Perception should always be an innate stat...

Perception should always be an innate stat. Having it as a standalone skill that requires investment or proficiency only serves the purpose of being a skillpoint or build siphon, as everyone at any given time can and will make use of perception.

With that said, what are some games that handle Perception in a more interesting or hands-free way? Or standalone mechanics you might want to come up with. Alternatively, what are some ways of diversifying or dividing perception so it's not a must-have thing for everyone?

I'm listening.

There is no perception score/stat.

You tell the players what they see. If they hear dripping wait until one of them says they look up/around to tell them about the giant spiders on the ceiling, otherwise it will get the drop on them.

Everything that can't be seen by regular people when they enter the room must be searched for via roleplay (is there anything under the bed? I open the chest. etc), or is hidden by magic spells or disguises and has to be found by other methods or bumping into it.

I'm fine with it as is, assuming you are talking DnD.

The way I prep for it is I keep track of the passive perception of my players which I only use for obvious threats like ambushes or traps.

Then in more defined rooms I set up perception tiers of 6/12/18/24. Each tier higher giving more insight on what the party needs or can use for their current mission. If they decide to look around of course.

But if you want a solution you can always roll perception for your players and describe what they would've seen anyway.

also a good idea.

I rike it.

There should also be no Strength dtat or fight skill. Any fight should be described and roleplayed in a believable way. If you do it satisfactory, I will judge it valid.

I describe the scene and give players as much detail as they want within reason. The only time I make players roll dice involving perception is when there's an obstacle or challenge involved or if the action is contested, the same reasons as any other kind of dice roll. Examples of needing a 'perception roll' might include seeing through heavy mist, picking out one conversation in a crowded tavern, or trying to spot a sneaking enemy. Of course, if the difficulty is low compared to the bonus the player has to the action I'll often let them succeed automatically, it's only when the task would challenge them or pose true risk that I ask for a dice roll.

I keep perception from being a 'mandatory' skill in my homebrew system by making all skills quite useful and heavily limiting skill points. You can have a +2 to perception, or you could have a +2 to manual dexterity and grace, or a +2 to identify (and get bonuses against) several types of monsters, or you could Level 2 Fire Magic.

>Perception should always be an innate stat.

It should be its own stat, maybe being able to synergize with other ones in certain skills but never relegated under an umbrella

>Having it as a standalone skill that requires investment or proficiency only serves the purpose of being a skillpoint or build siphon

That depends on how shitty the GM is

>Alternatively, what are some ways of diversifying or dividing perception so it's not a must-have thing for everyone?

Players are supposed to be a team, not everyone needs to be Peepy McNinja

I have this one stat which I keep shoehorning into every game, be it video game, tabletop game, or quest that I make. It's called Sobriety.

Sobriety is a mixture of perception, willpower, and wit. Basically, it's how awake you feel and how immersed you are in your experience of life. Some people are always engaging everything, managing problems, keeping track of things, and relevantly, spotting things that are out of place. They have wit, they have cunning, and they have it as quick as they need it to be. These people have high sobriety, and they make great merchants, scouts, and commanders. Then there are the slow people, either those that never get any more awake once they roll out of bed, the drunk, or the retarded. They don't notice, or better yet don't attribute any value into things. These people have low sobriety, and it impacts their experience of life detrimentally. They're not as involved, they're not as present. They're always distant, even if their weak-willed aspirations want them to be present.

Extremes of these values are rather... extreme. Have you ever had three 5 Hour Energys and felt like you were about to shit yourself, have a heart attack, and die? That's the highest you go with it naturally. You notice everything. You're bouncing off the walls, ready to do all the shit you need, but the amount of energy that you have in you is painful, your mind becomes scattered, and you start dipping into madness. Certain drugs and eldritch tomes raise Sobriety to these levels. On the flipside, an extreme lack of Sobriety is being completely persuaded that the experience of life itself isn't genuine. It's a dream. They don't feel gravity to anything that happens, so they don't pay attention to it. They often don't register things that kill them, whereas their sober counterparts would be shitting themselves over the untold number of ways their life could end in which they have no control over but perceive.

>mental stat
>a mixture of
it's shit

>I took Wisdom and conflated it with Charisma

Nigger, what are you doing?

Both sides of Sobriety experience things differently. For example, let's go with a dark, likely trapped room. A person with high sobriety has always felt the air bothering him in weird ways, sensing traps both real and imagined, but this room just makes every hair on his body stand on end. He stands in the doorway, imagining his first step into the room ending in a myriad different ways, spears poking him from different sides, the floors cracking in different ways, his attempts to secure himself failing. So many potential ways of failure must invite many ways of cautious approach.

Meanwhile, the low sobriety man just walks in. The idea that the room was trapped had crossed his mind; so could every room have been. Imagine if the piston chair you're sitting in just exploded right this second; you're still sitting there, aren't you? The possibility of threats don't bother him. The GM just rolls behind the screen, and doesn't even tell the player when the trap had sprung and missed its target.

