It is still possible to botch in a flatline psionic world. You can have brain burn, psionic shockwaves, and I knocked somebody out with a TK pulse. These are probably restricted psionically in a flatline world. But they happen. Therefore, they must be @1 psionics. Can you create a botch? Purposefully give yourself brain burn? That stops psionics from working for you. I could imagine uses for that. Could you purposefully throw psionic shockwaves? Yes, you get hurt, but I could imagine someone in combat using that as a last-ditch suicide weapon. These botches are possible in a flatline world, so can they be done on purpose?
And you better believe I could come up with hundreds of uses for being able to knock somebody out with a TK pulse. I did it in a flatline world, so it is psionically possible. Can I do it on purpose?
Osevens, I believe, gave himself hallucinations in a flatline world on a botch. That must be psionically possible. Kind of like your own personal Holodeck. That would most certainly be cool. Can these be done on purpose?
Or controlled psionic shockwaves? Since they can be done in a flatline world, they can be controlled. Throw a psionic shockwave that does me 6 points of damage, but it deals my opponent 4, and he only had 3 left, anyway. Has this ever been tried?
Or develop a body skill that protects you against psionic shockwaves? If you personally could be made immune to them, that would be a helluva flatline weapon.
I know a lot of the botches are just referee's discretion, so I could totally understand if it was limited only to botches that are in the official rules, but has this ever been done?
A1Nut - I asked exactly this in my "Learning a Botch?" thread a while back. I actually did exactly what you're describing. After a botch with a P5@1 Telescopic Vision, I developed a hyper-magnified view. I later learned to keep that as a P5@1 Microscopic Vision. You can't use the botch itself to learn the skill - it's a botch, it's supposed to be bad - but there's nothing that keeps you from using a botch to inspire a new skill, which is basically what I did.
Mind you, if I were referee'ing, even if I were using a Behind the Screens thread or you somehow got your hands on my botch table, I wouldn't let you try to learn a botch you hadn't experienced. In my case, learning Microscopic Vision was OK because I had done that to myself and thus could duplicate it. I couldn't learn psionic shockwaves even though they were on the same list because it had never happened to me, and thus wouldn't occur to me to try in that instance.
Which brings up the interesting point: Are botches keyed to the world bias? To the bias of the skill being botched?
Is botching an M15@10 Do Anything significantly more likely to cause some catastrophic mishap than a P5@1 Telescopic Vision?
Or is my P5@1 Telescopic Vision more likely to do something horrific if I botch it in a P10@10 world, even though it's a P5@1 skill?
Osevens, the thing is that psionic shock waves and brain burn are considered "Bad" botches. Learning a new skill would be a "Good" botch. If you could learn to do a "Bad" botch on purpose, that would be something new. I could think of quite a few uses for some of these "Bad" botches.
In no particular order:
- Yes, there is a degree to which the severity of botches is related to the bias of the skill. For example, the psi and mag explosions table is not considered an appropriate botch option until you reach the level where you are tampering with the molecular structures of objects. It is at least difficult to kill yourself if you botch while walking, even in a low-bias world or a challenging situation. However, it is not impossible. It is only a matter that less dangerous skills are less likely to have more dangerous botch outcomes. This is managed by the fact that botches tend to be related to the nature of the skill. If you're tampering with your own sensory abilities, you might damage them, or you might damage someone else's nearby, but you're not likely to cause an explosion.
- No, botches are not limited, strictly speaking, by the biases of the universe. I had a guy in a flatlined psi world attempt to use a 10@1 psionic force shield in a martial arts combat, and made himself non-corporeal--clearly outside the bias of the world. The bias only controls what you intentionally attempt to do, not whether you can kill yourself by accident.
- Yes, you can develop skills based on careful consideration of how a botch happened; I even allow using a botch outcome as an example in creating a skill that does the same thing, if there's reason to think you have or had the ability to examine the botch well enough to have some idea how it happened.
