Arcane Telegraph and Telephoto

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by hcobb

How can the Courier job exist?

Why pay $100 to some joe blow to waste a week wondering lost someplace when for the same $100 you can get a five world message delivered to anybody on the planet? (Assuming that the wizard's guild can efficiently solve five degrees of Kevin Bacon to find a wizard who knows a wizard who knows the target.)

I'm not sure how they'd do that exactly, but I do feel like I need to think about it.

That's one of the reasons I don't want there to be powerful divination magic that can solve that sort of problem - if the wizard's guild can fairly easily find everyone, then:

1) If the guild wants you enough to look, they can find you, find out about you, and if they want to, take you out.

2) All sorts of situations which would normally mostly require standard means to deal with, solve, figure out, or live with not being able to get complete information about, can be reliably solved by some minor fees to the wizard's guild.

3) How high-power situations play out should heavily involve this sort of wizardly interference, which is complicated, overpowers non-wizardly means of doing things, and involves everyone in range of the wizards' guild. If everywhere is in range of the wizard's guild, then for the GM to be able to figure out what's going on in high-power situations, he needs to take into account that everywhere is inter-connected.

So my job as GM becomes extremely complex, because the implication is all the wizards can and will find out about and interact with all the other wizards and powerful factions in the world, which has headache-inducing implications. And my desire to run games where there are mostly non-wizardly situations going on that mostly get handled in non-wizardly ways, gets undermined.

And so I nerf most of the divination and scrying magic.