Some thoughts on senses

[Sean Waters]

HERO deals with senses more accurately than any other system I know. You can tailor existing senses or build new ones, and do so to a high degree of definition. I do believe that there is some considerable confusion over senses though and that not everyone has the same ‘vision’ of what the elements of senses do.

 

I’d like to discuss those elements, give my understanding of what they entail and make some suggestions as to ways we might add to or amend the system to clarify it further.

 

You can ask the following questions about any sense:

 

WHAT can a sense detect?

 

WHAT can hinder the ability to detect?

 

WHAT information can you derive from a successful detection?

 

WHAT can you do with the information?

 

Now, but ‘What can a sense detect?’ I do not mean what information can you derive from a sense or what can you do with the information. I specifically mean ‘What can the sense detect?’

 

Take, for instance, normal sight. You can see all sorts of things with normal sight: you can detect solid objects, you can detect some non-solid objects, you can detect danger (that man is pointing a gun at you) and beauty. However, that is NOT what the sense detects. Normal sight detects visible spectrum electromagnetic radiation. The book says it is a 25 point sense. I’m assuming that is built as follows:

 

5 point detect (class of things: light in the visible spectrum)

 

10 points of targeting

 

5 points of Range

 

2 points of Sense

 

3 points of discriminatory (5 points -1/2: not fully discriminatory)

 

First off: would anyone argue with that build? (I’m not asking if that is how it should be done, just if that is how it is done)

 

Now detects only come in 3 flavours: 3, 5 and 10 point detects, although you can add other stuff to a detect for +5 points.

 

Question: if a character wanted the ability to detect Electro Magnetic Radiation, what would you charge for that?

 

It is a very common object: 10 point detect?

 

Trouble then is that makes UV and IR detection (both 5 point adders) obsolete.

 

My first real proposal, therefore is that we expand the range of detect you can buy as follows:

 

3 points: a single thing, or a very narrow range of a spectrum of things (example RED LIGHT)

 

5 points: a narrow class of things, or a narrow part of a spectrum of things (example VISIBLE SPECTRUM LIGHT)

 

10 points: a broad class of things, or a broad part of a spectrum of things (example IR through VISIBLE SPECTRUM LIGHT)

 

15 points: a very broad class of things, or a very broad part of a spectrum of things (example IR through UV SPECTRUM EMR)

 

20 points: a complete class of things, or a complete spectrum of things (example all EMR)

 

The +5 adder (as is) would only be used when a sense detects more than one class of things, and would not be limited to +5. For example, the sense of touch detects pressure AND temperature. The broader class is probably pressure, probably a 5 point detect, and would have more adders. Temperature in this context is probably a 3 point detect. You would therefore build ‘detect pressure’ for the touch sense and then add a 3 point ‘temperature’ detect. This uses some or all of the same adders as ‘detect pressure’ (any that it doesn’t use are noted as -0 limitations) . The two (or more) detects are treated as a single sense for the purpose of being flashed, or affected by other sensory powers.

 

I’ve quite a bit more to add, but there are only so many hours in the day and it is probably wise to get comments on this section , and hopefully some sort of consensus before moving on.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

I know you've been waiting for this.

 

...

 

Wait for it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ready?

 

 

 

NOW I agree with you.

[BobGreenwade]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

This is a good thread of thought generally, and should be posted in the 6E Forum, except for one factual error.

 

In 5ER, Normal Sight costs 25 points because Physical Limitation: Blind is a 25 point Disadvantage. I'd rather see it built as a Detect with appropriate Modifiers, but that's the official rule.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

This is a good thread of thought generally, and should be posted in the 6E Forum, except for one factual error.

 

In 5ER, Normal Sight costs 25 points because Physical Limitation: Blind is a 25 point Disadvantage. I'd rather see it built as a Detect with appropriate Modifiers, but that's the official rule.

 

That does seem like putting the cart before the horse, doesn't it? I'd alsways assumed that the detect was 'a 10 point one, but in fact it makes more sense to do it that way, as a 5 point detect. What you are actually seeing is a small part of a class of things (EMR).

 

Obviously we derive a great deal of information from that, but that strays into the next part of the treatease: the difference between a basic detect, a discriminatory detect and an analytical detect.

 

Ha! Just thought of something We tend to think of senses as 'instant' and, in the most part they are functionally instant: information from our eyes is only limtied by the speed of light and the speed of transmission of nerve signals, similarly sound moves fast enough that it is functionally instant.

