Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6923359" data-attributes="member: 6677017">"Passive" is a misnomer. If the character isn't actively spending effort on staying alert, they don't get to use their passive perception. This can be seen in the rules that disallow you from using passive perception while performing other exploration tasks, and some other examples in published materials that don't even give NPCs a chance to notice you because they aren't paying attention.So in order to use your passive perception, you are already on alert and actively trying to keep track of what is going on around you, spot dangers, etc. You are almost always considered to have your passive perception active during combat. Whether it is active at other times is between you and your DM, based on what you are doing at the time and the character's intentions. It does take effort though, so most people are not going to walk around on high alert mode all day long.If a character is using their passive perception in exploration mode or combat, if they then roll a perception check in addition to that, they won't have their passive perception reduced because they rolled lower. So if a character has the Observant feat, it means that anytime they turn on their passive perception they are very good at it. The only time the mentioned situation would come up would be if they didn't have their passive perception up, and just took a moment to stop whatever else they were doing and make a single discrete perception check. That very well can and does happen, and it demonstrates that that character is really good about spotting things when they are generally paying attention (ie, Observant), but doesn't have any particular talent in fast searches.</blockquote>

Verification