NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8543043" data-attributes="member: 7032025">And in all our campaigns, observant was taken exactly once by one character, because if fitted the personality and background of the character, and it was not a problem, because the player did not abuse it.We simply do not use weapons of warning, because we think that things that give an absolute power are usually a mark of bad design. Giving advantage is relative and fine. As for alertness, our players realise that it's a stupid feat again because of that "absoluteness" and no-one has ever asked to take it.Because it more or less invalidates the whole trap / exploration process (as well as secret doors), and at least one of the resources for exploration just go away, as well as the possible cleverness of thinking about it in the first place. Yes, I know, you can always design special workarounds, but doing it every single time has at least two drawbacks, that of requiring over-design and that of frustrating the player. As our players understand this, they don't try to bend the system back to front to get silly advantages like that.Because it detracts from the general fun, including that of other players.The game is a mix of a lot of things, but cutting out whole pans of things just because one player abuses the system is not for me the best way to go. Especially in this case since it's clearly an abuse, so for me it's way better to prevent it at start.Because natural selection does not work on individual cases as a general principle, it's statistical over generations of random mutations, for one. Second, it is abused, because the player is bending rules backwards (in particular the help action) to try and achieve something that the rules don't allow.As for the world being made in a specific way, if it was that way, then ALL characters classes would have expertise in perception, otherwise no character would ever survive if he did not have that.Observant is already a feat, and a powerful one, and one could argue that it's effectively already giving you advantage on passive perception. It's good enough, no need to double that, especially with bounded accuracy.This reminds me of a player insisting that his owl familiar should have passive perception of 18 on the sheet, since it has 13 and advantage on rolls using sight or hearing, conveniently forgetting that some rolls might not be using these senses and that the owl, in the dark and even with darkvision would have disadvantage therefore cancelling the advantage. That's the part that bothers me, people with selective reading capabilities...</blockquote>

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