Spot / Listen

[legionetrangere]

Howdy

A question: If I want to detect stealth characters - which skill should i take? Listen or spot? How do they work and which one should be given preference?

Thanks!

[The Rambling Midget]

Spot has better range and more utility, but Listen can be better in niche cases, because Move Silently generally doesn't go as high as Hide. If you can only pick one, and you can't afford Epic Skill Focus, Listen is more likely to give you a chance of detecting high level stealthers.

If you're going full blown max skill detector though, you want Spot.

[Techne]

Rambling Midget has a good idea of how spot/listen works, and I would take their advice over mine. However, I think I found something on another forum that makes decent sense to me, hopefully providing a more in-depth look of how the skills work (as it helps me to know how things work mechanically in the game).

The "Listen" skill allows you to "see" a character if you pass the resulting DC from whomever you are trying to detect. They appear translucent on the screen, and you will see their "ghost" moving about. However... they can still sneak/death attack you because you haven't spotted them.

The "Spot" skill requires line of sight to be effective. If someone is sneaking up behind you, and you have only put points into spot, you won't be able to see them at all. However, spotting a hidden character with spot negates any chances of them using sneak/death attacks on you.

Mechanically speaking, there are a bunch of DC bonuses and reductions based on what you are doing as a "spotter" and what the "hider" is doing. Standing still gives bonuses to both parties, but usually the bonuses work out in the "hider's" favor. Looking at the scenario on the forum page that I looked up this information, the math points to Spot coming out on top. As you can control a lot more of the DC values for Spot than you can for listen. (All of this was courtesy of "Gravemaskin" on Amia's forum)

In short, both are important to "properly" spot a creature. As with (magically) invisible creatures, you won't be able to spot them without listen. But if you have to go for one skill, spot seems to be the choice to go for. I can link the forum page where I found the information, if you so desire it.

TL;DR - Spot is better mechanically (from my perspective) but both are important.

[Jagel]

Listen is also easier to buff substantially for short periods as amplify nets you a + 20 to listen checks

[msterswrdsmn]

From personal experience, spot is easier to make use of, if you have to choose one of the two. Listen is pretty wierd when it comes to how/when it is effective, even if you can buff it to kingdom come with +30 spell bonuses. When you find things, they're still counted as concealed/hidden, meaning you can't directly target them with some attacks, and they get a 50% concealment bonuses until they drop out of stealth.

[TimeAdept]

As with (magically) invisible creatures, you won't be able to spot them without listen.

Listen doesn't let you detect invisible creatures.

[msterswrdsmn]

^ Confirmed. It will treat things you locate with listen -like- they were invisible (again, limited targeted+concealment) but it won't let you find things with the invisiblity effect. Its for this reason spot is typically better than listen when it comes to finding and engaging things