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.*
have the players roll a bunch of perception rolls at the beginning, list them all and cross them off as you go, they know the rolled them, but have no idea if they see nothing because of a bad roll, or if there is truely nothing to see.