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Old 09-01-2015, 10:55 AM   #31
vicky_molokh
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
I take it that the "and" is misleading. Before the technomancers starting shaping reality to have stabilized laws of nature, there were no laws of nature about which a truth could be known. Mages knew the laws of nature because they created them—but only after they created them; before Kepler, the planets didn't move in ellipses, because it was Kepler who made them do so.
Ah, no, there was a truth that could be known. Laws of nature are divided into malleable ones and constant ones. E.g. the existence of Quintessence and its importance to Awakened magic has always been a thing, since the creation of time - it is a cosmological constant. IIRC the Gravitational Constant was the same in the MtA universe too. OTOH, ability of heavier-than-air craft to fly is currently maintained by consensus reality inertia, and is not a cosmological constant.
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Old 09-01-2015, 11:03 AM   #32
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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Ah, no, there was a truth that could be known. Laws of nature are divided into malleable ones and constant ones. E.g. the existence of Quintessence and its importance to Awakened magic has always been a thing, since the creation of time - it is a cosmological constant. IIRC the Gravitational Constant was the same in the MtA universe too. OTOH, ability of heavier-than-air craft to fly is currently maintained by consensus reality inertia, and is not a cosmological constant.
I should like to have a quotation to support that about the gravitational constant.

I grant the point about Quintessence, but I don't consider that a law of nature. It's a law of the supernatural/magickal/transcendental forces and powers that create nature; it's prior to the "nature" that astronomers and physicists study. There is nothing whatever about Quintessence in the theories of 21st century physics, after all. Let's not confuse levels of discourse.
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Old 09-01-2015, 11:10 AM   #33
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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In principle, yes. In practice, I'd be interested to see the magical procedures that would do that spelled out, taking into account that Democritus had no idea how big an atom was—other than "too small for the eye to resolve." If he had been looking for atoms that were 0.000001 m in diameter, he would have gotten interestingly misleading results.
If the system is used as is, basic Sense Matter and Sense Energy from RPM will nicely emulate a TL12 Star Trek tricorder, with Sense Body for medical and biology uses.

Compared to published rituals, Sense Matter used to view the 'smallest discrete units' that make up a given rock, piece of metal, etc., does not seem to be problematic in any way. You can use it that way, or you can start by peering at the surface of the material and use a succession of rituals to see ever more details and (effective) magnification.

I imagine that the first spell would be Sense Matter giving 'what could one examine on that object from the viewpoint of a flea-sized observer' and working downward with 'the viewpoint of an observer who is to that flea as a flea is to me' and then onwards down.

Sense spells aren't reliant on actual light-based vision or bound by resolution, they give you the desired information in a way that is intelligible to the caster, so he'd get useful information even when down to atomic scale. Even if the GM decided to be much harsher in interpreting the specificity of the desired effect than is usual in the RPM, it still would only give a few 'duds' where the mage didn't get any useful information and had to phrase his intended effect differently.

Democritus with Magery (Ritual Path Magic) 1, Path of Matter at IQ, Path of Energy at IQ and Ritual Mastery for Sense Matter (Analyze Object) and Sense Energy (Analyze Object) would probably be able to invent more-or-less modern physics in a couple of months.

Always assuming that any universe with Ritual Path Magic has physics that match ours.
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Old 09-01-2015, 12:08 PM   #34
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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I should like to have a quotation to support that about the gravitational constant.

I grant the point about Quintessence, but I don't consider that a law of nature. It's a law of the supernatural/magickal/transcendental forces and powers that create nature; it's prior to the "nature" that astronomers and physicists study. There is nothing whatever about Quintessence in the theories of 21st century physics, after all. Let's not confuse levels of discourse.
Here it is:
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Originally Posted by MtA (Revised Edition), p. 142
Historical Inertia and Cosmological Constants
Two additional forces contribute to static reality's resilience. Both hamper a mage's ability to affect the world around them, and they make her more fantastic castings patently impossible in many cases. These bulwarks of reality are referred to by a number of epithets in mage circles, but they are more properly known as historical inertia and cosmological constants.
[ . . . ]
Cosmological constants, on the other hand, are things that have always been true and can never be changed. No mage, no matter the how powerful, can rebuild Quintessence into a totally different base of reality or change the gravitational constant of the universe.
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Old 09-01-2015, 12:31 PM   #35
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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Here it is:
Okay, well, they've just contradicted the whole principle that reality is subjective, which was the foundation of M:tA 2/e. Why am I not surprised.

