Crafting explosives turns your @smell to having notes of gunpowder and ethicol. This would raise suspicion, especially when traveling in corpie town.
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If everyone who uses a gun smells like gunpowder with a scent descriptor pointing them out of a crowd, it's a serious combat implication that allows people to track shooters even after losing sight of them in a chase.
As much as I hate the idea in the first place, if gunshots cause people to smell, everyone in the room needs to have that scent applied, not just the shooter.
If people smell like ethicol after crafting an ethicol bomb, why wouldn't they smell like ethicol after refueling their vehicle?
However players metagame the heck out of scents and when they're attached to suspicious behaviours they're mechanical downsides however much they're dressing in authenticity. So does explosives require a counterbalancing downside in its current form? I don't really see that it does. I don't think there's a problem with characters making bombs that they need to be IDed for it, or currently much of a problem with them placing bombs that they need to be IDed for it after the fact either. My experience is these are fairly niche pursuits and don't present an obvious gameplay strength that needs reining in, at least at the moment.
If there was a serious problem with timebombs getting stacked fifteen deep in rooms and no one having any idea of how to deal with that then I could see some need for balancing but that is not exactly the most common activity and tends to very rapidly 'balance' itself in a lot of cases.
If you had, for example, the scent of ethicol from any action that used a fuel can/fuel drum/ethicol pump, or the scent of burning from any fire (including fire places) or any flaming object (like torches), or the reek of any especially dirty location (sewers/park/swamps), then I see these sorts of things as way less of an issue in the aggregate.
Smoked
* Smoking cigarettes/cigars/pipes
* Fire damage
* Explosive damage
* Flamethrower damage
* Lighting a flare
* In a room with a fireplace
* Using an arc welder
Ethicol
* Using an ethicol pump (maybe more than 10L?)
* Siphoning ethicol
* Stealing ethicol
* Carrying filled fuel drum
* Filling molotov cocktail
* Hit by broken, unlit molotov
* Crafting ethicol timebomb
* Installing a flamethrower
Stinky
* Rolling in the park
* Getting swept in the sewers
* Going in Badlands water sources
* Carrying putrid corpses
* Ripping putrid chrome
* Butchering critters
* Contact with fire suppressant
* Hit by sick stick
Like yes, individually they're pretty limited in purpose or what they convey, but with a decent number of them all coming from different sources it could make for an interesting subtext of storytelling as you see other characters move around.
What I'm thinking of specifically is characters vatting out and smelling new. Like someone walks past like that and it's instantly a little micro story being told for the audience. It's not revealing anything too too compromising or overly exposing, and they can get around it if they were really dedicated to concealing that, but it communicates stuff to other players that's interesting and might not be otherwise.
That would be the benchmark for me. No scent so harmful so anyone is going to avoid doing the actual thing for that reason, or too revealing about characters that it's going to be used to metagame more than storytell, but things that just might make someone think 'mm!' as a character goes by.
But I agree that's an example of a highly unique scent that doesn't fit into the idea of generalizing scents, it's just an example of one where I believe scent showing adds to the storytelling without too much disadvantage to players.
Now, all of that mildly off topic spiel was actually to lead up to this statement. Because removing smells from camera feeds isn't likely to happen any time soon, if at all, I'd really rather not have additional information like that being fed to everyone with a camera network. It is much easier not to meta information that you never got in the first place.
I guess the biggest benefit is that it gives characters with low Int scores another chance to express that. Though I doubt many would. For most players it's just one more thing they have to do and one more expense they have to accept when go do things. Myst keep stock in smell in a can. Must us smell in a can after every other activity.
I'm sure many will disagree with me but every little thing you have to remember or manage in order to do fun things without being stomped into the curb just makes it so those cool things are done a tiny bit less often. I worry about the game one day reaching a state where nobody has the energy to try and go do cool things anymore.
I know, I know. Doom saying that keeps new features from being added. Some don't like the what iffing. I think it's important to consider the various ways a change might impact the game.
I would sort of like if smoking affected your character other than just being decoration, having someone smell like smoke tells you about their character without them having to pull a cig out, it's also realistic, cause smokes in universe have no health effects and in game doesn't leave bad smells (except in room descriptions probably?) so it has no downside to the "addiction" despite being a pretty noteworthy part of smokers
