Does 'Line of Sight' (LOS) range for spells include 'Touch'? In other words, if I have a blindfolded character, can he cast his Manabolt spell at a target he touches?

GM call. I've always played it that way, though. Touch trumps sight for forming links, IMO.

LOS and Touch are two different ranges. You don't need the former for the latter and vice-versa.

Sorry, I misread. If a spell has a LOS requirement, you have to see them even if you're touching them. Only Touch spells (or those you cast using Ritual Spellcasting) get around the LOS requirement of LOS spells. So no, you couldn't cast Manabolt by touching someone only, but you could cast Death Touch. They're two completely different types of "ranges," and one doesn't trump the other.

Umm... why worry about the blindfold? Have said mage use Astral Perception. The blindfold shouldn't be an issue then.

Alas, it still is. Because despite the fact that Astral Perception isn't "sight", shit that blocks your vision still blocks that.

astral perception does not let you see through solid objects.

Besides, not all Mystic Adept types have astral perception.

Mfb is right, astral perception is blocked by solid objects (even sunglasses and windows).

I wouldn't mind seeing a quote as well.

Why would a blindfold keep a mage who is astrally perceiving from seeing? Astral perception trumps the eyes not working, so it should equally trump having the eyes covered.

As far as casting, I say he could cast death touch, but not manabolt via touch but not sight.

blindfolds trump astral perception for the same reason that a brick wall trumps astral perception. the blindfold and the wall are doing the same thing--limiting the caster's vision. in both cases, the caster is not blind per se--he's just unable to see past the obstruction. anything between the caster's eye and his blindfold, he could easily target with a spell. with actual eye-not-working blindness, there's no obstruction; the physical organ simply doesn't work correctly.

as i stated above, there's a perfectly legitimate reason. blindness is not a physical obstruction. blindfolds are a physical obstruction. you don't need working eyes to astrally perceive, but you do need an unobstructed view. for stylistic reasons, i think i'd bend the rules such that a blind person wearing a blindfold would still be able to astrally perceive, but by a strict reading of the rules, i think they'd actually be astrally blinded by the blindfold.

hyzmarca, i don't believe your argument makes sense in the rules. it effectively gives mages near-perfect 360-degree vision. if that were the case, i think somebody would have said something, because that's going to have a huge effect on many aspects of the game.

A lot of these arguments, if true, would make the Mage Mask a non-item.

Well mfb, a mage can't cast LOS spells if he closes his eyes either. But he can astrally perceive and see things with his eyes closed. His eyelids are an obstruction in the astral too. You can't see through living things any more than you can see through a wall. So, that means mages have to keep their eyes open while perceiving too.

What if the mage doesn't have any eyes at all? Because of some sort of accident?

you don't need facing rules. you just need the understanding that the modifiers in the book apply to creatures with a field of vision at least passingly similar to that of an unmodified human. there's a huge, huge difference between being able to look in any direction at any time, and being able to see in every direction at all times. nothing in SR i've ever seen suggests that you look at the astral through anything except your eyes--working or not. adding that in is a major change to the fluff, even if you discount the impact on the rules.

Tarantula, i think it's probably up to the GM whether or not closing your eyes--or covering your eyes with your hand, or whatever--blocks your own astral perception. someone who doesn't have any eyes at all would be, in the rules, blind, just as if they had non-working eyes. the rules for being blind would apply to an eyeless person they way they do to any other blind character. they would perceive the astral from the portion of their face where their eyes normally would reside.

what in the rules suggests to you that there's a difference between having your vision blocked by a brick wall and having your vision blocked by a blindfold?

The fact that a brickwall completely seals you off from an area, while a blindfold leaves quite a lot of you unblocked.

Here's a question: If your using astral perception wouldn't the spell be cast on the astral plane?

