[P:ES] Smell: military advice vs. RAW distance penalties

Greetings, all!



Powers: Enhanced Senses makes Smell rolls take a penalty equal to the number of yards to the source of the smell, unless one takes superhuman smelling perks. However, I've encountered advice in several military primers to avoid smoking, because they make people detectable by smell at huge distances, as long as the detector is a non-smoker who spent significant time outdoors.



Wordings tend to be something like this:

Quote:

Cigarette smoke can be detected up to one-quarter of a mile away if the wind conditions are right. You can smell fish, garlic, and other foods being cooked for several hundred meters. You may be able to detect a person who has been using scented soap or eating specific foods from up to 100 meters away, thus discovering an ambush before walking into it.

Assuming this is even partially true (and I get the impression that it is), this means one of the following:

• Cigarette smoke should have modifiers of something like up to +400 to everyone's smell rolls, depending on circumstances. Other scents may have somewhat smaller, but still enormous bonuses.


• Humans should start with one level of Long-Range Smell for free, i.e. the default distance modifiers for smell should be as per SSRT, not -1/yard.


• Humans can trivially purchase the Long-Range Smell perk with minimal training, i.e. the first level should count as a non-exotic trait.

So, which one should it be?



Thanks in advance!

[P:ES] Smell: military advice vs. RAW distance penalties