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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6748970" data-attributes="member: 4937">Overall, a very good article and indeed one of the best quality essays written on EnWorld in the past couple of years.  I have some minor quibbles, but please don't let my criticism in any way get in the way of that first sentence.First, you write:Now I agree absolutely that players should not have to roll to use their eyes.  Indeed, they should not have to ask to roll to use their eyes or any other sense.  That sensory information should be coming to them all the time, and whenever it matters the GM should be making passive checks on their behalf to see if they notice even the fine details of the environment.   You shouldn't as a player have to ask what you perceive.  You can ask to investigate something more closely - either by spending more time looking at it, getting closer to it, or touching and exploring it - but you should expect to receive whatever sense information your character could observe automatically.  But it can be the case that a trap has no obvious sensory information.  Consider the case of a tripwire made of some semi-transparent sinew ideal for making tripwires viewed in less than perfect light, amidst any number of more obvious sensory queues.  There is no reason to suppose that this tripwire gives off any sensory cues that don't require above average perception.  Thus, by the rule that you don't have to ask to roll to use your eyes, there should be a chance that highly perceptive persons will passively observe the tripwire by some means.   This chance might be very low, but it should be there.   Then, whenever the players act warily and investigate, there is a new chance - perhaps and increased one because they are wary and not distracted - that they observe what was subtle and unseen before.   Likewise, if the player employs some stratagem to get new sensory information, the DM adjudicates that, either as an additional favorable or unfavorable chance to observe the hidden information, or else as straight delivery of information that is obvious.Again, returning to the example of the tripwire, we might write/read/invent something like:"The stone door opens to reveal a square passage, about 8' on a side bored straight into the mountain.  The passage disappears into shadows about 60' ahead, outside the range of your light.  The floor is fairly smooth, but still bears the chisel marks wear the stone was hammered away.  The walls have been more finely shaped and covered with a thin layer of plaster, which in places has ran off the walls from moisture damage.  The carving show a jungle montage of plants, serpents, parrots.  Skull faced warriors with bladed clubs leer out among the foliage.  The walls were once painted in bright colors, but these have faded, or pealed away, or else been ruined by spreading mold."Now, obviously there is lots of additional information that the players can gather here by stopping to inspect things.  But less obviously, 20' down the corridor is a difficult to detect tripwire which at this time the PC's have failed to detect through some combination of bad luck, lack of perceptive skill, distance from the thing to observe, inattention to particulars and the subtly of this fact.   Perhaps each had only a 5-10% chance of noticing it right away.The PC's, being no fools, don't rush up the corridor.  The recognize from the color of the situation that traps are likely.  Instead, they may propose any of the following:1) "I begin to slowly explore the passage, taking care to slowly wave my light source up and down to bring out any features of the floor I might have missed."This is essentially requesting a more active search of the floor ahead, and should be rewarded with an additional attempt to notice the tripwire before blundering in to it with the best of chances.  The person is attentive to the floor, and taking steps which would naturally highlight the presence of the trip wire.  There is still a high chance the near sighted absent minded wizard with no perceptive skill might fail to notice what is right in front of him, but the highly observant rogue now has a good chance of noticing. 2) "I crouch down and pick up some dust and carefully lightly sprinkle it ahead of me, while carefully moving the lantern in my other hand to look for shadows and features I might have missed.  I repeat this procedure every few inches as I progress."In D20 terms, this a 'take 20' sort of proposition, explicitly or implicitly.  Moreover, because its explicitly looking for the sort of things that might give away a trip wire, I'd probably give it a circumstance bonus to find the trip wire.  Even if the trip wire is hard to find, I might well allow this one to be automatically found.   But even with such precise intentionality, if the thing to be observed is even more subtle than the proposed trip wire, it might be the case that the near sighted wizard with no skills invested in perceptiveness fails to notice the thing despite his best efforts.  3) "Taking my staff and walking slowly, I begin gently probing ahead of me as I advance down the corridor"One thing is now almost certain:  it's the staff that touches the trip wire first, and not the player.  So the player probably has at worst a 5' separation from themselves and the trap, whatever it does.  Depending on what it does, that may mean the staff is effected and the player completely escapes.  Moreover, since this employs a new sense - touch - at the very least another chance of detecting the trap out to be allowed.  The question now becomes, is the players sense of touch fine enough that they can feel the trip wire before they actually trip it?  Again, I'd tend to resolve this being highly likely to reveal the trip wire, likely with a circumstance bonus to find a trip wire because of the highly appropriate action.  Failure here indicates your felt the staff impact the wire, but noticed it to late to avoid triggering it.  In the case of a localized scythe trap or a falling block trap, the fact the we know your staff is in front of you means you probably avoid damage entirely (the staff may or may not, though).  