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Given that (in PFS) you can't throw in wandering monsters to hurry up PCs taking 20 for hours on end, how do you handle it in PFS games?
I count on them being horribly impatient. "If you take 20 it will take you hours to get up this mountain pass." Many PFS players (in my experience, IMO, etc etc) are so impatient they're impatient on behalf of their characters, too.
Failing that, I try to discuss the practical effects. "If you take 20 searching every square, you will be on this mountain for months. How many helpings of trail rations do you have? What is the time limit on your mission?"
Failing that, I throw up my hands and give it to them, because if they're determined to avoid any hint of challenge, it's best to get it over with quickly and avoid those players in the future.
Regional Venture-Coordinator, Southwest
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Time is always an issue in PFS. If the party is taking 20 then they are taking long periods of time to do something that should have taken seconds. There are numerous ways to penalize a party for that.
I recall an instance when a party I was in decided to go regroup part way through an adventure. Unbeknownst to us, we were at the conclusion of the adventure. The GM decided that the boss fled while we went back to the store and bought arrows. So we lost a prestige point and the gold from the boss.
Now, personally as the VL, I would rule that the GM needs to clearly warn the players of something like that before it happens but yeah, if the players decide to waste time, the other elements of the adventure should keep running.
Alternatively, guards or mobs from other areas may roam into the area. Taking 20 to search is noisy, they may alert mobs that they are there, thus allowing them to buff up and prepare. The sky is the limit here.
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I don't think that aid another on perception is very realistic to be honest. I'm not sure that the rules say you can't do it.
But realistically, how are you aiding someone in looking for something?
Grey Mouser: Hey Fahferd I'm gonna go look over there
Fahferd: Grey Mouser dude, no, look over here. [auto Aid +2!]
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I don't think that aid another on perception is very realistic to be honest. I'm not sure that the rules say you can't do it.
But realistically, how are you aiding someone in looking for something?
Grey Mouser: Hey Fahferd I'm gonna go look over there
Fahferd: Grey Mouser dude, no, look over here. [auto Aid +2!]
I was going to say something similar, but then I realized that my SO uses Aid Another for my Perception checks in real life all the time! I am notoriously bad at finding things.
The Fox: Honey, where are my keys?
The Fox's SO: Try looking in your pile of junk!
The Fox: I already looked ther—er, um...Found them! :)
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Depends on the situation. If its a something that requires an individual check, no no aid another allowed. The best example of this is perception in the surprise round. However, searching a room? As long as they can all fit in there I would allow them to take 20 and use assists. It's going to take them 20 times as long as a single perception check (so that would be 1 minute since perception = a move action and 20 move actions = 10 rounds). That may mean the boss on the other side of the door gets those 10 rounds to make opposed perception checks to hear them, eventually succeeds, and gets some prebuffing in. Actions DO have consequences....
RPG Superstar 2014 Top 32
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a minor problems here... maybe,
ah... how are you ALL giving aid another?
Aid another is rolled, so everyone else would have to roll and beat 10 at the same time...
otherwise, what's the problem?
Well, as long as you have a +9 or more in Perception, it's impossible to fail at aiding. And even with less, you have a pretty good chance. It's very rare to see PFS characters with a negative Perception mod, so that's at least a 50/50 shot. You can't take 10 on Aid Another checks, but you still have a good chance.
Having everyone succeed on the same check will probably not happen all the time, but it won't be that uncommon.
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Except you don't search squares anymore.Er, really? How does it work now?
A character makes a single Perception roll when they "actively" look for something, or whenever the GM calls for a roll, and they see everything around them that they could be expected to notice, modified for distance as appropriate. Say I'm looking for traps in a 60 ft. long corridor with pit traps (say, DC 20) in every other 5ft square. If I look for traps and get a 22, I see the one adjacent to me, the one 15ft. away, the one 25ft. away, but not the one 35 ft. away (22 - 1 per 10ft means my 19 is not enough to beat that trap's DC of 20). I might also see the stirges on the ceiling if I'm close enough (with a stealth of, say, 18, I'd see them automatically as long as I was within 40ft when I made my roll to look for traps). I don't have to specifically look for hidden enemies to have a chance of seeing them, nor do I have to specifically look for traps if I say I'm searching a room.
For example, I walk into a room and want to look for traps. I roll a 35, because my perception is cranked and my dice aren't out to get me tonight. Not only should I be told if there are any traps whose DC I beat, I should also be told if there is a creature hiding in the room with a Stealth of less than 35. If there is any obvious treasure (not hidden away in the bottom of a chest) or secret doors, I should be told about those too. I don't have to make separate checks for each thing that I might see. Now if the room is pretty big, I might not see everything there is to see from the doorway, but if I do a cursory check of the whole room (taking 10) or take the time to do a thorough search (taking 20) I shouldn't have to make more than one roll against all available DCs. Taking 20 should still take longer for larger areas, but probably not more than 2 minutes for every 10ft x 10ft section (100 square feet).
