Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in- Marketplace
Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in
The important thing is that I'm not inventing a rule - that Passive Perception can replace a Search check - that appears nowhere in the text.
We're told the one - and only one - use for Passive Perception in the DMG. It isn't "replace a Search check". It's to avoid tipping off players. Speculation about "taking a 10" on skills with Passive abilities is pure speculation that neither appears nor is implied by the rules. For that matter, it creates rules conflicts that strongly indicate that it's incorrect.
People claiming you can use Passive Perception for Search are asking others to prove a negative. They're proclaiming that nothing prevents them from doing it, they must be allowed. Which isn't how the rules work.
There's more than one use of passive perception in the DMG
My suspicion is that some logic slipped through from 2014. Also, note that if the point is to check skill without alerting the players, presumably they are not actively searching, because if they were actively searching you could just have them roll and if there's nothing there, they don't find anything.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-forensic-view/202202/how-we-process-under-pressure-tunnel-vision
"Many law enforcement and military personnel have been shot not by the armed assailant immediately before them, the subject of their central focus, but by an individual on their periphery."
You do NOT get 360 degree super perception under combat. You get hyper focused on what is directly in front of you.
Finding the secret door 30.feet to your left while you hack at a troll would be extremely unlikely. Tracking the assassin quietly moving from one concealed position to the next 60 feet behind you in the jungle while you fight a dozen goblins on top of you would be impossible.
This is usually where the "dnd is not a physics simulator" get out of jail card is laid down.
passive perception is 10+perceptiin mods, if you do nothing, you percieve anything with a dc lowet than this.
But say you want to actively Search Action Perceptiin Check. You wanna roll that d20. Cool. Half the time, your roll is LESS THAN your passive perception and you would have been better of doing nothing and just using your passive perception.
Passive=10+mod always, std dev zero, min 10+m, max 10+m
Active => mean 10×mod, std dev 6. Min=+m, max=20+m
The proposed fix to this? Make Passive Score the "floor" value of the active check. You can never roll worse than your passive score, so there is always a benefit to rolling, right?
Well, not really. Half the time, you burn your action to search and you get the exact same result as if younhad done nothing and simply used your passive.
Active check(floor=passive): average = 13+m, std deviatiion 3. Min=10+m, max=20+m
So, sure, making passive the active check's floor keeps you from rolling WORSE than your passive. But now half the time you roll the SAME as your passive. Half the time, you could have done nothing, or used your action for something else, and gotten the exact same result.
The othrr half of the tine, you do better.
but if you average out the results of active check(floor=passive) for alll possibikities, what you get on average is 3 points better than doing nothing.
Passive: 10+mod
Active w floor: 13+mods.
So, on average, using your action to actively search is not worth it
The rules are broken.
What you're failing to recognize is: stealth is also not magical. Hiding from someone who is actively trying to kill you is not something you can realistically accomplish in one round, unless they're distracted by something else, so a given observer being distracted by goblins trying to kill them isn't a penalty to their passive perception -- it's a prerequisite for being able to hide at all.
Also you have to acknowledge that the party is filled with adventurers, who are nowhere near normal by any standard. What do you think an increase in Wisdom and proficiency in Perception is? It’s further development and honing of one's ability to detect things that no normal human is capable of.
A character with a wisdom of 20 has senses that equal or surpass that of a wolf's. The rogue has an ability to make it so they literally cannot roll low in their skills, expertise is such a common thing you can grab from feats that saying it’s unrealistic to detect someone hiding is in of itself a silly opinion. Can you hide from a person that can hear your heart beating or feel your movement through the air? Hell no, it doesn’t matter of your distracted, your not getting surprised by someone you can very clearly sense.
I have kids and let me tell you, not only hiding from people actively looking for you right under their nose is realistic, it's also frighteningly easy.
We're not talking about hiding from someone who is looking for you. We're talking about hiding from someone who has already found you and is watching you.
No, we are not. Hide requires you to be "out of any enemy’s line of sight". If you are found and they are watching you, you are not hidden.
Therefore, the only scenario we are considering you are hidden, they have not found you, they are not watching you, and they are not actively looking for you. If they were looking for you, this would be the Search action instead.
