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Temporary Bias Kludge

(30 posts) (7 voices)

Started 1 year ago by Tadeusz
Latest reply from Brock

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Tadeusz
Member

What if a GM wants to create a world in which psionic retrocognition is the next logical step after reading surface thoughts? Such a world seems reasonable to me. I see both as information gathering, and see TK as a step up the scale.

But let's suppose I'm wrong.

I still want to create that world.

The best way to do this is to create a very large sit-mod.

<i/> Novice Alastair serves at the front gate of the Wilmark Home for Extrasensory Perception. There he asks visitors an array of revealing questions while reading their thoughts. This serves to weed out those Equality For All! saboteurs and gangsters who try to sneak into the Home and hurt the students.

But, after he chased one away, he noticed that the man had accidentally dropped a crumpled up piece of paper with some suggestive but inconclusive numbers on it. Dropping to his knees, he took up the paper, and reached for the potential his teachers said was there.

==In a normal Multiverser world, he probably fails as he is trying to jump from a 1@ skill to a 12@ skill. In fact, he likely botches. Now the teachers at his school woululd have to know this, and so they would not teach him to go for retrocognition so soon.

--However in this world, all attempts to learn the 12@ level skills are bonused by 110%.

Alastair has a good roll, and he sees with his mind's eye the past, the shed behind a house, and the men gathered around to write the numbers from a map onto a scrap of paper. Now he has the code to figure out where the next attack is going to be. Finally the Minded can do something about the envious who seek to reduce all men to poverty of mind and matter so that none might feel slighted.

This is similar to what was done in Mythica which is a Tall Tales America with Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill. If you try to do something crazy in that world you can get a 100% bonus. If for example, you try to dump your roof of your cabin upside down into the river, and follow a dastardly thief over the Niagra Falls to get back your coins, well, you get a +100 for trying to ride a cabin roof over Niagra.

And like that, you don't get that +100 in other worlds. So if you learn, Pschyometry with Alastair, and then you're versed out by one of the goons from EFA!, in your next world, you don't have the bonus. Of course, you still have a 12@ skill which is a huge help.

Hmmm.

Fri Jun 25 2010 9:39 pm #
Glantri
Member

Is this +110% only for learning roles or for any attempt to use the skill?

Also, doesn't this make learning the rest of the 12@ skills guaranteed after the first?

I don't know what the skills are in 12@ so I'll use numbers.

Alastair had a 1@1 as his highest prior skill, which is why the 110% was needed to keep his chance of learning the 12@1 skill reasonable. What happens now though that he has a 12@1 skill and is trying to learn a 12@2 skill? Isn't it by default over 100% and therefore a success?

Fri Jun 25 2010 10:01 pm #
Tadeusz
Member

It would only be for learning a skill. Thanks.

Fri Jun 25 2010 11:47 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

I understand what you want to do, and not surprisingly I don't like it; but more to the point I think there's a work-around here.

This seems like the perfect opportunity for an application of the P3@9 Remote Mind Reading skill. What your novice "sees" is not the past of that piece of paper, but the memories connected to that paper in the minds of the several individuals who touched it. The paper becomes a bridge, probably a +10 contact point, for the much more difficult skill of reading the mind of someone you are not able to identify directly.

Note that the P11@2 History of Object skill traces "all the major and significant events associated with an object or artifact, who owned it, how it was used, when and where." That at least implies that it is an older object, and although you could use it for psychronomy (learning details about the present owner) its real value is in crossing the centuries to learn about artifacts. You would usually use it for very old objects, looking for psychic impressions left on them by major events. You might learn that the sword hung on the wall in Lord Braden's hall for the lives of three generations of Lords Braden, but you're more likely to learn that it felled a hundred men at the Battle of Bartok, one of whom was General Vortag.

