Them Bones of Adventure - III: Searching

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

The procedures of the search seem like they would be one of these really minor, blink-and-you’d-miss-‘em blip on the rules radar, a minor trifle if anything.

Yet this topic is one of the main pillars of old school play and how it is treated at one’s table speaks volumes of the tone set for a game. There is good reason for this as it is one of the foremost instances (by association with traps, the passing of time and the possibility of random encounters) where player creativity and input can become rather frequently solicited: deciding when to search, what to search for, where to search for it, and how to do it are all finer points of player expression which should have real implications on the end result, in numerical bonuses (if new school) or direct results (when old school). By comparison, a player’s not usually invited to wax poetic about a sword thrust from his character, but when searching for nooks all of the words have to be measured, the abstraction taking a back seat and interaction with the description becoming very important indeed.

Traditional play dealt with this in a very loose fashion, intuition being the watchword of the day, things were either In Plain Sight – described readily upon coming under a character’s notice, Concealed – meaning they were found as soon as a character declared he searched the general proximity of the correct spot or Secret – requiring a die roll to find even when a search effort was directed at the correct place.

Since I’m bridging an adaptation here, I’ll retain these terms and attempt to translate this approach to current mechanics.

That’ll be just the check, please – the Collective Roll Syndrome

A noticeable folly of the new school, I’ve seen players signal the referee to coast a search along, ask for dice to be rolled and just be presented with the itemized final tally of what they’ve found in a whole room.

This time around, in addition to abstrusely dispersing the relevant information in three separate entries (maybe more as these were the ones I could find) Fifth Edition seems to not have made up its own mind on how to treat this: the sidebars titled “Hiding” and “Finding a Hidden Object” pointing in semi-conflicting directions. Eventually, as going by the current books, we’re soon led into an ugly place in terms of game design: the collective search roll.

I’ve had a gut-problem with collective party rolls for searching since my first reading of the rules. Here is a place that inequivocaly points to the superiority of old school play, wherein the players cannot simply wander into a room and each pay their due d20 perception rolls like at a toll booth and expect to be rewarded with shinies if they score high. It’s just too easy, too mindless. 5th does take the positive step of requiring input from the player for the search to be a valid one, but doesn’t go quite as far as I’d like.

What’s worse: metagaming rears its ugly head but quickly, once a given player rolls poorly, in barges the nearest party mate, knuckles a-cracking to repeat the search “just to make sure the ranger searched things right”; rinse, repeat, nauseate. Lets face it: if something was hidden to the point of resisting a search by the highest of 4-to-6 Perception rolls we can pretty assuredly assert that it just wasn’t made to be found, conversely, knowing most things won’t stand to that kind of character scrutiny, why bother?

Granted, plenty of old school blogs nowadays have pretty much homed in on good procedural for doing this, so I’ll just push this along to completeness and avoid earning further stripes in obviousness. The Alexandrian, as well as Hack & Slash tackled this effectively, the first one even coopting some useful new school concepts (“take 10/20”) that already were implicitly present in old school play but simply lacked such designation, gelling it all together.

The Crunchy Bits

Searching is a choice of action that implies free hands or adequate tools and a minimum degree of illumination, meaning candles can actually be of use in providing localized light while at the same time minimizing the party’s profile to attention from the exterior. Characters focused on a search may well become disadvantaged at noticing other things so it is advisable to post a lookout.

Searching for static objects, whether hidden doors, items, features or traps is to be done dicelessly save for those cases so cornered that they’re basically rabid beasts. It’s a very stable albeit time-consuming task, hence my leaning that only the players’ options and the character’s Passive Perception, modified by circumstances and mode of search, are to count. This is basically the interpretation of the traditional methodology as shifted through the lens of the 5E mechanical frame. 

Remember: Perception only tests the character’s senses, whereas Searching is a lot more about deduction and investigative inspiration (i.e. actual play through meaningful choice) than rolling a die to see if you blinked at the wrong time. Also, note that despite referring to Perception throughout, I don’t care to formalize which skill bonus is actually applicable (Perception, Investigation or other), it’ll be subjected to adjudication on a per-case basis.

Verbal Declaration – Player Input

This is intended as the obligatory ground floor to whatever search effort the player wishes the character to engage in. The search pattern is directed by the player in relation to the description handed by the referee and the method of searching (Rummage, Rote or Thorough) is selected.

