D&D General "I make a perception check."

[GMforPowergamers]

For me, and I think @Chaosmancer and @GMforPowergamers, the player declaring "I walk to the center of the room, looking for traps..." Is specific enough.

For @Charlaquin , "I walk to the center of the room, looking for traps..." or worse, "I walk to the center of the room using investigation..." Are not specific enough declarations because the player has not specified how the PC is accomplishing the stated activity(using the skill). While it's assumed the character has proficiency there is still a need to SPECIFICALLY declare how the character is accomplishing the task of investigating, looking for traps etc.

That about right?

i think you have the gist of it...

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Basically, yeah. Though I would note that my metric for whether the action succeeds, fails, or requires a check isn’t actually the specificity of the action; it’s that I try to picture the action and imagine if there’s a reasonable possibility of it achieving of the stated goal, if there’s a reasonable possibility of it not achieving the stated goal, and if not achieving the stated goal would have consequences. I only call for a check if all three are true. This is correlated with the specificity of the action, because a more specific action is less likely to leave room for uncertainty in the possible results, but the specificity isn’t itself the deciding factor.

Seems like a good summary.

I will note, I have had players go into more specific detail, if they have a very specific goal in mind, but it isn't very common.

I think we have come to the point where we have some idea of how we do things...

 

[James Gasik]

Sure, but again, Wisdom being tied as your second highest stat is pretty important. And getting a 16 instead of a 14 isn't nearly as good as getting proficiency in wisdom saves.

If it was easier to get proficiency in Wisdom saves, you'd be seeing people do that as well. I have no data, but I'm willing to bet that people who take Resilient choose Con or Wis more than any other save.

 

[Mort]

If it was easier to get proficiency in Wisdom saves, you'd be seeing people do that as well. I have no data, but I'm willing to bet that people who take Resilient choose Con or Wis more than any other save.

Hmmm, possibly, but I suspect Resilient Dex is right up there. Great for Dex fighters and many subclasses like Bladesingers. The two times I've seen Resilient Taken, it was Con and Dex.

 

[SteveC]

While true, I hardly ever see this. At least, not in recent years.

What I do see, though, is people who don’t understand Goal & Approach assume that what is being described is some form of pixelbitching. @iserith in particular gets accused of this a lot, by people who (at least from my observations) don’t seem to understand what he is describing.

Honestly, I think that's what this entire long discussion is about. If a GM is expecting more detail out of their players for how they interact with the environment, they either have to get the players buy-in or it becomes a pixelbitching exercise.

This discussion is coming at things from the GM perspective: what do the players have to say? I suspect they expect a more basic approach to exploring the game world, or don't want a 'gotcha' moment. I know that when I start talking with a GM about searching for traps and they want me to explain specifically how I'm doing it, I often think "I'm not the expert on traps that my character is, and all we're going for is a 'oh, you put your hand in the wrong place' sort of thing."

 

[DND_Reborn]

Not directing this at anyone in particular, just some general statements which agree with what some others have said, or expound on some other posts...

1. Wisdom is super useful besides Perception and is key to many build-types or classes: Cleric, Druid, Monk, Ranger.
2. High DEX or CON is generally desirable, but not necessarily both. IME, WIS is a top level ability (usually first, second, or third).
3. ANY investment in a skill proficiency is a high cost. Most PCs begin with just 4, so yeah spending 25% on a skill because you feel you need it is pretty much par for the course.
4. PERCEPTION is NOT the be-all-end-all many people feel it is. While being surprised sucks, creatures that are good at doing it should be good at doing it and successfully surprising their opponents.
5. Even if you make Perception into an ability like Awareness or whatever, you are just shifting the "must have" to another thing instead of the skill. I think the focus would be better to take the "must have" element away from it--since it really isn't a "must have", nothing in the game really is IME.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Wow. You want to come out and say that directly instead of just implying it? You think I am actively trying to maneuver PCs into unavoidable traps, and just… lying about not doing so?

I am consistently impressed both with the content and tone of your posts, so I offer this as an ally: the undercurrent of hostility you are facing here, even prior to the last post, makes me wonder why you continue to engage.

 

[Charlaquin]

So things a low level party either can't do, or the Bard taking one of their only two expertises and instead of focusing on literally anything else, focusing on perception. Only then will you accept that they have invested heavily in their ability to spot danger.

