[Skill] Human Echolocation

[BraselC5048]

Originally Posted by ArchonShiva

Blind Fighting only requires you to make a roll to attack at full skill - this one caps your skill outright, so reaching Karate-20 will require Echolocation-20 as well, and heavy rain will drop your skill right back to 18. You might as well buy Trained by a Master by then.

Yes, it synergizes well with Mimicry and Ultrahearing, but without this I don't think there is a sound that Per-15 hears at no penalty that Per-12 won't hear at all. Using Mimicry to emit audible but unremarkable sounds is intended.

Note that clicking is for finding silent, inanimate objects. You wouldn't need it in combat.

Being unable to hear isn't at -7, it's at use some other skill.

Blind Fighting is a cinematic skill written to allow blind masters who fight better with a blindfold on. If you want that using hearing, maybe just write it on your sheet. But feel free to lift and reword mine to fine-tune the effect you want.

I was under the impression that you still needed clicking in combat, that's what makes it possible, and that the -7 for "being unable to hear at all" in Blind Fighting becomes for "not making any clicks at all." So roll at -7 if being completely silent, noise penalties only if clicking. If combat against objects that make noise (i.e. people) doesn't require clicking, than that's a big benefit. Assuming that you're using the Unusual Training perk, not Trained by a Master, of course, for the not needing clicking in combat.

[ArchonShiva]

Originally Posted by BraselC5048

I was under the impression that you still needed clicking in combat, that's what makes it possible, and that the -7 for "being unable to hear at all" in Blind Fighting becomes for "not making any clicks at all." So roll at -7 if being completely silent, noise penalties only if clicking. If combat against objects that make noise (i.e. people) doesn't require clicking, than that's a big benefit. Assuming that you're using the Unusual Training perk, not Trained by a Master, of course, for the not needing clicking in combat.

If your opponent is making normal combat noises, I have a very hard time imagining that clicking will provide any further useful information on a 1-second scale. Echolocation being a VH skill balances the -2 to hearing for the RAW roll, so it's really just trained use of that. You get hit locations because you hear them shifting their weight around and can guess how they're positioned.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ArchonShiva

If your opponent is making normal combat noises, I have a very hard time imagining that clicking will provide any further useful information on a 1-second scale. Echolocation being a VH skill balances the -2 to hearing for the RAW roll, so it's really just trained use of that. You get hit locations because you hear them shifting their weight around and can guess how they're positioned.

Balancing off the -2 hearing alone isn't all that big a deal: Acute Hearing and/or Observation can offset that -2 easily.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by ArchonShiva

If your opponent is making normal combat noises, I have a very hard time imagining that clicking will provide any further useful information on a 1-second scale. Echolocation being a VH skill balances the -2 to hearing for the RAW roll, so it's really just trained use of that. You get hit locations because you hear them shifting their weight around and can guess how they're positioned.

Realistically, you would need a carefully modulated sound produced from a precisely known location to best echolocate.
It isn't just good hearing.
My talking only tells you where my mouth is, not my body shape. For that you need sound coming from a well known location and echoing off me to your ears.

[ArchonShiva]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Balancing off the -2 hearing alone isn't all that big a deal: Acute Hearing and/or Observation can offset that -2 easily.

One of us* isn't making sense. Someone without any skill can roll Hearing-2 to locate an opponent. I let a VH skill do this at +0, because you had to buy it up to Per anyway. Acute Hearing will raise the Hearing roll at the same time it raises the Echolocation roll, so it's always Hearing -2 - you can't "offset" it except by raising the skill.

Flyndaran: The hearing your enemies bit isn't actually echolocation, but Acoustic Navigation sounds too technical for my taste. Hearing you enemy talking will tell you his mouth's position, and hearing him step will tell you about his feet - if you understand his physiology well enough, you can deduce the approximate position of his torso so you can stab at it. This isn't meant to be sonar imaging, it's meant to be practiced blind person.

*It's entirely possible that I'm the one explaining badly, and therefore not making sense to you.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ArchonShiva

One of us* isn't making sense. Someone without any skill can roll Hearing-2 to locate an opponent. I let a VH skill do this at +0, because you had to buy it up to Per anyway. Acute Hearing will raise the Hearing roll at the same time it raises the Echolocation roll, so it's always Hearing -2 - you can't "offset" it except by raising the skill.

