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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 7249877" data-attributes="member: 2629">This comes down to a DM design philiosophy: Do you design your dungeon with the PCs in mind, or do you design a dungeon agnostic to the PC's abilities?If you design a dungeon that caters perfectly to the PCs, then you can really optimize the difficulty of their challenges so that everything is perfectly balanced.  Perfect sounds good, but I find this ends up being pretty bland in the end as everything starts to feel the same.  It also results in situations like this: Where the DM decides if the PCs beat something or not before the battle begins.  Either you decide they'll beat the passive perception or they will not - you know in advance.If you design a dungeon without considering the abilities of the PCs, you get much greater variety in feel.  The PCs will blow through some of the challenges they are well suited to tackle, but will really struggle (or even find impossible) some challenges that they just can't handle.  This can be disastrous.  I took this approach several years ago and put a kobold sorcerer in the game.  The PCs ended up fighting him on a giant grassy plain.  He flew into the sky and cast a shield spell (which had a longer duration back then).  It was at that moment I as a DM, and the players as PCs, realized that they had absolutely no way to hurt him with limited range weapons and only magic missiles as a ranged spell left: but he had multiple fireballs, magic missiles, and other damaging spells he could rain down on the 6th level PCs.  TPK.  I prefer the feel of these games, and it is one of the reasons why stock modules are so fun for players, but you're running risks here... however, there isn't the 'I choose whether passive perception wins' problem.  You don't plan for it, so if they beat it, they beat it.In the end, I settled upon my preferred strategy: I build agnostic, and then adjust for party limitations (only).  I make sure there will be no TPK because the party has a glaring weakness, but I check for that after just building an adventure I'd throw at any party of a given level.  This allows PCs that invest in being super detectives with high passive perceptions to shine!  When they just spot the trap, we highlight how most people would have missed it and it gives them a chance to feel like a Sherlock Holmes type hero.  However, if the story I built involves a super secret hidden thing and it happens to exceed their perception ability, they feel like it was super hidden, not that I chose to make it something they would not find.</blockquote>

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