Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-2165692-20140425203121/@comment-29458028-20140808044138

Kitsune Inari wrote:

It bears mentioning that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If there's no reflection off the ground, there's probably no ground either; you should be able to notice the difference.

I watched once a documentary where a blind person was able to use echolocation to walk around and do stuff, by clicking his tongue and listening to the return sound; and there exists an archer who is an olympic recordsman despite being legally blind] (granted, he does have some eyesight left). If this is physically possible for an individual (no evolution, no natural selection) in real life (no fantasy), I guess it should be believable for a fantasy species to develop similar abilities over a few thousand years and a few hundred generations under harsh evolutive pressure.

Facepalm. You are selectively using parts of my post, which is not cool. I did say that they can echolocate the ground, but to do that, you got to point the sound organ at the ground, which you can't do simultaneously with shooting arrows at targets you echolocated, which the Falmer can do (they don't walk off cliffs while shooting at you, for sure)

Also, your examples, a blind guy walking around uses echolocation to locate stuff like what, 2 meters away. The falmer are shooting you from 20 meters. The loudness of sound coming back is kinda softer by nearly 10,000 times due to the inverse square law, so echolocation requires very sensitive hearing to be employed at such ranges. Yet, you don't see falmer flinching from loud sounds, which means their hearing isn't that sensitive.

Also, the archer, he does have some sight left (as you so helpfully pointed out, legally something does not make you it.), enough sight to let him see a very obvious red and white target board in broad daylight. The Falmer can "see" you in dimly lit caves and shoot accurately, which is way more difficult than anything that olympic dude achieved, without a good old pair of eyes or sixth sense.

Take it this way. Give a blind man IRL a bow and ask him to hit a moving target 20 meters away. I don't think it is so physically possible now, is it?

As for limitation of the medium, how hard is it to code for? Just explain it as a sixth sense and that makes so much more sense than hearing related superpowers. There is a reason why I support the sixth sense theory much more than natural senses combined.