D&D 5E Yet Another Take on Searching, Passive Perception etc

Like so many other people, I've struggled with finding a good way to handle players perceiving hidden items in the dungeon. I've read dozens of threads/posts here and elsewhere on the subject, and there's a lot of good advice out there - particularly from [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] here and (very differently!) the AngryGM.

Here are my goals:

1. I want player skill to be relevant; there should be a way (but not a trivial way) for players to find hidden items with little or no random input from the dice.
2. Players who invest in the Perception skill should see some concrete benefit from doing so...
3. ... but Perception shouldn't be a skill tax either
4. Discourage the automatic "I search the room" thing - this sort of generic searching should be a fallback, and there should be a meaningful cost to doing it
5. Some sensible degree of realism about the effectiveness of actively searching a room vs just walking into it - the whole Passive Perception "autoscan" thing has never sat well with me, but at the same time there clearly are differences in people's basic observation skills

I'm not bothered about RAW, although in general I'd like to stick as close as possible to the spirit of the 5e system. Here's what I'm thinking of doing:

1. In order to notice things "passively" you need to be paying some degree of attention - and focusing on something else prevents that. In practice, when moving through a dungeon environment, characters must choose between:
   • Keeping an eye out for secret doors/traps
   • Staying alert for monsters
   • Mapping (at least one person must do this or I keep the rest of the map hidden on the VTT and you only see your immediate surroundings)
2. Characters not looking for hidden things don't get their PP compared to any detection DCs.
3. There is no "auto-search" mechanism. Searching is an explicit action that must be declared (see below)
4. Passive perception scores act as a gate on information given to PCs based on just walking at exploration pace through the dungeon, or entering a room and doing a quick scan to see what's there. As a guideline, I would normally set the DC to perceive something in this way 5 higher than the DC to perceive it during an active search. A well-constructed secret door might have a detection DC of 20, requiring a passive perception of 25 to see just by walking into the room - and quite possibly 30 in a low-light environment. In practice this would restrict instant detection of secrets to characters that have invested very heavily in perception - and there is still plenty of room for failure at high levels with a combination of bad lighting and especially effective craftsmanship.
5. I would generally also include other hints as to the existence of something hidden; the more helpful hints would be gated behind detection DCs 5-10 less than the detection DC of the hidden item itself, making them instantly available (via PP) to the more perceptive party members, and easily findable via an explicit search
6. Doing an "I search the room" search on a well-furnished 10x10 room reasonably thoroughly takes 10 minutes; players make an active perception roll to do so, with no "passive floor". DCs should be set based on common sense of what is findable in this way - and something things might be nigh-on impossible to find in this timescale.
7. Spending 1 hour searching a room gives you a "take 20" result.
8. Instead of saying "I search the room" players can choose to go all OSR and call out specific ways in which they're going to search. Depending on what they say this is likely to entail an auto-success or an auto-fail - or there could be some element of doubt involving a roll at a modified DC. With careful play hidden items should be findable with no dice rolls based on just hints available from PP.
9. WANDERING MONSTERS! Time has a cost. Taking an hour to search pretty much guarantees you're going to run into trouble. Wandering monsters provide no or much reduced XP or little in the way of treasure - they are pure obstacle.

I *think* this basically achieves what I'm going for. What problems am I setting myself up for here? What have I missed?

Cheers,

Obreon said:

Like so many other people, I've struggled with finding a good way to handle players perceiving hidden items in the dungeon. I've read dozens of threads/posts here and elsewhere on the subject, and there's a lot of good advice out there - particularly from @iserith here and (very differently!) the AngryGM.

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Thanks for the mention!

Obreon said:

1. In order to notice things "passively" you need to be paying some degree of attention - and focusing on something else prevents that. In practice, when moving through a dungeon environment, characters must choose between:
   • Keeping an eye out for secret doors/traps
   • Staying alert for monsters
   • Mapping (at least one person must do this or I keep the rest of the map hidden on the VTT and you only see your immediate surroundings)

Click to expand...

I do Keeping Watch as traps and monsters (basically "dangers"), but I've thought about doing monsters separately from secret doors/traps. So I'd be interested in hearing what the impact on actual play is. The Mapping options seems like it could work well in the VTT format. What I generally do is make Mapping worth gold from selling or trading the source map (not copies). I outlined some other options in this post here. This can vary from game to game, depending on what's important in that campaign.

