Perception practice and challenges

[ThresherAle]

If we see the other auto skills go the way of climb, figured we should give some ideas. Here are some ideas for Perception challenges and practice:

- Spotting hostile stealth mobs. Add more of them. There are infested squirrels in an area now that sneak around, more like that. Easy solution, but not the best for non combat characters unless there are increasingly stealthy but not increasingly dangerous mobs added.
- Perception practice while tracking prey for hunting. Easy solution for trackers.
- Treasure scavenging. This doesn't help everyone, but the classes that do get it should be able to use it for practice, they have high perception caps. Make scavenging harder in some areas than others to give them a challenge which can be used for practice at higher skill.
- Hide & Seek. Frame it as stealth agent combat training if that makes you feel less embarrassed about playing it. Go to an area with a bunch of stealth NPCs moving around and try to spot them, getting practice each time you do. If you don't spot one, they ambush you with a practice weapon and you take a little damage. No armor allowed. Paid entry. The dangerous version could be higher skill levels and for the lower skill levels you're playing normal hide & seek with street urchins or something. And the urchins try to pick your pocket, meaning extra perception practice when you spot them doing that.
- Blindfolded dodging. You want to practice your non sight perceptive senses. Put on a blindfold and engage in combat with a bunch of negative defense rerolls. You're going to get hit a lot but it's a way to practice that perception. For a less dangerous situation and non combat characters, play a version with an NPC and DODGE LEFT, DODGE RIGHT, DUCK, or JUMP. Each successful dodge gives you some practice, each failure you take small damage from a padded practice weapon.
- Slap Hands. That game where you stare at each other and try to either slap the other's hand or dodge their incoming slap at your own without being faked out. If you're a GS rogue, you know it, you hate it, it's a classic. Different towns and outposts have different NPCs willing to play it, so you have to move around to different places as your skill level changes. Minor hand damage, no armor allowed. Morale penalty if you lose real bad? Trying to think of downsides so it's not too easy a solution.
- Kick the Can. Go to a dark area and set a can on the ground. Guard the can and try to spot NPCs as they approach and shout their name before they kick the can. Each NPC that kicks the can while you're on watch, you have to pay riln to.
- Detective work tasks. Requires a certain amount of skill so you're trusted to be paid and actually get the job done. Search around a bunch of rooms until you find the lost item, then bring it back for a burst of perception practice gain when the task is completed.
- Shell game. Add some NPCs in the shadier areas of town that offer to let you play a shell game for a small fee with a chance to win back more. Perception skill helps you keep track of which shell the ball is under, or if the dirty little scammer palmed the ball and didn't place it in any of the shells at all in which case you call them out. Could also be applied to other sleight of hand tricks like card tricks. You risk losing your money, but it can be a Perception practice opportunity. It's a roundabout way of paying for practice. Have some trickier games in different locations so when you get better you have to leave your home town and go out to other areas to practice.

[Lexx416]

I like these, and I think for most of these, they could probably be just different tasks on varying cooldown timers, not unlike the Copy Documents task that Scholars get. Reward a little bit of perception gain for the actual skillchecks involved in the task, and then if you succeed/win whatever the competition is (for the competitive challenges), you get a lil extra bump of exp and training.

[Navi]

Just as a heads up, currently stealth can be trained up just by running around town while hidden. I know there are players who have only ever trained it up by hunting animals or hostile NPCs, but yeah, I'm not a fan of making one skill more difficult to train up than the other. This could probably be just a knee jerk reaction because of experiences on CLOK though. I just wanted to drop it here for consideration

[Lexx416]

Just as a heads up, currently stealth can be trained up just by running around town while hidden. I know there are players who have only ever trained it up by hunting animals or hostile NPCs, but yeah, I'm not a fan of making one skill more difficult to train up than the other. This could probably be just a knee jerk reaction because of experiences on CLOK though. I just wanted to drop it here for consideration

Stealth gains probably just needs to be tweaked. I've mentioned it to Rias in the past, because it's kind of ludicrously easy to train up stealth at the moment (it doesn't suffer from diminishing returns either).

[Navi]

It would be neat to add in a number of different tasks for these skills in particular to give them some actual benefits as far as generating experience and riln goes. Right now, stealth doesn't generate riln or experience unless applied to other activities like combat or theft, and perception doesn't do anything except provide a defense against such things. Players are basically forced to invest in it if they want even a sliver of a chance to detect such things without getting any way to use it to their active benefit. It doesn't generate riln, and it doesn't generate experience. I'm all for minigames that need to be passed to advance these skills though, so long as it's not mindlessly attacking things from stealth or letting them attack you. LOL
To add to the list of activities in the suggestions from Thresherale,
A hidden guard task where you post up near a vender's stall in the market and watch for thieves. When completed successfully, or in a passable manner, you gain practice in both perception and stealth, along with a little riln based on the difficulty of the task. The task would scale in difficulty based on your skill level.

[nobody]

- Shell game. Add some NPCs in the shadier areas of town that offer to let you play a shell game for a small fee with a chance to win back more. Perception skill helps you keep track of which shell the ball is under, or if the dirty little scammer palmed the ball and didn't place it in any of the shells at all in which case you call them out. Could also be applied to other sleight of hand tricks like card tricks. You risk losing your money, but it can be a Perception practice opportunity. It's a roundabout way of paying for practice. Have some trickier games in different locations so when you get better you have to leave your home town and go out to other areas to practice.

I really like the shell game suggestion, but it'll need to be very well balanced or have a cool down, or else it will be a round-about way to get paid to practice.

[Lexx416]

- Shell game. Add some NPCs in the shadier areas of town that offer to let you play a shell game for a small fee with a chance to win back more. Perception skill helps you keep track of which shell the ball is under, or if the dirty little scammer palmed the ball and didn't place it in any of the shells at all in which case you call them out. Could also be applied to other sleight of hand tricks like card tricks. You risk losing your money, but it can be a Perception practice opportunity. It's a roundabout way of paying for practice. Have some trickier games in different locations so when you get better you have to leave your home town and go out to other areas to practice.

I really like the shell game suggestion, but it'll need to be very well balanced or have a cool down, or else it will be a round-about way to get paid to practice.

Any time you win, you should be barred from playing for several bells - more or less how those kinds of grifts work anyways!

[nobody]

Current auto-train skills are:
swimming
perception
meditation

I think swimming could probably be implemented more like climbing is now and then places don't need a *lot* of deep water swim rooms connected because it abstracts that very well.

I have no additional ideas for perception, those suggested are many and delightful.

For meditation it would be nice to have a diminishing returns sit-and-meditate option akin to the diminishing returns options for acrobatics and/or artifice. Aside from that I don't know how to practice that aside from going out go play with mind-assaulting critters.