Search
Key Ability: Int | Trained Only: No | Armor Check Penalty: No
Use this skill when you take a moment to carefully and deliberately use your senses to search for something that is not obvious. You can search for something by sight, hearing, scent, taste, and touch.
Check: You generally must be within 10 feet of the object or surface to be searched. For each 10 feet farther away, a -2 penalty is imposed. The table below gives DCs for typical tasks involving the Search skill.
| Task | Search DC |
|---|---|
| Hear someone talking or moving normally | 0 |
| Ransack a chest full of junk to find a certain item | 10 |
| Use scent and taste to tell if food is rotten | 12 |
| Read lips | 15 |
| Notice a typical secret door or a simple trap | 20 |
| Find a clue | 20 |
| Use scent and taste to tell if food is poisoned | 10 + poison save DC |
| Hear someone sneaking around | creature's stealth check |
| See through a figment illusion | illusion's saving throw DC |
| Find a difficult nonmagical trap (rogue only)1 | 21 or higher |
| Find a magic trap (rogue with trapfinding only)1 | 25 + level of spell used to create trap |
| Notice a well-hidden secret door | 30 |
| Find a footprint | varies from 5 for mud and snow to 25 for hard stone2 |
| Special Conditions | Search Check Modifier |
| Distance to the source, object, or creature | -1/10 feet |
| Through a closed door | -5 |
| Through a wall | -10/foot of thickness |
| Favorable conditions3 | +2 |
| Unfavorable conditions3 | -2 |
| Terrible conditions4 | -5 |
| Creature making the check is tired | -2 |
| Creature making the check is fatigued | -4 |
| Creature making the check is exhausted | -6 |
| Creature or object is unseen due to invisibility, blindness, etc. | -20 (for vision-based checks) |
| 1 Dwarves with Stonecunning (even if they are not rogues) can use Search to find traps and hidden construction built in stone. | |
| 2 A successful Search check can find a footprint or similar sign of a creature’s passage, but it won't let you find or follow a trail. See Special below. | |
| 3 Favorable and unfavorable conditions depend upon the sense being used to make the check. For example, bright light might give a bonus on checks involving sight, while torchlight or moonlight might give a penalty. Background noise might make checks involving hearing more difficult, while competing odors might penalize any check involving scent. | |
| 4 As for unfavorable conditions, but more extreme. For example, dim lighting for DCs involving sight (with normal vision), a roaring dragon for DCs involving hearing, and an overpowering stench covering the area for DCs involving scent. | |
Read Lips: To understand what someone is saying by reading lips, you must be within 30 feet of the speaker, be able to see him or her speak, and understand the speaker’s language. (This use of the skill is language-dependent.) The base DC is 15, but it increases for complex speech or an inarticulate speaker. You must maintain a line of sight to the lips being read. If your Search check succeeds, you can understand the general content of a minute’s worth of speaking, but you usually still miss certain details. If the check fails by 4 or less, you can’t read the speaker’s lips. If the check fails by 5 or more, you draw some incorrect conclusion about the speech. The check is rolled secretly in this case, so that you don’t know whether you succeeded or missed by 5.
Magic Traps: The spells explosive runes, fire trap, glyph of warding, symbol, and teleportation circle create magic traps that a rogue can find by making a successful Search check and then can attempt to disarm by using Disable Device. Identifying the location of a snare spell has a DC of 23. Spike growth and spike stones create magic traps that can be found using Search, but against which Disable Device checks do not succeed. See the individual spell descriptions for details. Active abjuration spells within 10 feet of each other for 24 hours or more create barely visible energy fluctuations. These fluctuations give you a +4 bonus on Search checks to locate such abjuration spells.
Action: In general, making a search check requires a move action.
- Reading Lips -- You have to watch the conversation for at least a minute.
- Searching a 5 ft x 5 ft area for anything that might be interesting -- It takes a full-round action to search a 10-foot-by-10-foot flat area (such as a wall) or a volume of goods that's a 5-foot cube on a side.
- Seeing through a figment illusion -- As a full round action, you can inspect an illusion of the figment type and use your search skill roll instead of your Will save to reveal that it is an illusion. The GM makes this roll secretly. Alternately, you can make a move action to disbelieve the illusion, which entitles you to make the usual saving throw. This move-action option also applies when intentionally searching for other stimulus.
Special: Listening through a door increases the Search DC by 5. Pinpointing a creature's location if you cannot see them increases the Search DC by 20.
Note that search checks always fail if the object of your search is not actually present.
Use the Track feat and Search to track creatures in urban, artificial, and constructed settings.
Elves gain a +3 racial bonus on Search checks.