NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8374888" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I'm still a few pages behind, but the conversation between [USER=22779]@Hussar[/USER] and [USER=97077]@iserith[/USER] got me thinking. Let me assume that we have access to Unseen Servant as a ritual. There are many ways to do this, including just being a human and taking the ritual caster feat at level 1. This is a flying, invisible servant able to lift and move anything weighing around 60 lbs. Let us say we have a hallway in a dungeon, and I command the servant to press every stone in the hall's floor and walls. Now, this cost me nothing except time. No spell slot, just a 10 minute ritual. And the servant might take a long time to complete the task, but any traps that we didn't spot via passive perception and that can be located by the application of 60 lbs of force are noticed. The only thing I can think of that isn't noticed is a pit trap with a false top, that the DM specifies needs more than 60 lbs of force to break. And if the trap destroys the servant, I spend 10 minutes making a new one.Now, here is the thing I got to thinking about. What is the main tool the DM uses in this instance of the players basically saying "we detect all traps and secret passages within 60 ft over the next hour"? Wandering monsters right? But, here is the problem, the moment you send wandering monsters... we are in the combat pillar. "Your servant raised the alarm and all the guards are preparing". Cool, that's a combat pillar issue. Not an exploration issue. Which is a bit weird right? Because it seems to indicate that if you "solve" the exploration problems by just taking a lot of time, exploration offers no tools to increase the challenge. Instead, it becomes a combat pillar issue. So, we instead end up with the only other seemingly logical answer... a ticking clock. Which doesn't make our solution less of a solution to the exploration problems, it just means we are forced to use less efficient means of solving the problems, because we don't have time to solve them normally. This is like saying that you would make combat more interesting by saying that the player's have two rounds to kill all the bad guys, or a death curse kills them all instead. It may be interesting for a combat or two, but it isn't really offering a solution if the problem is "we can't lose a normal fight"</blockquote>

Verification