Unkillable 3 vs. a Black Hole?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Negative, neither massive nor massless objects can leave the event horizon of a black hole. The inability of massless objects like light to leave is why they are called black, and the inability of mass to leave is why they are called holes.

That is my understanding also. I'm pretty sure that the event horizon of a black hole is, in the frame of reference of an outside observer, infinitely far in the future. Your Unkillable-3 monster could reincarnate if it were torn apart by tidal stresses of vaporised by radiation in the accretion disk, but given an unobstructed trajaectory to the event horizon it would never quite get around to dying. Unless, perhaps, it effected suicide before (in its frame of reference) crossing the event horizon.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by Ragabash Moon

What the title says... what do you all think?

EDIT: Ok, so maybe a bit more than just the title is in order. Basically, the advantage says you become a disembodied spirit... so would a spirit be able to escape from a black hole? I realize there is no way to know the truth, but that's kinda why I'm asking what you all THINK...

It isn't listed as a weakness for Unkillable 3. Absent giving it a limitation to the contrary ... it works like the books say it works.

Originally Posted by Ragabash Moon

I'm designing an alien species that is very, very rare and isn't able to self-replicate. The creation of more of them is banned because they have Unkillable 2, but I was kind of thinking... what if they had Unkillable 3? Would they then be truly unstoppable?

No, they'd become homeless refugees endlessly driven from place to place, never allowing themselves to care or feel for anything or anyone other than their own people ... for everything else can be (and potentially has been) taken away from them.

Originally Posted by Ragabash Moon

Is Unkillable 3 just THAT good?

Unkillable 3 allows you to come back. It doesn't stop you from dying, it doesn't stop you from losing, it doesn't stop the things you were protecting from being destroyed, it doesn't hold territory ... it does nothing other than allow you to return from death after it's too late to do anything about what killed you. It is far from "too good".

Originally Posted by Ragabash Moon

There is absolutely positively no way to kill or contain unkillable 3?

Affliction 1 (Negated Advantage: Unkillable 3, +150%) [25] counters Unkillable 3 [150] with a minimum of fuss.

Affliction 1 (Cosmic, +50%; Negated Advantage: Unkillable 3, +150%) [30] counters Unkillable 3 [150] + Resistant ("Negated Advantage"; Rare; Immunity) [5]. It also counters Unkillable 3 (Cosmic, +50%) [225]. Tack Resistant ("Negated Advantage"; Rare; Cosmic, +50%; Immunity) [8] on and it stops being an effective counter.

Cosmic vs Cosmic is resolved as if neither had Cosmic.

You can also use Neutralize if the Unkillable isn't a wild advantage and has a power source that receives a discount for being subject to counter-measures. I don't believe that Resistant ("Neutralize (_power)"; Rare; Cosmic, +50%; Immunity) [8] is permitted if you've a power with a "has counter-measures" power modifier. No getting a discount for a limitation that doesn't limit you and all that jazz.

[DocRailgun]

It really doesn't matter what damage may or may not be caused at the event horizon because at that point the object's time (to an outside observer) is zero.
The even horizon of a black hole is defined as the distance at which an object has to be accelerating at the speed of light away from the center of the the black hole to stay at that same distance. To do so also requires infinite energy, by the way. So, pretty much the object disappears from our universe at that point.

So the question is - does the character die BEFORE they get to the event horizon? If so, they should be able to appear elsewhere at some point... but if they get to the point where an observer would see their time=0, I would say no.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Ragabash Moon

What the title says... what do you all think?

EDIT: Ok, so maybe a bit more than just the title is in order. Basically, the advantage says you become a disembodied spirit... so would a spirit be able to escape from a black hole?

If ever there was a 'GM's call', it's that. The GM has to decide how spirits/ghosts work, what they are, and what black holes are in that sense, and that will give the answer.

If a spirit has to follow the same 'paths' through spacetime that other entities do, then it'll have problems with black holes. For one thing, while he was embodied and falling into the hole, the rest of the universe, from his POV, was accelerating ever faster into the future. So he might return a gazillion years later (or infinitely far in the future).

