Monsters Perception ??

[Wojorides]

Did our first game session yesterday. As usual moments of humor, and confounding the GM. One item came up that I had missed in the prep was the Thugs perception. The players had hidden themselves in an ambush hoping that the other group of bounty hunters had the missing key. When the bounty hunters arrived (4 street thugs), I went to check perception and found not dice but a rating of 8???. I ignored that and had the thugs roll 3 dice each.

I checked over other entries for monsters and found static numbers as well. Why?? Why not dice to roll? This was a designer's choice I really don't understand.

As it stands virtually anyone can hide for street thugs if they have just 3 dice in the appropriate stat giving them 75% chance of success and 90+% chance if they can roll 4 dice. Let the thugs roll the dice 3 for INT average of 10.5 not the 8?! and the whole dynamic changes.

 

[Morrus]

It's to speed up pre-combat prep when you have a lot of enemies. You should certainly feel free to roll for each individually if you prefer (I should note that in the statblock too - good idea).

Some of those still use an old calculation, BTW. It should be 3 x INT.

There's some changes coming to INT. Basically, even an animal can have a high INT. The type of INT is defined by the senient/animal/nonsentient categories. So a high INT animal is cunning and perceptive with efficient instincts and finely-tuned senses, rather than being great at reasoning and logic. As part of that, animal sentience creatures will derive their perception in the same way as sentient creatures (directly from INT).

The INT scores that should be used from now on (these are in the imminent new update document) for animal-sentient creatures are:

Animal, grizzly bear -- 4 (animal-level sentience)
Animal, wolf -- 6 (animal-level sentience)
Spider, monstrous -- 4 (animal-level sentience)
Tyrannosaurus Rex -- 3 (animal-level sentience)