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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 8543963" data-attributes="member: 97077">I would say you may be giving too much weight to the word "group's" and not taking into account the scales of travel in the same section of the rules. The rules for hiding are accounted for here as well. Everything works together - the travel tasks, the rules for surprise, and the scale of movement in exploration. You don't have a chance of noticing a hidden threat if you're not keeping watch.Of course adventurers walk around paying attention in the fictional sense. But if they are doing any of the aforementioned tasks, they aren't paying attention well enough in a mechanical sense to avoid surprise if a monster tries to surprise them. If they don't want to take that risk, they need to keep watch for danger instead of mapping or whatever. In your game, that's a terrible trade-off to make because every monster apparently tries to surprise the PCs. Perhaps to mitigate that somewhat, you appear to put an interpretation on the rules in the travel activity section that removes the trade-off in tasks. In my games, about 30% of monsters try to surprise the PCs, so depending on the PCs' priorities and status, it might be a risk worth taking. It's another meaningful decision for the players to make. I find the more meaningful decisions a player makes, the more engaged they are in the game.Again, parsing posts to the extent you do is causing you to take things I'm saying out of context. A few is fine, but I encourage you to refrain from overdoing it. As an example, above you are responding to a point I made as if I was making it in the context of surprise rules, when I was referring to finding traps or the like (which you say invalidates other players), which is of benefit to everyone. That said, it's still of benefit to the party for another PC to not be surprised when someone else is surprised. That's more actions for Team PC for the round than there might have been.Perhaps your parsing also made you miss that I said it's training in Stealth and/or any lore that suggest they favor ambushes or the like. Nevertheless, the 30% is meaningful in that it creates a situation where there's a meaningful choice to be made: Do I risk being automatically surprised in order to draw a map? I certainly would not make that choice if it was 100% as in your game. (But anyway, that's not relevant in your game since there is no trade-off or meaningful decision to be made, thereby making Perception stronger than may be intended.)</blockquote>

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