 

Smell, on the other hand, is not. It takes considerable time for a smell to diffuse through air. If someone threw a smelly ball at you you would never be able to catch it by smell because it would travel much faster than the speed of smell.

 

Nothing to do with what I was on about but it tickled me.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

I know you've been waiting for this.

 

...

 

Wait for it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ready?

 

 

 

NOW I agree with you.

 

 

 

I'll to an example involving bullets to engage your enthusiams, Thia.

[BobGreenwade]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

That does seem like putting the cart before the horse' date=' doesn't it?[/quote']Yes, I think so too, in general. When you start trying to build on some of the other Sense Groups, though, it starts to make a bit more sense. But the Detect model really should, at the least, be a GM's option.

Ha! Just thought of something We tend to think of senses as 'instant' and, in the most part they are functionally instant: information from our eyes is only limtied by the speed of light and the speed of transmission of nerve signals, similarly sound moves fast enough that it is functionally instant.

 

Smell, on the other hand, is not. It takes considerable time for a smell to diffuse through air. If someone threw a smelly ball at you you would never be able to catch it by smell because it would travel much faster than the speed of smell.

 

Nothing to do with what I was on about but it tickled me.

Actually on the smell-related work I'm currently writing I cover that aspect of things, albeit rather lightly.

 

And by the way, that ball might or might not travel faster than "the speed of smell." Many volatile chemicals can travel pretty darn quickly, and if one's trigeminal sense was acute enough one could target a thrown ball quite nicely. Nothing on Earth has a sense that acute, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

 

I'll to an example involving bullets to engage your enthusiams, Thia.

 

Oh! OOOO! GUNS!

 

YES!

[Sean Waters]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

Yes, I think so too, in general. When you start trying to build on some of the other Sense Groups, though, it starts to make a bit more sense. But the Detect model really should, at the least, be a GM's option.Actually on the smell-related work I'm currently writing I cover that aspect of things, albeit rather lightly.

 

And by the way, that ball might or might not travel faster than "the speed of smell." Many volatile chemicals can travel pretty darn quickly, and if one's trigeminal sense was acute enough one could target a thrown ball quite nicely. Nothing on Earth has a sense that acute, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen.

 

More than any other sense, smell can be fooled by powers that do not directly affect senses. For instance if you have a Change Environment power, or even an EB based on wind, you could legitimately blow away anything the sense might detect, or re-direct it so that the target appears to be elsewhere. I'd suggest that, except in completely still conditions, a targeting sense of smell would be nigh useless without another sense that allows you to detect airflow. You'd also need two noses: I know we have two nostrils but they feed into the same sensory apparatus: we have to physically cast about to track down a smell.

 

I'm not sure that you'd be able to catch a smelly ball, no matter how acute a sense of smell you have, as the wavefront of smell from a moving target, especially a fast moving target, would not give you sufficient time to anticipate (we see a ball coming from a long way off and have time to calculate roughly where we need to be to catch it, refining he model as it approached) or react to catch it.

 

What is almost unique to smell though is the ability to follow it back in time. Without any cunning advantages, like extradimensional, you might well be able to say to a high degree of accuracy what happened in a room a day before, because smells linger.

 

Of course targeting smell is a perfectly legitimate construction for HERO, but if you want to be accurate and as realistic as context allows, it should be very hard to use .

[BobGreenwade]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

More than any other sense, smell can be fooled by powers that do not directly affect senses. For instance if you have a Change Environment power, or even an EB based on wind, you could legitimately blow away anything the sense might detect, or re-direct it so that the target appears to be elsewhere. I'd suggest that, except in completely still conditions, a targeting sense of smell would be nigh useless without another sense that allows you to detect airflow. You'd also need two noses: I know we have two nostrils but they feed into the same sensory apparatus: we have to physically cast about to track down a smell.

 

I'm not sure that you'd be able to catch a smelly ball, no matter how acute a sense of smell you have, as the wavefront of smell from a moving target, especially a fast moving target, would not give you sufficient time to anticipate (we see a ball coming from a long way off and have time to calculate roughly where we need to be to catch it, refining he model as it approached) or react to catch it.

While most of your basic information is correct, your conclusions aren't.

 

For one thing, directionality in smell has been clinically proven, and with minimal casting about. It stems in part from the trigeminal nerve, though some direction is still detected through the nose.

