Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 12-25-2004, 08:13 AM   #31
seasong
 
seasong's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Seattle, WA
Default Re: Here's something I don't get about Coventry...

No, that doesn't follow at all. If "teleporting between quanta" is a <i>rule</i>, then you are correct. But if it is a side effect of the rules interacting in a particular combination, then universes which allow parachronics could be exceedingly rare.

Some examples:

1. Worlds with a certain commonality of black holes can develop parachronics, because the overall fabric of their universe is stretched sufficiently thin. Too few black holes, and the fabric is too thick for any reasonable technology to develop (although races capable of building their own blackhole could make one way portals). Too many black holes, and you end up with bane storms. Homeline and Centrum have "enough" black holes; Yrth has too many black holes; most worlds have too few.

2. As you already know, worlds have a "quanta stability" measure. The exact determinants of this are unknown, except possibly by Centrum. Regardless, they can be classed, roughly, as unstable, stable, and superstable. Unstable worlds can be switched to new quanta easily (even accidentally); stable worlds require absolutely massive efforts to even have a chance of switching to new quanta; and superstable worlds can not be switched. Projectors can only be built on superstable worlds.

3. Parachronics is linguistically related to time for a reason! Each quanta is actually an <i>envelope of time</i>, and only the world which is pushing the forward edge of the envelope has a strong enough tension boundary in their chronological time to build projectors. This is why it is important that no other worlds have a later date than Homeline - it also indicates a way to find parachronic-enabled worlds in other quanta.

In all of the above cases, it is even easier to assume that projectors are the "simple" technology, and jumping technologies (conveyors) are a more complicated technology that was developed from projectors. That will keep conveyors from being developed separately.
__________________
Thomas Weigel
Gamer, Coder, Geek
seasong is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
infinite worlds

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 01:09 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.