Pay attention! See what I did there?

(I'm posting this from the new Blogger app I just installed on my phone. If I say something really bizarre like "purple monkey dishwasher", just chalk it up to predictive text gone awry.)

I spent some time revisiting the Attributes and Skills section today. I think I'm going to cut "Notice" as a skill. In my experience, perception skills have always been an automatic choice for players because a character with higher perception skills is always better. Of course, I'm not counting all the times that jerk GMs pulled the "you fail because you succeeded" trick (e.g. "congratulations, you can clearly make out the details of the sanity blasting abomination and lose extra sanity points" or "you successfully spotted the beady eyes of the cockatrice spying on you from the bushes, so you turn to stone").

When I think back to all the campaigns I've been in, it seems that perception skills were called for by the GM more than any other skills. In D&D 3, it was considered madness not to take max ranks in Listen and Spot if you had access to them as class skills. In other games, I list count of how many times I've heard "roll perception" in response to a player's question. I've come to realize that I don't like this for several reasons.

1. Taking the Notice skill or not doesn't make characters different; it just makes a character better or worse than another. Choosing between "awesome" and "awful" is not a meaningful choice.

2. Why should someone trained to recognize forged documents by looking at the minutiae of handwriting be better able to spot an ambush than a grizzled veteran of numerous military campaigns against the goblins and their irregular hit-and-run skirmishing tactics?

3. When the GM constantly defaults to "roll perception" in response to player questions about a scene, item, or situation, it cheapens all the more interesting (and more character-defining) skills that the PCs have.

I once made a character for a Star Wars D6 game who had "tactics" because it fit his background as a former lieutenant in the imperial army. He never used it. In situations where it might have been useful, perception was called for instead. Could I see how the squad of stormtroopers is deploying and identify their most likely next move? Sure. Forget about all that knowledge of tactics and imperial military doctrine: just roll perception to see if you can spot their positions and make out their movement clearly.

4. When players have access to a "spot something important" skill, it's too tempting to just default to it instead of thinking of things from the character's perspective and trying to use more specific skills. Why use your piloting skill to see of that ship has inconsistent registration numbers? Why use your mechanical expertise to look for signs of recent damage or modification? Why use "bureaucracy" to chat up the customs officer for clues about who was on that ship? Just "roll perception" and hope for random clues to spray from the GM like candy from a pinata!

I don't think Notice is needed as a skill. Noticing things can be done with a relevant skill. Is that swordsman really favouring one leg our is he faking it? Roll Fighting to gauge his stance. How many shots did he fire from his revolver and could he reasonably hit us at this range? Roll Shooting. Are we walking into an ambush? Make a check with your tactical or stealth skills (or even Shooting to recognize the best lanes for sniper fire).

Cutting the bland Notice skill will leave more points to spend on things that give a character more flavour without sacrificing the functionality the character would have gained from the Notice skill. For keen-eyed, paranoid scouts and twitchy lookouts who spot everything, there are Talents that can grant them a bonus to spotting things in their signature roles: +1D to perception checks "while taking point" or "while searching for traps", etc.