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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Perception, Passive Perception, and Investigation
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<blockquote data-quote="Shiroiken" data-source="post: 8203457" data-attributes="member: 6775477"><p>Perception is supposed to be noticing thing, while Investigation is understanding the importance of noticed things. Technically this should be mean that most things would require two checks, such as perception to see the trigger for the trap and investigation to realize it's the trigger for a trap. This really isn't ideal, however, so pretty much everything seems to get lumped into perception. Because of this, in my game I use perception for finding hidden creatures and investigation for hidden oddities (such as traps and secret doors). Creatures just need to be seen to be understood, but even if you notice something odd, you'd have to understand what it means.</p><p></p><p>Passive skills are poorly understood because they never actually put the rules down on how to use them. I'm of the opinion that this was intentional in order to allow each group to decide how to use them, despite JC's insistence on how they're "the floor" for those skills. I use the Mike Mearls of method of rolling a die against the PCs passive skill, allowing a level of randomness while still rewarding spending resources on passive bonuses. One nice thing about this is that you can then expand the passive skills to include the knowledge skills (arcana, history, etc.) so that you can roll a passive check to give out some info before the players think to ask.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shiroiken, post: 8203457, member: 6775477"] Perception is supposed to be noticing thing, while Investigation is understanding the importance of noticed things. Technically this should be mean that most things would require two checks, such as perception to see the trigger for the trap and investigation to realize it's the trigger for a trap. This really isn't ideal, however, so pretty much everything seems to get lumped into perception. Because of this, in my game I use perception for finding hidden creatures and investigation for hidden oddities (such as traps and secret doors). Creatures just need to be seen to be understood, but even if you notice something odd, you'd have to understand what it means. Passive skills are poorly understood because they never actually put the rules down on how to use them. I'm of the opinion that this was intentional in order to allow each group to decide how to use them, despite JC's insistence on how they're "the floor" for those skills. I use the Mike Mearls of method of rolling a die against the PCs passive skill, allowing a level of randomness while still rewarding spending resources on passive bonuses. One nice thing about this is that you can then expand the passive skills to include the knowledge skills (arcana, history, etc.) so that you can roll a passive check to give out some info before the players think to ask. [/QUOTE]
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