Is there such a world as a Verser's Trading Post? Perhaps a world inhabited entirely by versers. It was a dead world that some versers landed on. They colonized it. As more versers arrived, it grew. Cities formed. A vast array of technology and magic was brought to the world. Psionic ability grew steadily. Now, it's a place where verser, who are lucky enough to land on it, can get anything they need from anywhere. A sort of rest area for versers.
And of course, botches are power blocked. It is impossible to botch in any life-threatening way. Things like brain burn, low grade psionic shockwaves, that's as bad as you can botch.
Botches cannot be power blocked. It is inherent in the game that the botch is one of the limiting factors in skill use.
There is a place sort of like what you've described--but it suffers from the limits inherent in the concept. For one thing, the total number of versers in the multiverse is extremely small; for another, they tend to become adventurous, do dangerous things, and move on. NagaWorld is a place where a verser and his wife have settled and offered a place to travelers, and thanks to the work of The Architect in creating Umak Tek there is a "city" of sorts there, with its own industry and dwellings constructed by other versers who pass through there periodically. However, apart from the hosts, the record stay in NagaWorld is about forty thousand two hundred hours--two hundred earth days, one hundred twenty NagaWorld days--held by The Architect.
If you put versers in a place that boring, they try to do something interesting, and invariably push the envelope and get themselves killed.
But then, that's precisely because places that are boring are not interesting, and no one wants to stay in them too long anyway. We make places interesting, and that makes them dangerous.
Since not even the most senior versers can reliably guide their own versing destinations with much accuracy, a trading post world would be difficult.
However, NagaWorld is reasonably well stocked with a few commodities not merely because of production but because The Architect uses the Scriff Mail to ship supplies there periodically. Of other versers, only The Psientist has ever managed to make the Scriff Mail work, although both of them manage both to send and to receive packages by it.
--M. J. Young
Botches cannot be power blocked. It is inherent in the game that the botch is one of the limiting factors in skill use.
You contradict yourself. I thought ANYTHING was possible in the Multiverse. In other words, "Cannot be done" is a phrase that should never be used when describing this came.
Anything is possible in the Multiverse. That does not include particular manipulations of particular mechanics, because the mechanics don't exist in the Multiverse.
Perhaps your trading post world is a dimensional pocket within a D&D universe, subject to those game-system rules. Since the closest thing to a botch in D&D is "critical failure," which doesn't affect many things and is optional anyway, you might achieve effects similar to the one you want. You'd have a whole bunch of side effects along with that - everyone entering would have their sheets converted into D&D character sheets, for starters - but that's the price you pay for wiggling out of the rules.
I created the Menlo Park University world which is a university at Edison's stomping grounds where versers teach classes.
Marcoe came up with the idea for Ben Franklin's Library which is similar to your idea.
None of these 'meeting points' is nearly as grand as what you suggest however.
There's also The Wall at the End of the World which is not a meeting point, but it does have graffitti and a notebook. There are several hundred verser names on this wall.
The notebook at the Wall's meeting point ( a Cave created by Michael Di Vars on the notion that if he made one meet point in Naga, he'd do it again elsewhere) is kinda like an Internet message board. But one verser says something, another replies ten centuries later, and a hundred thousand years later the first verser bops back through to find several more pages of entries created including an answer to a question he asked a hundred years ago on his personal timeline.
Oh yes, the Bunny had a message buried in its subsconscious. One verser was trying to create a one-time meeting by using teh Bunny as a message in a bottle. It would have been very difficult and unlikely of success.
Not to nitpick, but as I understand it, there is a 15@10 spell, "Do Anything" Could not the first verser to inhabit this world have cast a spell "All botches are forbidden, now and forever"? I mean if "Do Anything" means what it says, then why now?
This falls into similar territory as the Seals of Creation spells I brought up a few months back. They are spells that, forex, stop magic from working for a planet. The magic bias can still be high, but the ordinary magician can do nothing.
Its not literally impossible to do magic or avoid a botch, but with a massive enough spell (cast by say 07's NPC Hephastion??, or The Hermit, my 8000 year old verser NPC, or the Alchemist) you can null the effect or prevent it from even happening.
