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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dcollins" data-source="post: 925890" data-attributes="member: 876">I'm actually running into this in my own campaign at the moment, and it's a bit distressing. As much as I'd like to agree with Hypersmurf's intuition that taking more time should be a penalty, in reality I'm unable to impress this on my players. I basically have to agree with Trainz that things are either automatically found or missed.Situation: A 3rd-level party with 5 characters, a continual flame torch, and trail rations. They have no long-term spell protections or buffs in action. Everyone involved is very rules-smart, especially the Rogue-player.(1) They're happy to proceed at 5 ft/round so the Rogue can take 10 Search in every space. His total skill makes this result over 20, so every average trap and secret door is found.(2) He definitely sees no drawback to a Take 20 on every Open Lock check for 2 minutes, automatically opening those.(3) A 30x30 room, they're happy to have everyone divide up the walls and Take 20 to Search those if it's a dead-end. This takes less than 10 minutes, which they see as reasonable, and turns up any secret doors in the walls.(4) When they're low on spells, they expect to barricade themselves in a room and sleep for 8 hours and re-achieve full strength.Now, admittedly this is not a zone of active counterdefense or a race situation, but frankly I see those as the exception and not the rule. I apply additional wandering monster checks, and when those appear they snicker a bit at that being old-school. If I were to interrupt the 8 hour rest period with a counterattack, they'd perceive that as a cruel interruption which slows down the pace of the adventure/exploration -- I can't imagine they'd ever be persuaded to leave the dungeon to camp (the statement last night is that that would open them to attack from any side).So from reading this thread, I'm fond of the idea of a "you must know what you're searching for" requirement for a Search Take 20, perhaps a formal declaration of exactly what one expects to find. (I don't want to delete it entirely, I too know how a missed secret door can wreck a plot sometimes.) Failing that, I'd almost want to introduce a penalty-on-1 for both Search and especially Open Locks just to prevent the Take 20, because yes, I can't convince my players that there's any reason not to do that.</blockquote>

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