04-24-2017, 12:08 AM | #41 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
But there are different ways to get a good perception roll. You can have a sense with high bandwidth, like the human eye. You can also have a brain that's good at processing information and extracting meaning from sense data.
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
04-24-2017, 12:20 AM | #42 | ||
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
Quote:
Quote:
Not an argument, a statement of support for Discriminatory Smell being an advantage most humans do not have. |
||
04-24-2017, 01:34 AM | #43 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
While this is a realistic distinction to make (20:20 vision with Per 10 and 20:40 vision with Per 12 should be distinguishable), it's really not one GURPS normally chooses to make: either something is impossible, or it's got a difficulty modifier, and if it has a difficulty modifier, all you need is more plusses. Distinguishing people by scent is something humans can do, just extremely unreliably, so it's a difficulty modifier.
|
04-24-2017, 01:52 AM | #44 | ||
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
Quote:
Quote:
Here's a list of examples from another roleplaying games and novels:
|
||
04-24-2017, 02:37 AM | #45 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
The first three of those seem like extreme difficulty modifiers. The last doesn't seem like something discriminatory sense would let you do, it appears to be sense-based mind probe.
|
04-24-2017, 02:53 AM | #46 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
Quote:
If you subscribe to such a view, I may as well tailor the wording for such a view: "Discriminatory Sense only provide a +4 Acute Sense equivalent, but allows one to disregard many extreme negative TDMs". With the problem being that a list of examples would take up an official PDF of its own (which I'd buy had it existed!). Only as much as Diagnosis and Psychology are mind probe and Detect (Life, Analyzing), i.e. not really. What it does is allows you to use your Hearing to gather the necessary data for the analysis. |
|
04-24-2017, 09:02 AM | #47 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
Quote:
But let's try doing it the other way round. We do have Discriminatory Vision. What is it like to have mammal vision rather than primate vision? Primate vision involves having a high density of cells in the fovea; a cat or dog has much less, and has about 1/10 the angular resolution. This is about like 20/200 vision. There are actual people whose corrected vision is no better than 20/200. This has a common name in everyday language: legally blind—20/200 is the threshold of legal blindness. (And even there, they mostly have optical blurring rather than sparse innervation.) With that low resolution, to begin with, you can't see facial expressions, except for the rather gross ones that are symbolized by emoticons. Primate faces have a lot of small muscles that form small expressions, and that makes up a lot of our social signalling. An average mammal can't read those subtle facial signals. "The frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" don't register. And so dog and cat faces just don't have the fine motor control to make all those expressions, because there's no payoff. There's also the ability to read. All of our reading is done with the fovea; reading is scanning the fovea across a page. Mammal vision might let you resolve the gross shape of a single letter on a page, if it were in large print, but it wouldn't let you take in a whole word, or the subtle complexity of a kanji. You might at best be able to get up to Broken literacy with mammal vision. The Discriminatory senses let you recognize individuals. Mammal vision probably gives you a poor and unreliable recognition, if any. Your dog knows you by your scent, or the sound of your voice. (Conversely, your dog knows which other dog has urinated on a lamppost or rock, and how recently; you probably can't get beyond "this smells like pee!") My current cat is very visual, for a cat. He loves to look out the window, especially if there are birds outside; I've seen him play with a tablet screen tuned to a channel that display fish or mice; he's very good at catching or tracking a thrown toy. But sometimes he gets to the area I threw it to and has trouble finding it, because it's small and doesn't stand out if it's not moving. And he can't see my facial expressions. He has Acute Vision for a cat, but he doesn't have the equivalent of human eyesight and never will. Now turn that around, and apply it to a different sense. It's tricky to narrate "your character routinely perceives things that you and I can't notice," and the GURPS rules for Discriminatory senses are kind of handwavy. But that's what they're pointing at.
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
|
04-24-2017, 09:24 AM | #48 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
Quote:
GURPS is kind of ambiguous about this. Discriminatory senses give +4 to do something, which is a big modifier; it's the same as the "miraculous aid" modifier for Abilities Affecting Skills. But Analyzing on Detect just says that the basic roll to analyze automatically succeeds, and the really hard analysis is possible on a normal success. That might be a way to look at this.
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
|
04-24-2017, 06:40 PM | #49 | |
Untagged
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
Quote:
__________________
Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check. |
|
04-24-2017, 10:40 PM | #50 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch
Quote:
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.)
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
|
Tags |
advantage, advantage of the week, discriminatory senses, sensitive touch, week, [basic] |
|
|