Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

[CrosshairCollie]

I have a problem wrapping my head around this. I can't really think of any kind of sense that doesn't fit into Sight, Hearing, Smell/Taste, Touch or Mental. I had a conversation similar to this once in 4th Edition, where someone had a 'kinetic sense' of Spatial Awareness.

 

"Okay, what sense group is it in?"

"Well, none, really, he just feels his surroundings."

"So, it's the Touch Group."

"Well, not like that ... I mean, he just knows where everything is."

"So, it's the Mental Group."

(Repeat variants of the previous 4 paragraphs 2 or 3 times.)

 

So ... just what IS the Unusual Sense Group besides some odd 'undefined' way of getting around Flashes, Darkness and the like?

[Teflon Billy]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

I have a problem wrapping my head around this. I can't really think of any kind of sense that doesn't fit into Sight, Hearing, Smell/Taste, Touch or Mental. I had a conversation similar to this once in 4th Edition, where someone had a 'kinetic sense' of Spatial Awareness.

 

"Okay, what sense group is it in?"

"Well, none, really, he just feels his surroundings."

"So, it's the Touch Group."

"Well, not like that ... I mean, he just knows where everything is."

"So, it's the Mental Group."

(Repeat variants of the previous 4 paragraphs 2 or 3 times.)

 

So ... just what IS the Unusual Sense Group besides some odd 'undefined' way of getting around Flashes, Darkness and the like?

I think the mental sense group is a bit narrower than being able to be used to cover things that are just "felt". The "I have a bad feeling about this" Force sense from Star Wars seems to be something that'd do well under the Unusual Sense group, while it is true the the character is understanding the stimulous mentally it could be said that it is their sensing of the Force as being the source of the Sense and that could be classified as being under the Unusual Sense Group.

 

TB

[Zed-F]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

"I sense everything by gamma rays / radiation in general" -- that's Unusual group. Sure it's part of the EM spectrum but don't let that fool you into thinking it belongs in the Radio group. Things that would jam radio would have no effect on gamma rays, any more than they do on Sight.

 

Mystic senses, if you don't have a mystic group in your game, are in the unusual group.

 

Cosmic Awareness is in the unusual group. It's not a mental sense, it's an innate connection to everything in the cosmos. It has nothing to do with mental activity or "feeling" something with your physical body, and you're not going to screen it off by mucking with the mental or touch groups.

 

Tremorsense -- a passive awareness that works on anything touching the ground by detecting and analyzing the vibrations it makes as it moves. You're not going to stop it by flashing the hearing group, and if it's done via an internal organ that senses vibrations, preventing someone from feeling with the surface of their skin won't do anything to stop it either.

 

Generally speaking, flashes to a given sense group work on a specific organ that senses in that group. If the sense being designed is detecting something that could be similar to an existing sense group, but is somehow shielded from flashes that would affect that group, then it's probably being sensed by a different organ that operates differently, and belongs in the unusual group.

[Tiree]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

I think Zed-F covers it pretty well. I see the Unusual Sense group (as long as it is not tied to the Visual Sense Group) as a feeling, an itch in the back of the brain saying "something is there".

 

I keep on thinking of a character with spacial awareness by use of mathematics. He goes into a room, and suddenly the lights go out. Everybody starts to move and furniture is tossed. Yet he is able to navigate through the room unharmed based on his mathematical ability of probability calculation.

[Nevenall]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

Well, the Unusual Sense Group isn't really a sense group, it's just where we put everything that doesn't fit elsewhere.

Any Detect in the Unusual Group is its own Sense Group of one, and the character who buys that Detect should define how the Sense Group actually works.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

Real-world examples of unusual sense groups:

 

Homing pigeons have magnetic iron oxide deposits in their heads which allow them to sense magnetic fields.

 

Sharks have organs which allow them to sense the electrical fields given off by their prey's muscles.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

Here's a couple of "senses" in the Unusual group in the game already:

 

Absolute Time Sense & Absolute Direction Sense.

 

You know how much time has passed, and you know where North is. You don't really "percieve" them but you have a sense of their effect.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

Say you have a third eye. It doesn't perceive anything in the visual spectrum, so is unaffected by sight group flashes and darkness and invisibility and shapeshift. BUT it is the place your unusual sense group 'spatial awareness' runs from. Your brain interprets the spatial awareness in the same way it interprets vision, so normally, when both the SA and normal vision are working you see a 'normal' image:vision and SA overlay and 'merge'. If your sight group gets knocked out then the SA overlay remains: stuff gets a bit grainier, less detailed, you mainly just get outlines, BUT you basically continue 'seeing' as you did before - you are just not using the sight group to do it.

 

The sense group just defines what DETECTS for that sense, not, necessarily how the data gleaned is interpretted by the brain.

