It’s Ask Angry time again!

Every so often, I select one or two or more questions sent in by readers to answer with my characteristic mix of sarcasm, hyperbole, insults, and brilliant correctitude.

Want a shot at being one of my future Ask Angry victims? Just send your question to ask.angry@angry.games. Remember to cut to the chase — I get bored quickly reading anything not written by me — and tell me clearly what I should call you.

Bean asks…

When it comes to knowledge skills, what are the benefits and drawbacks of using passive scores versus active checks? When and why should use one or the other?

Great question, Bean. I’m not just saying that because you actually got to the frigging point, unlike literally everyone else who e-mails me ever. I’m also saying it because I love Passive Checks. Passive Checks are one the of the most unappreciated, most underused, and most unfairly maligned by mouthbreathers who don’t belong behind a GM’s screen mechanic in all of modern D&D-dom.

I’m being serious, by the way. You would not believe the number of idiots who have screamed at me over my stance on Passive Checks. But then, it’s not surprising. Even the systems’ designers don’t seem to recognize what they’ve got in Passive Checks. Which also isn’t surprising considering they’re the same dumbasses who don’t see why Saving Throws are such a shit mechanic.

What can you do?

Now, my love of Passive Checks ain’t news to some of you. I’ve written about them more than once. By answering this question, I know I’m risking repeating some of the shit in my archive, but I ain’t sorry. I’ve been writing about gaming for almost twenty years now, so I’m going to eventually repeat myself and people keep asking me about — and fighting with me about — the same topics.

Let’s do the standard, simple, same-page start here…

The actual, factual Passive Check rules are a bit anemic in both the 2014 and the 2024 versions of one of the world’s roleplaying games. Most Game Masters don’t even know Passive Checks beyond Perception and Insight and the 2024 version of the D&D rules doesn’t even mention Passive Insight, which is an incredibly stupid choice given Passive Insight is at least as important as Passive Perception if you believe the three-pillars nonsense the designers keep trying to pretend they built D&D around.

Any Ability Check can be made as a Passive Check. You just take the character’s total modifier for the Ability Check in question — including the Ability Modifier and Proficiency Modifier as appropriate — and add 10. You treat that exactly like you would the result of an Ability Check.

So, if Cabe, a level 5 rogue, has 14 Wisdom and proficiency in Perception, a Passive Perception Check yields a 15 with no die roll needed. Cabe would perceive absolutely anything that required a DC 15 Wisdom (Perception) check to perceive just as if Chris, his player, had actually rolled that result on a real check.

Passive Perception and Passive Insight provide quick, easy ways to assess a characters’ basic awareness of the world. Cabe’s senses are such that he’ll spot anything moderately difficult to notice — given a Difficulty Class of 15 is defined as Moderate Difficulty — he’ll spot anything moderately difficult to notice just by having his eyes open, his ears perked, his nose sniffing, his fingers groping, and his tongue… tonguing? Whatever. This handy bit of streamlining means you don’t have to call for Wisdom (Perception) checks from every player every time their characters enter a scene. It also saves you from giving away the fact that something might be amiss just by calling for a check. Because, unfortunately, sometimes asking for a check can make the players a little suspicious, if you know what I mean.

As you enter the room, you see… everyone roll a Wisdom (Perception) check… what’d y’all get… okay… you see, nothing. It’s a totally empty, perfectly normal, completely safe room.

Passive Scores also let you easily set DCs when creatures act against the PCs. Or when PCs act against other creatures. When Cabe tries to sneak past the goblin guards, you just compare Chris’ Dexterity (Stealth) check against each goblin’s Passive Perception to see if he slips by unnoticed. Likewise, when someone tries to con Cabe, you compare the conniver’s Charisma (Deception) to Cabe’s Passive Insight to see whether you have to say, “…but you can tell the shifty dude is up to something.”

Unless you’re an utter moron, Passive Checks are great. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of morons in the Game Mastering community because there’s lots of folks who are totally, irrationally, angrily opposed to Passive Checks. I get the argument, but it’s still a stupid argument.

See, from the Game Master’s side of the screen, Passive Checks carry no uncertainty. If there’s a trap in my module that’s spottable with a DC 15 Wisdom (Perception) Check, I know Cabe’s going to see it. But then, even if I made Chris roll, I’d still know he was pretty likely to spot it. After all, Passive Checks are based on average, expected results. Actually, they’re based on slightly below average, expected results. But don’t sweat that.

The issue ain’t really about uncertainty and unpredictability, but rather it’s that Game Masters have some real dumbass ideas about challenge and gameplay. I don’t want to get into a whole big thing here, but some Game Masters think that if a player doesn’t overcome a certain amount of objective, random uncertainty or take a certain number of hit points worth of damage, they weren’t really challenged and so they didn’t really earn their victory. It’s stupid. Especially when it comes to traps. The trap you don’t spot is the opposite of a challenge, it’s just rolling a die to not get hurt. Traps only become gameplay when they’re spotted. Besides, if you’re using Wisdom (Perception) checks properly, it’s not like spotting the trap gives away the game. But that’s a whole, other story.

