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theadddm · 6 years

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Regarding the Gentle Art of the Passive Check

Raise your hand, if your Dungeons & Dragons character is supposed to be a master of ancient magics, or whatever, but can’t ever seem to accomplish any test of intellectual and arcane skill, because you, the player, keep rolling 2′s on your d20? Go ahead and raise your hand, and really confuse the people around you, in the coffee shop.

Now, raise your hand, if you’ve ever DM’d games of Dungeons & Dragons, where the heroes enter a room with secrets to be discovered, and when you ask the players to make a Perception check, they respond by obsessively searching for the things which they aren’t supposed to know are there.

These are well-known dilemmas for anyone experienced in playing roleplaying games, and Dungeons & Dragons has answers, but is extremely vague about them, because they want to empower DMs to make their own decisions about things that they don’t understand. Said answers are Passive Checks: when the DM evaluates the result of a character’s effort, without rolling the die, and instead using the equation of 10 + Skill Modifier.

The Player’s Handbook is sparse on the details, and the Dungeon Masters Guide even sparser, but the essence is any of a handful of mechanics:

1) when the DM wants to test the player characters ability to accomplish something, without letting the players know about it, the DM may use a passive check (A.K.A. seeeeecret check).

2) when the narrative situation is such that DM would be asking the player to make many consecutive ability checks, the DM may, instead, use a passive check (A.K.A. make one average check, so you don’t have to make a full-days’ worth of regular checks).

The second mechanic is pretty harmless and makes a lot of sense, but the question of whether checks should be made in secret has a range of fans and detractors, depending on how much the DM trusts (or wants to trust) their players to not meta-game, or how much the DM wants to create a sense of drama in their game.

3) There is, however, a more interesting issue, in a 3rd mechanic, which is *not* in the core rulebooks, but has been described by Jeremy Crawford, lead writer for the Player’s Handbook, as the intended mechanic: that the value for a Passive Check is intended to serve as a minimum value for a regular check, at least for Wisdom (Perception) checks. The idea is, that there is a baseline level of awareness, which is available to the character when they’re not paying particular attention; it’s the difference between spotting something which you’re looking for, and just happening to notice it. (take a gander at this podcast episode, for more details about this concept: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/james-haeck-dd-writing)

This leads us to the fascinating question, of whether it makes sense for a character to have a minimum-possible value for any check, if they have one for a Perception check? Maybe the wilderness-guide ranger should be able to get a sense of direction or danger intuitively as well as analytically. Perhaps the worldly bard should be able to sniff out a liar before they even speak, without having to take in their cadence and micro-expressions. In other words, maybe sometimes you just get a feeling about something.

ALSO, though, this mechanic doesn’t have to assume that the character isn’t paying literal attention; instead of it being “oh, I didn’t realize that I was attempting a feat of Acrobatics,” perhaps it can be “this feat of Acrobatics? No sweat; I don’t even need to try.”

This is a SUPER-contentious item amongst the dungeon master community, since it boils down to pure philosophy of gaming. Shouldn’t skilled characters be able to consistently succeed at their skills, even if their player can’t roll to save their imaginary life? ...but shouldn’t characters also be able to fail catastrophically? Shouldn’t players be better than meta-gaming, and shouldn’t the DM trust them to be? As I often do, I believe that the real answer is revealed with MATH!

Looking at the numbers, characters with a +0 to a skill will automatically succeed at a DC 10 check; we’re talking about a character being able to walk through Very Easy and Easy skill checks, and the DM gives it to them automatically, even if they aren’t particularly good at that skill. ...unless a character has a penalty to that skill, in which case their passive score is probably 9, maybe 8. Keep in mind, that, we’re talking about Very Easy and Easy checks—mundane tasks; things that anyone could do, and the only questions might be how well they do it, or how long it takes. It could be something as minute as opening an unlocked door, or something as neutral as chopping firewood, where a skilled person can do it magnificently, but a complete derp can still accomplish it.

(conversely, a check with a DC of 15 almost always requires a character to be proficient in that skill, to pass it with a Passive Check. The keyword, here, is ‘proficient’ -- a character needs to be actually good at this thing, for the DM to just give it to them, and this is for a check which is considered to be only Moderately Difficult.)