4) "I get down on my hands and knees and place a bit of straw between my lips so that it lies on my tongue.  I then go forward lifting my head slowly up and down and gently manipulating the straw with my tongue."This is a very specific real world technique for finding a trip wire without setting it off.  Regardless of the characters perceptiveness, he's going to find a trip wire given enough time spent on the problem.  I'm not going to get into a table argument with a player being this specific about his purpose.  This is a good example of not needing to roll to tell the character what he finds.  Note though, this search is specific only to trip wires.  It's not the same as having +10 search/perception skill, which is going to notice lots of things this technique does not - the technique isn't helping much against pressure plates for example.  In theory, a player could describe all the various detailed routines that the character goes through to search an area and in theory automatically find lots of clues that otherwise might only be available to a perceptive character.  But at the least, I would penalize a party acting in that manner such that it would take 10 minutes to cover 5' of passage, as the imperceptive character would in no fashion as efficiently observe the environment as one with great perceptive skill.  I would probably also penalize a player pixel bitching in this fashion by counting them as distracted and imposing a penalty on observing everything but what they are focused on, in a way I wouldn't penalize a PC with high ranks in perceptive skills.  Because seriously, while this sort of puzzle solving is fine when appropriate, if that was happening all the time, it would be annoying.Note that although I accept all the above exacting propositions as valid, I'd also accept a game proposition like, "I take 20 to search the corridor as we advance down it."  Such a proposition is clear in its intent and shouldn't be penalized.  And in general, it doesn't require I nail down hard what exactly that looks like.  On the other hand, what I don't do in that situation is give any special advantages in fictional positioning that might come from a more concrete proposition.  On the other hand, you have no assumed disadvantages either.   It's a good idea though to establish whether a search is a visual inspection only, or whether the person intends to touch the object.  I tend to assume search is also tactile unless otherwise stated (and apply a penalty if the person wants to keep their distance).I sincerely hope not.  One of the biggest ways to avoid this problem though is to make the DM responsible for all rolls involving perception.  It's important that the PCs not be able to determine whether they didn't find anything because of a low roll, or they didn't find anything because there is nothing there to detect.  Any meta-gaming here by the Rogue's player is solely do to the Rogue's player knowing he rolled a '2'.  If he doesn't know what he rolled, then its purely due caution.  Speaking as a long time 1e Thief, the 'Find Traps' check was so unreliable, that any good Thief resorted to it only as a last resort as a safety check to make sure you the player hadn't missed something in your due diligence.   It's never metagaming for a player to be cautious when they legitimately lack information.  Of course people in a trap filled dungeon exercise due diligence and check everything at least twice.  It's only meta-gaming when they act on something that they should not know in the game world.And DM's should never call it 'metagaming' when a player attempts to interact with the environment.  Interacting with the environment is what you want to happen.  Don't punish it.Even though you correctly point out the problems of a DM wanting traps to be triggered, I feel this is by far your worst passage, because there is so much wrong with this and you don't call it out.  First, it's not unfair to just be informed that you stepped on a spike trap while walking through 50 miles of forest, provided the DM gave a chance for the player character to passively notice the spikes through some mechanism.   I think what is probably unfair here is that 3e unfortunately made traps only detectable through active perception, and didn't have some default passive level of search.  This implies - again unfortunately - that no trap can be detected if it isn't actively searched for, which I think we both disagree with in our own way.Secondly, the player shouldn't have to say, "I'm looking at this."  The DM should make that check on his own before determining pass/fail, whether the trap was triggered.  Thirdly, you should never ever map a 20x50' section of a 50 mile forest.  This should be theater of the mind until the actual fictional positioning of the party relative to something matters.  There is only one thing here at present, a spike they either stepped on or didn't.  We don't need to know where everyone is standing relative to that.But most importantly, what makes this scenario bad is that it is pointless.  It doesn't make for an interesting scene whether they notice the trap or step on the spikes, because the trap is disconnected from the environment.  It's a pointless hit point tax.   What would make this scenario interesting is that in fact there is an area of the forest liberally salted with these punji sticks, that have been placed here by some mad cannibal hermit or an ogre magi or a tribe of goblins or a VC ambush or whatever and this initial interaction is how we are introducing that scenario and setting apart the long overland journey from the more tactical play beginning here.  In other words, if we use this simple and not terribly dangerous trap to begin framing a more significant scene, then that's a good thing.What makes a trap particularly well designed is if it creates an ongoing situation.  Traps at hit point taxes/fines aren't always bad, but without time pressure or surrounding context you shouldn't even bother with them because the solution is rather trivial.  There isn't a puzzle introduced by the trap.</blockquote>

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