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Old 07-16-2018, 07:31 PM   #1
Agemegos
 
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Join Date: May 2005
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Default Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

Sorry about the wall of text. I have edited for brevity and focus.
the cost of creating a Gate using the rules for hiring wizards to cast spells is not expensive compared with a bridge, a road, or even a ship.

Amortising the cost of the gate over its expected number of transits before failure works out expensive. The cost of hiring a wizard with Create Gate or Control Gate, with apprentices or a ST battery to stand by ready to repair the Gate when it started to malfunction is expensive for a low-traffic route; quite affordable for a high-traffic route or if a number of Gates serving different low-traffic routes were co-located at a Gate nexus.

there are implications of infiltrators establishing Gates for the defences of cities and towns.

RE: trade through the Gate network. goods would flow from market to market through the network, finding the cheapest route even if no-one had the information needed or mathematical chops to solve that cheapest-route problem. the huge mixture of long-distance and short-distance links would mean that geographical distance is unimportant on Cidri.

"bottleneck" links in parts of the network, would produce huge wealth by charging tolls on them, or conducting a monopoly trade through them.Such middlemen could be cut out, by creating new Gates that circumvented theirs. So traders' guilds with very lucrative Gates would try to keep it secret where their Gates connected to, and might reserve them for trading through, and not allow toll-paying stranger to use them. Gates originally created for commercial use might have rules that do not allow any wizard to pass through them who has one end of a Gate set up — perhaps many Gates might not allow any wizard who knows Create Gate, Control Gate, or Long Distance Teleport to pass through them (except for their original creators and perhaps successors according to some rule).

Gate networks have strategic and logistical implications: discontiguous empires and so forth.

Gates are omniscient, which can be used for non-transport purposes: divination, security:. Imagine the research and intelligence-gathering applications of a Gate that will transport only pieces of paper with false statements written on them, or only witnesses who lie!
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Last edited by Agemegos; 07-18-2018 at 08:21 PM. Reason: Cut wall of text for brevity and focus
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Old 07-16-2018, 08:25 PM   #2
luguvalium
 
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Default Re: Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

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And I wasn't even an economist back then!
You were, you just didn't know it yet.

Very Interesting.
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Old 07-16-2018, 09:46 PM   #3
Rick_Smith
 
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Default Re: Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

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...

Finally, I presented my own rules for a much tamer form of Gate.

I am sad to tell you that my typescript has not survived.
Hi Agemegos!
I would love to see your tamer form of Gate spell here. Gates are one of the spells I listed in my problematic Spells thread.

Very warm regards, Rick.
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Old 07-16-2018, 10:18 PM   #4
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Default Re: Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

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Hi Agemegos!
I would love to see your tamer form of Gate spell here. Gates are one of the spells I listed in my problematic Spells thread.

Very warm regards, Rick.
Very little of my stuff survives from back then. There are some notes in the margins of my #1 and #3 copies of AW. Basically, I required Gates to have heavy physical frames, made in identical pairs, and to be enchanted together, in one place, by a single casting. Then the frames have to be carried physically or otherwise transported to, and suspended in, their positions. But I let them be mobile, carried around on ships instead of a hold, etc.

I required the Gates' rules to act only on criteria that are perceptible in principle to normal senses.
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Old 07-17-2018, 02:10 AM   #5
zot
 
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Default Re: Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

Fantastic idea! (I wish you could rename the thread to, "How gate networks affect towns and cities", or something like that)

The Cidri setting seriously, seriously needs a decent treatment of gates like this. You could structure tons of adventures around transport guilds. Exploration, assassination, protection, etc. This opens up a whole world within Cidri that I really just hadn't thought about, despite doing a lot of gate engineering back in the day!

You see gates in just about every jrpg video game but not like this! This is something AFAIK unique to Cidri and an incredible source of intrigue and power.

I can't enthuse enough on this idea!
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Old 07-17-2018, 05:33 AM   #6
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Default Re: Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

Really interesting!

