D&D General Want to use traps? Make them obvious

[James Gasik]

Are you glancing around the room or did you just walk in? Perception.

Are you actively searching the room for traps? Investigation.

It’s a really bad way to run games, in my opinion. It turns everything into a button and lets the players turn off their brains. I’m more a fan of the old-school way of actively engaging with the environment. Not to the point of tedious pixel hunting, but I’d rather actively engage with the fiction instead of smash buttons.

That makes sense, but then there's passive Observation to consider. Which apparently means characters are always searching the area to some extent.