For the sake of comparison, I call it a mixture. It's actually the mental state of "there"ness. It's difficult to describe Sobriety without using the word Sobriety; are you there? Are you seeing what's going on around you? Are you reacting to it?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Charisma is others' perception of your actions. Whether or not you mean it when you say "I love you" doesn't make it any less sweet to ears that need you and believe you. You can make a non-sober yet charismatic person; they don't call beer "Liquid Courage" for no reason.

That's called "situational awareness".

>Charisma is others' perception of your actions

No

>You can make a non-sober yet charismatic person

Yes, thats called lack of wisdom

Ok, sure. In our theoretical system, Perception is a base stat generated at character creation, and while it may be modified by circumstance or tools, it is not a skill which is to be improved.
However, stealth/hide + move silently or whatever we want to call it, is a skill in which some may be skilled or not skilled, and which may be modified by circumstances such as lighting, or by gear, be it weight/bulkiness penalties or specialized gear bonuses.
This means that perception does not scale upwards at the pace that a skill which directly opposes it scales.
so let's just make sneakiness a baseline stat as well, but since it is logically skill based, should we do the same with other skills?
the problem with the argument that essential skills should be divorced from a skillpoint system is that either you end up with a bunch of things that are contested by skills which can be pumped up - opposed by a baseline which cannot - and thus become overly powerful, or you move just about everything over to baseline and scrap your whole skill system.
unless your skill system, whatever the base system may be, has a very narrow gap between untrained and max trained, you're going to have to allow for the countering stats to be scaled up by those who wish to protect themselves from those who use the offending skill.
If you want to rebuild a skill system, the WH40k RPGs such as Rogue Trader are a good foundation to build from. Simply being Trained in a skill (relatively cheap investment as far as xp) gives you a flat check modifier based on your related attribute, with a pair of +10% success chance increments after that, to a max of +20% or +30% depending on the individual game, whereas being untrained is either half the related attribute or -20% depending on the individual game, leading to a maximum difference between best possible skill and worst possible skill (assuming average human attributes) of 50%. skill floor and skill ceiling allow here for what you want.

>theoretical system
There are plenty of systems where perception is a stat and it works fine.

as I said - it can work given certain limitations on how skills are designed, but simply saying that perception should Always be a stat is ignoring the crux of the issue, and simply throwing out an assertion without qualification or specifics ala
>there are plenty of systems where anal circumference is a stat and it works fine
is nothing but a wasted bump.
There are also plenty of systems that have no perception stat at all. or Strength, or intellect. or skills of any kind beyond a handful of baseline stats largely divorced from any physical characteristics, such as MH or Apocalypse World. does that make them applicable to the OP's question?

>This means that perception does not scale upwards at the pace that a skill which directly opposes it scales.
Perception governs a broader area than sneak and needs not scale in line with it.
>so let's just make sneakiness a baseline stat as well
Non sequitur.

Is that a girl? I like her

If it's a boy then I still like it

secret of zir an make perception a secondary stat that is derived from main stats

nWoD also does this if i remember well.

if you replace wisdom with perception, the stat makes much more sense

In GURPS it is an attribute that starts equal to Intelligence. You can buy up Intelligence and then deduct Perception to get a few points back, or spend up on Perception only. A number of other games do it similarly.

>secret of zir an
A rare system.

Wisdom can also easily be broken down into perception and willpower.

One example of a situation of imbalance
let's take a theoretical d100 system where Perception is a baseline stat, with an average score of 35.
If I can take a highly specialized character and build around stealth, and pump my related skills and baseline stats to support it up to an effective 95, the fact that perception was made a base stat to prevent it being a necessary skill sink is allowing this character to have a definitive and unbalanced edge.
>so let's just make sneakiness a baseline stat as well
>>non sequitur
As the OP's solution to the initial problem is to make things a simple baseline stats in an effort to enforce a balance, I am simply applying the same conclusion here.
>Perception governs a broader area than sneak and needs not scale in line with it
Slight of Hand - same problem
Insight/Sense Motive and others - opposed by bluff, deceptions, same problem.
Skills are built into systems with direct oppositions, and while they may cover broader areas, failing to account for this is a failure of game design.

wisdom means discernment. to have good judgement as a mechanical stat is and always will be retarded.

Which is why if you break down what wisdom actually applies to mechanically in the game and call it perception instead, it makes a much more sense.

Which was my point

>wasting huge amounts of time as the players search every single object in the room, instead of having a die roll that takes a few seconds
Nah, fuck that.

That's a girl, she's Frost from Rainbow Six Siege, a chinese-canadian operator working under the JTF-2

Funny that you make a trap joke, because she uses traps as her tool of choice.

