Here's a crazy idea.. What if Perception was a base save alongside Fortitude, Reflex, and Will? In trying to expand their theoretical usage outside of just 'defense against spells', for my usage, Fort has encompassed stability and endurance (and is Str based), Will interacts with social and command effects (and is Cha based), and Reflex is being used as based avoidance and touch AC (still Dex based), which can be overly centric.
Splitting off Perception divides some of the emphasis off Reflex, which is active avoidance of mobile dangers you're already aware of, while Perception (with a Wis base) would be noticing dangers you weren't aware of before, or spotting the flaws in illusions. (it also means we're up to two mental saves and two physical saves, which I like for parallelism.)
Maybe Reflex should be renamed, though.. Suggestions?
In my Cityscape work, I had elevated Perception into its own stat (as a physical sensory stat, at that, counterbalanced by the 'Insight' stat for a mental sensory stat.) In this case, I can't bring myself to alter the core stats so much, but maybe this works a bit better.