Whenever a player feels like the situation merits it, he can describe his search in greater detail, the character being thus allowed to manipulate his surroundings in a way that still adheres to the numerical logic of the rules, since without the proper input he’ll only ever find items or features hidden within his perception range, but can occasionally supersede them if adequate action is taken, for example smashing a sealed cubic urn upon the ground to access its contents instead of attempting to find a delicate opening mechanism concealed on its underside or spilling water to watch if it seeps through any hidden cracks instead of being helplessly prevented from finding an otherwise impossibly-well-hidden trapdoor.

Single Glimpse – Skill Check

A character that only gets one glimpse through a corner as he tries to count the number of denizens in a room or he wants to assess details as he steals a quick glance down a side-passage while on the run from something nasty; Basically, when pressure and uncertainty collide, randomization is the answer.

Ransack – Skill Check

When time is of the essence and the character wishes to wantonly rummage through a room’s contents, ransacking takes half the time of a rote search and can even yield better results depending on the roll, but I’ll impress upon the players that it is exceedingly noisy and absolutely careless behaviour, and the gains of rolling high (i.e. matching a Thorough Search at most) are probably not worth the accumulated risk of Fumbling and attracting undue attention or even breaking fragile treasure.

I’m willing to retain the maligned option of rolling for Searches as I can appreciate its borderline uses (and recognize that sometimes change is hard to impose at a table) but I'll be sure to stress that as soon as the d20 is lifted, it’s all on fate and the player's shoulders: I only let characters fail forward when there’s a swordpoint or a pit trap greeting them at the other end.

Standard or Rote Search – or “Take 10” – Passive Average Perception Score

This total is actively applied to whatever the character searches at a slow pace, taking a rough average of 10 minutes per 10’x10' area searched, 10' of wall section, or 2 minutes per handheld object inspected. Multiple searchers linearly accelerate the process.

Thorough or Detailed Search – or “Take 20” – Maximum Perception Total

Nets the best possible search effort that the character can muster, as per having rolled 20 on the die, slowing the pace to a crawl and taking five times as long as a rote search to perform.

Orientation on DCs

Note that I’m really only mechanically concerned with Hidden level of information. Concealed things are given to anyone who merely takes the time and indicates searching in the correct place (meaning they’ll have a DC in the 7-10 range if that), the rest being In Plain Sight and either directly part of the referee’s initial description or obtained immediately upon request (for example, the texture of the walls, the height of the ceiling, any plant growth or discolourations, etc).

Going with the static totals requires some thinking about DCs, as the searching efforts become very stable: keep in mind that something labelled “Hard – DC 15” will be found by anyone – even a Perception 3 character – with a thorough search; while it takes a DC of 27+ to ensure that a character maxed out in Perception (taking 20, +4 mod, +2 from Proficiency) cannot find a chest buried under flagstones.

I’ll most likely (d)evolve my approach into gut-feeling these numbers as a “requires rote search to find/requires thorough search to find” simplified heuristic labelling, the actual DC being little more than a numeric middleman that will prove the most useful when writing or adapting published material. Time will tell.

Modifiers

Not many that I can produce, but searching under dim-light (since movement is already pretty hard-coded into the search modes), will impose a -5 to the Perception total. Again, I should only resort to the numbers when discretion fails me.

Closing Thoughts - Relativizing the importance of missed content

A word relating to the importance of missed content. This type of occurrence will only ever truly matter in a revisitable megadungeon or a place where otherwise several parties with varying rosters of players are likely to pass through. It only really carries any weight that we lock some information or item in a fixed place if the importance of doing it is demonstrably not spurious, otherwise it is ourselves that we’ll be fooling. With but one party to master, whatever they don’t find in the first comb-through is very much akin to never having existed in the first place, as even later maps pointing to a supposedly original hidden place can be created out of thin air after the fact, along with the placement for the reward.

My adoption of the above system was rooted on this asymmetry between unknown difficulty (since a player can never know for sure if there is something hidden when he searches or not) contrasted with the player’s own public rolls, conspiring to create this inelegant metagaming vortex of die after die being thrown at a problem until the desired high roll comes along and the referee has to tell a crestfallen player that no, there really isn’t anything there worth the chase, all this punctuated with the occasional pavlovian score that shines through only to perpetuate the behaviour.