Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

Thank you.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

I'm not saying that they're not great. They all have their uses. But I don't want to juggle Acute Vision +2, Telescopic Vision 1, Parabolic hearing 2, Acute Hearing +3, and so on. So I tend to pick and choose and stick with them. Except on racial templates, where I agree with you (there it's okay to start to introduce weird concepts, because a racial template is the perfect place for something like that).

Part of the problem is that there really aren't many counter-parts to these. Things like Bad Sight are really big and chunky, as opposed to Acute Vision's fine gradations. The result isn't you can't really fine tune a specific set of senses. Thus, I see people muck about with Perception more than anything else.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

Because the IQ 10 doesn't really see less than the IQ 12 other things being equal. It's just not as good at figuring out what it is that it is seeing

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

Really, part of this is a convention of heroic fiction. GURPS says that a spider has IQ 1, a lizard has IQ 2, a dog has IQ 4, a baboon has IQ 5, and a chimpanzee has IQ 6—and a man can have IQ from 6 up to 20. Why the huge variation? Because people don't want to play characters who all have species-normal IQ, or even characters limited to ±1.

In the same way, we have body weight varying as the cube of ST for animals—so an ST 5 cat weights 16 pounds, and an ST 22 horse weights 1330 pounds—but an ST 20 man doesn't weigh half a ton!

GURPS allows human traits to vary widely, but maps animal traits onto the same scale, with human beings falling onto it around a score of 10. But the numbers aren't really measuring the same things.

Bill Stoddard

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

It ought to be IQ that scales broadly. 10 average men can drag a weight or dig a hole as well as the strongest man, but a million ordinary persons working day and night couldn't solve, for example, the Poincare Conjecture.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

Could you explain the difference? It seems to me that the human eye can either see something or it can't.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

You have sensory organs which register triggers (e.g. photons falling onto the retina) and send impulses to the brain; you sense brightness, or a sound, or a warm touch. You perceive as the brain interprets the signals into something meaningful - you perceive the sun, a melody, a hug.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

Or more to the point, two people can look at the same clump of bushes, but only one of them see the machine gun position hidden in it.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

But the human eye's resolution is limited. The way GURPS represents that is with your Vision sense--whatever that number is. I haven't done the math on it, so I don't know what the limit is, but I don't see how it makes sense to say that a person can "perceive" things at resolutions no human eye can detect. Perceptive ability of the brain isn't what's in question here. If you have two men stand next to each other, and move back away from them, eventually you (and anyone else with a human eye) will no longer be able to discern how many men are there, and that's because of how the eye works, rather than your brain's perceptive ability.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses
 

People tend to fail to perceive something way earlier than they stop sensing it.