I divided his total number of hours, by the number of skills he was training. Since he gets a shot at advancement every 25 hours per skill, he gets 1 at 25 and 1 and 50, with 15.455 hours left over.
...
And that's completely f'ing wrong. Again. Because it's 25 days. *thumps head on wall*
The hell with it. This continues to make no sense at all.
It's not as complicated as you want to make it. Think of it like this.
* Skills advance as a function of days, not hours. If a skill is getting enough practice for X days, it gains a mark. If it is getting less than enough practice, it does not improve.
* Each skill is either getting enough practice, or it is not. (Think of it as the difference between "keeping your hand in" and actually working to become a better piano player.) Enough practice is defined as at least 3 hours every 5 days. More than that for a given skill is wasted time; less than that means the skill won't improve at all.
* At the end of X days, every skill that has been getting enough practice goes up one mark. (It doesn't matter how much practice exactly, just that it's enough.) How many days X is depends on the instruction situation: with no instructor, X = 100; with an unskilled instructor, X = 50; with a skilled instructor who succeeds at his skill roll, X = 25; with a skilled instructor who fails his skill roll, X = 50 (just as if he hadn't been skilled after all). If a skilled instructor botches, X = 50 but the learner doesn't gain the mark.
With that in mind, there are two steps to take in this situation. Step one, decide for which and how many skills the student is getting "enough practice." Step two, roll the teaching checks, one 25 day period at a time.
Next post: Step One and Step Two, outlined in detail. Stay tuned! In the meantime: questions? Comments?
Step one: Figure out how much time it would take to practice all the skills the character wants to practice. Three hours per skill every five days: thirty-three skills times three hours each is ninety-nine hours, divided by five days is roughly twenty hours a day.
Twenty hours a day? He has to eat and sleep! Well, maybe some of those skills are related; maybe it wouldn't take quite that long. Give him a break and cut that down to 14 hours, say.
But wait, you say, he only has 60 hours a week to practice? Hmm. That comes to about (60/7=8.51) eight and half hours a day; he doesn't have time to practice all 33 skills. Time to make some tough choices. He needs to either practice another 5.5 hours a day (tall order!), or else drop some of his skills. He's roughly 40% short on time (5.5/14 = .39), so if he ditches about 13 of his 33 skills, he can advance the remaining 20 on his his chosen schedule.
Instead of working backward like that, you could work forward. On average, he's practicing skills for (8.5*5 =) 42.5 hours every five days. Divide by three, and that's time enough to bring 14 skills to that "I'm practicing enough to advance" threshold. If you decide to give him a break for related skills, divide by two instead: 21 skills. (Notice that's roughly the same answer we got above, but it was a lot easier to get to and more accurate to boot.) Let the player pick which 21 he wants to advance, making sure enough of them are still related to warrant the bonus, and tell him he just doesn't have enough time in his day to devote to the others without either going over sixty hours a week or neglecting the skills he's already focused on. Alternatively, make his teachers pick. Perhaps after he's sufficiently advanced in these skills, he'll drop a few to make room for the ones he didn't pick earlier.
(Does this make sense?)
Step Two: After 25 days, roll teaching checks individually for each of the skills he's learning. (Yes, this can be a pain. I think this is why MJ doesn't skip six months at a time, but forces the player to go month by month with GE rolls to see if something interrupts the routine.) At the table, you have the player roll these himself while you're attending to other players; when you come back, he can tell you which rolls succeeded and failed. Now go down your list:
* Each roll that succeeded improves that skill by one mark. (I draw a check by the skill, followed by a tally mark.)
* Each roll that fails does nothing this time, but see below. (I draw a dash by the skill).
* Each roll that botches ruins learning for 50 days. See below. (I draw B by the skill.)
___
Then, at fifty days, roll teaching checks again, but only for those skills which gained a mark last time.
* Each roll that succeeds improves that skill by one mark. (I draw a check by the skill, followed by a tally mark.)
* Each roll that fails does nothing this time. (I draw a dash by the skill).
* Each skill for which you did not roll (unless it botched last time) gains a mark automatically. (I add a tally mark.)
* Each skill which botched last time does not improve this time, but will get to roll normally next time. (I draw an X by the skill, which shows that it would have improved but didn't, and thus that the botch has been discharged.)
Rinse and repeat. At 75 days, every skill with an X or a tally as the latest mark gets a teaching roll, all those with dashes get an automatic tally, and every skill with a B gets an X. Every rolled success gets a check and a tally, every rolled failure gets a dash, and every botch gets a B. Once you get into the swing of it, it goes pretty quickly, and before long you have several hundred days' advancement charted out. To figure out how much any given skill has improved, just scan across its row and count tally marks.
Anything I can clear up about that explanation, don't hesitate to ask. Anything you don't like, I know I can trust you pipe up about, and I welcome the opportunity to discuss your grievances!
