A Nose for Medicine

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    • A Nose for Medicine

      So...We've heard stories about Dogs being able to smell Cancer and other illnesses in Humans...How one Dog attempting to bite his owner's mole was what prompted her to get it examined...A thought came to my mind about how this would be applied to Doctors and Physicians (Not Sir'Hibas Healers because Sorcery is less a species related trait)

      This could be applied to any Animal with the ability 'Tracking Scent' from Pigs to New World Vultures...In Ancient Greece one...Drank Urine to determine certain illnesses (The Janah probobly don't do this because of their obsession with cleanliness or they did back in their ancient history)

      But I was imagining this for a future story...Could an ordinary non-medically trained Janah with tracking scent...Suppose a friend is...Reliving themselves a short distance away...And they have diarrhea for one reason or another...Could a Janah with tracking scent...Sense by the scent that something about a friend's fecal matter was...Off even if they weren't medically trained?
    • I really like the way you consider every aspect of an animals abilities and how they might be able to be applied in the world of SHARD…. That being said lets consider what you are asking about regarding possibly detecting disease or even other types of issues in other Janah with the use of heightened senses… My first thought is to look at the rules and consider what they say for any character possessing any specific skill, or any animal ability or racial talent….. In this particular case we would be looking at TRACKING SCENT which is based on PERCEPTION…. The definition clearly states that the user of TRACKING SCENT would be able to follow a person based on scent, and even determine the amount of time which passed since he came upon the scent; it goes further to state that the user of TRACKING SCENT could be able to determine if the individual was wounded… If I were your GAME MASTER I would allow other information to possibly be communicated as well with varying levels of success which would be balance against levels of difficulty of the feat being accomplished, these modifiers can be found on the difficulty modifier tables and applied liberally by the Game Master which would simulate the factor which must be overcome for success …. For example, let us take the above example and examine how it is used successfully to track the Janah which is now missing, the tracking Janah is a Hound dog with TRACKING SCENT based on his PERCEPION ATTRIBUTE of 7 which would provide 7 dice to roll…. The tracking character makes his roll and is off to a good start tracking the other character…. He comes across some of the fleeing characters fecal matter and stops to examine it….However the GAME MASTER has decided that the illness the character has is rare and as such your character may not ever have come into contact with those suffering from it, and that you have never even heard of it…. And that in general you do don’t use your TRACKING SCENT to pry into peoples private health matters…. These factors would earn you a negative -3 or even possibly a- 4 on your Dice roll to attempt to succeed a gaining any extra information regarding the character by scent alone ….. Now if you truly wanted to make the best attempt possible you could take extra time and effort using that ability and gain a few extra dice bonuses depending upon how long you wanted to prepare….. I would say that normally no more than a range between 6 seconds-3 minutes would be used giving a bonus between +1-+3 now you could roll the dice and if you succeeded the GAME MASTER would provide you with general information about the character which others may not be able to detect, such as Pregnant or suffering from some illness… and if you were successful you could continue to track them…