I think it is a false assumption to say that ALL badguys and/or NPCs in the campaign's adventures have majorly jacked up Perception ranks, to the point where trying to be sneaky is almost/actually impossible. I've not done an analysis but I recall some encounters where the NPCs had good Perception scores, others where they did not. In this system more than any other I've played, the die rolls -actually matter- when determining the results of an action.

My main character has a passive Perception of 20 and a couple of the people he travels with are sneaky types and they are very effective doing that sort of thing, but its not a foregone conclusion. My guy sometimes knows where they are when in stealth mode, but often he does not.

In another 3.X campaign I had a shadow dancer character who at 11th level had a Stealth check of about +40 something, +30 to hide in plain sight in bright light areas. If you did not have blind sense/sight you simply did not get to know where he was. That actually got boring real fast, for me and other players and the DM.

That extreme case of 'sneaky' should be avoided in any system.

Sneaking around should be a risk, and the fun of it is the uncertainty/anticipation of success or failure. Knowing that you have a 98% chance of success is just not interesting, to me. So I like the balance of the skill, and appreciate that most NPCs that are in survival/security/interaction roles have a good score for it. Not all beings, but a lot of them should, else they'd be pawns or worm food very quickly.

I decided to take a look. Perception is WAY over-used. Looking through all of the Crusade hard-points (I didn't have time to check the soft-points), the vast majority of enemies have Perception and there is only a single fight where at least one of the bad guys doesn't have Perception (HP7 Scene 5).

Rick....come on, man! We all know you don't know jack-all about wildlife.
When I wrote that, I was just thinking of eyesight.

That is rather absurd. D&D 4e has a good basic rule for stealth (which they then of course break regularly with feats and powers) - if you don't have cover or concealment (I think it may even require superior), you can't hide/stealth (period, end of story). Other systems I've played have rules that effectively match that (in Rolemaster, it's something like -250 to hide in plain site (of course, I've seen one character actually make that but it was an extremely lucky roll)).

I agree. As long as there is nothing as stupid as a Shadow dancer’s ability to “hide in plain sight” (HIPS), while being observed, I don’t see how having someone be “broken” with stealth is even broken. There just usually isn’t that much you can do with it other than flee (yeah fleeing! Something thieves are good at!). Though as someone who has played a thief before, it can be critical for the trap detector who is 30 feet out front to be hidden as he does it so he doesn’t get eaten before the rest of the party arrives…

As long as you can’t HIPS any stealth ability is inherently limited. There is the ability to HIPS in Arcanis, with the “Chameleon” spell so you can sneak across an open courtyard (which is useful) but it limits your movement so dramatically that depending on how GMs rule it there could be so many perception checks you’re bound to fail anyways. But I think it’s a great spell, and a good compromise for not getting stupid powerful like HIPS. Plus, it’s entirely useless in combat, since you have to move so slowly and take 12 ticks to blend after breaking concealment.

But even that is getting side tracked, because to some degree whether stealth is too powerful is not the question; but rather whether perception should be a skill that everything but most player characters have. I can see the argument for most natural animals to have it. I disagree with it, but I can understand with where it is coming from. I think giving it to every animal/beast out there is a little overpowered, but even doing that would be reining in the current use of it with… everything.

Maybe I’m wrong. I haven’t been reading stat blocks. Hopefully the fact that many of the enemies in Arcanis are human, or human like, (which is one of the things I like) will mean that many of them suffer from the same limitations. I worry that that might not be the case, since so little consideration seems to have been done in the past with assigning the skill to threats. But applying the same logic, I wouldn’t have thought the Agamassi would have it since they are pretty much the equivalent of a martial type for the Ssressen (accept the elite with advancements that actually bodyguard the emperor of course).

Is that stealth taking into account the environment: bonuses for using cover, darkness, distractions and distance? Any decent GM should be making it hard for a character to just dissapear in plain sight but with the right setting even an unskilled character should be able to stealth it on occasion. The other thing to consider is how Arcanis deals with stereotypes and tropes: DnD was an environment which was about extremes and surprises and so it happened regularly with perception and stealth being 'god' skills to have, does Arcanis conform to this mould? We are told that it doesn't so it is perhaps us that need to adjust our ideas as to what is viable/feasible/expected.

Agreed. I've yet to see any system whether this, D&D in any iteration, Spycraft, Dark Heresy, and others not suffer for making that specific mistake with skill-based Invisibility.



So...idea.

Looking at the 'perceptive animals' concepts, maybe the problem is looking at "is perceptive" as a positive state and not a neutral one. For example there are species of flatfish who's eyes work as a light sensor and not a whit more. They can just differentiate between light on and light off and that's it. What would that Perception score be, as a straight value? Zero? In the negative numbers?
We've got this gigantic pool of "everything is perceptive" which means...what? They all have high bonuses? What about looking at that idea as being baseline zero as in "you've got eyesight or hearing capable of registering a gross movement or sound -congratulations, you have a non-penalized Perception score." Obviously quantifying "gross" in some way would help, but as an abstraction consider that.

