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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 8543625" data-attributes="member: 97077">Condensing this down: Yes, passive Perception applies often as you say... until it doesn't. The rules carve out when it doesn't and those have been posted by [USER=6812658]@Seramus[/USER] upthread. You seem to be ignoring this in play, so far as I can tell, and doing so means Perception is overvalued. If you're also not taking marching order and other context into effect, which the DM is empowered to do by the rules, you're further making Perception better than may be intended. In such a situation, I would fully expect every player to take Perception and Observant and ask to have a pet to grant advantage. This would not be abuse, but simply playing the game as you have presented it. But for your seeming social agreement around optimization, I'd be surprised if they didn't.In the context of how I run it, you're surprised if you put yourself in the position to be surprised and something tries to surprise you.If a character is performing one of the listed travel tasks (which all have useful benefits in my game), they are automatically surprised if a stealthy monster comes calling. That is the risk they are taking if they turn their attention away from keeping watch for danger and, hopefully, the payoff is worth the risk. I have it where searching for secret doors while traveling the adventure location is at least as distracting as these other travel tasks since, as you point out, the DM can decide this.It should be noted, however, that not every monster attempts to surprise the party. Per the rules governing surprise, the DM makes this determination. For my part, only monsters trained in Stealth and/or who have some kind of lore indicating a preference for ambushes will try. That's about a third of all monsters, I'm told, though that may not apply to all terrain types equally (e.g. Underdark monsters might be sneakier in general than desert monsters). The players will have to take this into account when making their meaningful decisions during play. It simply isn't enough to max out Perception and call it good because the DM rules that passive Perception is always on no matter what decisions you make.As well, traps the party are approaching can only be noticed by the front rank of the marching order. So if you put the Observant character up front, they stand a good chance of finding those traps before the party runs afoul of them. However, that Observant character might not be the most heavily armored person in the party and attacks coming at the party from the front will tend to target them first. (People in the middle and back ranks have the benefit of cover!) So there's some risk there for the player to consider.Now enter our ranger: They can do a travel task and keep watch at the same time in their favored terrain. Which is pretty neat.What this means is that, in my game, Perception is useful, but it's not an auto-win button. You need to do things in the game to put it to use and that will come at the cost of not doing other things and additional risks. This is fully within the rules and eliminates the problem a lot of people seem to have with Perception being overvalued.</blockquote>

Verification