Out of play, first let me address John 2, and then let me address Harry.
It sounds like you're making it more likely for me to botch. Given my behavior of late, I don't really begrudge you that. However, you do have the reputation as the single most fair referee, so I will trust your judgment here.
Well, the problem I face is it sounds to me like you're trying to force success and prevent botch. That is, to take the PUSH method straight--let's say you're trying to create an anti-weather shield, and everything else comes to the baseline so the only point in question in the time factor. The baseline TF is eighteen minutes, 18:00. We'll say your highest mag skill at this point is another stationary shield, so the bias factors cancel out, and your chance to "learn" this skill equals BRA+world bias. Let's say that the world bias is 10@, and your BRA is 1@10, so your chance to learn the skill with 18:00 of praying is 30%. Three out of ten rolls will be successful.
But if you keep praying for 36:00 your TF goes to 40%; make it 1:12:00 and you've got 50%; 2:24:00 makes 60%; 4:48, 9:26, 18:52, 37:44--you now have a 100% chance of success, and all you had to do was keep praying that long.
On the other hand, you said you were going to pray until something happened, and when you prayed for 18:00 you had a 30% chance to succeed, a 70% chance to fail, and a 7% chance to botch. But then, when you had only prayed for 9:00 your chance of success was only 20% and your chance to botch was 8%. At 4:30 you had a 9% chance to botch, at 2:15 it was 10%, at 1:08 11%, 0:34 12%, 0:17 13%, 0:09, 0:04.5, 0:02.25, 0:01.125, 0:00.3625, 0:00.18125, 0:00.090625--when you prayed for about a tenth of a second, you had a twenty percent chance to botch. At some infinitessimal point, you had a 100% chance to botch, because you had sliced the time factor so small that the chance to succeed on a prayer that short would be -900, the chance to fail 1000%.
Now, obviously it is absurd to speak of a prayer being that short; but it is equally absurd to say that there was never an instant in time when your prayer was not that short. Your instruction is you want to pray exactly as long as is necessary for "something" to happen, and that length of time is nearly no time at all, at which point a botch will happen. You cannot imagine praying for so short a time, but that's not the point: the point is that you are attempting to avoid giving a time factor as a way of avoiding a botch, and that can't be done that way.
My solution is an attempt to be fair to you, and to be fair to the game and all other players at the same time. You can pray until "something" happens. I will calculate the chance of success based on everything, but with the time factor at the baseline (whatever that is), and then I will roll the dice. At the moment I roll the dice I will already know where the edges of the range are--how low is a success, how high is a botch. I will then see how close you are to each. I can then determine whether it is more likely that you would have botched at some moment equal to or less than the baseline time factor, and call the botch at that moment, or more likely that you would have continued to the moment at which it would have been a success and calculate the time you would have to continue to reach that.
Or you can avoid this by telling me how long you intend to pray for each prayer, and my math becomes a lot easier, and you make a lot less work for me when you do this. I get testy when people find ways to make my job more difficult. Failing to give proper meaningful answers to the questions asked does that. However, you are perfectly within your rights to take control of the time factor of a skill, to say that you are going to pray until something happens and thus create a variable TF skill--and when you do so, I have to create a sliding scale that determines when you botch (because you cannot use this trick to eliminate botches, even though you can eliminate botches by packing your prayers so full of bonuses that they cannot fail) and when it succeeds.
Oh, yes, and since TF is not something normally allowed as a variable controlled by the caster, it's always going to be a -10 penalty for taking control of an aspect of the skill not normally given to the caster.
Now for Harry.
There are a couple of alternatives you can use in your current situation; they are sort of integrated with each other.
The thing that you seem to be doing is creating a School, that is, an organized training program that should result in improvements in specific skills within a specific time frame. You have a very long list of skills, and they are not all related to each other. However, when you create a School, you allow yourself the option to tinker with the system.
The School technique is being used in the world in which you are currently playing, Mary Piper. You've seen how it works: every hundred days you advance certain skills, and every two hundred days you advance certain other skills, and there are other skills and eventually attributes that advance because you are immersed in a program that forces you to "practice" those skills. That's without instruction. You can accelerate it by including instruction as part of the course.
It seems to me, too, that part of what you want to do with this is distinguish your ninja into specializations. In Dark Honor Empire I created three groups, which if I recall correctly were effectively burglars, fighters, and assassins. They had different skill levels in different skills that fit their jobs, but I didn't create a school to do that, preferring to let the player character focus on whichever skills he wanted to learn individually (and I did not have as many skills in the program).
