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<blockquote data-quote="Keith Robinson" data-source="post: 2740384" data-attributes="member: 21330">Slightly off topic alert... but...... a person's sense of smell is really quite amazing.&nbsp; I watched this program about one of the world's top tea tasters.&nbsp; They questioned him about what it was that he thought made him a good tea taster and, not surprisingly, he put it down to taste.So they ran all these tests on him and it turned out that, in fact, he was actually worse than your&nbsp; average guy on the street at tasting things (they had some bizarre machine which monitored the activity of taste buds!?) - because taste buds in fact only respond to five distinct tastes.&nbsp; They even stuck a peg on his nose and got him to taste tea and he couldn't taste the difference between a cup of tea and a cup of coffee!It turns out that the most important aspect to taste (and something that this guy really excelled at - in fact, his tests results were the best they'd ever seen, according to the analysts) was smell, which has millions of variations.&nbsp; So when you're tasting something, it is in fact its scent that gives it its flavor.&nbsp; Taste is simply a way of passing information to the brain to tell it which of the five variants the body is about to consume.On topic, I'd use a Wis check, like others have already mentioned.&nbsp; I quite like the idea of a Perception skill, though.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Keith Robinson, post: 2740384, member: 21330"] Slightly off topic alert... but... ... a person's sense of smell is really quite amazing. I watched this program about one of the world's top tea tasters. They questioned him about what it was that he thought made him a good tea taster and, not surprisingly, he put it down to taste. So they ran all these tests on him and it turned out that, in fact, he was actually [I]worse[/I] than your average guy on the street at tasting things (they had some bizarre machine which monitored the activity of taste buds!?) - because taste buds in fact only respond to five distinct tastes. They even stuck a peg on his nose and got him to taste tea and he couldn't taste the difference between a cup of tea and a cup of coffee! It turns out that the most important aspect to taste (and something that this guy really excelled at - in fact, his tests results were the best they'd ever seen, according to the analysts) was smell, which has millions of variations. So when you're tasting something, it is in fact its [I]scent[/I] that gives it its flavor. Taste is simply a way of passing information to the brain to tell it which of the five variants the body is about to consume. On topic, I'd use a Wis check, like others have already mentioned. I quite like the idea of a Perception skill, though. [/QUOTE]

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