From:	The Geek in the Hat alex@**********.com
Subject:	senses and magical targets
Date:	Wed, 4 Oct 2000 21:23:32 -0400 (EDT)

Doc' sez:
> Personally, I think that being in
> contact with something is just as good as seeing it -
> you don't have to have your eyes open (or have enough
> light in this case) to cast a spell on something
> you're touching. But that's another can of worms
> altogether.

Perhaps it'd be a good idea to pop this can o' worms open... why is it,
exactly, that metahuman magicians rely on line of sight to cast spells?
I agree that you should be able to cast spells at things you're touching;
this would make playing a blind magician a good bit more viable...

But what happens if we're talking about a magician that's not a metahuman?
The magical dependence on sight, in our case, is because we depend so much
on sight in our daily lives; we humans are visual creatures. So if we've
got an Awakened dog, who doesn't have the same degree of reliance on
sight, but thinks more in terms of scent and sound than we do, I would
imagine that targeting would work entirely differently... perhaps a dog
could get a metaphysical fix on something in terms of its smell. Then
again, this probably wouldn't come up to often, as we don't get awakened
canines in SR... but Merrows? Or awakened dolphins? Could they target by
echolocation?

On a note that's more likely to come up, could a troll or dwarf mage (who
would tend to think of infravision as a normal part of sight) zap
somebody who was trying to hide behind something by the heat signature?

The Geek in the Hat
alex@********.org