(Skill) Detection

[Wald Lowca]

Name: Detection



Overview

Detection is the primal ability of honing one's raw awareness of the physical world around them. There are many kinds of senses within this field, many of which help countless trades and situations. The typically accepted natural senses are:

Sight: The ability to see distinctions within one's environment and through obstacles.
Hearing: The ability to sense footfalls and general noise within the environment.
Smell: The ability to sense distinctions within the air, or aromas of objects
Taste: The ability to sense distinctions in flavor between foods and anomalous additives.
Touch: The ability to sense differences in one's environment through tactile involvement.

While some have a natural predisposition to others, this is the process of refining one's abilities. A blind woman might be able to train herself to sense sound better than her friends, and a deaf man might be able to train himself to rely on his sight to be more aware of his surroundings.

Pattern recognition is an important facet to detection. Through a combination of senses, one may be able to feel that a door is heavier than usual and something may be weighted upon it, or that a floorboard is particularly loose as they step on it. It is the ability to see and otherwise sense disruptions in the flow of a room, or even forest floor. While it won't help matters covered by cryptography (like cyphers/codes/curtain patterns), it may be the tipping point in helping realize that something is out of place.

Sight

Sight is one of the most classically handy senses.

The raw information one might be able to gain from sight can vary. Someone might be able to discern that two supposedly similar objects are actually different, or that someone has been tailing you for the last few hours by catching glimpses of them in the shadows.

Training one's sight might make them able to see thin tripwires or even hidden traps. It may as well help them see someone trying to sneak on them or someone trying to hide in a crowd.

Hearing

Hearing is another classical sense that many take for granted.

Unlike sight however, there are more variables to training one's sense of hearing. The footfalls of a man versus an animal will be hard to tell the difference between unless one has experience. However with training one might even be able to hear things that are trying to stay hidden.

Training one's hearing might make them able to hear someone's footsteps in a house when they're trying to hide. It's also handy to eavesdrop and separate out voices.

Smell

Smell is a classical sense that some don't often consider.

With the raw information alone in smell, one might be able to pick up on scents before their partners. While it takes experience and at sometimes learning a trade to familiarize with an array of scents, it's something that's deceptively useful.

Training one's sense of smell might allow them to detect a rotting corpse faster or even be able to smell a poison or at least something wrong with a meal.

Taste

Taste is a classical sense that's often overlooked.

Sometimes some things just need to be tasted. While rarely used it is most useful in determining the age of various objects or even being able to tell what they're made of.

Training one's sense of taste might allow them to differentiate between a wide array of materials and food. Biting down on a piece of silver nell just to find out that it tastes like lead might just prove that the coins are a forgery.

Touch

Touch is a classical sense that is rarely considered.

The raw sense of touch is something that's used in everyday life. Touch helps determine how fragile something is and whether or not it's something to be grabbed in the first place. It can also tell you if there is a change in weather if you are aware enough. Even telling the difference in weight between two objects when held.

Training one's sense of touch might allow them to feel the difference between materials as well as their general physical properties.

Relevant Skills

Detection allows you to gather information for other skill. Because of this fact, there is not many skills that are not relevant to its use. Trade skills benefit from being able to from its use to study both their own and other's work. Combat skills benefit from the ability to see an opponent's attack. Social skills benefit from seeing physical cues.

The key to all of this is that Detection gives you raw information about the physical world. It is up to your other skills to piece it all together.

Detection factors into many existing skills. These are the ones that seem to rely on trained senses the most, but is by no means the full list:

Appraisal: Helps with assessing quality and properties of an item
Caregiving: Helping keep an eye on the changing condition of your ward
Discipline: Helping see through supernatural illusions
Etiquette: Helping with noticing the minutiae of expected behavior
Forgery: Helps with quality forgeries by noticing any personal mistakes
Hunting: Helping with tracking prey
Investigation: Helps with finding hidden clues to be examined
Medicine: Helps with noticing symptoms key to diagnosis
Navigation: Helps stay on course during rough conditions
Psychology: Helps with noticing physical tells and tics of a person
Seafaring: Helping gauge distance and course while sailing
Sociology: Helps notices differences between cultures
Teaching: Helps with noticing things with your ward

Trade

All trade skills require a steady hand, a sheer focus, and a keen sense of what you are doing. Being able to feel how gently you need to make a weave, or how heavy a piece of dough is. It is up to your physical senses, and honing them through your trade that allows for true perfection.

