Yrth technology

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by KDLadage

I think that GURPS can handle a second "semi-official" Fantasy setting that has been given more word-count than the one in GURPS Fantasy. And, with Banestorm rooted in Earth history and religion and such, the idea that this theoretical new Fantasy Setting dealing with purely new, unique, and imagined history and religion was (to my way of thinking) the way to go with it.

Madlands 4e in 2009.

That is what I want. ;)

(Banestorm is cool... but when I run fantasy it is either Stoneage or SteamPunk Victorian. Go figure.)

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Not to mention that damage from an explosion shouldn't just spread like water through any available tunnel openings

AD&D Fireballs however are not explosions - they explicitly state they do not generate substantial pressures. Of course the description makes little sense, but, well, magic never does.

burning out all the available oxygen where it gets dropped.

And you base your assumption magical fire consumes oxygen on? Sure as a GM you could go that way, but I have to say that any GM that did and failed to warn the players we're using a pretty non-magical version of magical fire before they tried this is probably more into "winning" himself by thwarting the players than I'd prefer to game with. Well unless the characters really are supposed to be the first people to ever try this spell, or somehow learned it from a source that provided no ancilliary information about how it worked.

And if you *are* opting for actual fire chemistry using up the oxygen, you better have a reason the PCs can't stand at the entrance to the dungeon, toss fireballs into it repeatedly, and claim the xp for all the air breathing monsters in it as the heavier than air CO2 sinks to the lowest levels and smothers everything. Don't think for a moment they won't try stuff like this if you start forcing too much real physics into the magic system. Beware, beware, this is the first step on the road to the teleport cycle relativistic bomb....

BTW, does drinking a potion of fire resistance somehow make all your clothes and equipment also heat proof somehow?

Probably. Fantasy potions routinely extend to equipment - not much point in your potion of levitation if gravity still pulls on your clothing, or your potion of ethereal stepping through the walls if your gear (and your hair and fingernails and whatever other body parts a potion in your blood isn't going to get too) stay behind. No that doesn't make much sense either - magic remember. Though for this particular example, unless its been changed since the old days, D&D fire resistance potions only about half the damage from fire attacks, so this isn't that great a tactic.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Though for this particular example, unless its been changed since the old days, D&D fire resistance potions only about half the damage from fire attacks, so this isn't that great a tactic.

Well, the discussion was about the old days (pretty sure now it provides energy resistance, so yes, it's changed) but I think it was half damage, save for none, with a bonus to saves.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Applying real world logic to D&D makes as much sense as claiming that a pawn couldn't really kill a rook in chess. It's a game, it has internal gamist logic.

True. But linking back to the earlier theme of magic changing the world and arguing for the other side for a moment, I think this is part of the problem with these sorts of extrapolations. They have to be made entirely from the rules. Why is this a problem? Well let's take the incidence of demon summoning critical failures, a popular justification for why GURPS magic is too dangerous for trivial use. It's a reasonable point, until you notice similar analysis gives airline pilots a life expectancy of months, or leads to that classic Murphy about the number of expert axemen who cut off their own heads in a typical battle. More subtly, the spell list of just about any game should convince you magic is most useful as a tactical combat tool. Fine, so you expect it to have its largest impact on military tactics. But if you read most game's skill descripitons you can equally conclude Chemistry is primarily the art of making explosives, with a sideline in illegal drugs, and that architects spend most of their training learning to conceal and detect secret doors.

The problem is with real things, you know or can plausibly guess what has been altered for dramatic purposes, or left out as unimportant to adventurers. You can't do that with magic.

I suspect one of the more significant dramatic omissions for the issue of the large scale impact of magic is countermeasures. This is a common excuse for why magic doesn't radically alter the setting - magic on both sides cancels out. But it gets dismissed early in a more "detailed" analysis, because most spell lists are very short of effective counters, and the ones they do have almost always have loopholes or workarounds, or at least more powerful effects they do not counter. There are strong design reasons to downplay countermagic, most significantly PCs usually have the initiative, and complain if any time they try to use a cool power it's counteracted. Even considered in just the domain of stories, the high utility of magic and scarcity of counters stands out in RPG - after all in traditional stories it magic is fairly peripheral and doesn't usually even take counter*magic*. Magicians tend to be bit parts or special effects, and the hero never has much trouble discovering he can neutralize a nasty effect by wearing his hat upside down, or spitting on the threshold. But design a game like that, even when its clearly in genre, and listen to the player's scream - anybody who thinks otherwise should consider the history of Pendragon magic systems.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Just how well would "medieval society" or "guild structure" really stand up to proof that genuine power -- the sort that bends reality -- can manifest across class or guild lines? Just how well would divinely appointed nobility or monarchy really fare against positive proof of miracles in the hands of random men?