>No (, Charisma is not others' perception of your actions)
So personal appeal is objective, then? It might not be looks, it might not be voice, but a state of mind, how one approaches other people in a way that to themselves doesn't matter but to those they reach out to makes all the difference. Some people might realize what things they have to say, choose their words carefully, act appropriately. Others might be naturals, speaking their thoughts in a simply delightful manner, not worried about making or losing friends, their attachments or obligations. One's sobriety doesn't play a role in how they approach and get along with others. It's completely independent. Sobriety is how they approach operating themselves.
>Yes, (a non-sober yet charismatic person) has a lack of wisdom
If Plato walks blindly off a cliff while deep in thought, is he a fool? He wouldn't be perceptive, but it was his mind, active with rational thought and rhetoric, that distracted him away from reality to the point where he couldn't recognize the ground ending right beneath his eyes. The strength of the mind is dependent from its ability to sense only so far as to what they spend their time thinking about. Wisdom is fed by perception of the world, but a dulled perception doesn't disable the same level of thought, only malnourishes it.

>So personal appeal is objective, then?

Charisma is not necessarily perceived as positive, practical charisma is about transmitting a message

>One's sobriety doesn't play a role in how they approach and get along with others. It's completely independent. Sobriety is how they approach operating themselves.

Spatial self-awareness is already covered by Dexterity, emotional self-awareness is covered by Wisdom, condensing them and perception under the umbrella of "sobriety" is dumb, Wisdom is already too broad and your solution is to introduce another vague stat that rehashes aspects that are already covered by other stats

>If Plato walks blindly off a cliff while deep in thought, is he a fool?

Yes

>He wouldn't be perceptive, but it was his mind, active with rational thought and rhetoric, that distracted him away from reality to the point where he couldn't recognize the ground ending right beneath his eyes.

Thats high Int low Wis, perception had nothing to do with it, he was a fool for engaging an attention-grabbing activity in a dangerous area, something even a blind person could prevent

OP isn't making perception a baseline stat in an effort to enforce balance; he's doing it because it makes sense.

See, this completely ignores things like "I bought cybernetic eyes" or "that robotic tank is able to perceive and target ten thousand objects simultaneously".

I am fine with most people having a baseline passive perception, but some things, especially robots, are ACTIVELY FUCKING PERCEIVING.

Just play something like Risus where your strengths are individual skills. (Preferably not Risus itself but you get the idea.)

Not everyone is perceptive, user. Viewing it as a must-have skill and dumping points into it every game despite whatever your character would reasonably have is metagaming

How about you just give the cyborgs or robots a higher perception level

>Perception should always be an innate stat.
It's a skill that people actively train themselves in, IRL. You can increase it with training, so no, it shouldn't always be an innate stat.

Perception is used as a gamist tool, and should be treated as such. Until that changes, then it's status as a must-have skill will stay there. It's not like disarming traps or reading a spell, it's something that shows up constantly during play and affects everyone, that's why it's a must-have skill. NOT spending on it is counterproductive and only serves to actively gimp yourself.

Actions have a time limit nigga. Chose to Investigate the pool of murky red water, the slightly unhinged door or behind the out-of-place bookshelf. Of course,with a good nights worth of investigation you will learn all about the place.

Or will you?

AFMBE has the stat Perception (sensory acuity) and the skill Notice (trained awareness of your surroundings, like what spies and cops have).
I use the subsystem that when a person tries to scope out a room or other area, they roll Per+Notice (with modifiers etc) and the nuber of levels of success they score is the number of questions they may ask about the item.
Sometimes I will block a question if there's no way to answer it, but it costs them nothing to ask. The detail of the answers I give is based on the sum of their Per+Notice skill. That way a very talented observer can do Sherlock Holmes shit like "Judging by his shoes, where's he been in the last hour?" or the like.
I have Investigation (for searching), Questioning, Science (Psychology) and similar skills work in much the same way.
PCs with Photographic Memory can "save" questions for later from a Per+Notice roll.

>Jump through a window
>CLANK

Every time I feel like a fucking D&D character

>I just want to roll dice and turn my brain off LMAO!

And there we have it.

Why the fuck are you playing, then? Just to roll dice?

>I'm listening.
I WANNA STICK MY MATROYSKA BOMB IN FROST'S BEAR TRAP UNTIL I EXPLODE ALL OVER HOSTAGE

If it's a must-have skill then why not just make it either a stat or an innate skill that everyone has access to?

Hell, just make your perception be equal to (half your) total level as a representation of you gaining enough experience to know where to look, since the same tricks that work on a newbie won't be as effective against someone who knows how to look out for bullshit.

I believe wisdom was initally meant to be a 'willpower'-like ability score.

And then 3.5 turned into Seeing and Hearing: The Ability Score (perhaps because monks druids and rangers are all chill and shit and they're supposed to be almost supernaturally aware of stuff?)

...

Was Perception even a thing in earlier editions of D&D or did they treat it more like suggested?

They did it like the other user said. Perception didn't exist, the closest thing was surprise rolls, where you had a 2 in 6 chance (1 in 6 if you were an elf or a ranger IIRC) of being "surprised" and thus unable to act for the first turn. Also, Dwarves and Elves got a chance of detecting secret doors with a roll