Though someone not trained in the trade will still have no idea of what is going on. Even if you are a master of detection, you will not know just how much dough is needed for a bagel, or how much slack is needed for your fishing line. It takes a someone with skills in the trade to understand the information given though detection.

Combat

The flow of battle, the hum of the blade, and the varying steps in between. Combat is all about out doing your enemy, with skill or with knowledge. Detection is used to help read your opponent, where he is standing, how he is holding his weapon, even how he is breathing. All these can be used to your advantage.

Just because you can see what your opponent is doing, does not mean you know how to react to it. It takes honing your skill with the weapon to counter your opponent. Detection just gives you the raw information to work with, you will not beat someone from it alone.

Social

Detection is an auxiliary skill to many social approaches. While one can see the raw input from other people, the minutiae of culture, motive, deception, etc., will be lost on the person. These are covered by relevant social skills such as: Sociology (Studying/Understanding culture), Psychology (Studying/Understanding motives and the mind), and so on.

Since detection is about gathering physical information it will not be able to tell if; Someone is lying, Someone is angry at you, Someone is learning well, or How someone should act. It is only used to gather tells for their appropriate skills.

Counter Play

While picking someone out of the crowd or out of the dark is something that detection is good for, combining methods to better hide one's self such as acting and disguise, can put off the perceiver as they have no means of pointing out that you are not who you say you are.

Stealth: Physically hiding what you are doing
Acting: Putting on an act to give false information
Disguise: Hiding your true face or use of different clothing to give false information
Deception: Physical Deceptions such as sleight of hand, or distractions to remove focus

Novice: 0-25

A novice of detection is just learning how to comb for details from the world around them. They may be able to pick out a specific scent and partially follow it if it's strong enough, hear someone's conversation in a private room with a thin door, or be able to perceive the general characteristics of an object when touching and tasting it in relative good detail.

Competent: 26-75

At competent one's senses will begin to be more clear to the user, allowing for better understandings of their surroundings. They have a decent shot at picking someone out of a crowd, if that person isn't trying to be hidden. They are able to follow strong odors a small distance to their point of origin, and even catch traces of faded trails. At this competency, many are able to vividly get raw information for basic materials, allowing for specialist skills to step in.

Expert: 76-150

The expert of detection is someone who is keen on their surroundings. They may approximately half of the time, find the person that they're looking for in a crowd, eavesdropping in a noisy room is also possible. Well hidden traps may also be found by the senses. At this point in one's training they may as well be able to see those trained in stealth in clear conditions most of the time, and obscured conditions around a quarter of the time.

Master: 151-250

The master of detection is a person that carries with them a high degree of understanding of their environment. They are able to spot discrepancies in the environment that are likely traps or weaknesses, as well as eaves drop in a bustling room with little issue. Trace odors and remnants of objects can be detected without pause. The only obstacle to these folk are ingenious trap makers, highly trained stealthy individuals, high physical deceptions with slight of hand or camouflage, and highly obstructive weather such as pitch darkness or hurricanes.

Credit: Wald Lowca

[Llyr Llywelyn]

I'd like to look at this later when I have some time for it, and maybe write up the descriptions for the tier ranks if they're still the template version then.

Note for self: general awareness of surroundings, keen perceptions through senses, and noticing patterns/out-of-place things, etc.

[Alora]

I like it. For the master tier perhaps include deception users (advanced in skill) to those that can counterplau

[Wald Lowca]

Yea I added it, Just needed to clarify that it is for Physical deceptions. Since Deception is one of those skills that has two parts. Physical and Social. Detection is only for the Physical deceptions, such as slight of hand, or distracting someone. Something like what con-artist do to take your watch and wallet off you without you noticing.

[Llyr Llywelyn]

Ah, rank summaries look okay. On the rank write-ups.. maybe including mentions of detecting things of taste like poisons or such, smaller/subtle traps rather than physical traps?

Like most skills, I think that Detection has enough of a social application to be included in the actual write-up. Much of it falls under sensory perceptions but makes it clear that these are social observations; detecting changes in body language or facial expression, hearing differences in vocal tone or changes in what words someone uses, but then there is also gut instincts that are gained through experience and awareness of reactions to certain things, situations, and/or people.