Edit to fix my geometry fail
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I think the logic behind taking 20 on a large area taking more time is that when a group takes 20 to search a room, it's presumed they are tossing the room, essentially. If you took 20 once, from a single location, you'd still have to take the range penalties if the room is bigger than 10'x10', right? So if you want your full "take 20" result to count everywhere in the room, you're actually taking 20 multiple times. How many times, I don't know. My guess is that's where the 10'x10' square idea came from. That's the largest area you can search without taking range penalties, so if you want to search an entire room without penalties, you need to do it in 10'x10' squares. That's my interpretation of the logic, not necessarily how I run things.
I tend to do it by room, and if it happens to be a particularly large room, I might say it's going to take a little longer than normal, but I wouldn't make the player pick which spots they want to take 20 from or anything like that. Since there's no hard rule about it, I don't think there's a need to quibble with the players if the room is 20'x20' instead of 10'x10', for example. It's significantly larger in terms of square feet (4 times as big!) but it's still a single room, and in a minute you can give it a pretty good once over. Now, 100'x100' I'd probably say takes longer, but where the line is to determine that, I don't know. It's a GM call based on the situation, and I think that's ok, as long as that doesn't result in a wide variation where some games searching a 100'x100' area takes a few minutes, and in others it takes a few hours.
In the situation of the dragon across the room, you'd see the dragon as long as he doesn't have a stealth roll higher than your take 20 - the range modifier. Even if a judge requires multiple take 20s, the answer should never be "you weren't checking that square." It should be something like, "You were at this end of the room when you did the search, and there are range penalties to see something that far away that is hiding." That's the only way to prevent things like taking 20 from the doorway from automatically spotting everything in the room, and it's the reason the spell Sift exists. If you take 20 from the doorway, and due to range penalties you don't spot the pit trap on the other side of the room, and you don't search again once you're actually inside the room, you won't spot the trap. If the players make it clear they want to search the entire room, moving about the room as they do, I think it's fair for the flow of the game to compress the multiple searches into a single search, but rule that it takes more time than a single take 20 from a single point in the room.
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i figure if my players want to "toss the room"they'll say that. that would then include moving about, opening boxes, and potentially setting off traps they missed in their perception checks.
I'll often get, "I take 20 and search the room," which are not exactly the same things, so without getting into the finer details of taking 20 with the player, and if there's nothing dangerous in the room, I'll just skip to the endif the search. If time is a factor, I'll mention if I think it will take longer than a minute for an exhaustive search.
If they say, "I take 20 on a perception check" - I'll reply something like...
"from where you are, after a minute spent scooping you surrounding out, you detect..."this seems to work.
Which sounds like you're already essentially doing what Mystic Lemur is suggesting. One take 20 gives you your take 20 total from one spot in the room. If you can see the dragon in the corner after range penalties are taken into account, you see it. If not, you don't. If you want to be sure you've seen everything in the room, you would have to take 20 from multiple spots to eliminate the range penalties. Since range penalties are every 10', you end up with 10'x10' squares.
EDIT - And hope the Dragon just wants to watch! More likely, he'll attack when you get too close any it's clear he'll likely be discovered.
EDIT again - Actually, the math is off. You would start by taking 20 10 feet into the room with no penalty, but once you're able to move into the room, you'd be able to take 20 on a 10' radius with no penalty, or a 20'x20' square, which would speed things up.
After all, a perception check isn't a search! It hasn't been that sense 3.5 days... it's just an examination of your surroundings... and a take 20 perception check is just taking a minute to examine your surroundings.
I'm genuinely curious about this, not trying to make a point. What mechanic does represent searching a room? If something is hidden with a DC 50, and the players can't spot it by taking 20, no matter how long they try, can they find it by doing an exhaustive search? I've always taken searching the room to mean taking 20s until you're sure that if you could spot something, you would have. Should there be a bonus for interacting with the room? Should they auto succeed? If so, how long until they auto succeed?
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This all seems incredibly complicated.
If a player wants to search, say, a door for traps or to listen at the door, and they want to take 20, they're effectively "taking 20 to perception on that square".
Perception is "observing stimulus" by RAW. Searching is effectively the same thing.
You can word it any way you like; I think we're all on the same page.
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Except you don't search squares anymore.Er, really? How does it work now?
Long answer - see opinion above.
Short answer, no one really knows. It used to be a move action per 5' square (in 3.5). That language was removed and nothing put in its place. Without some limit you get a lot of ridiculous situations that range penalties are not nearly sufficient to account for.