There’s more to this than just streamlining, though. Requiring the players to make — or worse, to ask for — Wisdom (Perception) checks to have any chance to spot anything hidden creates perverse incentives that don’t serve the game. Especially not when there’s zero cost or risk associated with rolling such a check, as there is in D&D. There is literally no reason for players not to constantly ask for Wisdom (Perception) checks, and they shouldn’t have to. Characters should have some kind of awareness of the world around them. Even video games are smart enough to have some kind of convenience cost to holding down the Hunter Sense button and also to give you visual cues so you know when it’s worth doing so.

I’ve actually seen Game Masters go so batshit crazy over the idea that anything the players can automatically spot not being a challenge that they purposely set the Wisdom (Perception) DCs on every hidden thing too high to for any of their players’ characters’ Passive Perception Scores. That’s the sort of shit Gygax did in Tomb of Horrors to challenge the players he hated. There’s literally secret doors that can’t be detected by the elven special ability to detect secret doors because fuck the players, that’s why.

I shit you not.

The thing is that, according to the rules, the same DC applies to both actively searching for a trap as to spotting it passively. It’s based on an objective measure of how hard the trap is to spot. So you set it as such and you pay no attention to the characters’ Passive Scores when you design challenges. Gygax was actually a shitty game designer and kind of an asshole, God rest his soul. I love the guy and I’m grateful for what he did, but I also don’t want to be him.

But I digress…

You didn’t ask, Bean, about why Passive Perception is great and how people are irrational fuckwits about Passive Scores. You asked about using Passive Checks for knowledge skills. Which, by the way, haven’t been a thing since the third edition of one of the world’s roleplaying games. I assume, when you say knowledge skills, you’re referring to Intelligence-based skills like Arcana, History, Nature, and Religion commonly used to determine whether a character recalls pertinent information about a particular subject, particularly as part of what the 2024 version of the rules call the Stu… the Stud… the Study Acti…

Sorry, I threw up a little.

As I noted, I’m a fan of using Passive Checks. I think they’re great and they have lots of obvious uses outside Perception and Insight. In fact, I wish the designers had listened a little less to the screaming internet fuckwits and made them more core to the whole action resolution thing. Because there’s a great general use case here. It works for Perception and Insight and checks to recall to information and lots of other shit besides. Which is why I took my time dissecting the rules about Passive Perception and Insight.

By the way, even though the rules for Passive Checks are anemic in the core rulebooks, they are actually a thing for more than just Perception. For example, the 2024 DMG notes on page 28 that you can use Passive Checks for any Ability Check, not just Perception. You can even use it for Insight.

Dumbasses.

Knowledge checks are actually one of the things I almost exclusively resolve with Passive Checks and it actually mirrors almost exactly how I use Passive Perception.

I love telling my players things their characters know. Personally, I think roleplaying games become more playable, more fair, and more engaging as you give the players more information to work with. Moreover, I personally think that if you design a challenge that would be ruined if the players know too much about it, you built a fake challenge. You made Silksong instead of Hollow Knight. That’s a shitty thing to do.

I also personally think that it’s totally moronic to treat the characters as completely ignorant of anything they haven’t actually tripped over at least once at the table. Remember how Marty McFly lost his mind whenever anyone said the word chicken to him? I’m like that with the word metagaming, except more violent. Which is why I’m not allowed back at Origins Game Fair ever.

When my players’ characters encounter anything in the world that someone with some kind of expertise might know something about — say a coin with the stamp of a foreign kingdom on it or a slavering, tentacled horror dwelling in an underground labyrinth — I use an appropriate Passive Check to determine what to tell them about the thing. I do that before I even start narrating so I can weave my exposition right into my scene-setting or description or whatever.

Pulsating grotesquely in the middle of the room, you see a worm-like monstrosity, ten feet long, with barbed tentacles splayed around a beak-like jaw. Beryllia has heard tell of such underground predators. They burst forth from crevices in the rock, grab prey with their flailing tentacles, and then snap through armor and bone with their rock-hard bony beaks.

The coin is stamped with a regal-looking woman wearing a diadem marked with a weeping eye. As a student of History, Ardrick thinks she is likely Queen Conjunctiva of Mesothelioma, a kingdom in Middle Left Center Continentia that collapsed three centuries ago after the naive queen fell prey to one of the innumerable traitors in her court. To this day, historians are not sure which of the uncountable murder plots actually succeeded in bringing her low. Either the merchant who gave you the coin is extremely well-traveled or else there’s some serious narrative foreshadowing going on here.

See? This is basically the same as the what do you see when you enter the room rule for Passive Perception Checks applied to factual recall. In point of fact, whenever my players encounter anything they might or might not see, hear, perceive, or know, I use Passive Checks to decide what to tell them about what they’ve encountered to set the scene properly. Mainly, it streamlines gameplay, but with knowledge checks, there’s other benefits.

