Methods for house-ruling away trivially-maintainable gate networks

[Skarg]

Starting a new thread for this house rule tangent in the main forum:

Originally Posted by hcobb

Simple. Just rule that paired gates that have both ends of both pairs within a mile of the other pair suffer from Hawking quantum foam feedback collapse.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/mos...e-machine.html

Or to make it easier to account for: When stepping out of a gate roll 6 dice, if all of the numbers rolled are 6s then the gate starts to collapse. Subtract one die from the dice to be rolled for all sixes for each other gate opening within a mile of the opening you just stepped out of.

Naturally there are many ways to house rule a reason redundant gates aren't practical.

I was thinking of something along the lines you mention, though if both ends have to be near each other for a problem to happen, the obstacle can be overcome by having even one other station at a different third point, though that is a tricky technique to house rule away.

Having gates become more unstable the more gates there are nearby would work, but I wouldn't want to increase the reliability for a single gate to 6's on 6 dice (!), or even 4 or 5. And, I don't really want to remove the ability of guilds to have a gate room with multiple destinations. I just don't want them to be trivially maintainable.

I'm leaning towards a few house rules, but still brainstorming and pondering several other ideas.

My considerations include:

* The way we played made sense that there would be limited and unreliable gate networks, assuming mainly social conditions such as not many Gate wizards typically available and willing to spend a lot of time/effort making and maintaining gates, and important/wealthy/influential/Wizards' Guild people and their needs tending to use the available Gate wizard effort for their own uses.

* Creating and stabilizing gates shouldn't be entirely trivializable to the point where it's "just" an IQ 15 wizard with the spell and 50 ST. Making these more difficult can go a long way to reinforcing the unwillingness of wizards to spend all day on gate maintenance, or to "just" make several redundant gates when they make a gate, or to always have one backup gate for every gate in use, and making another gate to use with it as soon as the main use gate goes down.

House rules I am particularly liking so far:


* When Create Gate is used either to create or to stabilize a gate, it affects the astral plane all around the gate opening (whose other details can tie in with other house rules designed to make Astral Projection more interesting and hazardous). The effect is large (a mile or more radius) and lasts at least a day, and one effect is it makes casting Create or Control Gate again within that radius and time more difficult (e.g. add a die to the difficulty of casting Create or Control Gate for each such effect).


* When a gate fails and starts to flicker, the effects are neither predictable nor obvious.

On a 17, a gate will flicker indistinguishably from a failure for 1d minutes, but not actually fail. (i.e. a gate maintenance team will want to stabilize the gate to be sure, but that has effects per the above house rule.)

An 18 means a breakdown, but how long that takes, whether it's still possible to use it while flickering, and if/when it flickers, are all unpredictable. I'm not sure what tables I'll settle on for this, but a first shot:

On an 18, roll d6 for symptoms:
1-2: Gate flickers for 1 minute as in RAW.
3: Gate flickers for 1d minutes.
5: Gate doesn't flicker for 1d turns.
6: Gate shows no sign that it is failing.

And roll d6 for effects:
1: Gate fails after 1d minutes.
2: Gate fails after 1 minute.
3: Gate fails after 2d turns.
4: Gate fails after 1d turns.
5-6: Gate breaks down immediately. No time to stabilize it, turn back, or run other people through it.

And roll d6 for usability before failure:
1-3: Usable until it fails.
4: Not usable 2d6 turns after it starts flickering.
5: Not usable 1d6 turns after it starts flickering.
6: Not usable while flickering.

A gate that fails before it stops flickering will still be a flickering gate for a while (possibly inspiring people to try to use or stabilize it) but nothing can fix it after it fails.


* If there is a gate with both ends within a certain radius of another gate (1 mile? 10 miles?), and one of them starts to fail, it may cause the other gates to also start to fail. Roll 1d6 for each other such gate and if the result is less than or equal the number of similar gates, that gate also starts to fail as if it too had rolled an 18 during use. (This means you can still set up redundant gates, but the more you do it, the more likely it becomes that they'll all fail if one goes.)


* When you stabilize a gate, roll again 4/DX. If you fail, the gate is less stable than before. Add a +1 to future breakdown check from attempts to use the gate. This is cumulative.