Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by zot

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.

Yes, in theory.

When a gate starts to flicker somewhere, that means there is one minute from then to go alert the repair crew (minimum IQ 15 and 50 ST available to use somehow, probably Aid spells which require additional turns and DX rolls) - in this case maybe involving more using of gates and get them to come back and do it. That team needs to be very responsive and not on a bathroom break, and the distant Wizards Guild branches with the gates need to trust each other to allow the maintenance crew to rush through and cast spells in their gate room. (They probably do, if they trust each other enough to have mutual gate rooms, though it's another interesting situation for possible backstabbing and/or covert operations...)

Originally Posted by zot

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.

Yet another very cool/interesting idea arising from gates and breaking up and tracking who knows what spells and what that implies for power politics.

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Yes, in theory.

When a gate starts to flicker somewhere, that means there is one minute from then to go alert the repair crew (minimum IQ 15 and 50 ST available to use somehow, probably Aid spells which require additional turns and DX rolls) - in this case maybe involving more using of gates and get them to come back and do it. That team needs to be very responsive and not on a bathroom break, and the distant Wizards Guild branches with the gates need to trust each other to allow the maintenance crew to rush through and cast spells in their gate room. (They probably do, if they trust each other enough to have mutual gate rooms, though it's another interesting situation for possible backstabbing and/or covert operations...)

No, it wouldn't have to be that tricky at all, you just put five gates on top of each other with priority rules that ensure fail-over. Inspection crews would go around and periodically check how many gates are left, using a key patrol protocol like security guards do.

All the gates are inside of gate stations, like train stations, with a crew and a crystal ball (maybe several of these). If all the gates in a station that go to a particular location happen to fail, the crew uses the crystal ball to contact the gate network so an emergency technician can either come in through a gate from another location or as a last resort, a senior emergency tech can Long Distance Teleport in and make a new gate for a junior gate crew to use.

Senior emergency techs would be responsible for a territory, traveling the gate networks to familiarize themselves with each gate station so they can teleport to it at need. Each station would have a distinctive appearance to help technicians teleport there.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by zot

No, it wouldn't have to be that tricky at all, you just put five gates on top of each other with priority rules that ensure fail-over.

Yes, the ability to add however many gates from A to B is a really strong tactic. You need 100 ST for each gate, but that can be reduced had with apprentices with Aid spells - the usual limit being 25 ST / apprentice per day, so only 4-apprentice-days per gate or redundant gate. The more apprentices you have available for this purpose, the less time you take from the wizard with Create Gate. By the book, it's a cheap operation except for the need to get a wizard to move from A to B to do it.

Originally Posted by zot

Inspection crews would go around and periodically check how many gates are left, using a key patrol protocol like security guards do.

Ok.

Originally Posted by zot

All the gates are inside of gate stations, like train stations, with a crew and a crystal ball (maybe several of these). If all the gates in a station that go to a particular location happen to fail, the crew uses the crystal ball to contact the gate network so an emergency technician can either come in through a gate from another location or as a last resort, a senior emergency tech can Long Distance Teleport in and make a new gate for a junior gate crew to use.

Crystal balls let you see things but not send messages. It takes 5 minutes and and IQ roll and 2 ST to use one, and their nominal value is $50,000, and they're ridiculously useful for other applications (so much that I tend to ban them from existing in my campaigns), so that technique doesn't seem very feasible to me.

How about Long-Distance Telepathy instead? Still, requires an IQ 16 wizard with that spell to be on-call, as 12 ST per message.

Seems to me like a protocol for "where is the repair crew" and just sending a page through the gates would tend to work even better.

Any of those methods will want people to be on duty whenever the gates are in use, and ready to respond very quickly to get the message and get the repair crew to come to the flickering gate and cast Aid spells and then the Create Gate spell to stabilize it.

It might be less work, if you have redundant gates, to do what we assumed was done, which is to just keep one gate as the last-resort gate, and use it to send someone through and rebuild more gates when one link is wearing down. It only costs 100 ST more to build a new one than the 50 ST to stabilize one, and then you're not having to keep an emergency crew ready to scramble and not allowed to use the WC for hours.

I suppose if you're really going for industrial levels of traffic, though, that a repair team might end up being more efficient.

Originally Posted by zot

Senior emergency techs would be responsible for a territory, traveling the gate networks to familiarize themselves with each gate station so they can teleport to it at need. Each station would have a distinctive appearance to help technicians teleport there.

The thing about Long Distance Teleportation though is:

IQ 19: "... one person at a time ... If the wizard misses his DX result with any result EXCEPT a 16, the teleported character is dead, kaput, finished, lost forever." ST 20

So maybe just use the gates?

