Harry's Game · Page 30

"Giving me the easy job, hey? Or are you looking to impress the brass?" His smile tells you that he's teasing you on this point. "You're going to need all the help you can get, I expect, so I'll send people as they arrive, and in half an hour I'll follow myself. Don't worry; I know how not to interfere with a command structure."

The wagons are out the door, the night crew and part of your team going with them.

--M. J. Young

"Every little bit helps," I tease back, buffing my nails on my coat as though looking all haughty, but still grinning. "I'll look forward to having you. Thank you, sir."

Then I am out the door with the crew, jogging along until I can hop onto a wagon myself.

What with metal tools, sacks of sand, barrels of water, empty buckets, ladders, and everything else, there really isn't room on the wagons for people, so it's a jog to the site. You're in good shape, but you and most of your crew are a bit winded on arrival.

You catch your breath while surveying the scene. A large four-story office building seems to be at the center of the conflagration, and the fire has spread to the buildings on either side and behind, but not yet to the buildings diagonally adjacent. The local watch is attempting to throw water on it the old-fashioned way, pumping it from a well across the street and carrying individual buckets to the fire. Your people are catching their breath, trying to do so without the smoke making their situation worse.

--M. J. Young

I don't have time for a Remove Fatigue... or do I? Nothing says I need to sacrifice components right in front of me. Maybe this will work...

While the others catch their breaths, I pray under my breath. The words matter but not the sound. I figure it'll be two minutes before anyone interrupts me, so I pray for two minutes. One eye closed for Odin, a gold piece in my left hand for Loki, which rest on my sword for Thor, right hand over my heart for Tyr. I pray to give my people vigilance, fill their lungs with pure air, and let them work like men possessed to save those who count on us. To that end, I will set the magic to consume gold from my storage at the Bank sufficient to pay for room at a common inn for the full... dozen or so of my men who arrive with me, myself included. This is intended only as a Remove Fatigue spell - despite the bit about pure air it does not twin-link a Remove Impurities spell.

Whether that works or not, two minutes is all I need to catch my breath and start projecting like the actor I am:
"Get those men in line!"
"Bucket brigades, focus on the outlying buildings! Let's keep this on a leash!"
"Ladder wagon, get those buckets higher!"
"Men on-scene, take your rest." I'll try to split the people already fighting the fire between crowd control and getting buckets onto the buildings not yet afire, so that they will not become afire and make our jobs worse.

Once I get everyone scurrying, I'll cast my eyes up at the building and activate my Telescopic Vision psionic power; I want to make sure there's nobody still in that inferno.

And once again I'll start tapping with the butt of my axe to set a working rhythm. It works at sea, why not here?

Looking over your spell description, I'm not certain whether you intend it to be a new variant modeled on the existing skills or whether the familiar description means you're performing one of the existing skills (in which case I should be able to match it to the version I have and use its numbers).

I'm a bit uncertain about the part in which you "sacrifice" an amount of gold that you have on deposit. Banks don't really work that way (except maybe Gringotts)--there isn't a vault here that contains Harry's gold. Instead there are account books that are updated by courier so that all the offices of the bank know how much you have on deposit, and you can withdraw gold from any one of them from the common pool.

Thus if you are "sacrificing" your gold, you must be remotely altering the books to indicate a transaction; but if you are sacrificing "actual" gold, there's no particular way to know that it's yours.

So I'm curious as to how you would address this bit. (I would roll for whether the banks in this world are like Grigotts, but since we know that you can withdraw money here that was deposited in Sardic, we know that they're not.)

--M. J. Young

Ah but that would be addressing means rather than outcome, and I am not an arcane caster. The gods know which way works best within the bias curve of this world, and which they consider a more acceptable sacrifice - maybe some actual gold goes missing, and a clerk makes a bank error to my detriment that never gets discovered?

(Hypothetically speaking, if I were an arcane caster, I would sacrifice actual gold, and let the clerks catch up with it later. If I had to address means rather than outcome.)

