Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Yes, that's exactly correct. This was an intentional change and it's functioning as intended.
It is an assumption of the game that individuals who become adventurers with a Level and Class have gone through quite a bit of training and in most cases have extraordinary and borderline heroic natural gifts and abilities as evidenced by how the standard rules do not give PCs a 10 in every stat. They are not "civilians". They are adventurers.
The 2014 rules explicitly stated that creatures have 360-degree awareness during combat. When carried forward to 2024, this exact phrasing was dropped as a blanket statement just in case a DM needs to make a ruling about some unusual circumstance. But this concept of creatures being aware of the battlefield is baked into the rules for combat all over the place. If you want something more granular and grittier then maybe some other TTRPG system would be a better choice. Certain things like this are simplified in this game for several decent game design reasons.
Not only that, but anyone who has played team sports, particularly those which require a combination of focused vision and peripheral vision such as soccer or ice hockey or basketball will disagree with your description of "tunnel vision" or "panic" under pressure pretty vehemently. In my experience when I am engaged in such activities I can see and hear the environment around me way better than I can when I am laying on the couch vegging out and watching TV, or even when I am at my workstation in front of a computer. Senses are heightened, reflexes are faster, mental and physical abilities improve and so on during such activities as compared to the rest of daily life.
The numbers that are listed in the hundreds of stat blocks for all of the monsters in the game are really meant to be used as they are listed to find hidden creatures both within and outside of combat. That's the entire purpose of it. There is absolutely no reason to impose disadvantage on perception just for being "in combat". On the contrary, as Pantagruel666 suggested earlier, I would be more inclined to grant advantage as the default while "in combat" instead.
Just think about these two basic scenarios in real life. You are walking down a path that is lined with trees. In the first case, someone is hiding behind the trees. In the second case, someone is standing in front of you on the path. They scream out a war cry and then they throw a water balloon at you. THEN they run to the side of the road and duck behind the trees to try to "hide". Which one of these people behind the trees do you think you are more likely to see?
And yet, even if you get tunnel vision in combat while you are distracted attacking things trying to kill you, dnd rules say your passive perception is as if you had a completely average roll from taking the Search Action for a Perception check.
(A) Youre in a room by yourself, nothing trying to kill you, all the time in the world looking for that hidden lever that opens the hidden door.
(B) mid combat, surrounded by monsters all trying to kill you, and all your actions have been focused on killing them.
In current rules, both A and B will get the same perception, on average. And half the time (A) will actually produce a worse score than (B).
A and B getting same score on average is not getting tunnel vision in combat. And the fact that half the time, actually spending time searching produces a worse result than just attacking is bonkers.
If you get tunnel vision in combat, there should be a penalty to passive perception. And id suggest that Martial classes eventually get features to counter that penalty.
"It is an assumption of the game that individuals who become adventurers with a Level and Class have gone through quite a bit of training and in most cases have extraordinary and borderline heroic natural gifts"
You usually start out level 1 with the hitpoints of an average commoner. Level 1 characters can die falling out of an apple tree. And while there are backgrounds like "soldier" and "guard", you start level 1 the same as anyone. Those backgrounds gave you a skill proficiency or two, and different starting equipment.
Its also a common trope to get a player who wrote a backstory for their character that puts them at legendary status. They already slayed a dragon, somehow. They already saved their village from an Aboleth, somehow. Nope. Sorry. You start at level 1, like everyone else. Anything legendary about you is in your future, resulting from how you play in the game. If you just want to write a legendary backstory, write a novel.
Nothing in the rules says that you get your passive perception for finding secret doors in combat. You get your passive perception to spot people using stealth.
Is it? This is an assertion, sure... but that's my point. A lot of assertions here with no supporting rationales.
In reality it is almost always the case that it takes less time and energy to hide something than it does to find it. Nearly always. If there are places to hide, the effort of the searching is always more than the effort of the hiding. Hell, you can just lose sight of shit and misplace it on accident. IRL it is that easy you can accidentally hide. You never walked up to someone and startled em?
So why are we arguing about this from the POV that it would/should be easy to spot stuff? Especially in combat or similarly distracted scenarios. That these should be equal in action economy? I've yet to see any explanation for that.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
While a lot of things get called action economy that aren't, this is a case where it really is action economy. To be a useful counter, the action cost of the counter can't be higher than the action cost of the thing it's countering. Thus, you either have to make it so countering hide is unnecessary (presumably by making it so hiding doesn't do much -- for example, it should not conceal your location) or easy to do.
Then asume the bit you quoted is about finding someone who is hidden.
My argument is that when you take the search action for a perception check, your results should be better than if you do nothing or do something else and rely on spotting things out of the corner of your eye.
Currently, spotting something out of the corner of your eye while you spend all your time doing other things is you Passive Perception, which is defined as 10+perception mods, which is the average you would get if you took the Search Action and did nothing but actively looked.
So i suggest a -5/disadvantage to passive perception during combat, and add some buffs to martial classes that eventually overcome this.
The resistance against this seems mostly to boil down to people not wanting passive perception to be nerfed in the slightest way.
