In real life I’ve spent considerable amount of time in professions that highlighted use of perception; in the military, as a private investigator, and then as a casino surveillance agent/instruction I was familiar with the breakdown of both trained and untrained perceptual ability to the point of intimacy.
It seemed to me penalizing characters who had not acquired a skill such as investigate or recon just didn’t make sense; I’ve known plenty of people who were untrained but highly perceptive, and basing such a thing off Intelligence characteristic in my game doesn’t make sense to me.
Accordingly, my players have a fourth mental characteristic: Perception. It is active in that it can be rolled against to determine the success of a task based in their instinctive, learned, racial, and inherent perceptual abilities. It can also be passive and rolled against in a situation where “Did you hear that?” or similar would be appropriate.
The Perception characteristic can be increased in certain careers – usually I offer to swap it out anytime Intelligence is listed in the tables – and is subject to degradation with aging. It severs as the most-often used base for the Recon and Investigate skills, but rarely if ever with skills such as Sensor or Remote Operations, which in my opinion don’t depend upon your perception so much as your interpretation of what’s presented in a display. I think Edu or Int are better base characteristics for these instances, and use Per mostly when a character’s perceptiveness is the defining trait.
