Thermal Smoke Visibility Modifier, Use best or worst modifier? Options

[RedmondLarry]

I'm reading the Visibility Modifier rules (SR3 p. 111-112, and MM p. 49) and am having trouble agreeing with one of the rules. I'll describe what I'm thinking, and you tell me if it makes sense to you. Here's the rule in question:

[mfb]

flash and glare modifiers apply even if you switch off the affected vision system. as for thermal smoke, that's like saying that because you're standing next to a jet engine and unable to hear anything, you should also be unable to see. just because you're unable to differentiate body heat from the surrounding temperature doesn't mean the visual-light-sensitive portions of your eyes are somehow being 'overloaded'.

[Shockwave_IIc]

My counted on it is that if it's cybered then you can turn it off, thus drop to the better modfier. However if it's a natrual vision giving you the problems, tough your suck with it.

[ Spoiler ]

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[RedmondLarry]

mfb, are you saying that a Troll, who we could consider to have both "Natural Vision" and "Thermo Vision", should be able to use whichever of these two visions give him the best Target Number?

Shockwave, that seems quite reasonable.

[Kurukami]

A troll shouldn't be able to, because he has the natural thermographic perception -- he can't turn that off.

[mfb]

yes, ourteam, that's exactly what i'm saying--only partly because that's what the rules say. consider it this way, as well: metahumans pay for their abilities with a loss of karma pool. turning those abilities into disadvantages is incredibly unfair.

and no one yet has explained why everything being roughly the same temperature would affect a troll's ability to see in the visual light spectrum. that makes absolutely no sense.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

I think OurTeam has a good perspective on this. If someone is being blinded by one of their multiple visual senses that cannot by turned off, then it should in some way impare them. Lucky for players this applies to opposition as well. Fortunately for players who do have cybered visual enhancements, if something is being overloaded, there is the glorious free action available on everybody's turn that one can take to deactivate that cyberware.

I wouldn't go as far as comparing this to a deafening jet engine imparing your sight, since the senses described above are all based on visual perception only. Bioware heat sensing organs might overload senses in the same way however, even though they are not part of the eyes.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

Turning them into disadvantages grin

They have attribute bonuses also that give them advantage over humanity. But the deal behind the senses is that a cybered sense provides less help to its owner than a natural sense, providing the one bonus that it can be deactivated on a free action. I cannot deactivate my natural hearing anymore than a cobra can stop using its natural heat sensing organs on a wim.

Metahumanity gets the lower penalties because of their natural senses, but because their natural they cannot take a free action to deactivate them. Then again, that would apply mostly if you are playing this game in a reality type of setting.

[mfb]

*snort* those attribute bonuses don't mean diddly. twice the karma pool is a massively more useful racial trait than anything that any of the other races can offer. not to mention the lower point cost of being human.

and, artemis, you're mistaken. if a visual sense is being 'overloaded'--through either glare or flash--then that glare or flash mod continues to apply, even after you've switched the affected visual system off.

why should not being able to see in the infrared affect your ability to see in the visual light spectrum? please, please explain this to me. thermal smoke doesn't induce glare, it doesn't induce flash. all it does is warm up the surrounding air a bit. i mean, come on--if you drop your troll in the middle of the tropics, are you going to say it impairs his normal vision? because guess what: it's going to impair his thermal vision, probably by about the same amount as thermal smoke.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

I know a few Troll playing characters who would disagree with that. Elves make wonderful summoning mages since their charisma is that much higher than a human's maximum. And of course, there are the Gnomes and their eight Willpower. The improvement to maximum racial attribute limits alone makes many metahumanity races very appealing when compared to humanity.

In addition to which, the rule is meant to discourage people from playing metahumans all of the time since humans are still considered to be the most numerous. Which is why it is listed as an optional rule for GMs and groups who wish to push their campaign in that direction.

[mfb]

humans' faster karma pool progression isn't an optional rule. it's right there in black and white on pg 242 of SR3, and nowhere is it called 'optional'. elves and gnomes and whatnot--a human will whup the snot out of any of those within 50 or so karma, and the gap will only widen as the game goes on. yes, humans are at an initial disadvantage. that disadvantage disappears very, very quickly.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

Smirk

I don't see that spot in the rules, but if you have then I'd be curious to know where. It seems logical to me that if someone's thermographic vision were deactivated then they would no longer be blinded or affected by that after that point. (By a purely game mechanical point of view.) If you wanted to, as a GM, you could apply a cool-down period during which the penalty takes a round or two extra to burn off.

The Troll in the jungle may have toruble at first, as any of us taken from a dark and damp placesuch asthe northwest and dropped into a sunny and humid environment like the tropics would have to deal with. But after a while they would adapt and burn off their penalties.