- Protecting yourself against a psionic shockwave originating from you would be very difficult for two reasons. First, you have no warning; you would have to develop an ability that would be functioning constantly or would activate automatically in advance of the botch. That's not impossible, but it makes it a very difficult skill to create. Second, though, you are the epicenter of the shockwave. It's kind of like asking, "If my body were a bomb and exploded, destroying an entire building, can I create a skill that would prevent my body from being damaged by the explosion?" Your brain is the bomb that sets off the shockwave. It can't be outside the damage area. Thus your only hope is to survive the shock, not by preventing it from hitting you but by finding a way to absorb the damage.
- It would be inappropriate to say that you can "create a botch". That rather literally says "can I intentionally make something unexpectedly happen by accident?" No, you can't do that. What you can do is simulate a botch, that is, make happen something which normally happens by accident. That's what you mean, anyway. You don't mean that you want to cause gas tanks accidentally to explode, you mean you want to find a way to use gas tanks quite purposefully as explosives and have it appear to be accidental. All the things you name can be done intentionally.
- Just because they can be done intentionally doesn't mean you can do them intentionally in worlds where they happen accidentally. Psionic botches in particular mean, in general, that you've overloaded the circuits, pushed more power through the system than the system can handle, and had it arc in a way that gives an unpredictable and dangerous outcome. Whether that burns out the circuit, or fires a charge out into the surrounding area, you can't predict. When you want to do the same thing in a controled way, you have to have control over the power. There's a big difference between a carbon arc lamp and power arcing across the contacts of the power capacitor, even though they both are bright lights created by electricity leaping across a gap. Certainly seeing the arc leap between the contacts of the capacitor can give you the idea for building the lamp, and understanding the lamp can help you understand the problem with the capacitor, but neither automatically gives you the other.
--M. J. Young
I won't say Multiverser 'desperately needs', but it strongly needs some more descriptive rationales for psionic and magical effects. My spell for planetary healing has an element of 'and the kitchen sink' with the plasma cannon firing into the sky. Now, I could probably come up with a reason for why the spell works that way, which would be superior to always 'kitchen sinking it'. Sometimes it is done that way in stories, and it is fine, but at least some of the time a reason why such is the case should be offered.
And for psi...your electrical circuit is a useful rationale, but a few more and different rationales would be good as well.
An article on 'Different Theories of How Psi Works' would be nice.
Eric
I think the electricity thing is more of an analogy than a rationale.
I agree that "theories of how it works" would be useful, although I think that maybe any verser would develop his own from experience.
As to magic, the sole rationale is that what the caster expects is what controls the power, as long as the caster actually does control the power. All the rest of it--the "kitchen sinking" as you call it--is part of building that expectation. The firing of the blaster in this particular case is relevant because it is (as you argued initially) a potential sacrifice, that you are expressing a willingness to sacrifice a useful object in order to achieve a desired goal, whether or not that object is actually sacrificed. This in turn feeds to your expectations, because you believe that making the sacrifice, or at least expressing the willingness to make the sacrifice, increases the probability that your prayer will be answered. (And having made that argument, I realize that I was right not to penalize you for Ed's failure to fire the thing constantly. You expected him to do that part and turned your attention to the rest of the ritual; he kept the gun to use against incoming demons and only fired a few token shots into the sky when it crossed his mind. However, it was your willingness that was the component, and his failure to risk the weapon as you instructed does not change the fact that you fully intended to risk the item.)
Thus the rationale in magic is simply that what the user expects controls what the power does, and everything the user does to increase that works through his expectation.
Part of the beauty of this is that it allows special rules to work in special worlds. For example, in D&D all spellcasters expect to forget the spells when they cast them, so they do, and this enhances their ability to cast those spells. In Haston, all spellcasters expect that music will work magic, and so it does, and for them nothing else will do so, while in Mary Piper Furry Steampunk the expectation is that magic will work when strange seemingly technological devices are operated, and so that's how magic is activated by the indigs in that world, and no other way--but the limits do not prevent magic using persons from other worlds from using magic that works some other way, so Mr. Mxyzptlk, the Angel Gabriel, Gandalf, Merlin, and Albus Dumbledore can all work their own types of magic in those worlds, but to the magicians in those worlds, these are aberrant and shouldn't work--and won't work for those magicians, because they don't expect them to.