You would not be able to say 'botch', but you could have a spell that prevents Catastrophic Failure. This might allow certain botches like Magic Anomaly but it would not allow Brain Burn because Anomaly with its floating rocks would not be interpreted by the spell as a problem.
In order to cover the planet--- -200
In order to cover millenia...
In order to block severe failure in any bias....
It'd be doable, but it'd be a lot easier to turn off the Sun, y'know something simple.
Keep in mind that a determined, competent individual with literally centuries to burn could accomplish some totally shocking things. Occasionally, one needs an order of magnitude larger structures or accomplishments.
There's nothing stopping a verser from building the Great Wall of China by hand or creating an interdimensional bridge to cover ten alternate realities and wide enough to handle semi traffic going both ways.
Could not the first verser to inhabit this world have cast a spell "All botches are forbidden, now and forever"?
No, he could not, because to do so he would have to make reference to game mechanics. In the real worlds of the Multiverse, there is no such thing. Botches are what happens when you fail a skill roll very badly; since no one makes skill rolls, ever, botches do not exist and cannot be targeted by magic.
If the player wanted to do this, he would need to think very hard about what his character was trying to accomplish. Then, he would need to describe to me (or whoever his ref was) exactly what his character wanted the spell to do from the character's point of view. Then, I get to evaluate exactly what kind of effect that is, place it in the bias tree, invent mechanics for it, and ask for a skill learning roll.
If the player was lucky, or else very clever with his description, he may even end up with an effect that, for the most part, eliminates botches.
Again, not to nitpick, but you guys are forgetting a very serious point here. That point is that this is a FICTIONAL universe. It exists only in the mind of the creator. Michael Di Vars was the first HUMAN known to step into the Multiverse. So, that simply means that an alien being, who has been in the Multiverse for a few million years landed on our fictional planet. This fictional alien verser had powers that would make Di Vars and The Architect look like a couple of 1@1 newbies. He knew that some strange things happened sometimes, and he wanted a safe haven for himself so they never happened. So, he cast a spell "Nothing strange is allowed to happen here." Since it is FICTION all you need to do is write it like that, a viola, you have a botchproof world.
When I was in junior high, there was a guy I knew. He drew a fictional character that had a robotic arm. In his story, the robotic arm had a particle beam weapon on it. I kept asking him "Why doesn't the arm augment the guy's strength too?" the guy kept saying "Which would you rather have? A long range weapon, or augmented strength?" He could never quite grasp the notion that since it was FICTION he could make that robotic arm do anything he wanted. If he wanted the robotic arm to augment strength AND have a particle beam weapon, that's what would happen. If he wanted the robotic arm to spit out bouquets of flowers, that's what would happen. And, if you as the world designer want there to be a world where a magic spell has been cast so that all botches are power blocked, that's what happens. In a way, a writer has more power than God. God cannot control a person's actions. A writer, however, controls every aspect of his fictional character's existence.
John's right here. I-me-the moderately intelligent guy don't have to describe the perfect spell. All I have to do as a game designer is stipulate that someone with far more IQ and talent and experience than I did so and that while that spell was extremely clever and insightful its practical effect is 'no botches'.
Once that's done, its still possible to botch. You just have to overcome the resistance of the Seal of Creation spell which is going to be awesomely difficult. If you unleash enough power to blow up the universe...that should do it.
I like that Eric. And think, it opens the door for NPC alien versers. Maybe you meet a verser from the planet of Jurassmells, and he teaches you things within the bias that no one else ever considered? Just a thought.
Something else. I've never liked the notion that 3@10 was the highest that you could possibly go. Why is there no 4@ level? Or a 5@ level? Or a 125@ level? Really simple way to write this in. Only someone with 35,000 verses could even hope to attain the 4@ level, and since versing is a relatively new thing, even by the standards of the Multiverse, not many versers (and certainly none of the human versers) have reached this level.
I mean there should never be a cap on the ability of a immortal being.
Three posts from A1nut
If versers are truly immortal, then there are versers out there who could have been to trillions upon trillions upon trillions of worlds. However, versing is a relatively new phenomenon, even by the standards of the Multiverse.
