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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8649554" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Whether or not you accept Crawford's ruling, (I can see his logic, but the implementation is clunky), the way Observant is written implies that they are meant to be used often.  This isn't what White Wolf would call "automatic success" (ie, a scenario where you don't need to roll because your abilities meet a certain threshold).  Any time you walk into a room, this is the default level of detail you should perceive without having to make a die roll.Making a check, therefore, is you actively looking around and searching for something out of the ordinary, and this probably should take some time as you scan the area and poke about.Generally, I only ask for die rolls when players peform some action that they could reasonably fail, and that has real downsides to failure; if someone wants to search a room for an hour, I see no reason to make them roll, and will probably just give it to them- there's only so many places or ways to hide something.It speeds up play immensely when players dictate when rolls are made by their actions.  Like if you want to chat with a town guard for basic information, a passive Charisma check seems perfectly acceptable to me, where it's pretty rare they will instantly tell you to buzz off.You want to use your Thieves' Tools to open an ordinary lock, QED.  I've found this approach works well, as players are less inclined to look at their sheet and go "oh I'm bad at X, I better not even try".Now if you're trying to convince a guard to come with you to investigate someone in an alley, without backup, that's a die roll, and failure will most assuredly raise suspicion.Another good reason to do this with Perception and Investigation is to avoid having the players slowly creep about, rolling dice for every 10' section of dangerous dungeon, which slows down the game immensely.  Of course, in order to actually speed up play, I do prod them to roll when there is a trap or hidden door to see- it's sort of necessary or we might as well go back to the days where you carry around 10' poles and such.</blockquote>

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