Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - hollow49

Pages: [1] 2
1
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 8 of 8"
« on: October 09, 2007, 11:08:34 PM »
I notice one key fact from the books that has not made it into the write-up here - that it is specifically mortal (human) magic that can open the gates. Most of the preternatural nasties around couldn't get hold of an outsider even if they wanted to. The fact that the vampires had aid from Outsiders was proof that there was a renegade wizard allied with them, back in Dead Beat. It seems very siginificant to me, somehow, that the most powerful supernatural monsters of them all are trapped, unable to escape without human intervention.

2
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 7 of 8"
« on: August 31, 2007, 07:31:28 PM »
I suspect that rather than sending oneself back in time, one is more likely to encounter a chronomancer being guided by his future self (the classic "bootstrap" scenario) as it is probably easier in terms of raw power. Hints from Proven Guilty imply that even this can cause dangerous paradox.

On a different note, I doubt that there is any violation of the law in simply changing the rate at which time passes, as there is no risk of a paradox from doing so. Whether this is possible outside of the NeverNever is uncertain, but Faerie is notorious for changing the rate of the passage of time. Possibly a wizard might be able to find some pocket of the NeverNever and affect the rate of time therein, either to accelerate it (to spend a week studying while only an hour passes on Earth) or slow it (to wait a day inside to stay hidden from your enemies for a year on the outside, hoping they'll give you up for dead).

Personally, I don't think there's likely to be much meddling in outright time travel in any Dresden game I play - it's too powerful if paradox is downplayed, and too lethal if it's ramped up. But subtle hints coming from cautious future selves through Hindsight might be a good way for the GM to guide the players into a plot - if you have the Aspect Hindsight, the GM could drop all manner of odd, ambiguous messages as compels in all kinds of situations, and it would be a good justification for turning up at the right place in the nick of time...

3
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 5 of 8"
« on: August 15, 2007, 12:07:32 PM »
Quote from: Slife on August 12, 2007, 11:00:08 PM
Here's an even more bizarre scenario.

A wizard is worried that in the heat of battle he might go too far, and any slip-up will mean Bad ThingsTM for the world (maybe he's fighting Denarians or something), so he enthralls himself so he can't touch one of the coins, or kill a human with magic.

Is this lawful?

Before you ask that, you have to ask another question first:
Is this possible?

I suspect that one cannot enthrall oneself, any more than one can perform brain surgery on oneself - you are trying to change that part of oneself that is trying to make the change. If you tried it, if anythng did happen I suspect that it would go horribly wrong...

ON the other hand, this may be a case for GM adjudication.

4
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 6 of 8"
« on: August 03, 2007, 12:33:44 PM »
Quote from: von Bek on August 02, 2007, 10:36:38 PM
I guess I'd never really seen the "disrupt the natural order" part of this law before, which is a bit dense of me.

Well, the 6th and 7th laws are as much "Thou shalt not tamper with the End of the World Button" as merely disrupting natural order - it's a different scale altogether than common necromancy (although the Darkhallow probably counts on the same level as calling forth the Children of the Old Gods, mostly necromancers seem to confine themselves to smaller-scale effects).

5
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 6 of 8"
« on: August 01, 2007, 09:05:59 PM »
That particular scene has caused some debate on the boards before. The concensus seemed, IIRC, to be that real distinction is that when Harry did his trick, he was simply giving power to what was already present (thanks to the Nightmare) with his own energies, whereas necromancers bring raise ghosts from slumber, and empower them with the energies drawn from death. The drawing on death, not life, seemed to give a very different feel to the magic in Dead Beat. Perhaps Harry managed to do his bit only because the bit that really required necromantic energies had already been done for him. Even then, not that the GP ghosts had to make bodies for themselves in order to harm the living whereas the spectres raised by Cowl could do so while remaining incorporeal.

6
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 5 of 8"
« on: July 21, 2007, 11:31:38 PM »
Besides, anything sufficiently similar to a human mind to be good practise would also be subject to the same ethical issues - remember, even a nonhuman might be considered close enough to warrant a violation. (If I were GMing it, I'd say that it would count as experience if and only if it also counted as a violation for accumulating "ticks" and stunts.) Remember if SF, Harry tells the Shadowman that the Fourth Law prohibits bindind another against their will - referring to Kalsharrak the demon? If even that kind of monster is deemed to be protected, then the Fourth Law gets applied with a very broad brush indeed...

