[Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

How do you pick pockets or locks, massage people or carve scrimshaw without a sense of touch?

If Telekinesis can perform all the same tasks as a pair of hands, it needs some equivalent sense to the sense of touch to do it.

Well, I have to grant that that argument carries a good bit of weight, at least for what TK is stated to be capable of in the Basic Set. Let's look at the details, though.

* There are forms of TK where this may well not apply. Attraction/Repulsion, for example, is effectively the tractor/pressor beams of space opera. Magnetism may also not register as "tactile"; there are Detect Magnetism and Detect Magnetic Materials, after all.

* Not all aspects of "touch" are included in TK, I think. Can you tell, using your telekinetic hands, whether something you're picking up with them is hot or cold? Can you hold them up to a fire and feel the warmth? Can they be injured and cause you to feel pain? If you telekinetically grab someone, and they have an attack with Contact Agent and Aura, does it apply to you, or to your invisible "hands"?

* Even restricting to the purely sensory and mechanical dimensions of "touch," TK might not need all of them. You have to be able to tell when your "hands" have encountered a surface, rather than have them sink into it; so they have to be able to tell that a solid (or liquid) surface is there. You probably have to be able to tell how much resistance is being given to the force you're applying. But you may not need to be able to judge textures by sliding your "fingertip" along a surface, or read Braille telekinetically (though now I think of it, that's kind of a neat image). Imagine a robot with "fingers" whose interiors contain very sensitive strain gauges, so it can apply very precisely measured force—pick up an egg without breaking it, for example—but it has no cutaneous receptors that can feel the smoothness of eggshell.

* Can you reach inside a solid object and manipulate its interior? The idea that TK miraculously aids lockpicking seems to suggest this. If you just had four hands instead of two, it wouldn't be such a big deal.

* What about this? TK does give you tactile feedback. But normal use of it is visually guided, just as normal use of hands is visually guided. To use it nonvisually, you need to buy "Work by Touch" as a technique, and it's a different technique for TK than for your hands.