First off, in order for a being to become a verser, their planet must either have at least late 20th century technology, or scriff which occurs naturally.
Secondly, only universes that rolled a GE roll of 100 (on 100 ten sided dice) even have scriff. So that means if the scriff doesn't occur naturally, or the world is of lower than late 20th century technology, there's not even a chance of versers coming from that world.
So, a very small percentage of universes are even capable of producing versers, and even then, that's if the indigs discover the scriff at all.
You guys aren't thinking in terms of INFINITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Four posts from A1nut
Again, why is there a 15@ cap on the ability levels? Why is there no 16@ level? How can you put a cap on infinity? So, there does in fact exist a 16@ level. And higher. I know 15@10 Do Anything is pretty had to compete with, but perhaps at the 16@ level, these versers can do things even in a flatline world. However, only the amazingly rare verser is at the 16@ level.
The 16@1 skill is "Overcome Biases in that bias area"
The topping out, especially for tech, is a problem common to games. A lot of people lack the imagination to go further (even game designers).
Multiverser deals with this with Do Anything skills (at least in magic) which is a better answer than many. I'd say the door is left open enough that if you want to push on it, you could create a bunch of different 15@ skills, and maybe even 16@ skills.
However, my intuition is warning me that extending the bias upward might get into a fair chunk of problems, or be pretty difficult.
I think MJ made the right decision this time. That is not to say that in the future some sort of Ultrabias Book of Superskills might not be a good idea, but that it would be enough of a problem to warrant its own book.
At least thats my guess.
==============
As to Infinity...well yes. I did have an alien verser who'd been to a number of worlds who finally meets his first human in the form of Tadeusz.
Sometimes a sense of grandeur is important. Look at the orginal Star Wars. They did this very effectively. Or for more recent, the LoTR scene in the Mines of Moria where the Fellowship first sees the Great Hall.
But Grandeur is a spice, and not a main course. Most worlds should be more to human scale. Which is not to say that one couldn't make a world totally Grand because Multiverser needs LOTS of differing worlds.
One more 'however'...a world of versers would be inevitable in my opinion, but I am not eager to try to create such a thing. It would need its own book. This is a massive, major project you're talking about. Its big enough to make me a bit wary and I've written several hundred thousand words on worlds.
Try to come up with an idea for a small valley where an Archmage cast Protection from Failure upon the vale, and several versers arrived, and set up shoppe, and what they and the Archmage are doing now, and why the Archmage went to all this trouble to cast an extremely powerful spell....
Tad, what I was thinking was that the 16@ bias skills are so far advanced that only an insanely elder verser would even begin to be able to try them. That would put a limit on their usage.
Why do you think a world populated solely by versers in inevitable? Because of the large amount of scriff? Would it draw in other versers? I think it would be cool, but not something I would want to try.
As far as the Archmage idea, I don't know.
Because in infinity, everything is inevitable. I don't think the Verse is infinite, but its near enough so that anything a human can conceive of exists somewhere.
I also think the idea of a Verser world is rather obvious, and so someone would try to do it.
And because of the huge amount of the verse there has to be a really large number of versers out there. I add in a bunch to the list MJ uses (and I use some of his list as well)...I use some of my previous players (following in MJ's footsteps there) and I made a bunch for WAW...and then there were some made here like O7's Hephastion who I should use sometime.
I've used Graeme and Marcoe in games...Graeme became The Magic Engineer (as he likes to use math and magic together) and Marcoe was just a buffed up form of Marcoe.
As far making possible skill and attribute levels above 3@10, there was a very specific mechanical reason why this was not done.
If you have a 3@10 SAL and a 3@10 BRA, you've already got a base 80% chance of success. To this you get to add two times the lower of your bias level or the world bias level. That means that at a bias level of 10@, you have a 100% chance of success.
That's not terribly unreasonable. It also means that if the world bias level is not 10@, you have a small chance to fail, and in a world like NagaWorld with a 0@ bias level, that chance to fail is 20%--one failure in five tries, a reasonable failure rate for a world that is rather strongly non-supportive of that bias area. It also means a 2% chance to botch.
