Gates, Gate keys, and Gate locks

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

That was what I meant with the comment about the character sheet. Too silly? Too meta?

It is a little too meta for what how I'd like them to work, because:

* they are giving perception powers to gates that I don't give to actual people, even talented ones. (There isn't even a spell for "Detect Talent", well, except Telepathy with permission. There also isn't one for "Analyze Attributes", and we preferred to try to avoid referring to attributes directly when in-character.)

* I'd like gate rules to be expressible verbally in-character by someone who doesn't think in terms of game stats. (So I'd be happy with "pass people who appear to have above-average strength" or "...who look stronger than me" or weight-based things, but not "ST 14" or measures of DX or IQ unless you set up a test they have to do and have them roll to do it.)

I think might be good if basically the gate were like a medium-IQ observer (or literally included a magic spirit) who can see, hear, and smell (and may have Mage Sight) and possibly can act as a metal-detector (or substance-type detector - maybe as something tries to pass, it can "taste" the surface of everything passing through, even under clothes and in containers... maybe it can even taste the interior of things due to its nature).

I tend to think I might like it to be fool-able by disguises, Conceal Spells (if the logic applies), and to be fallible (like someone casting a Detect Magic spell). i.e. I don't think I really want a Gate to come with a built-in ability to detect or analyze magic that is more reliable than a wizard casting a spell to do so.

Nor do I want it to be able to detect things that an observer can't, and that there are not even any spells for.

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

This takes us straight back to Nivenesque perpetual motion by teleportation.

The "free energy" problem is the big one to me and is solved, I think, by requiring the plane of the Gate to be aligned with the vector of local gravity.

Well... it helps. Perhaps we should post that notion for some creative physicists e.g. on the TFT email list and phsyics.stackexchange.com and see what they can come up with for exploits.

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

I wrote a monster called the Gate Spider which spins webs that make Gates. It will be posted one of these days.

Sounds good!

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

I would like Gates to remain one of those things where the standard wizard texts don't have all the answers. Leaving GMs free to make interesting Gates: cool. Empowering IQ 18 rules lawyers to make interesting Gates that twist time, space, and economics: only funny once.

I'd like that too.

[howitzer]
I'd also suggest a line or two mentioning somewhere that GMs may want to have slightly altered versions of some spells to suit their tastes, and that a campaign might have variations of the same spell with different tradeoffs.

That would help explain how the GM's world has some existing gates doing something interesting yet it doesn't mean the Wizard's Guild's version of Create Gate allows that, perhaps because it was cast with a little-known version of Create Gate that even if you find a book containing it, you'll realize that version has other limitations.
[/howitzer]