Based on this poll I’m currently working on my first professional design work featuring the Pathfinder system. (The 3-to-1 advantage over 3.5 was impossible to ignore. Hopefully the other people, like me, using 3.5 in their home games will be OK with the minimal on-the-fly conversion work necessary to make a Pathfinder module work in 3.5.)

I’ve run into a conceptual difficulty, however, surrounding the conflation of Listen, Spot, and Search into a single Perception skill. It’s a fairly minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but I wanted to get some outside opinions on it.

LOCATION KEYS

The way I structure location keys is fairly straight-forward:

• There’s boxed text which conveys the common information that anyone walking into the room would immediately perceive. (“You see a box in the corner with a weird symbol painted on it.”)
• After the boxed text, I immediately list any reactive skill checks which should be immediately made by anyone entering the room. These are typically perception-type checks, but they might also be knowledge-checks. (For example, make a See Hidden check to notice that there are small spiders crawling all over the box. Or a History check to recognize the symbol as the royal seal of Emperor Norton.)
• Then each significant element in the room is independently described with additional details that will become important if characters investigate or interact with it. (“Inside the chest is ruby which has been cracked in half. You can see that the inside of the ruby is filled with empty spider’s eggs.”)

The significant elements often include specifically delineated skill checks that become relevant during the investigation/interaction. In my work with 3.5,  this delineated skill check was usually a Search check and, as a result, the format was self-evident in its utility: A Spot check for the room was almost always at the top of the key entry; specific Search checks for various elements within the room were located with those elements.

What’s happening in Pathfinder, however, is that I’ve just got Perception checks scattered throughout the room description. My concern is that it’s not necessarily self-evident which Perception checks are passive versus which Perception checks require active searching, which could lead to the key being more confusing to use at the table.

EXAMPLES

Here’s a really simple example of what a room element looked like in a 3.5 module:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Search (DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

Here’s what a straight conversion to Pathfinder looks like:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Perception (DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

In isolation, that doesn’t look particularly problematic. But if you’re a Pathfinder player, what I’m specifically interested in is what you think about this:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Perception (Active – DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

Is it clear what I mean? Is there a better solution for what I’m trying to distinguish here?

Reactive Perception checks are part of Pathfinder, but the term “active Perception check” isn’t actually part of the core rules. It does seem to be fairly widespread among fans, either as a natural evolution of the “reactive” terminology or because it migrated over from 4E (where “active Perception check” is a term of art).

Thoughts?