Hypothetically speaking, if you were to sacrifice someone else's gold I'm not sure I would give it the same value if it's not in your possession. That is, if you broke into the king's treasury and used a handful of what was his gold for your spell, I'd count it as you having stolen it and used it; but if you were in Nottingham and you decided to cast your spell and include the sacrifice of a bit of gold from the King's treasury in London, I'd be hard-pressed to allow that.

Now, if you happen to have the requisite amount of gold in a wallet at home, I could permit you to sacrifice that gold; but if you're going to sacrifice "your" gold that is in the bank, it's going to have to incorporate the spells necessary to cause the gold to be debited from your account to make it yours, and I'm not certain you can do that in this world.

In other words, the specific pieces of gold that you sacrifice do not need to be in your immediate presence, but they do need to be within your possession and sphere of control.

Otherwise, you're right, I have no specific problem with you sacrificing objects you own which are not in your immediate presence, if they are to be destroyed in the casting. (I would not agree that you can incorporate material objects in the casting which are not in your presence and are not being destroyed. My rationale here is that if you are destroying a material object and not doing anything else specifically with it including not destroying it in a specific fashion (e.g., burning the incense), it doesn't matter how far from the object you are as long as it is within your sphere of control--you could destroy gems in a safe deposit box downtown, if it's your safe deposit box and all that matters is that the gods take possession of the gems, but if the objects are to be used in a manner that does not involve their sacrifice, even if they are simply to be present for the casting, then they must be where you could touch them if you chose.

I'm not certain whether you have more gold diktar at home, but I suspect you withdrew some at some point for household expenses and probably did not spend it all, if you want to try that course.

--M. J. Young

Second post.

It occurs to me that you could include the promise of sacrifice as a component, which does not really give you a materials bonus but should give you some kind of bonus (which I would have to think about for a while and work out how that would work). It would also oblige you to make the sacrifice, and might inhibit your spellcasting abilities until you have done so.

--M. J. Young

I'll go that route. Probably the simplest way to resolve it, if I may suggest it, is to give me the bonus as per an appropriate material, to this spell, and a penalty of double that number to all other spells until I make the requisite sacrifice.

While that's not an unreasonable solution, I am somewhat inclined to think that the penalty ought to increase with time--if you pay your debt in an hour it should be less of a burden than if you pay your debt in a week. I think, though, that the best penalty will be a per spell penalty--easier to count the number of times you call upon the gods than the length of time that passes.

I've got another problem with the stated material component. You define it as

gold from my storage at the Bank sufficient to pay for room at a common inn for the full... dozen or so

We've resolved the part about it being from the bank by replacing it with a promise to destroy the gold later. The problem is that the quantity is non-specific, and in a way that will cause it to fluctuate. That is, I could guess that the price of a private room at an inn for a night is something between ten and twenty five gold diktar; I could be specific about it, but it comes to the fact that gold is not that valuable in this world but rooms are rather cheap. But were you to come to this world, a room is probably fifty to sixty dollars a night and a two-ounce gold coin would be worth near a thousand dollars, so one coin would be sufficient to pay for all the rooms for a dozen people and then some. In another world, gold could be absolutely worthless such that you don't have enough diktar to pay for a single room.

My solution is to fix the amount of gold you are spending per person; but my decision is inherently arbitrary, and your character needs to be able to know how much gold to sacrifice.

There is the separate question of how you will sacrifice it. I'm inclined to say it ought to be thrown in the harbor or otherwise discarded in a fashion that prevents its recovery (the fire is a bad choice because the gold will remain in the ashes). I don't worry about that when you're allowing material components to be consumed in the casting, because I don't like to hassle with the distinction between a candle you burn or a leaf you eat or a rock you crush or don't crush but simply expect to have disintegrate in the process. But the ability to destroy the coins later suggests that you would have to cast another spell to destroy them, and I'm not certain such a spell is possible in this world (or more precisely, I'm not thinking right now of how you might be able to do that).

I would say you could sacrifice it by giving it to a religious leader or order, but there aren't any in this world. I'm open to other suggestions.