What I would recommend is that you divide your ninja into specialized groups of some sort, and determine which skills are critical to which specializations. You also decide whether there are some skills that are "exclusive to" one specialization or "excluded from" another. Then for each group you create a skill advancement track: these two skills improve by one mark every twenty-five days, these five others do so in fifty days, these eight in one hundred days, these twelve in one hundred fifty days, these fifteen in two hundred days, these fifteen in three hundred days. You eliminate the rolls. You divide your students based on attributes--best in strength puts them in one category, agility in another, hand/eye in a third. Then you either inform your player that the teachers have decided his character is an X, or you let the player decide (having informed him that the groups are divided as they are) that he wants to be in a specific group.
You can also include attribute improvements with the skills. These will advance more slowly (two hundred instead of one hundred days for physical attributes, non-physical attributes are yet more difficult, and the total number of hours needed cannot be reduced by a training/teaching skill check). Probably the attribute that puts a candidate in a particular class advances once in four hundred days, and the others once in eight or twelve hundred.
The school then advances him at a fixed rate, and does the same for all his companions. On this basis whenever you "interrupt" school for an adventure/mission, you can quickly determine the skills of classmates by tracking their time against his. You can interrupt the school training for the mission and return to pick up the day count where you broke it.
The thing to remember about the skill advancement system is that "sixty hours over one hundred days", adjusted for teachers and instructors and trainers, is the core guideline you're supposed to follow, but that as long as what you've designed fairly represents those guidelines you are not locked into following it in precise detail. YOu're trying to track the advancement of probably a hundred characters, at least a dozen of them potentially critical to events that are apt to unfold (after all, I can't imagine that Ric's conflict with this jerk is going to be less than six-on-six). You're not going to want to make all the rolls for all of them. You know that rolls average out over time, so instead of doing the rolls over time design the system so that advancement happens at the right rate, and assume that more care is being given to the skills that matter more to the expectations of each subgroup within the group.
*****
There is a problem with letting Ric assign the successes, and that is that someone also has to assign the botches--and the botches effectively take away successes, but specifically where they occurred. If you're doing the individual rolls, as Scott indicates, you need to know which skills botched, and you really also need to know which ones had the successes and failures. The aspect of different skills improving at different rates in that case is not a matter of the player's choice but of the character's ability and other factors within the world.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
I am now (two in the morning) tied up on the phone with someone who needs to talk (death of a close friend), so I'm going to have to stop here and pick up next time. It might be that I can get a bit of time tomorrow; Sunday might be a problem, as I have to take my son back to school.
--M. J. Young
Well, I'm sure you've seen the WWJD bumper sticker. My favorite was PUSH Pray Until Something Happens. Then of course there's FROG Fully Rely On God.
At least with prayer botches, it's not my fault if something goes horribly wrong.
The point is that you are attempting to avoid giving a time factor as a way of avoiding a botch, and that can't be done that way.
No MJ, what I was trying to avoid was failing. Avoiding the botch never occurred to me. Perhaps I should change that to PUSGH. Pray Until Something Good Happens.
No MJ, what I was trying to avoid was failing.
Interestingly enough, that's exactly what MJ's odd little system does for you - it avoids failures. All you get are successes and botches.
If the baseline for the skill is an hour, and at baseline you have a 50% chance to succeed and a 5% chance to botch, then under a PUSH TF:
* You have a 40% chance to succeed in an hour or less.
* You have a 50% chance (rolls from 41 to 90) to succeed in much more than an hour - up to 32 hours for a roll of 90!
* You have an 11% chance (rolls from 90 to 100) to botch very quickly or very slowly - in just under two minutes for a roll of 90, to one hour for a roll of 95, up to 32 hours for a roll of 100.
You probably noticed that I included 90 twice, and that it all adds up to 101%. That's because 90 is exactly as close to success as it is to a botch - doubling the baseline TF five times means it succeeds, halving it five times means it botches - and I don't know which MJ would count it as. I'd wait the 32 hours and then flip a coin, myself. And probably force you to make stamina and/or willpower checks to keep praying for that long in the first place.
I never really liked the notion that you could have "skill" at praying. It's like saying that you're skilled at telling God what to do. Since it is just a game mechanic, and since it's already been explained to me, I'm not arguing with it. I'm still allowed to think it's a dumb game mechanic though.
It took God 12 years to answer my prayers for deliverance from my psychosis, and even then, I had to do a lot of it myself. Looking back on it though, I think it happened just the way it was supposed to. Don't ask me why. They say that God might not answer when you call, but He is never late when He comes. I believe that to be true.
A1Nut - Don't think of it as knowing better how to tell God what to do. Think of it as knowing how to ask. Didn't you ever have somebody in your life who you knew just how to ask to get them to say yes? And you got that way by asking lots of times, right? Knowing how to read their moods, knowing just the right words, the right body language, the right wheedling tone or favorite-dinner bribe or whatever? Granted the relationship between a man and his deity is more complicated than that, but the same idea applies: you're not telling God what to do, you're just getting to know really well how to ask.
Osevens, I think that's the best answer I've ever heard on the topic.
