Failed A Spot Check / Webcomics

• Commander Kitty: Every time the crowds stop and creepily announce that their target has arrived, Ace somehow manages to completely ignore it, or simply shrug it off as a local custom.
• Dungeons & Doodles: Tales from the Tables: In Episode 10, Redwen attempts to look for traps in a hallway using only her Darkvision to see them without a torch. When she sees it is all clear, she takes a step in... only to end up triggering a trap and getting herself set on fire for her troubles. Her allies reveal that the traps were marked in red by the scholars all along — but darkvision cannot perceive color.
• D And DS 9: The DM fails to realize that his roll for the Borg's attack on the U.S.S Saratoga is a Critical Hit, despite the fact that he seems to be railroading Sisko into having a tragic backstory. Until Sisko points it out to him.
• El Goonish Shive: Grace depends on this when she plays around with change blindness. Dan once dedicated a whole storyline to it.
• Freefall:
  • In strip 1518, Florence when she misses an emu with a datapad:
    Florence: [thinking] I hate not being able to follow Direct Orders.
    My thoughts get so fractured
    And I miss things I otherwise would have caught.
  • Or the previous page featuring The Mayor and Sam.
    The Mayor: He's on foot. He can't have gone far.
• Generic Title: A character rolls a 1 on a spot check... and walks right into a city wall.
• Girl Genius shows us that inescapable death traps do not always remain so.
  Lucrezia/Agatha: That hole was not there when I last looked!

• Grrl Power:
  • When Varia tries out her Gestalt power by touching Sydney, she's puzzled that their is no obvious power gain from the contact. Both she and Halo completely miss out the fact that the orbs usually floating around Sydney's head expanded their orbit to the two of them. This lead to plenty of speculation, but the most probable meaning is that Varia might be able to use the orbs herself.
  • Sydney manages to do this mid-press conference, by forgetting there are journalists watching her antics.
  • During the villain fight, Vehemence forgets to check his target, and instead of landing a Megaton Punch on the Flying Brick, he lands it on the kinetic absorber, who promptly returns the favor.
• Homestuck:
  • It's implied that Equius's "Heir of Void" power amounts to being able to make things impossible to spot check. This can range from pixelization on musclebeast penises to hiding something from the omniscient view of a god. Specifically, it was implied with his Ancestor Darkleer, who had the ability of the Void.
  • Previous to this, Dave Strider manages to mistake the apocalypse for a heatwave.
  • On a more meta level, it took almost two years for the fans to notice that Dave's hair is a bird, which subsequently became a meme.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, it has been implied that it is impossible to find anything that has been deliberately hidden in Bob's sock drawer (such as a 65-million-year-old iridium bomb). Because there are just so many socks in it.
• In Knights of Buena Vista, Mary races her PC down a street to foil a robbery, but rolls a 2 to see if she notices Bill's character riding right to her. That's how Anna in Frozen (2013) got knocked into the boat.
• The Looking for Group crew does this once. Somehow they fail to notice the dragon perched conspicuously atop the spire in the middle of the cavern while they go down into the crater to play with the eggs. Oops. Apparently, it was a statue before they touched the eggs.
• In MegaTokyo, countless photos of Miho are uploaded online by Ping, causing her to go from zero online presence to massive meme overnight. Piro assumed it was a jilted ex-boyfriend, even though Ping stamped every individual photo with her serial number.
  Piro: Huh? Ping?
  Miho: Who else would it be?? These are all from when she was with me!!
  Piro: How was I supposed to know that?
  Miho: You can even see her in the mirror!!
  Piro: What? I never saw Ping—
  Miho: That's because you were too busy staring at my underwear!!
• Mulder and Scully of Monster of the Week repeatedly fail a spot check, and (surprisingly) it's rarely lampshaded. For example, Mulder doesn't notice that the Senator who ordered him to investigate the aliens has a photo of himself shaking an alien's hand, and Scully doesn't notice that her doctor's surname is Evil.
• Yeagar doesn't seem to notice that the guy he's asking for directions is a demon from the pits of Hell (albeit a polite one) carrying a victim in one strip of Nodwick.