--M. J. Young

I'll sacrifice it by donating it to some secular charity, such that it is no longer useful to me in any way and has no further magical potential. (The odds of my getting that same coin back again are less than my odds of getting struck by lightning.)

As for the fluctuation, I expected that. The idea was to have it fluctuate in both denomination and amount - an amount of the local currency sufficient for a night in a common inn for each person to be affected by the spell. So ten people in Durnmist, 100 diktar. Five people in New Jersey, 500 dollars. The idea is to make the spell connected to both people and location.

And in locations lacking either people or inns, the spell becomes impossible?

You realize, of course, that MJ's problem with the fluctuation is that the bonus for material components is based on the pan-universal value of the object, and thus he has very little basis for determining the sit-mod for your sacrifice (being as it is relative to the circumstance). I'm not sure how I'd handle it, myself. I might just call it +1, doubled for +2, because the only real requirement is that it be some amount of currency, and then throw on an additional modifier for the requirement that the spell can only be cast in locations where people can pay money-equivalents in exchange for room-equivalents at inn-equivalents.

There is the additional problem that you might not know, in a given situation, exactly how much you just promised to sacrifice. I suppose the gods would know, though, so if you didn't sacrifice enough you would discover this the next time you tried to cast a spell (via the persistence of your penalty).

(What I was going for was more a break-even point: sacrificing enough money to break even for including more people in the spell. In a place with neither people nor inns the spell would generally become unnecessary, since I have more effective means of restoring myself.

Well, sure, but with either people or inns (not both), the restriction comes into play. In parts Gamma World, for instance, the spell would be useless (even if you found yourself the leader of a tribe of dog-headed cannibals).

And the fact that you sacrifice more when including more targets doesn't alleviate the mechanical problem of your unit sacrifice being an unfixed quantity. I'm glad I'm not obliged to solve that problem.

If I were solving this for someone else, I would simply say the two cancel out and move on. It seems fairly simple to me.

I've never really understood why MJ likes to stop my game for a week every time I come up with a new spell. All it really does is make me disinclined to actually experiment with the very mechanics that make this game different from all the other online play-by-post games.

I've never really understood why MJ likes to stop my game for a week every time I come up with a new spell.

That would be because you always surprise me with your approaches, and I have to wrestle with them to fit them into my categories.

I've also noted a problem in your suggestion

Five people in New Jersey, 500 dollars.

That might be a representative price for a mid-range hotel. The last time I booked a single room for Ubercon (more recently I have shared a room with another referee) I paid about $50 a night for a room at a nearby Motel 6; a quick check of rates at the Hotel Dupont in Wilmington Delaware informs me that their nightly rates run from $429 to $1500 dollars. Obviously you don't mean the rates of the top luxury hotel in the area, but the Hilton probably costs more than the Holiday Inn.

On the other hand, I kind of like the notion of "the cost of a night's lodging in a private room at an average hotel" as the sacrifice. As Scott observes, though, that requires you to know how much that would be. I think perhaps it could be randomized as "the cost of one night in the cheapest available private room at the next hotel or inn I pass," which obliges you to be aware of the places you pass and determine the rate at the moment you pass it, but that becomes a game in itself--whether you can map out cheap hotels and avoid passing expensive ones, or whether a GE roll tells us what you pass on your travels, so I'd like to avoid that.

I also like the notion that the sacrifice would be made as a contribution to a charity. You specify a "secular" charity, which might also tie your hands--in a high mag world, most charities are likely to be religious. In some worlds (Gamma World comes to mind again) there would be no charities, so your magic would be stifled until you versed to a world in which it was possible to catch up on your charitable gifts. On the other hand, it might be sufficient that the gift be made charitably and anonymously (the latter so that you would not benefit from it by status or gratitude), in which case I can see any of a number of means of distributing the wealth being valid.

So we're looking at a material component defined as "the value in local currency or fungible goods of a single night's local lodging in a private room or the equivalent, to be given anonymously as a charitable contribution."

