Night Vision gained from TL8 (bio)chemistry (P:ES?)

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

So, mad scientists rejoice, even though it seems like it's a bit early to celebrate. Still, any estimates on how much Night Vision [0] it provides while active?

Assuming that the enhanced person saw/identified 100% of objects, while normals identified about 33%, at 50 yards, here's my rough estimate:
Vision 10, Plain Sight +10, 50 yards -8, 3 levels of darkness for -3, netting a roll against 9 (about 37% success rate). That's for normal people.
Getting 3 levels of Night Vision would up the roll to a 12, for a 74% rate of success, at which point there is no more NV to be had to compensate penalties.

Seems a bit underwhelming for 'from 1/3 to 100%-ish'. Perhaps more of a darkness penalty is a factor?
Thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Seems a bit underwhelming for 'from 1/3 to 100%-ish'. Perhaps more of a darkness penalty is a factor?

This is mostly an issue with how vision modifiers work. Realistically, tests under controlled conditions (vision or lots of other things) go very rapidly from always succeed to always fail, and the much more modest modifiers in GURPS (or other games) are because tests don't occur under controlled circumstances and there's a bunch of weird things that can happen but are impractical to track that can dramatically alter the probabilities.

[MechaMage]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Realistically, tests under controlled conditions (vision or lots of other things) go very rapidly from always succeed to always fail, and the much more modest modifiers in GURPS (or other games) are because tests don't occur under controlled circumstances and there's a bunch of weird things that can happen but are impractical to track that can dramatically alter the probabilities.

Perhaps then the approach is to 'take 10' in the vein of D&D, to represent the controlled circumstances?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by MechaMage

Perhaps then the approach is to 'take 10' in the vein of D&D, to represent the controlled circumstances?

It's not my favorite implementation, but some sort of 'reduced randomness under controlled conditions' rule would be a good thing, probably as a replacement for the normal out of combat modifiers (i.e. rather than getting a +4 or whatever, you roll 3d6/2+1 or something).