Guide to Sensing, and Souls

Wed Apr 10, 2024 2:24 pm

Sensory

The first section that this thread will cover. This addresses a variety of things regarding your characters, as well as the benefits available particularly to the field of Sensory itself for specialists.

General Sensing

Available to everyone. It is the act of detecting others based on feeling out their reiatsu. This is only feasible outside of combat and against what your other senses can smell, hear, see or feel, and works within a ten-tile radius of you. It is not capable of determining the strength of someone compared to you, reserves, emotions, and thereon, leaving it fairly barebones.

Specialization

The high point of sensory is inputting a specialization slot into it, or in rare occurrences, getting something that allows you to be counted as a Sensory Specialist. Sensory specialists scale the capacity of their value parallel to the Tier of Sensory they have, which will break down what they are capable of viewing below (the range increments are cumulative, thus totaling at 125 w/the base 10):

Tier 1: +15 Sensory Range. Gains the abilities to suppress & disperse.
Tier 2: +20 Sensory Range. Ability to view a character's reserves vaguely (see it in 25 percent as 'Very High' for 75 to 100, 'High' for 50 to 74, 'Medium' for 25 to 49 and 'Low' for 1 to 24.
Tier 3: +30 Sensory Range. Vague detection of emotions toward themselves & others. Irritation, joy, admiration, desire, etc. can be picked up through tangible fluctuations in an individual's body. Can discern lies & half-truths. Precise discernment of what percentage someone's Stamina & Reserves are at.
Tier 4: +50 Sensory Range. Use of ambient reishi with the 'Disperse' mechanic, skipping the spread (and potential stifling) of one's sensory & rendering it permanently active. Can detect the 'general vitality' of individuals such as organs/damage in general (but not immediately determine the root cause to said damage), and detect reishi-born illnesses or ailments (i.e. status effects).

Disperse

These characters expend an action to establish contact with something in the vicinity, allowing them to emit their reiatsu across it and the rest of their surroundings. Similar to how bats utilize echolocation, this dispersed reiatsu spreads along what it touches & relays the information to its releaser, subsequently coating stimuli to create a mental layout of one's surroundings. While active, this reduces Reflex & Awareness debuffs imposed by loss of / damage to a sense to -5% and/or -5. The range of this is limited to a character's Sensory Range, or in the case of a Soulborn, their Projection Range until T4.

Suppression

Gains a verb that renders a character unable to be detected through sensory unless of the same tier as the user's own. While it is active it reduces a character's Spirit, Spirit Defense & Control by a percentage; this decrease is less severe as a character gains a higher Sensory tier.

Soul

There is little known about the soul other than the fact that it exists. How characters can view the soul differs from race-to-race, and hinges primarily on one's senses. As a general baseline - if you can detect the soul with full clarity, you can interact with it; this requires a baseline of Tier 4 in a sense & something that interacts with souls*, and does not factor any +1s a character may receive unless it is from a mechanic inherent to their affinity or race. Interacting with a soul is an S-Rank minimum feat as well.

*: Here at Daiichi, every race has a means to interact with the soul, down to rolling it as one's affinity, which circumvents the other requisites.

General Awareness

This is the cognizance of souls allotted to all races by default.

Soulborn: Can see 'ambient reishi' oozing from a dying character. Sometimes they may see the soul itself leaving a body, but without higher-end Sensory Specialization, cannot differ between the ambient reishi or the subsequent ambient soul leaving a character.
Adepts: Determine the presence of a soul via. the density, weight & sentiment behind reiatsu. There are ways to trick this, such as by simply not inputting one's emotion or outputting reiryoku other than aside from the raw form that moves through the body.
Spiritualists: Vaguely feel it through physical contact, though not-in-combat without Sensory Specialization.
Devils: Wriggly thing that hugs food when they cover themselves in energy. Tastes different depending on the person.

All of the Sensory Specialization checks here account for T3+.

Damage

In the rare event that you encounter something that hits the soul directly, this is equivalent to said something always striking you with Internal Damage Type. Unlike that Damage Type it is not treatable without something that directly interacts with the soul in the same manner. What this damage causes is usually able to be aligned 1:1 with mechanical injuries, with the 'cap' suffered from these interactions being +1 over what was dealt (i.e. Medium Soul Damage = Major Damage to the region that suffered soul damage).