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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8728775" data-attributes="member: 6801228">And it is your decision to make up a new character to shore up a weakness simply because you don't like the example. But I'm not doing that. Maybe it is a two person DnD game. I'm currently running a game with only a single PC via Dischord. It happens. Declaring the party make up HAS to have a perception expert is ludicrous, especially since, again, 14 wisdom and proficiency is far from bad.Right, sticking to the original parameters is disingenuous. Adding new elements of design, new party members, specific race combos, and mixed-level parties (a thing that never happens at the majority of tables) is perfectly reasonable. Well, since that's the case we can give the goblin a cloak of invisibility and purple worm poison too, right? If we are just going to go about changing the parameters to suite our argument.And nothing says that working together gives advantage on Passive Perception, after all, I know I often rule that you can't Work Together or take the Help action with perception, because it is all about what you see or what you smell or what you hear. No one can help you smell something, this isn't something that people can work together to achieve.But even if we assume it does apply... that doesn't change my overall point? There isn't a decision to look for danger. It is a default state. And if you want to rule that you can grant +5 Passive perception to someone... then it is even less of a choice. Person with the highest modifer looks, other person helps, because you both seeing the same thing doesn't do anything different. And since they are helping, and not providing their own passive perception, they are now vulnerable, but hey, at least they won't have to worry about traps.Critique isn't Badwrongfun. I've never accused you of Badwrongfun. Not even trying to prove you are "wrong". But since any all things that challenge your position are ignored, I can't really have a discussion either. Because your consider your ideas impossible to challenge or critique.Normal doors are absolutely something you pay attention to when looking for an ambush. Blind corners are absolutely something you pay attention to when looking for an ambush.Darkness is absolutely something you pay attention to when looking for an ambush.Why aren't secret doors? What makes them so special? They are hidden from view? So are traps. You don't build a trap with a sign that says "Trap here!". You hide it, sometimes really well, sometimes not so well. And since you'd be looking at the floor and walls for signs of traps, things like scrape marks that could be caused by moving stones... you'd also see the signs of a secret door.Well then why are secret doors different than traps and ambushes? And, since you have made anyone looking for ambushes unable to find secret doors, then ambushes that happen behind secret doors are utterly impossible to stop before the ambush happens, because the player has zero chance of spotting it. They'd need to find the secret door to suspect there is something behind the secret door after all.Seriously. You have never once until right now said that the approach was not specific enough. Only once I pointed out that there was completely and totally a way to move towards the center of the room where the trap was AND reasonably have a chance to spot the trap do we suddenly have that the approach was not specific enough. So, I guess "I go to the East Wall and look for traps" is equally not specific enough. What you mean by specific is you want me to describe the method of looking for traps. Something that I don't actually know how to do, because just like I'm not a auto-mechanic, I'm not a trap-smith. And since my method can fail simply by describing something that wouldn't work to locate that specific trap, I'm utterly without options.Really? Because all I was asking for before was a chance to roll when moving to look for traps. Now I've got two different SOP's that I'll just read to you every single room, every single time, until they don't work and I get smashed. Because you won't allow the same thing to work every single time. I know plenty of DMs who have decided that since their players insist on using mage hand to interact to avoid traps, that they specifically build the traps to trigger in ways that hit you for not being near the trigger. The logic being that "of course" trap builders would know of mage hand and build traps to counter it.It's just a matter of time until my bored, droning reading of the same list of specific actions gets me in trouble.Right, because all of us who say we've tried it, didn't like it , and had bad expeirences with it are either just wrong or were traumatized to fear success by Bad DMs. That's why you feel no need to defend your practices, because you are obviously right and your approach can have no problems or pitfalls.Because, again, I came into this thread that was explicitly a rant about bad players doing bad things (declaring they use their skills <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" />) and my initial goal was and has continued to be, explaining why you don't need to "train" these players to be "better" (as many posters early on talked about doing) because what was happening was mostly a breakdown of communication and this bizarre fixation on the player's needing to be hyper specific so they can't complain when something bad happens. Which still seems rather crappy, since the ENTIRE POINT is this fear of the players getting upset when something bad happens, because you don't give them a chance to roll if their declared action MIGHT set off the hazard.And again and again, the same arguments repeat. "Well it isn't hard, so I don't understand why you won't do it" (Weird when you spent multiple days saying an approach was fine only to backpedal the second you realized it wasn't) or "You just are so scared of failure you can't seek success" or "The players just had a bad DM" or "This would never happen at MY table" or or or or or What hasn't happened? Someone saying "You know, I can see why players might feel that way, that's a valid point." or "I can see how that is specific enough to narrate" And since this conversation happens every few months, with people complaining about the exact same things, maybe I'm feeling like it would be useful to actually attempt to reach some sort of real understanding instead of platitudes.</blockquote>

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