D&D General "I make a perception check."

[Charlaquin]

what it is is pay more attention then my normal and actively look

You were actively looking, repeatedly, hence the use of a passive check. Had you not been paying full attention while doing so, that check would have been made at a penalty.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

You were actively looking, repeatedly, hence the use of a passive check. Had you not been paying full attention while doing so, that check would have been made at a penalty.

and if they just say "Look, I want to make a perception check... what do I have to tell you to do that, cause I don't understand"

 

[Charlaquin]

and if they just say "Look, I want to make a perception check... what do I have to tell you to do that, cause I don't understand"

This is not something I have ever actually experienced. In real life, saying “I’m hearing that you want to find out if there’s anything hidden here. What is your character doing to try to find that out?” (or similar) has always resulted in the player describing an in-character action. But, I suppose, I would say something like “I’m not looking for some magic words that will let you make a perception check. I’m trying to form a clear picture of what is happening in the fiction so I can determine if you even need to make a check. Depending on what you do, you might just find whatever you’re looking for automatically.”

 

[Chaosmancer]

When have I said it’s not an action? I have repeatedly said that looking around is an action, which the characters are constantly doing, and so I use a passive check to resolve.

But that is exactly the problem. The player is indicating to you that they want to make a check. You demand an action. They tell you an action, and your response is to say that that action is something they have already done, it isn't worth making a check, because you already accounted for it.

So, what is the player left to do? They need to somehow come up with an action other than the action they want to take, because the first action is non-viable.

Why on earth would you run your fingers along the books to try to find out if there’s a clue in the names in the titles of the books? You could have simply said you read the titles of the books to see if they contain any hidden patterns or information. This is why both goal and approach are necessary parts of an action declaration. If you just said you ran your fingers along the books, I wouldn’t have thought to consider the titles, because that has nothing to do with touching the books. I can’t read your mind, so I need you to tell me both what you’re trying to accomplish and how.

Because I don't know where the clue is.

You keep saying "I can't read your mind" but you somehow seem to think that the player has totally read your mind and knows where and how to look for the clues you've left. Yes, you've said you telegraph, but I want to point you to @Cruentus 's post. They said they would telegraph a trap if it was in the room, one of the methods they said they would use was "there is a pull rope to the side of the desk,"

Now, for them, that was a telegraph that there was a trap in the room, activate by pulling the rope I imagine. Of course, me, thinking about a fancy room, in a castle, with a pull rope.... it's just a bell for the servants. So, they have telegraphed a clue, and to them it is a good telegraph, but to me sitting at the table, it is just a background detail that isn't actually a clue. So when I go looking for clues, I'm not going to focus on the pull rope.

This is why your response keeps frustrating me, because you seem to assume the player has perfectly picked up on your telegraph, and therefore will know exactly which clues to look for. But I am not assuming that. I am assuming the player may have a vague idea, but not that they know what they are looking for.

Are you not actually reading my posts? I’ve told you twice now, I call for ability checks and leave it up to the player to determine if one of their proficiencies apply. If you we’re playing in my games, the usefulness or lack thereof of the perception skill would come down to your assessment of when it’s applicable, not mine. If you do something to try and detect danger, and that action could result in detecting danger or not, and the key factor in determining that was intuition and/or awareness, I would call for a Wisdom check. If the key factor was memory and/or deductive reasoning, I would call for an Intelligence check instead. Either way, it would then be up to you to decide if you thought your proficiency in Perception (or your proficiency in Investigation, or Eve. your proficiency in cooking supplies for that matter) was applicable.

Yes I am reading your posts. Why is the first thing everyone on this site goes to is "can you read?" Just because you ask for a Wisdom Ability score check instead of a Perception check doesn't mean my point doesn't apply. Because, again, what action are they allowed to take to try and detect danger? They've stated an action, and you've said "you already did that, that doesn't count."

