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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6487449" data-attributes="member: 4937">Basically, a passive use is only used to respond to events in the game world, and usually only those particular events where the DM has called out 'You can use this skill here'.  In general, passive skills only have value if the designer invents scenarios for the player to use the skill in.  For example, this is common problem with Call of Cthulhu scenarios - not all skills are created equal.   A typical entry in a CoC module will describe 2-3 skills that are useful at that time.  Your knowledge of Ancient Greek only matters if their are clues in Ancient Greek.   Knowledge skills are typically passive, and certainly the 'Know' skills when 3e was first released were entirely passive.  On the other hand, since CoC is almost entirely skill based, it has many active skills as well.  Active skills are skills that let the player propose to do things and develop strategies and solutions that they might not otherwise have available to them.  D&D is class based and almost all the active abilities that a player character has are class based abilities.  The 3rd edition designers were generally very conservative with respect to the skills system and made the skills very weak, unreliable, and passive compared to class abilities (such as spells).   Some of the few examples of skills that aren't passive and weak - like Use Magical Device - were really instances of the designers translating class abilities from prior editions into the new skill system (something that they did rarely).   But, for example, Bluff is a very potent skill by 3e standards because it allows the player to propose social solutions that they might otherwise not have, and to propose two combat maneuver ('Feint' and 'Distract') which they might otherwise be unable to rely on.  So you can regularly make new plans if you are skilled in Bluff that comparatively don't rely on DM.  However, even so the Bluff skill design is very conservative.  Consider that the DC of having false surface thoughts is 100, yet the spell it is trying to defeat is available at 3rd level.   Similarly, Sense Motive lets you emulate 'Detect Thoughts' with a DC 100 check, but as a spell this available at 3rd level.   There is a huge distrust of making the spells more reliable and less used solely as a way to overcome hurdles when the DM calls them out that remind me that in D&D skills are a later edition to the system that is somewhat tacked on.  Yes, I think you actually intuit the heart of it.   Bluff and Stealth are active.  Perception and Intuition are passive (or 'defensive').   I'm not saying passive skills are entirely bad.  Every system is going to have some.  If they involve defenses that reliably come up, even if you can't plan an action around them they can still be highly useful to have.  Arguably Tumble is a passive skill and so as you mention are the 'Perception' skills, but since they defend against situations that reliably come up in scenarios and which are quite serious, they make the cut IMO as well designed.   In fact, Tumble is one of the better 3e skills, giving the player character defenses against AoOs and falls, and improved AC when fighting defensively.  It's so potent and broadly useful, I have a tendency to think of it as one of the active skills, since the player is freed up to propose a lot of tactics in combat that they might otherwise be forced to avoid.Basically, I'd like all the skills to be as useful as Bluff and Intimidation, for their to be more 'active' skills available, and for skillfulness to compete with spells in terms of reliable utility.  To do that required lots of minor tweaks.I consider 4e a mixed bag on skills.  On the one hand, they did more to protect active skills from strictly superior skill use ('Fly' vs. climb, 'Invisibility' vs. hide, 'Bluff' vs. Glibness or Charm Person).  But it seems also that they more intended skills to work as occasional means to vaulting some hurdle that the DM put in the way, and generally made being the skillful one less valuable.</blockquote>

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