To me, perception-based skills always walked the line between being mentally and physically based. On one hand, being blind or deaf is a physical condition. On the other, a dim-witted person tends not to notice things around him/her (or at least recognize the significance of things)

Take something like a Spot check. Is this based on a character's eyesight, or their mental awareness. The easy answer is both, but in terms of a system, you usually have to pick one or the other. In my system I only have two attributes which can modify skills, one which measures their physical existence, the other which measures their intellectual/spiritual existence (still working on the names). Depending on how the skill is used, one of this will modify the check. For example, actually smithing a sword is physical, while designing the sword is mental. With all this in mind, how would you handle perception based skills?

You could have the actual act of seeing as a physical stat, but processing that information would be a mental stat.

Well, you can simply take the average of both stats. (Of course, since nearly all skills are mental and physical, you could reduce your two stats to one in this case. ;)) You could even weight both stats (70 % physical, 30 % mental) if you wanted.

The other possibility would simply not taking "spot" at all, but "perception" + "physical state of the eye", where perception is a skill and the physical state of the eye a modificator. So, unless further mentioned, each eye has a modificator of "0", but you can take the advantage "eagle eye" for a bonus or be short-sighted and get a penalty. The same for the other senses - you cannot feel without skin, not taste without a tongue, not hear without ears.

I have thought about this before.  Lots.  My big idea was to make it simple.  There are  so many factors and situations that it is nearly impossible if not unplayable to juggle them all or simulate them.  I hope this helps!  It sure did me!

I'm going to go with Axe4Eye here.  The easiest way to solve this problem is not to bother categorizing it as mental or physical.

-JT

The simplest way to deal with complexity is to make it optional.  Have a base attribute (probably mental, like acumen/wisdom/perception) that mediates sense checks, and use racial modifiers and/or merits/flaws (such as keen sight, keen scent, blindness, etc,) to model variations where appliacable.  That way, players don't have to deal with the assorted subtleties unless strictly neccesary.

Also, what helped me was to lessen the dice range.  I was afraid to do this because it seemed to me that it would take away some kind of realism that 1-100 or d% gave...Just me.  Anyway, I tried d6 and the results were a little different but not "unrealistic" for my purposes.  d6 means that +1 or -1 is sufficient.  Much easier to work with than + 20 for awareness bonus, - 25 (poor vision), - 20 (night time) or what ever.  Hope it works for you!

Hi there fig,

Can you tell us a bit more about what kind of game you want to design? I think we need to put these perception skills in context somehow. You don't have to write much, just enough to help us figure out how perception is used in your game.

Du you have a real name, by the way? I'm Peter.

Cheers,

/Peter