Staff Rulling: Can Dragons Detect Other Dragons?

[*Love_on_a_Wire]

I think I read somewhere that they can smell other dragons, even in disguise.

Simply not the case.

Edit: Corrected what I was quoting for clarity.

[*Tsidkenu]

"Despite their excellent sense of smell, dragons do not have the scent special ability and do not gain the game benefits of that ability, except to the extent that this sense contributes to their blindsense."

"A dragon's sense of smell is as nearly well developed as its vision. This refined sense of spell is only partly dependent on the dragon's sensitive nose; it also uses its forked tongue to smaple the air, just as a snake does. A dragon's ability to sense the presence of other creatures by scent makes it difficult to catch a dragon unawares, and hiding from a dragon is nearly impossible once a dragon is close enough to pick up the quarry's scent."

Draconomicon ought to be compulsory reading for all dragon PCs, imo!

[*Neutral Zone]

A Dragon can track you by scent as provided by the game engine. If I set you to hostile I can find you, using the Scent feat... and I can use that feat to find you time and time again no matter what ten thousand forms you jump in between.

This is a big faux pas honestly. I would never track down someone's toon without OOC consent, even if I were RPing a bloodhound. And I think it should be a rule.

[*Vault 101]

Wether or not someone can be tracked with or without consent is not the issue, I have the power to do that on my character sheet and I consider it god modding to just delcare yourself unrecognisable by your scent just by changing forms or 'because I am dirty' when the game engine would still give me the ability to find you in even in a crowd by using the feat.

Accoding to Tsidkenus post dragons should maybe have Blindsight instead of Scent anyway.

[*Tsidkenu]

Dragons should not have the scent feat as per Draconomicon. It was likely only included as a 'flavour' feat to cover over their loss of Blindsense (which I think would be a far better feat to grant them, ie. permanent creature Blindsight spell + Blindfighting feat).

If you want to track someone, roll survival vs. their tracking DC

[*Love_on_a_Wire]

Accoding to Tsidkenus post dragons should maybe have Blindsight instead of Scent anyway.

They should. I believe the decision to give them Scent instead was a balancing decision.

Anyway. No aspect of Scent reveals to you in detail what you're tracking.

And if anyone is interested, here's a currently working link to the 3rd edition Draconomicon. PDF

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Game mechanically scent doesn't reveal race. It just shows you orange blob in the map. :P So the already quoted rule still stands. If it's not in game mechanics, you need a consent. That's the rule on it.

[*Taihou]

A dragon has keen senses. I think I read somewhere that they can smell other dragons, even in disguise.

Dragon can smell scents, but there is no "Universal/particular scent of dragon". Dragons would smell after consequences of their actions:

for sulfur, if they had been bathing in volcano
for swamp, if they did it in swamp
for toast human, if they burned someone and ate his liver
for ozone, if they use lightning techniques

and so on

Truth is, that none of these scents would for certain identify him as dragon, as if any other creature would do the same, it would smell that way without being a dragon.

One may however always suspect and there it would be hard to accuse anyone of metagaming, because no-one will ever prove, that character can nay suspect something and be correct in his suspicion by mere coincedence.

P. S.
As much as blue dragons are concerned, Draconomicon says explicitly, that scent of electrified air is easily concealed by other scents, especially in rainy or stormy weather. :P

[*Skuld]

It certainly sucks to be a claw path dragon and be unable to attack invisible targets despite seeing them clear as day lurking around.

[*Alersia]

We dont have blindsense ingame so scent was the closest feat to it.