And yeah Osevens, when I was a kid, I could talk my grandmother into giving me a 10 spot whenever I wanted. Now that I'm an adult, it only works about half the time, but I can still get it to happen sometimes. Of course, I was a lot cuter when I was a kid. That's the best answer I've heard on this topic I think.
I again apologize for the disruptions life has thrown at play. Hopefully I will be able to get through all three players tonight, Harry (whom I thank for his input on the prayer equals skill question), John 2, and Adam.
Harry wants a sword that is not an ordinary pirate cutlass. A standard quality cutlass runs a thousand diktar in this world; there is no indication that any other kind of sword is available at all, but I'll leave that as part of the GE roll. That roll is 21. If there are other sword designs, they are not made nor sold in Durnmist, where the cutlass is the standard weapon.
One of my guesses proved correct: John 2 wants to be given without learning a summoning skill that will summon his specific guardian angel Terry, the ritual of which is thought alone. "Thought alone" is -25, and the shortening of the time factor to instant activation (0:00:06) is going to have a serious impact on a skill whose baseline is several times that (0:02:00). Thought-only skills also have a high probability of botching as wrong result. However, the current skill is the skill to know a skill without learning it, which is an interesting sidestep to the problem of whether he can learn it against the heavy penalties, so let's start there. It will be a Permanently Confer New Abilities skill, M15@4, and the baseline TF is 6:00:00. We have +5 appropriate words, +15 for total body involvement, so with the TF at baseline the SM is +20. He has a 12@6 bias, +9 for religion, +10 for alliance world, and 2@2 BRA in a 0@ bias world. That's 187-154=33% chance of success on a 6 hour TF. I agree with Scott that to maintain a 6:00 TF will require a check; first, though, I need to roll to determine the outcome here. 73 means that we have to increase the time; one doubling increases the 33 to 66, and then we have 7/33=`21-22, I think. Let me pull out the calculator, yes, 21.21212121.... We can multiply that by the now twelve hour baseline, and we get 2.5454...; we pull the 2 to give us 14 hours, and we still have .545454... hours, which comes to 32 minutes 43.6 seconds. We'll make it 14:32:42.
But what about the duration? I'll give him simple stamina checks every two hours, but if he fails one he shifts to difficult will power checks every hour. The checks are 21, already a failure so he needs to use his will power to keep going, and 29 means that's all she wrote, two hours of praying and he's finished.
He gets a 16 GE roll on the weight training place. I'm not sure what he wants, but this seems good to me.
Adam is conversing with Horta. I'm not certain what he hopes to learn, but we'll see how it goes.
I'm done.
--M. J. Young
But what about the duration? I'll give him simple stamina checks every two hours, but if he fails one he shifts to difficult will power checks every hour. The checks are 21, already a failure so he needs to use his will power to keep going, and 29 means that's all she wrote, two hours of praying and he's finished.
I'm just curious where you got the notion of the stamina checks? I want to be perfectly clear that I AM NOT arguing the rules with you. It's just that I know for a fact that I could pray for longer than 2 hours. I know because I've done it before. I just wanted to know where you got that time estimate from. Again, I AM NOT arguing, just asking for clarification.
Well, first, I did not say you couldn't pray for more than two hours; I said that if you prayed for two hours and wished to keep going you would need to make a stamina check.
Second, I took into account that this was at the end of a long day in which you worked at your relatively new job, which involves both physical work and mental attentiveness, and then spent a significant period tiring yourself at the gym. Thus it is tired and you are late--or the other way around, I suppose.
Third, I needed a reasonable time that a person of typical stamina could keep going without a check. Remember, the point of the check is that anything up to this time a person like you (one with a 1@ stamina in this case) could do without effort. The check means that effort is involved in exceeding this point. If you succeeded, you were not so tired as I thought; if you failed, you were more tired than you thought. I, too, have prayed for longer than two hours--and I have also prayed for much shorter than that and fallen asleep or given up from exhaustion. It seemed a good number.
I'm not supposed to be here, but I seem to be stranged at the moment, so let's accomplish what we can, beginning with Harry, then John 2, then Adam.
Harry is going to buy a quality sword. It will be a Cutlass of Quality RF1 damaging +DC+1 which I have added to his sheet.
John 2 is looking at joining the Y.
Adam attempts to put himself outside the vampire battle. That's interesting, at least, but it's not going to be so simple as that.
--M. J. Young
Ric and I have finally figured out what's going on with his skills, and I've sent him his updated sheet. On average he gained two or three intensities in each of his fancy ninja skills, and is on his way to becoming a genuine amateur ninja.
He does stuff.
I wouldn't have given him a test that literally could not be completed, so I'll say there will soon be a baby for him to get tears from.
