Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

[ghost-angel]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Personally, this is one of the cases where I'd prefer to ditch the rules - just grant the Mechanic to Normal Sight and Hearing and for once stop muddying the waters.

 

(note: not the Sight Group, just Normal Sight; Hearing likewise.)

[schir1964]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Something else to consider with Normal Sight.

 

To be accurate, it needs to have a level of Independent placed on it, since anyone subjected to total darkness for enough time will lose their sight permanently.

 

Just Some Musings

 

- Christopher Mullins

[ghost-angel]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Something else to consider with Normal Sight.

 

To be accurate, it needs to have a level of Independent placed on it, since anyone subjected to total darkness for enough time will lose their sight permanently.

 

Just Some Musings

 

- Christopher Mullins

 

Given the length of time required, that could simply be considered a Transform based on the Effect Of The Environment.

 

Not every Power/Ability needs its drawbacks and advantages modeled directly inside it, some things are simply an effect of the Campaign and Environment. Or, to put it another way, that's already factored into the cost.

[SteveZilla]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Given the length of time required, that could simply be considered a Transform based on the Effect Of The Environment.

 

Not every Power/Ability needs its drawbacks and advantages modeled directly inside it, some things are simply an effect of the Campaign and Environment. Or, to put it another way, that's already factored into the cost.

 

Like

loosing one's REC when one needs to breath but can't.

 

[SteveZilla]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

I'm building a package deal for a goblin. The goblins have a strong sense of smell, so looking through Enhanced Senses I figure that they have Discriminatory Sense of Smell purchased for 5 character points (the cost for one single sense to have that power applied to it).

 

On page 107, in the example of Targeting Sense the character purchases Targeting on their Sense of Smell/Taste for 10 character points. That is the cost for a single sense, and not a sense group.

 

Am I doing it wrong and misunderstand what "Single Sense" means, or is the example flawed...or is there a third option that I am just not seeing.

 

As an aside, my understanding of having Discriminatory Sense of Smell is that the goblin would be able to gain information through smell. If he smelled a rotting carcass he would be able to make some rough guesses based on past smell familiarity of the species that it comes from, the size of the carcass, and how decomposed it is. Do I have that all right?

 

Thanks for any insights.

 

Uthanar

 

From 5ER, p161:

The Smell/Taste Sense Group

The Discriminatory effect provided by the Smell/Taste Group is not the full Discriminatory obtained by buying that Sense Modifier, but rather an effect of somewhat cruder degree. For example, a character can tell a steak from a potato by smell or taste, but can't necessary identify every ingredient in either dish.

 

So I'd say you have it in the ballpark -- just try to not give too much information, as that would be verging on what Analyze would give.

 

I think Proboscis paid the correct price for Targeting, since his sense of Taste is not ranged. I don't know why the writers would keep saying "Normal Smell/Taste" as if it were a single sense in the Targeting example. Especially since it specifically mentions "his superacute sense of smell".

[SteveZilla]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Something else to consider with Normal Sight.

 

To be accurate, it needs to have a level of Independent placed on it, since anyone subjected to total darkness for enough time will lose their sight permanently.

 

Just Some Musings

 

- Christopher Mullins

 

I was not aware that lack of light could lead to permanent eye damage. Could you post a link of a study that found this?

[SteveZilla]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Personally, this is one of the cases where I'd prefer to ditch the rules - just grant the Mechanic to Normal Sight and Hearing and for once stop muddying the waters.

 

(note: not the Sight Group, just Normal Sight; Hearing likewise.)

 

Personally, I would prefer if they would make a 2 (maybe 3) point sense adder that matches the level of "Discriminatory" that the normal human senses have -- perhaps called Selective. After all, while it is possible to Select between a steak and a potato by one's senses, it is not usually possible to Discriminate a list of ingredients used in their preparation. And much less likely to Analyze where the cow/potato was raised/grown and given what food/fertilizer.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

I was not aware that lack of light could lead to permanent eye damage. Could you post a link of a study that found this?

