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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3811388" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is an opposed check situation.  Part of the difficulty I have in answering this question is that I feel that some opposed checks are inherently broken as linearly opposed, and the perception/hide relationship would be a case in point.  Part of the problem is that the current spot/listen rules are inherently abusable, so that it is easy within the rules to justify ambushes where even the guy with +20 spot doesn't stand a chance.  The real fix here is in my opinion changing the way hide works and in particular how it works in relation to spot checks - but that is a totally different conversation.  I do however understand your point and in fact already conceded this earlier in a different context.  There are cases where things improve if the range between skill checks gets narrower, and in particular they improve where there is a mandated high check (opposed check most likely) where the risk of failure is real but not overly large (you don't fall into lava or have a castle fall on you).  In that case, its easier to get some intermediate result over a wider range of levels than in the current system.So there is definately room for improvement, but that improvement must be balanced against the reduced flexibility (dabbling, rather than binarily trained or untrained), loss of niche (classes which aren't associated with the skill are just as good at classes that are associated with the skill if the character hasn't chosen this as a trained skill), ugliness of multiclassing, increased skill complexity (more separation between trained and untrained uses), and power creep (everyone gets broadly better, numbers getting larger for the sake of getting larger) of the proposed solution.  The aforementioned problems in the hide/perception mechanics weigh more heavily on me than the potential for wide variation in skill checks.</blockquote>

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