How does Find Traps work?
I'm playing Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition and I have a thief (Safana) with 100 in Find Traps. I'm in the third level of the Nashkel Mines dungeon and there are traps that she doesn't seem to be able to detect*. I've been standing right in front of a trap for over a minute now with the trap remaining undetected. There are a few details that I'm confused about that don't seem to be documented anywhere.
- What is the maximum time I may have to wait to detect a trap?
- Are there traps that require >100 in Find Traps to be detected? (or are these traps undetectable at any value of Find Traps?)
- When the roll is made to determine if your thief finds a trap, is that roll permanent? IE is it possible that the thief will later succeed in detecting a trap that initially went undetected? If so, what conditions need to be met to make this possible?
*: Realized later that I hadn't consistently been enabling Find Traps. I think this is the reason that I failed to find traps. Yep, that would do it.
Best Answer
I opened the manual with a better OSX PDF viewer than Preview and managed to find the Thieving Abilities section where this skill is documented in some detail. From the book:
Thieves can select Find Traps, and they will look around for traps until otherwise directed. At the start of each round while the Detection mode is active, the Thief’s Find Traps skill (modified by a simple d10 roll) is compared against any traps within sight of the Thief. If the Thief’s modified skill is higher than the difficulty rating of the trap, the trap is detected. Note that this skill does not benefit from having more than 100 points assigned to it.
So it should only be necessary, most of the time, to wait 6 seconds for the start of the next round to detect any traps within sight. I ran through the level again and this seemed to hold true. Earlier, I might not have consistently remembered to reactivate Find Traps after reactivating Stealth. I'm still curious about how the Find Traps skill is modified, but it sounds like the d10 is added to it, since otherwise it would be useful to have up to 110 points assigned to Find Traps. Assuming that traps can have a difficulty rating up to 100.
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Who can detect traps in 5e?
A successful DC 20 Intelligence (Investigation) check allows a character to deduce the trap's presence from alterations made to the lock to accommodate the needle. A successful DC 15 Dexterity check using thieves' tools disarms the trap, removing the needle from the lock.What is trap detection?
Investigating a trap. This investigation may either take place by the player describing how they mess with the trap or might take place by rolling an Intelligence (Investigation) check. An Intelligence (Arcana) check can be used to detect and investigate magical traps as well as disarm them.Does passive perception detect traps?
As for passives, yes, they can notice Traps, Concealed Doors, and etc, but not *all* of the types. Pits, for example, in the DMG have no mention of being noticeable by Passive Perception, so you probably have to be actively looking.How to Find Traps - Part 1 of 3 D\u0026D Player's Guide to Survival - Wally DM How to D\u0026D
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Answer 2
the highest trap difficulty in the game is 110 (and there's only 3 that high. The rest are around 80-95 at the upper end, especially in BG2 where thief NPCs were rarer and you were expected to potentially be having to make due with a low level DC'd thief).
BG uses a threshold system, where a d10 is rolled and your relevant skill is added to it, and if it meets the requirement you detect/disable/unlock it.
There's one in BG2 with a 1000 difficulty, but that's cause you're not supposed to be able to disable/detect that one, due to the nature of the trap.
As above it also only pulses once per round, so you may run into traps due to them being outside the pulse radius, especially once you get access to boots of speed/haste spells and are covering a lot of ground quickly.
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