 

I've heard of this but I don't think it is a universal reaction - it is probably akin to hysterical blindness.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Personally' date=' I would prefer if they would make a 2 (maybe 3) point sense adder that matches the level of "Discriminatory" that the normal human senses have -- perhaps called [i']Selective[/i]. After all, while it is possible to Select between a steak and a potato by one's senses, it is not usually possible to Discriminate a list of ingredients used in their preparation. And much less likely to Analyze where the cow/potato was raised/grown and given what food/fertilizer.

 

There are many foodies who would give you an argument on that, and their senses are no better than yours or mine - but the knowledge that they use to apply the sense-information is what is important.

 

You could blind test two steaks from cows reared on different diets and you would be able to tell there was a difference. You wouldn't know that one was corn fed and the other grass fed, unless you had that kind of steak before, but with a decent sense memory you'd recognise them again (and be able to tell them apart even if you were not eating both in a comparison)

 

Personally I have quite a lot of difficulty in understanding how all 5 'normal human senses are NOT discriminatory.

 

Take smell. A dog has a better sense of smell than a human, but that is because it is more sensitive (increased PER) and covers a wider range of chemical response (a broader category of detect). I doubt Dog Scent goes as far as analyse. Then again I don;t accept that human scent is not dscriminatory - discriminatory does not change WHAT you can sense, just how much information you can extract from it.

 

Oh, and just so we are absolutely clear, here is how I 'see' normal sight:

 

32 points: Normal Sight:

 

Detect light in the normal human range of frequencies and intensities, A Large Class Of Things* 11-, Discriminatory, Range, Sense, Targeting

 

 

*Light is incredibly common and, in effect, allows the detection of other things too, like physical objects

[PhilFleischmann]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Once again' date=' the rules in 5er very clearly state that the discriminatory hearing we all share as human beings is limited and of a "much cruder nature" than that granted by the ability modifier "Discriminatory" which is why I capitalized it, referring to the bought ability not the natural ability which is somewhat self evident.[/quote']

Once again, I don't have 5er. I only have FREd. This is apparently a change between the two versions of the rules.

 

And BTE, I hope it isn't this passage you're referring to, provided by SteveZilla

From 5ER' date=' p161:

Quote:

The Smell/Taste Sense Group

The Discriminatory effect provided by the Smell/Taste Group is not the full Discriminatory obtained by buying that Sense Modifier, but rather an effect of somewhat cruder degree. For example, a character can tell a steak from a potato by smell or taste, but can't necessary identify every ingredient in either dish.

Because that refers to the Smell/Taste Group, not the Sight or Hearing groups. And I agree. Dogs can recognize individual people (or other dogs) by scent - they have Discriminatory Scent. Humans don't.

 

Humans can not only tell another human from a dog by sight, they can distiguish between two humans, even if they're of the same sex, height, weight, hair color, etc. Likewise, humans can not merely tell the difference between the sound of a lion roaring and the sound of someone typing on a keyboard, they can even distinguish between two different human voices, even if they're saying the same words, and using the same volume, pitch, and rate. Humans have Discriminatory Sight and Hearing, in reality, regardless of any rule change made in between HERO 5e and 5er.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

After reading both entries in 5E and 5ER I have come to the conclusion that the rules are just a PITA.

 

I think I understand why Steve did what he did; because he gave the Sight Group "Discriminatory" he had to then hobble it because the Simulated Sense Rule meant you could define anything under the Sight Group and get that Adder (like the Infrared Enhancer).

 

The whole thing can be solved like this:

Sight Group provides: Sense, Range, Targeting. Additionally Normal Sight has Discriminatory.

 

Unless I'm wrong about Steve's reasoning. Even then that probably solves more problems than it causes.

[PhilFleischmann]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Even then that probably solves more problems than it fixes.

Uh, what?

[ghost-angel]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Ahem...

 

I do English good. apparently.

