Perception v. Spot

[Dragonhelm]

Also consider that Perception includes things beyond sight and sound. Taste, touch, and scent are all parts of Perception.

I played a wild elf back in the AD&D days who had a strong sense of smell, kinda like Wolverine. In 4e terms, he might have have just rolled a Perception check to see if his heightened sense of smell might have detected some bad guys.

 

[Derren]

Combining all senses into perception would be a bad idea because then a blind man would also automatically deaf (or not blind at all) unless you still make a distinction between spot and listen. And if you do why combine them in the first place?

 

[FadedC]

Combining all senses into perception would be a bad idea because then a blind man would also automatically deaf (or not blind at all) unless you still make a distinction between spot and listen. And if you do why combine them in the first place?

Or you could just say a blind man is well....blind. It's not like being blind in 3e effects your spot checks it just means you can't see at all. You can have a +20 spot check and still be permanently blinded by a cleric spell. It's not like being blind doesn't have it's own rules.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

And if you do why combine them in the first place?

Well, the OTHER skills were being consolidated, so it's kind of necessary. If I've got very few trained-skill points, and I can choose between Stealth, Acrobatics, Lore, Spot-But-Not-Listen, and Listen-But-Not-Spot, which look more appealing?

Much easier to just lump sight, hearing, scent, and everything else into "Perception," and use special modifiers for especially good eyesight, sense of smell, or whatever.

You can make the same argument about plenty of skills. If I'm playing an ugly guy who's a really good debater, I'm probably better at convincing the king to alter his trade policy than at convincing that hot barmaid to sleep with me. Does that mean WotC needs to split Seduce and Persuade into separate skills? Not really, the DM just makes adjustments as the situation dictates.

 

[Jhulae]

It makes much more sense to combine all perception skills into one, then have modifiers because of feats, talents, or other special situations.

As it is, in 3.x, PCs can't smell *anything*, unless one has the Scent feat. And, forget about taste. All PCs (and monsters) can't actually taste anything, either. No tasting that the food seems a little 'off' because it's been poisoned! And, dont' bother describing how anything feels either... because it seems PCs have no sense of touch...

No, I'm more than happy to have a single perception skill that covers all senses with some kind of modifiers for whatever reason.

 

[Peter LaCara]

The Serenity RPG (and I imagine others) uses a semi-consolidated skill set like this. One can upgrade a general skill -- say, Perception -- up to a certain competence, but to improve beyond that, skills need to be more specialized. So using their dice pool system, a character might have d6 Perception, d8 Listen, and d12 Spot, specifically. The difference is that, in D&D 3.5, those would be separate purchases. You upgrade from d2 --> d6 Perception, from d2 --> d8 Listen, and from d2 --> d12 Spot. In Serenity, you upgrade from d2 --> d6 Perception, d6 --> d8 Listen, and d6 --> d12 Spot.

Hopefully that makes sense. At any rate, the point I'm probably failing to make is that there's a middle ground between totally separate and completely consolidated, and it wouldn't be a new trail that needed blazing.

Yeah, I'm wondering if the new skill focus is going to work this way. You train in a broad general skill, like Perception, Athletics, or Persuasion. But then you take skill focus which gives you a bonus to Spot or Listen, Climb or Swim, or Bluff or Diplomacy. That'd be kinda cool.

 

[arscott]

We know that characters are going to have a static perception score (presumably based on the perception skill) that the DM uses instead of calling for spot or listen checks in a way that can alert players that something is up.

Perhaps One of the two numbers we see is this passive perception (though the format doesn't reallly follow, as both are listed as +x rather than a simple number).

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

I hope the Spot/Perception thing was an oversight on their part or simply changed between then and now. Having a unified skill seems easiest.

 

[HeinorNY]

It makes much more sense to combine all perception skills into one, then have modifiers because of feats, talents, or other special situations.

In the latest Confessions article, the girl says she bought a climbing kit that gives +2 to Athletics when climbing.
So maybe the skills are condensed only regarding their progression and general use and maybe we still buy Skill Focus Spot instead of Skill Focus Perception.

 

[WyzardWhately]

In the latest Confessions article, the girl says she bought a climbing kit that gives +2 to Athletics when climbing.
So maybe the skills are condensed only regarding their progression and general use and maybe we still buy Skill Focus Spot instead of Skill Focus Perception.

Could well be. I'm expecting that each skill will have a number of subheadings or paragraphs with the different uses for it - much like the current books. Some of those uses will be trained, some will be untrained. PCs may be able to focus in some uses but not in others. Or, perhaps skill focus will continue to just give you a bonus to any check, but some monster powers or racial traits or whatnot will affect only one of them.

And, really, there's no reason for spot and listen to be identical uses. If you have +5 to listen checks but +0 to spot checks, v. the other guy in the party who is the other way around? That just means one of you is better at hearing the invisible guy, and the other is better at spotting the pickpocket in a noisy crowd. I don't see this as a problematic distinction, if that's the way they wrote it. Sometimes it'll matter, maybe sometimes it won't.