Making Perception Checks Less Random

[Skarg]

Your percentage breakdown is very convincing to me that in those cases, I quite like the way a straight 3d6 roll against 10 vs. 12 (or 5 vs 7) works out. I think the average dice are weird because they focus importance on the middle range, leaving no outliers, and make for forced limited outcomes even with typical values. There aren't many circumstances under which I think I'd want that.

On the other hand, I have so many decades as GM relating to things as rolling 3d6 against TFT/GURPS scores with modifiers, that I know what values to assign to get what chances I think I want. If you have different habits for assigning modifiers, maybe you could get what you think you want from average dice.

[dfinlay]

Here's the thing: if you actually want character 1 to almost always beat character 2 in perception checks, realistically, that means either C1 has some truly amazing ability in the sense and/or (more likely) C2 has some real deficit in it. Thus, the attributes should be more 10 and 14 (someone with an amazing ability) or 6 (someone with some real issues in the sense - partially deaf or very poor vision, for example) and 10 or even 6 and 14. In this context, C1 will very often beat C2, but still not always (maybe (s)he was completely zoned out when it happened). This seems reasonable to me. Scores of 10 and 12 are more within the normal range of ability, where there is some variance in capability but you usually don't see people almost always beating other people. Maybe you just need more spread out scores to get the effects you want.

But then, you might say, having high PER becomes expensive. Well, if you want it to be cheap, you can always change the price, but I have changed the cost of PER to [8] in my games and my players still think it's worth it. PER is a very useful attribute in most games.

[ArchonShiva]

Seriously, [20] for "Notices stuff pretty much all the time" is nearly an amazing deal.

Splitting Per from IQ probably serves your purposes better than Fate Dice, actually. And IQ is underpriced with free Per and Will anyway.