Distance Learning

Question: If someone wants to perceive something beyond their perceptive capacity, how does that work? For example, if I am an average person and want to see the facial features of someone who is 6 yards away, and my perceptive capacity is 2 (so my distance of sight is 2 yards), how does that work? Is there a penalty to see beyond that distance? Or do I just flat out fail? Or is it that I automatically succeed within 2 yards, and beyond 2 yards I have to roll?

Okay, Perception and distance stuff. One part mechanics, two parts Storyteller narration, with a dash of player creativity.

First of all, the perception distance table on our House Rules page details the exact farthest distance that a Scion can see with perfect 20/20 vision. If your Perceptive Capacity is 7 and you can therefore see 30 yards, you can read a book's typeface as clearly at 30 yards away as if it were in your hand.

But that's perfect vision; past that point, you get the normal diminishing returns that all of us see every time we look past our 20/20 limit. You can still see things that are more than 30 yards away - you don't suddenly go blind at that point or anything - but they're no longer perfectly clear, and the farther away they get, the more indistinct they are, like any mortal who can see a skyscraper miles away but not see any details about who's in the windows or what the texture of the walls looks like. There aren't specific mechanical details for what you can see past your 20/20 best perception limit because there's simply too much range to bother with trying to mechanize your sight, and a table with diminishing columns of percentages and distances would not only be a big pain in the ass to always have to refer to but also still not actually all that helpful since it would come down to the Storyteller's decision on how far away something was and what that meant in terms of its visibility anyway.

So, instead of bothering with a lot of fiddly numbers that would still come down to interpretation for everyone not using a precisely hexed battlemap to run their Scion games, Storytellers have the final word when it comes to how well you can see something that's outside your perfect vision range. In most cases, the Storyteller will simply decide what details aren't distinct enough since it's outside your range; if you can't see it clearly, they'll be able to make a good decision on exactly how much of it you can see. Some Storytellers may decide to run it cinematically, giving you details they think suit the scene and the moment, while others will enforce a stricter idea of the image being out of range meaning you can't learn the important information unless you get closer to it.

In most cases, rolls will probably not need to be involved; while it's true that Perception rolls are by nature more passive than those of some other Attributes, it's still more of an "active" action than simply looking at something. A Storyteller might call for a Perception roll if you're specifically looking for something hidden or subtle, sensing something that those with lesser capabilities might not or noticing something that you might walk right past otherwise. Squinting to see something that's a little out of your range, however, doesn't need to be covered by a roll if you're using the Perception distance table - it's already telling you how close you need to be to get that information, and if you're not doing anything else to alter that, there's no reason to bog things down with extra rolls.

Of course, if your Storyteller wants to use rolls to determine whether or not you can make some detail out, he or she is totally within their rights to do so; and if they choose to say that you need to get closer to get that information, that's valid, too. Exact details past the point of your normal ability to see are nebulous and may depend on the scene and situation at hand and are not only difficult to reduce to easy numbers but would also suffer from it, so this is a case where you'll want to let the Storyteller make calls for the good of the scene and roll with it from there.