Flyndaran: The hearing your enemies bit isn't actually echolocation, but Acoustic Navigation sounds too technical for my taste. Hearing you enemy talking will tell you his mouth's position, and hearing him step will tell you about his feet - if you understand his physiology well enough, you can deduce the approximate position of his torso so you can stab at it. This isn't meant to be sonar imaging, it's meant to be practiced blind person.

*It's entirely possible that I'm the one explaining badly, and therefore not making sense to you.

I'll try to expand:
The fact that Echolocation can replace the Hearing-2 roll to locate a foe in combat is largely irrelevant to its usefulness as a skill, since once you have one point in it, you're better off buying levels of Acute Hearing as much as you can. So e.g. you get it at Per-3 for [1], then get 3 levels of Acute Hearing, and now you have a modified skill roll at Per+0, or you can roll your Hearing-2 for your detection, which is still Per+1. And if you need to throw more than [9] on the skill+hearing combo, one starts really doubting whether it was smart to take Blindness at all.
IOW, the skill structure is such that a reasonably-playable build range tends to be very narrow, and discourages skill-point-spending past [1].
And the ability to replace Hearing-2 isn't all that useful.

[ArchonShiva]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I'll try to expand:

If you intend to make a Blind character into a playable fighter, go with Blind Fighting: This is primarily a navigational skill anyway. But if a character does raise it (because, say, they want to walk around and not run into telephone poles), it's pretty neat that it would help you in combat. I'm sure most blind people would love a simple skill that would make them just as efficient as sighted people in a cost-effective way, but they're, you know, blind.

The PC use of this skill in my campaign is for a sighted street urchin (future DF Thief) who picked it up from a blind kid - it's a poor substitue for Dark Vision, but a completely mundane one. It also seems like something I'd want access to if my character lost sight during the course of a campaign and there was no handy Master to Train me. It is not meant as an incentive to make blind characters.

Aa an aside, the second point into the skill is also cheaper than Acute Hearing. After that, Acute Hearing is strictly* better, but that also applies to Lip Reading, Body Language, Tracking and a few others. Also, campaign rules for raising skills are often far more permissive than those for raising advantages. GURPS isn't in the business of making sure all ways to reach the same result have the same cost, especially when attempting to use training to match something else's natural aptitude.

*Not exactly strictly better, as all of these skills could have IQ-based rolls for theoretical questions, but this also applies to the other examples I give anyway.

[BraselC5048]

So than I can just go ahead, buy the unusual training perk and use straight-up Blind Fighting? Shouldn't there be some sort of penalty attached to it? I think I went through two threads on this already.

I think by accident I came up with the whole "use the skill from this thread, assumes you're making clicks, apply the noise penalties from Blind Fighting, and if you're being completely silent, use the -7 for "being unable to hear at all" for not clicking at all. I'd also allow you to take any penalty you want to the skill and apply an equal penalty to anybody trying to hear your (being quieter). Background noise works both ways too.

But if I can just buy the Unusual Training perk and use full Blind Fighting, then there's some pretty big benefits to be had from that, namely stealth that doesn't rely on having a higher upper hearing range while fighting, so they can't use it to try to find you, or trying to sneak past a dog.

Than again, you can still see if it's darkness penalty -9, especially if you have Night Vision 2, certainly enough to function if you're used to it. For that matter, just how dark does it have to be for darkness -10, anyway?

[Flyndaran]

Unusual training perk allows use of cinematic skill under only very specific and almost always combat useless conditions.
Breaking Blow only against well braced objects out of combat, for example.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Unusual training perk allows use of cinematic skill under only very specific and almost always combat useless conditions.
Breaking Blow only against well braced objects out of combat, for example.

Not almost always. Unusual Training (Pressure Points) has no restrictions at all. UT (DWA) forces you to either learn it for two split foes, or for a single foes, but not both. 'Requires using clicks (not footsteps or other noise) for detecting objects that do not emit a sound, and has a -5 to the roll to detect noiseless objects (adjusted for SM)' seems pretty restrictive, actually.