Perceive health

Perceive Health is the Empath-only ability to PERCEIVE the life essences of the people and animals (and some highly-evolved intelligent plantlife) around them. This action trains the empathy and attunement skills. With increased skill, the sensations gain clarity and allow the Empath to detect additional qualities of perceived individuals, such as whether they are hiding, have a disease or low vitality, are poisoned, etc.

Empaths may also use their perception to check if a creature is living, undead or a construct. See the PERCEIVE for more information and syntax.

Sensitivity range

While the exact formula is not known, it is believed that sensitivity range increases by one room for every 200 combined ranks of Empathy and Attunement. Unlike the similar HUNT, there is no known upper cap on the effective range, and supremely skilled Empaths can sense and identify life forces more than 10 rooms away. There is also no perception skill check so hidden or invisible beings will be sensed without fail (but not identified) as long as they are within the Empath's sensitivity range. There is also no known way to impersonate a life force to make it appear as if it were another's.

Most NPC's such as shop owners and town guards can be perceived, and all critters.

Under rare circumstances, perceive health can trigger passively to sense single individuals without the Empath activating the check. The precise mechanics for this effect are not known but it is believed that the sensing Empath must have recently held a diagnostic link with the person.

Estimated threshholds

Skill Average	Ability
30	Empath, same room
50	non-Empath
75	critter
100	details
125	Empath, adjacent room
150	non-Empath
175	critter
200	details
275	non-Empath two rooms away

Usage and syntax

See PERCEIVE COMMAND for full details

PERCEIVE HEALTH, POWER HEALTH, and CONCENTRATE HEALTH are synonym commands so you may use whichever you prefer.

• PERCEIVE HEALTH: This will display the life essences within range as determined by your skill. It is possible to be stunned with a longish roundtime if there are a large number of life forces detected (the number increases with skill).

• PERCEIVE HEALTH SELF: This will display health information for your character, precisely as when diagnosing a patient. The same skill check for detecting parasites or disease applies as if you were perceiving the health of others, but otherwise you will see all injuries on your character's body.

• PERCEIVE HEALTH <PLAYER>: This can be used to show the diagnostic health information of other players with whom the Empath currently has a PERSISTENT LINK.

Perceive health messaging

Messaging	Meaning
The presence of Name, a fellow Empath.	Empath
The presence of an unseen fellow Empath.	hidden Empath
The presence of Name.	non-Empath
An unidentifiable presence.	hidden non-Empath
The presence of Name, whose life essence is wavering.	>50% vitality loss
The presence of Name, whose life essence is almost extinguished.	>80% vitality loss
The presence of Name, whose life essence has a faint greenish tinge.	poisoned
The presence of Name. You also sense disturbing black streaks about his/her life essence.	diseased
A relatively healthy presence nearby.	healthy critter
A malicious presence screeching in the far dark corner of your mind causes you to quickly open your eyes!	undead, evil, or cursed critter
A wavering life essence nearby.	critter with >50% vitality loss
The presence of a secondary shadow about yourself.	blood critter

Examples

This is from an Empath with 578 Empathy skill and 487 Attunement skill:

You sense:
    The presence of Player.
    An unidentifiable presence.
    The presence of PlayerTwo.
    The presence of PlayerThree, a fellow Empath.
    The presence of PlayerFour.
    The presence of PlayerFive.
    The presence of a wandering minstrel.
You sense (E, E) from your current position:
    The presence of an old blind beggar.
You sense (E, N, N, E, E) from your current position:
    The presence of a town guard.
You sense (S, W, W, S, S) from your current position:
    The presence of PlayerSix.
You sense (S, W, W, W, W) from your current position:
    The presence of a town guard.

Notes

• The types of things you can sense (see above list and table) appear every 50 combined ranks between Empathy and Attunement. It is possible you may get lucky and see them very rarely before this point, but it appears to always be close to the 50-rank mark (within 20 ranks).
• The range you can sense seems to grow every 200 combined ranks in Empathy and Attunement. It is similarly possible this will happen earlier than expected.
• The total number of individual essences you can sense is also limited by your skill. If you exceed this amount, your senses will become overwhelmed and you will be stunned for a moderately long time. Though it will not always happen, you can receive internal injury to your head and nerves.
• There is a 4.5 minute timer per room.
• It should be noted that, when searching a large number of rooms at once at high level ability, this command is very resource intensive.

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