The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
Better Guns for Dresden and Co.
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--- Quote from: Zaphodess on July 19, 2017, 01:36:34 PM ---These are all very special tools, the more versatile foci are wooden. At least those we've seen. Elaine has come closest to a versatile metall focus with her lightning chain. Which Harry promptly copied and taught the Warden trainees about.
I agree with your point about the weight. It's definitely a factor wizards consider when they are preparing their weapons.
--- End quote ---
I suppose it's always possible that the material plays a role in what sort of enchantments it can take. We know Rubies, Silver, and Iron all have specific effects, for example. I guess I always got the impression that the two sort of went together: the more specific/specialized the application, the more specific and/or specialized the requirements of construction, and thus the more general the application (ie a staff as the extreme) the /less/ specialized the requirements.
It's also likely that it's not a Pass/Fail sort of situation, but rather that different materials have different pro's and con's. We know, for example, that at a certain point only Blood is capable of carrying large amounts of Power in a ritual (per SmF iicr), or when Harry worried in SG that he'd miscalculated his new staff and might overload the limits of what the physical material could hold (risking an explosion of kinetic force), and at the absolute end there's supposed to be a hard limit on the amount of magic that can be crammed into a given physical object (a limit DR breaks). All this to say that materials certainly play a role on the descision matrix, but might not be hard and fast by spell application.
khadgar4606:
well if harry gonna cast magic via revolver i think jim would made him a cowboy instead but there is a way to harry to get some real good gun and funnily its from monoc securities and it must be custom made to just for him like Mjölnir for thor. only person can buy him a major boom stick is molly via request to odin and the only time she can buy is accidentally where harry can bust a cap on mabs ass aka Halloween and i dont think mab will like that.
Sully:
Most pilots have STEM degrees going in. For AF it's pretty much impossible to become a pilot otherwise.
I'd double check on the people getting graduate degrees. By brother and most of his friends have their masters in engineering management. They're not actual practicing the discipline. Yes, there are schools that cater to the military and accommodate a military schedule. My brother and his friends chuckle at the quality of education vs the schools that were actually trying to prepare them to be practice a discipline. Compared to checking a box for promotional boards. My brother has also laughed about needing to go back retake his entire bachelors if he wanted to engineer. Yeah he has two degrees in it, and they helped inform his piloting reflexes. But he hasn't done any engineering in his entire career as a pilot, nor will he.
Yeah I have a marine friend getting a phd, but he's a linguist & teaches at the...DLI? So it's in his discipline.
Independent George:
More than just training for wizards, the real force multiplier for the White Council would be to form and maintain a dedicated team of soldiers who train alongside the wardens using combined arms tactics. A wizard firing a rifle isn't putting up a shield or launching fireballs; there's an opportunity cost to it. What they really need is a minion with a machine gun laying down suppressing fire so that the wizard can line up the big 'boom' - basically, dungeons & dragons tactics with a SAW instead of a broadsword.
Heck, this is more or less exactly what Harry does with his squads - everybody has a dedicated role that they support each other with. The wardens would be much more effective if they used the same tactics instead of just sending wizards off by themselves.
The problems is that while this would physically be a world-beating force, it is wholly dependent on trusting in the loyalty of a bunch of vanilla mortals who would suddenly gain insights into the strengths and vulnerabilities of the wizards (of which there are many). That's already hard enough with wizards who have a vested interest in banding together - a regular mortal who develops a grudge against the warden has a lot less binding them to the council than any wizard would.
Shift8:
--- Quote from: Sully on July 19, 2017, 04:58:48 PM ---Most pilots have STEM degrees going in. For AF it's pretty much impossible to become a pilot otherwise.
I'd double check on the people getting graduate degrees. By brother and most of his friends have their masters in engineering management. They're not actual practicing the discipline. Yes, there are schools that cater to the military and accommodate a military schedule. My brother and his friends chuckle at the quality of education vs the schools that were actually trying to prepare them to be practice a discipline. Compared to checking a box for promotional boards. My brother has also laughed about needing to go back retake his entire bachelors if he wanted to engineer. Yeah he has two degrees in it, and they helped inform his piloting reflexes. But he hasn't done any engineering in his entire career as a pilot, nor will he.
Yeah I have a marine friend getting a phd, but he's a linguist & teaches at the...DLI? So it's in his discipline.
--- End quote ---
Whether or not its a practicing discipline is utterly irrelevant. Having the time to do two separate jobs at the same time is not the same thing as having a level of competence in more than one thing. A wizard does not have to be a Navy Seal in order to be usefully competent with a weapon. Clearly this is the case, because Dresden spends basically no time perfecting his skills but finds guns highly useful. The notion that someone could not be an expert in more than one thing, especially with a lifespan in centuries, is self-evidently absurd. Were not even talking about leaning entire professions here, but rather simply additional skills. I'm sorry but this line of reasoning is as abjectly ridiculous as saying a Doctor could not take a martial arts course. Or that Murphy could not learn martial arts on the side of her police job.
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