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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9000020" data-attributes="member: 82106">Does B/X HAVE a 'detect traps skill mechanic'? There is NO SUCH THING in Greyhawk! The skills are 'Open Locks/Remove Traps' and 'Pickpocket/Move Silently/Hide in Shadows' and then thieves get a level-determined bonus to their 'hear noise' roll (which IIRC is d6 based). There is also the Climb special ability of course. In any case, there is no 'Find Traps'! You find them by the old-fashioned method of pixel bitching the dungeon! Also, Remove Traps is defined as 'remove small trap devices (such as poisoned needles)' (p4). Thus thief abilities are irrelevant to the normal sorts of 'dungeon traps' such as covered pits and other 'tricks'. The player must describe HOW she is finding the small mechanical trap, and then may use the Remove Traps ability to defeat it. Presumably this, and Open Locks, were provided as thief abilities in this way is on the assumption that most DMs are NOT trap smiths nor even lock smiths, and thus would be unable to adjudicate these sorts of actions without resort to some kind of mechanics (and would be under heavy pressure from players to NOT make them fail). I would put it this way, in the famous Indiana Jones trap gauntlet it won't help to be a thief, except maybe at the very end where he tries to lift the idol and replace it with a bag of sand. That one I could see qualifying, and Indy obviously blew his check there! All that being said, AD&D did add the word 'Find' to the ability. Again though, this explicitly applies ONLY to "relatively small mechanical devices" and I imagine the addition of the word 'find' was intended to help adjudicate these situations, since the DM's notes are going to basically "there's a poison needle trap on this chest which triggers when you unlock it, save vs poison or die!" Finding it by procedural methods simply doesn't work, there isn't enough information. Sadly a lot, probably most, DMs didn't really read the PHB very carefully and assumed that 'Find Traps' meant ANYTHING that is semantically considered a 'trap' including deadfalls, covered pits, etc. This was NEVER intended! In AD&D 1e, even if you have a thief, you need to prod everywhere you intend to step with your trusty 10' pole first!</blockquote>

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