So, fine, since I need to be so precise. You've made Wisdom Ability checks to detect danger and hidden details a near useless ability check to which proficiency can be applied. Does that make my point more clear? Are we happier now? I don't care which words you use to ask for the die roll, that isn't the point. The point is they are asking for the die roll, they are trying to take an action to use the die roll to get their intended result, but you aren't letting them do it because the only way they know how to ask what they want is regulated to Passive Perception and nothing else.

So, if a player wanted to make a Wisdom Ability check using a d20, which may or may not apply their proficiency in the Perception skill, to look for hidden details or detect danger and you won't let them do that by simply saying "I look for hidden details and/or try to detect danger" what actions can they take? I can't read your mind, but it sure seems like from the player perspective their goal and action is pretty clearly laid out, but it isn't good enough. So what is?

They shouldn’t want to roll, because rolling has a chance of failure and failure has consequences. Instead, they should want to find out if there is something they missed with their passive perception or not. And if they do want that, they should tell me so, and tell me what their characters do to try and find that out, so I can determine if a roll is needed or not. Which they should really hope it’s not, because again, a roll can fail and failure has consequences.

Actually, a failed roll does not neccessarily have any negative consequences. I certainly don't cause negative things to happen to characters who fail perception rolls. But, again, they HAVE told you so. They HAVE tried to give you an action, and you've said "No, that doesn't work. Pick a different action." But you won't actually explain what actions would work.

Sure, and “looking again” indicates that they are performing the action of looking in your room repeatedly, so a passive perception check would be used to represent the average result of them doing so. If they still don’t see it, they would probably have to move some of the clutter, or otherwise do something that changes the circumstances in order to find them.

So in other words it was a waste of time to declare their action, because you won't give them new information. And, actually, they don't need to move any of the clutter. The keys are right there. They just need to pay more attention. Which isn't a new action. It is a new roll.

What? Players are free to take general or specific actions as they like, and there is no punishment for either.

Except that you said if they stay too long in a single place they potential monster attacks. And that their declared action of "looking again" is a waste of time, which would indicate to me that they are just ticking down the counter til a random encounter shows up.

And every time we've given a general action, your response has been, "No, what do you DO?" indicating a need for more specific actions.

Yes, that’s part of the challenge of the game - paying attention to the environment and trying to make the best decisions you can based on that information. Sometimes you make good decisions, sometimes you make poor decisions, especially if you misinterpret the available information. That’s literally how exploration works.

And not everyone desires their only chance to explore being paying precise attention to your every word. They want to have other options. That isn't a problem.

But not how they plan to accomplish it.

General actions are perfectly fine as long as they clearly convey a goal and an approach to trying to achieve it.

I have described everything relevant that he ought to know based on what I know of his knowledge base. If you want to know something beyond that, you have to tell me what, and how you might know it.

You shouldn’t have no idea what the idol is. If that’s the case, I have done my job as DM poorly.

So there is nothing about this idol that I do not know? Because, again, I can't ask questions about things I don't know to ask questions about. Why do you keep acting like the player always knows what to ask about? Can you at least see how if they don't know what to ask about, that is a problem when you then double down that they need to ask specific questions?

I think you’re assuming a different style of game than I generally run. In an event based campaign, it would probably be true that the idol was placed for a specific story purpose, with certain information the players are supposed to be able to gain from it. But I prefer to run more location-based games. The idol might be there because it showed up on a random table. Or it might be there as set dressing, or because it makes sense to be there. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. It’s as important or unimportant as the players make of it.

In my experience, if it isn't important, you tell them it isn't important and move on. If it is set dressing, I tell them it is set dressing when they start asking deeper questions about it, because I don't have the answers, because those answers don't exist.

And neither conveys anything meaningful about the player’s intent or the character’s activity. You could know anything about the idol, or you could not. I can’t do anything with an infinite field of possible information. I’ve told you what I think is likely to be relevant that would be obvious to your character. If there’s something more you want to know, I need you to specify what. If it’s a lot of things that’s fine, we can resolve them as needed.

