Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Rice
I think the problem with extrapolating what would happen if such and such a spell existed in a world in which Magic is not uncommon, is that the consequences can’t really be predicted with any certainty.
On another forum, I made a statement that “Castles (of the high fantasy medieval sort) would not exist if the Open Tunnel spell existed. This led to a spirited argument but no agreement.
I still have Castles in my games, even though I don’t think they would exist. And I’ll still have lock/knock although I agree that it’s existence would have unintended consequences. I just choose to ignore them.
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Ignoring consequences is a pretty good option, one I take most of the time.
However, those consequences sometimes have to be dealt with, to at least some extent. My adventure was a bank robbery so I had to think about what kind of security a bank would have. My player's wizard has Knock, so he knows about that spell. I can't just totally ignore the consequences in that case, because the whole premise of the robbery would look silly.
In the same way, if you want to ignore the consequences of Open Tunnel when it comes to castle sieges, you had better not make a siege adventure. To be fair, you probably weren't going to anyway, since TFT is scaled at smaller battles.
Same thing came up with gates for me. I already had planned some material about trade routes when I realized that if gates are even kind of common, no one would haul very valuable materials by wagon or ship (because there would be money to be made producing gates for those purposes). Perhaps I could have ignored this consequence, but at some point, a player will realize that something is off. I'd prefer not to have that happen if I can avoid it.
I'm still ignoring a pretty big hole in my adventure. The robbers are digging a tunnel towards the bank. How the heck are they getting rid of the tailings? If my players think about it, I'll kinda look foolish, but I'm reckoning they won't and hoping for the best. Otherwise, this conspiracy is going to have to grow rather a lot and work slow rather a lot. (Fortunately, ignoring this detail has a long history in RPGs. There are often ghoul warrens beneath graveyards. Where did all the dirt go?)