Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

Skarg · 07-17-2018, 12:43 PM

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.

07-17-2018, 12:43 PM	#9
Skarg Join Date: May 2015	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.