--M. J. Young

Sat Jun 26 2010 5:35 am #
kyler
Member

And then you can take it with you and use it as a material component for the spell Vortag's Revenge. Requires the sword stolen from the descendant of the noble Braden which has killed the general named Vortag, for the caster to stand in one place, hold the sword in front of himself, blade down, while reciting in the ancient language spoken by General Vortag the speech given to his army before the fated battle, until the end of the speech, at which point the blade of the sword must be thrust into earthen ground and the hilt held in both hands behind himself while sitting on the pommel. The caster must then say in the ancient language spoken by General Vortag his final words before the blow was struck, "oh crap." The entire ritual takes about five minutes, does not destroy the component, and it afflicts everyone within a ten foot radius of the caster with the sickness dysentery.

and THAT'S how you make a spell =]

Ky

Mon Jun 28 2010 4:43 am #
kyler
Member

*dodges the throwing die*

Mon Jun 28 2010 4:59 am #
Brock
Member

*guffaws at the comical spell above.*

Mon Jun 28 2010 6:30 am #
Max
Member

Lets say that the world have a specific learning tree that have sensing, force generative, special and hybrid. The world would bonus the similar type of psionic skill if the skill is learned from the same branch and make it harder to someone from different branch to learn the upper level skill if the learner does not learn a prerequisite skill first. How does multiverser rule cater to such world?

*****

1) First example:

Sense type:
Mind reading
Detect material
Retrocognitive skill
Precognitive skill

Force generative type:
Telekinesis
Force field

Hybrid:
Hypnosis
Healing

Special:
Enter dream
Spatial/temporal distortion

The above is not complete but you probably got the picture.

*****

2) Second example:
An attempt to learn 1st rank ice magic by two people.
a) First person is 1st rank fire user.
b) Second person is 2nd rank ice user.
If the skill bias of the 1st rank ice magic is the same for the first person and higher for the second person, how do I make the second person have the advantage of learning this skill rather than the first person and how do I penalize the first person from learning it?

Mon Jun 28 2010 2:32 pm #
kyler
Member

Well, first of all, what causes this specific learning tree? If things are done this way because this is the way things have been done so this is the way they will be done, they could be viewed much as the psionic or magical equivalent of a martial arts style in the sense that you have an expert in specific skills teaching you specific skills. Then if you penalize learning all skills of the bias area you could in effect make it extremely difficult for anyone to learn skills except from people who can teach them. Creating new skills or spells would still be possible, but only for those with high bonuses due to their statistics, focuses, or other bonuses; as in the case of the ice wizard, who would more easily learn ice magic than the fire wizard even without instruction because he has an example of how to cast ice magic.

It's also possible that the predisposition which causes people to climb one tree or another is something inherent to their genetics or even their soul, something that sets them apart.

Mon Jun 28 2010 3:08 pm #
kyler
Member

Somehow my phone doesn't allow me to post huge responses so I guess I'll have to break it up.

without this predisposition, casting magics or using abilities to which one is not disposed would be nothing short of impossible. this disposition could even be caused through the use of an ability, and if you so desired an individual could be trapped in the decision they made and not be able to gain the disposition for a seperate tree.

of course, world-specific rules are exactly that, specific to the world. If the ice mage were to become a follower of the verser, he would no longer be bound by the strictures of his homeworld (excepting the possibility that he is somehow unable to cast fire magics due to a genetic or other similar distinction), and would have the same chance of learning any magic as would be determined in the new world he was in.

i hope that makes sense. In short,. If you're the gm, what you say goes. As long as everyone has fun, that's the important part.

Ky

Mon Jun 28 2010 3:22 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

It is so good to have Kyler back. He's right: you can create worlds that have special rules that limit the indigs and that also limit the verser without compromising abilities he already has.

The big example is versing someone into Dungeons & Dragons. Your verser might already know some psionics and some magic, and he can use those skills and improve them. However, if he wishes to learn more magic while in that world, he has to become an apprentice to a magic user, illusionist, wu jen, wizard of high sorcery, or other arcane magic-using class (there are others in other editions), or a cleric, druid, holy order of the stars, shukenja, runecaster, or other holy magic-using class, and then he learns his magic according to the rules of that class. Once he verses out, those spells become multiverser spells; but they are cast according to the limitations agreed for them. For example, Kyler the verser apprenticed with a wu jen, and he has some very potent spells that he can only cast as long as he abstains from the consumption of alcohol. That bonuses those skills when he casts them, but prevents him from casting them if he breaks the taboo.

Similarly, if you're in OAD&D, the rule is that psionics are a naturally occurring accident, and thus the verser has those psionic abilities he brought with him but barring a wish he cannot gain more. In AD&D2E, by contrast, there is a psionicist class and a wild talent rule, and the verser can apprentice to that class to learn new psionic skills or attempt to gain them under the risky wild talent rules.