 

Of course, if the ccharacter has an entirely different way of interpretting the data, there's no way that can be usefully explained anyway: it is real difficult to explain a sense to someone who has not got it

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

I seem to recall reading (quite some time back) that there were in fact 22 cataloged senses for human beings, far more than the "famous five", but I've been unable to confirm that when I went looking recently. I was, however, reminded of some other senses that we have, that people often forget about:

 

• Sense of balance
  
• Temperature sense
  
• Ability to sense EM fields (they have to be pretty strong, though)
  
• Sensing the passage of time (though it's highly inaccurate)
  
• Kinesthetic sense (this is the sense of where your limbs are in relation to the rest of your body, and plays a part in "phantom limb syndrome" in amputees)
  

 

There are others, but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head.

[Pogo]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

Someone on the boards had a teleporter with density sense -- made teleporting into buildings and the like more reliable.

 

Sense neutrinos: Might as well get megascale for this one, since you won't see things much smaller than a moon.

 

Sense mesons: Appropriate for some radiation accident characters.

 

Gravitic sense: Character can sense gravitational pull from small objects. This can also be the SFX for spatial awareness.

 

Sense Chi: I'm sure this has been written up by lots of folks. I don't really think of it as a mental sense, but that is campaign dependent.

[Ganesh]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

Well, there's the mechanical effects of whether a sense gets flashed, what it's rage (in time and space), how accurate it is, whether it's targetting, yadda yadda.

 

But there's also the question of how you describe the sensory input.

 

We do sort of divide our senses into roughly five categories. I think this is because we're brought up with the idea, not because it's intrinsic...after all, different cultures have different colors.

 

Visual information comes with descriptions like dark, bright, colors, flat, flickering, shapes, and the like.

 

Chemical information comes across with descriptions like sour, salty, pungent, faint, lingering, sweel, floral, etc.

 

Sonic information comes across mostly with volume, pitch, affect, vowels and consonants, and durations.

 

Touch and sonar are conveyed with terms like hard, soft, hollow, fuzzy, solid, liquid, tingly, squirming and such. I had a character at one point who was blind, but had a ranged sense of touch.

 

Mental senses can come across with any of the other terms, but also often come across with no or little terms at all...uneasy, or sudden awareness, or "you know." Flashes of symbolic images and eerie, dreamlike certainty are also useful for mental and/or mystical senses...so we can say the mental sense has all descriptors or none.

 

 

 

When using senses, information is filtered. Its neat, as a GM, to describe something and watch the player's face light up as they realize what it is. But in order to do that, we need some frame of reference and terms from that frame of reference.

 

It is useful, outside of notions of flashes and additional sensory organs and all that, to know what kind of information the player expects to have filter through that sense. But that's a separate issue from power build. Sean Walters descibed a third eye with non-light based spacial awareness -- it's a separate sensory organ, not part of the sight group...but the information that comes in should be descibed using visual language.

 

So yes, everything can be shoehorned into one of the sense modes, and it's often good to do so. But that doesn't mean that everything's part of one of those sense groups. Excercise for the reader -- have someone have a sense that uses descriptors from one sense, but has the qualities (range, blockage, field of view, etc) of another...say, sight and smell. It feels very distinct from either the sense it shares descriptors with or the sense that it has the properties of. Synesthesia, anyone?

[Dust Raven]

Re: Explaining the Unusual Sense Group

 

I have a problem wrapping my head around this. I can't really think of any kind of sense that doesn't fit into Sight' date=' Hearing, Smell/Taste, Touch or Mental. I had a conversation similar to this once in 4th Edition, where someone had a 'kinetic sense' of Spatial Awareness.[/quote']

 

Human's have far more than five senses, but the classic five we all know (plus a few others added in) are there because of how those senses are affected by the game mechanics. Meaning they all react the same way to the same Powers.

 

As for the Unusual Sense Group, there is no such thing. It's just what we categorize a sense that doesn't fit into any listed group. Technically, it is its own group. Depending on the genre, setting and GM preferences, there can be more groups available (the Force Group for a Star Wars game, or a Mystic Group for a high fantasy game for two examples). The same sense may fall into different groups in different genres. Zen Awareness (bought as Spatial Awareness), the ability to know your surroundngs by sending your spirit (that does not require light to see) above your body to look all around you at all times, could be part of the "zen group" even though there is no zen group in the game. Some GMs might say the zen group is just another name for the Mental Group, others may say the zen group is a larger group with other senses as well (such as for a danger sense ability that is your floating spirit warning you of potential harm, or seeing the inner spirit of your opponent to locate vulnerabilities).

 

As far as "getting around" Sense Affecting Powers, there are some drawbacks to some Unusual Sense Group senses. First, you have to improve them individually. So you if buy a lot of them, so they can't all be Flashed at the same time, you'll also be paying for the upgrades to Ranged, Discriminatory, etc for each and every one, instead of for an entire group. Also, most of the most useful "unusual" senses are common enough that there is likely to be a Sense Affecting Power out there that specifically targets it. Spatial Awareness is a perfect example of this.