They don't exist in SR4. At least not yet. So... nothing.

a blindfold seals you off from the area outside the blindfold. the only difference between a blindfold and a brick wall is how close they are to your face. if you put your face against the wall, does it become a blindfold and allow you to see through it? no, of course not. so maybe it's the dimensions that matter--a blindfold is only a few inches high and wide, and generally less than a fifth of an inch deep (i'm estimating, obviously). does that mean that any thin item a few inches high and wide is transparent? are they only transparent when you hold them up to your face? how close to your face do they have to get before they become transparent? and most importantly, why hasn't the fact been ever mentioned before that items of certain dimensions become transparent to astral perception in certain circumstances?

there are huge, huge differences between being blind and wearing a blindfold. one of those differences is that being blind doesn't stop you from perceiving astrally, and everything in the rules indicates that wearing a blindfold does.

here's what it boils down to for me: blindfolds worked in 1st-3rd editions. nothing in 4th edition indicates that anything has changed with the way blindfolds interact with astral perception. ergo, nothing has changed with the way blindfolds interact with astral perception.

As others have pointed out, astral perception is a completely psychic sense. It is neither sight nor sound, and the descriptive equivalence of both exist to the psychic sense (thus negating that one is, in fact, linked to the other in any real way; else there would be astral sight and astral hearing senses). You can actually "see" inside people while using it, detecting not only the location of any implants they have, but toxins, diseases, and hoards of other details that real sight can't give you.

So why do so many people assume that sense originates from the eyes of the magician? Especially since there's faiths out there that claim a "third eye" located in the middle of their forehead is the source of their psychic senses, and doubtfully countless other similar belliefs not centered on the physical eyes. Why can't the entire body of the magician be the "astral eyes," or more correctly their own aura? And why should a blindfold stop it? Just because it interfers with their meat eyes, even when that's not necessary the seat of their astral senses?

A brick wall is definitely an obstacle. But why should a blindfold be one when a headband or hat isn't? Or any form of clothing for that matter? What makes the meat eyes so special to a psychic Hindu, or someone who was born without the ability to see and never associated sight with his eyes to begin with?

the psychic Hindu can be wrong about the point of origin of his astral perception, just as a Christian can be wrong about the idea the 'miracles' granted him by YHWH are more powerful than the magic granted by any other god.

as to whether or not the psychic Hindu is wrong, well, the canon doesn't state it in concrete terms one way or the other. but a combination of evidence and reasoning leads me to believe that astral perception originates from the location of the meat eyes, whether they work or not or even whether they're there or not. we know that at least up until 2070, magemasks blocked astral perception, which means that astral perception originates from the head somewhere. astral perception is not sight, but it is a visual sense--it's described in terms of color and shape, in other words, rather than (say) pitch and volume or sweetness / saltiness / sourness. given that it's a visual sense, the simplest assumption is that it orginates in the eyes. it might orginate from the nostrils or the mouth or the chin or the crown--but that would be weird, weird enough that the fact that nothing states that astral perception originates from one of those locations can be taken as evidence that it doesn't. the fact that i've never told you i don't have six fingers on each hand can be taken as evidence (not proof, but evidence) that, indeed, i don't have six fingers on each hand.

that covers up to 2070--1st-3rd editions. in 4th edition, it's entirely possible that the origin of astral perception has changed, maybe to a mystical third eye, maybe to the entire surface of the skin. however, if it has changed, there's no evidence of it in any of the books thus far printed, including Street Magic--the definitive source of magic for 4th ed. therefore, the evidence that holds true for 1st-3rd edition also holds true for 4th. that evidence says that astral perception comes from the eyes, which means that a blindfold can block it.

So you can effectively "see" through people's clothes, skin, muscles, and organs to detect the exact type and location of an implant, but a thin piece of cloth stops you dead in your tracks... but only if it's blocking your meat eyes, which have zero direct correlation to astral perception? Curious.

well, to get technical, it never actually says you can see the implants. you just discern their location based on the aura of the person you see.

and, as i asked above, what's the difference between a thin strip of cloth and a brick wall? it never says anything in the rules about thin objects being transparent to astral perception.

Every time an obstacle is mentioned, it's something that's not part of the magician's own aura. That brick wall isn't part of the magician. Those sunglasses, blindfold, and monocle all are, in much the same way a projecting magician isn't stripped naked the moment they project. Sure, the current rules don't technically say you're not naked (at least not when I last read them), but it is a fairly safe assumption considering the art and flavor text seen all over the place.