Obreon said:

1. Characters not looking for hidden things don't get their PP compared to any detection DCs.
2. There is no "auto-search" mechanism. Searching is an explicit action that must be declared (see below)
3. Passive perception scores act as a gate on information given to PCs based on just walking at exploration pace through the dungeon, or entering a room and doing a quick scan to see what's there. As a guideline, I would normally set the DC to perceive something in this way 5 higher than the DC to perceive it during an active search. A well-constructed secret door might have a detection DC of 20, requiring a passive perception of 25 to see just by walking into the room - and quite possibly 30 in a low-light environment. In practice this would restrict instant detection of secrets to characters that have invested very heavily in perception - and there is still plenty of room for failure at high levels with a combination of bad lighting and especially effective craftsmanship.
4. I would generally also include other hints as to the existence of something hidden; the more helpful hints would be gated behind detection DCs 5-10 less than the detection DC of the hidden item itself, making them instantly available (via PP) to the more perceptive party members, and easily findable via an explicit search
5. Doing an "I search the room" search on a well-furnished 10x10 room reasonably thoroughly takes 10 minutes; players make an active perception roll to do so, with no "passive floor". DCs should be set based on common sense of what is findable in this way - and something things might be nigh-on impossible to find in this timescale.
6. Spending 1 hour searching a room gives you a "take 20" result.
7. Instead of saying "I search the room" players can choose to go all OSR and call out specific ways in which they're going to search. Depending on what they say this is likely to entail an auto-success or an auto-fail - or there could be some element of doubt involving a roll at a modified DC. With careful play hidden items should be findable with no dice rolls based on just hints available from PP.
8. WANDERING MONSTERS! Time has a cost. Taking an hour to search pretty much guarantees you're going to run into trouble. Wandering monsters provide no or much reduced XP or little in the way of treasure - they are pure obstacle.

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Here it seems like there might be a little more prep to stick to what you've outlined here for determining DCs and gated information, if I'm reading you right. That might not be a concern for you however - I just prefer less prep. Sometimes I do no XP for wandering monsters (depends on campaign), but definitely no treasure. It definitely works as a trade-off players can understand: "Do I spend time doing this thing at the risk of a no-XP, no-gold combat?" And when they are low on resources, some real tension can be created considering this trade-off and waiting to see the result of the wandering monster check...

Obreon said:

I *think* this basically achieves what I'm going for. What problems am I setting myself up for here? What have I missed?

Cheers,

Click to expand...

It looks like it will work to achieve your goals. I'd like to hear how it goes in actual play.

Keep in mind that having a Passive Perception that beats a secret doors DC doesn't have to grant all the information.
I'll often have the PC with the successful Passive Perception notice signs of the presence of a secret door or trap: scratches on the floor, a strange breeze or smell. Which in turn prompts the kind of active searching it sounds like you're after.

Obreon said:

Here are my goals:

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2-4 all bear directly on 1, and are probably as close as you can reasonably get. For instance, perception useful but not a tax means balancing skills and the ways you call for their use such that there aren't obvious-best choices, either at chargen not in play. Good luck with that.

. Here's what I'm thinking of doing:

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1-4: PP, IMHO, should be viewed as a DM tool. It helps you decide who should notice things /that you want noticed/, anyway - you can take this as far as describing the same things differently to different players depending on the PCs respective PPs and other skills, bacgrounds, etc. It gives you a DC to roll stealth &c against when you need to resolve uncertainty (behind the screen), without tipping off your players.
You shouldn't ever bother comparing PP to a DC, either call for a check if the players actions would suggest a possibility of noticing something, or roll an appropriate check vs the passive score if there's no such action.

6,7,9 gives a straightforward logistical challenge of time resource & risk vs potential to find something. An hour-long search by one PC might be an opportunity for others to rest, too.

8) can lead to 'pixel bitching,' as players realize they can skip search mechanics that may not be in their favor by just getting more explicit in their action declarations..

Passive perception gives a hint that may initiate a more thorough search.
Passive investigation may do the same.

The difference for me is:
Perception allows to notice things that are there.
Investigation notices things that are either absent or wrong.

Example:
Passive Perception lets you notice scratches on the floor.
Passive Investigation lets you notice that the wall between two rooms are unusually thick.
Percetion lets you find a secret door by feeling a small gap. Investigation lets you find the door by following the scratched to their source or deduce the location and shape of the item responsible for the scratches.

See how both approaches may be mixed and it is not too difficult to distinguish between investigation and active and passive.
Sometimes both skills are useful sometimes only one of them. Sometimes none...

Tony Vargas said:

2-4 all bear directly on 1, and are probably as close as you can reasonably get. For instance, perception useful but not a tax means balancing skills and the ways you call for their use such that there aren't obvious-best choices, either at chargen not in play. Good luck with that.

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Yeah, I'm aware that it's never going to be perfect. I just want to try and make an incremental improvement against the default "Roll Perception... you see a secret door" without utterly devaluing all the mechanical options surrounding Perception. If this was easy there wouldn't be so many discussions about it!