I generally don't start assuming a level of investment based on how they could build in the future, and instead look at how they build with the resources they had. And I don't dismiss an investment just because they could have possibly done more.

You’re still ignoring feats, which are entirely possible to get at first level, either from variant human or custom lineage, or from backgrounds.

All I am doing is not altering the terms of the example. Isn't that the goal? Isn't the goal not to shift the goal posts until we are both arguing entirely different situations tailor-made to support our arguments?

I’m not shifting the goal-posts, I’m saying that the fact that this particular party lacking a specialist in perception is not a flaw with my DMing style.

All the fighter could have done is make wisdom their highest score. Or wait a few levels to get feats and such to improve their perception even more. Is that seriously what you would have expected from them?

And the problem with "not having a specialist" is that there may not be a need for a stealth specialist, there may not be a need for a persuasion specialist, there may not be a need for an arcane knowledge specialist.

There is always need for a perception specialist. So, you must always have someone with high wisdom, investing in those feats, in every single game. Or otherwise it is "on them" for not being prepared.

I don’t disagree that Perception has disproportionately more utility than a lot of other skills, and would be open to arguments that it should accordingly not be competing with narrower skills for character building resources. Sounds like a good argument for the What’s Wrong with Perception thread.

So no matter what the party does, unless they spend gold to get more bodies, they cannot possibly even attempt to try and be safe.

That’s a bit hyperbolic. Without spending gold to get more bodies they can’t do everything. They have to prioritize and make sacrifices. They might prioritize safety over navigation, as you indicate you would do, or they might risk the possibility of getting surprised. Or they might decide that not having to sacrifice one or the other is worth the gold expenditure. That’s a meaningful decision, which to me is what the game is all about. What do you sacrifice when you can’t have everything you want? What do you risk when you can’t avoid risking something? These are the questions that reveal the most about the characters who make them and what they truly value, and are accordingly the questions I’m most interested in answering through play.

Especially with how you were running it before where they needed one person to look for traps, one person to look for secret doors, and one person to look for monsters. At that point I guess just forgo the mapping and agree to get utterly lost, because trying to not get lost just leads to you getting ambushed.

Now, let's set aside your belief that the rules support this, because my belief is that they don't and you have made it clear you hate discussing our beliefs. What is the advantage of doing it your way? What is the advantage of making this such an incredibly hard decision that will always leave them vulnerable no matter what they do?

I'll go first. The advantage of my way, where looking for danger includes all the possible types of danger is that the party doesn't need to hire NPCs (which means I don't need to roleplay those NPCs and the players don't need for me to inflate the coin they receive to cover expenses). Additionally, they can feel like they actually have a chance to be safe. They are in a dangerous area, but when they declare they are on the lookout for danger, they are on the look out for danger. This matches with what they are imagining in their minds when they declare the action. And it gives them the ability to do other things as they travel, without feeling like those things will get them killed. This can vary widely, covering everything from discussing with a freed NPC while they travel, or fiddling with a strange magical device they discovered.

The advantage of my approach is that it makes the very act of navigating the dungeon a part of the challenge. The dungeon isn’t just a backdrop for encounters to happen in, it is a hazard in and of itself. And as I get at above, it creates difficult choices, which to me is the most interesting part of the game.

Because if someone is looking for ambushes, they should have a chance to spot the threat before they turn the blind corner. Maybe they see a shifting shadow, maybe they see a weapon glinting around that blind corner the enemy didn't properly conceal. Maybe there is a creak of leather as they shift.

See, that to me sounds like a telegraph. I would describe something like that if someone in the party was looking for danger and the monsters failed to beat that character’s passive perception with their dexterity (stealth) checks. Of course, to even set up such an ambush, the monsters would need to be aware of the characters’ presence - perhaps because the party was traveling at greater than a slow pace and therefore couldn’t attempt to move stealthy.

Then, after noticing the signs of a potential ambush, they tell the party that they think an ambush is ahead. Now, if they are dumb (which trained killers used to dangerous situations should never be assumed to be dumb) they are loud enough that the enemy charges out, which isn't an ambush, because no one is surprised. If they aren't dumb, then they have a chance to act before the enemy realizes they have been spotted. They may even counter-ambush, depending on their strengths and tactics.

