I've always felt the rules for the Spot skill rather laughable, really. The main problem is that they don't really take into account stuff that should be obvious at very long range (there are a dozen or more orcs in the plain, headed roughly this way). I realize there is a certain need for fixed encounter distances. But the way spotting stuff at a distance is handled makes me sad. It seems very, very far removed from the way visual perception works in the real world.
I can easily read a newspaper at a distance of about 2'. I totally can't do that at a distance of 12' (though I can still read the headlines, but they're often about three or four times as big as the main text). Those are simple facts not depending on my d20 roll at all, so there seems to be a much bigger difference than -1.
However, I can tell the difference between a long-haired, 5'5'' tall human wearing a skirt and a 6'3'' tall, broad-shouldered, bearded human at a distance of hundreds of meters - and that's more or less regardless of whether we're talking about 400 meters or 500.
That's a difference of about 300 points in the DC of distinguishing a male Scot from a female Bulgarian Shotputter, depending on whether they're 400 or 500 meters from where I stand. That's ridiculous, since it impacts my real-world ability to distinguish between the two almost not at all.
I guess it would be similarly difficult to tell a Half-Orc (whom I may be allied with) from an Orc (whom I am most certainly not allied with). I can do that at hundreds of meters of distance, maybe even more, if my vantage point is good. So I'd have that information long before the two of us would be able to affect each other with any meaningful attacks.
But I realize it would be bothersome to start plains encounters at huge distances and spend round after round just moving towards each other. What I don't get is how I'm expected to not realize there's a potential threat by the Spot rules in D&D.
