Good uses of Sense Through


Advice


Does anyone have experience using Sense Through (vision) in games? There are now at least five ways to get it: a serum (Armory), a magitech augmentation (Azlant AP), a cybertech augmentation (Signal of Screams AP), the x-ray visor tech item (core) and the clarity scope weapon accessory (Armory). The scope is limited to only seeing through a single obstacle, generally a wall or door. The visor and serum only can see through 1/5 as much material as usual. The augmentations have negatives on your regular senses when active, but allow full sense through to 60'.

The most common/obvious uses seem to be scouting/recon by looking through walls/doors before you enter rooms, searching containers, and finding traps/secret doors. Great stuff, as long as you don't come up against the limitations.

Blocking Sense Through, Core book pg 265 wrote:

Unless stated otherwise, in addition to all other limitations, sense through is blocked by energy fields and sufficiently dense material. This includes all energy fields that impact the physical world (such as force fields that grant temporary Hit Points and force effects such as the wall of force spell). The density limitation generally causes these senses to be blocked by 10 feet of wood or plastic, 5 feet of stone, 1 foot of common metal, or 6 inches of lead or any starmetal (such as adamantine).

Typical suits of armor and containers do not block such vision unless they specify otherwise.

The second most obvious use is target selection when using things that allow you to shoot through cover, like Line property weapons, some Technomancer magic hacks, and phasing projectile ammunition.

Any practical applications of these techniques to report? I can see why they'd frustrate GMs, but trying to pretend everything is behind 6" of dense metal or a force field would also get old pretty quick. The easy options of the visor and serum can't penetrate much, so they aren't very problematic, and the others are maybe too expensive or too new (especially the AP augmentations) to have been used much yet.

Edit: A bunch of the vehicles in Armory also have sense through, usually limited to stone (and presumably not stopped by 5' of it, given their ranges), but the level 19 Quantum Pod has a hilarious 500' range that isn't stone limited and may not be limited by the density rules given that it has a 34 mph burrow through steel and softer materials travel mode. Perfect for seeing everything inside the building you're about to assault.


Aha! Sense Through lets you use Flash Teleport technomancer hack to teleport through walls, as it gives you line of sight. Also Arcane Eye, maybe other similar spells.

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