Quote:
Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity
I like the idea of having different superscience behave differently, that could stop proliferation of some of the more powerful ultra-tech whilst still allowing some. It would also make players cautious about taking things like ultra-tech explosives between worlds, if they didn't know what would happen!
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I would definitely allow players with appropriate skills to roll to at least take a good guess at what could happen, though. Someone with Physics-18 should have a reasonable chance to figure out, based on how the laws of physics differ, whether an item is likely to just not work, permanently break, or catastrophically fail. If superscience devices are just a complete crapshoot as to what they'll do, no one is likely to try any of them, and at that point, you might as well just say they don't exist anyway.
This sort of thing might actually be testable - I can see someone constructing a device that has a bunch of sub-components based on different physical principles known to differ on different timelines, so that when you turn it on on a new world, it can simply test whether various principles work or not. It wouldn't be perfect (there are worlds where "working electrical circuits" are effectively superscience, for example), but it would be a good start.