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Old 09-29-2018, 07:44 PM   #1
hcobb
 
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Default Arcane Telegraph and Telephoto

The Wizard's Guild offers affordable messaging services. This serves their goal of exposure to information along with giving the guild members a nudge to visit the guild hall frequently in order to check their mail.

This requires a wizard on both ends of the connection who both know Long-Distance Telepathy and Duplicate Writing.
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Old 09-29-2018, 11:40 PM   #2
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Default Re: Arcane Telegraph and Telephoto

And/or gates and mail pouches.

And/or winged messengers.

And/or demons. "Don't distress! Call Demon Express!"

And/or Astral Projection and/or crystal balls and/or scrying.
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Old 10-03-2018, 08:51 PM   #3
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Default Re: Arcane Telegraph and Telephoto

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Originally Posted by hcobb View Post
The Wizard's Guild offers affordable messaging services. This serves their goal of exposure to information along with giving the guild members a nudge to visit the guild hall frequently in order to check their mail.

This requires a wizard on both ends of the connection who both know Long-Distance Telepathy and Duplicate Writing.
I bet the Mechanician's Guild is working on their own version. Probably involving gates and a device called Flemish Painter in a Box.
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Old 10-16-2018, 03:31 PM   #4
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Default Re: Arcane Telegraph and Telephoto

How can the Courier job exist?

Why pay $100 to some joe blow to waste a week wondering lost someplace when for the same $100 you can get a five world message delivered to anybody on the planet? (Assuming that the wizard's guild can efficiently solve five degrees of Kevin Bacon to find a wizard who knows a wizard who knows the target.)
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Old 10-16-2018, 04:19 PM   #5
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How can the Courier job exist?

Why pay $100 to some joe blow to waste a week wondering lost someplace when for the same $100 you can get a five world message delivered to anybody on the planet? (Assuming that the wizard's guild can efficiently solve five degrees of Kevin Bacon to find a wizard who knows a wizard who knows the target.)
I'm not sure how they'd do that exactly, but I do feel like I need to think about it.

That's one of the reasons I don't want there to be powerful divination magic that can solve that sort of problem - if the wizard's guild can fairly easily find everyone, then:

1) If the guild wants you enough to look, they can find you, find out about you, and if they want to, take you out.

2) All sorts of situations which would normally mostly require standard means to deal with, solve, figure out, or live with not being able to get complete information about, can be reliably solved by some minor fees to the wizard's guild.

3) How high-power situations play out should heavily involve this sort of wizardly interference, which is complicated, overpowers non-wizardly means of doing things, and involves everyone in range of the wizards' guild. If everywhere is in range of the wizard's guild, then for the GM to be able to figure out what's going on in high-power situations, he needs to take into account that everywhere is inter-connected.

So my job as GM becomes extremely complex, because the implication is all the wizards can and will find out about and interact with all the other wizards and powerful factions in the world, which has headache-inducing implications. And my desire to run games where there are mostly non-wizardly situations going on that mostly get handled in non-wizardly ways, gets undermined.

And so I nerf most of the divination and scrying magic.
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Old 10-16-2018, 04:28 PM   #6
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I'm not sure how they'd do that exactly, but I do feel like I need to think about it.
This is just three wizards in a Long-Distance Telepathy chain, assuming they can find that middle wizard who knows both the local wizard and the remote wizard acquaintance of the subject.
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Old 10-16-2018, 04:34 PM   #7
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And so I nerf most of the divination and scrying magic.
Or you make counter-surveillance magic just as commonplace. If you can hire a wizard to find someone, it stands to reason that they could hire a wizard to block the scrying. Make it part of the economics of magic.
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Old 10-16-2018, 05:45 PM   #8
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This is just three wizards in a Long-Distance Telepathy chain, assuming they can find that middle wizard who knows both the local wizard and the remote wizard acquaintance of the subject.
For the telepathy part, yes. You need enough IQ 16 wizards with Long Distance Telepathy who know each other and are willing to forward messages to each other. I don't mind that. (We did that and it wasn't a problem except for human & situational mistakes. GM: "You hear a message from Zagdan in your head: 'Zembo says bring the viola.'")

And if the sender can tell you where the recipient is, or if it's a famous personality like nobility, a guildmaster, or something, then I can see the wizard's guild maybe knowing who to contact to get a message going to the right place. I don't mind that either. (We did that too, though not very often.)

What I wonder and worry about is how you identify a wizard who knows the recipient, and how you navigate the network of connected wizards. While there might be someone withing seven degrees of separation or less in the modern world, we have cheap planetary communications and travel, so I don't think everyone in a fantasy world is liable to be as closely linked, and I also think the whole idea breaks down if they have to be linked by IQ 16 wizards who know Long Distance Telepathy and are willing to forward broadcast telepathic messages to every other such wizard they know, even if it's just someone with $100 who wants to deliver a message to someone. A multi-level broadcast to find someone, even if there were such a network, wouldn't it start to be hugely expensive in fatigue/casting/time fees to spread out over the world checking for someone who knows the recipient?

So I wonder how you imagine that working, and I hope you don't have a good answer that involves using the new Scrying spell or a Crystal Ball or something, as that would be something I'd like not to exist, or else it creates a "wizards can find anyone anyplace" kind of situation.
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Old 10-16-2018, 05:50 PM   #9
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Or you make counter-surveillance magic just as commonplace. If you can hire a wizard to find someone, it stands to reason that they could hire a wizard to block the scrying. Make it part of the economics of magic.
Er, that can help, yes. However it also escalates the desire for ubiquitous use of magic, or else. i.e. As a GM I still have a world-spanning problem to think about who is using what magic, only it now includes a lot of common defensive scry-guarding. Do guards and military units now need to have scry-guarding spells as much as they need scouts and night guard shifts?
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Old 10-17-2018, 07:53 PM   #10
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Default Re: Arcane Telegraph and Telephoto

Ma Bell was broken up by anti-trust act. Perhaps the few Mnoren who are tinkering around may decide that AT&T needs to be broken up too.

You could always make Long Distance Telepathy and this type of scrying annoying to Demons (the ether buzzing gives them headaches) and there is a higher percentage of visits from them if a person continuously does this. Perhaps its a type of uninvited summoning?

This may not affect your PCs doing these Long Distance calls, but AT&T might not like the liability of it and restrict it as a common thing.
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