Okay. I wanna explain. When I say my little frontier scribe cleric/ranger’s fatal flaw is curiosity, what I mean is …
She’s on a semi-timed mission through some tunnels. She’s gotta reach the end before a certain (unknown) time limit trips and the BBEG’s plan goes off without a hitch. She is aware of this. She was also warned, ahead of time, that these tunnels have ancient anomalies in them, and if she comes across things with runes on them that she can’t read, to avoid them, because they’re dangerous as hell. So, obviously, she finds a stone door with strange runes on it. And she has a Helm of Comprehending Languages. So she just looks at it, just to see what it is, right? And translating the runes from an extinct dialect of giant, this is a shrine to a forgotten giant god of pleasures and diversions. She’s on a timed mission. She’s been warned about these doors. And she’s absolutely, positively smart enough to know, to figure it out, this is a god of pleasures and diversions. This is a lotus eater trap. Guaranteed. She goes in here, she fucks this up, she’s lost time and possibly lost the mission, and therefore the whole kingdom. For real. But.
I mean. You gotta look, right? It’s a shrine to a forgotten god. Her whole thing, as a cleric of Deneir, is to document knowledge so it won’t be lost. You gotta look. What’s in there? You gotta know.
Let’s just say, it’s a good job she is a cleric and her Wis save is decently high.
She also, at another point in these tunnels, stumbles across some herbivorous Underdark aberration that’s wandered up just peacefully grazing fungi, and her perception is high enough to notice that it’s only eating one kind of fungus. The pink ones. So like. Wanna try a fungus?
Again, it’s fortunate that she’s a cleric/ranger and her survival checks are also decently high. So she noticed it was flesh eating before she actually put it in her mouth.
Honest to Deneir, if her stealth, perception, and survival checks, and Wis and Dex saves, weren’t all as decent as they are, she would have been so dead. So many times over.
She’s high Wis, she has bonuses to Int skills. She’s decently smart, insightful, perceptive, pretty well read and pretty skilled in some extremely practical areas. But she’s also more than a little impulsive, and if it comes down to keeping herself safe or knowing what’s beyond the door … she’s gotta know what’s beyond the door. Now, she won’t push all the way, she has limits where the actual job that needs doing will override, but up until there’s a hard check? She’s gotta know.
And if that means I’ve gotta roll a lot of saving throws, well. There’s a reason she’s not back in a nice warm safe scriptorium or library, isn’t there? If you want to document something worth documenting, you gotta find something worth documenting. And, you know, sometimes that’s the dietary habits of underdark herbivores, and sometimes it’s what happens when you push open the doors you were warned about into the shrines of forgotten gods, just to see.
The two phrases she lives by are ‘do good recklessly’ and ‘curiosity killed the scribe, but satisfaction brought her back’.
And cure wounds. Maybe mostly cure wounds. Heh. But she’s got that too, so it’s all good.