Quote:
Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ
I can only think of contrived realistic examples. Is the book not good for supernatural abilities? I can think of lots of those that have discrete cutoffs, which GURPS doesn't handle well at all.
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Well, actually, I didn't think of this as a book about ESP (covered in Psionic Powers) or about magical senses. It has some unphysical things such as x-ray vision, but mostly taken from comics or space opera.
But that's not the real point here, as I see it. GURPS provides abilities that can be used to define pretty much any magical or paranormal or weird sense you can imagine; between Detect and Scanning Sense (Para-Radar especially) you're pretty well covered. But Detect assumes standard range modifiers, not a sharp cutoff; and Scanning Sense has a specified range, but takes a penalty for use outside that range—it's not a sharp cutoff either. I don't think there's any sensory ability in GURPS that has a maximum range, whether it's detecting water vapor or arcane metaphysics. And that, I think, is because the games that have such cutoffs do so as a matter of game mechanics, because they make things simpler to run, at the expense of realism—"No, I'm sorry, your Detect Undead has a range of 50 yards and the vampire was waiting 60 yards away, so you didn't notice her." That kind of arbitrary sharp cutoff isn't based on any actual theory of how magic ought to work, but purely on keeping things simple for the GM. And GURPS doesn't do that so much, because its style is to privilege realism.