Finding a four-leaf clover really is a matter of luck. Wikipedia says there's 10,000 shamrocks for every 4-leaf clover, but I think 1 in 10,000 odds are a bit steep. That is, after all, the odds that each clover he looks at will be a four-leaf clover, and depending on how much time he spends looking, he might look at 10,000 clovers in a matter of a couple of days. Not really sure how to handle this one, so advice is appreciated.
He's going to attempt to grow his own rice. I happen to know from experience that four candles will grow him precisely jack, but I'm willing to let the dice decide his fate. The thing I don't know is, what skill is this, at what tech bias? Farming is a fairly primitive skill, after all...
And he's gathering sticks. In a mostly natural environment, where people generally do make things out of wood. He can pick his color and style.
Finding a four-leaf clover really is a matter of luck . . . Not really sure how to handle this one, so advice is appreciated.
GE roll. A roll of 3 means he sees one right away, a 16 or 17 means pretty much what you personally would expect (in this case, he finds one "in a matter of a couple of days"), and a 30 means the local children consider it good luck to eat fresh-picked four-leaf clovers for breakfast.
I'm not sure about the rice-growing skill, but it's almost got to be in the first three levels. Ric's tech bias is high enough that it won't matter for skill learning purposes in this world, so you have some time to figure it out (or poll more opinions).
A GE roll of 23 says he's going to be wallowing in grass stains for a while.
Being a generalist, I actually know something about four leaf clovers. I know that their frequency varies with conditions. When we lived near the Dupont Chambers Works chemical plant we always had dozens of four-leaf clovers in our ill-tended lawn every year. Out here in the purer country on the edges of one of the nation's cleanest acquifers, I don't know that we've seen one in the past eight years. It's a mutation, but its rarity is tied to whatever causes mutations in an area. Scott is right in the main, that the first trick is to determine how common they are, and a GE roll is the best choice for that.
The second step, though, is probably a skill check. The problem that is itching in the back of my mind is that he might not really have that skill--because you could do it by carefully scanning individual clovers for hours, but the way we spot them is entirely different from that. It involves a sort of mental pattern matching. This is somewhat akin to the Where's Waldo skill, the ability to condition the mind to notice a specific visual pattern (shape, color, interaction of lines). We saw enough four-leaf clovers that it would often happen that we noticed one merely walking across the front yard, and then spotted several more because we turned our attention toward the ground. That was aided by the fact that they were relatively abundant and tended to grow near each other; it was also impacted by the fact that having practiced looking for them we saw them relatively easily. I would figure that pattern-matching skill to be something of a P3@0 variant, something like perception only applied to spotting specific shapes.
Without it, though, you would have to do a more complex sort of combination roll: what are the odds that there are four leaf clovers in this patch he is examining (a GE roll requiring not worse than 12 for there to be one present) and what are the odds that he will actually spot what's there (a visual focus skill check penalized for the fact that there aren't a lot of them there).
I think botches will mostly be that he thinks he sees one but is wrong (it is often the case that two clover will get their leaves tangled in each other such that they seem to spring from a common stem) or that he crushes one underfoot before he sees it.
Also, if you have a high incidence of four-leaf clovers you will also have five-leaf variants very rarely.
As for rice growing, well, rice grows. Your skill involves creating the conditions in which it grows. Since rice grows in bogs (or paddies, which are artificial bogs), you either find a bog or you make one. Making a bog uses T5@ water skills (dams and such). Finding a bog is probably a T0@ survival skill variant.
Now, let's answer Harry's other post--the one in which he plays the game--and continue with John 2 and Adam.
Harry is pulling out of Durnmist bound for Tempest--a city he hates. My sheet says 15 days, which is about average for that run. It also says that nothing happens here. There is, however, a customs check approaching Tempest, as I recall.
John 2 asks an excellent question--is there a place for target shooting, and particularly something akin to skeet shooting, on a space station? There's this "gee, that's unlikely" thing going on in my head, but then, there's a separate "of course there is" thing, since this is a floating city, so we let the dice decide--and a GE roll of 10 is very favorable.
I think Adam has overestimated what his vampire knows about the world. Rome and Britain both suffer from a geocentric lights-on-spheres view of the cosmos, and he's talking about cities on planets (it would not occur to anyone save perhaps Merlin that Earth is a planet, as the very word means "wanderer" and refers to those stars that move in irregular orbits).
--M. J. Young
John 2 asks an excellent question--is there a place for target shooting, and particularly something akin to skeet shooting, on a space station? There's this "gee, that's unlikely" thing going on in my head, but then, there's a separate "of course there is" thing, since this is a floating city, so we let the dice decide--and a GE roll of 10 is very favorable.
I would have thought that would be a 3 GE roll. I was half expecting to see you say that I had rolled the first 3 of my Multiverser career. Of course, I don't know TerraNova like you do....
Terranova is the equivalent of a city, something near the size of New York, I think. For the place to sell weapons but not include a place to practice with them would be quite unusual. I gave thought to the possibility that any such place would be in the "suburbs"--the many smaller "towns" that drift in the area around the central one--but the GE roll was good enough to put it somewhere reasonably accessible, even if out of the way.
