Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
If you come in too quickly, it doesn't have time to be moved aside, and thus must be "destroyed" (whatever that means in this context). Air can accommodate pretty quick movement, probably up to the speed of sound, but trying to get water to move faster than around 60 mph runs into the "cement wall" effect. Assuming each molecule moves in the most efficient route to evacuate the area, a warp that has the character materialize over the course of roughly 0.0005 seconds has enough time for all the air to have moved and formed a human-shaped vacuum for them to inhabit. That's short enough to be a complete non-issue. With water, given the water can't really be moved out of the way faster than 60 mph or so, the minimum safe time is 0.006 seconds, which honestly is probably short enough as well - but if we assume Warp normally uses the 0.0005 second time frame, quite a bit of water will still be around (only ~8% of the necessary safe time has passed) to cause problems. And of course this depends on the water taking the most efficient route - if instead it just shifts away from center of mass, the water traveling down the "leg" will take around 6x as long (although that's still less than 1/20th of a second).
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I don't think it messes up much of anything to say that teleporting may take, oh, say, a whopping 0.05 seconds even. Instantaneous power dodges could be explained as the warper spending that 20th of a second in some extradimensional vacuum. That also allows him to change positions en route, so he can 'port into that famous moving car from a standing position - though that posture change will take much more time than simply scooting air or water aside would. Even a whole second in vacuum is pretty trivial.
Hmm. Speaking of warping into cars, just how explosive a shockwave would a 0.0005, 0.006, or 0.05 second displacement of a human volume of air be in such a confined space? Blow out the windows bad? Blow the roof off the car bad? That's adding an intrinsic (if situational) attack ability to Warp, a definite no no.
So maybe we should just rule that warping
is a castling effect, but the boundary surface doesn't have the energy to sever solids. Maybe not even liquids, so you can only Warp into gasses (or vacuum... or probably plasmas if your heart is set on it).
Or that the speed of your materialization automatically adjusts to the situation and the energy available, even if that sometimes means it takes longer than a second.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that supernatural abilities don't get along with natural laws, and at some point you just gotta handwave it. I love looking at and defining the consequences of power use as a way of adding flavor and maintaining consistency, but in practice in a game you just can't look too closely at this stuff.