I can't see blindsight electricity being blindsight (life) + a bunch of other stuff. If the electrochemical potential in a brain was enough to set it off, it would be strictly superior to blindsense life.
Blindsight: sound would be a real world bat. Which is good enough to fly between small holes in a volleyball net. (which i know from trying to catch them in said volleyball nets...)
BigNorseWolf, just a side note about bats. While they do echo-locate and it's good enough to catch insects while flying, the do have good vision (at least comparable to humans) so that observation doesn't necessarily say much about their sense of echolocation.
BigNorseWolf, just a side note about bats. While they do echo-locate and it's good enough to catch insects while flying, the do have good vision (at least comparable to humans) so that observation doesn't necessarily say much about their sense of echolocation.
Its a black net, at night. One tiny hole or rip and you wouldn't catch any all night, they'd just fly right through it.
They've done experiments where they blindfold and earplug bats who use echolocation. Blindfolded bats fly no problem. Earplugged ones.. not so much.
BigNorseWolf, just a side note about bats. While they do echo-locate and it's good enough to catch insects while flying, the do have good vision (at least comparable to humans) so that observation doesn't necessarily say much about their sense of echolocation.Its a black net, at night. One tiny hole or rip and you wouldn't catch any all night, they'd just fly right through it.
They've done experiments where they blindfold and earplug bats who use echolocation. Blindfolded bats fly no problem. Earplugged ones.. not so much.
I'm now more intrigued about how they managed to blindfold and/or place earplugs on a bat.
Mimeograph correction fluid for the blindfolds and glass tubes plugged up for the earplugs.
To your question OP, I don't believe the rules ever clarify.
I'm not sure how the game should take into account blindsight electricity. I mean, in reality electricity is really just an electromagnetic field that is basically everywhere, sometimes with near 0 potential but present. So if you look at it that way, it's basically just blindsight 60ft (with no restriction on how it works). But since they bothered to put electricity it's probably intended to not just be perfect sensing 60 ft around you.
So then we have to ask, how much electricity? How much electromagnetic potential is required for it be noticeable? I'm not sure how we would know.
I would ere to the side of electrochemical reactions in a body aren't noticeable, but anything with a battery is.
So in your dog with an electric collar example, they would see the part of the collar that was energized or the battery, but typically electric bark collars aren't energized the whole time and also don't electric the entire neck. It's usually just a couple spots near the battery pack.
Situation B I'm a no on.
Situation C, maybe. But I'm still not sure if static electricity like that should be enough.
But batteries on energy weapons would, as would the battery systems on any armor.
Electrically powered equipment is all over the place in Starfinder, and any of that should definitely show up. Like not the outline ofthe whole thing, but the power source. And maybe the pathway of it as it's directed through equipment.
To your question OP, I don't believe the rules ever clarify.
Seconding that.
Ultimately you are going to have to work out the details with the other players you are playing with.
All we can do is provide pointers and hints on game balance - what the effect of any of the options are likely to be.
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As BigNorseWolf pointed out, being able to see the natural electrochemical reactions in a body would make it more powerful than blindsense(life). Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Not everything needs to be in balance. A character with blindsense is always going to be strictly more powerful at sensing things than one that does not have any blindsense (which is most of them).
Making it too limited would make the ability not fun to have.
Making it too powerful would ... Actually not do much. It would only be more powerful than the other players in a scenario where the other players couldn't use their own precise senses for some reason. So if your plans for the game don't involve very much of that, I would err on the side of being more powerful than less.
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I see a couple of ways of running it.
As Metaphysician said, it could rely on ambient electrical charge. Meaning that as long as 'sufficient' amounts of electrically powered equipment is around, you can precisely target anything in the area whether the target is electrical or not. You might even rule that using electrical weapons will charge the area of the battle enough to use the blindsight.
You could also have it work more like a heat sensing ability, where the object itself has to contain the electricity in order to see it. At that point it might degrade down to only a blindsense for things that are only partially powered (such as a dog wearing a shock collar - you can see the collar, but can only sense that 'something' is moving it around. So you could target the correct square, but not accurately target the dog itself).
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I wrote the dirindi for AA3, so you can blame me for writing that sense. Dirindi had three eyes, so I was going to give them three senses -- darkvision, lowlight and blindsight. Darkvision got edited out at some point during the process, but the blindsight (electricity) stayed in. Arkanen is a very electrically charged place. Giving the Dirindi an electrically charged sense seemed really cool.
My vision was that so long as sufficient amounts of electrical tech was around, you could target things in the area -- but maybe that does not work as well in super low tech settings like battles against monkeys in a jungle.
Now remember: authorial intent really does not matter. We're not developers, and we don't interpret the rules. You're the GM, choose what interpretation makes sense for you!
Hmm
PS I am so happy to hear that someone is playing a dirindi! I keep hoping that at some point there will be a boon for them in SFS!
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Note that, while Blindsight ( electricity ) might seem like its the superior version of Blindsight ( life ), it also comes with more restrictions and complications. Notably:
1. There are a lot more things that would block "seeing via electrical fields" than would block "seeing via magical life essence". Faraday cages and electromagnetic jammers are a lot more intuitive than. . . I guess magic life essence barriers?
2. Its similarly easier to see a character "blinded" by too much ambient electricity than too much ambient life. If you are in a room with an active power generator, that's analogous to a great big blinding light that blots out any ability to see much else. Not only are their fewer and less intuitive equivalents for "life energy", but by and large the things emitting the most "life" are probably the things you want to track, anyway.
I don't think any of those are common enough to warrant considerations of balance. One is a niche custom item to deal with an incredibly uncommon sense and the other is a DMs call about how much of a sense we don't have would be considered blinding.
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As a frequent player and GM, I always thought it was cool when authors came on to these boards to answer a question about their creations. I never imagined that one day I would be doing it... so thank you! Katina Davis and I had so much fun creating the Dirindi and Sazurons together. My including energy slaps as a regular Dirindi greeting, and having the Dirindi be a bit hazy about facts meant that Katina decided that she had best give her Sazurons energy resistance and Zone of Truth! We had a fun collaboration on our species.
It was my first Paizo assignment, and it was so much fun!
Hilary Moon Murphy