But none of those rules can prevent him from using the magic or psionic skills he learned elsewhere. If he has skills within the bias curve (even if above the level), and others can use comparable skills, he can use his.

As far as indigs go, again Kyler is right. You could say that some people are born with an innate bonus on certain kinds of skills; you could say that some people are born with an aptitude for skills in a particular category but are unable to learn skills outside that category. Just as you can create a character who is a born telepath without making it the case that that character can necessarily advance to telekinetics even in a universe in which telekinetics are a known possibility, so too you can create creatures and characters who have some abilities and not others, or the ability to learn certain skills and not others, as long as it applies to those characters.

Whether those characters would still be restricted after versing out is a judgment call for the referee. I've had come associates for whom I've ruled that their brain type is such that they cannot learn psionics, and others for whom I've ruled that they were prevented from learning psionics because of the restrictions of their own world but are now free to do so.

--M. J. Young

Tue Jun 29 2010 12:56 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator

Let me add, though, that this does not mean the referee can create a world in which skills are possible for indigs but the bias does not support them. For example, if indigs are going to be able to create psionic devices, then it is possible in that world to create psionic devices, and you have at least a 9@ psi bias to support that skill. It means that the verser also can create psionic devices (if he knows how), and do any other skills within that bias, and get the 9@ bias bonus for skill learning and use.

--M. J. Young

Tue Jun 29 2010 12:58 am #
Tadeusz
Member

So we need some worlds with Psi Learning Trees and other odd skill learning situations. Now we've done a bit of this before with certain worlds where you have a Powerblock such as: Only those with the Psi-Gene can develop psi powers, but a Psi Learning Tree would be more complicated.

And thanks for the point about a lower bias psi skill doing what I thought needed a 12@ skill.

Tue Jun 29 2010 1:41 am #
WilliamTWodium
Member

Similarly, if you're in OAD&D, the rule is that psionics are a naturally occurring accident, and thus the verser has those psionic abilities he brought with him but barring a wish he cannot gain more. In AD&D2E, by contrast, there is a psionicist class and a wild talent rule, and the verser can apprentice to that class to learn new psionic skills or attempt to gain them under the risky wild talent rules.

But none of those rules can prevent him from using the magic or psionic skills he learned elsewhere. If he has skills within the bias curve (even if above the level), and others can use comparable skills, he can use his.

Blast. I knew I should have asked about this instead of trusting to my interpretation of the rulebook.

If, then, I were running a character in a game-world like (hypothetically) Gamma World and had converted the character to that ruleset, would I then be justified in ruling that the character could not acquire new psionic abilities save by the usual channels for that world, despite the fact that no one would ever mistake those channels for "learning"?

Tue Jun 29 2010 2:54 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator

Absolutely. If it's a game world, any rule that applies to the game world characters applies to the verser converted to that world, save only that he can still work his own skills. To the degree that it's possible, you are justified in making his skills work the same way game world skills work. It's been a long time since I was in Gamma World, and I don't remember what you had to do to use mental mutations, but you can make his psi skills work that way if they're easily converted, or you can make him roll Multiverser checks if that's easier for you.

--M. J. Young

Tue Jun 29 2010 4:48 am #
WilliamTWodium
Member

They're mental attack rolls if they directly affect another character. Otherwise they just work as stated for the mutation; since in several cases that includes a percentage chance that the power will function properly (sometimes based on the mutant's Mental Strength and sometimes not), I'm just using his Multiverser percentage chances for every psionic skill that is not in any way targeted.

This leaves me with the question of whether to undo this last week's posts to be consistent about the possibility of skill learning, or to grandfather in the precognitive choice assessment but forbid future learning. I am too tired to decide this now.

Thank you for the input.

Tue Jun 29 2010 5:27 am #
Max
Member

to undo this last week's posts to be consistent about the possibility of skill learning

Which probably means that the time travel might have be undone too if it is done on that side of the portal.

to grandfather in the precognitive choice assessment but forbid future learning.

Which would work too but there must exist some event after that to make the world work that way. This event probably would happen after the "Time Stop" unless the character initiate something to cause that event.

