Alert to the hidden traps and secret doors found in many dungeons, you gain the following benefits:
You have advantage on Wisdom (Perception) and Intelligence (Investigation) checks made to detect the presence of secret doors.
You have advantage on saving throws made to avoid or resist traps.
You have resistance to the damage dealt by traps.
Travelling at a fast pace doesn't impose the normal -5 penalty on your passive Wisdom (Perception) score.
Dungeon Delver: The Tomb Raider
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Dungeon Delver screams retro D&D. Every element of it cares about the dungeons of old with secret doors on otherwise plain walls and a seemingly endless barrage of traps you bring a ten-foot long pole with you to navigate past. A lot of the modern dungeon designs have wildly deviated from these old ways; turns out a lot of people aren’t super into crawling square by square through a constant stream of potentially lethal traps that can destroy you off of a simple misstep. At most modern tables, you aren’t coming anywhere CLOSE to considering this feat. If you are playing a more classic sword and sorcery 5th edition dungeon crawler, how good is Dungeon Delver to you?
My gut reaction is it's probably quite bad. Help being a common tool to grant advantage on skill checks and attack rolls can make the advantage on Perception and Investigation checks feel redundant. Advantage on saving throws against traps is fine to have, especially when paired with cantrips I’m normally not crazy about like Resistance. For the same reasons I don’t suspect Resistance is good at those tables, I doubt this benefit is too major. There just can’t possibly be that many traps that ask you to make one save or take a bunch of damage or suffer a major penalty. Traps have evolved past “You didn’t see it, make save or take damage”. They tend to be complex escape room-like compounding events, and while a save will often be involved in the overall experience, you’re probably not going to need to pass every save or certainly die.
This ties nicely to the resistance to trap damage; again, even in the grindiest, most old-school feeling spike traps and boulder traps, resistance to trap damage just doesn’t come up enough that I think it justifies taking a feat for it. An increased Con or Dex will provide the benefits you’re looking for here, and also apply to the myriad of random encounters and planned fights every dungeon tends to entail. A core feature of old-school dungeon crawling is monster patrols and monsters as traps; none of the bonuses to trap avoidance help you in that instance.
Finally, it removes a penalty I guarantee you the majority of DMs and players don’t know exists. Up until reading this feat for the 5th time I forgot this was a rule for it. I DM multiple times weekly for groups of varying familiarity and styles; I have not once considered reducing passive perception when moving at a fast pace. This then ties into the retro dungeon experience terribly; a major component of that style of play is methodical, planned delving. The ten foot pole is an iconic item for a reason: it was one of the cheapest and most consistent ways to set off traps from a moderate distance. Yes, there will be some instances where you’ll be running from or towards something, and don’t want to get punctured by 1,000 arrows from the arrow hall trap, but removing this penalty isn’t going to matter in the vast majority of cases when you’re exploring into the depths of Undermountain or the Tomb of Horrors.
When you pull all these together, they still feel lacking. A +2 Dexterity seems like it will help you almost as much in most of these circumstances, and also be useful for improving your AC, attack rolls, and saving throws against non-traps. If you’re trying to be the party member who finds the traps and secret doors, multiclassing rogue for Expertise or picking up the Skilled feat to get proficiency is going to have a consistent boon that will work with the existing advantage structure the game is played with. I just can’t imagine even at the tables where frequent traps pop up time and time again this being worth it over an ability score improvement or even just a feat like Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster to get some tools to aid in delving in a new way.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.