The action is thinking. Or recalling if you want to get technical with memories. There is the activity. And you know the intent, they want to know if they know more than you told them.

Now we are the crossroads. You keep saying you can't tell them, because they haven't asked a specific enough question. But how are they supposed to ask a specific question about things they don't know to ask about? If you respond to them asking with "I've told you everything relevant" then you have ended the line of inquiry. You are saying there is no more information which could be found. And if that is true, then great, we move on. But that isn't your intent. You intend by saying "I've told you everything relevant" to then get them to ask more specific questions. And now instead of DnD, we risk playing 20 Questions, because now it is a matter of asking questions until they hit on something that gives them the clue to ask the right question.

And your responses seem to indicate that you feel that outcome is impossible. But it is trivially possible, I've seen it happen. And I've had DM's pull that sort of thing. I've had DM's where we nearly TPK'd because "you didn't say you looked on the bottom of the vase. If you'd looked, you'd have seen the clue, and then you wouldn't have been caught off-guard" when we all were saying we were searching the room for clues. And yes, you can rightfully say "but that's bad DMing and I'm not a bad DM" and you are 100% correct, you are not a bad DM, but player's develop habits based on the DMs they've had. And the player who asks to roll perception, or asks to look again and wants to roll? They are doing so because they have been trained by DMs who punish them for taking specific actions. And your response of "No, give me a specific action" doesn't encourage them to play differently. It makes them more suspicious, because that's exactly what the Bad DM's say too, and that is always a trap, and they don't want to fall into the trap.

What I don't understand, is how I can explain this again and again, to try and explain what the player's thought proccess and goals are, again and again, and you can't seem to have an ounce of understanding beyond just repeating yourself.

I don’t see a problem with that. It makes the world feel richer by revealing the character’s backgrounds and connections.

No. It really doesn't. Maybe your player's do it better, but every table I've seen it happen at, it has been a joke of coming up with some hare-brained excuse to allow them to roll the dice. It doesn't make the world feel richer, because it isn't taken seriously, it is taken as "what excuse can I give to allow me to roll"

Instead of having them come up with excuses, I just let them roll. We can justify it afterwards if we feel the need to,

That isn’t how it works. I don’t have an action in mind that you have to correctly guess to get me to let you make an ability check. If you think there might be hidden stuff in the room, tell me so, and tell me what you want to do to try and find it, and I will make my best assement of if that can work, if it can fail to, and how difficult it might be if both are possible.

We tried that. I gave you what I wanted to find, and how I wanted to do it, and you told me it wasn't going to work, because I've already done it. So, you don't have a specific action in mind, you just know the action declared doesn't work. Yet, you think the player can come up with a different action, that will work? Why should we assume the player is better with coming up with actions than you are?

Ok?

Probably? We’re speaking in pretty vague hypotheticals, so I can’t really give a definite answer.

I don't think it is "okay" because there are skill abilities and ways to enhance those skills that cannot come into play if the only way for them to interact with the skill is via passive scores. Instead of making the passive insight the floor of what the character notices when talking to someone, it is the ceiling, because they cannot take actions that lead to "a wisdom ability check that may or may not apply their proficiency in Insight" so they can't do better than their passive 10.

That sounds like a passive check, yeah.

And what if the player said they wanted to roll instead, because they are a rogue with reliable talent and they are guaranteed to not do worse than their passive, and they want to get higher than their passive?

 

[Cruentus]

I also don't see this as an instance of <skip> mentality. It isn't about <skipping> as much as it is about simplifying. I have zero interest in sitting down at the table with my fantasy hero, then pulling out my three page checklist to go over all the possible things I could check.

It isn't actually interesting to say "I search the top of the desk. I look under the desk. I pull out the first drawer of the desk. I look under the first drawer of the desk. I pull out the second drawer of the desk. I look under...."