It also occurs to me that in the ancient Middle East, the value of such a room is zero: it is incumbent upon locals to extend hospitality to travelers in the form of food and lodging as a moral obligation, and thus inns and hotels do not prosper in such lands. That becomes a problem with the spell, since free accommodations eliminate the value of the sacrifice. A pure socialist state might create the reverse problem: no charities, no needy persons to receive charity, and no means of distributing wealth to them. That, though, would become a problem for you to solve in such a world, and not really a problem with the spell itself.

The point was for the value of the sacrifice to balance against the number of persons affected by the spell. It is pretty typical for the second person to be -10, the third to be -5, and each additional person to be -2; so if we allow that there are as many coins as persons, the first three coins provide +6 against the -15 of the combined second and third is -9, and above that each additional individual is balanced by one additional increment of value.

I see it as the material component is one night's lodging, that in essence it would be the same as if the spell required Harry to provide a private room for a night in a place where he could only get it from someone else by paying a price; the material component of the room is then converted into a currency value based on local exchange rates, and dispersed through anonymous charitable giving.

Does that work for you?

--M. J. Young

Yes.

I know this will frustrate you, but I have another question that I am pondering that I think might be relevant in a way that is going to create a huge argument; in fact, I'm going to start it in another thread, because I think it likely that others will want to comment on it. I'll need your comments, too, in the thread Promise of Sacrifice as a Spell Component.

--M. J. Young

Done.

You feel a fresh flow of vitality within you, and see that your companions have caught their breaths. There are fifteen of you altogether at this point.

You've got a fire to fight.

--M. J. Young

I catch my breath and start projecting like the actor I am:
"Get those men in line!"
"Bucket brigades, focus on the outlying buildings! Let's keep this on a leash!"
"Ladder wagon, get those buckets higher!"
"Men on-scene, take your rest." I'll try to split the people already fighting the fire between crowd control and getting buckets onto the buildings not yet afire, so that they will not become afire and make our jobs worse.

Once I get everyone scurrying, I'll cast my eyes up at the building and activate my Telescopic Vision psionic power; I want to make sure there's nobody still in that inferno.

And once again I'll start tapping with the butt of my axe to set a working rhythm. It works at sea, why not here?

You get everyone moving, but your telescopic vision does not come into focus for you. From what you can see, the building is probably empty, but then, you can't see through the walls either, and the windows are at present vacant.

Over the next half hour, everyone pulls hard, and you have the fire contained to the original building. It has suffered a significant amount of damage but is still standing, although the fire is still burning within it.

More help arrives, including the captain, and by the end of the hour people are able to start resting as the fire is small enough that it's become a matter of dousing the remaining hot spots.

By ninety minutes you're ready to dismiss all but a small crew to rake through the remains looking for cinders. Captain Peter asks if you want him to stay. There is a group of what appear to be senior watch officers on the General's staff standing behind the crowd control lines.

--M. J. Young

"That's alright, sir. I started it, I'll finish it."

I'll do exactly that, seeing it through to the end. Anyone lost or hurt?

I'll also see to the General's staff before I turn in. Any of theirs hurt? Shaken? Need a debriefing? Did anyone see how the fire started?

It was not their building; they came to see what was happening, and were interested in how the fire division handled the matter.

--M. J. Young

Ah. In that case I hope they got a good show. I'll salute anyone of rank, and otherwise see about getting my people composed on their way as efficiently as possible once the fire is well and truly out. If there is anyone from the building still nearby, I'll stick around to ask questions, otherwise I'll head home.

Oh, yes, there are several people here. It appears to have been some sort of law office, and the man who seems to be the boss is rather upset at the damage and seems to think that it's the fault of the watch. There are several underlings cowering a short distance from him, as he starts to ask why the fire wasn't put out faster with less water damage to everything.

There's also a soft-spoken man who apparently owns one of the adjacent buildings who is trying to thank you for your efforts.

