Background:
I got the idea for this, oddly enough, from watching my dog. I have a standard Dachshund. Lily is very short obviously but has a hounds sense of smell. I've had days when all the countertops in my large kitchen were clean, but I had set out food of some kind that I'd snack on. On those occasions, the dog might be outside or in another room. I let her in. She'd walk around the kitchen and without the ability to see anything on the counter, would inevitably end up sitting on the floor with her nose in the air pointing *directly* at the food way up on the counter. At this point I haven't even approached the food, I'm just sitting at the kitchen table being ignored. She can do this with food that doesn't even have a strong smell (to me). It's not like I laid a pickle, aged cheese, or warm cinnamon roll on the counter. It's like a handful of Goldfish crackers or something. She can literally do this in moments and never misses. With this as background I move on to my question.

Question: Is it permissible to roleplay your Spot score as an uncanny sense of smell?

I'm considering starting a PC at some point who is a spot build. I haven't really ever played a spot build but if I'm going to do it I'd like it to have an interesting wrinkle. I thought it would be an interesting motif to use as interplay with other characters as well, commenting on their cologne, when they took their last bath and where, asking them how their meal was and guessing the contents based on their breathe, that sort of thing. I suppose I'd roleplay detecting their location by smell, but once detected I would assume he could see/hear them as his sight/hearing would be normal.

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Tark Hammerfeast - Immovable Object
True Greenspan - Bendir's Boy Wonder

I wouldn't, because a really keen sense of smell goes far beyond a good spot score. By magnitudes, really. The way I've seen it done is with shifters assuming dog form and whatnot. That way it's clearly an ability with grounding but you're not trying to tie a number to it (though roll wis if you need to prolly).

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@Thanatopsis#6293

Smell, to me, seems like it would go under "Search."

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I'm done. Goodbye.

Listen, since if you smell someone you technically don't see them.

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Fear is not evil… It tells you what your weakness is. And once you know your weakness, you can become stronger as well as kinder. - Gildarts Clive, Fairy Tail, Hiro Mashima.

I would say Listen, yeah. It's the same argument as the Blindsense that dragons get. They pinpoint with their senses, but still suffer penalties since they don't actually "see" them.

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Who cares? As long as you've got proper rationale for it, I don't see why anyone would be too nitpicky about it. I can see many mechanical contradictions with correlating Listen to Smell and Spot to Smell likewise. For instance, for tracking someone it would make more sense if Spot understudied Smell rather than Listen, because sight and smell are both valid methods used frequently in hunting, whereas hearing is something you would seldom resort to.

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UCE THIS, YOU COW.

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I can agree with Opustus on the point that sight and scent are the commonly used senses when it comes to hunting, at least for canines. You don't find hounds using their hearing to find things, it's either scent or sight.

Scent Hound
Sight Hound

An important point to making such a strategy viable would be to limit the roleplay to keeping within the mechanical abilities of the Spot skill and not implying the ability to do things outside them.

Thanks for the link Dead. The fellow is a Barbarian so NWN feats and skills are somewhat limiting. Mimicking the skills of a scent tracker may require either a unique multiclass mixture or some DC items/abilities.

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Tark Hammerfeast - Immovable Object
True Greenspan - Bendir's Boy Wonder

I roleplay scent a bunch on one my characters as his one powerful skill.

I base it strictly on character aesthetic that requires no real check unless dealing with NPCs, like a social skill. See: Bluff, Persuade, Etc. Even the DMs who have RP'd with this particular character have been particularly generous in allowing extra responses to using his nose. "He would smell such-and-such."
In Pathfinder, we'd just let nose-work go to a Perception check along with the rest of the sensual index, but NWN is a mess, as we all know, I think characters can have fine senses if it matches the character. That is, if it is believable. In the event of an NPC your character's nose will be at the mercy of the DM. What your nose reveals is based on how believable your character's ability to pick up traces of scent are.

I wouldn't subscribe that scent is in the hands of barbarians either, but more in the hands of a ranger or alchemist, who knows scent only by way of compounds, much less the scent of blood.
And also giving the benefit of the doubt to particular phenotypes such as: animal, magical beast, lizardkin, dragons, shapeshifters, and vermin.

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