create object/duplicate on firearms

[mlangsdorf]

I think the spell is somewhat less confusing if you just follow natural language rules and only allow 1 artifact to be created at a time. So a laptop is a single thing, a gun is a single thing, and a car is a single thing. If the artifact has removable parts, they stop existing if they are removed from the object and are no longer directly touching a living thing: if you take the recoil spring out of a duplicated shotgun, and use it to repair a second shotgun, the spring disappears as soon as you let go of it, even though you only have to be touching the duplicated shotgun (and not the spring hidden inside the mechanism) as long as the spring is still part of the shotgun.

So you can duplicate a laptop, and since laptops normally include internal batteries, you can duplicate those too. It's perfectly reasonable to say that the laptop's permanent storage is blank and the battery isn't charged, but if you charge the battery (or plug the laptop in) and put data on the hard drive, the photons from the display don't disappear. Similarly, if you Create Object a torch, it burns and you can see in the light in generates.

But a gun and its ammo are separate things, and a car and its gasoline might very well be separate things, too. A wardrobe (even a complicated one with doors and hidden drawers) is a thing, but the clothing in it are each different things. And so forth.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

If you make a flashlight, do the photons disappear just as soon as they're outside of the bulb? I suppose you can't create a laptop either, unless you connect in a separate, non-magical monitor. Wait, no, the electrons couldn't power the monitor either. Need to figure out some way to do a monitor that doesn't emit its particles. Maybe it could have a built-in braille output, or other mechanical output.

Photons? What are they? Oh, light rays. But everybody knows the rays involved in vision are emitted from the eyes.... Spells don't have to care about modern physics.

Even if they did, you need to get the physics right. Photons are themselves created, they aren't something stored in the object and let go, they would no more disappear than the sounds the object makes would. And electrical power doesn't involve a store of electrons either. Indeed for an AC power source, no actual electrons move more than a few micrometers from their initial position in the conductor.

Though I think you could make a good case for being unable to create an object with any stored energy, so you'd need to charge you created laptop before it would do anything and any gasoline in your created car or gunpowder in your gun would be mysteriously inert, by analogy with food being non-nutritious.

I wonder if there's any way to keep a bullet connected, like with a string attached to it. Is there any material that could do that? Maybe that would work with a rocket or grenade launcher. Or some sort of crossbow. You could have exploding tips.

Not reasonably for a bullet, but once you slow the weapon down enough and don't have to run the line through a solid barrel it's more plausible. We do build harpoon guns, and line throwers that use a gas generator to launch the line.

If you make a car with it, are the gases inside the cylinder still part of the machine, or do they disappear as well? Do the gases inside a firearm count as being in contact? As soon as the powder explodes (if we could find some sort of device that comes with its ammunition), then at what point does what cease to be?

Assuming you allow created energy sources, the obvious logic is as soon as it's outside the machine. So the car would have no exhaust and a created bullet could only hurt somebody if you pressed the muzzle against them.

Mind you I'd have no real problem with a ruling that Create Object simply can't make something with easily detachable parts. That makes the rule the caster has to be able to make it himself an issue a lot less often.

It's quite confusing.

Not really. It's not physically plausible, but that's not the same thing. It's a rule for a magical effect, and one that pretty clearly exists for game balance. Trying to interpret it as if it were a physical property may be confusing, because that is not what it is on two separate counts.

Most of the "problem" cases for spells result from ignoring or twisting rules that exists for game balance. My reaction is that if you attempt to use the literal wording to justify something that provides you with a huge advantage that clearly isn't one the spell is supposed to give you, it fails no matter what the wording says. Even if this requires it to fail in a way that contradicts the way it failed last time you tried this.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Spells don't have to care about modern physics.

They don't have to, but the presence of radiation spells, spells dealing with nuclear power, and other such things seems to imply that these spells are intended to function in a world where modern physics is at work.

[Pluribus]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

The distinction between weapon and ammo is not neither for convenience nor arbitrary. The natural use of the word "gun" includes all the levers, springs, pins, screws, and other pieces of metal, wood, or plastic included in the gun. But it doesn't include the ammo. If I say, "I just bought a new pistol", I don't have to buy a separate firing pin. But I do have to buy the ammo separately if I don't already have a stockpile.

That seems like a personal choice. To me, the fact that you buy a gun without ammo is just like buying an electronic device labeled "batteries not included" or "some assembly required". When I think of a TV remote I don't picture one without batteries, and when I think "gun" I never picture it without a clip. A laptop battery is something that can be used up and replaced, so why is it different from a clip of ammo? A laptop battery can be recharged, and a clip can be reloaded.