--M. J. Young

I explain to him that it was put out as efficiently as possible. If we had tried to put it out faster, there would have been less water damage but more fire damage and he would not have been better off. As it is, his neighbors appreciate his sacrifice, seeing as our methods were able to keep the fire from spreading, as did the efforts of the watchmen who were here before us.

Mind you, one of the reasons the Watch was not faster is because the Fire Brigade is very far away. If we were able to open an office closer by, this area would get much quicker service. Unfortunately it's just not in our budget just now...

Once I've seen to this man's complaints, then I'll accept the other's thanks.

After you've handled the people, one of the members of the General's staff quietly maneuvers himself to a position near the carts where he'll eventually wind up with you next to him. When you wind up there, he says, in a voice designed not to carry far, "That was very diplomatic of you, Mr. Sevenwinds. That is who you are, I'm told? You undoubtedly turned that man's anger into support for your program, made the Watch look good generally, and did a bit of politicking in the process. We just might have to open a new branch up here, and we might have to appoint you to a captaincy in what will be a meteoric rise.

"It will help if you can figure out anything about the cause of this fire. I don't know how you do that, but your file says you were quite good at determining the facts of a particularly grisly murder some months back, so you apparently have some investigative skills."

He moves off nonchalantly.

--M. J. Young

"Thank you," I answer him, "I try my best. And yes, I was involved in that investigation. I haven't worked many arson cases, but I'll continue to do my best, see what my team and I can come up with. As for the new office, we would always appreciate any help your office can afford."

So, have you any thoughts about how to conduct this arson investigation?

--M. J. Young

Start by going through the building and inspecting what's left. The place where the fire damage is worst is likely to be where the fire started. Liquid accelerants like lamp oil (in our time gasoline) leave a very distinctive burn pattern - rising upwards in a V shape - on the walls and ceilings that I'm told even an amateur should be able to pick out, as well as gutters burnt into the floor where it was poured. Solid accelerants (like wads of paper or hay) are a bit harder to spot by their burn pattern, but a bit easier to spot by their residue (huge piles of ash with unburnt bits still identifiable). It helps to know what was in the building, as well, as that cuts down on false leads. I'm not going to conclude that the area with the worst fire damage was the center of the blaze if, for instance, this building had a stockpile of oil barrels or gunpowder kegs which by their very nature would make for much worse damage than normal fire. So I'll ask those sorts of questions and go have a look around.

Your investigation finds something on the second floor. It looks like it was a wooden barrel in which were papers, and something that looks like the remains of a tight roll of large dried leaves that is burned at one end. It's next to the remains of a very large desk in part of the building that was a big private office.

--M. J. Young

So some asshat dropped a lit cigar into a trash barrel and set the office on fire. Wonderful. I make sure to present this to the representative from the General's office, and to whoever owns this building. I'll be sure to say that it is likely this was an accident, but that the local Watch office might want to have words with whoever this office belonged to, just in case.

That particular office belonged to that hot-headed lawyer who was yelling at you in the street earlier.

--M. J. Young

I'm somehow the opposite of surprised.

I proceed as before - turning him over to the local office.

When you say that you're "turning him over", I'm not thinking that you're taking him into custody, but rather that you're telling the local watch commander that the fire started in his office from a cigar in his wastebasket (although if you are planning to apprehend him yourself, I'd love to hear what you're doing in that regard). Is that the sense of it?

--M. J. Young

You've got the gist of it - reporting him to the local watch commander.

Just to clarify the gist, which of these is your statement:

1. The fire was caused by a lit cigar in a waste basket in this man's office.
2. I believe that this man through a lit cigar into his waste basket; the cigar we found was the cause, and it was in his wastebasket.
3. This man started the fire by throwing his cigar in his wastebasket.

Whichever you tell them, they will thank you and promise to act on the information appropriately.

--M. J. Young

#2.

And then... wasn't I about to be off shift? I go home.
And then... wasn't I just coming onto shift? I go back to the office.

My recollection is that the Captain was just going off shift and you were relieving him when news arrived.

I also recall that you made a promise.

--M. J. Young