[3.5] Traps and Thoughts of the Hidden Mechanism

[Justis]

I think a couple of my friends and players scroll through these parts so if the code-phrase 'The Archmage's MAC-Tower in the sky' mean anything to you just stop reading guys.
So, my PCs are doing their usual song and dance [in the Bard's case literately] and I've got them running around doing the little dinky side-quests they chose when the rouge asked a solid question. If he 'beats' a trap that involves a crossbow then may he 'loot' the trap for said crossbow. I really didn't have an answer so I asked to put it off until I could find the relevant rules, didn't want to slow down a fairly fast segment of the games as the question was asked out of character.
To begin with I've looked up the rules for traps and they're odd but solid in their rule set and then I noticed CR calculator and began running numbers, as my current ruling is going to be that you get an appropriate number of trap parts which can be sold for the correct gold amount. However, the rouge is canny and often has he pulled some very off the wall stuff with his builds so I want to clear up a particular debate before it even starts.
Would you guys allow a canny rouge to pull a crossbow out of the wall? Because I can totally see the rouge in the group drooling over a non-magical crossbow that deals +4 damage on the shot, a thing that can happen with the trap rules.

[OldTrees1]

Yes. I would allow the trap expert to salvage parts of traps that are not broken by the way the trap is disarmed.

[Jack_Simth]

Welcome to the territory of "things the rules were not intended to cover".

For various forms of handheld weapons, I'd be inclined to say "No" - not for balance reasons, but for thematic ones: When you're building a trap as a trap, generally speaking, you're going to meld the grip of the weapon into the device, or build the weapon specifically to be held by the device; you're not going to build the device to hold the weapon correctly (waste of effort). The only real exception to this would be quickly improvised one-shot traps - like, say, the guy who rigs a crossbow to fire when the door opens by way of a bit of string and a few eye hooks. Anything more complex than that? The weapon was altered while being installed, and doesn't grip right. You can probably make it work, but it's treated as an improvised weapon (which is to say, -4 to attack rolls).

That said, there ARE a lot of things you could reasonably harvest. Arrows, crossbow bolts, darts, et cetera? Those will almost always be rather standard. Any resetting trap that makes use of poison is going to have some form of poison reservoir; if the trap is intended to last any meaningful amount of time, it will even be in some form of preserved state. That could be harvested.

Do, however, stick to your guns on the value of things. Anything that he's pulling from the trap to use? Clearly, that was one of the saleable components if it's still in usable shape. Figure out what you'd charge for the thing (whatever it is) if the player wanted to commission it, and deduct the appropriate value from the saleable parts.

[Justis]

Thanks guys.