My perception of the thermal smoke grenade is that it is meant to blind those with natural or cyber-enhanced thermographic vision. As if all the red light that I normally see were suddenly amplified a hundred fold for a few seconds. For a Troll I imagine that their natural vision and thermographic vision are somewhat melded, much like a Cyberzombie can see both the normal world and astrally perceive at the same time.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

Ah, I believe I was remembering back to soemthing I read in Second Edition that indicated it was an optional rule, although I might be mistaken. Ultimately it is up to your GM, but in the end it still goes to enforce that humans are the standard and are still more numerous overall than metahumanity variants.

As for the disadvantage overall, there are plenty of ways to get humans to burn off their karma pool if they want to live to fight another day. And not always does a high karma pool mean that someone will survive. Some days luck simply isn't on your side, whether you have 4 karma pool or 16. People with 4 karma pool simply have to play smarter in the end, taking a little more creativity on the part of a player.

[Rev]

[mfb]

CC page 49, artemis, under 'multiple vision systems', last sentence.

yes, you can burn a character's karma pool. you can also cause attribute failure in a troll's Strength score, or an elf's Cha, or a gnome's Willpower. you can shoot out a street sam's cybereyes and blind him. you can put a mage through magic loss. you can degrade a rigger's drone network and steal all his drones. none of this changes the fact that humans have the ability to roll more dice than any other metatype. your arguments about 'luck isn't always with you' applies to all characters, artemis--and for those days when the dice are against a player, a human character has a better overall chance of surviving, because he's got more chances to reroll his screw-ups.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

Not a bad idea at all. You're right about the smoke and flash thing, the smoke would linger a lot longer and impare normal vision as well as thermographic. Flare compensation would prove to be the saving factor at the end of all this.

I always wondered— second edition mentioned this, but 3rd edition never promoted the idea of flare compensating sunglasses. Such a bad idea to make sunglasses that are exceptionally good at their originally intended purpose? Supra-polarized Sunglasses. They allow them to supply thermographic or low-light modifications, so why not.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

Yes I had a feeling you'd bring that one up. That is applying to multiple Cybered vision “Systems”, if I am not mistaken. To which one can only use one at a time.

Natural vision, like a cat's ability to see with low-light and natural vision are not interchangeable but are instead automatically stacked.

[mfb]

they're not 'stacked', you take the lowest applicable modifier.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

To fit with the rules and their method of applying modifiers to one's abilities and perceptions, but not because it is the only sense operating at that moment. Perhaps because the user is concentrating on the one spectrum of vision more than the others, but not shutting off their other senses entirely in order to do so.

[mfb]

ah. right.

well, like i said--until someone can explain to me why a troll in the tropics should be totally blind, i'm going to continue using the current rules.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

I would see no reason why he couldn't adjust after aclimatizing. Their eyes adjust to the environment and begin to better pick out the details and such. No reason that couldn't happen within a the first five to ten minutes of their arrival. Usually people won't get thrown straight into a situation like that, but I would think that if the Troll were a trained member of a military unit that commonly dropped into jungle zones and the like, then he or she would have little or no trouble adjusting to the new levels of sensory input. It would be something they are use to and that they are expecting.

For a shadowrun team who operates in the dark and cloudy lands of the northwest greater Seattle Metroplex, a sudden drop in a tropic jungle climate would definitely play havok on their senses.

[mfb]

no, artemis. thermographic vision works off of relative values. if the entire area is 98 degrees or so, you're simply not going to be able to pick out a human being's heat signature. what you're saying is that any time there's a hot day, trolls will be blind. that's insane.

[Guest_Artemis_*]

If they only had thermographic vision, then I'd agree with your interpretation of what I said. But because they have a combination of natural vision and thermographic, I see them as being able to tune out the general overload of input and recognize beings and targets through their other attributes aside from heat.

In such an environment, where both air, plants, and beings are practically the same heat.. then yes I suppose thermographic vision is not going to give you any help in combat situations that require modifiers. But it won't blind a Troll since they can tune it out after a while, much like the person downstairs with the loud speaker system playing Troll Thrash Metal Band music all night long.

[mfb]

right, that's exactly what i'm saying. thermographic vision won't help you, in the jungle--but it's not going to blind you, any more than the heat of a thermal smoke grenade is going to blind you (granted that the smoke part of a thermal smoke grenade will).

in short, you take the lowest applicable modifier in any situation.

[Tziluthi]

Well, obviously IR smoke grenades are just a version of smoke grenade used to counter thermographic vision, right? So essentially they'd work by creating a smoke screen and a heat screen, right? It's difficult for normal people to see through it, but its nigh impossible for people with two types of vision being confused. I don't think it's the presence of heat which screws the thermographics, its the fact that there's a screen of heat, not to mention a screen of smoke. This differs from the tropics in the respect that the eyes have a contingency, normal vision, whereas with the IR smoke , it's all being impeded. If that explination doesn't do it for you, just remember that the rules are abstract, and that reality has no place in a role-playing game. :D