The Campaign Builder's Guild

I've noticed lots of people have adapted the skill abilities in their homebrews.  I was wondering if anyone has any interesting houserules, or  have implemented any changes in their worlds, involving the Scent ability.  I've always thought that it was sort of underrated in the D&D system.

This seems to me to be a very difficult area. I don't know that I've ever seen any either, probably because of a lack of stuff to base improvements to smell on in the D&D game. It would definitely be more prominent if, say, there were more monsters you could hinder with the help of various smells (and not just vampires and garlic).

This isn't a totally bad thing though. In a way, not having a whole bunch of extra stuff for Scent and the like makes the game run more smoothly. A DM can just say "you catch the faint odor of blood" or roll a random Perception check (maybe even with the Constitution modifier substituted for Wisdom's). I do agree on the underrated-ness though. I can't think of any actual common purpose Scent serves except being a boon to gnoll rangers and the like.

I've always ran Scent as just another way to take in sensory info.  If it's just too dark to track but you can smell the trail, then its another tool to get you to your quarry.  Just as you can't target an enemy with just hearing alone but you can get a sense of the direction, so too with Scent and the faint odor of blood in the air.  A druid with Wildshape and the Track feat could become a bloodhound-dog and follow a trail by Scent but that is just 'creating an avenue' to track with.  Interesting question.  

I saw a program on cable (an irrefutable source, I know) about blood hounds.  A trained bloodhound can do some amazing things.  I always felt that Scent has a much larger effect on things.  How many times have people said that animals can "smell fear"?  While that's an exaggeration someone with Scent would be able to smell increased sweating, from nervousness or fear.  They would be able to tell what people a person had touched, where they had been recently, what they had walked through, whether or not they had a lover.   I feel like that could add a bonus to sense motive checks some times.  I've often wanted to add some more capabilities to scent, especially if it were a campaign of monstrous PCs; but at the same time it seems as if it would make game mechanics more complicated.

Bonus to Sense Motive is a very good idea, Eorla.  I don't think it would complicate things any more than skill synergies do.  I suppose Extraordinary power synergy bonuses could get annoying after a while, but keep it simple, eh?