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Old 04-23-2017, 05:59 PM   #31
Anthony
 
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
So your ability would allow me to smell colors, hear faces, or see odors?
If you wanted to buy that and the GM said OK, sure, though the first two aren't very likely (spectral analysis does allow reasonable guesses about the smell of something based on vision).
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Old 04-23-2017, 06:02 PM   #32
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
I thought Discriminatory senses are mostly the opposite: detecting things that no (sensible?) amount of Acute Sense will help detect. E.g. licking a fence blindfolded and realizing that it's painted in two different paints (and later figuring that this is Paint A and that is Paint B).
If the paints are different types (say, lead-based vs latex) an educated human palate could probably tell. If not, animals generally aren't going to be able to tell the difference either, though animals noted for their sense of smell are likely to be somewhere around +10 relative to humans.
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Old 04-23-2017, 08:44 PM   #33
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

Looking at Enhanced Senses, here is what I'm finding.

First, there is the question of what kind of thing a sense responds to. There's a broad answer to this: electromagnetic radiation, electric potential, magnetic potential, pressure and vibration, heat, chemical substances, and so on. Then there are narrower answers: EM radiation divides into radio, thermal IR, light, ionizing radiation, and with light into near IR, visible, and UV. Hyperspectral vision, for example, covers near IR, visible, and UV, that is, "light," and perhaps extends into thermal IR; that's an extension of kind. It's not immediately obvious how this would work with stimuli that don't have wavelengths, but I suppose we could imagine a chemosensor that was specifically attuned to substances in nonpolar solvents, or one that signalled the presence of alcohols, or of soapy molecules, rather than our recognizing these things from a combination of other tastes, smell, and texture. (Alcohols do have a smell, so they could have a taste.)

Second, there's the spatial aspect. We have here/not here; we have "thataway"; we have near/far (usually needing two spatially separated sensors); we have high-precision targeting, which is sort of what bat sonar provides ("That's a bug there!"). So far you're just locating an object in space, or a few objects. But then there are senses that define a spatial grid and map objects onto it in finer detail, creating an image. With human beings that happens with vision and touch.

As GURPS uses it, "discriminatory" is orthogonal to both these dimensions. What it means for hearing is that you have a very high capacity to tell different sounds apart—for example, to recognize people by voice. For smell it lets you recognize people and places by scent, and to follow people around by smell trails. For taste it means that you can analyze the detailed composition of a sample. Sensitive Touch says you can tell pieces of fabric apart by feel, which seems comparable. But human vision naturally lets us do this: we can read letters and perhaps judge what font they're in, we can recognize faces and read expressions, we can tell one tartan from another, and so on. This is working with a spatial array of data, which isn't really the case for the nose or, very much, for the ear; but the key difference seems to be that you have a lot of nerve endings that respond to different things, and by implication that the specific sense has a high bandwidth. That's why you have the big +4 bonuses, and it's why I gave average mammals like cats a form of Bad Sight with around a -6 penalty, because their retinal grids just aren't as fine. (For spatial things, like vision or touch or high-resolution sonar, I take "discriminatory" to mean "submillimeter resolution.") It's a question of how much detail the sense is capable of.

So how is this different from Acute Sense? My take is that Acute (Sense) is Perception (One sense, -60%). And Perception, in humans, is driven off of IQ. That is, it's a matter of how the central office processes the reports coming in from the sense receptors. Those two collapse onto pluses to Sense rolls, because in the last analysis GURPS cares about "did you notice it or not?" But one is pluses because the sense organ is good, and the other is pluses because the brain is efficient. And that's also why you have sharp high-res/low-res senses in one case, and continuous variation in the other case, I think.
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Old 04-23-2017, 09:32 PM   #34
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
As GURPS uses it, "discriminatory" is orthogonal to both these dimensions.
The problem is that actual examples correspond to your first definition. The big difference between human and canine smell (which is pretty much the template for discriminatory smell) is that dogs have about fifty times as many olfactory receptors as humans, and corresponding greater development of the olfactory nerve and cortex. They also practice the skill of 'recognize things by smell' a lot more than humans do, but we normally think of enhanced senses as real physical differences, not just differences in training.
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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
So how is this different from Acute Sense? My take is that Acute (Sense) is Perception (One sense, -60%). And Perception, in humans, is driven off of IQ. That is, it's a matter of how the central office processes the reports coming in from the sense receptors. Those two collapse onto pluses to Sense rolls, because in the last analysis GURPS cares about "did you notice it or not?" But one is pluses because the sense organ is good, and the other is pluses because the brain is efficient. And that's also why you have sharp high-res/low-res senses in one case, and continuous variation in the other case, I think.
The problem is that discriminatory is vastly overpriced for a mere +4 bonus. What do the other 7 points account for?
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Old 04-23-2017, 09:55 PM   #35
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
The problem is that actual examples correspond to your first definition. The big difference between human and canine smell (which is pretty much the template for discriminatory smell) is that dogs have about fifty times as many olfactory receptors as humans, and corresponding greater development of the olfactory nerve and cortex. They also practice the skill of 'recognize things by smell' a lot more than humans do, but we normally think of enhanced senses as real physical differences, not just differences in training.
I don't understand what you mean by this; the intended referent of "your first definition" is not clear to me.

