JonnyP71
Explorer
A KEY difference between us RE the bold is who is "they" referenced in that sentence and how much screentime does that get?
the scene as described by GMfor... said nothing at all about were the CHARACTERS being cautious at every door, it simply showed a different way pf dividing ON_SCREEN vs OFF_CAMERA activities.
Ever watch MST3K? i loved a send up they did for some old 60s movie about yeti which it seemed showed "characters walking in a spiral uphill by a fern" at least 50 times or more to represent climbing the mountain to get to the "yeti eats you" phase. it ate up actually quite a bit of the run time of the film. Whether it is for movies, books, video games or other forms of storytelling, every single media shows and uses ON_SCREEN vs OFF_CAMERA editing of content as a thing. Sometimes it is integral to the story and drama.
just because something like "door protocol 7" is not shown in play at the table by the PLAYERS at every door does not mean the CHARACTERS necessarily did not act just as cautiously at those doors.
So its nothing about "should the characters be cautious at..." in any way. it is about "how we edit our on-screen time".
As we tend to talk mostly in character in our games, there's very little differentiation in terms of 'they'... we never say for example, "I ask the bartender for an ale", we would say, "Could I get an ale please bartender?"
Regarding dungeoneering, in terms of specifying actions relating to the dungeon environment, if the player does not specify it then the character does not do it. It needs to be specified if/when a lantern is lit, who is carrying it, if a cabinet is being examined, who is examining it? Are they simply browsing its contents, or are they looking for anything that might be hidden? Breaking that down to simple Passive Perception cheapens this process in my opinion, even a specified Perception check will never give specific details - I use the various intelligence skills for those.
I play in 3 groups at present, each group being somewhat different from the other, but neither myself or any of the other people who DM will handwave away those fine details when dealing with specific adventuring locales.. (bear in mind that about 50% of the players in the groups also take turns at DMing various games). One thing the groups do have in common though is that they are all perfectly happy with sessions that are very light on 'action', we might have one session with no combat, followed by another with just a 10 minute skirmish. The rest of the time is exploration and roleplay. Most of our games are low level, gritty and lethal. Taking precautions matters.
And no, I've never heard of MST3K - I guess it's a TV show that never made it over to this side of the Atlantic.