Again our players are Harry, John 2, and Adam.
Harry is drinking--something, I don't know what. As to whether he will drink himself drunk or sick, that partly depends on what he's drinking, so I'll have to find out.
Addressing John 2's various questions, he's got a 14 GE on his holster, 24 on the availability of a .22 pistol.
I think it's time to give Adam the opportunity to end the conversation; Horta is not really interested in those ideas of his.
--M. J. Young
I think I'm looking at Harry, John 2, and Adam tonight.
Harry gets an incredibly good 5 GE roll for his evening in Tempest. The customs check roll is 10, which is favorable.
John 2 has a 1@6 SAL at Use Crossbow, but before I can determine whether he can hit the target he'll have to define the target. Having shot skeet, I know that you can effectively "adjust the difficulty" mostly by range and vector; in a high tech shooting range, there will be a lot more adjustments you can make.
Adam turns his attention to Geneice, who was present for the conversation but silent through it. Now she'll give some impressions, but not take away his dreams.
--M. J. Young
By the bye, if the mead is that good and that cheap I would buy at least a gallon, considering I can keep it fresh ad nauseum.
That's an interesting question, though. Considering alcohol is created by a fermentation process which is, in effect, a type of controlled spoilage, would a Freshen spell make spoiled mead into good mead, or into unfermented honey and water? Or is this one of those situations where Divine magic would read your intentions and thus do one, while Arcane magic would read your means and do one or the other accordingly?
My answer: depends on the spell, not whether it's divine or arcane. If I were your ref and had to make the call right now, the Restore Food and Drink spell you currently know (which causes the target to revert to a prior state of freshness) would undo the fermentation completely, leaving you with pure, fresh water and some honey in the bottom (plus whatever else goes into mead). Perhaps I might allow relative success to govern how much purification you left undone, with higher rolls meaning more restraint achieved and thus better mead.
Edit: Of course, since it doesn't turn your apples into apple blossoms, we can assume the spell restores the target to "peak" freshness. It's just a matter of deciding what peak freshness actually is.
That's why I said it either depends on your intentions, or your methods.
I misheard you, then. I understood you as saying that for divine magic it would depend on your intentions and for arcane magic it would depend on your methods.
Having given this spell further thought, I've decided that peak freshness in this case would be pre-fermentation. Given that you've successfully expanded the spell to applications that have nothing to do with food - cleaning yourself and your clothing, for example - it seems to me that it's primary focus is 'restore what was', not 'make this edible'. A spell of the latter kind would yield good mead; yours yields the makings of good mead.
Or it would, if you were in my game. MJ's thinking may be quite different.
Scott - No, you heard me right. That's something MJ explained to me, oh, ages ago - divine magic looks at your intentions, arcane magic looks at your literal works, so you can afford to be a bit less precise with divine magic and trust the gods to get it right for you.
Ric casts his darkness spell. If I did my math right, he has a 66% chance of casting this here, and rolled a 36, so he'll get 18 minutes of magical darkness.
With a low 2@ BRA, a low 1@ SAL, and +4 for a 2@ world bias, that seems right for a sit-mod of around or just under +30.
Scott - No, you heard me right.
Okay. I interpreted that as divine magic being more forgiving in the skill learning process (getting what you want instead of what you asked for, getting a solution that's within the world bias if possible), not as divine magic skills being more flexible once their effects had been defined.
Ohhhh I savvy. No, no, divine magic and arcane magic make you work just as heard to learn, it's just that, like you said, divine magic is more flexible once you've got it.
Actually I think Scott has it right. This is particularly in the case of situations in which someone prays for an effect that can be reached in several different ways--for example, do you need to create light, or do you need to manipulate the light you already have to make it brighter/more focused? If you pray for more light and a 9@1 create light would be a disaster but a 4@1 manipulate light would work, I'll usually say that the divine magic involves the intervention of the deity, who chooses to do it the easier way. If you are doing it by arcane magic and you've specified that you are creating light (and I will ask) then you get the disaster. However, once a spell effect is defined, that is the spell effect. As with your "freshen" spell, we can clarify the definition, but every clarification limits it.
It appears that your freshening skill removes impurities. Alcohol is an impurity that comes from a spoilage process, and thus I would have to agree with Scott that the freshening skill as you learned it removes such impurities and restores it to its pre-spoiled state. It would, as he says, be different if you had a "purify food and drink" skill, because in that case we would be restoring the mead, not removing the impurities created by spoilage.
Divine magic is inherently easier to learn, too, because you have the religion bonus no matter where you are, and if you are in a compatibly-affiliated world you have the world affiliation bonus. And, as observed, if you pray for an effect that can be achieved in different ways, with divine magic it is more likely that you will wind up with the skill that reaches the desired effect most safely. This is what it means that divine magic considers your intentions: the skill you get is based on what you wanted to accomplish.
