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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8728976" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Putting a 14 in a score and taking proficiency in a skill is what I would call moderate investment. A significant investment would involve additional character building resources such as feats and/or expertise. This is not unique to perception. But you’re dismissing the possibility because your argument hinges on all of the characters involved having invested only moderately in Perception. Which is fine, that happens sometimes. I’m just saying, the fact that groups can struggle in situations that the party doesn’t have a specialist in is not a problem with my DMing. It’s a normal and expected part of the game.You left out helping someone look for secret doors. But you added it later, so I’lladdress these together.To be clear, I believe this is by-the-book, apart from shifting looking for traps to be part of looking for secret doors instead of part of looking for monsters. But, yes, there are more possible travel actions that characters in a typical 4-person party. This means that the party will either have to forego one or more of these tasks, or hire additional help. In other words, they have to make a choice. A difficult choice. That’s the point.There have been three times during this conversation, if I recall correctly where you have actually given me more detail instead of trying to argue why you shouldn’t have to do so (specifically, using fire to smoke out the goblin, using a 10-foot poll or mage hand to poke the ground to find traps, and walking slowly forward while looking at the ground), I have said those would be perfectly acceptable action declarations, and seem like good plans.I don’t agree that it says that.Ok, let’s remove the secret door from the equation. Assume there are some monsters hiding around a blind corner. How exactly do you propose you would prevent this ambush? You don’t even know the monsters are there.The point when I realized the declaration was not clear enough was when you stressed that your approach was to move to the center of the room while looking for traps. Until then, I had been taking your approach at face value - you said you were moving to the center of the room, I assumed you were moving to the center of the room. Not an action that I can imagine succeeding at the goal of finding any traps that might be present, except in the sense that the trap we’ve established in this example is in the center of the room would be sprung by you doing so. If you had made it clear that “looking for traps” was part of your intended approach, I would have said that it was not clear to me how you were looking for traps.I don’t think we actually interrogated the “walking slowly forward while looking at the  ground” example, you were too busy mocking the notion that you might find traps by looking somewhere other than the ground. In fact, I think that approach is reasonably specific and seems like it could succeed or fail at the goal of finding out if there’s a trap (before springing it). It also seems like it could fail to do so, and that failure would certainly have a meaningful consequence. So I would call for a Wisdom check to resolve that action.Wow. You want to come out and say that directly instead of just implying it? You think I am actively trying to maneuver PCs into unavoidable traps, and just… lying about not doing so?“Walking slowly forward while looking at the ground” is far from exact. It is, however, reasonably specific detail, and from that detail I can discern that a check is needed to determine the results. I keep asking for more detail because you keep refusing to give it, instead trying to argue why you shouldn’t have to give it with meaningless semantic tangents about what “important” means. My conversation with you is my conversation with you. No, I don’t think this conversation is particularly likely to be helpful to… anyone. Which is why I’ve been dropping lines of discussion when it’s clear they’re leading nowhere but bickering about our differing play preferences or differing interpretations of the rules.Hey, we have something in common!It matters to me, because a lot of methods they would reasonably choose could lead to them achieving their goals without even needing to roll.Right, so maybe your concerns about automatic failure are a bit overblown. For the most part, players who actually describe actions that they have thought about in terms of what would likely achieve their goal, instead of desperately trying to avoid giving any more detail than absolutely necessary, tend to achieve success at best and a roll at worst.Great! I’m glad that works for you and your players, and I wouldn’t want to take that away from you.You keep bringing this up, but I have never talked about my DMing style in these terms. If you want to discuss this with me, kindly discuss it with me instead of with a pastiche of everyone who’s style you imagine to be similar to mine.</blockquote>

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