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The problem is that discriminatory is vastly overpriced for a mere +4 bonus. What do the other 7 points account for?
Ability to memorize, which is kind of like aspected Eidetic Memory. And GURPS Powers specifies ability to distinguish things nonvisually; that is, where your friends might know that a particular shirt was yours because they've seen you wear it, your dog wouldn't have a clue about that, but would know it was yours because it smells like you.

If you just have Acute Hearing, I would let you hear things that are hard for most human beings to hear: faint sounds, a particular clarinet that's marginally flat in the third row of the band, that sort of thing. For Discriminatory Hearing, if you wanted to make up exotic sound-based stunts, especially if you could point to accounts of an animal doing such things, I'd ask you to roll and let you have it. I don't have specific examples to offer because I haven't researched this, but there is such research.

For example, and to get back to vision, a mantis shrimp seems to have Discriminatory Color Vision, with 12 different visual pigments. So I would let it spot points of color with a precision no human can match, and see right through camouflage. I'm not sure what the point value would be, but one could probably be figured out.
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Old 04-23-2017, 10:35 PM   #36
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

The mantis shrimp has failed to exhibit that level of color discrimination as far as I read. It's more of it needing that many channels to compensate for lack of visual "intelligence".

But does your (Anthony's) definition mean that no one can memorize what bread smells like because people don't have Discriminatory Smell?
I never understood that "extra" ability in the write ups.
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Old 04-23-2017, 11:25 PM   #37
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
But does your definition mean that no one can memorize what bread smells like because people don't have Discriminatory Smell?
I never understood that "extra" ability in the write ups.
"Recognize" is an ambiguous term. On one hand, I may recognize that a certain bird on my fence is a crow, or a California jay. On the other hand, I may recognize it as one specific crow or California jay, the way I recognize many people I know as individuals.

When p. B49 says "recognize people, place, and things by scent," it clearly isn't talking about identifying kinds. We don't refer to "recognizing" someone when all we can say is, "they're human," even though that IS recognizing what species they are; we don't even talk about it when we can identify their sex, age, and race—"one X looks like another to me" is a classic expression of bigotry. So what is being talked about seems to be recognizing a specific person by their smell, and therefore being able to say "I'm in the men's room at my workplace" or "this is the loaf of bread you baked yesterday" by smelling them. And memorizing would be memorizing exactly what a particular loaf of bread smells like, rather than just "Yeah, it smells like bread."
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Old 04-23-2017, 11:52 PM   #38
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
So what is being talked about seems to be recognizing a specific person by their smell, and therefore being able to say "I'm in the men's room at my workplace" or "this is the loaf of bread you baked yesterday" by smelling them. And memorizing would be memorizing exactly what a particular loaf of bread smells like, rather than just "Yeah, it smells like bread."
If it was about memory tricks, then we would be able to distinguish people by scent when they are present, but unable to remember what was distinctive. That kind of thing can happen, but for the most part if we can distinguish things by scent at all, we can remember that distinction.

Something like a portable genetic assayer would be legitimately something different in kind, rather than just a high perception roll, but there's nothing about animal scent that can't be reasonably represented as a high perception roll.
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Last edited by Anthony; 04-23-2017 at 11:58 PM.
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Old 04-23-2017, 11:58 PM   #39
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

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If it was about memory tricks, then we would be able to distinguish people by scent when they are present, but unable to remember what was distinctive. That kind of thing can happen, but for the most part if we can distinguish things by scent at all, we can remember that distinction.
It is not just about memorization tricks though.
Profiling is pretty much Memorizing but Discriminatory seems more about sensing enough detail to see and recognize individual differences. That helps you remember but is really about the level of detail.
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Old 04-23-2017, 11:59 PM   #40
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#40): Discriminatory Senses, Sensitive Touch

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It is not just about memorization tricks though.
Profiling is pretty much Memorizing but Discriminatory seems more about sensing enough detail to see and recognize individual differences. That helps you remember but is really about the level of detail.
That's just a good perception roll.
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