Spot Check
Players believe that spot/notice/search/perception is the “god skill.” It is the one place on the character sheet that needs max ranks no matter who or what you are. Eleven ranger with a PhD in squirrel tracking? Full ranks. Expert trapsmith with a fine eye for minute, hair trigger details? Full ranks. Near sighted wizard? Doesn’t matter, full ranks. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a crazy good skill to take. It can help you avoid ambushes and traps, see through disguises, catch pickpockets, find secret doors, identify potions, etc. etc. Here’s the thing though: those actually useful Perception rolls? They’re in the minority. At far too many tables, when the GM asks for a Perception check it’s really code for, “I’m about to describe something.” Here’s an example:
You find yourself face to face with the bank vault. The huge metal door glints in the torchlight. Give me a Perception roll. *clatter clatter* You can tell that’s no normal steel. It’s been alloyed with adamantine!
Or how about this one?
You walk into the tavern. Give me a Perception roll. *clatter clatter* You can see a group of half-orcs in the corner giving you the hairy eyeball. You don’t think dwarves are welcome in here.
Or this one:
You climb down the rope into a new cavern. Give me a Perception roll. *clatter clatter* You can see your breath frosting in the air. It is cold down here…unnaturally so.
In each of these cases, I would far rather a GM simply say “the door is adamantine” or “there are some orcs staring at you” or “it is unnaturally cold” rather than making me roll for it. All of this information is obvious, and should be readily apparent without the need for dice.
I understand why GMs do it though. Asking for the roll pauses the game, alerting players to the fact that “critical game information is incoming.” Exposition is hard, and throwing in something interactive (read: asking for rolls) is an attention grabber, recalling players from side conversations and focusing their attention back on the action. It also allows GMs to gather their thoughts before they launch into a lengthy bit of description. However, I believe that “perceiving the obvious” has a downside that outweighs these benefits.
Every time you ask for the dice to come out you’re interrupting the flow of play. You’re moving focus away from the fictional world and asking the players to recall that they’re sitting in a basement tossing chunks of plastic around Bob’s mom’s pinochle table. You are breaking immersion. Exposition is exactly when you want players to forget the real world, and to instead focus in on the fictional secondary world you’re trying to create. What I’m arguing for here is less dice at the table. Make your descriptions interesting, and make your calls for Perception meaningful. After all, you want there to be consequences for failure beyond, “Welllll….OK. I guess that’s just high enough,” before you give them the plot-critical information anyway.
And if you happen to be a player rather than a GM, consider putting less than infinity ranks into Perception. Sure you’ll roll it a lot at the table, but half of those will be inconsequential…especially if there’s nothing around to perceive in the first place.
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When I gm I prefer to have player perception stats on hand and roll in secret to determine if the player notices something passively. If they declare they are searching for something they roll it themselves. This also allows you to pause, roll a die and then look like you are consulting the stats just to mess with their heads occasionally and keep them guessing when your roll means something and when it is just made up.
I love that metagame element of GMing. The last module I designed was a mystery, and I actually included a table of minor character names just so players could see the GM consulting notes rather than making up an “obviously not the villain” NPC on the fly.
In my experience it’s been less that Perception rolls are for information you should be getting anyway, but for details that you maybe could use or would find interesting or the GM wanted to get characters to RP a bit by making one character explain stuff to the rest of the group.
So yeah, still means that 90% of the time it’s not for those super important things you think it’s going to be for. I mean really, this shouldn’t be a surprise. If your GM is throwing an ambush at you every session that’s a problem.
Oh sure. Perception has all kinds of narrative uses. But that’s my point: it’s not actually as much of a min/max survival skill as it looks on paper. Heck, I’ll sometimes ask for a Perception roll just to see which character notices the thing first, but the truth is that somebody in the party would have noticed the thing on a 12 just as easily as a 37.
In my experience, mostly through PFS, Perception is a skill that you can actually get away with not ranking up. Most classes have it as a skill, and most players who browse forums or read guides have had it drilled into them that Perception is the skill you are morally obligated to take lest to be a potential liability to the group. Granted, I’ve had a few characters who’ve gone without it and they HAVE been punished.