Power creep is a thing. You can easily suggest a slight buff and most folks will shrug. But suggest a small nerf and some folks will scream bloody murder.
And then you get some old timers who spent years learning the rules and feel a tad better than the noobs who are struggling, and they resist any and all rule changes because they dont want to be a noob and learn new rules...
Mechanically speaking, im suggesting a minor debuff on passive perception and 5 classes that eventualky overcome that debuff and getbback to current rules. So its clearly not about "ooohh this will break game balance" or something
Okay, think of it this way: yes, you have penalties to perception in combat, but you typically also have bonuses. Most notably, it is much easier to find something if you
It should be considerably easier to hide if you haven't yet done anything in a combat, but that's supposed to be covered by surprise rules.
There is no reason this is true. Again, you're starting at the presupposition that spotting something and hiding something "should" be action economy equivalent. But there is no reason to assume this is true. Why should it be so?
Not only does it not really make any sense, verisimillitude-wise, but also lacks any mechanical necessity. Counters having different action economy costs are... very normal. Common, even.
Well, as is written... that is the case. Taking the search action has a chance to spot a hidden creature while not-doing-so has no chance to spot them until they give away their location.
That's just... not true? Passive perception is a tool for the DM, not some always on magical aura divination effect.
It is typically used outside of combat for when the DM doesn't want to reveal to the players there was something they might have spotted. Like in encounter notes they might scribble "if the passive perception is X the spot the hidden Z" or whatever.
I can't speak for other DMs but I would assign disadvantage to someone's passive perception if during whatever the trigger for needing it that character was sufficiently distracted. But, it really shouldn't be being used in combat at all. That's what the search action is for.
Again, the player characters don't have some magical detection effect on them to just use their passive perception whenever they please. That's not how it works.
I think if you just stopped treating it like a player ability they have on tap you'll find it doesn't need nerfing.
It is more that you're super-buffing it, then acting like it needs a nerf, and instead of just using it correctly you've now double homebrewed it into a pretzel.
There is no problem that needs to be fixed this way.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Passive abilities are never useable 'on demand'. They can only be used by the DM as the DM feels appropriate and are not a replacement for active Search in any way, shape or form. Indeed, any details that can be revealed by Passive abilities are usually so trivial that you're likely to automatically succeed on an active Search.
For example, I've got some pens in my desk drawer. What is the Passive Perception check to discover this? There isn't one. No amount of Passive Perception lets you discover I have pens in my desk drawer. At best, Passive Perception might reveal that I have a desk drawer and it's potentially meaningful in some way. Now, what is the active Search DC? Probably about 5 or so. It would take you mere seconds of an active Search to find those pens.
The same is true even for more D&D-centric issues. The DM might set a DC 20 Passive Perception check to realize there are long, vertical scratches in the wall. However, it's probably only a DC 15 active Search check to discover that they were caused by the deadfall trap in this room.
There really isn't a reason to have a 10-page thread to 'fix' a problem that doesn't exist in the first place if you simply play under the existing rules.
If the player/searching unit doesn’t have some magical radar, why should we assume the unit attempting to hide has some magical invisibility/imperceptibility field? The issue with Hide in 2024 is that people assert it’s effectively creating a magical effect from a straight Stealth roll. And no, the “my character is timing things so they move when the enemy is distracted” isn’t a good counter argument, particularly given the medium. It’s a common action trope that there’s individuals of sufficient situational awareness that they can reliably catch someone trying to sneak up behind them, even mid-fight. 5e has no medium for implementing this outside of Passive Perception vs Stealth roll.
Seriously, I don’t know why people feel so threatened by applying Passive Perception mid-combat- the majority of a party isn’t going to break 15 in the first place ime, and the only PCs likely to use Hide already can set their minimum value to about 20 by 7th level. A secondary threshold doesn’t break the system, it just allows character design choices to have an impact and keeps a still badly overpowered interpretation from going completely off the scale.
"That's just... not true? Passive perception is a tool for the DM, not some always on magical aura divination effect."
You do realize this thread is titled "should passive perception be lower?" That my original post is talking about taking thr search action during combat versus using passive perception during combat, that my suggested fix is to apply a -5 penalty to passive perception during combat, and therr are 100+ replies because everyone is objecting at the idea of lowing passive perception during combat because it makes it easier for enemies to hide?
There are a lot of people running passive perception as always on.
Given that the threshold to Hide is 15, a direct 5 point nerf to Passive Perception basically means “don’t bother”, since it would take a mod of at least +11 before it was even possible for it to work, if we’re treating PP as a DC vs the roll.
A -5/disadvantage during combat applied only to passive perception, not actuve searches. if you get sentinel shield they cancel on your passive, but still work on active searches.
And then at level 5, martial classes get to Search as a Bonus Action. So martials can do an active search, which doesnt get the -5/disadvantage penalty.
At level 10, martial classes do not apply the -5/disadvantage at all, meaning sentinel shield gives advantage to passive perception, cause theres no disadvantage to cancel it. And you can still search as a bonus action.