...and that’s the part that I think most people miss, thinking about Passive Checks -- EVERY DM hands out automatic successes for most things that a character does. DMs don’t require a die roll, for a character to open an unlocked door. It’s something extremely easy, the DM says “yeah, you can do that,” without going to the d20. ...and, why would they? That’s a task that’s well-within that character’s ability to accomplish perfectly-well, nearly every time. This DM just used a Passive Check, against a task with a really low DC. The big variable in every DM’s usage is how extreme is the ease of the task which is being attempted. Of course a DM wouldn’t require a roll for opening an unlocked door, and of course they would require a roll for picking a locked one. It’s the stuff in the middle that’s the question -- the checks with a DC of 10, 12, 15, which are the question, and Passive Checks simply offer a consistent mechanic answering that question. Would the scholarly wizard be able to find common information in a book? Probably. How about the barbarian? Maybe not. On the flippy side, a check which isn’t a gimme is not going to be accomplished passively, except by a character who’s reeeeally good at that thing. So, is it a given, that the barbarian could make the 5-foot jump over a pit (let’s say it’s Athletics, DC 12)? Almost certainly. ...but the wizard? Not at all. This is a mechanic that provides quantifiable justification to answer the question of when to grant an automatic success, or when to require a roll -- something that every DM has to think about, throughout every game.

Personally, I prefer a somewhat middle road for Passive Checks. My guidelines are:

For Passive Check Mechanic #1: Seeeeeecret checks,

Does it make any damn sense for the skill to have a sub-conscious baseline level of that skill? When making this check, the question is literally whether the character is aware of needing to use this skill, and if they could just happen to notice something, or get a feeling about something. So, physical skills probably don’t make sense, here, ie., Athletics, Acrobatics.

I use Perception, Insight, Survival, Medicine. ...Wisdom skills, basically, for that gut-feeling factor. I can see an occasional use case for Charisma skills, for those situations the character’s vibe is affecting a whole room, and the character hasn’t taken particular notice of every person there.

Is the situation such that a sub-conscious baseline level of that skill would be available to the character? Sure, a character keeping watch over a quiet campsite could happen to notice a hidden monster, but what about in the heat of battle? Other roleplaying games (see: Kids on Bikes) have standardized this distinction as a primary mechanic in their system, distinguishing decisions or actions made in calm situations versus stressed situations, and, if you want to allow Passive Scores to ever be used in these situations, D&D can handle this with Advantage and Disadvantage (which modify a Passive Score by +/- 5).

For Passive Check Mechanic #2: Make one check instead of a billion,

Will the character be doing this thing repeatedly for more than 6 seconds? This one is useful for a whole day of library research, or hours spent climbing a mountain, crawling a dungeon with constant searching, or anything that takes a while; more than a minute, even. Its flaw is that it does assume the law of averages -- that the character will never achieve an extraordinarily good or bad result. That don’t seem right to me, so I think it makes sense to ask the player for a roll, first, to give them that chance to roll really well, or reeeeeally badly. Then, if they didn’t roll a 1, the Passive Score can be their result.

For Passive Check Mechanic #3: Passive Score as mimimum-possible-value for an Ability Check,

Is the DC for the check below 10? It’s in the every-day, low-difficulty tasks, where a character really should be able to perform how we expect them to, since they have the time and room to set up for it. Probably less so, for the more difficult tasks, although there is an argument for pressure actually sharpening one’s senses, which is totally a thing in real life. How to measure if a character is a pressure performer? Imagine me shrugging. (if it helps, I’m 5′7″, average build, with brown hair and eyes, and a short beard)

Is the situation such that the player would ask to make the same roll over and over again? You can’t just keep rolling until you get a 20, but if the character has the time and the freedom to keep trying something, they truly should get something more than just that one roll. Then, the situation falls under the purview of Passive Check Mechanic #2, so just use the Passive Score to back up a single roll.

As contentious an issue as this mechanic is, I believe that it’s really just a sensible way to codify the long-standing common-sense practice of allowing characters to auto-succeed certain tasks, and lets skilled characters be skilled.

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