Now if someone comes up behind you and covers your eyes with their hands, I can see that affecting things since that's someone else's aura impeding on your own. A magemask (a very specialized type of blindfold that was more than a mere blindfold, but a complete hood!) may very well have had its own aura, whether by being soaked in some kind of FAB-like substance, woven out of a dual-natured plant, or whatever else. Or it may have been simple cloth. It's rather a moot point right now since it curiously doesn't exist in SR4. The main point is that it clearly was more than a blindfold regardless of which idea you like better. And why is that?

That said, if astral perception was reliant on your eyes, why can't things like Optical Vision Magnification assist on assensing tests? Why are mages who never had eyes still limited by their eye sockets? What makes that part of the head so important to a sense that has nothing to do with sight beyond a metagaming reliance on sight and sound (which is our -- the players' -- most dominant senses) to describe things? Especially to those who place no importance there whatsoever?

Then again a blindfold could work due to the "emotional resonance" of it. People believe it blinds them, thus it blinds them.

EDIT: God damn, I must need sleep or something. Even I have no idea what I originally wrote!

in SR3, at least, it actually does all but say that your astral form is naked. you're allowed to create whatever clothing you want for your astral form, but it's pretty clear that you come out of your body with what you were born with. it doesn't say anything about clothing in SR4, unless there's something in SM. *shrug*

y'all keep misreading what i'm saying or something. i'm not saying astral perception depends on your eyes. it obviously doesn't, or being physically blind would render you astrally blind. but your POV when you're astrally perceiving is, as best i can determine from the evidence at hand, located in your eyes. why that is, i don't know. i didn't write the rules, i'm not in charge of the fluff.

No, I'm not misunderstanding you. Think you're just not getting what I'm saying either. I haven't read anything that says your eyes or your astral POV is based on your eyes. Yes, the descriptions rely on sight and sound, but that's because that's all we, the players, can comprehend. Astral perception isn't real (warning: incoming hippie alert!), so it's pretty damn hard to describe things with a sense you can't even comprehend.

granted. however, since it is described in visual terms, i don't see why the metaphor of vision wouldn't hold true except where it's specifically stated otherwise. i mean, it never says that you can differentiate between near and far astral presences, using astral perception--but we assume you can, because of the vision metaphor. why wouldn't the metaphor hold true for the location of the POV, since it's not stated otherwise?

Not the best analogy there. Distance is relative whether you can see it or not, whether you can hear it or not, or whether you can feel it or not. As for other analogies, I kinda touched on it two of my posts above. I'm leaning to it being more of an aura thing than a physical thing.

i'm not sure what the fact that distance is relative has to do with perceiving relative distances. if astral perception used scent instead of vision as a metaphor, it would be perfectly reasonable for it to be hard to differentiate between near and far astral presences; a near presence with a low force might very well smell as far away as a distant presence with a high force.

i've read your analogies and agree with them--astral perception is not vision, and does not necessarily follow the same rules as vision. however, it uses vision as its base metaphor, so to me it's more reasonable to assume that it works like vision except where stated otherwise than it is to assume that it has completely different properties than vision in cases where no determination is made in the rules.

...i'm getting tired, it's getting tough to condense what i'm trying to say into short sentences. might crash soon.

I don't know, dogs seem to have little trouble following a scent. Knowing it's not right where they are, but which direction it's coming from. Much like astral tracking, in fact. (Does that mean you can't astrally track someone if you have a nose plug on?) And what if someone covers your ears? Are you deaf on the astral plane, too?

And yeah, I'm heading out myself.

The visual metaphor isn't the only one they use. The last paragraph under Astral Perception says pretty clearly that there are astral "sounds". And elsewhere they mention that astral perceptions can be as much tactile or directly empathic as visual or auditory. A person with cancer reads as "gravely ill". A temple "feels" sacred. Murder scenes "smell" wrong.

Now, admittedly, they use 'see' much of the time. But, as Funkenstein pointed out - if you're trying to describe an experience to someone who hasn't (or can't) have it themselves, you couch it in the closest terms that they can comprehend. It's like the way artificial ultrasound systems are rendered as a visual approximation. The actual data collected has very little to do with the way sight works, but that's the easiest way to put it so people can use it.