If, however, we allowed those scores to rise to 4@10, that would mean that the base chance of success for a person with maximum scores would be 100% before bias, and even in a very low bias world there would never be a chance of failure, never mind a chance to botch.
That chance to botch is critical to the Multiverser system, and particularly to the magic and psionic skills.
It was obvious right from the beginning of role playing game design that there had to be a way of limiting magic. That is, if you said that a magic using character could cast as many spells as he wanted of whatever kind he wanted whenever he wanted, then magic would entirely dominate the game, and anyone who did not do magic would be worthless. So there has to be a way of "limiting" the spells you can use.
The first way this was done is generally called "Vancian Magic", because it is based on some fantasy books by an author named Vance. The concept in essence is that the spellcaster has to learn the particular spells he wants to use, is limited to how many he can keep in his mind at once, and when he casts them he forgets them. This works rather well as a limiting system--but for most players, it feels very unnatural, and very unlike the magic in books not written by Vance. Thus people complained about it as a system, and looked for something else.
The most common "something else" is a resource system, a point system of some sort. Some call it Mana, others Spell Points, or any of a dozen other names. The way this system works, the caster has many things he can do, and he can do any of them, but each of them costs points and he has a limited number of points. When he's spent his points, he can't cast any more magic until he recovers the points. This then creates a more natural feel, in that spellcasters get tired and cannot continue to do magic, and at some point they can no longer do the really powerful spells but can still squeak out one or two little things, and they can do anything they've learned as many times as the points will support. However, there are a lot of complications with this approach. For one thing, it means developing a system just for magic, tracking magic points, figuring out how to increase them and how much every spell costs to cast. For another, there is the question of effect. If I cast a spell, does that mean it automatically does whatever it does to my target, or does my target have a chance to avoid the effect? If he avoids the effect, did I still spend the points? How do we determine whether he avoids the effect or not? So there's still the entirely separate issue of spell failure even though spell success is now linked to points.
Multiverser limits magic the same way it limits everything else: by making it hazardous. You can drive a StarFighter at Warp 10 through an asteroid belt, but there's a good chance you'll crash even if you're the best pilot in the galaxy. You can leap the thirty foot chasm on a running start, but you might fall to your death. You can cast the spell that converts lead to gold, but you might blow up the entire universe. Failures only mean that you can't always do what you want; botches mean that you will hesitate and consider whether you want to attempt something risky. The very word "risky" means that there's a chance to botch.
That's also why you can't powerblock botches: it eliminates risk. Really, in mechanics terms we call it "botch" if you roll high enough that you failed dangerously, but you can fail dangerously in a lot of situations that are not technically botches. You can fail to land the plane safely and kill everyone aboard despite not having rolled a botch. You can be run through by an opponents sword because you failed to parry. There is no way that you can phrase a spell to eliminate "botches" but by eliminating "risk"--and once you have eliminated "risk" you have probably eliminated all action.
As to the skill framework, the +/-15 levels and 0-10 intensities was rather arbitrary. Ed wanted it to be that scale, for mathematical reasons that don't make sense if you understand math. On the other hand, the numbers fit once we had the doubled bias level factor (in early tests we added single bias, but that gave us lower probabilities of success in moderate biased worlds than we wanted). You can have a 110% chance of success on an ordinary skill if you're best of the best in a 15@ world. It gave good range. It was an arbitrary choice, but one which worked well. You could arbitrarily raise it, I suppose, but in doing so you would create higher and higher potential chances of success. Also, the 15@ bias is balanced by the -15@ bias, and to retain the symmetry (which I think is reasonable) you would have to figure out the effects of a -16@ bias level.
Once the framework was established, it fell to me to figure out how to fit everything into it. That is, level 1 had to be the simplest most basic skills within the bias area, and level 15 had to be the most difficult top of the curve skills. I worked with that for a long time, and even after I'd finished the outline I made some very significant changes to it in the edits. It required me to attempt to think of absolutely everything that was popularly done in all the fiction I had encountered, and everything that might be added to it at some point, and fit it all together into the framework.
