Psikerlord#
Explorer
Hi everybodym
I'm not very good at math, but it seems to me that sometimes Passive Perception is more effective than the Active one.
One of the players in my group plays a 1 lvl. dex and wis based fighter, with 16 in Wisdom, who is Proficient in Perception, and has a Passive Perception of 15: definetely quite hard to surprise, just when he's not searching for anything in particular! ;-)!
What do you think, and what are your experiences about this topic?
Many thanks!
PP is broken, turning stealth PCs into super ninjas, and making traps auto detect or fail to detect with no randomisation involved (a spectacularly bad idea, why you want to take luck out of the game I don't know). Delete it from your game and just roll perception checks, which is how it worked in prior editions without any problems whatsoever, and as far as I'm aware, how most other RPG systems work.
If you're concerned about "tipping off" players by asking them to make rolls seemingly out of the blue, roll for them behind your screen, or get them to make 10 rolls at the start of the session, and use one of them.
You also dont need passive for lore checks, or strength checks, or anything else that is not a contested roll. Just make a ruling about whether if they have the skill or a certain Str score or whatever that they know or do the thing automatically without needing a roll.
If you're concerned about retries over and over - the answer is simply no retries unless it makes sense (breaking down a door, eventually you succeed, why even roll?) or the situation changes significantly. Taking 10 and taking 20 are probably the genesis of the passive rule, and are also broken, for similar reasons. Instead either (i) if time doesn't matter and the thing can be done, they just do it, or (ii) no retries unless the situation significantly changes.
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