Plus, I've always been taught to treat every gun as though it were loaded. It has been emphasized and reemphasized that I should never imagine a bullet-less gun.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I agree that poison might be more complex than gunpowder, but a pint of poison is a continuous and discrete object (mostly), while a pound of gunpowder is a lot of distinct grains of powder. Certainly a cartridge of black powder ammunition, with black powder, wadding, and one or more bullets, is probably not a single object, especially after parts of it are place into different parts of the gun in different steps of the loading sequence.

I imagine that gunpowder tightly packed would not suffer from lack of contact. The spell allows for "contact with a living thing" to be through a glove, so I wouldn't say a microscopic gap between grains of powder would be a problem. If it were just a loose pile you would probably lose the top layers over time though a process similar to sublimation as minor disturbances shook it up.

I don't see how a cartridge, powder, and ammunition being separate parts of the loading process is any more of a problem than a barrel, stock, and firing pin being separate parts of the assembly process.



Desthro, I'm not sure what your point is. You seem to be bringing up valid points, and then just saying they aren't valid without saying why...

Cornucopia is a decent enchantment, but the main concern with the thread is reload time. Cornucopia creates ammunition, but you still have to manually load it.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Pluribus

Plus, I've always been taught to treat every gun as though it were loaded. It has been emphasized and reemphasized that I should never imagine a bullet-less gun.

"Treat every weapon as if it were loaded" is a safety rule. It doesn't follow that you get to complain to the gun store guy that the weapon he sold you isn't. I don't see how the spell is any different (except that it cares even less about your complaints).

[Genesis]

If it's really giving you guys this much tsuris just make a new spell! Prereqs can be Cornucopia and Create Object (does Cornucopia already have this as a prereq? IDHMBWM) and some insta-reload spell from the Guns college.

It's magic.

That said, for the spell we're actually discussing, I'd say that duplicating a loaded gun gets you a loaded gun. The natural use of the word 'object' includes internal and contiguous pieces - and that includes magazines and their attendant ammunition (if said ammunition were in the object being duplicated). If a loaded gun was lying on the table, and you said to your buddy, "hand me that gun" he would hand you the entire contiguous package. If a bow, with arrow nocked, were lying on the same table, and I asked the analogous question, I wouldn't be nearly so sure of the arrow coming with. The ammunition for a bow is neither internal nor contiguous. Of course, as people have pointed out, the created ammunition couldn't be effectively fired, so it's a moot point.

[Pluribus]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

"Treat every weapon as if it were loaded" is a safety rule. It doesn't follow that you get to complain to the gun store guy that the weapon he sold you isn't. I don't see how the spell is any different (except that it cares even less about your complaints).

I already explained the gun store scenario.

[Genesis]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

"Treat every weapon as if it were loaded" is a safety rule. It doesn't follow that you get to complain to the gun store guy that the weapon he sold you isn't. I don't see how the spell is any different (except that it cares even less about your complaints).

If you cast Duplicate Object on an assembled Ikea table, do you get a bunch of flat-pack boxes? You get what you cast on, not what was bought. If the source gun is loaded, the duplicated gun should be loaded too.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Genesis

If you cast Duplicate Object on an assembled Ikea table, do you get a bunch of flat-pack boxes? You get what you cast on, not what was bought. If the source gun is loaded, the duplicated gun should be loaded too.

Maybe. I'm not sure I even have an opinion. I'm just saying you can't use a safety rule (a 20th century US military derived safety rule at that) to answer this question. Does Create Servants always produce guys with OSHA approved safety vests and hardhats?

[Genesis]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Maybe. I'm not sure I even have an opinion. I'm just saying you can't use a safety rule (a 20th century US military derived safety rule at that) to answer this question. Does Create Servants always produce guys with OSHA approved safety vests and hardhats?

Sure, sure - but I think the safety rule was quoted in support of the notion that the gun and magazine are often thought of as a single entity. Not that they expect the gun to be sold loaded, but that, once loaded, the composite of bullets + magazine + gun is one item and is often thought of as such. That said, I'm not the one who advanced that argument, so I'm just guessing at that.

What sort of servants does Create Servants make, in general? Does it not respond to the expectations of the caster? Maybe I'd buy it responding to the expectations of the wizard who wrote the spell, but in either case, I would not be surprised by a Create Servants spell conjuring up vests and hardhats. I mean, it'd be funny, sure, but not illogical or out of the question.