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Drop Parties Near the Wilderness Before the Ditch (OBSOLETE) TruthScape Skill Secrets

NOTE: This page contains information about luring that is now obsolete. It is retained on the site for historical information purposes.

Perhaps the most insidious of all non-Wilderness lures were ones that involved player owned houses (POHs). These lures bothered me more than perhaps any other, because they resulted in people dying and losing items while using a feature where this was not supposed to be possible. Some variations were straight item scamming through betrayal of trust, while others were in fact bug abuse that Jagex wouldn’t fix.

The Construction skill, released in 2006, lets players design and build their own houses. Each POH can have up to 30 rooms of various types, some of which involve combat between players, or players and monsters. This combat is all supposed to be for fun, and it is not supposed to be possible for anyone to die in a POH. In fact, the RuneScape Knowledge Base article on POH combat rooms says:

As always, please note that you cannot die in your house or a friend's house. If you die you will respawn safely and retain all items.

Unfortunately, this was not the case for many months. There were ways that clever, evil people could either kill you directly within their houses, or trick you into accidentally killing yourself as a result of house combat. I'll start by explaining the setup for these lures, and then describe the different ways that lurers “finished off” their victims.

Jagex never did directly address the various flaws that led to the specific kinds of house lures, but rather took a more generic approach. In July 2007, Jagex finally made all the house lures obsolete through an indirect change: they updated player owned houses so that if you are injured within one, you are healed when you leave. This made it impossible for scammers to try to get victims near death and then finish them off outside the house.

Here’s how it used to work.

The lurer would usually seek out someone whom he felt was either an easy target or was wearing an expensive item—especially a rare. He would invite the victim to a “house party” or “drop party” at his house. The lurer would have friends there as well, both to help with the scam, and so the victim didn't get scared off by being the only one there. This lure could be particularly lucrative because victims would even bring expensive items like rares into houses, believing them to be “safe”.

The lurer would turn on combat in his house so everyone could “have fun”. People would begin attacking each other, and some might die, respawn and come back into the house for more “fun”. Unknown to the victim, the lurer who owned the house was carefully watching his prey's health. As soon as the lurer found that the victim was close to death, he would spring the trap in one of several ways, which can be grouped into bug abuse kills and trust abuse kills.

In the simplest but nastiest kill, the lurer would kick the victim out of his house as he was near death but still in combat, trying to time it so that he died outside the house instead of within it—he would then die normally and drop his items, which the lurer and his friends could take. This was the most evil of the methods, because there was no warning or defence against it, and the victim had done nothing at all wrong. This was pure bug abuse, reportable under Rule #4.

A variation on this used the high-level Lunar Magicks spell Vengeance. When this spell is cast upon someone, that person will automatically hit “rebound” damage on the next person who hits him, amounting to 75% of the damage that the attacker did. The lurer would have a friend cast Vengeance Other on himself and other accomplices in on the scam. They then would either tell the victim to attack them, or hit the victim knowing that the victim probably has auto-retaliate on. When the victim hits anyone with Vengeance active, it will kick in, doing damage to the victim. The lurer tried to kick the victim out of the house at just the right time, so that the Vengeance damage kicked in outside the house, killing the victim for real.

One giveaway that the lurer was trying this gimmick was a bunch of high-level people with no armor: this was to increase the chance of the victim successfully hitting someone to activate the Vengeance rebound hit. They might also run around with Protection from Melee active; they want the victim to see this and do it as well, as this makes it easier to get the victim near death without actually dying. This nasty trick was also bug abuse.

These variations don't abuse bugs in the game, they just fall back on the usual scammer routine of telling lies to people to trick them into doing something foolish. The most common one involved the lurer kicking the victim out of his house when he had only a few hit points left. The lurer then “apologizes” for this and offers to help the victim by giving him some food: raw karambwan. The lurer even built a fire for the victim to cook it on—isn't that helpful?

Sure. Well, the reason they used this food is that if you have not completed the Tai Bwo Wannai quest, you can only cook it “partially”, which actually turns it into a damaging poison. Many victims didn't notice (or understand) the message that indicates that the food might be “a little suspect”. They ate it, were damaged 5 health, and died in front of the house, losing their items to the lurer.

Another method involved the lurer again kicking the person out when near death, then using various odd stories to convince the victim to put a piece of limestone into a furnace. He might lie to the victim, claiming it will turn the limestone into something valuable, ask the victim to do it as a condition of being let back into the house, or some other nonsense. Putting limestone into a furnace transforms it into quicklime—and does 8 damage to the one who does it if they are not wearing gloves (see Figure 126).

In both of these cases, the lurer is deliberately lying to the victim and could be reported for item scamming under Rule #2.

As mentioned, you are now healed when you leave a player owned house if you are injured within it, so these scams are obsolete. However, I still recommend being very careful about what you do in player owned houses, in case another lure is discovered in the future. As always, never take valuable items out of the bank that you are not willing to risk losing.

And in general, please use common sense when people are acting suspiciously. If someone goes to the trouble of kicking you from a house, giving you fish and building you a fire, you should start to smell a rat. And why would anyone bother trying to get you to do something weird like sticking limestone in a furnace unless there was some sort of catch you didn't know about?

Drop Parties Near the Wilderness Before the Ditch (OBSOLETE) TruthScape Skill Secrets