Of course, there's nothing to stop some beings being bound by their own will in various ways - a contract with various powers like the Denarians, a bargain with the Leanansidhe, the mantle of a Faerie Knight, an oath sworn on ones own power - we've seen many examples in the book. All of these do apply some degree of compulsion/obligation on the bound party, but he or she chose to accept them at the time, so free will is not compromised. I'm not sure whether the Swords of the Cross belong on the list or not - my impression of those is that no futher obligation is required after the choice to take up the sword - one merely has to keep making that same choice every day, and only those capable of doing so are given the option in the first place.

7
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 5 of 8"
« on: July 20, 2007, 12:46:14 AM »
Quote from: Slife on July 19, 2007, 11:06:12 PM
If I had a character who wanted to do this, I could make a huge legal argument about the difference between enthralling and using magic on the mind.  The examples given seem like they could be transferred just as easily to surgery, with any instance of compulsions changed to "chainsaw". 

Surgery is bad because treating cancer by cutting it out with a chainsaw kills people.  You'll sever arteries and break bones, leaving your patient a crippled, bleeding mass on the operating room table.

There's also the gray area of removing a compulsion. 

The real problem with that analogy is that without practise and training, you aren't going to become a skilled surgeon, and you wouldn't want to make the attempt without suitable equipment. But there's no way to practise mental surgery on dead bodies or fakes like one does in surgical training, and (because of this) there isn't any tradition or practise with the level of skill to train others in this. (After all, that kind of knowledge hass to ultimately come from practical experience at some point in the past...) And without experience or training, to extend the metaphor, attempting surgery with crude unsterilised equipment isn't something you'd want to risk - the comparison isn't quite as blatent as your chainsaws, but is certainly far from safe and probably often fatal.

8
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 5 of 8"
« on: July 15, 2007, 09:21:20 PM »
Of all the Laws, this is the one we've seen in the most detail in the books, thanks to PG. (While First Law infractions are more common, they are also more clear-cut and unambiguous.) Because we've already got a prime grey-area example from the books, and have already had over a year to hash out the implications elsewhere on the board, I find it difficult to come up with anything really worthwhile to say, other than that you've lived up to my high expectations and hit the nail on the head. (That's the one downside to consistently doing an excellant job - people come to expect it of you!)

9
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 4 of 8"
« on: June 30, 2007, 05:44:40 PM »
Quote from: iago on June 30, 2007, 03:38:57 PM
I don't know about the "without really trying".  Learning how someone *else* says a name, precisely, isn't exactly easy.  The one guy we've seen do it with casual ease in the books was Mister Ferro -- Ferrovax, one of the very few True Dragons in the world.  And he did it with a fragment.  Getting someone's *full* name, spoken from their lips, pronounced accurately, with every nuance correct -- that, to me, isn't something any human could pick up "without really trying".  IMO. :)

Mind you, a trained wizard probably learns to memorize any name he hears, and if someone without any middle names introduces themselves formally - they've given him the key to their psyche  - as it stands now. (Of course, mortals having free will, their true names do gradually change along with their nature - the Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden of WN is not the same person as the young boy adopted by Justin DuMorne, and his pronunciation of his Name has changed subtly as well. Harry has gone into detail about this before, but in WN shows how he can make adjustments to the name to allow for such changes to get it to work. Whether he could do the same without some idea as to what the other had experienced over the years since the Name was given, is another matter.)

Out of interest, how common is it now for people to have no middle name or (in some parts of the world) go by both first names, and so be unprotected? At work we use our initials for logins, but about 1 in 10 of us is stuck with X or Q as a dummy middle initial instead. Is this a modern trend, and is it more or less common in the US than here in the UK? (OTOH, my father's side of the family runs to multiple middle names - my dad has 5 names, my uncle 4 and my new nephew has 4 as well.)

10
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 4 of 8"
« on: June 29, 2007, 05:11:20 PM »
I have my suspicions that a voluntary invasion of ones mind is going to be banned as well, given that it's never been seen. The transmission of thought, however, should probably be permitted, though might require fairly stringent conditions -  WN spoiler.
(click to show/hide)
Transmitting a thought or mental impression to another, as long as the other is not obliged to pick it up, is not going to violate the law, and might well be helpful in establishing details that can't easily be described. I suspect that it may leave the door open for mental attacks from the recipient though...

11
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 4 of 8"
« on: June 28, 2007, 10:29:10 PM »
Quote from: mikeryan on June 28, 2007, 01:57:48 AM
3) Harry tells us that there is no such thing as an expert in defense against mental magic. No one is allowed to practice it (although he didn't know about the Blackstaff at that point), so there is no way to practice defense.

