Quote:
Originally Posted by RogerBW
To me the canonical use of observation is "casing the joint" – as in Asterix and the Cauldron, pp. 37-39. (Sadly no legal public version I can find to link to.) Finding out how many guards there are, when they change shifts, that sort of thing. My players are generally fond of lying up some distance from the target and finding out as much as they can before charging in, which helps keep their characters alive so I'm not complaining.
It's an odd skill - I'd normally expect GURPS to separate "notice the thing" from "interpret the thing". But I can see it makes sense this way.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil Masters
The movie I always remember when discussing Observation skill is Ronin. Robert de Niro puts on a textbook demonstration of passive and augmented Observation when setting up the operation.
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Yeah, pretty much this. I'll also add that it's the skill that could let you locate security cameras, how good the security measures are on a building (e.g., pressure plates), general physical security (e.g., fences or reinforced doors), etc. The former wouldn't include anything that's been specifically hidden away, while the latter is pretty obvious unless you pay a lot extra. You can, for instance, see most reinforced doorframes just from the way they are constructed.
You can also use it to discern access and egress and estimate how long it might take you to get there (this would be an IQ-based roll though - or that's how I've done it). (Finding your way around the building would probably be an Urban Survival roll though.) You could also use this skill to observe an area and figure out when it's the most or least crowded.
Where it gets tricky is when you use Observation to spot hidden details. I've found that it almost always bogs a game down with the "Please roll to see if my character notices anything else about the [target]." What I usually like to do is use their original margin vs. the target's original margin to conceal [X]. This way you don't get the weird situation "Yeah, you spotted the machine gun nest in the wall, but forgot about the cameras." That of course is not RAW, but a GM trick that makes my life easier.