Hmm. You know, you're not wrong. Hidden Perception rolls would be better. One benefit of video game is the game can make secret rolls without anyone knowing. That would be more real and true to D&D.
So yeah. You're right. If you stick true to classic D&D, if your character fails to perceive something, you CANNOT find it. Sucks to be you. That's part of role playing. That's what makes the Perception skill so important.
So back to the original concept. Perception rolls but in secret. The higher the roll, means you find better stuff. Fail the roll, fails to find hidden stuff. Limit inventory to keep people from hauling tons of useless stuff to sell, and instead provide opportunity to find more gold. Manual searching only rewards you with low grade items like food so it still might benefit a bit to search manually, but you know you aren't going to manually find anything real good in that way. Thus, you won't waste so much time searching every little thing unless you desperately need to pick up some food or something like that for healing because you'll know that only when something highlights is it worth something.
What do you think?
