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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RUMBLETiGER" data-source="post: 5857018" data-attributes="member: 6674868">I want to comment to this personally from  real life experience.  As being someone who grew up just outside New York City and then moved to Ohio as an adult, I want to cite the HUGE difference between walking thru NYC at night, actively listening as you walk, actively glancing down an alleyway and walking with a buddy down the street, chatting and unconcerned about the environment.  Moving to Ohio, I had been unfamiliar with having to drive at night and pay attention to the frequent possibility of Deer on the side of and in the road.  Huge difference in my ability to spot a Deer and my response time when I'm thinking of looking for them vs. when my mind is wandering on my way home.Active Spot and Listen checks will better catch what passive Spot and Listen checks miss.  Bringing it back to the game.  I do not require my players to make a check every 6 seconds as they travel through the woods.  I do however make the distinction between when the Ranger declares walking through the woods with his bow drawn, arrow in hand, looking off the road for signs of danger, and when the party is RPing some dialogue as they make their way down the trail.  If the Ranger is ready while the rest chat, he's the one that get's a check at full strength, the rest get a penalty.  My players get this, and if they get jumped because they didn't setup a rotation of someone being the designated alert person, they don't complain.Now the way I DM this, if they're going down the dungeon corridor and one or more players say, "I look  around.  Do I see anything that seems out of the ordinary or possibly  threatening?" I expect they remain in this state until they:-Actively change it by declaring doing something else-Switching to RP dialogue that gets involved to the point of clearly being distracting (like engaging in a debate, threatening another player, trying to coerce another player, singing, etc.)-Declaring attention to be on something specific instead of the environment at large ("Oh, a drawer, I wonder what's in it?") -Actually discovering a threat ("A monster appears!") and engaging that monster instead of declaring being alert for any other monsters.  ...and the like.Once engaged with a monster, usually one of my players says something to the effect of "I'm looking around to see if there are any more."  This behavior is rewarded.</blockquote>

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