Honestly, as a player who invested a feat in Observant I would be annoyed if I felt like I wasn't getting value from the feat.
As a DM if I was taking your approach of forcing both passive and active checks to detect a trap then I would give advantage to an active Perception check to a character with Observant that was triggered by their PP.
Remember, most campaigns finish in Tier 2. So players get 2, maybe 3 feats in total. So I feel like there needs to be an appropriate reward for locking in a feat, especially when it's a non combat feat. Otherwise why bother taking Observant when you could take GWF, polearm master, etc?
Investment of a feat is a significant thing, no doubt. But should a single feat be so overpowered as to automatically reveal most anything hidden? I dont think so. I think giving them a gut feel about anything with a DC below 21 is major value for the investment. They are basically not going to walk blindly and unknowingly into anything. But expecting a single feat to allow them to walk past anything, finding and defeating its purpose automatically, is just too big an expectation.
Investment of a feat is a significant thing, no doubt. But should a single feat be so overpowered as to automatically reveal most anything hidden? I dont think so. I think giving them a gut feel about anything with a DC below 21 is major value for the investment. They are basically not going to walk blindly and unknowingly into anything. But expecting a single feat to allow them to walk past anything, finding and defeating its purpose automatically, is just too big an expectation.
The Observant feat is significantly powerful no doubt and we can often see the feat banned at some table for this reason. When a high Wisdom or Intelligence creature being proficient or even expertise with Perception & Investigation takes the feat and get Passive scores that breaks Bounded Accuracy level and defeat most DCs in the game coming from published content or force DMs to come up with even much higher DCs that become impossible for others to succeed or that simply bypass Passive score entirely, requiring hidden or concealed things to be detected only after a certain action is performed. For exemple a secret door concealed behind a curtain that must first be moved to possibly spot.
If most DC's in the game are perception or investigation, there are a massive number of campaigns that simply stall out due to temporary blindness or deafness, more than a little hyperbolic a position.
You may have misunderstood what i said. Very high Wisdom (Perception) or Intelligence (Investigation) score defeat most of those check's DC is what i meant, not that most DC's in the game were only these two.
But Perception is not the most popular and widely used skill for nothing. It is hands down the most frequently used check in the game and that is not hyperbolic, it's just a reality of the game.
One thing I’ve noticed in reading thru this is how quickly folks jump from one extreme to another. Passive perception doesn’t/shouldn’t be giving you a ton of info - at best it’s a sort of danger sense, something is wrong! Get ready, let me check carefully. It could be easy - “you enter a room paved with cobble stones. The wall on your right has a decorative pattern filled with holes. The left wall is lined with crumbling skeletons with corroded spears thru them. “ you know it’s a trapped room - that’s passive perception. Finding which cobblestones activate which of the remaining spear traps is going to take not one but a series of investigation rolls/activities. It could be hard - think of some of the laser detection systems from movies or the 1 to 2 inch of a blond hair along the top of a light colored doorway that will tell the bbeg that the door has been opened and closed since they were last there. Passive perception tells you “that” but not “what, why, where or when” for that you need active rolls. Even when your using for repeated tasks it tells you “probably safe/done/etc” not absolutely that again calls for active rolls and often only a single one (especially in the case of ambushes).
My take on passive perception is that it's just taking 10, and characters exploring a dungeon (and not currently doing something else, like fighting) are using search every turn. I also have a general concept of how much area a single search would cover (typically a 5' square for secret doors, traps, and the like, much more when searching for creatures), so PCs trying to move at all swiftly probably won't get a chance to use passive perception except against ambushing creatures.
Also, I roll the PCs' perception checks as DM so that I can mislead if a 1 is rolled, and so that they don't know if they succeeded or not. The players love the "not knowing" aspect of it.
I hadn't considered doing this. Being old school we always rolled for anything related to our character. To me part of role playing is knowing you failed but going about things as if you don't know the failure.
Yeah, I get your point. But its kind of a spolier to the story to know you rolled the 1.
Depends on the style of the game and players. My group likes coming up with ridiculously bad ideas for what you believe on rolling a 1.
I had one player who on every botch of a nature check (for identifying creatures by their spoor) would confidently declare "what we have here is a chupacabra"...
Best running gag ever... The PC knows all the facts and rumors surrounding the Chupacabra and would randomly spout them. (sometimes to represent his flubbing a social check). The look on the partys faces when his usual wrong claim turned out to be correct? Priceless
Investment of a feat is a significant thing, no doubt. But should a single feat be so overpowered as to automatically reveal most anything hidden? I dont think so. I think giving them a gut feel about anything with a DC below 21 is major value for the investment. They are basically not going to walk blindly and unknowingly into anything. But expecting a single feat to allow them to walk past anything, finding and defeating its purpose automatically, is just too big an expectation.
The Observant feat is significantly powerful no doubt and we can often see the feat banned at some table for this reason. When a high Wisdom or Intelligence creature being proficient or even expertise with Perception & Investigation takes the feat and get Passive scores that breaks Bounded Accuracy level and defeat most DCs in the game coming from published content or force DMs to come up with even much higher DCs that become impossible for others to succeed or that simply bypass Passive score entirely, requiring hidden or concealed things to be detected only after a certain action is performed. For exemple a secret door concealed behind a curtain that must first be moved to possibly spot.
You may have misunderstood what i said. Very high Wisdom (Perception) or Intelligence (Investigation) score defeat most of those check's DC is what i meant, not that most DC's in the game were only these two.
But Perception is not the most popular and widely used skill for nothing. It is hands down the most frequently used check in the game and that is not hyperbolic, it's just a reality of the game.
One thing I’ve noticed in reading thru this is how quickly folks jump from one extreme to another. Passive perception doesn’t/shouldn’t be giving you a ton of info - at best it’s a sort of danger sense, something is wrong! Get ready, let me check carefully. It could be easy - “you enter a room paved with cobble stones. The wall on your right has a decorative pattern filled with holes. The left wall is lined with crumbling skeletons with corroded spears thru them. “ you know it’s a trapped room - that’s passive perception. Finding which cobblestones activate which of the remaining spear traps is going to take not one but a series of investigation rolls/activities. It could be hard - think of some of the laser detection systems from movies or the 1 to 2 inch of a blond hair along the top of a light colored doorway that will tell the bbeg that the door has been opened and closed since they were last there.
Passive perception tells you “that” but not “what, why, where or when” for that you need active rolls. Even when your using for repeated tasks it tells you “probably safe/done/etc” not absolutely that again calls for active rolls and often only a single one (especially in the case of ambushes).
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
My take on passive perception is that it's just taking 10, and characters exploring a dungeon (and not currently doing something else, like fighting) are using search every turn. I also have a general concept of how much area a single search would cover (typically a 5' square for secret doors, traps, and the like, much more when searching for creatures), so PCs trying to move at all swiftly probably won't get a chance to use passive perception except against ambushing creatures.
I hadn't considered doing this. Being old school we always rolled for anything related to our character. To me part of role playing is knowing you failed but going about things as if you don't know the failure.
Depends on the style of the game and players. My group likes coming up with ridiculously bad ideas for what you believe on rolling a 1.
I had one player who on every botch of a nature check (for identifying creatures by their spoor) would confidently declare "what we have here is a chupacabra"...
Best running gag ever... The PC knows all the facts and rumors surrounding the Chupacabra and would randomly spout them. (sometimes to represent his flubbing a social check). The look on the partys faces when his usual wrong claim turned out to be correct? Priceless