Read the fucking rules. Perception is in no way limited to the five 'standard' human senses. It also covers gut feelings & picking up ambient mana, for example (realizing you are being shadowed, noticing an astral form passing through you).

And noticing the use of magic is not a Visual, Audio, Olfactory, Tactical, or 'I lick it' test.

This made me giggle. "I lick the spell!"

While you may not consciously acknowledge that you see, hear or smell something that leads you to believe you are being followed it is still a reaction to a stimulus of one of the five senses. Anything else cannot be perceived. The passing astral form probably is a tactile sensation.

If the test to notice magic is not a visual test, why does the BBB give several visual example for what the clue could be?

Sorry double post. First one ever.

While gut reactions are based on input from the five senses, we are not consciously aware of what that input is. There's a section of your brain that makes snap judgements (the fight-or-flight part of the brain) and it clues you in to changing your behavior, or warns you about something (you think you're being followed, so you take an unexpected detour into a bookstore to test the hypothesis). What we're aware of is the idea but not the input.

The Getty Kouros is subject to debate on its authenticity because all scientific analysis showed that the statued was indeed as old as it was claimed to be, but every art expert who looked at it had the first impression that it was wrong, that there was some aspect that they couldn't put their finger on that was making alarms in their head go off. The first words out of one person's mouth after hearing that the Getty paid for the statue was "I'm sorry to hear that."

Thanks for all the info everyone. I had totally forgotten about the perception test based on the force. That will help me a lot as I have a mage who likes to stay invisible most of the time. Now I realize I simply have to add the thresholds from the casting to the invisibility and wammo there is the invisible mage! hehehehhehe

I think you misunderstand something there. The perception test to notice the casting of the spell has no impact whatsoever on the spell resistance test once the spell is cast. Even if you do witness the invisibility spell being cast, it does not help you find the target of the spell. It is just as invisible as it would be if the spell was cast half a world away

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but this seemed relevant...

The test is to notice the spell being CAST, right?

Is there anything mentioned about noticing that a spell is being sustained?

Like, a mage sustaining phantasm - does a person get a chance to notice that the mage is sustaining the spell?

Nope.

I'd say no, but. While there is no hard rule on it sustaining a spell imposes a 2 dice penalty to all your actions due to concentration. That level of concentration should and IMO would have visual cues, but how hard it is to notice should be up to your GM. Also bluff/disguise could be used as a skill to counter people noticing it. Sort of like if you are injured but patched up so not bleeding out, people can still notice you limp or favor your right side etc. There is no rule for that, but it is common in both reality and fiction to notice these things and that is one of the things the perception skill is for.

If I were to handle it I'd say there is a threshold of 2 to notice this, a person can use bluff or disguise to actively try to hide the strain of sustaining a spell each hit reduces the hits from the perception check by 1. Also all this would tell someone is they are distracted and focusing on something else, it would not tell them they are sustaining a spell though that might be a logical conclusion given the world.

Cool thanks ya'll

I couldn't find any rules for noticing sustaining spells, but like you say Shinobi, it seems like the concentration required (-2) would be noticeable. But then again, with the amount of AR and whatnot whizzing around, I guess someone might notice you're distracted, but wouldn't automatically realize that you were sustaining.

Magic is pretty much the "I win" button in SR by RAW.

Agreed, telling if someone is distracted is a standard social/perception test, but you wouldn't know why.

I would also add (the level of the quality) the focused concentration quality to anyone trying to perceive a magician casting or sustaining a spell.