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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 842581" data-attributes="member: 4937">Witness: But spot (along with listen) is used to determine surprise.  So 'Spot' is a measurement of awareness (wisdom) and visual accuity.  It might possibly be used to judge distance, though that seems to me properly more a component of BAB than any other skill, but it's primary usage is to determine whether or not something sees something else.  For instance, it is used as an opposed roll to 'hide'.  If the spot DC's in the DMG were to be used in some special fashion other than the normal usage for 'spot', you would think that the DMG would have said so.   Not only that, but the DC's of the equivalent 'listen' skill very clearly determine whether you can hear something.   Lastly, I would expect rules for determining range to be written slightly different, and would emphasize the 'shooters' familiarity with the target and the surroundings.I think the designers basically 'fudged' listen and spot.  I think that they were well aware that as distance grew large that the system broke down, but they let it go for the following reasons.  First, they wanted to keep the rules simple.  Second, they designed the game with an emphasis on 'classic' dungeon exploration and assumed most encounters would be at a sufficiently short range (under 200') that the system would basically work.  Lastly, they made the basic assumption that if the object wasn't obscured you could automatically see it - in the since that you automatically fail to hide if you have nothing whatsoever to conceal you.  Working together, the assumptions are fine.But if you break the assumption that encounters are taking place at a fairly short distance, the rest of the design falls apart and the DM is left with rule 0.So what I'm telling you is my rule 0 for encounters that occur at a long distance.</blockquote>

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