Tue Jun 29 2010 3:17 pm #
kyler
Member

I would say leave past mistakes in the past and continue into the future using your best idea of how the rules work.

Ky

Tue Jun 29 2010 3:22 pm #
Tadeusz
Member

I'm agreeing with Ky here.

Tue Jun 29 2010 4:35 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

Yes, I would do that nine times out of ten. I have a couple times realized that I had goofed in allowing something, and undone it. (Case: I allowed players to develop psionic skills in a Metamorphosis Alpha world, and permitted them to keep the events that came from those skills but not keep the skills.) I have also a couple times realized that I had goofed in allowing something and adjusted the rules of that world so that it would be permitted. (Case: I allowed Harry to learn a spell that was above the bias curve of the Mary Piper world in which he was playing, but rather than undo that I raised the curve for him.)

I think my choice in this particular case would be that the skill worked by some fluke (Gamma World is a strange world--perhaps he was standing next to a plant that was telepathic and precognitive, and when he attempted to do the skill the plant read his mind and did it for him, feeding him the results; or perhaps there is some other undiscoverable explanation) so he got the information but he doesn't have the skill.

As far as skills learned before the rift closed, I would give him the benefit of the doubt that he was on the right side, or at worst that although he was on the wrong side the fact that he still was within range of his body on the right side made the right side his de facto location until the rift closed. That does not mean that the reopening of the rift (if this happens in the future) reconnects him without him passing through it; he is now isolated on the Gamma World side.

--M. J. Young

Tue Jun 29 2010 9:54 pm #
WilliamTWodium
Member

I of course agree with Tad and Kyler in general philosophy (as, I think, most GMs do), and MJ's logistical solution satisfies me entirely. Thank you all (you too, Maxx).

(Also, apologies for derailing the thread.)

Wed Jun 30 2010 3:04 am #
Tadeusz
Member

One way to put magic in a story without the hero having it is to have Someone looking out for the Hero. Thus...

"The child is protected by some force so that my scrying spells, nor the searching Mind of the renegade Mindful One can find him."

In this case, the descendant of Vorthag took over the Braden's land, and put all the family to the sword, but a loyal maid fled with the youngest Braden, an infant in swaddling clothes. And now the Land seeks to protect its traditional Master so that the Vorthags will be driven out in time. So now, the Land uses its varied powers to shield the growing child from spell and psi-searches.

And in time, the child will learn to request help from the Land which will function like an Operate Always Active Device.

When the child becomes a man, he receives a quest from the Master of the Wilmark Home for Extrasensory Perception, our old friend Alastair who has advanced from Novice to the leadership of his order. The quest is for him to find the Vorthag Bane, and Alastair had a precognitive vision of the young man succeeding if he had something identified cryptically as the Vorthag Bane.

First he needs to unriddle the meaning of the phrase...and soon enough he does after talking to an old witch woman who remembers the tales of his great-grandfather slaying the great General Vorthag with the Braden paterfamilias????? sword.

He then has to find the sword because the Vorthag descendant cast it away feeling humiliated and fearing it. For that, he must enter his ancestral castle in disguise, and strike up a dangerous conversation to find out what was done with it.

He finds that it was tossed into the Neverending Pool in the middle of the Vorthagi Mountains. He has to travel through lands filled with hostile Vorthagi tribesmen, and bandits, and along ice-covered mountain trails with thousand foot drops two inches from his feet as gusts of wind threaten to strip him from the mountainside.

Once to the giant waterfall, he finds the pool at the bottom where the great pressure of water has punched the river floor for several thousand years. It is two hundred feet deep, and at the bottom of it is the sword.

And without modern scuba gear, he has to get to the bottom of the pool or something to get the sword.

So...

Bonuses for the following:
1. He's told by a master precog that this will work. That's got to instill confidence.
2. He has to unriddle a riddle. Granted, a relatively simple one.
3. He has a very difficult quest.
4. He has to get a unique item. One can manipulate the magic by creating magic spells tha need unique items that are easy to get, but in this case, that's not the problem.
5. The item is appropriate, and not just a little appropriate, but very appropriate for a spell to kill a Vorthag to use a sword that killed a famous Vorthag.

This is something we don't see that much of in Multiverser where the hero has to go on a heroic quest to do something magical. It is, of course, a mainstay of fantasy fiction.

