Handle Passive Perception and Passive Insight when both scores are so high it takes all the fun away

dnd-5eskills

Currently I am playing a lvl4 Ranger with the Observant Feat. Meaning my Passive Perception lies at 20 and my Passive Insight at 17.

So my DM recommended, which was awesome for me at first, to roll, and if it is lower use my passive score, as anything else would not make much sense. Seems legitimate to me.

BUT, to be honest, this takes every fun out of the game if you have two important and pretty often occuring skill checks, which basically never fail, and it takes away all the happiness and hype of a successful perception/insight check…

But on the other hand, it does not make any sense when I roll a 4 for perception or insight and fail, when my passive scores are THAT high as for an extremely observant character which for a change TRIES to look and its so much worse..

I dont know how to play this in a way that makes sense, but does not take all the fun out of these checks.

Best Answer

There's a different way to use Passives.

Straight out of the Player's Handbook...

A passive check is a special kind of ability check that doesn’t involve any die rolls. Such a check can represent the average result for a task done repeatedly, such as searching for secret doors over and over again, or can be used when the DM wants to secretly determine whether the characters succeed at something without rolling dice, such as noticing a hidden monster.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/using-ability-scores#PassiveChecks

A passive check is partly meant to represent your average results. It does not represent all of your results.

Yes, it is specifically used to defeat Stealth and notice some traps--but for other checks? It's not the floor of your results. If run with my interpretation, that's just how you perform if there's no time pressure.

So if you have plenty of time to search a room, you would use your Passive Perception. If you have plenty of time to keep talking to someone to get a sense for what they think and how they feel, you would use your Passive Insight.

This has generally been my approach to using passives, and my players are quite happy with it. Even ones with the Observant Feat. Because they still get that benefit against Stealth and Traps...and if the party is willing and able to take the time to carefully search an area, the player gets to benefit from using their boosted Passive.

But when there's time pressure, when you need an answer right now, the d20s still hit the table and decide what happens.