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<blockquote data-quote="Obreon" data-source="post: 7210672" data-attributes="member: 6815225">Yes, that's how I'd like it to work most of the time in practice. The tricky bit is combining that with the option for &quot;generic&quot; room searching without breaking the perception mechanics somewhere. If you want to allow a secret door to be found with a DC20 Perception check and a 10 minute search, you need to come up with a reason why the guy with 18 Wis, Perception Expertise and the Alert feat only gets a hint as to its presence rather than outright seeing it.That's why I wanted to make explicit the idea that seeing things without searching was harder and had a higher DC. WotC did this in some of the earlier 5e adventures, I believe, but then apparently decided that it wasn't the right approach, and just gave single DCs for secrets/traps. It's odd, because to me, having different DCs based on the manner in which you're looking (casual glance vs thorough search) makes perfect sense and solves a lot of the problems with the system (providing there's also a cost for searching). The insanely twitchy guy with 25 Passive Perception is still probably going to see a lot of stuff outright - but he's invested in expertise in Perception, a Feat and presumably some ASIs to get his WIS up to 20, so I'm fine with that. There's always dim light, masterwork construction and magic to push the DCs higher if I really want to provide that sort of challenge at higher levels.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Obreon, post: 7210672, member: 6815225"] Yes, that's how I'd like it to work most of the time in practice. The tricky bit is combining that with the option for "generic" room searching without breaking the perception mechanics somewhere. If you want to allow a secret door to be found with a DC20 Perception check and a 10 minute search, you need to come up with a reason why the guy with 18 Wis, Perception Expertise and the Alert feat only gets a hint as to its presence rather than outright seeing it. That's why I wanted to make explicit the idea that seeing things without searching was harder and had a higher DC. WotC did this in some of the earlier 5e adventures, I believe, but then apparently decided that it wasn't the right approach, and just gave single DCs for secrets/traps. It's odd, because to me, having different DCs based on the manner in which you're looking (casual glance vs thorough search) makes perfect sense and solves a lot of the problems with the system (providing there's also a cost for searching). The insanely twitchy guy with 25 Passive Perception is still probably going to see a lot of stuff outright - but he's invested in expertise in Perception, a Feat and presumably some ASIs to get his WIS up to 20, so I'm fine with that. There's always dim light, masterwork construction and magic to push the DCs higher if I really want to provide that sort of challenge at higher levels. [/QUOTE]

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