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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 2060700" data-attributes="member: 1165">So what is the problem, if it doesn't take much time?Unfortunately, Search is not a well-designed skill. Players want to search the whole room for traps and/or interesting stuff, but the rules limit you to 10-foot squares. For some reason the Search example in D20 Modern is different. Did they change the rule in 3.5?Two other problems develop, one of patience, and one of killer traps.I'm not patient, so I don't do well in games where you're expected to search for stuff, such as Angband, Diablo or Baldur's Gate... and at least some Final Fantasy games. If I can't take treasure off my opponents' corpses, I don't bother searching. Maybe you're the same way? Maybe you rarely put junk around for players to find, but they don't know this? If you've done so in the past, you've rewarded them for taking 20 while Searching, and they'll keep doing this until they get the hint that they're not rewarded.This hint takes a long time to develop, BTW. They know they won't always get rewarded, so they pass off not finding anything as "bad luck".Players are often scared of traps, and don't want to end up in a situation where the rogue with the great Search skill didn't bother to Search, and so someone gets injured or killed. They'll say "if we were real adventurers we'd always search" (which isn't true at all...). If you try to make them stop searching, that may convince them there's a trap in the area and they'll search all the harder.Short of simply not allowing taking 20, what are some good ways to make time more relevant? Wandering monsters doesn't do much, since the PC's will just kill them. (And if they can't kill them, they're in the wrong dungeon.). The "the dungeon is going to flood/explode/vanish in exactly 2 hours" thing is just a bit too farfetched for the typical dungeon.While they're spending time, have the monsters in the dungeon organize and attack in a large group. Give them a leader or two with high Int and decent tactics. If the players are stuck in a room or a hallway, that makes things easier for spellcasting monsters.It is not necessary for the monsters in the dungeon to just ignore or passively dislike each other. But if you do that, maybe only the kobolds will organize. If the dungeon has 50 kobolds, and 20 are sent to slay the PCs, things will get messy. (Remember to give the kobolds decent class levels! And don't bother with the MM organization charts.)</blockquote>

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