LVL, is it unbelievable that he can figure out if there is a trap or not? -I think no. Why, who else can find it, if not him.