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<blockquote data-quote="SpellObjectEnthusiast" data-source="post: 9861123" data-attributes="member: 7031017">&quot;perception&quot; in Old school games is essentially the Search action - spend 10 minutes searching at most a 10x10 square, with a 17% chance of success each time, no retries.This rule is so horrendously bad and unusable that, by necessity, people started making up their own way of resolving searching, namely the &quot;interrogate the fiction&quot; approach that is so popular nowadays.&nbsp; Effectively - you ignore the bad rule and solve everything with the GM ruling what you do/don't find based on your description alone.&nbsp; Many games like Into the Odd, Cairn, etc do away with the Search rules entirely and explicitly state that &quot;interrogate the fiction&quot; is the correct and only way to play.It's hard to implement &quot;interrogate the fiction&quot; into games that mechanize perception in a functional way - it feels like you're choosing not to use the rules in favor of fiat, rather than abandoning rules that don't work in favor of something that does.&nbsp; For example, in Call of Cthulhu there's some pretty detailed skill rules for searching and researching that allow for a lot of player investment&nbsp; - replacing all that with &quot;just tell me where you're looking, I'll tell you if you find anything, we don't need to roll&quot; feels bad.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="SpellObjectEnthusiast, post: 9861123, member: 7031017"] "perception" in Old school games is essentially the Search action - spend 10 minutes searching at most a 10x10 square, with a 17% chance of success each time, no retries. This rule is so horrendously bad and unusable that, by necessity, people started making up their own way of resolving searching, namely the "interrogate the fiction" approach that is so popular nowadays. Effectively - you ignore the bad rule and solve everything with the GM ruling what you do/don't find based on your description alone. Many games like Into the Odd, Cairn, etc do away with the Search rules entirely and explicitly state that "interrogate the fiction" is the correct and only way to play. It's hard to implement "interrogate the fiction" into games that mechanize perception in a functional way - it feels like you're choosing not to use the rules in favor of fiat, rather than abandoning rules that don't work in favor of something that does. For example, in Call of Cthulhu there's some pretty detailed skill rules for searching and researching that allow for a lot of player investment - replacing all that with "just tell me where you're looking, I'll tell you if you find anything, we don't need to roll" feels bad. [/QUOTE]

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