(07-23-2013, 08:58 AM)Callipygian Wrote: 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).
To clarify what I actually said in that post. I didn't include lions on the list of animals because I couldn't find any source to tell me "Lion sense of smell is X times stronger than humans." I suppose it is slightly implied by the comparisons, but I never stated explicitly that Miqo'te sense of smell should be on par with house cats. In fact....
(07-23-2013, 08:58 AM)Callipygian Wrote: 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.
Here I assert that I would be cool with someone playing a character whose scent capabilities fall anywhere within the range between house cats and wolves. In D&D, a character can absolutely develop a sense of smell capable of tracking someone by smell, it just requires them to expend two of their feats and invest skill points in survival/wilderness lore, and skill penalties accrue for every hour since the scent trail was laid. Since those two feats and skill points are a limited resource, it's balanced by the fact that you're giving up an opportunity for attack feats or stealth skills by improving it. If you can find some way to do that in an MMO where we don't have RP character sheets or stat points to balance between a large number of character options, I personally would be cool with it.
This will be the last I say about the senses argument on this thread. I'll be moving this discussion to the thread Khaze'to and Alothia started here.
I'm a tinker! Tinkerer? Hrm.... I'm an artificer! - Myxie Tryxle | Impressions and Memories
