This is related to the fact that a lot of skills are basically trash & PCs don't have the budget for trash skills. Perception is almost always going to be useful to some degree. How often have you seen entire campaigns run without ever having someone use medicine/nature/handle animal history or performane? Out of the times those skills even come up in a campaign are they regularly important to any degree? Sure bob might tame a wild animal or use handle animal with a horse but was a possible failure going to have much more impact than "ok.. moving on" or something in even half of those cases?
Yes, this is more or less my issue.
Initiative as a skill, and certainly Perception, is clear, specific, and consistent in its applicability. Perception is useful whenever you are in an environment where you don't necessarily know all the information...which is
literally all environments ever. Initiative is useful whenever you are in an environment where combat can break out...which is
pretty much all environments. And, contrary to DND_Reborn's claim, I fully disagree that Initiative is unimportant in 5e, regardless of level: the people who go first have the opportunity to kill opponents or drop debuffs on their enemies, leading to a force-multiplying effect: the people who go first are more likely to gain ground early, which makes them more likely to gain further ground later. Or, to analogize to another game, White has a
consistent advantage against Black in chess, which is why chess tournaments always have the two players alternate. The advantage may not be
large, but it is always present.
The reason Perception is always desirable on as many people as you can get has nothing to do with succeeding on more rolls (though that is of course useful.) It's down to two very simple things, one mathematical, one practical:
- The more characters who can attempt to observe something, the more likely it is that you will in fact actually observe it. Of course, odds aren't too bad if every single person attempts it, but that leads to...
- You can't guarantee every person gets a chance to observe. Sometimes, only one or two people are in place to catch something, or can see in the dark, or in some other way actually get a chance to try. The more proficient people you have, the better-protected you are against "the guy in front could've seen something, but botched his Perception roll."