Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

[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?