Quote from: VisionStorm on November 12, 2022, 09:34:37 AM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on November 11, 2022, 09:22:42 PM
Just in passing, a thing that everyone has, is pretty much the mechanical reason for attributes in the first place.  Granted, there are plenty of edge cases.

Everyone has Stealth IRL. They might not always be good at it, but pretty much anyone could try to sneak pass someone else, even if they're not a spy or a burglar or someone who's had training in covert ops.

Doesn't mean that Stealth needs to be an attribute.

Same with Combat or Athletics. Anyone IRL could pick up a rock or a hammer, and bash someone in the head with it, or throw it at someone else. Or attempt to climb, jump or whatever.

Doesn't mean Athletics or Combat are attributes. Broad skills? Maybe. But that depends on how abilities are handled in the system, and how broad "Athletics" is (does it also cover riding and acrobatic stunts?).

Granted, in old D&D Combat is a game stat, since everyone has a THAC0 or whatever to handle their ability to hit. But that's based on class and level, rather than rolled at random and set in stone like an ability score.

And Athletics could also be said to already be covered by Strength, while Stealth is already covered by Dexterity. Hence, negating the need for specificity while still addressing the fact that anyone could try those tasks. Just like anyone could fallback on Wisdom to try to notice stuff without turning this ONE thing anyone could try into its own Perception attribute.

Unless by "Perception" we mean this expansive thing that can cover a broad range of stuff beyond just sensory perception (like intuition, investigation, deductive reasoning, problem solving, and specialized knowledge like tracking, etc). Which leads us back to what do we even mean by "Perception"?

Whether something can qualify as a proper "attribute" (or at least a class of universal "broad skills") mechanically speaking vs "just a skill/specialty" is more a matter of definition and specificity, rather than whether or not everyone could kinda sorta try related tasks.

Sure, but there is a core thing that everyone has (or with negative scores, notably lacks compared to the average) that will underlay all of those perception-based skills.  Some of you are saying it is Intelligence, or Wisdom, or something else.  I'm saying that in the whole design, those are usually lousy choices for it.  So much so, that using the D&D core six abilities, a better choice for working a Perception skill into the game would be to make it a skill not based on an attribute or perhaps base it on a feat.

When you design an entire system, there a few things that sit at the boundaries of attribute, talent, skill, etc.  The exact list will vary somewhat depending on what the game is about, too.  In fact, you can't accommodate all of them.  Perception is one of those things.  For me, perception is important enough that it gets a coveted slot, and then the rest of the design has to bend around that.  Whereas, for example, I don't find representing "Toughness" or "Charisma" to be quite that important.  Other designs have different choices because those designs have different design goals.

You'll note that it also matters a great deal how you want the system to handle overlapping activities.  If you want, say, "Persuasion" to be something that the "face" character does as a role in the party, then you might tie that to an ability score (Charisma or Presence or whatever) and a handful of skills that you need to buy up to a decent level to do reliably.  Then maybe even tack on some traits or feats or whatever to really drive it home. So the face character invests a lot in it, over two or more mechanical categories, and practically no one else does, because the face character has it covered.  That design will work quite well for that goal.  If you don't want "face" specialists, but instead want people to talk about the things they know when appropriate to the situation, that same exact design sucks. 

It's impossible to make a valid critique of a design without considering the intent of the design and its mechanics.  It's often true that the design intent is not one that the critic doesn't want, but that is a lousy reason for the critic to slag the mechanics chosen.  If the critic thinks the design intent is ill chosen, critique that.