I just want to say "I search the desk" and we can assume I go through the whole list, instead of me having to spell it out for you. Because if we are already at the stage where a desk with important clues has been found and we are looking for clues, the interesting part is what happens AFTER you find the clue, not the process of finding it.

“I search the desk” is perfectly acceptable. Did you walk across the rug? Are you searching from in front or behind the desk? - and both of these I would ask you before assuming anything. If, for example, there is a trap under the rug, I don‘t want the player saying “But I tried to use Perception from the door to see if there were any traps!”

I would further clarify that searching the desk involves touching things on the desk, opening the boxes, shuffling through the paper, and opening drawers. I will then assume there is some care taken by the PC, and if there was anything to find that required Perception, would roll it in secret, or call for the roll.

“I search the desk” is an action. It’s a simple statement of intent. “I search the room” is likewise fine. Same as the desk. BUT, there are some things that need clarifying. If I am going to adjudicate that statement “I search the room”, at face value, the player can’t come back after something bad happens and say “But I didn’t mean I looked under the rug.“. or “I didn’t mean I opened the Armoire.” If you mean something, say it. I can’t read your mind. Simple. But the player has to trust me that I’m not out to spring things, do gotchas, etc. That’s terrible gameplay.

Oh, and BTW, these kinds of expectations around rolls (and not rolls), are also things I discuss and explain in Session 0. So if you don’t want to play in that style, you can not play. Simple also.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That’s an assumption you are bringing to the table, not something anyone has actually said they are doing.

Woah, woah, woah, who ever said there’s no save or check if the player’s action triggers a trap??

It was back in the example of the pit trap... here we go

OTOH, say there was no assassin, but instead a pit trap concealed under the rug in the middle of the room. If I threw my torch onto the rug, there's a good chance I just revealed the trap! Whereas if I instead walked into the middle of the room and looked in all directions, I've walked into the trap!

If I just want to roll dice and expect the DM to explain what's actually happening in the fiction, am I going to be happy if I roll low in the second situation, and he interprets that as me walking right into the trap?

"I've walked into the trap" seems to indicate that is the end of it, especially since the next line was "if I roll low in the second situation, and he interprets that as me walking right into the trap?"

Now, maybe we could argue that the save might still be triggered, but the context includes the player wanting to try and detect traps, but since their declared action of walking into the center of the room triggers the trap, they have no chance to detect the trap they were specifically looking for.

 

[Smackpixi]

and if they just say "Look, I want to make a perception check... what do I have to tell you to do that, cause I don't understand"

Ummm…am I missing something, I’ve read some but not all of the thread, why are we still on this question? The standard request from DMs who IIke their player to not gameify their D&D is simply to say, “I search the room” rather than “I make a perception check”…and when I say, “ok, you want to search the room, make an investigation check” they say, ”I’d rather use perception, I’m better at that“ I say “fine” because I’m not a rules monger, but if I am, I clarify “ok, but using perception rather than investigation means you just look closely at everything, don’t open the drawers and stuff.” And then they say, what if I open all the drawers and then do a perception check”. again, i say “fine…do it.“ And then when they do, I say the second drawer from the top explodes and ask for a dex save, 2 d6 damage on a fail, half on a success. And then they get pissed at me, and I say someone doing an investigation check would have noticed the trap before opening the drawer, and also, someone that just accepted the precondition of not touching things when they request to “search the room” with perception rather than investigation would have also noticed the trap. But no, you opened the drawers before you searched, haha. I don’t do all that bs, but if you want to, perfectly fine. It all starts with, “tell me what your character wants to do, not what you want to do”. It’s pretty easy, only d-bags refuse to play along and discover the fun of how game works.

 

[Celebrim]

I have been accused of this enough... in what way is asking for clarification ESPECIALLY when someone has chosen a harder way to do something railroading?