 

And we don't have just one sensory apparatus; we have two, one for each nostril. (Actually, if you count the vomeronasal system, we have two for each nostril, but vomeronasal smell is almost never consciously noted in humans.) Generally the two take turns in "shifts" of twenty minutes or so rather than working in stereo like our eyes and ears, but sometimes stereo smell does happen, especially when an aroma is new or suddenly changes.

 

So while true targeting smell doesn't occur (as far as I've been able to determine) in any real-world creatures, it's theoretically possible. It would suffer some of the drawbacks you mention, though not to the extent that I think you've assumed.

 

Trust me on this one -- I've spent the past five months reading every book and journal article I could get my hands on about the topic.

[prestidigitator]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

Trust me on this one -- I've spent the past five months reading every book and journal article I could get my hands on about the topic.

 

You're sick. But I can respect that.

[PhilFleischmann]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

And we don't have just one sensory apparatus; we have two' date=' one for each nostril. (Actually, if you count the vomeronasal system, we have two for each nostril, but vomeronasal smell is almost never consciously noted in humans.) Generally the two take turns in "shifts" of twenty minutes or so rather than working in stereo like our eyes and ears, but sometimes stereo smell does happen, especially when an aroma is new or suddenly changes.[/quote']

I've also read that our nostrils don't smell equally. One is biased slightly to make smells seem more pleasant (or less unpleasant), while the other one is more accurate.

[BobGreenwade]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

I've also read that our nostrils don't smell equally. One is biased slightly to make smells seem more pleasant (or less unpleasant)' date=' while the other one is more accurate.[/quote']This is more true in men than women.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

............................

Trust me on this one -- I've spent the past five months reading every book and journal article I could get my hands on about the topic.

 

OK, OK, I believe you

 

I do think that sfx of non-sense affecting powers would affect smell (and taste) more than any other sense, just because of what is being detected: you are detecting small amounts of chemical residue, which exists long past its creation, unlike the light that eyes detect.

 

In addition there has to be an enormous difference in the ability to smell detect (say) a man in sports gear and a man in a space suit: I daresay that the latter emits far fewer volatile chemicals.

 

I've got quite a few ideas on how we could overhaul the sense system to make it more logical, and sensation intensity is certainly part of that, but I was hoping for a few more comments on expanding the detect base and clarifying what 'Detect' actually does before I move on.

 

I'll post the next bit when I get home tonight in any event.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Some thoughts on senses

 

So, first we have to determine what the sense detects, and generally it can not detect something like 'trees' it would detect something else (like visual spectrum light) and then recognise the tree from what it 'sees'. There might be some senses, perhaps a sense attuned to magical signatures, that can detect individual items - and it is convenient to use that as an example now to keep Thia engaged

 

Something that bugs me, a little, is that human senses do not form a specific category in Hero. We are ‘sort of discriminatory’. I strongly suspect that this is so that we can build senses with ‘discriminatory (partial -1/2): +3 points’ to balance that awkward ‘sense +2’ modifier, and make them all round out to numbers divisible by 5. If so, that seems like a bad idea to me.

 

Human senses are something we all understand – what they can do, what their limits are. They ought to be a standard category, and that category ought to be ‘discriminatory’. That would mean that senses divide into three groups: basic detect, which simply identifies the presence and location of what it is you are detecting, discriminatory, which gives quite a bit of additional information, allowing you to either detect or infer attributes that are beyond the scope f the original detect, for instance, telling two things that you can detect apart – basically you can obtain a lot of identification information, and infer even more (with appropriate skills). Finally we have analyse, which gives you practically all the information that can be obtained about what you are detecting, down to chemical composition – in fact you go quite a way out of the scope of the original detect.

 

There we go.

 

To use an example to clarify what I mean:

 

For instance DETECT BULLET would allow you to detect the presence and location of bullets but you could not tell one bullet from another.

 

DISCRIMINATORY DETECT BULLET would allow you to detect the presence and location of bullets, and tell a .22 from a 9mm round. You could tell if the bullet had been fired. You might be able to say something about the manufacturer, or source of the bullet if you have knowledge skills with bullets or ammunition, or maybe just with guns. You might be able to say how long ago a bullet was fired, or what it hit, if you have forensic skills.

 

ANALYTICAL DETECT BULLET gives you all of the above plus definitive information about the composition of the bullet, and any peculiarities of it. You can basically do pretty much anything that lab tests can do, although you will still need to have relevant knowledge skills to properly utilise the information, for instance, if you have the knowledge to apply the information you could say whether a particular bullet was fired from a particular gun.