BARBARIAN CORDIALLY POINT OUT THAT SUN NOT CONCEALING SELF,
Not relevant. There are separate rules for spotting creatures and spotting creatures trying to conceal themselves.
If you're going to make a blanket statement like that, back it up.And again for the most part the rules are only meant to be applied for tactical distances, and... and they fail utterly at that, too. That's the problem.Read the thread. There's 139 posts prior to yours that do a very good job of listing examples of how the Perception rules fail utterly. To see a normal human at anything over 300 feet requires a very high degree of both skill and luck. To see a building at anything over 500 feet requires practically superhuman abilities. But at the same time, almost anyone can read the fine print on a newspaper fifty feet away.
The modifiers for Perception DC's seem very straight-forward to me.I agree that they are straightforward. That doesn't mean that they're not broken as anything.
There are two fundamental problems. The first is that the size modifiers do not cover a useful range; a thousand-foot skyscraper and a sixty-foot dragon are both Colossal. The second, more serious, is that the difficulty of seeing something in the real world varies with the square root of the distance, but the penalties imposed by the rules use a linear model. The bad model makes the ruleset fundamentally and utterly broken.
So your saying a normal human cannot see the Sun. Since to see a building at anything over 500 feet requires practically superhuman abilities.
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Then use the rules as a guideline and add some common sense to your decision making.Well, that's great. Why have rules, then?
"The Most Important Rule" according to the Core book? Page 9.
-The rules in this book are here to help you breathe life into your characters and the world they explore. While they are designed to make your game easy and exciting, you might find that some of them do not suit the style of play that your gaming group enjoys.Remember that these rules are yours. You can change them to fit your needs.
Perception (Wis) Page 102.
....The DC to notice such details varies depending upon distance, the environment, and how noticeable the detail is. The following table gives a number of guidelines. [How about these guidelines or Apples!]
Yes then we must "follow" these rules and not come up with guidelines or house rules to fix some ambitious or broken rules. ;-)
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Then use the rules as a guideline and add some common sense to your decision making.Well, that's great. Why have rules, then?
"The Most Important Rule" according to the Core book? Page 9.
-The rules in this book are here to help you breathe life into your characters and the world they explore. While they are designed to make your game easy and exciting, you might find that some of them do not suit the style of play that your gaming group enjoys.Remember that these rules are yours. You can change them to fit your needs.
Perception (Wis) Page 102.
....The DC to notice such details varies depending upon distance, the environment, and how noticeable the detail is. The following table gives a number of guidelines. [How about these guidelines or Apples!]Yes then we must "follow" these rules and not come up with guidelines or house rules to fix some ambitious or broken rules. ;-)
hawkfire's got you there, OQ. (It also appears that you're new to posting in the forums, hawkfire. Welcome!) The section that's literally titled "The Most Important Rule" says that the purpose of rules like Perception DC's is to "breathe life into your characters and the world they explore" and that "[the rules] are designed to make your game easy and exciting."
Although Pathfinder can be externally described as aiming for a moderate to high degree of simulation, it textually makes no such claim, at least explicitly (or at least not that I've read!). One could argue, I suppose, that to "breathe life" into characters and a world could roughly mean some simulationist-sounding things like "make them seem real, to give them the simulation of life." But it's far too biblical a phrase and at odds with the stated goal of making things easy and exciting!
Now don't get me wrong: I'm also not a big fan of Pathfinder's overall rules system. I think it needs better GM rules and a clearer focus on what the rules are trying to accomplish. The real question we should be focusing on is: does Pathfinder's failure to model how vision over long distances works greatly affect the game as it's played? Can you write a rule that 1) mechanically simulates how long-distance vision works in real life to a degree of accuracy that you would be satisfied with, AND 2) makes the game easy [to play?] and exciting, and breathes life into the characters and world? (The mechanics will be neither easy nor exciting if I have to do any algebra.)
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I think it's easy because it's been done already on this thread. Take a -2 penalty if the object is ten or more feet away, and an additional -2 for every successive doubling of the distance. If that's too much math for you, anything tens of feet away is a -5, anything hundreds of feet away is a -10, anything thousands of feet away (miles) is a -15, and so on.Yes, especially since the fix would be trivial.
Do you think a realistic (or at least more realistic) physical modeling of real world simulation would improve this or another RPG for you?Would it be trivial? I have a hard time imagining a rules system that would attempt to more accurately model the physical world in terms of light, distance, and perception (lower case) that wouldn't involve a lot of advanced math, either on the part of the player or the designer. Or do you think it could be done by just adjusting the numbers in Pathfinder's current system, for instance? I'm not disagreeing with you, for the record, I'm just interested in why you think it would be so easy, when that's the opposite of my gut reaction.
I'm trying to structure my own house rules, but I think -2 at 10 feet seems a little high. What if we start 10 feet at -1, before moving on to -2 at 20, -4 at 40, -6 at 80, etc?
ft : penalty000:-0
010:-1
020:-2
040:-4
080:-6
160:-8
320:-10
640:-12
Wild Hare time I guess.
Yes, the rules for it fail on a lot of points, because, frankly it is not important in most cases to the game.