Really, from the descriptions, astral perception seems to work a lot like the way matrix perception does. You're really taking all of the information at once but there's so much of it you're only generally aware of it as background noise. The astral energies permeate everything and react against each other in as a radiant field. The magician's body/soul is sensitive to all of this and by shifting their focus to particulars among the whole, they can try and make some sort of sense out of it or pick out individual components. How easy or difficult it is to detect a given thing among the chaos depends on how big it is, how "strong" its emanations are, or however else it stands out from the rest, not it's (meta)physical location relative to the observer.

Which gets back to the wall v. bandanna thing. If you couch astral perception totally in a visual metaphor, there is no real difference between them. Their shadows are equally opaque, and if the latter is "close" enough to you, it can blot out just as much of the astral world as the former to your perspective. But using the omnidirectional sense approach, the shadow of the cloth can only obscure another astral form smaller than itself (or exactly the same size). The wall, since its shadow is much larger, can offer cover to larger astral forms.

And, from a practical standpoint, it's alot easier than typing see/smell/hear/feel every single time. It's not an indicator that that's how the input is actually processed.

Also, the magemask wasn't a fancy gimp hood because covering the head or eyes blocks astral perception, but because it blocked physical LOS and it served as a useful base for installing the white noise generator, earplugs, and gag tube in one convenient package. Astral Perception and other mental or magical actions were hindered because the bloody thing made it exceptionally difficult to concentrate enough to do any of them. With a high enough willpower or a lucky roll, you theoretically could do any of those things - albeit with a high dice penalty.

from what i've read, dogs discern scent direction by the scatter of the scent--as time goes on, the scent left by somone's passing spreads, so the scent trail is weaker and wider where it's older. using that metaphor, you could track where an astral presence has been, but not necessarily where it is now, including how far away it is--though you could make educated guesses based on the relative age of different parts of the scent trail.

which is a whole 'nother topic. on the subject of astral POV, my stance is that it's in the eyes because the perception metaphor is visual. blindfolds are rarely encountered enough that if other GMs want to rule otherwise, i'm not going to come to their house and shoot them. they're wrong, and the lord will send them to hell for their wicked ways, but i'm not going to try to stop them.

MitS, page 12. it says it "completely cuts off line of sight", but doesn't say anything specific about astral perception. my assumption has always been that no LOS = no astral perception (since otherwise, astral perception would grand you LOS--a kinda important detail).

Yeah, I know that reference, but I see nothing about casting with high penalties, or only being effective because they make concentration difficult.

Actually, wouldn't a blindfold be within the mage's aura and as such, not affect this abilities on the Astral?

You certainly couldn't target a spell at the blindfold while it was on someone. There are rules in place that specifically forbid that sort of stuff.

I also remember in an earlier edition the claim that you went astral sans clothing. Which is why I mentioned using Astral Perception. But then again, opening your senses to the Astral isn't the same as actually GOING Astral (Perception vs Projection).

Honestly, if you are going to neuter a mage's ability to cast on you in terms of prisoners... you are going to put him/her into a living cage / barriers / wards so they can't escape astrally and their spell casting would be limited.

I just can't see a mere blindfold stopping their ability to cast entirely. Interfere with? Yes. Totally prohibit? No.

I always understood Astral Perception to be a 360 view perspective from the head (well in meta-humanity).
Therefore
blindfold = partial cover.
mage mask = total cover.

there is nothing in the rules i'm aware of that links a mage's aura to his astral perception. so the fact that the blindfold is part of the mage's aura, and can't be seperately targeted, has no bearing i can see on whether or not the blindfold blocks his astral perception.

i've never seen anything in the rules that says that astral perception allows the mage to see in all directions simultaneously. i think the rules are actually fairly strongly against that model--the listed modifiers are for beings with a field of vision at least vaguely similar to that of a mundane metahuman, ie two eyes that face in the same direction. there are no modifiers for astral perception that indicate that it grants a significantly different field of vision.

a blindfold is not enough to completely inhibit spellcasting--you could still cast touch-range spells, and maybe other spells as long as you're touching your target. it does, however, block LOS as best i can determine from the rules.