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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8720331" data-attributes="member: 6779196">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.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.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.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.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.Wanting to see if they missed something isn’t an action at all, it’s just a desire - a goal. It’s a perfectly valid goal, but to achieve it they need to do something. Want in one hand and spit in the other…What? Players are free to take general or specific actions as they like, and there is no punishment for either.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.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.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.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.I don’t see a problem with that. It makes the world feel richer by revealing the character’s backgrounds and connections.You know who else doesn’t know everything your character could know about a subject? Me. So, we need to narrow it down. Tell me what you want to know beyond what I’ve already told you and where you might have learned it so I can resolve that. 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.Ok?Probably? We’re speaking in pretty vague hypotheticals, so I can’t really give a definite answer.That sounds like a passive check, yeah.</blockquote>

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