Failed a Spot Check: Difference between revisions

[[File:spot_check_7923spot check 7923.png|link=The Order of the Stick|frame]]

''(an [[That One Boss|Invader]] throws a car off the bridge and heads for Michael)''<br />

'''[[Deadpan Snarker|Michael Ford]]:''' You neglected to mention the giant alien standing on the bridge.|''[[The Conduit]]''}}

The name comes from a running gag in the webcomic ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'', which is itself based on a mechanic from ''[[Dungeons and& Dragons]]'', where a character's success on various tasks is determined by a die roll added to their ability modifier and relevant skill ranks. The skills in question include several that require substantial luck, like Appraise, Use Magic Device, Hide, or the various Perform skills, but also such mundane tasks as Listen and Spot. Indeed, the Spot skill, which determines whether someone notices events around them in time to react, is often very dependent on luck, even if it's something any idiot should be able to see. A single failed Spot Check can put the whole party at a disadvantage, and if you're not lucky you can miss something vital, even while looking for it. Ironically, both in ''D&D'' games and in ''The Order of the Stick'', the players will ''know'' that they failed a spot check (though ''D&D'' GMs are encouraged to roll spot checks secretly when necessary), thus they are aware of ''not being aware'' of something, only not knowing what that something is (however, there is the possibility that there was nothing to find anyways). In the ''D&D'' case, the ''player'' is aware of the ''character'' not knowing something. In ''The Order of the Stick'' case, the lack of distinction between player and character reaches the level of [[Medium Awareness]], and is [[Played for Laughs]].

This doesn't necessarily imply that the character is stupid; they just aren't noticing an important "something". In a role-playing setting, players who fail their spot checks badly enough may even find themselves "discovering" something both incredibly large and plainly obvious (such as an island or a mountain), instead of the one unobtrusive detail that they were ''trying'' to find.

* In an episode of ''[[Full Metal Panic!|Full Metal Panic Fumoffu]]'', Sagara defuses a [[Hostage Situation]] by taking the hostage-taker's little brother hostage and somehow tying him up in the rafters of the warehouse without anyone noticing. {{spoiler|The kid was also in on the plot, however, which makes it slightly more plausible.}}<br />:This actually makes some form of sense in context; Sagara's ability to move silently at extremely high speed is specifically noted by at least one character to be amazing. He defuses a situation between Mao and Weber when he's still a recruit by casually crossing at least three metres of space without a sound and without being noticed until he sticks the butt of his rifle between them from about ''two feet away''.

** The presence of the huge occidental dragon in the underground of Mahora gets missed twice -- untiltwice—until it literally ''[[Drool Hello|drool on someone's head]]''.

* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!|Yu-Gi-Oh]]''

** In ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! GX (anime)|Yu-Gi-Oh! GX]]'', when Judai is trying to return to Duel Academy, he somehow fails to notice a sign pointing the way, and the fact the buildings are visible.

* ''[[Bleach]]'': During the [[Filler|Bount]] [[Anime|Arc]], [[Number Two|Vice-captains]] [[Martial Pacifist|Hisagi]], [[War Is Hell|Kira]], [[BottleHard-Drinking FairyParty Girl|Rangiku]] and [[Almighty Janitor|Fifth-Seat]] [[Blood Knight|Yumichika]] are sent after the Bount. Outside the hide-away caves, the vice-captains catch Yumichika admiring himself in his mirror and chastise him for dropping his guard. However, the anime shows the audience that Yumichika had both noticed the vice-captains approaching him via his mirror and that he's the only one who realised the Bount had already detected the group's arrival. Once inside the caves, the group examine many strangely designed pillars but Yumichika keeps looking off in a completely different direction to the others. Whey they're suddenly [[Right Behind Me|attacked from behind]], Yumichika saves them all by blocking the strike. He then chastises them for having been so unobservant they'd never noticed the danger he'd been aware of all along.

* In what's a bit of a [[Running Gag]] in ''[[Kodomo no Jikan]]'', Aoki rarely successfully reads emotions, especially if it's those of his fellow teachers.

* ''[[PRIMARCHS]]'' lampshades this concept in one of its many homages to ''[[Final Fantasy]]''.

* Used a lot in comedies like ''[[Hot Shots]]'' and ''[[The Naked Gun]]'', where there's always [[Weirdness Censor|something bizarre happening]] in the background and the [[Deadpan Snarker]] main characters just ignore it completely. This is apparently a Zucker-Abrahms-Zucker trademark.

* As an artistic choice, this happens so much in ''[[The Good, the Bad and the Ugly|The Good the Bad And The Ugly]]'' that characters can hardly be said to even ''[[Rule of Perception|exist]]'' if they are not on screen. This is actually the film maker's idea. Characters' fields of view is the same as the audience/camera's. This explains how the villain manages to sneak up on the hero in the middle of a mostly flat area for the film's final confrontation. [[Behind the Black|While off screen, the hero and the audience cannot see them]].

** Very much a matter of opinion there. Watson, when prompted by Holmes, can be said to make quite a lot of intelligent and observational jumps -- andjumps—and in stories like ''The Hound of the Baskervilles'', where he has to function in Holmes' absence, he is nonetheless very effective at helping Holmes. He's good -- Holmesgood—Holmes is just so much better.