First, it makes me wonder about the omniscience of gates -- maybe the gate should only be able to determine things that the caster could have determined?

Second, as you say, gates would become incredibly important for economy and security. It does sound like they might be everywhere. I'm not familiar with Control Gate -- can an enemy wizard completely subvert the system? So a gate in a city is high profit but also very high risk?
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Old 07-17-2018, 05:36 AM   #7
zot
 
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First, it makes me wonder about the omniscience of gates -- maybe the gate should only be able to determine things that the caster could have determined?
As written, you can use them for divination...
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Old 07-17-2018, 05:51 AM   #8
Rick_Smith
 
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Default Re: Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

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Really interesting!

First, it makes me wonder about the omniscience of gates -- maybe the gate should only be able to determine things that the caster could have determined?

Second, as you say, gates would become incredibly important for economy and security. It does sound like they might be everywhere. I'm not familiar with Control Gate -- can an enemy wizard completely subvert the system? So a gate in a city is high profit but also very high risk?
Hi RobW,
Yes, Control Gate can be used to change the rule on an existing Gate, so it is indeed a huge security risk, if the enemy wizard can access the other end of the gate.

I liked a fantasy world where you had ships and traders, so I changed the rules to make long distance gates more restrictive and more expensive.

Warm regards, Rick.
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Old 07-17-2018, 11:43 AM   #9
Skarg
 
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Default Re: Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

It's so sad you don't the manuscript! (Are you sure you don't? I thought I had lost some of my TFT stuff but then it turned up.)

In our TFT campaigns, after some initial issues with the assumptions in ITL and AW that "it just takes an IQ roll to find anything in a city" making whatever magic anyone wants a bit annoyingly/implausibly easy to find, we tried to think about what the wizard population was like, what their spell mix was, and what they were doing with themselves, especially the ones with the more powerful spells.

I think your analysis either assumes a very large population, or a higher rate of wizards in the population that 1 in 200, or a high rate of powerful living wizards per people who were born wizards, or a high rate of wizard obedience and focus on commercial goals - probably all of the above. Also, using Long-Distance Teleportation is deadly dangerous - if you have the high-IQ wizards with Create Gate doing it on an industrial scale, there will be a significant casualty rate.

However we did end up with gate networks... but they were limited. We considered that not very many wizards could or did know the Create Gate spell, and some of those who did preferred to learn some other spell than Control Gate. However the Wizard's Guild was very interested in having a gates in their guild houses, so they would try very hard to get wizards who could to learn those spells and use them in that way, but there was a hard tension between what the guild wanted and whether the few powerful high-IQ wizards were willing to travel about making gates instead of doing things that were more interesting to them. It was fairly likely that a major city's wizard's guild would have one or more gates to someplace, and the GM (and players) would keep track of where those were. Using them was not cheap, and would be either unavailable or much more expensive when a wizard with Create Gate was not on duty. When there were gates and Control Gate staff on hand, sometimes the guild would advertise it to cash in: "WE HAVE GATES! LOW LOW RATES!"

When a wizard did go on a mission to set up a new gate, it could be an occasion to hire escorts (potential PC adventure situation), and often the wizard would have other things in mind to do if he was going to have to travel someplace interesting.

At any rate, there's lots of potential for fun and interesting situations from gates. If they were really commonly available all over the place, though, it would certainly have big effects on trade and distances and so on.
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Old 07-17-2018, 01:16 PM   #10
zot
 
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Default Re: Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

More gates means fewer wizards need to know the spells because those that do, the ones that build and maintain the redundant gate network, can use it to move around and leverage the network effect to get to the gates they need to maintain.

After reading the OP, we realized that an ancient, Dune-like Transport Guild must have arisen that would control the knowledge of Gate, Control Gate, and Long Distance Teleport, assassinating competitors, controlling prices, and influencing governments.
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