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<blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 4432474" data-attributes="member: 5889"><p>Generally this is a hard problem to solve.</p><p></p><p>From a math standpoint, having the trap make one stealth roll vs the team's passive perception is quick, and scales very well. It is the ideal method from a mechanics point of view.</p><p></p><p>Its main drawback is that one player is always the star of perception. There's never a chance that a player with a weaker perception will see something you don't. That somewhat grinds on 4e's notion that everyone is skilled at everything, at least a little bit.</p><p></p><p>However, if you do it the other way, give everyone an active perception vs passive trap stealth, you encounter a different problem. Because only one party member needs to see the trap to inform the party, it is exceptionally hard to hide a trap. One example, if you have 5 party members on your team, and each has only a 30% chance to see the trap, the team as a whole has an 83% chance to see the trap. And of course, in most parties your going to have at least one guy that has a much higher number, which can bump it to about 90%. You could of course just bump the difficulty up to lower the party's chance of detection, but that kind of defeats the purpose of giving everyone a chance to see the trap.</p><p></p><p>The most ideal way mathematically to fix this problem would be to use the 3d6 rolling method instead of a d20, or some version therein. You still allow everyone to roll, everyone still gets the chance to be the "star" for that roll, but the variance is much lower. So even if you have a lot of guys spotting, it doesn't give you a huge chance to spot the trap. But since we are playing d20, that's not really a good option either<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></p><p></p><p>One idea I've toyed with is the idea of "random awesomeness". Basically you roll a party member randomly, and give him some bonus for that encounter or area or whatever. So in this case, a party member gets some bonus to detect the trap. That could allow a normally weaker perception party member to actually have the best perception...simply because he's in the right spot at the right time. Never put down any mechanics for it, but I thought I'd throw that at there as a compromise between the two main positions above.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Stalker0, post: 4432474, member: 5889"] Generally this is a hard problem to solve. From a math standpoint, having the trap make one stealth roll vs the team's passive perception is quick, and scales very well. It is the ideal method from a mechanics point of view. Its main drawback is that one player is always the star of perception. There's never a chance that a player with a weaker perception will see something you don't. That somewhat grinds on 4e's notion that everyone is skilled at everything, at least a little bit. However, if you do it the other way, give everyone an active perception vs passive trap stealth, you encounter a different problem. Because only one party member needs to see the trap to inform the party, it is exceptionally hard to hide a trap. One example, if you have 5 party members on your team, and each has only a 30% chance to see the trap, the team as a whole has an 83% chance to see the trap. And of course, in most parties your going to have at least one guy that has a much higher number, which can bump it to about 90%. You could of course just bump the difficulty up to lower the party's chance of detection, but that kind of defeats the purpose of giving everyone a chance to see the trap. The most ideal way mathematically to fix this problem would be to use the 3d6 rolling method instead of a d20, or some version therein. You still allow everyone to roll, everyone still gets the chance to be the "star" for that roll, but the variance is much lower. So even if you have a lot of guys spotting, it doesn't give you a huge chance to spot the trap. But since we are playing d20, that's not really a good option either:) One idea I've toyed with is the idea of "random awesomeness". Basically you roll a party member randomly, and give him some bonus for that encounter or area or whatever. So in this case, a party member gets some bonus to detect the trap. That could allow a normally weaker perception party member to actually have the best perception...simply because he's in the right spot at the right time. Never put down any mechanics for it, but I thought I'd throw that at there as a compromise between the two main positions above. [/QUOTE]
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