I had a thought today.

Why can't we, with sufficient skill, limit how far we want to extend our "feelers" when we Perceive Health?

It seems like skill in Empathy shouldn't just be a measure of how strong your empathic tendencies are, but also of your ability to control them. This would seem to suggest that as you became more skilled with your empathy you'd find yourself capable of doing more (or rather less) than just "Opening up the Floodgates."

It seems to me, that at a certain point you should be able to limit yourself to a number of "rooms away" that's less than your maximum when you Perceive Health.

Thus, let's say an empath can sense people who are 5 rooms away. Something along the lines of what I'm thinking would allow them to indicate, when activating Perceive Health, that they only want to perceive 1, 2, 3 or 4 rooms away instead.

Thoughts?

>>Thoughts?

I like the idea, and agree with the theory behind it. My main question is why you'd want to limit the ability? I tend to use perceive health either as a training tool, or to figure out which way somebody went. Either way, I prefer the max range.

- Ogoh

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System Announcement: In order to simplify our mythology for newer players, all gods have been renamed after the Little Rascals. Henceforth, Urrem'tier will be known as "Spanky."

From what has been said about described about past NPC Empaths, not being able to control and limit our Empathy has been a pretty significant drawback to being an Empath, for example, the letter about the Imperial Empaths having to retreat farther from society because thier empathy was so great it was maddening.

Also it would seem to me that the ability to limit our Empathic Sensativity could be used as an argument against why Empathic Shock would/should occure... I mean if we could control our ES, who's to say we couldn't just turn it 'off' when whe wanted to attack something, then turn it back 'on' when we wanted to use some of our nifty empathic magic spells?


Got Body Parts?

I seem to recall Perc Health being explained as essentially taking the lid off your Empathy, which is why we currently have no real control of it. Its just a flood of information, and, if we get overwhelmed, we get stunned.

If you want to actually look at it, the higher Empathy you have, the more dangerous it is. There are essentially two ways to look at how much you can see with perc health, your radius and your maximum capacity. Keep in mind, this is from my observations and watching my Empathy skill grow over several hundred ranks since I got the ability. I did not start my Empath when perc health was released, so I can't really say how it works at the lower end and my estimations may be off.

For distance, you're going to get an extra room out about every 100 ranks. You can start out seeing your present room for the first 150 (Not sure when you can actually start sensing things at all with perc health).
At about 140-150 Empathy ranks, you can being to see Empaths in adjacent rooms, by the time you reach 200 ranks, you'll see be seeing nonempaths in adjacent rooms nearly 100% of the time. Add a room to these thresholds for every 100 ranks.

For maximum capacity, or 'how many people can I see before getting stunned' I've estimated you can see about 1 life force for every 10 ranks before stunning. So at about 100 ranks, you should be able to handle seeing 10 people before hitting the stun. When you are Legendary (560 Empathy) it'll take about 56 entities before you stun. Of course, it is rarer to get 10 people in a room to push you over, unless you're in a gathering spot.

Now combine this, and you see that if a 100th circle Empath has a 6 room radius and a capacity of only 56 people, then a place like the Crossing can be a dangerous place to perc health with all the guards around. Also, you're going to see your window scroll by several times over as the data rolls in. As I said earlier, for me to see all the data, I need to stop and scroll back up if I want to see what's in the room closest to me.

Now, I said I did understand why we get this 'flood' this doesn't mean that an Empath somewhere can come up with an IC way to teach us how to control it. The Empaths of the Seven Star Empire may have known a lot, but I'm sure there's more to discover out there, and maybe it'll help us be better in control of our Empathy.

Shaunn

I really like this idea. And there is ample precedent for exercising fine control of our empathic senses--the TOUCH modifiers that let us only see wounds of a certain intensity, as well as the TAKE modifiers most/part/all.

The more rooms I get (currently four), the more I appreciate just what a great ability perc health is, and how useful, especially during events and invasions. Adding refined functionality to perc health would really honor and enhance what this ability does.

We should be able to filter not only the range of Perc Health, but for anything the ability can do. Target a specific person to see if they're in range. Find only the hidden people two or three rooms away. See who in your range has disease, or a parasite. How about adding race sensing, too? It would only work if race isn't concealed such as by a feature-hiding cloak.

PERC HEALTH 4 - shows only beings precisely at range 4
PERC HEALTH <3 - shows beings three rooms away or closer
PERC HEALTH >3 - shows beings three rooms away or farther
PERC HEALTH GNOME
PERC HEALTH EMPATH - shows only the empaths in range
PERC HEALTH NON-EMPATH
PERC HEALTH DISEASE/POISON/PARASITE/VITALITY
PERC HEALTH UNDEAD
PERC HEALTH HIDDEN
PERC HEALTH CELINTH - well, you might just use your nose for that one ;)

~ Player of Farman et al.

http://www.elanthipedia.com/wiki/Main_Page

>>How about adding race sensing, too?

This I would say no to, since it's very close to sensing guild. Unless you meant like with empaths you only would sense your own race (I'd be willing to let that go in terms of playability and community, even if under Empathic Sense theory it wouldn't make sense).

J'Lo, I'm a ranger.. I'd believe anything.....
The Manipulation List -- http://symphaena.com/index.html

This is something we've visited about perc health since day one, but its very good to bring up again cause...well, why not?