It's railroading precisely because you are asking for clarification because someone chose "a harder way". You aren't seeking clarification because you don't know the specific intent. You are seeking clarification because you are surprised by or skeptical of the stated intent. This seems innocuous and can have very good motives, but it is a form of railroading.

See a description of railroading here:

Techniques for Railroading

Railroading refers to a variety of techniques use to limit player freedom of choice. Some distinction should be made in my opinion between the act of limiting player choice (“railroading”) and a game which has limited or no player choice as its most salient feature (a “railroad”). Virtually...

www.enworld.org

As I outline in the above essay, one of the ways of keeping players on the "right path" is hint to them that they are making the "wrong" choices by saying things like, "Are you sure you want to do that?" It's not wrong to say to players, "Are you sure you want to do that?", but it is railroading. I do it sometimes myself when I think the proposition may wreck the game, especially with younger players who seem to not understand that there are no "save points" to reload the game after they do something crazy. But, to say things like, "Are you sure you want to do that?" or "Make a Wisdom check...Your character realizes that would be a very bad idea." is a disguised Metagame Director stance which is railroading.

One thing you have to understand is that I'm not saying that railroading the players is wrong. Too many people use the term "railroading" as a pure pejorative, when in fact many players like having some rails. Having rails makes it easier to keep the game moving forward and makes the game less stressful. Many players want to have signals as to what they should do next and do want to experience the GM's story. The important thing is understanding the aesthetic of play of your players and providing them opportunities to do the thing they consider fun.

A lot of players get burned by bad GMing and then they adopt these really extreme absolutist positions. They got railroaded badly by a metagame director that refused to let them get off the rails so they wouldn't wreck "his game" and now they think railroading is the worst thing ever and fume when they see any sign of it and hurl lots of invective and "GMs who railroad their players". And I get that, especially after listening to horror stories about what they endured.

But that position isn't rational, because all games depend on at least a little bit of railroading. Player just accept and expect that "coincidentally" things happen to them, the way if you are Batman watching a dark alley there will be a mugging in it while you happen to be watching it. Players just accept the tiny world because they know ultimately no DM can really build anything but a tiny world. But this is the GM asserting narrative force to constrain and control their actions, it's just so mild and so "normal" that they don't think about it.

I think about it.

You think I'm mainly criticizing like you think I think you are "doing it wrong". Mostly, I'm just trying to understand how your game works. I don't think there is anything at all wrong with doing Fortune at the Beginning over Fortune in the Middle. I don't think there is anything wrong with doing a greater portion of character testing over player testing. Those are just styles to achieve certain goals.

I do however have a strong preference for stating propositions in the form of fictional positioning rather than Moves, even when the fictional positioning is mostly color. It's just good narration and story building, something all table participants should be doing. And concrete fictional positioning is almost always good.

I do have a strong preference for demanding social interactions be done in the form of in character role play, but even then I don't think it's necessarily wrong not to do those things just less... skillful, and I try to push players and GMs toward more skillful play because it's more entertaining ultimately for everyone involved.

Like when I go to a con and there is a guy there that clearly has been gaming for 30 years or something and he literally can't Role Play in character, he's always in pawn stance and he's only focused on "winning", that makes me sad both because it detracts from my experience and because he's devoted his life to a hobby he's not actually very good at. (And if he's also a jerk to the GM and my daughter, well that's even worse.)

I mean would you let a player jump to there death just for them to say "I didn't think that would kill me?"

Depends on how long they've been playing with me. If they've never fallen before and they try to jump off a great height, I'll remind them that in the real-world heights are dangerous. My expectation is that my players will make propositions based off casual understanding of realism. If the player really doesn't seem to understand the consequences of their proposition and they are new, I might in fact railroad them a bit by saying things like, "You think a 40-foot fall will probably kill you." or explaining to them the rules for falling in my game if they've never encountered them before. But ultimately, if you don't let the players choose freely to do things that are unwise, then you aren't really letting them play the game. At some point they have to learn not to push the Red Buttons, even if it takes losing a few characters.