If spirits exist independently of space and time, then yeah, it could probably get out, unless there's some other factor about a black hole that is problematic for spirits, which would be a GM call. One is as plausible as the other, given the lack of hard data.

(Way, way, way back, in the early episodes of the Doctor Strange comic, it was revealed that spirits couldn't survive in the cores of stars. They were immune to the heat and pressure, but something about nearby nuclear reactions was bad for them. I don't know if that was later dropped or not.)

Note, though, that if spirits exist indepently of spacetime, then there's no obvious reason why you couldn't reform in your own past or future, say. Time travel would be implied almost by definition.

[Bengt]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

If ever there was a 'GM's call', it's that. The GM has to decide how spirits/ghosts work, what they are, and what black holes are in that sense, and that will give the answer.

This.

One important decision for the GM is how/if spirits can travel FTL. Just getting to a star system from the where the black hole is will to take a really long time if a spirits floats along at its basic move. Someone wanting get rid of the UK3 person in a setting with slower than light spirits could just throw it out the airlock somewhere inconvenient and be rid of it for thousands or millions of years.

[Not]

If the character actually dies, he reincarnates (or whatever) at a place specified by the GM, perhaps outside the black hole.

In Pohl's Gateway, characters that fell into a black hole experienced time dilation and didn't actually die for an unspecified (but very long) period of time (from the perspective of a character who escaped).

[Ragabash Moon]

All very good points, though there seems to still be a debate on whether Negating Unkillable with a Non-Permanent power allows actual death. I think for the most part I agree with sir pudding on the if it's not a permanent negation of advantages, when it kicks back in, it works again.

As for the time dilation thing, that actually sounds kind of good... If it takes them a million years to die, the fact that they can instantly teleport across the galaxy once they are dead doesn't really matter much. The current species of the galaxy have successfully gotten rid of them because this species is the only species that is truly immortal (other than AIs that do appropriate backups/etc... but even then, destroy their backups, destroy them). So, odds are by the time they escape, nobody is still going to be around that even would have cared. Those millions of generations in the future will have to deal with them, but that's like us worrying about when our sun becomes a Red Giant... sure it's going to happen, it's going to destroy Earth, but... none of us will be here, so why should we care?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

U

No, but Achilles Heel specifically kills you.

And if Unkillable 3 brought people back to life, that would be no impediment. But it doesn't. It keeps people from dying. If they don't have Unkillable at the moment when they fail a roll versus death, then they actually die.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Ragabash Moon

What the title says... what do you all think?

Since we don't know the physics of spirits, there is a lot of leeway. Some possibilities ...

(1) A spirit has a localized physical location and behaves like some sort of physical object. The spirit is trapped in the black hole. It may travel through to another universe on the inside and have all sorts of adventures therein.

(2) Spirits are more symbolic than physical. Since our current understanding is that all information of anything that passes through the event horizon is stored at the event horizon (leading to Hawking radiation and other fun phenomena), the information on the spirit - the crucial symbolic property - is stored at the event horizon and can escape back into our universe.

(3) From the point of view of an outside observer, time dilation slows down infalling objest so much that they never go through the event horizon (although they do tend to pile up in an extremely thin layer just outside the event horizon). This makes the question moot. The being's consciousness is slowed down so much by time dilation that it is effectively trapped.

(3a) That said, hawking radiation will eventually carry away the information of anything that is trapped in that very thin layer just outside the event horizon. So maybe the spirit can escape after all.

(4) The spirit has Achilles' Heel (Black Holes).

Luke

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Before hitting the event horizon anything solid will be ionized And the UK3 kicks in. The possessor is then a ghost, energy pattern or some other sort of incorporeal spirit.

From the point of view of the infalling object (I choose this point of view so we don't need to worry about time dilation), and if we treat it classically, a sufficiently large black hole will have weak enough tides that the person falling in will survive and will experience the transition through the event horizon.

That said, a recent attempt to reconcile elements of quantum mechanics with general relativity gives us the so called "firewall paradox," which suggests anything hitting the black hole is broken into fundamental particles. Physicists are extremely skeptical about this, and are actively trying to find what really happens that is in line with their intuition. So far, they have come up empty handed.

Luke