Baiting

This article is about the PvP tactic. For the fishing process, see Fishing#Fishing rods and bait fishing.

Baiting (not to be confused with luring) is a fairly common player killing technique. It usually involves two or more people. One person, the bait, will wear many valuable items (obsidian cape, dragon helm, trimmed armour) that they will be guaranteed to drop if they die. The second and third persons, several ancient mages, will wait nearby. This was commonly performed around green dragons and the Mage Arena.

The bait will run through an area with several people and will try to entice a player to kill them, receiving the pickup penalty. The penalty prevents them from using Protect Item to protect their Godsword, Saradomin sword, or (less commonly) Abyssal whip. The ancient mages use Ice spells and Dragon dagger special attacks to quickly kill the victim, while the other mages continuously attacks him to prevent him from getting away if someone distracts the ancient mage. The person baited is usually not prepared for this, so he or she dies rather quickly.However many people use the baiting method to their advantage. They equip a Telkinetec Grab and grab the bait from a long distiance not giving the attackers a chance to attack. Making A LOT of money.

When woodcutting Macros were in RuneScape, many people lured them this same process, usually dropping yew logs around the Yew Trees around Melzar's Maze and letting the trail lead into level 28 and 42 Hobgoblins. The macros would then die. It is not known if Jagex supported this idea of luring macros or not.