I've got one kid (he's like 25 at this point, so not really a kid) in my current group that has never quite learned that. He's lost more characters than the rest of the group combined. It seems like every few sessions he does something despite the warnings of everyone else in the group, and then he goes, "I didn't think it would be THAT bad." But, maybe he just likes dying spectacular deaths and making new characters.

An experienced player tells me that he wants to jump off or into something, well, hopefully he has a plan.

 

[Chaosmancer]

“I search the desk” is perfectly acceptable. Did you walk across the rug? Are you searching from in front or behind the desk? - and both of these I would ask you before assuming anything. If, for example, there is a trap under the rug, I don‘t want the player saying “But I tried to use Perception from the door to see if there were any traps!”

I would further clarify that searching the desk involves touching things on the desk, opening the boxes, shuffling through the paper, and opening drawers. I will then assume there is some care taken by the PC, and if there was anything to find that required Perception, would roll it in secret, or call for the roll.

“I search the desk” is an action. It’s a simple statement of intent. “I search the room” is likewise fine. Same as the desk. BUT, there are some things that need clarifying. If I am going to adjudicate that statement “I search the room”, at face value, the player can’t come back after something bad happens and say “But I didn’t mean I looked under the rug.“. or “I didn’t mean I opened the Armoire.” If you mean something, say it. I can’t read your mind. Simple. But the player has to trust me that I’m not out to spring things, do gotchas, etc. That’s terrible gameplay.

Oh, and BTW, these kinds of expectations around rolls (and not rolls), are also things I discuss and explain in Session 0. So if you don’t want to play in that style, you can not play. Simple also.

And that all sounds perfectly fine. But the moment you ask "do you walk across the rug" I'm stopping what I was doing and trying to figure out what is up with the rug, because you have now indicated that there is something there that I missed, and needs to be figured out before I can get to the desk.

Likewise, if you ask "Do you search from in front of or behind the desk?" I now have a problem. To me, this question indicates there is a trap, I'm going to set it off, and I'm trying to guess which side is the safe side to stand on. Which is frustrating, because I would have imagined my searching the desk to give me a chance to notice any trap. Most likely though, considering I have no idea of knowing which side is safe and accepting I'm about to lose hit points, my answer would be "both, starting with the front" because my OTHER concern is, much like I have experienced in real play, searching one and not the other means I'm going to miss an important clue that could harm the party if missed.

And I know "why don't you trust the DM?" Because I've been burned in the past, and the way you phrase those questions, the way those factors didn't come up until after I made my declaration, locking me into my actions, signals to me "You messed up, you are going to get hurt". And you can state that you wouldn't do that til I'm blue in the face, but it doesn't change the fact that that is immediately where my mind goes, because that is exactly like the scenarios I faced that were done by the DMs who relished in that.

And the fact is, you recognize that, and that almost seems like your intent. Because you want the player to declare their actions so they DON'T "come back after something bad happens and say “But I didn’t mean I looked under the rug.“. or “I didn’t mean I opened the Armoire.” If you mean something, say it." So my instinct that something bad might happen if I say or do the "wrong thing" is 100% accurate, because the reason you want me to be specific is so that when something bad happens I can't blame you.


Again, most of your example sounds perfectly fine. But then I see these hidden shards of glass in the muffin and my only response is "this is why some players want to roll, instead of declaring an action" because the dice roll can give them more information so that they can make informed actions, instead of going in blind and trusting that they didn't make a mistake. Which, quite often, they did make a mistake.

 

[tetrasodium]

Because I don't know where the clue is.

That's exactly the point. Neither does your character! What does your character do with the scene in front of them to find it? "I roll perception" expecting the GM to decide what your character does for you on top of running the game should never be the answer for many of the GMs active in this thread. If your chararacter knew where the "clue" was it would have been an obvious thing in the room description like a dead body blood puddle pile of treasure or a slumbering monster rather than a clue.