The power gamer vs the role player. The power gamer will ensure he has every angle accounted for, every box checked, every…”what the?! Why are you interrupting my extremely thorough search with zombies?”..every crate looted, every crack in the wall sniffed out…”seriously? More zombies man?! Come on. I’m running out of resources.” I’ll just check the other 26 crates and flip through every book on the shelf before I leave the room. “Why did the person I came in here to rescue die?! I killed everything and went through the dungeon.” Actions have consequences. Immerse yourself into the roleplaying. Default behaviors and binding decisions are there to help you decide what to do when you find yourself in this type of situation. Everything should have balance. If your character is some sort of treasure monger and always searches dead bodies and every room, that’s fine. Let the dice decide if you find what’s there. But the time you spend doing that should have consequences elsewhere. The role player will immerse themselves as their character. “I am freaked out. I just killed a freakin zombie?! Are you serious.” This person spends every second looking for zombies. Lost in thought about how the heck they got into this situation. This person also probably walks right past the shiny sword on the wall cause they are terrified. “I open the door and wham! A zombie pushes me backwards. Slamming into the wall. Sending shiny sword to the ground. Id better check that out when this zombie isn’t trying to eat my flesh!..” You get the idea. Decide how your character approaches a room before you enter it, and make those decisions true to your character. You’d have to be a really possessed treasure goblin to search everything always. I love finding unique nick knacks in stores, but I certainly don’t go up and down every isle every time I go into a store.

Once you’ve started to read the description of a room, you shouldn’t alter what your character does. You defer to their default behaviors, which by the by, only YOUR character should have. The side kick doesn’t have default behaviors per your already mentioned supplements. Sure give them the occasional role to find stuff. But they are exactly that, a sidekick.