Thus when you say that there ought to be 16@ skills, what you're saying is that there ought to be principles in these bias areas that are higher than the highest principles in these bias areas. 15@ is defined as "the highest principles in each bias area", so you really couldn't have higher ones. Now, you might argue that I've got the scale wrong--that time travel and scriff manipulation are not the highest principles in technology, that noncorporeality are not the highest bod skills, that creation ex nihilo is not the greatest magic and alter reality not the top of the psionics chart. However, I am comfortable with those being the highest principles, and I have yet to encounter any principle in any bias area that has seriously challenged my view on this. Certainly there are many potential skills that I missed, that aren't included in the book; but there are none that I missed that are based on principles above the top of my chart. The chart could have been stretched (although it would have been more difficult to fill, and it already contains some significant gaps). I don't think we'd have gained anything if those highest principles were level 20 except that they'd be that much harder to learn.
And as far as making a level of skills that most people can't learn, well, level 15 is as much that as level 16 would have been. Anyone can work his way up to that, if he puts his mind to it and gets into the right worlds. Sure, it's only a one percent penalty if you know a 14@10 skill and are trying to learn a 15@1 skill, but then, it would only have been a 1% penalty to go from a 15@10 to a 16@1, it would just have taken a couple more skills learned to get there.
--M. J. Young
Just because it's fiction doesn't mean you should ignore the essential framework of the mechanics. They are there for a reason; a large portion of that reason is to create believability and internal consistency within the game.
If you really want a mechanic to eliminate risk in actions, use a die mod penalty. This will have effects beyond drastically reducing the frequency of botches, of course, but I contend that it is vitally important that this be the case. The rules are there (in part) so that when you achieve your primary effect, all of the little secondary and tertiary effects that had ought to go along with that happen automatically.
There are always tradeoffs, and no amount of intellect will eliminate that essential fact; taking an approach that says "Mr. Supermage was so clever he figured out a way to do it with no side effects at all" is not helpful when I, the referee, need to know what, mechanically, is going on. All you can possibly mean by a statement like that is "Supermage was clever enough to devise a system where all the drawbacks are in areas that I don't care about, so I shan't bother to detail them."
Yes it does mean you should ignore the mechanics....at first. First you decide if what you want to do is cool, then reasonable, and then you rummage through the mechanics for a good way to achieve what you're trying to do.
At least thats one way to do it, and its completely legitamate.
There are no perfect strategies in a finite universe is one of my theories so yes, there are always tradeoffs.
Yes it does mean you should ignore the mechanics....at first. First you decide if what you want to do is cool, then reasonable, and then you rummage through the mechanics for a good way to achieve what you're trying to do.
This is fine. I am completely okay with that. I would object to "there are no botches here, by fiat, because some dude must have used some skill." Maybe I got the wrong impression about what was being suggested.
The more I think about it, the more I think that a global negative die mod is the way to go in this case. Even a die mod as small as -10 would make it very hard to botch at anything but the most ill-advised skill learning attempts, and it would also cut down on failures to some degree. On the flip side, it makes everyone's best efforts that much more mediocre; it saps the greatness out of everything, leaving mere adequacy in its place.
We may have gotten around to including limits on the 'some dude' fiat skill like my mentioned 'blow up the universe' limit or we might not have.
Your suggestion fits mythically...I think I've heard tales where you can't fail, but success is blunted as well to a lesser degree. It also reminds me of that saying that goes something like this...he fears his fate too much too put it to the test and win or lose at a stroke. Imagine a world full of cowardly versers who think they've discovered Paradise, but can't understand why they're not happy.
The thing that gets me is that MJ and others keep saying "Anything is possible in the Multiverse" Then they say that something can't be done. Which is it? Either anything is possible, or it isn't. If ANYTHING is truly possible, then there is a world where botches can't happen. Either there is a world like that, or the statement "Anything is possible in the Multiverse" is a lie.
John - When I say "anything is possible in the Multiverse," and then I say you can't powerblock botches, I am not contradicting myself. This is because my two statements are made about entirely different things. On the one hand, we have the Multiverse; on the other, we have the rules of Multiverser. These are not the same thing. The Multiverse is fictional, practically infinite, and can be or do anything we can imagine. The rules are real (non-fictional), quite finite, and are clearly limited in how they can function.