Wed Jun 30 2010 3:49 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator
In this case, the descendant of Vorthag took over the Braden's land, and put all the family to the sword, but a loyal maid fled with the youngest Braden, an infant in swaddling clothes. And now the Land seeks to protect its traditional Master so that the Vorthags will be driven out in time. So now, the Land uses its varied powers to shield the growing child from spell and psi-searches.

And in time, the child will learn to request help from the Land which will function like an Operate Always Active Device.

In a fantasy setting, I think that I would not make the Land a magic device; I would rather create the Guardian of the Land who is identified with the Land.

To clarify that, in a lot of stories Jupiter is a planet, a light in the sky, but also a god, or at least an archangel. High magic can mean high animism, with spirits in the trees, the rivers, the major land formations like mountains, the animals, pretty much everything alive.

There thus would be a Spirit of the Land, whose name is the Land (or the same as the name of the land), whose job it is to protect and guide the land itself. It then acts on behalf of the land by taking such action as it can to protect the child, and later the child calls upon the Land to continue his actions.

In modern terms, it would be similar to those who ask their guardian angels to help, or who ask the saints to pray on their behalf. It's still monotheism; it's just viewed as The God having a lot of servants and giving a lot of authority to those servants. The example might be that if you're a guest in the palace, you don't have to ask the King for lunch--you can ask the cook or the butler, because they have the authority to run the kitchen, and why make the King your middleman when you need the services of the cook? The cook works for the King, and in serving you your sandwich is serving the King.

This is something we don't see that much of in Multiverser where the hero has to go on a heroic quest to do something magical.

Well, yes, but that's for entirely different reasons.
1. First, that kind of heroic quest scenario is very heavy-handed refereeing, and Multiverser tends toward a much lighter hand--the quest really almost has to be pre-plotted by the referee, unless he gets very lucky and sees an opportunity to bring in a such a quest run by the seat of his pants.
2. Second, spells tend to be designed by player characters, not by referees. A player character is less likely to design a spell that entails a quest, partly because of lot of spells are designed to meet an immediate need, partly because the player wants his spells to be reusable.
That said, there is a stated bonus for any holy magic spell that is used in the fulfillment of a holy quest. That's a blanket addition to the religion bonus: if the quest is commanded by the deity himself, it's +10, and if by a mortal cleric of the deity, +5, and if the player character says that he needs to get his rest to complete the quest so he's going to pray first to set up wards to protect his camp while he sleeps and then pray for restful sleep, then he gets the bonus on both of those spells because they are contributing to his completion of the quest.

You can also work in a similar bonus aspect by having the player character state that one of the material components must be obtained in a specific way--a scale removed from a dragon while the dragon was alive; the petals of a flower that grows only in the mountains in winter. The difficulty of obtaining such a material component can bonus the value of the component, and the more so if it has to be obtained repeatedly (either because it will lose its usefulness after a period of time or because it is destroyed in the casting). That's not quite the same thing as having a quest as part of the magic, but it does mean that someone has to go on a quest to get the ingredients necessary for the magic.

--M. J. Young
Wed Jun 30 2010 9:46 pm #
Tadeusz
Member

Its done both ways. I would tend to do the Land as The Land in a story with a noble or royalty. The King's health is identified with the Land. Thus if the King gets sick, or becomes corrupted, so does the Land.

But having a Guardian does allow for more opportunities for roleplaying.

You can, if you choose, just have one spirit per area.

Well, then searching for Vorthag's Bane would be the equivalent of a holy quest by God, or close enough (one of His servants in any case.). I'd give +10, possibly because I'm generous.

Riddle, simple. +1
Quest...hero risks his life three times so I'd count that as 1.5 times the value of his life in a sacrifice, perhaps.

Wed Jun 30 2010 10:40 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

Quest...hero risks his life three times so I'd count that as 1.5 times the value of his life in a sacrifice, perhaps.

That's kind of a tough one to rate--but my law school training has kicked in here, so I think I can rate it, sort of.

Part of the problem here is that there's no bonus for including yourself as a spell component; it's sort of assumed that since you have to say something and/or do something and/or use something, you are involved. Therefore, saying that you are a necessary component doesn't get you anything. But then, saying that you are destroyed in the casting doubles that--but double nothing is still nothing, and that's not terribly reasonable. It's got to be different.