* Lily Charles of ''[[Pushing Daisies]]'' misses the fact that Chuck, {{spoiler|her daughter who thinks she's her niece, }}is back from the dead despite Chuck standing right in front of her. While Lily '''is''' [[Eyepatch of Power|missing an eye]], it's her right eye that's missing/blind, and in the scene in question the obstruction was to her right -- soright—so the eye that was best placed to see Chuck was actually her good eye.

'''Sam:''' Listen. There will be three girls: Girl Number 1, '''[[Bold Inflation|GIRL NUMBER 2]]''', and Girl Number 3.<br />

'''Gibby:''' So, which one is Shannon?<br />

'''Carly:''' If you want '''TWO''' go on a date with Shannon, you got '''TWO''' choose carefully.<br />

'''Carly & Sam:''' That is all you have '''TWO''' do.<br />

== ProProfessional Wrestling ==

** While referees are easily distracted allowing for all sorts of shenanigans and can't put two and two together, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr-JO9j7d0A the referee of this match] deserves honorable mention. It's really bad when a commentator [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] your error.

'''Pirates/Policemen:''' [[With Catlike Tread|He thought he heard a noise. Ha Ha!]]<br />

* Let's just say that ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'''s guards [[Captain Obvious|weren't particularly bright]] in the original, upgraded in ''The Twin Snakes'' and [[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty|its]] [[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater|other]] [[Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots|entries]].

** One quest in Hellfire Peninsula has you search for a special corpse in a marsh filled with green bubbling liquid. Many people have searched and searched, looking in every pool, checking every corner, before giving up and asking in general where the frig the stupid corpse is. Soon after that, they generally find out it's the [[Ribcage Ridge|10-story-high ribcage and skull]] that [[Hidden in Plain Sight|you can see before you even ENTER THE AREA]]. Granted, people are expecting and looking for an average-sized corpse, but it's still kinda funny. The player has to be standing in one specific pool of ooze to use the quest item, or else it won't work; there are several pools surrounding the giant corpse, and using the quest item in all but one of them will return an error message.

* This tends to happen a lot to FPS heroes -- enterheroes—enter a perfectly normal room, and BAM! Hit in the head by some random mook (the likes of which you've killed dozens of by now) who then [[Bag of Spilling|helps himself to all your weapons]]. And, of course, lobbing a grenade in before entering the room never works. Doesn't help that they sometimes [[Offscreen Teleportation|teleport into the room offscreen]].

* You would think that by now, Somebody would have noticed that [[Hitman (video game series)|Agent 47]] Has a ''Barcode Tattooed to the back of his head.'' That would make identifying him rather easy, would it not?

* Played with in ''[[Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas]]'', which has many RPG elements. Characters will notice if you are out of shape or if you are not wearing the appropriate gang colors. You can pick and choose clothes and whatever you are wearing shows up in the cut scenes. However, characters will not notice if you attend, for example, a serious business meeting in a gimp suit. Said meeting includes the character's sister. Ew.

** Geth aren't liked at all in the ''Mass Effect'' universe. So, in the second game, when you bring along Legion, your Geth party member, to the Citadel -- whereCitadel—where security has been heightened since the events of the first game to prevent against "Geth infiltration" -- someone—someone would notice, right? '''WRONG.'''

'''C-Sec Customs:''' [[Comically Missing the Point|You should leave your personal synthetic assistant at home. They aren't allowed on public shuttles anymore.]]<br />

''([[Beat]])''<br />

* In ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'', and to a lesser extent the later SNES games of the series, nearly all secret passages take forms that would be completely and totally obvious from the [[Player Character|PCs]] point of view, only being hidden by the fixed isometric view the player experiences.

* In the ''[[Carmen Sandiego]]'' game "Great chase through Time", a lot of the thieves are [[Hidden in Plain Sight]]. [[Alternate Character Interpretation|It's easy to assume that the Good Guide spotted them right off the bat and just wanted you to figure out where they were hiding yourselves]], with you failing the spot check. However, everyone in the past apparently does this too, as Julius Caesar never looks ''to his left'' to see Doctor Belljar hiding behind a pillar right next to him, The servant never looks behind him because the camel Buggs Zapper is hiding to find that the camel is a cardboard cutout, Isabella doesn't notice a chart with mysterious lands in her room, Beethoven doesn't spot the foreign instrument in the orchestra that Jacquelyn Hyde is playing, and Thomas Edison simply stands there staring at the wall without realizignrealizing that Dee Cryption is ''RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM'' hiding behind a battery.

* [[Trope Namer|Belkar]], from ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'', does this so often it's become a [[Running Gag]], which the characters hang lampshades on.

** And shortly after Belkar finally [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0516.html succeeds on a spot check], the bad guys [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0522.html fail].

** When Riff from plays an [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]], he's frustrated trying to get an item that's only dropped by ''female'' slimeblobs, which he can't tell apart from the males. It takes Torg to point out that, like all women in the game, the female slimeblobs [http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=080813 all have the bodies of supermodels].