But if the gravitational constant is an objectively true fact about reality that is beyond the power of any consciousness (short perhaps of God's consciousness) to alter, then it can exist without any human being knowing it exists, as part of the hidden substructure of reality. It certainly isn't part of the known phenomenology for anyone earlier than Newton; it isn't as if you could just look up and say, "Oh, there's the moon, there are the stars, there's the fundamental constant G." So I don't think you're entitled to infer that pre-Newtonian mages knew all about gravity and all that Newton did was tell the sleepers about something discovered by greater mages than he.
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Old 09-01-2015, 12:35 PM   #36
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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Democritus with Magery (Ritual Path Magic) 1, Path of Matter at IQ, Path of Energy at IQ and Ritual Mastery for Sense Matter (Analyze Object) and Sense Energy (Analyze Object) would probably be able to invent more-or-less modern physics in a couple of months.
I'm not sure that it would be anywhere nearly that simple. But set that aside. There's a more basic dilemma: If you suppose Democritus could do that, then ancient Greece would have ceased to be TL2 very quickly, and we would not have anything like our actual historical timeline. If you want to play in an AH, cool, but it's going to be really hard to make it work as a secret history.
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Old 09-01-2015, 12:46 PM   #37
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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I'm not sure that it would be anywhere nearly that simple. But set that aside. There's a more basic dilemma: If you suppose Democritus could do that, then ancient Greece would have ceased to be TL2 very quickly, and we would not have anything like our actual historical timeline. If you want to play in an AH, cool, but it's going to be really hard to make it work as a secret history.
There's a reason why all of my 'Real World but with Magic' campaigns tend to a) Make magic extremely rare, hard to perform under laboratory conditions and so quirky and ritual-dependent as to amount to non-reproducable results and b) Be set in worlds where magic has not been availablefor centuries, usually more or less all reliable recorded history, but is suddenly emerging at around the start of game-play.

My fantasy campaign has backward areas of TL1+2 and TL2+1 existing next to TL3+1 and TL2+2 societies. Some rich merchant houses, mage guilds and clergies have access to what amounts to TL3+2 in a lot of areas. In the history of the setting, there have been TL1+9 and TL2+10 societies that collapsed in apocalyptic events (hence dungeon-crawling as a profession).

I'll grant that the magic system is less flexible than RPM, so philosopher-mages have to do a lot more spell-research alongside their physics research to develop magical measuring instruments of the desired power, so no PC mages inventing modern science in a matter of months, but there is historical precedent for doing so in years and decades.

Unfortunately, the physics of the campaign world are different than ours (Dies the Fire-esque), so a lot of high technology we use is impossible without the aid of magic. So the magical societies of the past aren't replicatable without some way to replicate the awesome amount of power they had access to, which is hard in today's more magic poor world.

I can't imagine any way to make a world with reliable, reproducable spells like those most RPG magic systems plausibly resemble any kind of historical era in more than the most superficial strokes.
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Old 09-01-2015, 12:55 PM   #38
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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Okay, well, they've just contradicted the whole principle that reality is subjective, which was the foundation of M:tA 2/e. Why am I not surprised.
I haven't carefully re-read the whole chapter, but it seems like that sidebar/box is meant to note the exception, the two 'rules' that are either hard (inertia/consensus/paradox) or impossible (cosmological constants) to bend.
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Old 09-01-2015, 01:28 PM   #39
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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I haven't carefully re-read the whole chapter, but it seems like that sidebar/box is meant to note the exception, the two 'rules' that are either hard (inertia/consensus/paradox) or impossible (cosmological constants) to bend.
The first is perfectly compatible with subjectivism; it just says that sometimes your subjectivity collides with other peoples' subjectivity. The second is not; it only makes sense if you assume objective reality. To my mind that makes the game philosophically a lot less interesting.
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Old 09-01-2015, 01:57 PM   #40
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Default Re: RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

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The first is perfectly compatible with subjectivism; it just says that sometimes your subjectivity collides with other peoples' subjectivity. The second is not; it only makes sense if you assume objective reality. To my mind that makes the game philosophically a lot less interesting.
In a way, it produces a hybrid universe, where both subjectivism and objectivism coexist (sort of), denying the expectation of a simple explanation regarding how things work.
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