[bigbywolfe]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

I posted this in my very first post on this thread:

 

"The Discriminatory effect provided by the Sight Group is not the full Discriminatory obtained by buying that Sense Modifier, but rather an effect of somewhat cruder degree. For example, a character can tell two people apart based on their visual appearance, but cannot always determine a person's ethnicity or religion through sight. Characters can make Normal Sight (or the entire Sight Sense Group) fully Discriminatory by paying the usual cost." - 5er pg. 161

 

The book says virtually the same thing for hearing. My comment had absolutely nothing to do with SteveZilla’s post about taste/smell, and even though I understand you don’t have 5er the post with direct quote was there. The book, however, does also say that human smell/taste is discriminatory in the same limited way that sight and hearing is. I can smell the difference between black pepper and cinnamon can’t you? We can taste salty/sweet/bitter/sour. It’s the difference between discriminatory modeled after actual human senses, and Discriminatory, the almost supernatural sense modifier.

 

Ghostangel, I agree with you for the most part, but I think simply having a better definition of discriminatory of a “cruder degree” and Discriminatory you buy would be better than making sight fully Discriminatory and scrapping discriminatory in every other sense…just my opinion. I think the problem is definition, not the ability itself.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

No, I'm not saying to define "cruder version" and Discriminatory better, I'm saying eliminate the two versions and give Full Discriminatory to Normal Sight only, instead of the "Cruder Version" to the Sight Group.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

After reading both entries in 5E and 5ER I have come to the conclusion that the rules are just a PITA.

 

I think I understand why Steve did what he did; because he gave the Sight Group "Discriminatory" he had to then hobble it because the Simulated Sense Rule meant you could define anything under the Sight Group and get that Adder (like the Infrared Enhancer).

 

The whole thing can be solved like this:

Sight Group provides: Sense, Range, Targeting. Additionally Normal Sight has Discriminatory.

 

Unless I'm wrong about Steve's reasoning. Even then that probably solves more problems than it causes.

 

Here's how I think it went:

 

We want senses to work out as nice numbers that divide by 5, but 'sense' is a 2 point adder. Damn.

 

If we make discriminatory kinda 'Almost discriminatory (-1/2)' then that costs 3 points, and we are back on for nice numbers that divide by 5.

 

On another point, I have no idea why normal sight is not built to detect a large class of objects.

[SSgt Baloo]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

The Smell/Taste Sense Group

The Discriminatory effect provided by the Smell/Taste Group is not the full Discriminatory obtained by buying that Sense Modifier, but rather an effect of somewhat cruder degree. For example, a character can tell a steak from a potato by smell or taste, but can't necessary identify every ingredient in either dish.

 

 

The way I understand it, discriminatory smell/taste would enable one to tell that two steaks came from the same steer or different ones.

 

Normal sight only allows one to see that iron pyrites and gold are both yellow, shiny substances. One could, with specialized knowledge, identify them as what they are, but that would require hefting them, subjecting them to chemical tests, or some other process independent of sight alone. Fully discriminatory sight would enable you to tell that similar lumps of gold and iron pyrite were different materials even if you didn't have the knowledge required to identify either one. Analyze would enable you to distinguish between a golden object and an identical object made from an alloy of gold, as if one were a living mass spectrometer.

 

Q: Discriminatory is a prerequisite for purchasing Analyze, isn't it?

[Sean Waters]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

The way I understand it, discriminatory smell/taste would enable one to tell that two steaks came from the same steer or different ones.

 

Normal sight only allows one to see that iron pyrites and gold are both yellow, shiny substances. One could, with specialized knowledge, identify them as what they are, but that would require hefting them, subjecting them to chemical tests, or some other process independent of sight alone. Fully discriminatory sight would enable you to tell that similar lumps of gold and iron pyrite were different materials even if you didn't have the knowledge required to identify either one. Analyze would enable you to distinguish between a golden object and an identical object made from an alloy of gold, as if one were a living mass spectrometer.

 

Q: Discriminatory is a prerequisite for purchasing Analyze, isn't it?

 

Iron pyrites and gold may look the same in terms of shininess and colour, but their shape is usually a give away - pyrites are usually obviously crystals and gold isn't, and you can tell that with normal vision, and that is knowledge based.

 

Basic detect allows you to determine whether something is present, rough range, rough quantity, that's about it.

 

Discriminatory allows you to tell similar objects apart, and derive quite a bit of information from what yuo are detecting.