We can consider that it is not impossible to include a type of person as a spell component. The typical one is a virgin, and these are frequently sacrificed to double their value. The book doesn't give a value to "virgin" as a material component (for what it's worth, it in essence says that material components are valued from 1 to 10 with 1 being extremely common in the multiverse and 10 being nearly unique; all examples have come since those rules were published). However, humans and sentients are generally rated fairly high, 7 or 8, by most referees.

So by that reasoning, including yourself as a material component doesn't get you a bonus, but sacrificing yourself should get you +8. We could argue whether a verser's life is worth the same as a mortals, since the verser continues to live in the next universe; but Lauren Hastings has a spell in which she sacrifices herself to take her opponent with her, so it's been done and it isn't entirely inappropriate to say that your own death is a sacrifice.

But in this case the individual is not sacrificing his own life; he is risking the sacrifice of his own life. If he actually does sacrifice his life, he fails, and the spell is never completed. So it makes some sense to say that he should get a bonus for risking his own life, not equal to sacrificing it but fairly high.

However, the notion of "risking his life" is rather a flexible concept. What does he have to do? Cross the highway at rush hour? Ride Amtrack? Walk down a New York dark alley at two in the morning? Decide where the Iocaine is and drink? How much of a risk is this?

That's where the legal training comes in. We have a discounted value of risk. We've decided that the sacrifice itself would if required by worth +8. Now we consider the probability of death. If there's a 75% chance that the person would die in the attempt, that's worth 75% of +8, which is +6.

That's a subjective judgment, perhaps; but I don't think that if one of the three risks has only a 25% chance of survival it would be included in the spell. Arguably it might if we say that the average ordinary guy has a 25% chance of survival but the spellcaster here is someone extraordinary and thinks his chance better. After all, the chance of survival is based on the notion that if a hundred random people representing all levels of ability equally were to attempt this, seventy-five of them would die and twenty-five would succeed. The spell caster is betting that he's in the twenty-five percent already, and the concept of the quest is intended to discourage those who don't have that confidence in themselves.

On the other hand (I can find lots of hands), there seems to be some problem with the concept that every time you risk your life in casting the one spell you get a percent of +8 equal to the chance you would have died. If I can argue that running across the highway has a 12.5% chance to get the average person killed, and I make running across the highway a component of the skill, I should get 12.5% of +8 or +1 for doing that; and if I happen to be the one guy who can run at flight speeds and I cast this spell late at night when traffic is thin, I can then cross the street a hundred times for +100, and that seems an extreme bonus for something that didn't cost me much more than time and a successful skill check on my running. So that potential for abuse has to be addressed.

The answer to that is that in casting the spell I did not risk my life one hundred times, nor three times. I risked my life once. The bonus is not based on the probability of surviving each of them individually, but on surviving all three in the time allotted. It will never be 100%, because that would mean it was impossible to survive; but it could be 99.9%, and that would get you the maximum bonus of +8. The question is how to calculate it; and the answer is already in the book, under dice probabilities in the appendices, although that answer is there applied to a different question.

Here the question is, what is the chance that I would fail to survive three tests, three risks to my life? The first step is to determine the chance of surviving each of them. Let's make them Climb the mountain, Take the sword from the dragon, Cross the river, in that order.

The mountain is treacherous. An average mountain climber has a 1@5 SAL and 1@5 BRA and probably a 5@ bias, which gives him a 40% chance to succeed at ordinary mountain climbing, but this mountain has a -30 penalty sit-mod for the difficulty (if you're going to roll it as a single roll; the actual climbing would be done in stages, the penalties varied, but this is the easiest way to get the estimates we need). So the climber has a 90% chance to fail to climb the mountain; but that only means he doesn't succeed in climbing the mountain--it doesn't mean he's going to die. He's got a 9% chance to botch. Let's suppose that 3% of those botches would be fatal (high, but it's covering some aspects of this that I'm glossing). So the risk of death in climbing the mountain is 3%. It happens to be less than that for our expert climber, but we're trying to create a spell that is based on the average value; our expert climber might argue that his life was worth more than +8 because he is unique, but we've already disallowed that claim.