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

The thing about Long Distance Teleportation though is:

IQ 19: "... one person at a time ... If the wizard misses his DX result with any result EXCEPT a 16, the teleported character is dead, kaput, finished, lost forever." ST 20

So maybe just use the gates?

That's a very good point. There should be service gates only for when all the other gates fail. If THOSE happen to fail when all other gates have also failed, that's when someone with Long Distance Teleport sends over "the new guy" to make a gate. Probably using a bunch of apprentices to charge him or her up on the same turn to try to make a gate immediately. The guild would use Long Distance Teleport to find out what happened if the gate doesn't immediately start working.

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Any of those methods will want people to be on duty whenever the gates are in use, and ready to respond very quickly to get the message and get the repair crew to come to the flickering gate and cast Aid spells and then the Create Gate spell to stabilize it.

It might be less work, if you have redundant gates, to do what we assumed was done, which is to just keep one gate as the last-resort gate, and use it to send someone through and rebuild more gates when one link is wearing down. It only costs 100 ST more to build a new one than the 50 ST to stabilize one, and then you're not having to keep an emergency crew ready to scramble and not allowed to use the WC for hours.

I suppose if you're really going for industrial levels of traffic, though, that a repair team might end up being more efficient.

One wizard with Gate plus 6 apprentices can cast Gate once every two hours if they each use 8 ST each. That's 4 gate-ends per day. Maybe they make 4 ends one day and go to the destination and make the other ends the next day. That works fine for connecting established gate houses to each other and provides each gate with 3 fallbacks.

That's 32 ST for each apprentice but these are Travel Guild employees, not Wizard's Guild employees. They're better paid and they aspire to learn Gate, Control Gate, and Long Distance Teleport, which they can't do from the Wizard's Guild :).

When a gate flickers, the station crew sends someone through a service gate to a service location to fetch a maintenance crew.

1 in 216 failures will keep maintenance crews busy but redundant gates let crews repair a bunch of failures in one location without a crisis.

[Skarg]

I do rather love the Travel Guild idea.

As mentioned, our Wizards Guild houses had far less thorough/elaborate gate networks. They did tend to have guarded/protected gate rooms and would try to keep them maintained and staffed, but there weren't all that many wizards with the ability and willingness to focus on gate network status.

Another interesting situation, it seems to me, if someone did develop a really comprehensive and robust gate network that linked most major places over a large area, would be that it might become a target for some sort of master takeover scheme. Of course it would need to involve the Wizards Guild, or it might just be about the Wizards Guild running such a network spanning the known world, but it seems to me that if one faction has control of the gate network (which by definition is effectively sort of all in one place that touches all the major cities of the world), then that group would tend to have massive power.

If such a group were the Wizards Guild, well that could naturally be one of the main pillars of their power and control. On the other hand, if ever there were hostility of division, having the gate network all connected could suddenly turn the gate network into a world-spanning battlefield involving every city in the known world.

If the gate network designers had foreseen such an issue, though, maybe there would be a way to design the network so that it could be compartmentalized if/when there were reasons to have not every gate extremely proximate to each other.

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Another interesting situation, it seems to me, if someone did develop a really comprehensive and robust gate network that linked most major places over a large area, would be that it might become a target for some sort of master takeover scheme. Of course it would need to involve the Wizards Guild, or it might just be about the Wizards Guild running such a network spanning the known world, but it seems to me that if one faction has control of the gate network (which by definition is effectively sort of all in one place that touches all the major cities of the world), then that group would tend to have massive power.

There would certainly be a lot of scheming and a lot of extremely paranoid people running the Travel Guild. And they'd be very vulnerable to betrayal. My friend Guy sent my this article about castle networks as food for thought.

It might be more practical to take an organization like that over from within, since it already has the infrastructure and experienced people. Possession would help. It would be messy but such a powerful empire. Puts the East India Company completely to shame...

[Steve Jackson]

This is fun! Draper Kauffman, who was my economics wiz back in the day, would have loved it.

I read all the way down to the end and saw the original ms. was gone. Aieeeee!

What happens when you make the gate that only passes paper with false statements, and then feed it a paper that says "This statement is false." ?

Clearly we need to prevent divinatory Gates. It would be possible either to write a general rule for the kind of rules Gates could have, or make a short list of legal rules, such as:
- Says the Magic Word.
- Is, or accompanies, Person X.
- Carries Item X.

Suggestions welcome.

I have added a third class of Gate item. Gate Key is what it is, Gate Lock closes but does not harm a Gate, and Gate Seal eliminates the gate.

Flicker time - would five minutes be better?

See Larry Niven's various discussions of "stepping discs" for a teleport economy.