When I want a feudal power structure in a fantasy setting with a lot of magicians, I just induct the wizards into it. No reason not too - in most settings magical powers are hereditary, a magician is at least as useful to a lord on the battlefield as another knight, it takes as much free study time to become a good magician as a good warrior, and given the sorts of expensive components they usually need, it takes a similar amount of surplus to support a magical career as it does a warhorse or the heavy infantry armor that are the basis of other feudal organizations.

Indeed magery might well be sufficiently disproportionately common in the nobility their right to rule is obvious, though the direction of correlation can be subtle. IIRC its Christopher Stasheff who makes the point that "the king cannot be mistaken in battle" doesn't necessarily say anything about the supernatural powers of kingship, after all the guy who has the supernatural gift for tactics stands a better chance of winning the crown from chaos in the first place.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by KDLadage

I guess I am unique in that the only time I have ever ran an Yrth campaign, it was in the first three years following the Banestorm. In other words, there were no Human Kingdoms, no nothing like this.

Thus, my questions on why the world was still medieval and the like were moot.

Yrth during the first period of Banestorm activity could actually be quite a facinating setting, though it has a mild case of the same constrained by future canon problem as Interstellar Wars.

You know it's odd, but this seems to be a bigger problem in fictional settings than historical ones. In a straight historical, if the PCs want to kill Elizabeth I, or alter the outcome of the Synod of Whitby, they usually can and the game simply runs on down an alternate history, but in a fictional setting if you want to off Sir Lancelot, or shift Terran policy and avert the Interstellar Wars entirely it's harder. Much more like a time-travel game really - fictional events seem to have enormous amounts of Temporal Inertia.

[KDLadage]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Yrth during the first period of Banestorm activity could actually be quite a facinating setting, though it has a mild case of the same constrained by future canon problem as Interstellar Wars.

You know it's odd, but this seems to be a bigger problem in fictional settings than historical ones. In a straight historical, if the PCs want to kill Elizabeth I, or alter the outcome of the Synod of Whitby, they usually can and the game simply runs on down an alternate history, but in a fictional setting if you want to off Sir Lancelot, or shift Terran policy and avert the Interstellar Wars entirely it's harder. Much more like a time-travel game really - fictional events seem to have enormous amounts of Temporal Inertia.

If I am playing in <setting X> andf I am playing it <Y> years prior to the established canon; I really could care less if <plot element Z> is disrupted. I am playing, in my mind, one of many versions of that particular game world. Not the one that the company is publishing <Y> years or more in the future.

I admit that could just be me, however.

[Ciaran]

I'd like to take a moment to thank Phil Masters and everyone else who worked on this setting. I think part of the reason people have posted so much on how they run it (in this and other threads) is that so many people do love it, and play in it. It's the setting for one of my longest-running campaigns, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.

It can be maddening to see people picking apart something you've worked hard on and thought long about from the peanut gallery, but really once a setting is released there are few and far between who won't tinker with it in some way. In fact the more they do, the more fertile the ground you've tilled for them is revealed to be. Complete settings are too often... well, oppressive (Middle Earth? Loved to read about it, and watch it - but you can keep it for your games thank you).

As for me, in my Yrth the Goblins are from GURPS Goblins, the Little People and such exist alongside the relatively bog standard elves and dwarves, and the fire elementals love them some gunpowder. The Megalan navy sports racks of alchemically degaussed cannon aboard their ships of the line, and the borders of Caithness hold in part because the Wizard Line permits massed muskets on the West as much as it prevents Wizardly artillery on the East.

And somewhere north of New Jerusalem, my intrepid heroes are on a long and desperate mission to the Castle Perilous (what a fantastic name!) to recover the original reliquary which once imprisoned a certain throne-squatting demon, all the while dogged in their steps by a Lucifuge from GURPS Cabal, which serves either a certain vampiric consigliere or the reliquary's original inhabitant, they know not which.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Ciaran

It can be maddening to see people picking apart something you've worked hard on and thought long about from the peanut gallery

Yep. I've never worked on a GURPS book where this hasn't happened to me in spades. Yet despite that, I'm often in the peanut gallery when I'm not the author. It's in the nature of gamers, I fear.

The upside of this is that it proves I'm a gamer. I actually play this stuff, which probably bodes well for me managing the product line.

[Ciaran]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The upside of this is that it proves I'm a gamer. I actually play this stuff, which probably bodes well for me managing the product line.

Wouldn't have it any other way.