So that means that by the time he's finished climbing the mountain, that's a 3% risk of his life. Now he has to steal something from the dragon. Dragons are dangerous. I once saw a well-equipped group of fighters die at the attack of a dragon before they'd realized they were in danger, and they saw it first. On the other hand, heroes do succeed at this, dragons sometimes sleep, tricks are used such as invisibility, and a well-planned theft can work. So we'll guess that there's a 80% chance of dying trying to steal something from a dragon, and that means a 20% chance to survive.

Our previous chance to survive was 97%. Our chance to survive the second risk is only 20%, but the chance of surviving both is 20% of 97%, which is 19.4%. That means that our risk is now 80.6%.

We repeat the process for crossing the river. It's a dangerous river; small boats have been swept away, swimmers drown nearly every time, no bridge has been maintained, and the options are particularly limited. On the other hand, a boat has a good chance of making it, and particularly if ropes are used. The water level isn't always high, and sometimes the treacherous rocks are dry on top and people can leap from one to another. So the risk of death here is about 50%, and the chance to succeed also 50%. Again we plug that in, 50% of 20% of 97%, or 50% of 19.4%, a chance to survive of 9.7%, a chance to die of 90.3%. 90.3% of 8 is a bit better than 7, but it's not 7.5, so we'll say that the risk here is +7.

So that's what I think the quest I designed is worth, in terms of risking your own life. I can see a quest a little tougher than this one being worth +8; I can't see risking your own life, no matter how many times you do it, being worth more than +8, because you can't have higher than a 100% chance of being killed, and in fact unless any one risk is 100% certain death for everyone you can't mathematically reach 100% by that formula, so the total risk to your life can never actually be 100% or higher.

The quest could have other benefits, of course. The object you have to take could be a material component of the spell which is itself unique and which returns magically to the dragon's lair at midnight on the night of the full moon, a +10 object you cannot destroy and have to claim any time you want to cast this spell. It might be a requirement that you swim the river, a skill check with a penalty which gives +10 because the skill check must be successful for the spell to work. But you've got to be specific to get those kinds of bonuses, and if you just say "character must complete a quest in which he risks his life three times" you can't even really calculate much. Almost anything you do--driving a car, stepping inside a bank, getting out of bed--can be claimed to be risking your life. The question is how big a risk it is, because if it doesn't approach certain death it's not worth as much as sacrificing your life.

--M. J. Young

Thu Jul 1 2010 11:48 pm #
Tadeusz
Member

One nifty thing with The Land is that it could be some kind of genius loci, I guess. You can only call on its help while you are in the Braden's land. Thus step over the boundary stones that separate the Braden Hills from the Vorthagi Mountains, and The Land can no longer help you.

Which is another way to give the verser power, and then take it away from him later.

I did this in Northgate City with the Dreamweaver's Paintbrush. Its a terribly powerful device, basically a Ring of Infinite Wishes easy to use, or should be. I did not want to send such a thing out of Northgate so the Paintbrush is a sentient device which regards its duty as serving the Dreamweaver of Northgate City whomever that may be, and so its not going with the verser when he leaves.

This is a way of giving the Verser power early on, and then taking it away to go back to regular scale adventuring. Its a kind of flashforward.

Mon Jul 5 2010 12:23 am #
Brock
Member

Kay, bit off topic, but it's been bugging me-define 'Kludge'? it's a word I haven't heard before. The context clues tell me it's some sort of workaround or 'fudging the rules', but I'd prefer to be sure I know, and know any connotations I missed.

Mon Jul 5 2010 9:20 am #
Tadeusz
Member

Its from my understanding, kind of a computer term. Its something that works, but not elegantly, and not really how the system is supposed to work. Its like super-glueing your broken car door shut because it won't stay shut, and then climbing in and out of the car through the window.

Mon Jul 5 2010 5:55 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/kludge:

kludge
? ?[klooj]
–noun Computer Slang .
a software or hardware configuration that, while inelegant, inefficient, clumsy, or patched together, succeeds in solving a specific problem or performing a particular task.
Use kludge in a Sentence
See images of kludge
Search kludge on the Web
Also, kluge.

Origin:
1960–65; expressive coinage

--M. J. Young

Tue Jul 6 2010 1:26 am #
Brock
Member

thank you.

Tue Jul 6 2010 7:00 pm #

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