Yeah, that sounds consistent with how I would run such a scenario.

The only way I see this not working is if looking for monsters preparing to ambush you can not possibly detect an ambush being set up around a blind corner, which I do not believe is the case.

Yet you believe it to be the case that looking for monsters preparing to ambush couldn’t detect one being set up on the other side of a secret door?

So, you've known since Tuesday when you posted this?

Ok, I see where the confusion is coming from. In the portion of that quote of mine that you bolded, I noted that “trying to find out if there are traps in the room” as the goal, not as part of the approach. You seem to be treating the goal itself as communicating information about the approach, where as I am treating them as entirely separate things. To me, “I try to find out if there are any traps by moving to the center of the room” comes across as comparable to “I try to tie my shoes by shouting at them,” in that neither seems to be an approach that could reasonably succeed at accomplishing the goal. You read “I try to find out if there are any traps by moving to the center of the room” as something like “I move to the center of the room while looking for traps” and treat the goal as implied; more comparable to saying “I shout at my shoes while trying to tie them.” When you clarified that you intended for “looking for traps” to be considered part of the approach, it became clear to me that there wasn’t enough information because “I try to find out if there are any traps in the room by moving to the center of the room and looking for traps” is redundant. Comparable to saying “I try to tie my shoes by shouting at them and trying to tie them.” The point of asking for approach as a separate item from goal is so that I can evaluate how you’re trying to achieve your goal.

That makes me wonder why it wasn't until Thursday/Friday when I said "moving slowly and carefully forward" that your answer started changing. I'd go back further, but the conversation snarls after monday and it isn't easy to trace back when I first start with this example.

Well what you said was “moving slowly and carefully forward while looking at the ground.” The reason my answer to that is different than my answer to “move to the center of the room” is that it conveys what you’re doing to try to find the trap. I can imagine that as you slowly move forward, looking at the ground, you might notice something on the ground that you didn’t when you first entered the room, which might reveal the presence of the trap; I could also imagine that you might not do so before stepping on the trap. Therefore, a roll would be necessary to resolve that uncertainty. On the other hand, simply walking to the center of the room? Well if you did that, you would trigger the trap, because as established in the example, the trap is triggered by standing in the center of the room. There’s no way that would result in you succeeding in your goal of finding the trap, at least not without triggering it, which I do agree with you is obviously counter to the intent.

No, I don't think you are lying. I think that you are continuing how you've played and been taught to play for decades, and that you don't seem to realize that the bad things you are picturing when you state things like "actively manuevering PCs into unavoidable traps" aren't what we actually find problems with.

Ah, ok. Well, you’re incorrect about that. I only started playing this way in 2012 with the D&D Next playtest (so I guess that is one decade…) and I’d say it probable took me a good few years to actually get the hang of it, since up until then I had been playing much more like how it sounds like you do. I specifically changed to this style of play because it seemed to be what was indicated by the new rules (whereas I think your way is much closer in line with what’s indicated by the 4e rules), and it took me some time to really learn and adjust to. But I very quickly found myself enjoying it a great deal more than I had enjoyed the way I was playing before.

What you don't seem to realize is that in your pursuit of how you think the game should be played, you are doing the exact same things that many of us have come to see as problems. You may place a poisoned needle in the door handle, and you won't move it or force people to touch it. But you need to know, absolutely need to know, who touches that door handle and when they touch it.

But what is the consequence of that?

The consequence I've found, not from anything I've ever done, but simply from the behaviors of players I inherited from others, is that no player will ever touch a door handle, unless they have first specified that they are wearing a full-plate gauntlet and angling their hand so that any needles won't pierce. Those are the ones who never had to deal with an adamantium needle that punches through gauntlets. And how do I know this? Because I still have players checking every door and every hall and every room, even though I rarely run traps at all.

See, I don’t see any problem with that. What’s wrong with players deciding to wear plate gauntlets to protect from needle traps or opening doors with mage hand?

And I myself, I was in a game where we ran into a single treasure chest that was trapped. We then used mage hand to open every single treasure chest from that point on, and the DM lamented that we were never going to trigger another trapped chest, because we were never going to physically touch another chest, or another door, or another drawer. And we didn't. Which meant either the traps were pointless because we were never going to interact with them or the DM had to come up with traps that weren't pointless.