** Subverted in "The Research and Development Wars": Torg tells a story about the architect who designed the building they're now in and, due to having made its core into some kind of an inescapable Möbius strip shape, was trapped there forever. Zoë asks where he is now if that's the case. Torg points to a skeleton sitting right next to her. She states that she "totally thought he was part of [their] team" -- which—which while she was away had come to actually include a vampire and a [[It Makes Sense in Context|zombie head on a stick]].

* ''[[DumnestorsDumnestor's Heroes]]'': Arisdel made her pass, but "[https://web.archive.org/web/20170226151746/http://www.moderntales.com//comics/dumnestor.php?view=archive&chapter=14369#strip3 Let's say a 1 would have been really embarrassing.]"

* In ''[[Dominic Deegan]]'', poor Donovan [https://web.archive.org/web/20130523172952/http://www.dominic-deegan.com/comics/20111130.gif fails one to his father-in-law!]

* A photo seen on the internet, captioned "43rd Annual Ninja parade" -- showing—showing an empty street, of course.

* Happens to [[Darkwing Duck (animation)|Darkwing Duck]] a lot. The best example is from "The Justice Ducks". Darkwing finds a lone crumb which -- usingwhich—using ridiculously advanced levels of obscure knowledge and Sherlock Logic -- heLogic—he uses to track down Negaduck's headquarters, which has a giant flag with Negaduck's head on it.

** In the historical pageant from "[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Recap/S2 /E13 HearthsHearth's Warming Eve|"Hearth's Warming Eve]]", the three rulers of the pony races all get through speeches claiming the future land of Equestria as their new home... before realizing the other two are nearby.

* The vast majority of humans can only pay full attention to a handful of things and our peripheral awareness also has limits. This is actually a good thing as it prevents information overload and frees up thinking power and memory capacity, but it does cause us to fail spot checks on a myriad of subtle cues. Proper training and certain disorders can expand the aforementioned limits but they result in both positive and negative changes to the fundamental brain functions.

* In aircraft crashes or near-crashes caused by pilot error, failing the spot check because the pilot(s) get too wrapped up in something is one of the more common causes, especially since planes are often flown on instruments only with no visual cues outside. For example, [[wikipedia:China Airlines Flight 006|one notable case]] had a 747 pilot focusing on his airspeed indicator because of an engine problems and failing to notice his attitude indicator, ''right beside the instrument he was looking at'' indicated the plane was about to go into a diving barrel-roll. In [[wikipedia:Eastern Air Lines Flight 401|another case]] the Lockheed L-1011 crew were so busy debating a failed warning light that they never even noticed they were losing altitude until they ''plowed into the ground!''. Then there are pilots who miss glaringly obvious things in their pre-flight checklists: such as in [[wikipedia:Air Florida Flight 90|Air Florida Flight 90]] when the pilots, in heavy ice and snow, left their plane's engine anti-icing system off.

* Similar in surgeries -- asksurgeries—ask any surgeon who's been in the game long enough if they've left something in somebody or known somebody who has. Checklists and questions may seem annoying or unnecessary but its all too easy to glaze over glaringly obvious things. Going double when you have just spent over an hour doing delicate work with a person's life in your hands and now are almost finished and just want to go sit down and do anything else.

** That last part? That was a replication of a real psychological experiment. It got the same results.

*** Derren Brown had a TV special specifically devoted to this. In it, he was able to convince someone to take money-shaped pieces of blank paper as money and walk out of the store with a $2200 gold bracelet,<ref> he later returned it, almost thirty minutes later, at which point he had to ''point out'' that the money was fake</ref>, asked to view a man's very expensive watch and then calmly walked away with it,<ref> the man watched him go for about a minute before realizing something was wrong</ref>, and not only convinced a woman that the color yellow was in fact red, but then asked to see her ''red'' car, which she was absolutely convinced someone had painted ''yellow''.

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE In this video, most of the audience fails spot checks.]

** Military camo is also designed to disrupt the results of a spot check when looking at a group of camouflaged objects. The patterns weave randomly one into the next, making it very hard to see boundaries. When infantry or tents or ships are packed in close formation and viewed from afar, it's hard to tell if there's ten units there, or fifty. Thus, even a successful spot check typically fails to alert the spotter of the magnitude of the force they're facing.

* Some less competent military commanders have been guilty of this.

*** Actually justifiable in the case of glasses when they're not on your head.

** More than one hilarious screencap has shown up on the internet of a person who texts their friend, telling said friend to call their phone because they can't find it.

* How about spotting that one legoLego piece you really need? That one piece you KNOW there are several copies in the same pile? That very one piece you saw FIVE times when you weren't actually looking for it?

* When playing dodgeball even a small, weak player can get the strong ones out by tossing a ball while they're throwing.

* Texting guy almost runs into a bear [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[[Wmhvdt X 72 e Q]]WmhvdtX72eQ&feature=context&context=[[GG24486f7FOAAAAAAACAA 24486Texting fguy 7almost FOAAAAAAACAA]runs into a bear]

[[Category:FailedTabletop aGame Spot CheckTropes]]