Question: I had my first session as Dungeon Master (DM) yesterday playing pathfinder ("First Steps In Lore" from the "Pathfinder Society" series) with a group of first-time tabletop RPG players (myself included). Overall the sessions went well, a good crash course for everyone and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

My question is a problem I personally had while DMing. I taught the players that they can roll for perception to check things out, finding traps and secrets, etc. The players got the idea and started saying "roll for perspection to check out the room", etc., and they found a couple of traps that way, and that's fine. The problem I had was: What do I do with all the "useless" rolls?

Most of the time they were rolling when there was nothing to find. Even on a natural 20 I kind of just described the room in more detail while saying something like "but there is nothing of interest".

Is there a better way of approaching this? Do I make something up?

I'd like to add: I would prefer my players roll their perception checks when they are actively looking. I am not a fan of the hidden-DM-rolls-for-all-perception idea.

Answer: 
**There is ALWAYS something to be found!**\* *What* the players find, of course, may not be at all relevant or useful to the story or to the characters' progress.

But in fact, a high roll when searching or observing an area is a great chance to use some creativity to both enhance the overall experience, **and also to make the players think more carefully about their use of pointless random checks.**

A five-minute discourse on the detailed state of the area should do the trick! Consider this possible response:

> 
> There's clearly nothing of significant interest here to be seen -- the room is completely empty. But, feeling keenly observant and abnormally curious, you inspect the area with intense scrutiny anyway. You notice the roughness of each stony brick, and the slight decay of the grout between them.
> 
> 
> Then you observe that your shoes make a satisfying *clop, clop, clop* sound as you walk, and you find yourself considering the subtle unevenness of the floor -- the sandy but firm texture of the sandstone, the slim gap between each tile. You doubt you could force a sheet of good paper between them. Indeed, despite the slight lip where some tiles have sunken a millimeter or two on one edge or another, the mason did their job well -- there's no way you could ever work a tile out of place without inflicting tremendous damage. What effort it must have taken him or her to cut the tiles from some hillside afar off, to apply the mortar and then painstakingly lay the tiles out perfectly adjacent to one another and in their proper order. You ponder the craftsman's trade a moment longer, and then turn your attention to the ceiling... *and so on.*
> 
> 
> 

If you know your world, this isn't as hard as it may sound. Just be creative with it!

---

\* *Unless you have a PC who happens to be floating isolated and disembodied in an absolute void. But then I'd think it's unlikely to matter.*
We assume that players are by default going around being perceptive at an ordinary level. If there's an interesting detail that might escape the players' notice, the DM will call for the relevant characters (maybe everyone, maybe the guy in front, maybe the characters with darkvision, etc...) to make a perception check. If everyone who was given the opportunity fails it, there's no opportunity for anyone else to metagame and make the check. The downside is, if everyone rolls a low number and the DM says "ok, you don't notice anything interesting" then the players know that they have missed something. Sometimes there are immediate consequences (the orcs jump out from behind the bushes and surprise you, you fall into the pit trap you failed to notice, etc...) but other times not, and you're left wondering if you missed something important.

A partial antidote to that is to sometimes tell them they found something, but it's not the thing that you were offering the perception check for. If they were close, maybe they get a hint as to what they failed to perceive. Otherwise they "perceive" something totally different, and unimportant. You can also sometimes offer a perception check to find some small detail that isn't plot relevant, like "You notice some initials carved in that tree over there." This has the advantage of not "giving away" that something is significant, just because the players rolled a high perception check and found something. (If you're going to play this way, you should warn your players that not everything they perceive is going to be important to the plot, or they may waste too much time on red herrings.)

To answer the question of what to do when players want to examine something, and roll high, but there's nothing to find, you can occasionally also insert irrelevant details. You notice that the second drawer of the dresser sticks when you try to open it. You notice scuff marks on the floor near the window. And so on. So yes, I would sometimes "make stuff up". I think it's fine to also say, "nothing appears exceptional or unusual in this room" a fair amount of the time.