Human max for secondary attributes? (Per, will, FP)

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Gollum

some (very rare) people can see Saturn's rings directly

Another famous astronomical test is the ability to discern a difference between Mizar and Alcor (an apparent double which are the middle star in the handle of the Big Dipper).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Ted Williams had likely very close to the best eyesight ever, and was tested as 20/10. .

20/10 vision isn't that rare. I have seen claims that many major league hitters and jet pilots (and Williams was of course both) have it. I've seen at least 1 claim of 20/5.

To the OP: I've never heard a "consensus" that "realistic" HT does not go above 14. 1 don't even know how you'd realistically measure the multiple facets of Gurps HT. It's a game mechanical confabulation of aerobic fitness, resistance to disease, poison, altitude/motion/radiation sickness, broken bones and heart failure along with several things I've left out or couldn't even remember at the moment.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

20/10 vision isn't that rare. I have seen claims that many major league hitters and jet pilots (and Williams was of course both) have it.

I've read an article or two that claims laser eye surgery to improve vision is popular with MLB players. (Usually asking the question -- so how is this technological improvement to your natural ability any different from using medical technology in the form of steroids?)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

I've read an article or two that claims laser eye surgery to improve vision is popular with MLB players. (Usually asking the question -- so how is this technological improvement to your natural ability any different from using medical technology in the form of steroids?)

Eye surgery doesn't cause kidney failure and incidents of violence?

At any rate it would be a recent trend. Good eyesight has been making successful hitters well before the era of laser eye surgery.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Eye surgery doesn't cause kidney failure and incidents of violence?

At any rate it would be a recent trend. Good eyesight has been making successful hitters well before the era of laser eye surgery.

Steroids do not cause violence. It's the sudden stopping and starting to avoid drug test positives. As in low testosterone is far more like to induce aggressions and anxiety than high.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by RyanW

But Perception is much more than merely being able to detect detail. It is also recognizing detail, possibly at a very brief glance.

Yes. That is why I wouldn't limit Per + Acute sense to 12. I would just focus on limiting acute sense.

It is obvious that a man can't have the sight of an eagle or the hearing of a cat... Now, since Per is also the ability to notice and recognize humanly visible or audible thin detail which doesn't necessary attract everyone's attention, I thing that realistic characters can have a quite high score in that topic.

Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Jessica Fletcher are not realistic characters, I do agree, but they are good example of what I want to mean: most people don't notice detail that are still perfectly visible for everyone because they are not vigilant enough. Some people, to the contrary, are much more attentive, trained, etc., and quickly notice what others skip. And they may be very good at that. They don't necessarily have incredible sense. They usually have ordinary ones. They just pay much more attention to their surrounding.

Likewise, someone with an incredible sight may not be good at finding hidden visible clues during an investigation... Worse. When someone talks to me in a restaurant, when the TV is on or when there is some music around, it's hard to me to get what he says. That's the drawback of a very good sense. To much detail at the same time really becomes a nuisance to focus on something...

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

Discriminatory Smell includes +4 to Taste/Smell rolls.

Oh, yes. Thank you for that precision. I completely skipped that!

[BraselC5048]

Originally Posted by Captain Joy

From Basic Set pages 455 to 458:

Dogs: Perception 12, Discriminatory Smell
House Cat, Lion, Tiger: Perception 12, Night Vision 5
Falcon: Perception 12, Acute Vision 3.
Wolves: Perception 14, Discriminatory Smell, Night Vision 2

So a typical falcon has a Hearing 12 and Vision 15. Cats don't have any Acute anything; their Hearing and Vision are both 12.

Ok, cats should have acute hearing, although I don't know the precise level. Humans can go up to acute hearing 4, so (I would assume) cats are better then that, unless someone with acute hearing 4 can actually hear as good as a cat. Perhaps Discriminatory Hearing?

On the plus side, humans (and pretty much most mammals) have Discriminatory Sight for free.

20/10 vision isn't that rare. I have seen claims that many major league hitters and jet pilots (and Williams was of course both) have it. I've seen at least 1 claim of 20/5.

IIRC, the maximum theoretical resolution of a perfect sensor the size of a human eye is 20/8, which is (I think?) about acute vision 3, but I doubt anyone has ever actually had vision that good (although a documented case would raise the human max to acute vision 3 - Tactical Shooting's max of 2 is based on 20/12, not 20/10). (Anybody got a documented case of 20/8 vision they know of?)

Looking at the speed/range table, the 20/5 or so vision of birds of pray is about acute vision 4, not 3.

On a side note, I've never been able to figure out where the acute hearing 4 came from - all I could turn up was people who can't tune out minor sounds, which I guess would could be acute hearing, but also should come with a disadvantage about the inability to tune them out. Case for a quirk and light sleeper?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Indeed, Per measures both 'I have good senses' and 'I notice things'. The two are bound tightly together, but are quite different

It's non-trivial to separate the two, when constained by GURPS' design.

I can do so in Sagatafl, because perceptiveness determines the number of dice you roll, whereas sensory acuity modifies the Roll Difficulty. Thus Sherlock Holmes, poster boy for maximum Human Perception, rolls 9 dice, while a blood hound rolls only 5 dice but against a drastically lower RD. Quite often there will be stimuli that are impossible for Holmes to notice, because they're RD 13 or worse, but which the blood hound will routinely notice (rolling 5d12 vs an RD of 10 or 9 gives you a fairly good chance of at least 1 Success).

My other design from recent years (abandoned because I ended up folding most of the cool stuff into Sagatafl instead - Action Points, Flaws, Veteran Traits, and a few other nifties), Modern Action RPG (much in the vein of GURPS Action, but slightly wider in scope), doesn't do the Roll Difficulty being orthogonal to Skill/Attribute thing, so there I couldn't do that.

The least bad solution I was able to come up with, before abandoning the design, was to designate certain Senses as Auto for certain characters or species, meaning that they don't have to roll, but instead automatically detects anything that a Human has a chance of detecting. These only roll to detect something that is flat out impossible to detect for a Human, e.g. a Tolkien Elf with really long-range vision will automatically detect anything within a kilometer or so (depending on whether it's moving or not, and how large it is vs the distance, and of course colour contrast against surroundings), and would only need to roll to detect stuff much farther away, stuff that a Human would never be able to notice.

Since MA RPG was meant to be a simple system, I didn't go further than that, but for a more ambitious project, you'd obviously need to do it as a "layered" thing, same as the Cosmic Levels thing from GURPS Powers, where you have at least Auto I Senses, Auto II Senses, and Auto III Senses, each higher grade auto-detecting anything that a lesser grade has a non-zero chance of detecting.

Of course there is also the whole Discriminatory Sense thing, from GURPS and Hero System, but I never got around to deciding on that. It's an important trait for proper simulation (including aniaml Familiars, characters shapeshifting into animal form, and of course in some worlds also non-Human humanoids), but doesn't have anything to do with the perceptiveness vs sensory acuity question.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by BraselC5048

On the plus side, humans (and pretty much most mammals) have Discriminatory Sight for free.

Humans do. I'm not sure most mammals do.

Hero System, at least in 5th Edition, has a Sense Build system, where you can enhance and limit Senses with various modifiers, including Discriminatory and one higher tier (Analyzing, I think it is), and Targeting. Humans are already defined, in Hero System, as having Discriminatory Vision, and it's always seemed to me that you could make a vaguely Sherlock Holmes-like character by also adding Analyzing to his Vision. Human Vision is also already a Targeting Sense, in Hero System, but Hearing is not, nor any of our other Senses.