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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5466435" data-attributes="member: 58197">As far as the &quot;Mother-May-I&quot; issue goes: The problem is that there's really no decision-making involved in searching a room. I mean, in the absence of a time constraint, you're gonna search everything you can think of to search, in every way you can think of to search it. Since the DM is providing a description of the room, the logical thing for players to do would be to copy down that description word-for-word, then read through the description looking for nouns. Each time you find a noun, announce, &quot;I examine the &lt;noun&gt;.&quot; Whatever the DM says in response, write it down--there may be more nouns in it. Repeat until all answers are variations on, &quot;There's nothing else interesting about the &lt;noun&gt;.&quot;Next, repeat this process with other verbs. &quot;Move,&quot; &quot;lift,&quot; &quot;push,&quot; &quot;pull,&quot; et cetera.This ensures that the room is thoroughly searched and no bit of data the DM has provided is missed. It's also fantastically boring. It's game balance by tedium, in which the player with the highest tolerance for boredom gets the biggest reward.So, instead, we just assume the characters are searching to the best of their ability and roll a Search check to see how good that ability is. Social interaction is another kettle of fish. There are decisions and consequences involved there which typically do not crop up in a room search. (To be fair, a room search can have decisions and consequences. If there's a trap, you may risk triggering it if you poke the wrong thing. But my experience is that most room searches lack such threats.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 5466435, member: 58197"] As far as the "Mother-May-I" issue goes: The problem is that there's really no decision-making involved in searching a room. I mean, in the absence of a time constraint, you're gonna search everything you can think of to search, in every way you can think of to search it. Since the DM is providing a description of the room, the logical thing for players to do would be to copy down that description word-for-word, then read through the description looking for nouns. Each time you find a noun, announce, "I examine the <noun>." Whatever the DM says in response, write it down--there may be more nouns in it. Repeat until all answers are variations on, "There's nothing else interesting about the <noun>." Next, repeat this process with other verbs. "Move," "lift," "push," "pull," et cetera. This ensures that the room is thoroughly searched and no bit of data the DM has provided is missed. It's also fantastically boring. It's game balance by tedium, in which the player with the highest tolerance for boredom gets the biggest reward. So, instead, we just assume the characters are searching to the best of their ability and roll a Search check to see how good that ability is. Social interaction is another kettle of fish. There are decisions and consequences involved there which typically do not crop up in a room search. (To be fair, a room search [i]can[/i] have decisions and consequences. If there's a trap, you may risk triggering it if you poke the wrong thing. But my experience is that most room searches lack such threats.) [/QUOTE]

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