Tony Vargas said:

1-4: PP, IMHO, should be viewed as a DM tool. It helps you decide who should notice things /that you want noticed/, anyway - you can take this as far as describing the same things differently to different players depending on the PCs respective PPs and other skills, bacgrounds, etc. It gives you a DC to roll stealth &c against when you need to resolve uncertainty (behind the screen), without tipping off your players.
You shouldn't ever bother comparing PP to a DC, either call for a check if the players actions would suggest a possibility of noticing something, or roll an appropriate check vs the passive score if there's no such action.

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Agreed. I've spelled out all the DC stuff to make clear where I'd be pitching things, but effectively it's just a framework to help me as the DM approach a greater level of consistency in the detail I describe to players based on their characters' Perception abilities. I have no issue with the whole "PP gives deterministic predictable results" thing because a) I generally won't be giving *all* the information out based on a character's PP - just the initial hints and b) I think my players will appreciate the whole "Seer Sharpeyes notices a strange puddle of water in the corner of the room" thing just as much as if they'd had to roll a die for it. And yes, I do Stealth vs PP as well, although I don't roll much behind the screen because I generally try and leave the rolls until they have a directly perceptible outcome ("4 Goblins jump out at you from nowhere!")

Tony Vargas said:

8) can lead to 'pixel bitching,' as players realize they can skip search mechanics that may not be in their favor by just getting more explicit in their action declarations..

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True, but that's kind of the point - depending on where you draw the line on "pixel bitching". Avoiding search mechanics that aren't in their favour by intelligent engagement with the environment as described? Great. What I was looking for. Explicitly searching every described item in every room in the hope that one of them hides something? I'm going to be charging you some 10 minute searches with accompanying WM checks for that. In the end this will come down to a judgement call on my part, but I'm hoping it shouldn't be too hard to do it in a way that feels fair and consistent.

iserith said:

The Mapping options seems like it could work well in the VTT format.

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I'm especially excited about trying this in conjunction with the forthcoming improvements to Dynamic Lighting/Fog of War on Roll20. If you want the desaturated "where we've been" map view turned on, better designate a mapper!

iserith said:

Here it seems like there might be a little more prep to stick to what you've outlined here for determining DCs and gated information, if I'm reading you right.

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Yes, initially, but I think that's probably just a function of me having less confidence and experience as a DM. Eventually I think it should become more instinctive - knowing roughly how much detail/what sort of hints to describe to characters with differing levels of perception abilities. Right now it takes me a non-trivial amount of time to dream up a secret door + hints that aren't either a) crashingly obvious or b) impossibly obscure. But I figure that will get easier with practice.

Valmarius said:

Keep in mind that having a Passive Perception that beats a secret doors DC doesn't have to grant all the information.
I'll often have the PC with the successful Passive Perception notice signs of the presence of a secret door or trap: scratches on the floor, a strange breeze or smell. Which in turn prompts the kind of active searching it sounds like you're after.

Click to expand...

Yes, that's how I'd like it to work most of the time in practice. The tricky bit is combining that with the option for "generic" room searching without breaking the perception mechanics somewhere. If you want to allow a secret door to be found with a DC20 Perception check and a 10 minute search, you need to come up with a reason why the guy with 18 Wis, Perception Expertise and the Alert feat only gets a hint as to its presence rather than outright seeing it.

That's why I wanted to make explicit the idea that seeing things without searching was harder and had a higher DC. WotC did this in some of the earlier 5e adventures, I believe, but then apparently decided that it wasn't the right approach, and just gave single DCs for secrets/traps. It's odd, because to me, having different DCs based on the manner in which you're looking (casual glance vs thorough search) makes perfect sense and solves a lot of the problems with the system (providing there's also a cost for searching).

The insanely twitchy guy with 25 Passive Perception is still probably going to see a lot of stuff outright - but he's invested in expertise in Perception, a Feat and presumably some ASIs to get his WIS up to 20, so I'm fine with that. There's always dim light, masterwork construction and magic to push the DCs higher if I really want to provide that sort of challenge at higher levels.

I have made a clear split between Perception and Investigation.

You use Perception to see living things (like monster ambushes, or the scout in the tower).

You use Investigation to see dead things (like a hidden tripwire, or a peculiar book).

To me this is a much more immediately *playable* distinction.

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CapnZapp said:

I have made a clear split between Perception and Investigation.

You use Perception to see living things (like monster ambushes, or the scout in the tower).

You use Investigation to see dead things (like a hidden tripwire, or a peculiar book).

To me this is a much more immediately *playable* distinction.

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

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Yeah, I guess that might help with "everyone takes Perception" problem a bit - but even if I now have two skills in play I still have to deal with all the stuff around passives + bringing player skill into it.