And before John jumps in and stomps on this, as referee I can only determine what you want to accomplish based on what the ritual says you're doing, and I am probably going to ask you to focus your request so I understand what you're trying to do.
Don't let that stop you from trying it, of course. This would be one of those situations in which "how would you know?" is the answer to the question. On the other hand, part of the point of alcoholic beverages is that they don't spoil for a very long time.
On that note, let's look at posts from Harry, John 2, Adam, and Graeme.
My automatic rolls tell me that Harry has 16 days to reach Tristar, and that he is headed into a repair delay there; but Tristar is that volcanic coast, and the port might be closed. To determine the circumstances there, we use a GE roll against a chart in the world description; 18 is the best roll for what is described as a limited cargo drop stop, no special cargo, and alert security to prevent stowaways. It will be necessary to meld these events. Of course, there's no reason for anyone to tell Harry any of this beyond what he needs to know, unless of course he asks or someone asks for his help.
I am tagging some stats onto John 2's crossbow. I'm doing this by the seat of my pants, because I don't really have time to look up what I've done for other crossbows, but I think that RF1, 20':50':100':150':+2/3' is probably good. That means that a target 20' away will be at +20 point blank range, the movement he describes does not create a penalty, so the only size penalty for a 12" diameter circular target. There's a chart in the appendix of tables that tells me that this is a -18 penalty, so it comes to +2 for his intended target. The TV is going to be 0@4 (no intuition and no density, but the movement constitutes agility). 2@2 RSV+2@2 BRA+2x12@ bias+1@6 SAL-0@5 TV=79%. Rolls are 39, 96, 71, 27, 72, 49, since the crossbow holds six quarrels (one in the track and five in the rack) that's a full barrage.
Adam has a journey to London ahead, and I think that a GE roll for the road is appropriate; a really good or bad one might impact events overnight. The roll is 19, which is only moderately bad.
I hadn't thought much about what kind of magic Graeme's Azmayincan prisoner can use. It's a 15 GE roll, but then, he comes from a world in which everything is done by magic, so he must do quite a bit.
I'm going to call this a night; I have one more thread to address, and some other business to which to attend.
--M. J. Young
I have a bit of time left, and hope that I can cover the three games, of Harry, John 2, and Adam, in that time.
Harry has a cool new skill idea, but we're going to have to wait to see how he expects to test it.
I forgot to answer one of John 2's questions; at least he was polite about asking me again. I don't think he'll be particularly happy with the answer.
Adam gets a 20 GE roll on an aspect of his journey I was not including in the 19 I rolled previously: there are few places to stay along the way.
--M. J. Young
I forgot to answer one of John 2's questions; at least he was polite about asking me again. I don't think he'll be particularly happy with the answer.
Not disappointed, not unhappy.
Ric continues conversing with the old man, his point proved.
Unbeknownst to Ric, all of the old man's magic is actually divine magic, in that odd Japanese Buddhist/Shinto hybrid style of divine magic that has priests slapping sanctified parchment strips on things in order to enspell them.
So he'll have to learn some Religion before the old man will teach him divine magic. The catch? Ric doesn't read Japanese, and the odd Babelfish effect I'm playing with (*coughmaduponthespotcough*) in this world doesn't translate writing.
Try Google Translate.
What Harry means, David, is that the M7@1 Speak/Comprehend Language spell that enables Ric to converse with everyone does not cover Read/Write. At least, Harry, I'm assuming that it's a magic effect; if it's psionic, that's very different--probably a P1@1 Contact Language Center (a Read Minds variant) that enables the person to converse in the language of anyone whose mind he can contact, by using their mind to code and encode between speech and thought.
It looks like I have some time (while my clothes wash) to address the patiently waiting threads of Harry, John 2, and Adam.
A roll of 27 will certainly give Harry most of half an hour of intense olfactory ability. I'm listing it as 1@1 Bloodhound Olfaction P5@1 (reduces other senses).
John 2 is still at the practice range.
I'm going to discuss how to create warding spells with Adam, but I'll get Geneice involved, too.
--M. J. Young
M7@1 would put it above what my indigs could do, but seeing as it's really only applying to Ric right now there's no reason it couldn't have a non-indig source.
Just as an aside, why does my bloodhound olfaction reduce my other senses? Telescopic Vision is doing the same thing with my sight and has no such drawback, so I'm curious. And how would I go about undoing that drawback?
One enhances your perception, the other enhances your actual faculty. You undo the drawback either by overcoming it in some creative way (good luck), trading it in for some comparable drawback, or taking a fairly large sit-mod on your olfactory skill (I'm not looking it up, but I'd guess between -20 and -40). Those latter two require learning a new and separate P5@1 skill to replace the one you have.