Is it possible to have a world where mistakes never result in serious consequences? Well, that's a question about if something is possible in the Multiverse, so the answer (as always) is "yes".
Is it possible to powerblock botches? Well, that's a question about how the rules work, and in this case the answer is "no, because powerblocks apply only to categories of skills (which they prohibit entirely), not to the results of allowed skills."
Does that make sense? If you want a world to be a certain way - no matter what you want that world to be like - there is a way to run it under the rules, because anything is possible; but if you start out with wanting a rule to be a certain way, you might be out of luck. Anytime someone says "you can't do that," it's probably because you're talking about rules, not worlds.
OK, so maybe saying "Power Block Botches" is a misnomer. It's semantics. So you can't say "Botches are power blocked" but you can say "In this world, botches can't happen" Is that what you're saying? If that is what you're saying, I fail to see the difference.
It's like when someone kills another person. They can be charged with first degree murder, second degree murder, premeditated murder, manslaughter, and a myriad of other things. However, they STILL killed someone, no matter what you call it.
So I can't "power block" botches, but I can prevent them from happening in this world. What's the difference? The end result is the same. Well, if it's just a question of semantics, then I guess I can live with that. Semantics can be an interesting thing.
Also, just for myself, I think that the Multiverse HAS to be truly infinite. The verser is immortal. His lifespan is infinite. If there are a finite amount of worlds, no matter how large that finite number is, eventually, you would visit every single world in the Multiverse. If you had an infinite amount of time to visit them all, that is.
The difference is how you're preventing them from happening. You say to me, "In this world, botches can't happen," and then I say, "interesting; how are doing that mechanically?"
The answer isn't that you're powerblocking them, because you can't do that. You need to use some method from the book to prevent players from suffering botches. I'm sure there's more than one way to do that, each one of them different in its side effects and implications; however, if your only answer is "any botch rolled isn't a botch, it's just a failure," then you've just changed The Rules. In another game, that would be called cheating, but since you're the referee and the referee can't cheat, we call it "playing a varient."
Does that make any sense? I'll put it another way. Once you've said I can't botch in Botchless Land, all you've told me is the effect. If I'm going to run Botchless Land for my players, I also need details about the cause - the mechanical mechanism by which I'm preventing botches from happening.
On the last, of course, versers do not know whether we are immortal. We know that some of us have died over a thousand times and always returned to life, and from this we extrapolate that it is more likely that our next death will lead to another life than not. We also know that if any verser ever died and did not come back, they could not have reported this, so we cannot know that it does not happen.
We also cannot know for certain that we are not already duplicating the same worlds. After all, Adam is currently in Vampire Camelot; can he know with certainty that there is not another version of him fighting with some rebellion against an evil empire in a galaxy far, far away? It is entirely possible that some universes are infinitely vast, and that some have neither beginning nor end temporally, and so there are still infinities within the limitation.
Your argument is good, but it does not prove your point.
Now, as to this:
OK, so maybe saying "Power Block Botches" is a misnomer. It's semantics. So you can't say "Botches are power blocked" but you can say "In this world, botches can't happen" Is that what you're saying? If that is what you're saying, I fail to see the difference.It's more complicated than that. Let me try an example.
I'm going to set up a situation in which I have a row of metal cans containing gasoline. I am standing one mile away with a long-range sniper rail gun containing incendiary rounds. My intention is to shoot the caps off each can without causing an explosion.
If I succeed, I have done something incredibly difficult.
If I fail, then probably I just missed the thing entirely.
If I botch, the can explodes.
When you say that "botches can't happen", you mean that even if I put the incendiary round into the heart of the gasoline can, it won't explode. But then, what if I change my intention, that I want to use that same incendiary round fired from that same gun to hit those same cans, in order to create an explosion? In order to make the botch "impossible", I had to negate the possibility that an incendiary round "accidentally" hitting the center of a can of gasoline might explode, but now to make my new purpose happen I have to make it such that the same incendiary round hitting the same point "intentionally" would have a completely different effect.
