Listen/Spot: Is 10' not far enough

[Dice4Hire]

In 3.5 you get a cumulative -1 to spot and listen rolls per ten feet of distance between you and that sneaky rogue who hides in the back of every combat, while getting a full share of xp, and you have had enough. Off with his head!!

Now it seems like in 4E there will be one Listen/Spot skill which might be called notice or some such.

But how far should he interval be for each reduction in effectiveness?

 

[Celebrim]

A linear scale doesn't work. Nor should it be expected to. This was one of the major things I wanted to see addressed in 4e. My guess is that they'll change/break/ruin alot of things that I never felt needed changing, but leave major bugs like this unaddressed.

If something gets twice as far away, it gets about a quarter as easy to notice. Thus, when something is sufficiently far away, say 100', being an additional 100' away might have an effect on the DC but being an additional 10' away has no real effect. When something is 1000' away, even an additional 100' away is not a particularly significant change.

I use my own cludged scale, but I've never been happy with and would love to see some alternative suggestions since it doesn't seem I can depend on WotC to actually improve my game.

 

[Insight]

Listen and Spot are stupid as skills anyway. Who the heck goes around practicing their listen and spot? You can't really get any better at perception. It's sort of an innate ability - you are either good at noticing things, or you aren't. And as people age (especially men), perception tends to get worse, not better.

The ability to spot things is affected directly by two factors: visibility and distraction. Your visibility is determined by cover between yourself and the target, and your own innate ability to see clearly. Distraction could be explained by a random factor (the d20 roll). Your innate perceptive ability is pretty much fixed.

The ability to hear things is affected by three factors: acoustics, distraction, and your innate ability to hear. Some people are better than others at hearing (obviously, on the extreme range, you have deaf people and those who can even hear at the very edge of the subsonic range), but for the most part, people are about the same in terms of 'ability to hear'. Distraction is the same random factor as seeing things (so there's your d20 roll), and the acoustics is sort of a hard thing to judge. In a vaccuum, sure, you could use the 10ft increment (although it also depends on the sound's volume). In a forest with lots of trees and cover, sound will bounce and ricochet, nullifying the listener's ability to pinpoint the origin of the sound (or possibly even the sound itself).

I'd like to see a baseline perception that's pretty much the same for everyone unless they have magical aid or spend talents/feats/whatever to improve it. I'd say the same for movement. Most people tend to move at about the same speed, but some people are faster (taller, more athletic, whatever) and some are slower (older, shorter, less athletic, a hampering injury, etc). Most game systems tend to do perception and movement better than standard D20; I hope WOTC recognizes this and makes some changes in 4E. I have a feeling, however, that they won't.

 

[Cadfan]

10 feet is fine. Its easy to remember and calculate, and it lets the party be reasonably stealthy even if they don't have maxed out stealth skills, as long as they don't try to get too close to whomever they're hiding from.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

While it is obviously easier from a rules perspective, it did not make sense that listen and spot suffer the same modifier based upon distance. As a single skill, of course they need something, but 10 feet is way too short.

Overall I agree with Celebrim that it would be best if it were not linear, but that might make it just a little too complicated to implement since 4e seems to be trying to emphasize making things more streamlined.

My answer if they were to use a linear scale would be to make the distance modifer -1 for every 25 or 50 ft.

 

[Celebrim]

Listen and Spot are stupid as skills anyway...You can't really get any better at perception. It's sort of an innate ability - you are either good at noticing things, or you aren't.

This is not true. There have been scientific studies showing that perceptiveness can be trained.

Who the heck goes around practicing their listen and spot?

For example, video game players. It has been shown in studies that playing a certain amount of video games increases the speed and acuteness of ones visual perception. You don't actually see better, but you do process what you see faster and more throughly. For an other example, military pilots have long recieved training on perception in many ways similar to what video game players do as part of thier hobby.

And as people age (especially men), perception tends to get worse, not better.

There is a famous comic spot about the old Call of Cthullu RPG, that spoofs the mechanics about adventurers and how they live to an old age. It shows an atheletic young man running as fast as he can from the dread Cthullu. Ahead of him and pulling away is a rotund middle aged professor. Ahead of him and pulling away is an old man with a cane, and ahead of him is an octogenarian women in a wheel chair. You have a point that RPGs tend not to handle the effects aging or inactivity very well, but for most games it really doesn't matter. In the 3rd edition of D&D, you can go from 1st level to 20th level in a matter of days. The effects of aging in that period are trivial.

 

[Delta]

I was recently looking at Gygax's writeups for Conan's stats in Dragon #36 (I think), and he gave stats for about 10 different ages in Conan's career. Interestingly, his fighter/thief levels started going down after about age 40. To me that seems like a totally reasonable way to go about it, although it was never codified, and I'm sure none of the 4E design philosophy would permit that.

 

[RangerWickett]

I'd do Close (30 ft.), Medium (150 ft.), Long (800 ft.), and Extreme (beyond 800 ft.) ranges. Have a modifier for each range. Close is +0. Medium is, like, +5. Long is +20. Extreme is also +20, but you have no chance of spotting someone hiding; you can only see people out in the open.

Or something like that.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd do Close (30 ft.), Medium (150 ft.), Long (800 ft.), and Extreme (beyond 800 ft.) ranges. Have a modifier for each range. Close is +0. Medium is, like, +5. Long is +20. Extreme is also +20, but you have no chance of spotting someone hiding; you can only see people out in the open.

Or something like that.

Not a bad system at all if you are going for simplicity. It's certainly superior to the existing one.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

I was recently looking at Gygax's writeups for Conan's stats in Dragon #36 (I think), and he gave stats for about 10 different ages in Conan's career. Interestingly, his fighter/thief levels started going down after about age 40. To me that seems like a totally reasonable way to go about it, although it was never codified, and I'm sure none of the 4E design philosophy would permit that.

An interesting way to do it.

Whenever though I've run a game where aging was importan I sorta took a different approach. As you age ability scores drop (none increase) to a greater degree than in core but the character gains extra XP.

RangerWickett, your system seems very logical, I'm going to swipe it for my current game.