My guess is that MJ determined that the effect you want is far too potent to be listed under a P3@ Clairsentient skill, and that it sounded much more like the kind of thing you'd get from a P5@ Body Control. He then assumed that since you'd never done one of those before, you'd be okay with accepting the baseline skill. Again, I'm not looking anything up, so these are guesses based on recollections.
Actually, my reasoning was in this case a bit different than that.
When someone focuses his attention on one sense, he tends to disregard the others to some degree. Many times people trying to hear something will close their eyes, and people concentrating on seeing something do not hear what is being said to them at that moment. This is a natural application of the mental resource allocation principle at work here, but Harry's enhancements are significantly stronger than that. Still, if he were enhancing his eyesight or his hearing, he would probably draw most of the resources from his olfactory and gustational senses, which would go unnoticed as long as he was not also trying to use them at the same time. So when he uses his 5@1 enhanced vision skills, he gets a slight reduction in auditory sense which he does not notice because he's never had reason to, plus significant reductions in his gustational and olfactory senses which would be completely unnoticed when he is focused on what he can see.
Turn it around, though, and even a slight reduction in visual accuity is going to be noticed as long as he has his eyes open. Once he has shifted some resources from vision he will also shift some from auditory and tactile senses--none from gustational sense, which is so closely linked to olfactory sense that it is probably being enhanced at least slightly at the same time, and this is increasing the draw on the other three senses. So, having noticed that his vision was reduced somewhat, it alerted him to the fact that his other primary senses were also reduced.
I'm also aware that dogs, whose olfactory sense is so very strong, have very limited visual abilities, and although their auditory sense is strong they do not have as strong a tactile sensation as compared with humans. Thus I put this together and conclude that the enhanced olfactory sense is most likely to reduce visual sense, sufficiently that this would be noticed and would alert the user to the fact that his other senses were affected. So alerted, he would then pay attention to those other sense and notice the reduction.
Anyway, that's what I was thinking. In short, he does have that affect with the heightened vision skills, he just doesn't notice it. (It also helps that his telescopic vision skill costs him in another way: he sees farther, but in a narrower field. When he looks over the port bow of the ship he can see a wide expanse of the ocean and could see an entire flotilla, such as the Spanish Armada; when he goes to telescopic vision, he can look at one of those ships very closely, but has to move his attention from ship to ship, and ships outside that field of view could move without his awareness, as long as they do not cross his line of sight. Thus he is getting some of the resources for telescopic vision from his visual abilities themselves.)
Now, let's see what Harry's doing in his game, and then look at John 2 and Adam.
I think Harry is going to attempt further to shut down his tactile sense in favor of his visual; I want to confirm that before I do anything more with it.
John 2 raises his Crossbow SAL to 1@7.
Adam seems to know more about these vampires than I; I'm not at all certain why he believes they are unaffected by crosses or by garlic. (I am not saying that either of these beliefs are mistaken, only that I'm not aware of anything in the story to this point that would have led to those conclusions.) I'm also not certain why he thinks they are afraid of fire. I'm sure they are, but not necessarily more so than I would be. Still, he's designing a ward, and he's got some good ideas for it. We'll draw them out into a spell.
--M. J. Young
Again we have Harry, John 2, and Adam.
If Harry reduces his tactile response much further, he'll lose his kinesthesia, and that's a problem not easily overcome. However, he intends to do this, so first I have to figure out exactly what it is he is attempting to do. He suggests that what he's trying to do is perform the same enhanced olfaction skill, but reallocate sensory resources such that nothing is drawn from the visual sense and more is drawn from the tactile sense. Since that works, I'll go with that. However, I'm going to assess a -10 penalty because he is taking control of a factor that is not normally included in the skill. He rolls 46, which as a skill use attempt is a failure. That's too bad--I was looking forward to describing to him the sensation of being without tactile sensation. But I'm sure he'll try again.
John 2 probably doesn't remember Derek's name; but that's really what I was interested in discovering. If he does, he can make that call; if he doesn't, he can't.
Oddly, I played a bit of V:tM when we were developing Multiverser interface rules, and indeed this world is based loosely on that one. On the other hand, there was never any indication in the (pre-Hunters hunters) game I played that those vampires were afraid of fire, or that they were unaffected by garlic. (In fact, I designed some garlic-powder eggshell grenades for use against them, although I do not recall actually using them.) But if this were actually that world, we would be using interfacing rules, and Adam would be rolling handfuls of ten-sided dice for most of his checks rather than the Multiverser rolls. This world is very like that world, but not that world. There is, of course, the story of the Azure Gate Bridge. Meanwhile, we're still building this warding spell.
--M. J. Young
John 2 probably doesn't remember Derek's name; but that's really what I was interested in discovering. If he does, he can make that call; if he doesn't, he can't.
Derek Jacob Brown. One positive aspect of psychosis is it increases your memory capacity.