Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadekeep
This is probably excessive pedantry, but such things can be fun nonetheless. I was thinking about what constitutes a single "use" of a Gate, since failure has a chance of occurring after each use. Most of the time this is pretty obvious - a person or wagon or thrown object passes through the Gate, that's a discrete "use". One could think of the activity period as having a degree of latency, so that a whole party moving through in close formation might also be considered a single "use". But I would argue there is also a time component.
Say for example an evil mage opens one end of a Gate in a town, and then travels to his base, where he opens the other end and begins marching his Orc army through it. While this would be a continuous stream and therefore sort of like one "use", I would say that the failure roll should still occur at timed intervals during this use. Maybe once per minute for such continuous use.
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Unless you WANT gates to be an even more map-shattering force than they already can be, I would not allow an entire group or wagon to count as only one use of a gate.
Consider that you can already use one gate to get hundreds of armed men inside a fortified place (average 216 before it starts to flicker, plus however many can pour through while it is still flickering). That's extremely undermining for most forts and secure locations, and to my mind calls for more limits and defensive magics, rather than more lenient rules that allow it to be worse.
I generally pick a weight limit (say 300 pounds). If something heavier passes through, it either requires additional breakdown checks (e.g. another roll per 100-300 pounds in excess), or a modifier to the breakdown check (e.g. +1 for every 100 pounds over 200 pounds). And I tend to roll again when passing a gate while it's flickering, for additional mishap (generally instant closure, but a random gate breakdown result can be a nice deterrent to abuse).