Pattern recognition, and noticing when patterns are out of place (contextual detection), seems important to include somewhere. One doesn't notice a trap only because they can smell something - but because they can detect that out of a room that seems otherwise perfectly fine, they realize a vase is alone on a table... so they lift it and find a hidden button or something to that nature. One could boil it down to say that's visual, but it's the contextual understanding of that PC thinking a vase on a table might be something more than decor, thus creating the act of detection.

Detection comes into play when it comes to solving puzzles, handling supernatural entities, and these aren't always directly linked to physical aspects - the physical becomes secondary because the five senses blend together within context for the application.

If this is dependent on must-have secondary skills that are meant to apply to Detection, thus using Detection as a base skill to build from(?), then an expanded section with a list of those applicable skills might be good to have.

While there could be a lot, there will be a few more likely than others - Basket-weaving, of course - especially if things like social aspect skills or intuition-based detection aren't included in the write-up. Perhaps a small expansion of the categories you listed with relevant skills listed under those categories (trade, combat, social) so that people have an idea where they need to be putting their points along with their detection when developing the skill so their use of detection doesn't get lopsided because they aren't putting points into that other skill.

Maybe a short added section on counterplay could do that too?? I often consider Detection as the counterplay to Deception... For Combat specifically, I'd think maybe Stealth is the counterplay to Detection. I suppose your write-ups focus a lot on Trap-Making(? lol) as the counterplay to Detection, if I'm reading that right?

Here is the Example Knowledge List for reference with Detection.

The reason I would suggest including Social with the Physical in this skill write-up is that this is used in knowledge under this skill because there is no separate "Perception" skill available. For example, here are some knowledge that have been used by other players, listed under Detection:

• Detection: How to detect small changes in a person’s facial expression
• Detection: Simple Requests Aren't Always So Simple
• Detection: Small details in written records
• Detection: Recognising kindness when you don't know the language.
• Detection: Applying psychological understanding to perception.
• Detection: the feeling of being watched
• Detection: Feeling the difference between the waking world and a dream
• Detection: Working out ratios by eye.
• Detection: Noticing a necromancer when you see one
• Detection: Splitting your visual focus between the dealer and the game itself.
• Detection: Different moods of different crowds

[Wald Lowca]

Thank you for your suggestions, Llyr. What you brought up can still be used as unrefined sensory input, but interpretation is not what I can see Detection the 'go to' skill for. We wouldn't want Investigation(as an example) to go without merit, so using this approach, people can still have those knowledges about detection, especially if they're using a more prominent skill and detection as a secondary.

Otherwise we'll have an issue of detectives or conman being out shadowed by a single skill, rather than a more fair lineup.

The input is highly appreciated, and I'll keep working to improve this. I implemented many of your other suggestions though, as they very much were a decent point in readability and applicability.

[Llyr Llywelyn]

Awesome, love the edits, Wald! It hit at most of what I was trying to get at.

Especially dig the combat section write-up. That section helped me understand what you're getting at with the whole "interpretation" distinction. It hits the nail on the head that detection isn't the reaction, but it's just a step before deciding what to do/think - the details that inform the next action of the PC. This distinction maybe could be described more clearly on the Social section, but since it comes right after the combat one, I think it's fairly clear contextually (now that it clicked for me :p).

Only thing I see now is just... the old... what distinguishes acting from deception and vice versa. The putting on an act is sometimes put under deception for players... and you know, I realize... maybe deception needs to be developed next.... lol.

Excellent job, though. Personally, happy with the changes made, and the skill write-up as-is now. So thanks for taking the time to read my suggestions and find ways to include some to the write-up. I appreciate it.

[Maltruism]

"Detection"
Approved by Maltruism

Ultimately, my point will be to NOT worry about covering everything.
What you have right now is fine.
There are so many intangibles that are outside of the descriptions given that we HAVE to fall back on this fact.

Example: Fred knows George likes to look around when he talks.
He also knows George is a friend of Clyde.
Fred knows that Clyde is currently looking for him with ill-intent.

Fred sees George and goes to talk to him.
During the conversation, he suddenly notices that George has locked his eyes on him.
This tips him to the fact that George is subconsciously trying not to look at something behind Fred.
Fred ducks and spins to avoid a back-stab attack by Clyde.

"Detection: Behavioral anomalies can be warnings."

It doesn't fall under any of the senses. Sight, yeah, but not really.
It's really what he knows about George that made looking at him useful.
Skill-wise, I suppose it could be associated with Sociology, and would fall under your "Social" paragraph.