I disagree completely with this DM of yours. The players taking steps to avoid chest traps is something to be celebrated, not lamented. It means that they are responding to their environment and making decisions that their experience tells them will give them the best chances of being successful, which is a good thing! They are imagining the fictional space and making decisions about how to navigate it as if it were a real place, and succeeding or failing by those decisions, rather than the results of random number generators. That is only a good thing in my view.

And you can keep calling me psyologically traumatized, but that's what I heat every time you say you need a "specific" approach. We need to know if we do the wrong thing, if we make a mistake, so that we trigger the trap. Or just like the examples Mannahim gave of those garden walls, need to know which garden wall they go up, because they might be traps. Or why the example of the desk needed to know if you are opening the drawers, because there might be a yellow mold trap in the drawers.

And I fully understand that just having them roll to see if they trigger the trap or not won't stop anything. Because they will still seek to remove any ambiguity about the risk and take extreme measures to protect their characters. But that is where this divide comes from. When you ask that question it is no longer something like "how does my character search a room" which can be some fun RP. It is "what can I do to eliminate any and all possible risk from this scenario, because if I don't, I'm screwed by what I forget." And some of us don't find that fun or engaging. It becomes white noise and busywork.

And this is really what it comes down to. I find that kind of gameplay fun and engaging, and you don’t. And that’s fine, I don’t begrudge you playing in a way that is fun for you and not playing in a way that isn’t. I don’t think there’s really anywhere the conversation can go from here because it’s just a matter of taste. You don’r enjoy the same kind of gameplay I do, so you probably wouldn’t want to play at my table. I do suspect you would enjoy it more than you think you would, because it sounds like your experience with this type of play has mostly been with adversarial DMs, and I think it’s pretty universally true that this kind of gameplay sucks when you have an adversarial DM. But my experience has been that it’s a great deal of fun with a good, cooperative DM, and that has also consistently been the experience of players who have taken a chance on trying it with me as DM. Maybe your experience would be different, I can’t say. Regardless, there’s not much else to say here. You don’t like the gameplay style, and that’s perfectly ok.

Standard Procedure #7 engage, and it no longer becomes about playing the game or stepping into our characters, it is a repetition of the same things we've done 100 times, because that's the only safe option.

Yeah, that’s a problem that can happen with this style, especially when the DM doesn’t make good use of telegraphing. When you don’t have enough information, you end up either having to blindly guess, or try to pre-empt any and every conceivable danger, which… sucks. This gameplay is at its best when simply by paying attention to the DM’s description, you have a good idea of what you need to be prepared for, and can come up with a good plan for how to deal with it. This can be difficult to capture in forum posts, because effective telegraphing requires a great deal of context that is simply lacking here. I can’t just pull out an example of it done well out of thin air, because doing it well relies on a great deal of environmental design and tutorializing. See my answer to @Mort about how to handle the Stargate hidden door. I had to give four or five different possible clues, all of which would have to be sprinkled throughout a dungeon that made reoccurring use of such hidden doors.

And yes, I've argued that the level of detail given should be plenty. Because I'm sure if I go and look up rock-climbing or talk to a gymnast I could come up with all sorts of specific details I could ask when someone says that they climb a wall or do a flip. I've got a little musical experience, I know that is someone says "I want to play a sad song on my viol" that I could ask if they are playing in a major or minor key, if they are using a 3/4 time or a 5/8 time. I could which specific song they play. But none of that actually matters, and I assume that their character plays a properly sad song without getting into the details of HOW sad, or sad in which way. I don't even need to ask whether or not they sing an accompaniment. These are all details that would matter if I'm making a movie in my mind that needs to match the player's movie, but there is a difference with climbing, flips, and playing sad songs.

