(Original Source)

This came up briefly as I was discussing the Observation skill for my superhero, The Commander.

His Observation stacks up SEAL! and Ten-Hut!, and if he's using a firearm or looking at combat details, Shooter! as well. Because his Perception is 18, this means his overall Observation skill is 29.

Yow.

A skill like that, as much as his Stealth-27, defines who he is. He's just that good at spotting things.

+Christopher R. Rice were chatting about how to handle this. I casually threw out that we should just assume that I rolled a 14. Not a good roll. In fact, a fairly poor one. But the chance of rolling 14 or lower on 3d6 is 90%. So if I roll a 14, it means it covers 9 in 10 occurances where I pester the GM for details.

We decided it was a valid way of handling things. Assume a roll of 14, note the margin of success or failure, and then look at the result. For Joe Average with no training (Observation-5), it's failure by 9. For The Commander, it's success by 15.

Well, it means the untrained person will need to spend a very, very long time doing something, and still require things to be obvious enough to provide a +4 or +5 bonus for tactically significant, actionable detail to be relayed to the player as a simple part of the description. That doesn't mean that he can't take the time to look - in fact, it requires it. But when he walks into the bank, nothing strikes him as odd unless the bank robbers hiding in the crowd of people are being very obvious about it.

For the Commander? He can do a task that usually takes minutes instantly ('instantly' doing a long task is often benchmarked at -10) and still absorb -5 in penalties. He walks into that same bank, and the GM will tell him how many people are in it, that five of them are acting out of the ordinary 7 yards away (-3 penalty) and if they're carrying any weapons with a Holdout penalty of -2 or higher, will probably be able to tell they're armed. This will be relayed as part of the room description.

I like this, because it means that the GM and player both have a good idea of what's going on, and the “hey, I would have noticed that!” factor is much lessened. The extra detail is cool, but also the fact that if things really are that subtle, it will dawn on The Commander over the course of 30 seconds that something isn't right, and by the end of that time (when he's back up to no penalty), he'll have processed the entire tactical situation.

It's effectively 'no nuisance rolls,' but at no point cost, because instead of pestering the GM at every moment “I roll Observation, what do I see?” it's taken as read that Threat Analysis and OODA are constantly occurring. It's also a poor enough roll that it only comes into play when you do have a character-defining trait like that.

By setting the assumed roll not at the “average” of 11, but a lower-probability outcome of 14, it means that the GM isn't forced to reveal every single detail of a situation. The basic Perception (10) and Observation (5) by default is low enough that the assumed roll is a failure by 4 and 9, respectively. That's a lot of “stop, collaborate, and listen” that has to go on before details of tactical significance are provided. That's actually normal RPG behavior - you walk in the room, and the five guys with swords screaming 'deth to adventurs!' get that +10 bonus and draw immediate attention (but Observation-5 guy only barely notices), but the tripwire strung right in front of the door doesn't get seen without looking for it. Likewise with hidden doors and treasure.

I wonder what other skills this would work for?

You touch on the two extremes - the guys with 5-10, and the guy with 29, but what about the guy with 14-18? I don't think you mean that having a 14 in a skill means you get to be using this terribly often (not with those severe “-10 for instant” penalties) but does that mean it really only applies once skill reaches the 20's, and only then with some helpful modifiers?

This is really just guidance for what the GM would tell a given player nearly automatically as part of the “what do you see” description of the room.

So it means that someone with (say) Observation-14 would, on the average, be assumed to make the roll by 0. So anything that came across with basically no penalty - say, something that took 30s to see (+4) but was at a bit of a distance (-2) and concealed (-2) would simply be relayed. Across a crowded hall, he's going to have to mention it specifically.

Do you ever get to have to make Observation rolls? Or does this completely replace all rolls period? Frex, in some critical moment when you are falling out of an airplane in mid-grapple with an eight-armed chimpanzee and shooting targets on the ground and buckling your parachute harness on, all after being injected with the BBEG's mind-altering truth serum, did you happen to catch the airplane's FAA registry number stenciled just forward of the tail so you can trace who else is working with him?

You ALWAYS can request a roll! The point of this is to provide a general level of leeway and guidance to both the GM and player. By the player knowing that his “Roll of 14” margin is (say) usually 2, he knows that anything that is hidden from him by the GM is more concealed than a -2 penalty.

This is the background flow of sensory information that you get from “just being there.” A roll of 14 is a bad roll. So this is the stuff that's basically always available, 'cause it's just that obvious.

If you want to ask a particular question, or make an active search - yeah, you roll. This rule of thumb is specifically to avoid expectations mismatch between the player skill levels and GM-provided information flow.