Opposite of Acute Senses - Dull Senses?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I expect better from you, Bruno.
If you can't find what you want, don't make it. Just take either quirks or massive disads regardless of what you want.

I'm pointing out that there are already tools that may be doing exactly what the OP wants. People overlook things.

But, I'm not saying "since there isn't something between the quirks and disadvantages, you can't make one. Go away you silly little man", I'm saying "I think it's an awkward space that if you're not careful can lead to giving too many points really quickly." Particularly if you just do -2 points per -1 penalty without looking at things.

Penalizing taste/smell for instance - minus infinity is -5 points. There's just not a lot of space to work with there. Hard of Hearing is -10 for -4 to Hearing, while it's -1 for -1 to Hearing. You can do -2 and -3 in there, splitting the difference.

All three versions of bad vision come with stuff other than sense penalties, on account of humans being so vision oriented. Dissecting them can be difficult - if you give a point value to a flat -6 penalty, for instance, you're defacto stating what the rest of the Bad Vision (Nearsighted) or (Farsighted) disadvantage point cost is.

It's a bigger can of worms than it might appear on the surface.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm actually kind of neutral about it. It's not obvious to me that there's any more reason to disallow negative Acute Vision than to disallow negative Perception modifiers.

I do see a meaningful distinction here: Acute Vision seems to involve having more cognitive processing power devoted to seeing, whereas Telescopic Vision and Microscopic Vision and the like involve changes in the physical structure of the eye. The same seems to go with the negative versions.

Neutral is still much better than the posts I vaguely remember from previous threads.
But after eating, I realize that I was a bit muddled in thinking missing the possible pitfalls to dull senses. Not to mention my writing was probably a hair more standoffish than usual.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Since Perception can be bought up and down, it makes sense to say that Acute Hearing is Perception (Hearing only, -60%); and then Less Acute Hearing would be figured the same way.

From the thread "Opposite of Acute Senses"

Originally Posted by Kromm

GURPS doesn't do two things:

1. Flip signs to turn advantages into disadvantages. Something costing N points for +1 doesn't always imply that -1 is worth -N points as a disad. If that something is of near-global importance, like DX, it works that way. However, if it's a rather narrower consideration that you could build your entire character never to need, the disad is diluted or even forbidden. The reason for this decision was mainly to make life hard for "degenerate" characters, like some cold killer who gets oodles of points for gross social incompetence and not getting along with animals, which he then plows into combat skills that the player fully intends to use to kill people and animals rather than interact with them peacefully. In other words, we acknowledge that players tend to stack the deck to get lots out of their PCs' positive traits while doing their worst to avoid ever actually suffering from their negative ones.

2. Say that +1 or -1 to N things is worth N times more than +1 or -1 to just one of those N things. Look at DX vs. all DX-based skills, or just at how Detect casts its net wider and wider. There are no "package discounts" for templates, but many advantages and disadvantages can't be decomposed into parts whose values add up to the master trait's overall value; Detect (one of Ghosts, Liches, Vampires, Zombies, etc.) is 5 points, while Detect (Undead) is 10 points, not 20+ points. The reason for this decision was to group like with like at a decent price so that sharply defined characters were easier to create than generalists with a gift for "all the cool stuff I want, minus the stuff I think is lame and don't want, even though that would logically come along for the ride."

Both are, in essence, design-level attempts to thwart dodgy character design.

Fromm a different thread

Originally Posted by Kromm

Someone with low Per isn't identical to someone whose Sense rolls are equally low due to specific sensory disadvantages. All people who lack Blindness, Bad Sight, or Acute Vision see equally well in GURPS, regardless of Per. All people without Deafness, Hard of Hearing, or Acute Hearing hear equally well in GURPS, regardless of Per. And so on. Per isn't a bulk-rate way to buy these specialized traits. There's a quantitative similarity in the area of Sense rolls, but not everything hinges on a Sense roll. There's a massive and very important qualitative difference; for instance, Bad Sight gives direct combat penalties while low Per does not.

What Per does is determine how likely your innate curiosity and pattern-recognition abilities are to cue on something of importance. It's a specialized mental capacity, which is why it's derived from IQ. Low Per doesn't prevent you from seeing or hearing combat threats that are right in your face. A guy with Per 6 has better active defense rolls against such dangers than one with Per 16 and Bad Sight. Where a threat is immediate and a split-second reaction is required, the signal bypasses this processing step (i.e., the Per roll) and reflexes kick in. All that matters is whether the signal went out, and that's limited purely by your eyesight, hearing, etc., as implemented through the special penalties for disadvantages like Bad Sight.

Where low Per does matter is when the reaction isn't split-second but considered. You want to look carefully at the enemy's sword to see poison? That's Per at work. You want to notice some sneaky guy circling the fight? That's his Stealth vs. Per at work. Your Bad Sight or Acute Vision will play a role here, too, of course.

