I know to some of the old guard, Passive Perception seems something akin to Lucifer. Or that’s at least how I read the hyperbole. I think the argument is—and someone will tell me if I’m wrong—that it takes the skill and persistence of roleplaying the observant guy out of the equation. If that’s the case, I don’t think I agree. It always seemed nothing more than the doggedly persistent calls for spot, search, perception or whatever from rogue, rangers, and elves. A constant litany of “what do I see, what do I find, what do I hear.”
At the same time, passive Perception and Insight was never meant to be something that stops DM badgering. Rather it was supposed to be a guide to the DM for how much badgering they want to have in his or her gain.
Think of it as some reverse version of those signs in amusement parks. You know, the one with the cartoon character, a measuring stick, and “you must be this tall to ride.” Instead, you must ride if you are not at least this skillful.
And by the ride, of course, I mean the necessity to make skill checks. And that’s why I think you can passive anything.
RPGers have a Povlovian response to the opportunity of rolling dice. And then they wonder why the game is so damn random. The take 10 auto success has been around since 3e, but where the older game makes the player ask permission to use it, the DM just assumes that they are, because that would be the smart thing to do.
Skill checks and dice rolling with Death should probably not be dealt with passively, no matter how much you players might want it to.
When I write a skill check for my home game it will say something like: climb the cliff (Athletics DC 15; Tark, Ug’thom, and Tall Tyrion). What this tells me is the check, and who auto succeeds it. Typically such kind of small challenges are out of combat, so I know who can get up by themselves, and who needs checks. I also use them to help the narrative. I might tell them.
“The cliff looks daunting, but Tark, Ug’thom and Tall, you survey it, and figure any one of you could make it to the top. From there you can throw down ropes for the others.”
Then it becomes nothing more than local color, unless I launch a combat encounter on the cliff lip just as soon as everyone (or almost everyone) makes it to the top.
I deal with Knowledge skills in a similar manner, but I’ll admit that I make the DCs unusually high for one group. The wizard in the party is well-known for blowing his rolls, while the untrained bugbear pulls the knowledge out of his hairy ass at such a phenomenal rate that I awarded him ad hoc Arcana training. Now I make it the DC just a smidge over the wizard’s passive knowledge, and watch our group’s narrative unfurl.
There is something you will want to keep in mind about this method. It grants either an auto success, or less than a 50% chances for success for success to your most skilled characters. It maps a narrative style that I’ve always liked, when badass who aced everything. That swing really helps to create the quick southbound narrative I’ll call it. It’s like Solo in Empire. The man’s luck begins to crumble, with all but the ladies. But that’s Solo fo’ya.
What, I don’t have a future in nerdcore? Crap!
Anyway, it works pretty well for rogues and Sherlock Holmes style wizards. Hey, and they tend to work best for the quick southbound.
Remember, you don’t have to use passive for everything. Switching things up a bit is always fine. But for quick narratives, small challenges, and allowing skillful characters to show off their stuff, passives work fine. Using passive scores is also a great way to fine-tune your DCs for your PCs. Ever wonder why the skill DC chart has changed so many times in 4e? Often it was because the base assumptions building that chart were wrong, but it is also because the real skill DCs are determined not by the assumptions of the game as an abstract intellectual exercise, but by the skills of the characters. You ask, “Do I want this to be easy, moderate, or hard for my player’s characters?” Not for the system. Game rules should serve player (including DM) enjoyment, not themselves.
Skill checks and dice rolling with Death should probably not be dealt with passively, no matter how much you players might want it to.
I’m kind of moving in the opposite direction. Rather than using more passive checks, I’m doing more active PC checks vs passive NPC checks. For opposed checks, I’m trying things without rolling for the NPC, I’m just assuming their taking 10 on the skill check. I got the idea from a post that I think was on the Alexandrian. On that blog, the designer was critiquing the problem of a party of PCs trying to sneak by a party of NPCs. In a case like that, the worst PC check has to beat the best NPC check and that’s very hard, particularly when dealing with two sets of opposed checks (move silently vs listen and hide vs spot). Even consolidating the detection skills into Perception and the sneaking skills into Stealth only alleviates part of the problem.