Doubtless there is already a rule covering this, but I feel the need to speculate. Perhaps the skill used for defence in this kind of psychic struggle cannot be learnt beyond a certain level without experience, or if it uses a more common skill, is limited to a maximum value for this purpose? Harry's encounter with Corpsetaker indicates that he has some training, which might well have stood up to a complete novice. Presumably if a wizard gets attacked mentally enough he could learn by experience, and Harry probably now has at least 1 more level than the normal value thanks to the events of Dead Beat and the teachings of Lasciel...

12
DFRPG / Re: Aspects {Potential Book Spoilers}
« on: June 23, 2007, 04:38:41 PM »
I was thinking this over the other day. I'm not sure what the aspects are, but as at book 1 one of them is almost certainly "The Doom of Damocles". After book 1 I would say that one got replaced, probably with something like "Romancing the Reporter" or simply "Susan". In turn that would evolve to "Lost Love" around the end of book 3 (it was a driving force for Harry in book 4 and saved him in book 6) but as his relationship with Murphy is helping him move onwards, it probably no longer applies as one of the top 10 factors in his life after that point. I would switch it out with a Thomas-related aspect at this point (I'm assuming that we're going with a very limited increase in Aspects here.) His maimed hand was definitely an aspect in book 6, but not anymore (it doesn't really limit him anymore), while Lasciel definitely became an aspect in some form in/after book 7 ("Marked by Lasciel", "Shadow of the Fallen" etc.). Other possible "acquired" aspects from growth in the books - "Warden", "Debt to Winter", "Apprentice under the Doom", perhaps an aspect about his growing reputation in supernatural circles, and possibly after the events of WN
(click to show/hide)
.

13
DFRPG / Re: Antagonists
« on: June 23, 2007, 04:10:47 PM »
Quote from: mikeryan on June 17, 2007, 10:07:13 PM
1) Werewolves.

I like the Dresdenverse werewolves, especially the Alphas. I figure that since the Alphas are mostly college kids, they'll have friends and family that are based in places other than Chicago. I think werewolfery is then going to spread beyond Chicago, as they initiate others and those others start their own packs in other cities.

Now the Alphas generally just patrol for supernatural threats, but their progeny might not be so discriminating. I'm thinking there are going to be some mundane muggings and serial rapes that are going to be stopped by the local 'wolves. That's all well and good, but there will be violations of the First Law by these well meaning kids, and that's going to lead them down dark paths. Enter the PCs.

I'm not sure that taking werewolf form to attack an enemy is a violation of the First Law. You aren't rendering the enemy helpless by magic, nor harming them directly with your power, just giving yourself an advantage. Personally I would rule this as on a level as creating a magically enhanced weapon for combat - and since that includes the Warden's swords, I rather think that it's one step too far removed for First Law to apply.

14
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 2 of 8"
« on: June 23, 2007, 04:00:47 PM »
Quote from: ballplayer72 on June 23, 2007, 01:58:41 AM

I do believe the original translation is closer to "Thou shalt not murder" quite different than kill

Yes, and in fact many contemporaneous parts of the bible in fact encourage killing of heathens in battle, those guilty of various crimes, etc. The sample chapters of White Night have Harry explaining the issues involved in assuming the King James version of the Old Testament rules are accurate - in fact even at the time, it was established that the translation sacrificed some subtleties and nuances in favour of poetic speech.

Issues of exegesis are always tricky, which is perhaps relevant to the discussion here - as the Laws of Magic are concerned with the spirit rather than the letter, they are relatively free from such issues, but the Unseelie Accords probably require a trained lawyer and linguist to untangle the loopholes. What language are these written in anyway? I expect the Laws are officially written in Latin, being enforced by the White Council, but what about the Accords? Estruscan, Latin, Sumerian, some Faerie language, or are there official translations into each major group's language of choice? If the latter, does this leave loopholes in one version that aren't there in another, or is the legalese sufficiently complex to bypass such matters, by specifying the definition of almost every term used? (I suspect the overly abstuse legalese to be correct, given what we've heard of the Accords.)

15
DFRPG / Re: Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 1 of 8"
« on: June 14, 2007, 04:12:53 PM »
The example was based off the scene in Grave Peril where Harry has just eaten the Nightmare's power, and uses that power to obliterate the red vampire who jumps at him (can't remember her name - one of the twins from that book) only to feel sick afterwards at the realisation that he's used his magic, which comes from his own soul, in such a violently destructive fashion. I agree that it's not something that would ordinarily be a grey area - what I'm asking is can a player take such a situation and draw on the perversion of his own magics in such a way as to get the bonus, at the cost of the usual penalty, turning something that is normally OK into something questionable, perhaps in the way he does it? Deliberately use his magics in a way that twists them even when it isn't necessary, in other words.


Pages: [1] 2