• The Order of the Stick:
  • Belkar does this so often it's become a Running Gag, which the characters hang lampshades on. A Justified Trope, given that Wisdom, which Spot and Listen checks are based on, is his Dump Stat. He misses an army of ninjas while they are talking to him. To his credit, Haley and V fail their spot checks as well, and Belkar is alerted to the presence of something because while he's not aware of the ninjas, he's aware of his own failed spot checks.
    Belkar: Wait! I think I just failed a Listen check!
  • By the rules, ninja are hard to spot (and automatically considered hiding regardless of circumstances). Belkar can't even spot the ninja panel in the bonus page about the Pirates vs. Ninjas controversy.
  • And shortly after Belkar finally succeeds on a spot check, the bad guys fail.
  • Then Celia takes her turn, strolling through Greysky City and completely missing the various rampant evil acts that happen all around.
  • Secret doors are hard to spot, even though they are doors that are clearly marked as secret doors.
• Sleepless Domain: Heartful Punch somehow missed that three members of Team Alchemical were killed in action, despite the event making city-wide headlines and there being a school assembly about it (which she does admit she skipped). When she comes across Undine alone, she assumes that her team must have broke up, and Undine doesn't disabuse her of that notion because she appreciated being treated normally. HP feels horrible about how insensitive she inadvertently was when she finds out what happened.
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • In "Art Belial", Aylee calls Riff for help because she can't find her way out of Art Belal's (sic)^note Yes, it's spelled differently in the story name large compound. When he gets there and the creatures living inside agree to help them find the exit, they point to a big obvious door with the word "EXIT" all over it.
  Aylee: Sure, it's easy to spot, now that someone's pointed it out.
  • In "Most Wonderful Time", someone has stolen all the main characters' Christmas stuff, including the tree. Eventually Riff and Zoë notice Kiki's hidden it under the couch they're sitting on wondering where it's all gone. The tree doesn't remotely fit under the couch and they haven't been noticing the fact that the couch is at about a thirty-degree angle from the ground. To the artist's credit, the reader probably won't notice the angle either before the view zooms out.
  • In "Years of Yarncraft", when Riff plays an 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 all have the bodies of supermodels.
    Riff: In retrospect, why the hell didn't I notice that sooner?
  • In "Homeward", Riff invents a joy buzzer version of his overpowered Omnitaser Supreme, but it's a relatively large contraption and way too visible for anyone to miss it — until he paints it camo, which makes it no less visible but still, illogically, works.
  • 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 while she was away had come to actually include a vampire and a zombie head on a stick.
  • In "The Immortal King", Riff passes his hotel's night manager, who's actually been replaced by a bodypart-stealing puppet monster, so that his (still animated) head and hands are visibly attached to wooden sticks emerging from his shirt instead of neck and arms. His reaction? "I swear that guy got taller."
• In Trevor (2020), Purdy realizes he missed a key detail about why Terry looks to be in such bad shape on the security camera a moment too late.
• Unsounded: Everyone (save Sette) in the Deadly Nevergreen misses the silver's thorny tendrils working their way through the walls and floorboards until the Silver starts attacking them. Stockyard misses it filling the room behind him and animating Toby's corpse and Gregory grabs a bag that is scant centimeters from the stuff without noticing moments before it grabs him.
• Grymm and Creepknight from Voodoo Walrus make a bad habit of this when it comes to not noticing that they're being tailed by ninjas or various henchmen looking to ruin their day. Everyone but Mirth seem to be susceptible to this when it comes to the strange spooky yet cute creatures that regularly pop up in places without any explanation at all.
• This is the only possible explanation for why Kurassa could have failed to notice the dragon he's walking on in Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic. Though in this one case, it leans into That's No Moon.