I thought of two ways to do it. Pick one roll for the NPCs and treat all others as taking the Aid Another action. If they score > 10, add +2 to the main roll. Or assume all NPCs are simply taking 10 and all PCs just have to beat the DCs generated by that method. In a group of homogeneous NPCs, that would yield the same DC for all of them.
Right now, I’m trying to determine if this really works for me or if I miss the possibility of having one of the NPCs make his detection roll while others fail.
I have been playing around with something similar in my campaign recently, but it’s not quite the same as passive skill checks.
Outside of skill challenges and encounters, I like to speed up play. The old Knights of the Dinner Table comics have always resonated with me, where the players roll on mundane tasks like brushing their teeth and eating dinner for mishaps. Basically I want to streamline my game and not clutter it up with constant dice rolling.
Here’s my very basic, multi-level system so far: You’re either untrained, trained, or specialized in a skill.
Untrained is exactly what you’d think — it wasn’t selected as a trained skill. Trained means, of course, that you did select the chosen skill. Specialized indicates that you are not only trained in a skill, but have a significat advantage to it — perhaps that skill is also associated with your primary ability score, or maybe you have a magic item that adds an item bonus to the skill as a property.
A character trained in a skill can easily accomplish normal tasks associated with that skill, such as climbing a rope with Athletics, finding the seediest tavern in town with Streetwise, or identifying the iconography in a haunted chapel with Religion.
Specialized characters automatically get to do really cool things: con a free room out of the innkeeper for a night with Bluff, easily spot a secret door with Perception, or scout ahead into the dungeon’s next room and not be noticed with Stealth.
Sure, I could force rolls for the secret door and hope that the party happens to find it — but if I created a really cool encounter behind that door or if it’s the only real access point to the next part of the adventure, then why not just let the player feel good about gearing his character toward a really good Perception bonus?
I’ve heard conflicting information about whether or not using passives for everything is “rules as written.” My understanding is that passive perception and insight is supposed to be on all the time but the other skills are up to the DM. What I like to do is use the passive scores for other skills to give players an idea of items that might be interesting to their characters. An athletic thief might notice that a wall has plenty of handholds, a wizard might sense arcane energy in the room. They still need to roll to gain more information and there is always that trade off of how much information to give.
I may sound like a lazy player since I like to minimize dice rolls, but the truth is more that I’m just an inexperienced one. It would take me years to catch up on all the tropes the players with more experience know. Many of the clues that seem obvious to experienced players go over my head and then I have a table of people telling me how obvious it was that there was a trap there because the DM said or didn’t say one word.
Also, I’m a big fan of not having a 1 mean an automatic failure on a skill check. Sure it’s possible that a 10th level character might have a hard time climbing down a ladder of DC 5, but is it really 5% likely? If the character’s bonus for a skill is large enough to make failure impossible, don’t punish the player for that.
I can see two sides to this one. For ease of gameplay and keeping things moving along, using passive DCs for many situations eliminates a lot of the mundane rolling and streamlines overall progress of the game. Many times this is a good idea, particularly if things have either bogged down and you want to move onto something more interesting, or if you’re in the midst of something exciting and using those passive DCs will help keep that momentum going.
On the other hand, making those rolls lends a bit of “realism” to the game as well (something I like to bring up quite often…heheh). Regardless of how knowledgeable or skilled someone is at something, there is always the potential for something unexpected to happen or to have that moment where you’re simply unable to remember or do something correctly. It’s these kinds of situations that lend credence to DCs and the basic concept of rolling for success even when you think you’re doing something that normally requires very little effort or chance of error.
Personally, take the middle ground between the two. If the passive DCs will keep the game moving or maintain momentum, I’m all for them. On the other hand, if players are getting a bit comfortable with always being able to do things and/or if a DC check for something simple might yield unexpected results, I like to force those rolls with some unanticipated or unknown modifiers that can in turn yield unpredictable results. On top of that, a failure with some skills can yield results that confuse or hinder players and force them to think creatively. The skill in question is always a factor in this of course.
So while I agree with what you’ve posted here, I also agree with the opposite as well. It all depends on the game and how it’s progressing and what kind of impact those DCs can have on the overall enjoyment of that game. =)