Yes, this thread is suggesting / feedbacking on that decision of theirs. Saying D&D isn't immersive because it has immersion breaking components of decisions, logic gates, and mechanical equations is an odd paradigm to start working from. Its only immersion breaking when you don't feel its something you should be doing or you cant do it when you feel like you should be able to.
Because it is the truth. These are limitations that we cannot escape in PnP but are always looking to. Video games should not keep this limitations in for no reason. The older games hid with with a degree of finesse that hides the fact that the action economy is still working while everything happens in real time. They chose not to include active rolls so as to deepen the immersion and it was one of the things they changes that the community didn't get into uproar about because it worked to their advantage. The goal of D&D is to give structure to a story, and videogames are capable of doing that on a much deeper level. The roll's can still occur, but there is no reason to shove the artificiallty in the players face.
Passive perception is what the average roll would be if you rolled infinite times and it is there to stop someone saying "roll for perception!" in dungeons and rooms to the DM. You can, at any point of the DM describing things, say "Id like to look at that statue, specifically" - even if passive perception had picked nothing up. Its a useful mechanic to avoid dice spamming from a PC.
I am aware, this is exactly what I was describing to the point that you highlighted the reason I am championing it.
Illusions require an active intelligence(investigation) check equal to the DC to see it as such; there is no mechanic for passive investigation due to the nature of what investigation is and how it is applied differently for each situation. They have done a good job of letting illusions be illusions, however. Ive been able to walk through every single one of them without any prior clue (except the map) that there is something beyond.
I didn't say there is such a thing as passive perception. I said passive perception works in conjunction with investigation and the act of you walking through an illusion is an investigation check that has been cleverly hidden from you. Not all illusions are hidden walls, how would you interact with an illusion that is concealing the text of a tapestry that is weaved in color without bolding or outlines? What if the same illusion concealed this text by changing what it says. One solution does not conquer all.
It feels like they have it almost perfectly wrong, at the moment. If they just rotate it a bit and put in more player controlled activity - a button that does a perception check on a small area, or investigation check on an object and lets us try until we hit a DC high enough to trigger "This is something / This is not something" then people can be as OCD as they want about it. In my last multiplayer game we went to the church with the resurrection skeleton guy. We all failed our checks to find the keyhole to his crypt. We had to leave. There is no other way to get in there or find that keyhole that we could think of. So, now we can't resurrect dead companions. Wtf. We need more tools than passive stats when it comes to some of the most used and highly rewarded mechanics in the game. Yes, it is a bit of a chin-scratcher if Larian decides to throw all of this advice out the windows, for sure.
In older games you could just trigger search as a feature that passively happened while you walked through an area and factors such as your distance from hidden things or details also affected your chance to see it. Rolls where happening in the background and your passive perception was being taken into account but it was done in an immersive and natural way that didn't interfere with the player, didn't push them in any particular way while still adhering to the mechanics.
It is the perfect example of what I mean when I say that these artificial elements should be hidden from you so that things can take a more organic and natural approach. I'd like to just spurge on about this for a minute if that is all right. Think about how different those approaches are. In one instance you are having to stop to roll a dice. In the other you select a party member and get them to actively search while they move around(potentially with stealth) while the artificial busywork happens in the background. You get so much more power as a player with nothing to take you out of the moment while your build and stats remain just as relevant. It is such a simple solution but it carries so much weight. Imagine if spending a hit dice on a short rest was instead an option to 'rest' where your characters sit down and have a drink or eat a piece of fruit while they regenerate. There are so many solutions to this problem that can only improve the immersion.