Or look at quantifying bonuses differently. Take raptors: do they need a large Perception skill bonus, or would giving them no range increments on vision work better? They can spot a field mouse from a few hundred feet up, but does that mean they see every field mouse every time or that the actual task is one they're adapted for? Or cats and night vision. Are they actually amazingly perceptive, or do they have a small skill bonus, placing them above the zero baseline value, and low-light vision?

Stealth is another similar example. I have lived many places with Deer. Deer are pretty stealthy -except not. They're quiet moving, but so is everything walking slowly across a soft lawn as long as it doesn't crack a stick or two. They don't make passive noise like jingling car keys in a pocket and they stand real still to blend in, but does that make them Stealthy? Or does that make me Perceptive? Is the difference that my eye is probably more advanced then that of things that they evolved fleeing from so freezing up does nothing, or because I can learn I know what to look for? Tan blob superimposed over a garbage can waaaaay over yonder? Probably a deer. I sure couldn't hear it coming from a distance, but visually it's not a trial to spot them coming. Given how much they rely on movement cues, that distant, statue-still buck is virtually a Mastermind White Tail to other deer....but he's clearly unmoving on a light grey concrete patio to me.

This is the critical difference: animals don't improve like we do. We lucky, lucky sapient creatures have volition with which to focus on skills. Animal abilities seem to be primarily benchmarks -"bears can detect noise at X range consistently," and that value doesn't go up.

Part of the issue is an artifact of the system -I was playing a mod, we were fighting some caster type, I broke through the chaff to confront the caster (he unarmored in robes with a dagger) and Lo! He doth initiated a most vexing ass-whupping!
Oh, right. He's an Elite. His otherwise casting-focused ass is as good with his butter knife as I am with my greatsword. Probably better -he's got more Tricks, and overall higher die values at everything because Elite.
Fantastic. Sure it happens to everyone etc etc, but his classification ensures that if we duel in a Perform (Bongos) contest he'll still have the edge because Elite. Part of it is also my own failing in not having an as-yet clear feeling about where I am in regards to my actual setting-relative potency. I have 3 ranks in Perform (Bongos), am I good?

So if a Shadow Lion is in fact a Mastermind Shadow Lion, he'll be far beyond his normal racial parameters. It's a classic D&D problem: APL 1 = ORKS! APL 3 = More ORKS! APL 9 = SUPER ORKS (or) NO MORE ORKS! What, are they all dead? Fled? Or do they have to keep evolving like Pokemon? "We still hear about villages being raided by Orks -why don't we fight them any more?"
The real problem tends to be, IMXP, that the players want to find a lasting solution to the Ork problem, and the GM maybe kinda wants them to move on because s/he thinks it's inconsequential or totally beyond their reach.

That was kind of a 4th Ed. problem, too. Ask Val'Holryn about "The Big Man" some time.

Point being: maybe a better starting point is to assign things with generally balanced perceptory suite a starting Perception bonus of zero. You're a bear. Your hearing and scent traits are excellent, but your eyesight sucks. This does not give you a gigantic inherent bonus because 2 out of 3 ain't bad, it just means you qualify for starting at nothing and working up from there. Or maybe you get the Scent Quality, and otherwise your Perception bonus is nothing special.

Edit: punctuation, some clarification.

as an aside

I have been working on updated and expanded monster creation rules... so this discussion is quite useful... please continue.

I live out in the country. Here is my perspective of animals and perception. Animals may have special sensory boosts to perception, but most don't have perception as a natural skill. What is easily confused as perception is really paranoia and lack of trust. It is a skill that is learned for most. Each animal may have special gift in a field, but that is more like how ss'ressens have a bonus to balance checks.

The issue I have with perception is that it is over generalized. It is a single rank to represent a character's skill in sensing something. That something comes from training. The issue is that there are so many bonuses to that perception vs stealth checks. Being actively attentive invokes the roll, which is right. Choosing to focus on fewer senses should provide a bonus to perception. And then for stealth, the environment and resources to camouflage provides bonuses for each senses.

So much is rolled into perception and stealth, it helps in generalizing, but it is hard to be strategic with stealth when all senses are rolled into one result versus another result. Perception is the detection of a disturbance in the room, not the recognition of the disturbance. It is like an animal responding to a pebble falling off a hill. They may detect it on the silent hill, but it doesn't know what caused it. The animal is paranoid,forced to make a mettle check. It such case, this creates a strategic use of stealth to force a creature into a trap. Then you have the issue of GMs getting angry that the players are restricting the NPCs' actions.

This comes to a choice of how perception/stealth mechanic is suppose to be in the game system. If it is intended to be used strategically, it needs to be handled strategically. A list of bonuses to perception and stealth need to be worked out just like attack versus defense and how the quality of the equipment adjusts the outcome. Then, you could add to stealth a mechanic just like etiquette to show experience in different forms of hiding, such as crowds or shadows. When aiming for strategic purposes, you can't over-generalize perception and stealth.

it all comes down to the kind of game your playing, I'm pretty sure that Arcanis the Roleplaying game is a lot more about fighting bashing people s heads and following intrigue rather than sneaking around in the dark avoiding doing those same things, and the details of the game system play more to those ideas.