(07-22-2013, 08:07 PM)Razamir Lahoka Wrote: Hell for one such instance their nose, as per SE "Â have the noses of hounds."Â If you bring this topic up, you are shot down as being a metagamer or even godmodder.I'll take a stab at the second part first. From the private messages I've gotten regarding this thread, the vast majority want this information to inform their character's backstory. Because the male Miqo'te are new to the setting and because their social structure is different from normal humans due to their different mating strategies, people have a lot of questions without any answers leading to a lot of discussion.
tldr = Why are people focusing on the mating so much of this race, when there are many more aspects to focus on, str/stam/agi their senses ie noses, eyesight, hearing.  etc. Unless alot of people are planning on doing just this " breeding." Should it really matter if not? I personally think , if any aspect of the nuhn thing should be focused on is their other duties, such as protecting their lands/ clan members, hunting etc.
As for the other discussion you mention about the senses, I'd be very interested to see that thread. I did a little digging and got a couple ideas. For your quote about the Miqo'te sense of smell, I found this quote from 1.x:
"Midlanders do not possess the endless stamina of the Roegadyn, nor the hawk-like eyes of the Elezen, nor the hound-like noses of the Miqo'te, nor the deer-like ears of the Lalafell, nor even the muscle-bound builds of their cousins, the Highland Hyur."
It's the only one I could find equating Miqo'te to hounds. Considering this comes from an NPC description of Midlander Hyur rather than a description of Miqo'te, my take is that it's a little bit of poetic license, and that they were likely exaggerating a little bit to punctuate the notion that Midlanders were the "jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none." Just as I would doubt that Roegadyn all have no limit to their stamina and that Elezen have eyes that are literally capable of telescopic vision like many birds of prey.
Further searching yielded this quote, which seems to come directly from a description about Miqo'te. This same quote appeared on several wikis. Although I couldn't find its source in game, it sounds like it came from the character creator:
"Adaption to a hunting lifestyle has fashioned them with a keen sense of smell, powerful legs, and a tail which provides them with exceptional balance."
Doing a little bit of internet research, I came up with the following numbers. Real-world cats have senses of smell that are roughly 14 times as acute as humans. For wolves, their sense of smell jumps to 100 times the strength of humans (about 7 times more powerful than cats). Bloodhounds are the terrestrial kings. Their sense of smell is around 300 times more powerful than humans (3 times that of wolves and 20 times that of cats).
Given the source in game is NPC dialog and the fact that bloodhounds are the result of 1000 years of artificial selection by humans to specifically strengthen their sense of smell over all other traits, the idea that Miqo'te have scent capabilities equivalent to bloodhounds is unreasonable. A shark, for example, can detect blood in the water at concentrations as low as 1 part per billion, but it dedicates a third of its brain to olfaction in order to do so.
The other problem with a super-human sense of smell is that it's game breaking for a variety of scenarios. If you're throwing a murder mystery event and someone's character can just smell the butler's scent on the bloody candlestick as well as the victim's blood on the butler despite him washing his hands, the story ends in three minutes and no one had any fun. It becomes an arms race where the storyteller has to bend over backwards to find a means to completely negate the player's ability just to have an interesting story, leaving both parties aggravated.
If we consider the second quote as giving a more reasonable interpretation for a Miqo'te to have a sense of smell somewhere in the real world cat to wolf range and limited the capability of the trait to something along the lines of the scent feat from D&D 3.5, I think that would be more reasonable.
Personally, I'm curious about Miqo'te night vision. I was watching a documentary on lions yesterday and learned that their night vision is far better than humans can achieve even with military grade night vision goggles. Real world lions do a lot of their hunting at night, and often sleep through the heat of the day, so they differ from Seekers in that regard. While not explicitly mentioned anywhere that I can find, I wouldn't think it unreasonable that at least the Keepers would have really good night vision.
I'm a tinker! Tinkerer? Hrm.... I'm an artificer! - Myxie Tryxle | Impressions and Memories