 

Analyse allows you to get all the information you can from the thing that you are detecting.

 

We do not need any greater division. We are simply not set up to understand each other at a greater elvel of granularity.

 

Now here's the thing.

 

I really don't like 'Detect Physical Object' because it does not tell you anything about the mechanism of detection.

 

HOW are you detecting physical objects? Gravity distortion? Reflected light? Reflected sound? Chemical analysis? Zelotron pulses*?

 

THAT is the sort of thing we should be detecting - whatever it is about the thing under observation that lets the information GET to us.

 

If we define the problem properly then everything becomes a lot more straightforward.

 

Now, let us take an example: Detect Gold. OK, I want to detect gold - how? I want to use magic. Fine. So I'm actually detecting what the presence of gold does to the ambient magical field - how it distorts it, for example, and I only detect in the particular frequency that gold resonates in.

 

See what I'm doing here? I'm defining an unusual group and explaining how the detect works. Now we know that the detect will be affected by fluctuations in the ambient magical field: for instance if someone is letting of blasts of magic nearby then it is likely to interfere with my detect gold, but if someone is setting off a strobe light it won't.

 

ALL detects should be assumed to be stopped by the things that would stop normal senses, like solid objects BUT for a +0 adder you can switch to an equally common set of things that stop the sense or for +5 you can define a limited group of things that stop the sense and for +10 you can define the sense as being stopped by nothing EXCEPT the same sort of energy that the detect relies on to detect things.

 

That replaces the current iteration fo N-Ray vision.

 

Anyway, that's what I think.

 

 

*I made that one up, but that is fine - it doesn;t have to be real, so long as you and the GM agree as to how it works.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Sight isn't Detect Physical Object.

 

Sight is Detect Light Waves Bouncing Off Of Physical Object.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Having said that though - it's completely over complicating the issue, and muddying the waters.

 

We know how sight works, we know what it does, we know everyone starts with it.

We have Mechanics to build Senses from scratch should it be needed.

 

Just say Normal Sight has Discriminatory and save everyone the bloody headache.

[bigbywolfe]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Just say Normal Sight has Discriminatory and save everyone the bloody headache.

 

Would this measure also make all other senses non-Discriminatory? That's the only porblem I have with the idea...

[Sean Waters]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Sight isn't Detect Physical Object.

 

Sight is Detect Light Waves Bouncing Off Of Physical Object.

 

Well, quite - I'm not suggesting otherwise BUT Hero is keen enough to allow 'Detect Physical Object' (and as I pointed out above does not actually define what normal sight detects - obvious as it may be).

 

I'm saying that is silly because it tells you nothing about how the detect works. It is muddling cause and effect, and it shouldn't.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Would this measure also make all other senses non-Discriminatory? That's the only porblem I have with the idea...

 

By my lights, all 5 human senses are discriminatory, perhaps the least discriminatory being touch, but even that is pretty impressive.

 

One other thing.

 

You buy ANALYSE for touch and for sight. I'm thinking they still give very different information. Anyone disagree?

[ghost-angel]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

Would this measure also make all other senses non-Discriminatory? That's the only porblem I have with the idea...

 

Why would it?

 

I'm saying remove the "kind of discriminatory" chunk of the rules. Add the same line to Normal Hearing or whatever other Sense you want. I don't care.

 

A good chunk of the issue comes from the Simulated Sense Rule. Under the rules if you define Infrared (5pts) as Sight IR (IR Vision) it automatically gets Sense, Range and Targeting for free; oh and it gets that "kind of discriminatory" which is why I personally believe the rules don't give Sight Group the "Full Discriminatory."

[SteveZilla]

Re: Normal Smell/Taste one sense?

 

The way I understand it' date=' discriminatory smell/taste would enable one to tell that two steaks came from the same steer or different ones.[/quote']

 

IMO that would be Analyze instead of Discriminatory level of detail. Now, Discriminatory would likely be able to tell the breed that the steak came from (longhorns just taste better! ).

 

Q: Discriminatory is a prerequisite for purchasing Analyze' date=' isn't it?[/quote']

 

The full Discriminatory is a prerequisite for Analyze.