Allow Heightened Senses partial stacking with Infravision
Posted: Sat May 25, 2013 11:47 pm
As I understand it, the main reason these two don't stack is because of the ability to get to 10+ so easily.
Heightened Senses being a different source of essentially the same sight type as Infravision is vaguely unintuitive, however. More importantly, it trivializes low infravision gains-which are pretty much useless on equipment at the 1/2 range, for anyone that has gotten an escort and picked up Heightened Senses(to say nothing of people that invest heavily).
What I'm thinking of is, allow them to stack up until 10, then not exceed 10 unless either Heightened Senses or Infravision goes past 10, then only take that one source for post-10 values. (For example, Heightened Senses radius 5+2 Infravision would give you 7 radius, 5+8 Infravision would grant 10, and 5+12 would grant 12.)
This is somewhat unintuitive, but it would give them an effective way to stack without instantly producing ridiculous values. And it arguably makes as much sense as having two different ways of out of sight sensing not stack at all, and works better for gameplay.
Another alternative, and one that produces a more intuitive curve, would be to take the higher of Infravision or Heightened Senses, then add half the value of the other to that, and make that your non-light-based vision range. Since they're thematically somewhat different sources of non-light detection, this also makes sense, and may be the better answer. The downside is, that it makes stacking the two to 10+ still possible, just harder, which is still not desireable necessarily.
Edit: Another possible option is to simply let them stack normally, but cap at sight range.
Heightened Senses being a different source of essentially the same sight type as Infravision is vaguely unintuitive, however. More importantly, it trivializes low infravision gains-which are pretty much useless on equipment at the 1/2 range, for anyone that has gotten an escort and picked up Heightened Senses(to say nothing of people that invest heavily).
What I'm thinking of is, allow them to stack up until 10, then not exceed 10 unless either Heightened Senses or Infravision goes past 10, then only take that one source for post-10 values. (For example, Heightened Senses radius 5+2 Infravision would give you 7 radius, 5+8 Infravision would grant 10, and 5+12 would grant 12.)
This is somewhat unintuitive, but it would give them an effective way to stack without instantly producing ridiculous values. And it arguably makes as much sense as having two different ways of out of sight sensing not stack at all, and works better for gameplay.
Another alternative, and one that produces a more intuitive curve, would be to take the higher of Infravision or Heightened Senses, then add half the value of the other to that, and make that your non-light-based vision range. Since they're thematically somewhat different sources of non-light detection, this also makes sense, and may be the better answer. The downside is, that it makes stacking the two to 10+ still possible, just harder, which is still not desireable necessarily.
Edit: Another possible option is to simply let them stack normally, but cap at sight range.