Skills And Perception

The Change

Initiative

anything in the base game that refers to Perception and it's proficiency, other than Skill Feats, is now renamed to Initiative.

New Skills and Skill Trainings

To accommodate Perception no longer working as RAW, here are the following changes:

New Skills

PerceptionNotice (Wis)

PerceptionNotice is your ability to precive things around you, It's your general awareness of your surroundings.

Insight (Wis)

Insight is your ability to intuit intentions from small clues in creatures body language or speech.

Investigate (Int)

Investigation is your ability to find clues and make deductions from them.

1st Level Characters

All first level characters gain one additional skill training than base.

Intelligence and Skills

Extra Proficiencies

As is normal, for every point in Intelligence above 0, you gain an extra skill training at first level.

Bonus Lores

for each point in intelligence a character has during character creation, they gain one additional Lore skill training, that is always kept at the highest proficiency possible for their level (Trained at 1st, Expert at 3rd, Master at 7th, and Legendary at 15th)

These bonus Lores do not get added retroactively should you later increase your intelligence score.

Skill Feats

The skill feat "Skill Traning" when taken, now allows you to increase your proficiency in a skill by one step, up to Trained if below 2nd level, Expert if below 7th level, Master if below 15th level.

The Reason

I think the conglomeration of a ton of skills into perception, and then to make it worse, perception is now a skill defined ONLY by your class, everything is proficient in it, AND it's also your initiative score.

this generally makes the concept of a unperceptive monster, by raw, impossible, there isn't any RAW way for a low level character to sneak past a dim witted hill giant, etc.

the logic here is likely just that lower level characters should not be interacting with over leveled monsters at all.

it also means that the entire party and their foes, by default, are expert investigative trap finding lie detectors, and losing that variance/distinction just bugs me more than losing the difference between disarming traps and pickpocketing, for example.