I can see how your distinction makes for an easy game mechanic; personally I don't find it feels that meaningful from a game fiction POV. This isn't directly relevant to my original post, but it brings up some interesting limitations in the 5e skill breakdown. Some examples of how you might become aware of items in a room:

1. Something catches your eye as you walk in
2. You scan a room and notice something
3. You walk around a room, looking closely at everything in it
4. You search a room, opening drawers, pulling books off shelves, looking to see everything that can be seen
5. You search a room, looking for hidden things
6. You search a room, looking for one particular hidden thing
7. You deduce the presence of a hidden object from visual clues that you can see.

There are no sharp dividing lines here, but, in broad terms, the first 3 rely largely on your ability to take in visual detail and process it consciously. People who are more capable of focusing their visual attention, at storing visual detail in their memory, and at recalling other visual details to make connections between them ("I've seen one of those before") are going to perform better at this task. Once trained, much of this happens passively - you just notice things - but higher levels of detail may require closer or longer examination which would require an active engagement with the subject matter.

The second 3 things involve more methodology. No matter how carefully you stare at the carpet you aren't going to see the trapdoor underneath it unless there are particular clues to its presence (outline showing throw the carpet, drag marks where the carpet has been moved etc). But someone skilled in searching a room will immediately think: "I should move the carpet in case there's something under it". There's a certain sort of lateral thinking involved here to look at an arrangement of objects and imagine where other objects might be hidden within it. In the case of deliberately hidden objects, that may also involve an ability to double-guess the thought processes of the person doing the hiding. Although there's this intellectual component to it, searching is very definitely an *activity* that involves interaction with the environment. Of course, you might be brilliant at the required sort of spatial reasoning, but incredibly inattentive - so you know where to look but miss things when you do!

Item 7 is a slightly odd one. The intellectual component is closely related to the previous three, but rather than being a consciously directed activity ("searching") it's something that just pops into your mind as a self-evident conclusion from the visual evidence available to you. It's not too much of a stretch to say that it relies on a similar mental skillset as searching, but in the game it works differently because it doesn't really fit the model of players declaring actions and the GM adjudicating the results. Unlike in the simple perception case ('noticing'), it's also tricky to fold it into the phase of "GM describes the environment", because that amounts to the GM describing the character's thought process. This robs the player of the opportunity to reach the conclusions for themselves, and also threatens the player's sense of agency. How much this matters will naturally depend on the player.

In D&D 5e, items 1-3 fall clearly under Perception for me. It's not especially clear how to deal with the varying degrees of active engagement required - passives vs active rolls, hidden vs open etc - but the skill involved seems clear. Personally I wouldn't want to draw a line between living/dead that cuts across this, because I don't find that a convincing model. YMMV.

Items 4-6 are trickier. In previous editions this would have been Search, but that doesn't exist any more. There's some sense in this being an Intelligence-based skill, although as noted, success will still rely to some degree on your ability to Perceive things as well as reason about where they might be. Some people think that this is what Investigation is for - basically a drop-in replacement for Search - but a) that contradicts the guidance given in the rules and subsequent clarifications and b) I think it's pretty clear that Investigation also covers a wider range of other research - looking things up in books, solving logical problems etc. and I see very little connection between these latter skills and those involved in searching a room methodically.

Item 7 is pretty clearly Investigation; but making it an active roll feels weird and creates all sorts of meta-gamey problems, whereas relying on passive Investigation creates different problems with player agency.

In the end it's all a bit of a fudge to keep the skill system simple, and as a result it's hard to make it convincing from a simulationist perspective. What I do at the moment:

• 1-6 are all perception. Anything that involves an action (searching or examining) uses an active roll, anything else is resolved based on passive perception - but the DCs for noticing are generally higher than finding things by closer examination. This completely ignores the Intelligence component of searching but it streamlines game play and removes a lot of arguments, because there's one mechanical system for finding things rather than a lot of squabbling over whether something is a "search" or a "spot"
• 7 doesn't have a mechanical resolution. If I provide visual clues, its up to the players to draw conclusions from that; otherwise they have to use Perception to find the hidden item via a search
• Investigation is reserved for active intellectual problem solving or research. Examining a mechanism to find out how it works/how to disable it. Finding information in a book. Solving some complex puzzle (although generally I'd only include puzzles if the players like them, in which case they'll solve them with player skill rather than rolls)
• I basically don't use passive Investigation at all

I could see an argument for pushing 4-6 into Investigation - also unrealistic but perhaps no more so - which would make the Int/Wis choice more interesting and make Investigation a more valuable skill. But then searching a room becomes a more complicated thing to adjudicate - you really need a Perception roll to see what visual clues are picked up AND an Investigation roll to determine how effectively the search was conducted - and then you need to decide which information to connect to which roll. In practice I think anyone with a high INT will argue that they are alway searching, and anyone with a high WIS will arguing that they are perceiving. Unless there's a clear heuristic for deciding when each applies, I don't think splitting them up like this will help with game balance much.