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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AmerginLiath" data-source="post: 6500605" data-attributes="member: 777">Essenti's point is apt. One thing that DM's need to remember is that they are the player's sensory access to the world. Very often a player will simply not know or realize that they're "supposed" to be actively searching or detecting something in a given space (where their character would know*), even if they're an experienced and skilled roleplayer. There's often simple miscommunication – a DM might miscue a note or the players might be distracted by checking something on the sheet, or the people at the table may simply interpret the signals differently. The mechanics of something like Passive Perception (cueing that the PC characters versus the PC players notice something from the world versus from the DM) is an objective notion available to make up for these very human issues. As Essenti notes, if one scores high enough on PP, that doesn't have to mean that everything is revealed – even a score versus a Stealth roll could result in "you hear a rustle in the bushes and think you see a shadow go by" sort of response from the DM that would require more active responses from the players in determining what was there.*Much as knowledge skills represent world-knowledge that a character would know or have access to that a player either does not or wouldn't conceivably think to (given that they come from Earth and not that campaign setting) without being in the DM's mind.</blockquote>

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