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
Also, bringing up IRL studies is not a strong talking point- this is not a reality simulator, it’s an action/adventure narrative. A main character instantly responding to threats from multiple avenues at once is extremely common in the genre, so the argument it can’t happen in a game because it’s not realistic is rather weak.
"I duck behind a pillar and suddenly they've lost track of me" doesn't actually work.
"This is usually where the "dnd is not a physics simulator" get out of jail card is laid down. "
Sometimes there is joy in setting up the pins, just to watch someone knock em down. Its the life of a.dm, i suppose.
That's not the context of the thread. If the creature is not hidden, no perception check is required to find a hidden creature ... because it's not hidden. If the creature is hidden, it is not currently found and it is not being watched.
But, just for grins, feel free to provide a rule that prevents it from working.
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
If you are behind full cover, and roll a 15 on stealth, you're hidden. That is literally how the rules work.
The question being if someone comes around that pillar on their turn under normal lighting conditions, are you still somehow imperceptible because they haven't "found" you, despite their being no logical basis for your concealment in that event?
Its a superhero simulator, sure, but its a dumb one.
doing nothing, your passive perception is 10+mods.
If you spend your entire turn searching, your average perception is 13+mods.
Its just dumb. No one will take the search action for an average extra 3 points
Passive shouldnt be the average of an active roll, it should be much lower than that.
The current mechanism is silly but players defend it becausr it raises their perception capabilities to just shy of an active search, but they dont pay anything for it. Its free. Its a power grab pure and simple.
Lets make Arcana Skill checks use the same mechanism. Passive Arcana will be 10+arcana mods. Active Arcana checks will use passive Arcana as a Floor. Now you get constant on arcana chrcks without doing anything, and if you DO roll, you get an extra 3 points on each roll on average, with a floor that saves you from rolling less thsn a 10. So why not power boost arcana and all the skills?
Because its silly and broken.
How about Passive Stealth? Passive Stealth should be 10 plus all your stealth mods. And active stealth rolls should uae that as a Floor. Now you dont have to do anything and with a decent dex and proficiency in stealth you are automatically hidden, with the Invisible condition, every turn, unless someone nearby has a better Passive Perception.
The dm could resolve hiding without a single dice roll. Just compare passive Stealth versus passive Perception every turn.
Or passive insight versus passive persuasion, you ask the shop keeper for the price, he tells you, then the dm compares your passive scores and automatically tells you its 20% chesper now.
Everyones skills will get a massive boost becausr they have the pasive skill on at all times, which is already average. And if they did want to roll, they can never roll worse than a 10. Its all upside.
Can you imagine if you cant roll less than a 10 on every skill check? Wouldnt that be awesome? Better skills is always better. I dont see a downside.
Except at some point at least some of you will see that will completely break the game. But it already breaks it for perception.
"despite their being no logical basis"
Didnt you quite recently tell me a psychological study of actual combat perceptiveness didnt apply to dnd because its all fantasy? And now you demand cold hard logic and realism?
Is the charcter who is doing thr perception in realistic combat? Because if he is, and theres someone right in front of him and theyre trying to kill each other, the guy behind the pillar is gone. Is the pillar 60 feet behind the character doing the percieving? The guy hiding is gone.
Then there you go, a realistic reason for a guy to hide behind a pillar and then come out on the other side with the invisible condition intact.
Now, if the guy doing the percieving did an active search for pillar dude, ya know what, invisible condition is probably gone.
Because, LOGICALY speaking, someone actively focused on searching is going to do a LOT better at spotting someone than someone occupied with a dozen goblins trying to literally eat his face.
I'm sorry. It's late. How is your average perception 13+mods? The average of 1d20 is 10.5. If your round down (because you round down unless a rule tells you otherwise), that's 10. The average result is 10 + your Wisdom (Perception) check bonus. Your passive perception is...10 + your Wisdom (Perception) check bonus.
Where are you getting the extra +3 that you don't think applies to a passive perception check?
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
No-one will spend their action searching unless there's literally nothing else useful for them to do, because searching is almost always a waste of your action. If you want people to actually spend their actions searching, give it a +10 bonus. The reason to have passive perception always active against stealth is to have perception actually be a sensible defense against stealth.
I'm new to this, I think there's a difference between passive and active. Active takes an action, so it doesn't count when you're not using it.