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+--- Thread: Trap Disarming (/showthread.php?tid=5441)
Trap Disarming - Trexmaster - 06-21-2018
As it stands, to disarm a trap you're given either a d20,40,60,80,100,or 120 with max Disarm AND the trait, and you need to roll higher than the trap's level*10.
So with the absolute highest die (d120) you can get, your odds of disarming traps are...
Code:
Level 1: 92.5%
Level 2: 84.2%
Level 3: 75.8%
Level 4: 66.6%
Level 5: 58.8%
Level 6: 50%
Level 7: 41.7%And with the die just about anyone will normally have (only r5 Disarm, d100)
Code:
Level 1: 91%
Level 2: 81%
Level 3: 71%
Level 4: 61%
Level 5: 50%
Level 6: 41%
Level 7: 31%Meanwhile, with a r7 lockpick and all 10 ranks in Knowledge, you can only start failing lockpicking past level 70 dungeon floors. With the proper traits no lock exists in the game that you cannot always pick.
This is due in part to how different lock and trap rolls are made. Locks require you to roll UNDER the DC given, and your bonuses work to increase the DC, and you always roll a d100, as far as I'm aware. For Traps, the DC is always Trap Level * 10, and you're given a die based on the bonuses you have, anywhere from a d20 to a d120, in increments of 20. This makes Locks insanely easy and nearly always a guarantee with the proper investment, while traps will never see the same level of assured success.
Thus people have taken to preferring to slam their faces into traps rather than invest into any skills to safely handle them, considering the investment required to handle them. When presented with having to decide between faster lockpicking, or picking up Failsafe (to make trap disarming actually worth it considering your very, very good odds of failure no matter what), most people will lean toward ignoring trap disarming all together. Not to mention the Scout talent required to spot them in the first place, without using your face as a trap-checker.
So there's several ways to go about fixing this.
Altering how trap disarming works. Have Disarm ranks and other bonuses to trap disarming instead grant modifiers to your roll and increase the DC for traps across the board to compensate for this. I.E. have level 1 traps start at say, DC 70 or 80, then go up in a similar fashion to before from there, whilst having players roll a d100 as per the norm. Though now Disarm just adds a flat +20 per rank to your roll, and Trap Dismantler another +20. This would still offer a chance for failure at higher levels, but remove the odds of failure entirely for lower ones.
Make traps worse. The option no one probably wants, but would offer more incentive to prefer disarming traps as opposed to disarming them with your face. This could either just be making the current traps far more annoying/lethal, or implementing new ones to make everyone's lives more miserable. Something like spike traps dealing far more damage, or having a chance to inflict wounds at a much higher rate--or even automatically inflicting Fever at higher levels. Or Teleport traps just sending you straight out of the dungeon. As for new trap suggestions, I'll put those in a spoiler beneath this.
(If new, worse traps are introduced, I'd suggest perhaps tuning the chest rewards to compensate for the difficulty hike.)
TL;DR
The verdict is that traps are just too much of a pain in the ass to bother handling properly and reward you very little for actually investing in the ability to do so, while lockpicking is simplistic, highly rewarding and absolutely necessary to proceed in dungeons or even have the chance at getting loot. So either tune traps to be more reliably dealt with for those who actually invest in the skills to do so, or make traps that give incentive to be dealt with properly.
One last point--with Failsafe's existence, so long as your die is big enough to have an above 0 chance of success, it doesn't matter how many times you fail. If traps do get reworked, I feel that the 'reduce odds of trap activation' effects should start to decay as you rack up failures on the same trap. Either something simple like '10% higher chance to activate per failure' or something based on trap level like 'trap level*2 higher chance to activate per failure', with each rank in Failsafe being worth -20%, and Trap Dismantler being worth -50%, for a grand maximum total of -150% chance to activate, giving a healthy amount of leeway for someone totally decked out on -activation chances. (instead of Failsafe making Trap Dismantler absolutely worthless in terms of its activation chance reduction).