One of the biggest problems here, is we don't really define what perception means, or how we make identifications on incomplete but also multifaceted cues. Yes, we can see the sun from far, far away. Can we see, unaided, that it is a glowing sphere, with an irregular and ever changing corona, with the occasional flare? How many times will this be important?
Depending on the situation though, perception can be critical, life or death stuff.
Range penalty has to deal with two major things, the first being acuity of vision. Small/distant things impinge on fewer receptors, so the eye receives less actual data. Range also increases the effects of individually less significant "concealment" effects. Regardless of acuity issues, the object gets obscured/lost in the surroundings. Especially important here is when, due to intervening objects, uneven terrain or even the curvature of the earth, the object is completely concealed. Concealment based range effects are the ones that can often be countered by observer altitude. Acuity based issues are dealt with using "optical" devices/abilities. Dealing with this is where doing it right is mostly too complex nd fiddly to be productive to our game set.
Problem is, at least as important is the interpretative aspect of perception. We fill in incomplete visuals with movement cues and, mostly, experience. This is where the randomness of the die roll finds it real justification, and it also justifies increasing skill ranks. Problem is, with this, knowing and familiarity with what you see can be huge, more important than acuity and concealment. You see something, but you really can't tell what it is that you are seeing. Your brain is going to want to "trick" you into believing you are seeing what you expect to see. On an average, this tendency is a survival advantage.
You know, I maybe should have started with that.
EDIT, wow never ending correction time.
Wild Hare time I guess.
Yes, the rules for it fail on a lot of points, because, frankly it is not important in most cases to the game.
One of the biggest problems here, is we don't really define what perception means, or how we make identifications on incomplete but also multifaceted cues. Yes, we can see the sun from far, far away. Can we see, unaided, that it is a glowing sphere, with an irregular and ever changing corona, with the occasional flare? How many times will this be important?
Depending on the situation though, perception can be critical, life or death stuff.
Range penalty has to deal with two major things, the first being acuity of vision. Small/distant things impinge on fewer receptors, so the eye receives less actual data. Range also increases the effects of individually less significant "concealment" effects. Regardless of acuity issues, the object gets obscured/lost in the surroundings. Especially important here is when, due to intervening objects, uneven terrain or even the curvature of the earth, the object is completely concealed. Concealment based range effects are the ones that can often be countered by observer altitude. Acuity based issues are dealt with using "optical" devices/abilities. Dealing with this is where doing it right is mostly too complex nd fiddly to be productive to our game set.
Problem is, at least as important is the interpretative aspect of perception. We fill in incomplete visuals with movement cues and, mostly, experience. This is where the randomness of the die roll finds it real justification, and it also justifies increasing skill ranks. Problem is, with this, knowing and familiarity with what you see can be huge, more important than acuity and concealment. You see something, but you really can't tell what it is that you are seeing. Your brain is going to want to "trick" you into believing you are seeing what you expect to see. On an average, this tendency is a survival advantage.
This is a cross-post but I think relevant:
The perception check gives you two pieces of information. (1) that a thing is there (if not already obvious), AND (2) precisely what 5 foot squares it occupies.
It specifically does NOT give you sight of an object. Ie, you can make a perception check against an invisible foe. If you succeed you are made aware of their presence and know exactly what space they occupy. But you don't get to see them. They still get a full cover bonus.
We can therefore infer that because the perception check doesn't grant sight, it doesn't govern sight.
So, failing a perception check for an object (like the sun) means you do not precisely know its location down the exact 5 foot cubes (in this case) that it occupies (that would be a huge and quite impossible check, like, with a -59 billion modifier for a creature on Earth as indicated by the OP). That, however, doesn't preclude you from seeing it since we have already inferred that sight isn't covered by perception anyway.
I think it's easy because it's been done already on this thread. Take a -2 penalty if the object is ten or more feet away, and an additional -2 for every successive doubling of the distance. If that's too much math for you, anything tens of feet away is a -5, anything hundreds of feet away is a -10, anything thousands of feet away (miles) is a -15, and so on.Yes, especially since the fix would be trivial.
Do you think a realistic (or at least more realistic) physical modeling of real world simulation would improve this or another RPG for you?Would it be trivial? I have a hard time imagining a rules system that would attempt to more accurately model the physical world in terms of light, distance, and perception (lower case) that wouldn't involve a lot of advanced math, either on the part of the player or the designer. Or do you think it could be done by just adjusting the numbers in Pathfinder's current system, for instance? I'm not disagreeing with you, for the record, I'm just interested in why you think it would be so easy, when that's the opposite of my gut reaction.
I'm trying to structure my own house rules, but I think -2 at 10 feet seems a little high. What if we start 10 feet at -1, before moving on to -2 at 20, -4 at 40, -6 at 80, etc?
ft : penalty
000:-0
010:-1
020:-2
040:-4
080:-6
160:-8
320:-10
640:-12
This is what I use:
40 feet -> +1 DC60 feet -> +2 DC
80 feet -> +3 DC
100 feet -> +4 DC
120 feet -> +5 DC
250 feet -> +10 DC
500 feet -> +15 DC
0.25 mile -> +20 DC
0.5 mile -> +25 DC
1 mile -> +30 DC
Then +10 DC for each power of 2. ie
2 mile -> +40 DC
4 mile -> +50 DC
8 mile -> +60 DC
etc.
This is of course limited to the current horizon.