Suddenly the physics of the world depends on what I want to have happen--and just as suddenly, it is no longer technology but either magic or psionics that is at work here. The incendiary round becomes a component in a spell or a focus for a mental task, and it is my will, and not the missile, that causes the explosion.
That means that the technological botch cannot occur because I am not really using a technological skill--but now I can have a psionic or magical botch instead.
Scott is absolutely right: if you put a -10 die mod against all skills, you would eliminate the chance to botch as long as you had at least a negative nine percent chance of success.
However, if you're a novice and you've designed some skill which is so impossible that the chance of success is lower than that, or if you're trying to learn a new skill that requires you to leap from the very bottom of the bias chart to the very top (I've never done magic before, but let me see if I can construct and cast a wish spell that will work in twelve seconds), the penalties against success might be so great that you're looking at a chance of success--well, I've seen people attempt things where there chance of success was somewhere below negative two hundred percent. That gives you a thirty percent chance to botch, and even with the -10 die mod you're still going to botch. So you won't botch on tasks even which are mildly impossible, but you can still botch if you design something impossible enough.
Of course, Scott is also right that you can escape the Multiverser botch mechanics by moving into what we call a "game world" (see the chapter on Worlds). In this case, you've moved into a universe where Multiverser rules only apply where other rules do not cover their function. Thus if we dropped you into an Original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons world:
- Low tech weapon skills would be covered by the OAD&D combat rules; depending on referee judgment, high-tech weapons might fall into this category as well.
- Magic could only be learned on the Fire-and-Forget system of OAD&D; if the character already knew magic, the referee would have to determine whether that made him a magic-user and recategorized all his magic as fire-and-forget, or whether his magic would be run under Multiverser rules.
- A character could not invent magic or learn new magic unless he adopted one of the OAD&D magic-using classes and studied it under OAD&D terms; this would of course be fire-and-forget magic, but would be immune to botches as long as it was so.
- Psionics would work by the psionic points system, and the referee would have to decide whether psionic skills already known to the character still worked under Multiverser rules or were converted to AD&D psionics. New psionic skills could not be learned, as psionics in OAD&D are innate, not learned.
- Bod skills would not normally be rolled, with the exception of Martial Arts and a few others such as the thief's falling skill. Again the referee would have to decide whether the character used his old skills under the Multiverser rules or converted them to the OAD&D system, but any new skills could only be learned by becoming an appropriate class and studying with a teacher. Other tech skills mostly would be covered under Multiverser rules, because with very few exceptions there are no tech skills in OAD&D.
If you want to advance your abilities in a botch-free environment, the best approach is:
- Land in a world with very high bias in that area, usually 15@ although 14@ is good;
- Find a teacher who understands how to advance a student slowly through progressively more challenging skills and training techniques such that success is nearly always guaranteed and practice is in a controlled environment;
- Stick To The Program, and if you get crazy ideas to "try" something, suppress them and trust the teacher's judgment as to what it is you should be able to do safely. Of course, that can be boring, too. That, though, is pretty much how Yoda trained Luke.
If you want to teach yourself, you're going to face botches even under the best of conditions. What The Architect does was give serious thought to what might go wrong and attempt to provide protection against that--don't practice tightrope walking without the equivalent of a net, don't tamper with molecular structures of objects without a blast shield--and he still is more likely to die from a botch than from an enemy attack.
--M. J. Young
I could also design a world with a superintelligence running nanotech...it continually reads your mind as the nanites infiltrated your body within the first minute of your arrival and so it knows what a Catastropic Failure might be, or at least has a superhuman guess as to what it might be, and it has a wide variety of means including Scalar Energy Transport (aka Teleport Energy) to enforce its intention to have ....Nursery World.
That could be an intriguing variation on the Purple Dino World...Have a superhuman AI nanny who regards the several hundred year old verser as an 'irresponsible child' and feels that his claim of being 'immortal' is delusion, and so the nanny must protect 'poor little wubkins' from any harm...which is taking this idea a step further.
This would be especially great for Kyler who is after all playing a child. Heh, heh.