Sandbox Discussions

[Alicorn]

Bar can directly perceive facts like people's species and their allergies. Anything you're unwilling to attribute to "knack", "practice", "literally being a sapient bar", and "guessing", you could assume falls under this sense's more general/aesthetic applications and feedback.

[Adelene]

She also seems to be able to perceive nutritional status, at least to the level of specific vitamin deficiencies? I wouldn't be /surprised/ if she could detect, say, a (mundane-definition-of-) mutation that caused someone to need more of a particular vitamin, or at least to be able to infer that if someone stuck around for a few days and let her observe them. And if I'm on the right track there, it seems like she should be able to customize meals to peoples' biochemistry in general - like, that thing where that one spice tastes good to some people and tastes like soap to others is probably not even /close/ to the only thing in that class, just a particularly obvious example, and if Bar automatically knows exactly how a given person will perceive any particular food at a particular moment (since it changes with nutritional status, too), that seems like it'd do it.

[DanielH]

I don’t see how any amount of knack, practice, or literally being a sapient bar could let her know things like my not liking mint or Alexes not liking cilantro without either unusually accurate guessing or some variant of that sense, which I previously had not known about. Everything else I think is adequately explained by some combination of the experience and knack (and world and culture information, which I think she also has direct access to so she can know what the reasonable, currency-dependent prices are). If the sense is general enough to show more of the relevant biochemistry than just allergies, everything makes sense even if she doesn’t automatically directly know how a given person will perceive a taste.

[Alicorn]

The cilantro thing is genetic. I don't know about your mint thing but my mint thing seems to run in my family.

[DanielH]

I don’t know about my mint thing running in the family, but it’s probably not-strictly-brain-based biochemical in some way or another.

I suppose I wasn’t giving enough credit to guessing, either. She doesn’t necessarily give you literally the best thing, just something good. If she weren’t pretty sure about mint or cilantro she could probably find a safer dish that did not include them.

[Alicorn]

Also, fwiw, about half the time I'm just making up a beverage/plate out of thin air without consulting the other author and I have seldom been obliged to back up because the character wouldn't like that thing, and I have way less information and practice than Bar.

[Timepoof]

Can coins do fade out/fade in wishes (Cypress's translation spell does not supply words you learned / I would like my senses to get better slowly)?

[Bluelantern]

Can coins do fade out/fade in wishes (Cypress's translation spell does not supply words you learned / I would like my senses to get better slowly)?

This sounds like a yes, but I don't know if there would be much of a benefit, besides being able slowly getting used to it.

[DanielH]

They did that for Sarion, whose perfect memory prompted her more at first and then faded back to Bell standard. I don’t think it took a bigger coin, but I think they just stuck that on the same evil as everything else so it’s hard to judge if it would have.

[Alicorn]

A pentagon can handle that unless the change itself really pushes the bounds of the pentagon; a square-based vision improvement is not smart enough.