This seems to be leaving the goal out of the equation. For what purpose is the character playing a sad song on their viol? If they’re just playing it for it’s own sake, there’s no need to roll. Can you succeed in the goal of playing a sad song by using a Viol? Assuming you’re proficient with it, yes. Can you fail to do so? I guess, sure. Is there a meaningful consequence for that failure? No, not really, not if you’re just playing it for its own sake. No further detail is necessary, the action can just succeed without need to roll any dice. Now, if the goal is to entertain a crowd, then playing a sad song on the viol is an approach they might take to try and achieve that goal. Depending on the crowd to be entertained, the mood in the venue, etc. a sad song might or might not have a reasonable possibility of entertaining the crowd, which might or might not have meaningful consequences. In either case, it’s enough to know that the song the character is playing is sad; the time signature, key, etc. are unnecessarily specific details.

There are no traps that can trigger from doing the wrong thing. It is impossible. So you don't need the detail. There are only two times you need that detail. Investigating a physical space. Talking with NPCs. And I only agree with one of those.

I don’t follow.

You couch it in nicer language, sure, but you don't deny that other people who share your position do say exactly that. And so if you want to know why am I bothering, there it is.

My opinion is my own. There are other people who’s DMing styles might be similar to mine in some ways, but I am not responsible for what they say.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I’ve finally read the entire thread.

I’m kinda on the middle ground on this.

Sure I want the players to describe what their characters are doing but I certainly don’t need the sort of specificity some people here seem to be demanding. To me it seems such requirement would lead the players wasting time meticulously poking everything in various different methods. This doesn’t seem fun to me YMMV.

I would generally have them roll if they poke roughly in the correct direction. For example in the earlier example where the character searched secret lever in the bookshelf but the actual significant thing was that the books were arranged so that their backs spell a message I would just have them roll investigation and on decent result let them notice the message. This makes sense to me. The character’s experience of their surroundings is far more complete than my words can convey in reasonable amount of time and this is the sort of thing a skilled investigator could certainly notice whilst pulling the books to see if they are secret lever.

Similarly I let knowledge skills to trigger by merely observing the target. This is how memory works. If you know about the subject, merely observing a thing related to it will bring up the memories. You don’t need to play twenty questions with your brain and you most certainly don’t need to know where and when you learned the information! (Seriously that was silly. I have pretty good general knowledge but I most definitely couldn’t tell you how all this useless trivia ended up in my brain.)

However I also don’t think we should try to eliminate player skill completely. It is always present and should be. Even in combat the tactics you choose matter a great deal. Similarly it is perfectly normal that out of combat different approaches might not be equally effective. I’m rather careful with auto success and auto fail though. They of course sometimes are needed but often I rather adjust the DC and have the player roll so that the character’s stats can still have an impact.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Sure I want the players to describe what their characters are doing but I certainly don’t need the sort of specificity some people here seem to be demanding. To me it seems such requirement would lead the players wasting time meticulously poking everything in various different methods. This doesn’t seem fun to me YMMV.

I am a big fan of the approach @Charlaquin is describing, but I think part of the disconnect is that to work really well it requires a different approach to writing/planning adventures. If you just to apply it to, say, official WotC adventure paths, it doesn't work well. At least, I personally struggle to make it work, because most adventures don't really telegraph the presence of traps/ambushes/secret doors/etc, and I end with the thing @Crimson Longinus is describing. You don't want the players declaring they walk slowly across every floor, scanning for pressure plates; you want them to have some reason to suspect this particular floor.

In my experience, it works best when the players stop worrying that hidden things might be completely untelegraphed, and learn to pay attention to clues. It might be an immediate clue, like charred skeletons in front of a door, or it might be a more roundabout clue, like looking at the map and realizing that there must be a secret room in that blank area. Maybe the PCs find spare parts for crossbow traps and tripwires in a storage room, or an NPC gives them a cryptic warning that seems to reference a feature of the dungeon they just found.

I know some people object to the players themselves solving these sorts of things, because they're supposed to be roleplaying the 9-Int Fighter, and apparently (from previous threads) 9 Intelligence is insufficient to come up with interesting plans and solutions, but personally I find figuring things out, rather than being handed them via RNG, to be one of the best parts of RPGing. I find it completely unrewarding...playing a "board game"...to roll a d20 and be told, "You find a trap." /yawn

Now, the caveat is that this is hard. It's hard to come up with unique, interesting clues. It's much, much, much easier to wait until they say "I roll Perception" or even to say myself, "Everybody give me a Perception check." But I just don't find that style of play...after years of doing it...fun anymore. Expedient, yes. Fun, no.