Honestly, I’d rank Diplomacy slightly higher. Both skills are essentially content gates (Perception to notice the Thing You Need, Diplomacy to work with that Thing You’re Not Allowed To Kill) but Diplomacy is a much rarer find. It’s much less common as a class skill, an Charisma is the kind of stat that is either a class-defining ability score or dumped like a bad habit for the sake of point buy. Plus, a few of the classes that DO meet both of those requirements suffer from the terrible weakness of 2+Int skill points. When they’re Charisma based. And those classes often dump Int anyway. And when you only have one skill to max, well… we know what most people take, don’t we?
Knowledge skills that relate to monster identification come up as a close third, however, as PFS is fairly skill reliant and the tactical benefits can save PC lives.
Skills are a finite resource, and dropping a rank into Perception or Diplomacy has the same resource cost as putting ranks in bottom of the barrel options like Appraise or Craft. Games are about tough choices and resource allocation, but stories are about minor details coming back to have a big impact. I’m thinking stuff like the “You’ve never been to Singapore” line in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies or the entire freaking plot of Slumdog Millionaire. Next time I write a module, I think I’m going to go out of my way to make the less-used skills a more important part of the game.
Also, thanks for the phrase “content gate.” That’s a useful way to look at design.
No problem! The concept has been floating around in my head lately. Whenever I play classic western RPGs I always sacrifice character power for Diplomacy skills/related stats because I’m the only one who’s able to use them even if I have charismatic party members. (Looking at you, Bioware) Not able to say the Important Thing? Welp, guess you can’t have this item/character/ending now.
In a more extreme case, there’s a certain Pathfinder Society scenario that hits a brick wall and becomes unwinnable if none of the characters have a Wayfinder. Granted, they’re fairly cheap to buy and you’re given one for free the first time you play the big “welcome to being a Pathfinder” scenario. But you know what? For every scenario that uses the item, there are a dozen that become more difficult (if not unwinnable) if your identity as a Pathfinder is discovered. Like, say, by showing off the Society’s badge of honor: the Wayfinder. And to top it off, none of the legal pre-gen characters have it in their inventory.
I need to give organized play a more serious try. I’ve only done a few 5e sessions, but I’d like to see what other designers put out there for the purpose. And more importantly, I’d like to see how they’re really played. Market research!
I heard that 5E organized play is a bit of a cluster. Something about a dragon related module having poor balancing and their content being strangely lax on what levels people are allowed to play.
Anyway, you should totally give PFS a try. Skim the guidebook, roll up a character (or snag a pregen and amuse yourself with their variance in focused design) and play some lowbie sessions. I’ve had a ton of fun with it!
I had one GM who asked for 5 spot/listen checks at the start of every session, and if your character was supposed to be making one he’d consult the list to see what you rolled. Then after each one he’d cross it off and move to the next. It worked great for not alterting players to something that maybe was going to be a surprise while still keeping them from feeling cheated.
It only started to be an issue when someone found a way to buff their perception scores halfway through a dungeon run.
When I first started out in d20 system, I asked for Perception bonuses and kept them on note cards behind the screen. Between the buffs problem you describe and the hassle of rolling all the checks it wound up being more trouble than it was worth.
I do like the 5e concept of “passive perception” though. That mess goes a long way to solving this problem.
My GM has us put our Perception on the little “what is your AC and saves” notecards he also uses to keep track of initiative, and then assumes that we are taking 10 on Perception at all times unless we are actively searching, extremely distracted or otherwise disabled.
That’s the thing about good ideas. They tend to exist as house rules before they ever show up in an actual product.
DM: You see a shack.
Monk: Can I roll perception? Oh, natural 20!
DM: It’s a shack.
In the immortal words of Sigmund Freud: “Sometimes a shack is just a shack.”
Unless it’s a killer gazebo
I always thought Perception was just the God-Skill. You’re probably going to roll more attacks or saving throws than Perception checks, but you don’t spend skill points on those.
I never thought of drawing players’ attention with a Perception check. That’s something to keep in mind next time I’m in the DM chair.