Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran
Most people are unreliable identifying others by scent alone. But some find it as easy as identifying people by voice alone. What kind of penalty would that involve such that those like my family could just do it on normal rolls?
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This is the first I recall hearing of your family having this ability. But from all your past mentions of it, I must say that I don't really feel sure exactly what it is you can do. And I'm not entirely sure that you know, either. You haven't undergone double blind testing, right? At best what you're saying is anecdotal. I did some looking for studies of animal and human chemical senses, and I really couldn't find anything detailed, so I don't think what you have to say is greatly worse than what GURPS is based on, but I'm not entirely sure how to deal with it.
However, I think there are several ways to deal with this, based on wanting to create a GURPS character who can do what you suppose you can do:
* We give most people a penalty, and give you a lot of Acute Smell or a high Perception
* We give most people a penalty, and let you take Discriminatory Smell, perhaps with Special Exercises or even Unusual Background to explain it, or perhaps not
* We say that most people can't even attempt the roll, but that you can, and that this is because you have Discriminatory Smell
(Incidentally, it occurs to me that a big question is how often you can actually do this stuff. You know when you register an odor and you may be able to find out if the odor is actually there. But if you fail to register an odor, is there a process you go through to find out if it's there and passed you by? If not, you don't know your success percentage, so you don't know if you're rolling vs. a 6 or a 16.)