Joe Darkthorne:
Almost all "Back of the book" stuff never got any errata.
That acid pit trap was true evil. Did more damage than the rest of the encounter if I recall correctly. Paladin was only able to make it out with the rest of the group pulling on the other end of a rope lowered down to him. Makes sense to put the tank in front of the group, right? But they'd better be trained in perception or they'll never notice the traps even on a crit perc check... oh wait... they CAN'T! Paladin and Fighter both don't have perception on their class skill list! Athletics to climb out? Paladins don't have
athletics on their class skill list! >.<
Even the precious Fate system falls prey to the problem of Multi Attribute (or skill) dependance. If you're up against a fair (2) challenge to climb out of an acid pit trap, and just so happen to have had the foresight to have superb (5) athletics (which means it's near impossible to have superb alertness for noticing traps, even at max level, but at least you're not banned from training those skills ala class skill lists), you can still fail with a roll of -4 on your fudge dice. (4d6. 1s and 2s count as -1, 3&4=0, 5&6=+1)
But at least then you can tap one of your character's background story aspects, like, "Benches trucks for fun," to get a +2 bonus to the check. There's at least
some way at all to give your dice the middle finger and succeed climbing out of an acid pit trap when your life depends on it even when the dice turns your superb athletics into average. Not so in D&D.
With that "I agree with you completely" mini-rant out of the way, I'm curious what you mean by "back of book" because the acid pit trap was on page 29 of 297. Guard drake is on page 90 of 288 in the MM. Oh... and I forgot to mention... the boss of the whole dungeon was a young white dragon.
Young White Dragon (D) Level 3 Solo Brute
Claw (standard; at-will)
Reach 2; +6 vs. AC; 1d8 + 4 damage.
Maybe Tim and I should instead be testing a different encounter. One that doesn't have broken DCs or monsters with teeth sharper than +5 vorpal longswords. The kobold ambushes on the way to Winterhaven come to mind.
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:07, Tue 17 Apr 2012.