D&D 5E I don't use Passive Perception

Nebulous said:

I had a player last week bragging about his low-level characters passive perception 20. The fact that he can even get that leads me to think the numbers are broken in this game sometimes. Regardless I will not let traps be automatically found or secret doors noticed the moment he passes them by. I will just keep in mind that he is highly perceptive.

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Then tell him that and give him a different feat choice than observant. Then the numbers get more to your liking and he didn't waste a resource. I absolutely hate scale the numbers up behind the scenes DM style.

iserith said:

Keeping watch for monsters and traps (which is when we may use passive Perception) is a trade-off against performing other tasks, unless you're a ranger in favored terrain. If the tasks have an upside approaching the benefit of keeping watch - a chance to avoid surprise and notice traps - then players will tend to mix up what they do. Some will then be automatically surprised if a lurking monster attacks or blunder into traps since they're focused on other tasks. Here is an example of this from one of my dungeon delves:

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In addition, discovering a trap is only the first step in the challenge. There's also figuring out how it works and disarming it. Further, you should probably try telegraphing traps anyway by including some clues when describing the environment such that players who are paying attention have a chance to pick up on it and interact with the environment in a way that allows them to discover the trap without reference to passive checks.

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I like this a lot. Is it your Homebrew or is it in one of the books somewhere?

Nebulous said:

I had a player last week bragging about his low-level characters passive perception 20. The fact that he can even get that leads me to think the numbers are broken in this game sometimes. Regardless I will not let traps be automatically found or secret doors noticed the moment he passes them by. I will just keep in mind that he is highly perceptive.

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I don't often use feats in my games, but I have no issue with Observant when I do because the player who wants to notice things has to be focused on a given task. He or she doesn't get to spot everything, just the things on which he or she is focused. So the character can probably spot all the traps and hidden monsters, but will miss the secret doors. Or vice versa. Unless it's a ranger in favored terrain!

FrogReaver said:

I like this a lot. Is it your Homebrew or is it in one of the books somewhere?

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If you take all the various rules on Exploration in the PHB and DMG and make sense of them, that is what you get. In my view, anyway. I stop short of calling it "homebrew." More like "reformatting."

This comes down to a DM design philiosophy: Do you design your dungeon with the PCs in mind, or do you design a dungeon agnostic to the PC's abilities?

If you design a dungeon that caters perfectly to the PCs, then you can really optimize the difficulty of their challenges so that everything is perfectly balanced. Perfect sounds good, but I find this ends up being pretty bland in the end as everything starts to feel the same. It also results in situations like this: Where the DM decides if the PCs beat something or not before the battle begins. Either you decide they'll beat the passive perception or they will not - you know in advance.

If you design a dungeon without considering the abilities of the PCs, you get much greater variety in feel. The PCs will blow through some of the challenges they are well suited to tackle, but will really struggle (or even find impossible) some challenges that they just can't handle. This can be disastrous. I took this approach several years ago and put a kobold sorcerer in the game. The PCs ended up fighting him on a giant grassy plain. He flew into the sky and cast a shield spell (which had a longer duration back then). It was at that moment I as a DM, and the players as PCs, realized that they had absolutely no way to hurt him with limited range weapons and only magic missiles as a ranged spell left: but he had multiple fireballs, magic missiles, and other damaging spells he could rain down on the 6th level PCs. TPK. I prefer the feel of these games, and it is one of the reasons why stock modules are so fun for players, but you're running risks here... however, there isn't the 'I choose whether passive perception wins' problem. You don't plan for it, so if they beat it, they beat it.

In the end, I settled upon my preferred strategy: I build agnostic, and then adjust for party limitations (only). I make sure there will be no TPK because the party has a glaring weakness, but I check for that after just building an adventure I'd throw at any party of a given level.

This allows PCs that invest in being super detectives with high passive perceptions to shine! When they just spot the trap, we highlight how most people would have missed it and it gives them a chance to feel like a Sherlock Holmes type hero. However, if the story I built involves a super secret hidden thing and it happens to exceed their perception ability, they feel like it was super hidden, not that I chose to make it something they would not find.

jgsugden said:

In the end, I settled upon my preferred strategy: I build agnostic, and then adjust for party limitations (only). I make sure there will be no TPK because the party has a glaring weakness, but I check for that after just building an adventure I'd throw at any party of a given level.