First, doing so reminds me to constantly give the players information about the world their characters in, which is something most Game Masters don’t do nearly enough. If at all. Hell, I often give basic information with no Passive Check at all. The first time the characters in my games run into orcs, I tell them what orcs are and what they’re about, and then I use Passive History or Religion or Nature Checks to add more information on top. Orcs are a terrible threat to the civilized world. You can’t live in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and not know that.

Second, doing so prevents the players from ever asking for a die roll that doesn’t involve any actual, doable action. Now, I’ve fought this fight before and I’m not interested in fighting it again, but, the fact is, “I try to remember what I know about the thing,” is not an actual, normal, human action that people would actually take. That’s not how the human brain works. When you recognize something, your brain automatically starts trying to recall information about it and serves it up without you having to do anything. Either your brain finds the information or it doesn’t. Yes, sometimes, it takes a few days and, in D&D, that often leads to a moot point — “That strange worm-like thing you fought three weeks ago? Beryllia suddenly remembers it’s called a grick.” — but that’s not about you thinking really hard while making a constipation face.

See, that’s the most important aspect of my general rule for Passive Checks. Whenever I need to determine the outcome of an uncertain situation that doesn’t require a character to actually expend any effort and actively interact with anything, I use a Passive Check. Moreover, a player should never have to ask for a Passive Check. That’s what passive means. If you walk into a room, you’ll see what’s there. That’s how eyes work. If you’re on watch, you’ll hear noises in the bushes. That’s how ears work. If you’re talking to someone, you’re aware of their body language and tone and shit. That’s how eyes and ears and social senses work. If you see a tentacled horror on a coin, your brain will serve up everything you know about it. That’s how brains work.

Except, of course, sometimes they don’t work. Sometimes you miss shit or you don’t remember facts in time. That’s why Passive Checks are based on your Abilities, Skills, and the difficulty of the task, whatever the hell that is. Skipping the die roll removes the random element, but that’s okay. The random element is time consuming, it doesn’t add much, it changes the game in undesirable ways in many of these cases, and, when it comes to giving the players more information to work with, it’s better to err in their favor anyway.

Likely, now, you want to know when I actually do have my players roll for such things as History and Arcana and maybe Perception and Insight too. Or when I’d let them roll. The answer is, players get to roll actual, real Ability Checks when their characters are actually, actively doing something that requires them to interact with the world.

For example, when you walk into a room, or keep your eyes peeled as your party travels, or sit up for a watch rotation while your allies sleep, you might spot signs of a hidden trap or a stalking spider-bear by virtue of your Passive Perception. That’s automatic. You don’t have to ask for it. You can’t ask for it. I already checked before I started narrating otherwise how would I know what to narrate. If I didn’t tell you that your character spotted something, but you suspect there’s something to spot, now you have to make an actual, active search. Then you get to make a real Ability Check. One that might yield better or worse results than your Passive Check. That means interacting in the space in a way that others would recognize as you searching.

In a trapped room, that means moving around and poking and prodding and knocking on things, peering under things, moving your light around, sniffing at things, licking things, whatever. That means, by the way, if there is a trap and you fail to find it, you risk blundering into it. This shit’s also time consuming. That might mean nothing, but it might mean a lot, depending on your quest. At the very least, it means you’re fifteen minutes closer to the end of your torch or to marking off another day’s worth of rations. Whatever.

In the wilderness, searching means moving away from the party or the camp and investigating. It means possibly holding up travel or possibly putting yourself at a distance from camp. It means potentially moving right into the reach of the stalking spider-bear you don’t know is there. It means, also, cluing your stalker in that you’re on alert. They might decide to sneak away without bothering you or they might decide to take you down before you can alert your allies.

Same with Insight. If someone’s pulling a con, your social senses might tell you something’s up, but if you suspect something’s amiss even though I didn’t tell you so because your Passive Insight Check wasn’t good enough, now you can actively try to gain Insight. That means asking leading or probing questions, confirming details, testing responses, or trying to catch the possible conniver in a lie. You don’t have to play it out, by the way; just tell me you think the dude is lying and you want to probe him. I’ll handle it. But do understand that’s an active process and the subject might notice you’re suspicious. If they’re up to something, they might back off. If they’re not up to something, they might get offended.

And all of this also applies if you fail to recognize the stamp on the coin or the wormy horror. Now you have to fall back on active, interactive ways to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. That’s called research. Go to the library or the hall of records or consult some scholars or whatever. Of course, some situations make that tricky, just as some situations preclude you doing probing Insight or actively searching your surroundings. If wormy doom is slithering down the slimy slope toward you, you might just have to fight your way through without knowing what to call the thing eating your face off. That sucks, but that’s how it be.

Your friends can always look it up later so they can give you a proper euology.