--M. J. Young
I know. I know.
Mage: the Ascension had the same difficulty. Ugly magic strictly based on the system although they knew they wanted players to do more than that, but they had a hard time achieving that. You don't seem to realize that you need the players to do more than 'kitchen sink it.' not so much on a system level (although you need system encouragements), but on a rp level.
Same with the psi. The player will develop what I have failed to do isn't really the best.
Eric
What I'm talking about is the need for color text, and the need for the system to support this extra effort on the player's part.
And making the psi example an analogy rather than a rationale just sets you back another step.
Example of color text:
In the ancient sanctum, dedicated and purified by over a century of righteous prayers, the miracle worker set to work, and soon there was a feeling of Otherness, of being not wholly in This World. One key element to the miracle was the rise of energy to the Seventh Heaven. This energy, in great amounts, and the purity of belief at willingness to sacrifice clothed the energy in aetheric energies which at first sparkled white in the miracleman's vision, and then spilled over into the material world so that the spear of plasma fire turned from orange to shining silver. It pierced the folds of Here and Now, and reached the Seventh Heaven as a gate, a bridge for Power to flow down to Earth. But, of necessity, it had to pass by the Abyss, and things and creatures out of the Abyss were filled with hatred at the sight of this pure and joyous light, and so they too came down the bridge to work mischief, and malice.
With description, there is a scale. On the one hand...
"The two great armies clashed, and Varna was victorious."
on the other...
"With his palms sweaty on the leather hilt of the Saracen blade, Mikhail waited for the asegai to lunge toward his face, and at the last second before the brute triangle pierced his eye, he dove to the right and his enemy's shield, and rolled under the protective hide rectangle, and came back up from behind to slice from high right to low left, cutting his enemy's calf muscle in twain, and revealing white bone, and sending blood spurting higher than his head as the Zulu warrior fell screaming to the ground."
There are many places in between on the scale, and the scale extends past both these points as well. The key is to know where to place yourself on this scale for a given situation.
Roger Zelazny's description of his writing is instructive--I left out the boring parts. I would not think that a world-beating spell was 'the boring parts', and I remember the climax of a certain book that felt somewhat lifeless because of lack of detail at the point where you would think the author would lavish attention, and fury, and pyrotechnics in the climatic battle of the book.
One part is to deeply detail the first time you do something, and then later only outline. The above fight with Mikhail could have been the first man he slew in war, and then you shift to ....
"And so Mikhail was blooded, and bloody, and he set out to face the rest of his father's enemies with courage that flagged as the afternoon waned, and the tide of enemy spearmen did not seem to ebb."
But, the game or the support material strongly needs to support the GM in this. You do not make it mandatory, because some people are perfectly happy with 'You hit, he takes ten intensities of damage.', but other people understandably want to live the experience. And you as a game designer need to enable that.
And yes, depending on the type of book, it is possible to write a very good book that is quite general. 'A Book Dragon' springs to mind, but then ABD also had a peculiar excellence of sentence writing, and a clever sense of humor, and on occasion it good get quite detailed about certain things so even this somewhat peculiar book was not immune to the need for some amount of detail of some sort to achieve excellence.
I don't want to clutter up the board anymore, and since this has kind of become an all-purpose thread, I wanted to say something. I just got a job driving a taxi today. I became a cabbie in my first game world. Life duplicating art, I suppose. The guy that was training me said that he makes on average $250-$300 a day. Of course, he has been doing it for 12 or 15 years, and knows the city really well. If anyone needs information about taxi driving for gaming purposes, let me know.