But the real limit of low Per is all of the out-of-combat rolls it hurts. Just about all adventures involve espionage, investigation, loot-finding, scouting, survival, and the like. With low Per, many important skills needed for that – Detect Lies, Lip Reading, Observation, Scrounging, Search, Survival, Tracking, etc. – are crippled. The Per-based use of vital threat-finding skills like Explosives, Poisons, and Traps is also affected. For all intents and purposes, a low-Per character won't be finding camouflaged traps, concealed snipers, hidden loot, secret doors, etc. He'll be stepping on land mines and eating poisonous berries all the time. And he'll be worthless for standing a watch, taking point, or guarding the rear.

Remember that combat always occurs in a context. It isn't just "all these threats appear at arm's reach and you start fighting." Every enemy who beats your Per with Camouflage or Stealth gets at least one free shot at you from a doorway or up a tree. If the fight is on prepared ground, you'll end up stepping on a lot of punji stakes . . . indeed, you might trip mines in some settings, which won't help your friends any. And it can be important to spot the concealed pistol before you decide to punch some guy – or to notice who has the poisoned knife once the violence starts.

[khorboth]

So, returning to the original, non-meta topic...

I would use these with no problem, and even allow characters to purchase them. But be sure to cap them at the number of points for the total lack of the sense. For instance Dull Taste/Smell -10 [20] would be right out. Even if someone has bought up their PER to 17, you can't get more points for a negative than for something which prevents you from making the roll.

[Bruno]

For taste and smell, I wouldn't give more than -1 per -2 to rolls - that way -5 is equal to -10 and becomes No Taste And Smell.

For sight, you either hand out diluted versions of the combat penalties along with the vision penalty, or you have to decide how much of Bad Sight is the combat penalty.

For hearing, I'd say that the penalty to understand other people speaking seems very fair to hand out with a diluted version of the disadvantage. Although I can't think of any animals with actual bad hearing. I know there's deaf animals (they usually have some kind of Vibration Sense instead), and animals with more or less ability to tell which direction a sound came from, but not any known for particularly bad hearing, per ce.

[Humabout]

Personally, I'd divide out the cost of Blindness, Deafness, Numb, and No Sense of Smell/Taste by 10 and call that your -1/level cost. There are some issues with doing that, but it's a good starting point.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Bruno

For hearing, I'd say that the penalty to understand other people speaking seems very fair to hand out with a diluted version of the disadvantage. Although I can't think of any animals with actual bad hearing. I know there's deaf animals (they usually have some kind of Vibration Sense instead), and animals with more or less ability to tell which direction a sound came from, but not any known for particularly bad hearing, per ce.

Actually, humans are fairly typical animals with bad hearing. We don't go up into ultrasonic frequencies like dogs, let alone bats or dolphins, and we can't locate a mouse crawling under snow like owls. We live in a world of visible objects, not a world of noises like cats. Since GURPS is humanocentric (it says that humans have normal vision, not half a dozen levels of Acute Vision), that affect how things are rated.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Actually, humans are fairly typical animals with bad hearing. We don't go up into ultrasonic frequencies like dogs, let alone bats or dolphins, and we can't locate a mouse crawling under snow like owls. We live in a world of visible objects, not a world of noises like cats. Since GURPS is humanocentric (it says that humans have normal vision, not half a dozen levels of Acute Vision), that affect how things are rated.

There's hearing range (ultrasonic/infrasonic), and then there's hearing acuity ("what was that?") We're talking generic penalties here, not "is it in your audible range?"; we're talking acuity.

Owls are not the standard for precision in location of a sound at all - their asymmetric ears are unusual. They're like hawks and eagles for vision - exceptional. Humans don't have mobile pinnae, but from what I understand the wrinkly ears on great apes is supposed to actually act a little like the owl's asymmetry - weak in comparison, of course. Owls are the superstars.

Similarly, dolphins and bats are exceptional for having sonar, primates aren't sub-par for not having it. Bringing it up is really a complete side issue.

Humans have a lot of brainpower associated with processing the sounds we hear (within more or less the range of human speech) - like the dedicated brainspace for processing human faces, the wetware for processing speech can (and is) re-purposed for other specialist recognition tasks. Recognizing individual species of birds by a brief sample of song, identifying the make and model of a car by a brief glimpse of the bumper and turn signal.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Actually, humans are fairly typical animals with bad hearing. We don't go up into ultrasonic frequencies like dogs, let alone bats or dolphins, and we can't locate a mouse crawling under snow like owls. We live in a world of visible objects, not a world of noises like cats. Since GURPS is humanocentric (it says that humans have normal vision, not half a dozen levels of Acute Vision), that affect how things are rated.

Human tonal discrimination is better than any non-echolocating mammal.
Ultrasonic hearing is necessary to help locate sounds when the ears are close together unlike ours.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Bruno

...
Owls are not the standard for precision in location of a sound at all - their asymmetric ears are unusual. They're like hawks and eagles for vision - exceptional. Humans don't have mobile pinnae, but from what I understand the wrinkly ears on great apes is supposed to actually act a little like the owl's asymmetry - weak in comparison, of course. Owls are the superstars....

Owls' acuity is better than ours but they can't hear above 14 kHz and ours is still better in the 1-6 kHz zone. It's funny how that's our super hearing range but human voices are much lower pitch.