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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 8728520" data-attributes="member: 9053">This issue can be a number of different things. The biggest thing that I have found is that the GM needs to establish good conversation skills with players. What do you want to do? How are you going to do it? What are the expectations of how the characters behave when in a dangerous situation?There's a term from old adventure games called "pixelbitching" where you need to click on a very small part of the screen to trigger the interactive elements. Many times this is very hard to actually do and it results in player frustration in extreme.The tabletop version of this is when the GM wants a specific way of phrasing the process or the location that players want their characters to explore. And then hits them with a gotcha: either nothing is found until the keyphrase is said, or a trap is triggered that an experienced adventurer would have known what to do about.What's more, there is a certain part of the gaming culture that just has problems visualizing and describing these sorts of things. I played with a lot of people like that as I was growing up, and these days we would think of them as being somewhere on the spectrum. You will never get a high level of detail with people who are liked that, yet they can still be great players.The key is finding the sweet spot between "roll perception" and describing in-depth every aspect of a search. Here's how I do it:I start of by being a fan of the characters. That means I treat them as trained professionals in a dangerous situation. The characters can see, hear, smell ... you name it in ways that I am going to have to reflect with words and descriptions. When I describe something, did I bury the lede on an issue and cause them to miss something obvious?I start by looking at the skills they have and assume they are using them all the time without having to tell me. Perceptive, intuitive, investigative characters just get information and can ask questions at a glance. Someone who knows about traps is looking for them in a dangerous situation. That's the starting point.Then I let the players ask clarifying questions to make sure they are on the same page as I am. Did you miss the pit in the center of the room in my description? As funny as it would be, no, I'm not going to have you fall in if you just missed it.At that point, I ask them what they want to do. When we continue the conversation it eventually becomes "I want to do <a thing> by using <a method>." I interpret that through the lens of what skills and abilities the characters have. A trained thief knows how to search a room even if the player might not.What I end up doing is having a conversation to keep the players on the same page as I am about what they see and what they want to do.That has been an effective way of handling this situation with players of just about every level of skill, and I mean both player and character skill.</blockquote>

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