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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 7102981" data-attributes="member: 6799649">I've seen a few claims like this in this thread:-* Crawford disagrees with this. He says passive is always on with the exception of the few actions that turn it off. It prevents you from rolling less than your passive number since you use the highest. Others here have pointed out how the book can be read to say the same thing.* What Crawford has said is that the passive number is the floor. So if the DC is 13 and your passive number is 15 and the DM calls for a roll, if you then roll that 5, your final number of 10 gets bumped up to your passive 15 and you succeed.No. Crawford is not saying that the rules of the game are that a Perception check cannot be lower than the passive score! He is not saying that the passive score is a literal floor, RAW.What he is saying is that the passive score is the effective floor. Not because Perception checks less than the passive score are not permitted in the rules, but because lower results are rendered irrelevant!In the example of: "A player opens a drawer with a pair of minuscule dots of blood, DC 13 and 16, passive perception is 15 and perception 5", his passive perception already tells him about the DC 13 drop, but not the DC 16. The player sees one drop.If the player then says that he wants to give it a more detailed look, then the player takes the Search action (if in combat, if not in combat then just saying so is enough) and rolls a Perception check. That Perception check result most certainly can be less than his passive score of 15 because the passive score is not a literal, rules-based floor! He could roll a result of, say, 9. This does not get magically increased to 15. He rolled a 9. That is not high enough to notice either blood drop!But where the passive score is an effective floor (though not an actual floor) is that he already noticed everything that his passive score noticed. He already noticed that DC 13 blood drop, and his later result of 9 doesn't take the memory of that drop away.That is why the passive score is effectively the floor. It is not an actual game rule that the check result cannot be less than the passive score!</blockquote>

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