Anyways, I think if its a biological state, it should be perceivable. I think some things are more useful to others.

Just as a reminder, we can see: Whether they are an empath, if they are hiding, general vitality level, whether they are poisoned or diseased, and if they have any sort of parasites on them.

Some other things that may be helpful, if I were randomly perc healthing around a battlefield that immediately spring to mind is whether someone was unconscious and if someone was stunned. Or seeing if someone is bleedin - that could be useful as well.

Things like seeing someone's race could be fun to do, but I'm not sure how useful it would be. That doesn't mean we still shouldn't do it? I love me some fluff skills.

Shaunn

<<Some other things that may be helpful, if I were randomly perc healthing around a battlefield that immediately spring to mind is whether someone was unconscious and if someone was stunned.>>

Being able to sense when someone is stunned would be great. In fact, I wouldn't mind getting danger-messaging akin to the randomly sensing that someone's entering the dying state when someone gets severely stunned.

In combat, getting stunned is often the kiss of death and the moment when intervention is needed. I also wouldn't object to Empaths getting a stun-removal ability or spell, if such a thing would be feasible. :)

Also, given that we can already tell race via assess race, and set a demeanor for a race in general, it seems to me like there is no reason why Empaths couldn't sense the races of individuals within their perceive health range, if they should wish to.

~Laril

>If you aren't wounded, about to die, or otherwise suffering from some non-ideal state of being, you'd be indistinguishable from anyone else.

I find your interpretation of how Empathy works to be excessively limited.

Why shouldn't a dwarf be distinguishable from an elf via empathy? Their bodies are put together in slightly different ways. Shouldn't one be able to determine that via empathy? On the most rudimentary level: S'kra have tails; no one else does. Thus when perceiving those around you, anyone who has a tail is a S'kra. But, there's no reason that more minute differences shouldn't also be detectable with enough skill.

>>Shouldn't one be able to determine that via empathy?

Strictly from an Empathic Sense theory standpoint, where things actually have to make sense? I say no. There's no evidence that, aside from the vela'tohr plants, the primary races are capable of infusing their lifeforce to be stronger/weaker than normal.

From the perspective of getting players to clump together and be more communal? I'm all for it. ASSESS RACE shouldn't be the only way to get a nice list like that.

>>In fact, evidence points to the fact that we can distinguish between individuals enough to be able to tell the names of people we detect with perc health.

Umm, no. I'm pretty sure you're referring to our current mechanical situation where anyone not in hiding is shown with a name (except for generic NPCs, which are collapsed into one all-encompassing label for scroll-inhibiting convenience):

Drawing your senses inwards, blah blah blah.

You sense the presence of Ted.
You sense the presence of Joe, with a wavering essence.
You sense the presence of Fran, a fellow empath.
You sense an unidentifiable presence.
You sense a hidden empathic presence.

Hmm, no names for those last two. Seems to me, though, that it indicates there's a line-of-sight component. That is, we get one set of blobs in our empathic third eye, and we get a second set through our normal vision. Like the way stereo vision works in RL, our brains automatically merge the two together to reach conclusions of "Hey! That's what's-his-face!" (for mechanical convenience, the game uses names for identification.)

J'Lo, I'm a ranger.. I'd believe anything.....
The Manipulation List -- http://symphaena.com/index.html

>Hmm, no names for those last two. Seems to me, though, that it indicates there's a line-of-sight component. That is, we get one set of blobs in our empathic third eye, and we get a second set through our normal vision.

This doesn't explain why we get names for people who are not in the same room as us.

But even if you do come up with a reason for why that works, the exact same logic can be applied to showing race via perc health (you sense someone and then can see that they're a __). So I'm not sure what the problem with "sensing" race is.

Murs and Prydaens have tails. Rakash have tails in moonskin.

Detecting race and or species would be very cool, especially against critters... Id much rather sense if that relativly healthy presense is my GS, a wolf companion, or warcat ready to tear my head off. But I think that would be a HUGE undertaking to make happen.


Got Body Parts?

Random aside...

There is a variance in Shift difficulty depending on whether or not you are Shifting someone of your own race. Races that are different from your own are harder to alter with Shift. This tells me that as far as Empathic abilities are concerned there is a discernible difference between the races.

So J'lo, you wanted evidence there's your evidence. Have anything to counter with except "because I said so"?

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Rev. Reene

The silence weaves a tapestry of once enchanted themes,
The shadows listen carefully and question what it means;
For stories have lives of their own,
But what good's a story whose end is unknown?

This is the first time I've noticed sensing non-Empaths two rooms away.

Empathy: 243
Power Perceive: 242

Charisma: 20
Discipline: 36
Wisdom: 26
Intelligence: 26

I forget what stats people were saying might be important.

It doesn't happen every time (or even every other time.) 250 or 275 average to sense every time I'm guessing. I'll post again when I have narrowed it down more. (Leaning toward 275, maybe even as high as 300?)

-- Player of Szrael --

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You grip the oversized book hanging from your leather belt and survey the area with a hint of malice in your eyes.

With a violent cross-body motion, you draw your oversized book.

If it helps your data - I am just now starting to get non-empaths 3 rooms away.

Empathy : 370
Power : 273

Charisma :29
Disc : 35
Wis : 33
Intel : 33