NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 5728721" data-attributes="member: 813">How were you "taught" D&D? Old school dungeoneering was far more about testing the players than testing the characters. But somehow that game never really made it into the rulebooks. And I've always wondered why.That's not completely accurate (but the following is entirely from memory): In the AD&D DMG, the sample dungeon shows the party finding the secret passage way in "room 2" by asking pointed questions and acting on the DM's responses. Ignore my first paragraph, the issue is the rules don't make it clear that the results of logical actions take precedence over any abstract rules in the books. The 1 in 6 chance is there to cover the cases where the players aren't being specific about how they are searching for stuff. A secret door cannot hide from someone who persists in looking for it unless the trigger for the door is something the searcher is incapable of doing. IOW, if the bookcase swings around when you tip a specific book, clearing the shelves of all the books will do it too. And no matter how unobservant you are, if you clear the right shelf, the secret door is revealed.I taught myself how to play D&D. And I always assumed the searching for secret doors was "automatic" if you could describe how you were searching and you were searching in the right place. My experience with coming here to ENWorld was to discover that was just how it was done. I didn't know there were grognards who didn't use these methods for finding dungeon secrets.Didn't you ever have a chest with a secret compartment? We were always using a forearm or shortsword to make sure the outer and inner dimensions of a chest were similar.</blockquote>

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