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You're more kind than I am. If a party has a glaring weakness, I put that in the "Not My Problem" category. It just becomes part of the challenge for them to allocate their resources and make choices accordingly.

iserith said:

If you take all the various rules on Exploration in the PHB and DMG and make sense of them, that is what you get. In my view, anyway. I stop short of calling it "homebrew." More like "reformatting."

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It's a great example of how much is buried in the rulebooks under mountains of words.

dpkress2 said:

With passive perception what is the point of a trap? The player either automatically finds it OR I jack the spot DC and the player automatically doesn't find it. This is barring actively searching for traps of course.

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My players use Passive Perception, but I actually roll dice to set the DC of the traps. So instead of active rolling to find a static DC of a trap, I roll active "setting up traps" checks (usually INT [Deception] of the person I assume set the trap) against the static DC of player's PP. So the DCs to find them can be random even their PP isn't.

I also don't tell people "You see a trap!" when their PP has them notice something... I instead narrate what they find odd about what they see. They can then roll active Perception checks to get more information about the trap, which will then affect the DC to disarm it.

(And as an extra thing... replace all instances of 'Perception' in the previous paragraphs with 'Investigation', as I use Perception only for living creatures that hide, and I use Investigation for all hidden inanimate things, like traps, secret doors, etc.)

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dpkress2 said:

I'm looking for arguments in favor of Passive Perception or perhaps alternate ways to use it.

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I use passive Perception in a way similar to that which [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] does, which I think is strongly in-line with what a straight reading of the section, Activity While Travelling, on pages 182-83 of the PHB, would suggest. With reference to hidden threats (i.e. traps and creatures), you are assumed to be actively searching for them (i.e. "watching for danger") at all times, unless you have turned your attention to some other task instead. That doesn't mean the DM needs to call for a roll. A passive score is used instead of a roll whenever the attempted task is done repeatedly, or the DM wants to keep the ability check secret from the players. I think both criteria potentially apply in the case of keeping watch for hidden threats while travelling. Also, which rank you are marching in can affect whether or not it is possible to notice a hidden threat. Taken all together, if the DM determines whether a character is fictionally positioned to notice a particular threat, both by the player's action declaration and by declared marching order, before resorting to a resolution method, then determining success or failure hinges more on the choices the players are making and less on what scores they have and what resolution method you use.

I mean, at the very least passive perception sets a DC for stealthing. It makes stealthing so simple, roll for stealth. OK its higher than these guys, only this one guy can notice you.

The other option is every time someone attempts to hide you get to have every creature roll perception really quick. OR hiding just flipping works, until someone actively looks for them using an action.

Passive perception just makes it all go so much smoother and quicker and more logically.


As soon as you realize that it doesn't see through walls,carpets, furniture, you realize many traps or important objects might still be hidden fairly easily.

"Removing the rug reveals a tile pattern on the floor, a Wisdom (Perception) check of 14 reveals one of the tiles is more worn"

"In the back of the closet, behind piles of clothes is a loose wall panel that can be noticed with a Wisdom (Perception) check of 15"

Neither of these are revealed by a person with passive perception of 20 entering the room. Both require doing something to actually have a chance to look at the hidden thing.


A player who uses a feat to get observant has given up a feat in order to get a benefit of spotting hidden things more easily. He could have just as easily picked Magic Initiate : Druid, and then grabbed guidance, produce flame, and goodberry, now that player is 1d4 better at every skill check that isn't super rushed, can also make a fire, and will never starve to death. He could have picked Inspiring leader and given out tons of temporary hit points, saving lots of player's (and npc's, they don't expire) lives.

But for some reason when people can notice traps or hiding creatures more consistently it just explodes some DMs minds. I am curious if they are just as quick to raise the DC of every trap in the world if the player picks expertise in perception.

Randomly rolling a perception check from the whole party every 5 feet isn't my idea of fun. If you want a trap to be an important part of a dungeon, make it an important part of the dungeon, not a roll x or take 3d6 poison damage. Make it a puzzlebox with keys hidden throughout the dungeon, or levers which run underground such that no indication of what each do can be determined by just rolling and hoping. If you want to just do damage to the players at random, then do it, you are the dm, you are empowered to do so, but don't pretend like you are taking the high moral ground.

As the DM your job isn't to defeat the players. That is fairly easy to do. "Oh an Ancient Red Dragon appears." "Oh just as you defeat it, it rises as a Dracolich!" It is to create part of the interactive narrative to entertain the players and yourself. If the player is picking something like Observant, he probably doesn't care to die to random poison arrow traps, find a more interesting encounter.