Personally, if it's in plain view, I'm lenient. If it requires looking around/behind things, I use 3.5 rule.
On-topic: Personally, reactive checks, no Aid Another. Intentional (and coordinated) checks like searching a room, no problem. Someone watching someone else search can often provide useful advice on where they might have skipped.
RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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As a personal rule of thumb, if a player can describe to me what their PC is actually, physically, doing to aid someone with a given skill, and it seems reasonably plausible, I'll let them do it.
1) The restriction to searching only a 5ft square at a time was removed in the switch from 3.5; therefore, reinstituting that rule is against the intent and inappropriate for organized play.
2) No, #1 does not break anything, as long as you understand the rest of how Perception and Take 20 work. For instance, line of sight is still a thing. If a PC is standing in the doorway and makes a Perception check (or even twenty of them!) from that spot, they're only going to get what's possible to perceive from that spot. If there's a vision-only stimulus that's on the other side of a solid obstacle, they don't get it even if they Take 20.
3) As a result of #2, searching a large area that includes multiple obstacles (such as a big room with a bed, desk, maybe a pillar or something) is going to require checks from multiple locations, which in turn means more time spent, especially if they T20 from each of those locations. See? You don't insta-search the entire room (unless it's a very clear room). However...
4) I don't even know who is reading this, but you're not as good at abstracting the passage of time as you think you are. I'm sorry, but you're not. Just about every time I've heard a player ask the GM "How long has it been since X?" , the answer has been a nonsensically large amount of time. For example, I once teleported into a dungeon with nearly ten buffs running (some of them minutes per level), and I figure a PC's buffs are a player's responsibility, so I started meticulously tracking the passage of time. In fact, to be absolutely sure I wasn't anywhere near "accidental cheatery", I consistently erred on the side of ticking off too much time (for instance, a combat lasting a few rounds was recorded as a full minute). Just before going into the last door, someone asked how long we'd been there. I was just about to pipe up that I'd tallied up 10 minutes and by the way I have a couple of buffs that need re-casting now so can we hold on a second... and the GM announces "It's been about an hour".
5) So with #4 in mind, please be careful about how long you think things will take. I know, there are some things (like discussion of strategy or finding your way across town in an unfamiliar city) that require some guesswork about how long they take. That's fine. Completely fine. Perception is not one of those things. Perception takes a very specific amount of time: one move action per check. That means 20 checks takes 1 minute. That means that for searching an area to take, say, an hour, the PC would need to have taken 20 on Perception sixty separate times!
6) As a side note to #5, I personally think it's bad form for a GM to tell a player what actions his PC is taking. I mean, if a player says "I'm just gonna keep hammering this guy,"—meaning to announce a full-attack this turn—the GM wouldn't then force the PC to keep full-attacking that target round after round after round without further input from the player. That would be ridiculous. Well, if a player announces taking 20 to search, and you then tell them it took a length of time longer than what their announced action actually takes, then that's exactly what you've done: you've declared that PC's actions over and over again without the player's consent (or even input). Does anyone else chafe a bit at that?
7) Putting it all together, we GMs have a certain level of responsibility here. Just like with any other ambiguously-declared action, if a player announces "I take 20 to search " but is in an area that can't be fully searched with a single T20 (i.e., can't be fully searched from one location), the GM needs to prompt the player to clarify their intent. We can inform them that they "can T20 and it'll take 1 minute but you won't see anything on the other side of " and that instead they "can search the whole room but you'll need to do so from multiple vantage points, so where do you want to search from and how long do you spend at each place?" This lets the players control their own PCs' actions while simultaneously putting time pressure on them. And ultimately, it takes remarkably little table time to point to a small handful of locations on the map and announce your T20 result and tick X minutes off your buffs. It's smooth, it's clean, it's fair.
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I absolutely HATE trying to play "mother may I" with reactive information. Its frustrating for players not to have information their characters have, gives stealth two different rules whether its the PCs or the bad guys who are using it, and makes knowledge skills unusable. (Oh, you need to know what it is before you decide which knowledge roll you want to use to find out what it is)
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Sometimes scenarios tell a GM how much time certain actions are going to take.
Yeah, that too.
Also, it bugs me when a scenario gives out information during the briefing for successful gather information checks. What did you do, interrogate the VC for 1d4 hours until he coughed up the info you wanted, but did it nicely enough to make it Diplomacy instead of Intimidate?
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In reponse to Jiggy's #4:
People are always surprised at me as a GM because I mentally keep track of how much time it takes (somewhat). Then when the player says "I need to re-up my buff" I say "You know it's only been like 10 minutes, right?" There's always that look of shock when I say that...like GMs are expected to extend the time of things far longer than they actually are.