trying to understand the mental sense

[ZeroGrim]

I have recently made a psychic character who uses perception ranged effects on his enhanced mental senses, one thing I was wondering is what sort of information do you get from the mental sense, do you simple feel the presence or absence of a mind?

this is mostly to help me handle how to get into my character, help is appreciated

[Saltcrow]

I think an Accurate Mental Sense would be something akin to aura reading, whereby you locate objects and people by the psychic signal echoing off of them. Kinda like echolocation, but with psychic pulses.

Detecting the presence of one thing or another would be more of Detect Mind effect (also under Senses), which can certainly be made Accurate to pinpoint and use perception-ranged effects with.

[ZeroGrim]

Yea that part I understand mostly, I've given my mental sense a huge amount of modifiers to bring it up to the task.

i was more wandering how the character itself would perceive things, maybe some examples of how people have played mental sensing heroes (or villains) before.

[Saltcrow]

Hmm, probably like how Professor X sees things while using Cerebro in the X-men movies. Fuzzy and almost surreal at times, but mostly recognisable.

[ZeroGrim]

hmm that's a good way to think about it.

thanks again saltcrow

[JDRook]

I'd want you to define your terms a little more clearly. Do you mean mental sense as in sensing mental effects? Because that would be Mental Awareness. Do you mean detecting individual minds? That would be like the Detect Mind effect Saltcrow mentioned. And of course Mental is also considered a Sense type, which is usually assigned to Psychic/Psionic/Mental effects as well as most exotic senses.

Prof X detecting minds with Cerebro is a good example of Detect Minds, probably with Accurate and Acute and even Analytical modifiers (not to mention several ranks of Extended) so he can identify mutant minds and know exactly where they are in the world. Detect would tell you there's a mind nearby (within your range). Accurate would pinpoint minds closely enough you could theoretically shoot at them through a wall. Acute would give you enough details about a mind that you could probably tell if you encountered the same mind again later, similar to recognizing someone's face, voice, or scent; although by that same reasoning, you may not realize it was the same person when you met them unless you "touched their mind", the same way you wouldn't recognize a person's face from hearing their voice on the phone. The sense wouldn't necessarily tell you anything about the area the mind is in, save what other minds are around, so you could detect collections of minds than might indicate groups but not what they are about without some other information. Minds in a prison and minds in a mall may look similar without an Acute or Analytical sense that gives an overall shape to thoughts in an area. Of course, Perception ranged Mind Reading or Empathy would help with details.

That's mostly mechanical considerations of the rules. As for how you would describe the feelings, that's more of an art than a science.

[Doctor Devious]

Indeed: once you get to accurate & accute, one starts to think "can I tell their emotional state?" and suvch like. After all, your freebie sight (and/or sometimes sound) is usually enough to tell if somebody is happy / sad / angry and the like, so why not a paid for "every-bit-as-good-as" mental sense equivalent? Particularly when the sense is much closer in nature to what is trying to be "seen" (a mental sense for a metal state).

[FuzzyBoots]

In 2E, the question was, in part, how far the natural Mental sense extended, since there were at least two feats/powers which depended on a sense, Uncanny Dodge and Danger Sense, where it made a difference if a given attack could be considered to have "concealment" from the sense on account of it not being present or being outside of personal range, which was all the mental sense people had by default. Several of the 2E builds had "Mental" as the sense type for Uncanny Dodge, but personally, I was always a bit sketchy on it. It would be like a really short-sighted person picking Sight as the sense and expect to catch dangers more than a hands-breadth from their face. 3E got rid of the sense dependency of Uncanny Dodge, so it's pretty much a moot point there, so then one just gets into penetration and concealment. Are there any materials that stop the mental sense? Does standing in a crowd raise the DC because of all of the "background noise" that has to be sorted through? For that matter, is it only people that you detect or do you detect strong mental impressions on a place or object, much the same way that finding an ex's scarf may temporarily make you certain they're present as the scent of their perfume hits your nose.

Ultimately, I think the system leaves a lot of that up to the GM and the players to hash out. I'd just say that one should be careful to not make Mental so useful that it makes no sense to pick up any other sense.

[Doctor Devious]

It might be quite fun to AP (or more-likely flaw) the "accurate/accute" part between normal visual sight and the mental sense: allowing only one to be accute/accurate at any time. After all, how many Psi types do you see closing their eyes and the like when sensing mentally? Or being caught off-guard when "doing something metal" in far-off parts.

[JDRook]

Indeed: once you get to accurate & accute, one starts to think "can I tell their emotional state?" and suvch like. After all, your freebie sight (and/or sometimes sound) is usually enough to tell if somebody is happy / sad / angry and the like, so why not a paid for "every-bit-as-good-as" mental sense equivalent? Particularly when the sense is much closer in nature to what is trying to be "seen" (a mental sense for a metal state).

That's a reasonable effect, but I'd probably make it an Insight roll, probably vs Will defense, to detect emotional states, the same way you should for sight or hearing. Mentalists as a rule tend to have good Insight, anyway, so it wouldn't be too hard to pick up general emotional states routinely from most people. Stronger minds, or people trying to resist being read would get an opposition roll. Something like Impervious Will would be great for keeping low-rank readers from picking up your thoughts.

[JDRook]

It might be quite fun to AP (or more-likely flaw) the "accurate/accute" part between normal visual sight and the mental sense: allowing only one to be accute/accurate at any time. After all, how many Psi types do you see closing their eyes and the like when sensing mentally? Or being caught off-guard when "doing something metal" in far-off parts.

That's kind of a genre convention, like the classic "hand to temple" move, since there needs to be some kind of visual indicator for the reader/viewer that a psychic is doing something. Mechanically, Remote Sensing already has this by default, essentially a built-in Distracting flaw. Applying Distracting to other senses would probably be simpler than making an AP, or just doing it as a Complication.