SEARCHING FOR THINGS can be a pain for both players and game masters alike. As a DM, I really try to leave as much up to the player’s imagination as possible. In the perfect world, I suppose that I would fully dress a room, but to be honest, I just don’t care enough to dress it in anything more then generalities. Not to mention that I play my games during the Victorian era, and those folks loved cluttering every corner of their rooms up with stuff. I simply couldn’t do it! Thus I just describe a room briefly, let the party know what they can safely assume a room is used for, describe the largest pieces of furniture, and maybe one or two things that catch their eyes at a glance. It is up to them to really drag what is in the room out of me.

The worst possible thing that could happen though is that they start searching the place, which gives them a slim chance of finding something, if anything is there. What exactly does this mean? That is what I intend to figure out today.

TIME

The biggest factor in searching for stuff like concealed doors, stashes of money, or clues, is the time that is involved in performing this action. Time affects two major aspects of the game. The first is Magic. Most spells are time sensitive, we have to know exactly how much time that the characters are going to spend looking for something, we must not ever forget to subtract this time from either spells or other time sensitive issues that can come up in a game.

The second thing that we should consider is the DM’s dream of “The Living World”. Are the characters snooping around where they don’t belong? Usually, they are! And for instances like this, we need to know the base chance of the person returning to catch the players red-handed. Alternatively, somebody else might spy this action going on as well and interrupt them, be it a guest, servant, or wandering monster.

SEARCH AS AN ACTION

I am sure that there are grumpy ol Dungeon Masters out there who would say that this whole system is weak. I can’t deny that! A player CAN open drawers and tap on walls, I’m not saying that this system isn’t lazy, however, it IS practical. Players love to pull this one, and they should be able to, after all, it is in the Players Handbook. We should keep to the rules, but, I feel that these rules can be expanded upon.

That said; let’s keep it as simple as possible. Something that we can remember without the need for any new “house rules” written down on paper. We’ll simply turn the search into an action, chopping it up into three different forms of search.

• Brief Search
• Regular Search
• Thorough Search