How do you define certain things? For example, I asked God to bless my weapons to make them more effective against "Demons". The thing of it though is that my personal definition of "Demon" is "Any enemy of God." Be it an actual demon, vampire, werewolf, or even a human who is an enemy of God. Would that be acceptable, or does it have to be an actual hellspawn demon?
Define your terms to the referee so that he can apply appropriate sit-mods and run your spell how you envisioned it. If all you say is "demons," MJ will probably use his definition of demon. If you say "demons, by which I mean . . .", then he'll use yours.
I suppose the answer to "how do you define" is "the player tells the referee when it's important," plus "the referee then holds the power to decide if any particular thing fits the definition the player gave."
Thanks Scott. The thing was, as you know, at that time I was fighting actual demons. It didn't occur to me then what my personal definition was. I'll have to tell MJ that next time I get into combat.
And MJ might even be more precise than 'hellspawn'. He might decide its only the particular kind of demon you were facing then.
This is sorta off-topic, but I find it useful to have differing varieties.
Hellhounds and imps, purely immaterial entities, beings limited to mental attacks, others that can assume at will a physical form but may risk being bound to it and destroyed....
The guy who wrote Shadowmancer and a couple others had some quite odd spriritual entities that you might not recognize as angels and demons, at least at first.
And then there are the Ringwraith. And Shannarra had its own versions of Ringwraith. One entity that was basically a lie..."I'm not dead, I'm a person." or some such thing.
I haven't really done that clear a job of dividing various infernal entities from each other in my games, but I've done a little. MJ fought Mr. Shadow, and talked with a minor demigod who was a giant snake that ate vampires in a netherworld. Krillis dueled with a Brother of the Abyss or something which was more a manifestation of anger and gas than something like Mr. Shadow who looked like a human.
Day fought an imp and sent it to a place so cold that even electrons don't move, or hardly so. Magnus, Hadrian, and Krillis fought a Mam Mal, a Mother of Evil Mammals which was an Outsider in D&D terms and the special creation of an evil god so that he could have a tool to use on a certain type of mission. And a Mam Mal is kinda trollish, and purely physical.
Of course, Jhiaxus talked with Memory, one of Odin's Ravens, and made deals with it. And McCallister played Risk with Entropy who's man-shaped, and can at will assume physical form although usually he/its immaterial.
Eric, did you ever see the movie Frailty with Bill Paxton? It was interesting. A father (Bill) and his two sons get instructions from God to destroy demons. The demons look like ordinary people, and there is of course some unsureness as to whether or not they really are, even among the three characters. (No, I won't tell you what happens) Anyway, that was where I got the definition of "Demon" meaning "Any enemy of God." I hope MJ allows the definition I gave.
A1Nut - That definition would get you into trouble. Take, for instance, me. I am of an Alliance faith, and will generally act with good will toward most people, but my Verser self would work to thwart many things done in the name of the Christian God simply because my bad experiences with His followers left me with a will to resist them; something I have resolved in real life, but haven't really had the time to focus on since Versing out in-game. Verser me is, for all intents and purposes, His enemy, though on the greater scale of things I'm more of a minor nuisance than an active threat. Would you really want your magic weapon viewing a fellow Alliance devotee and general do-gooder as a demon just for ideological differences born out of differing life experience?
It sets you up to be something of a Knight Templar.
Would you really want your magic weapon viewing a fellow Alliance devotee and general do-gooder as a demon just for ideological differences born out of differing life experience?
Don't take this the wrong way, but if I didn't want you dead, I wouldn't be shooting at you in the first place, now would I? If I'm shooting at you, it means I probably want you dead. If my weapons see you as a demon and kill you faster, all the better for me.
You make a good point there, actually.
There is a lot of important stuff here.
First, because it is rather important but not precisely on topic, I'm troubled by Harry's suggestion that he is an alliance affiliate but an enemy of "God". I sort of understand his position, as he has had good reason to dislike Christians and God as we conceive and express Him. The problem is that "alliance" means "those supernatural beings who are on the side of the Creator God." It is opposed to "anarch" which means "those supernatural beings who are opposed to the Creator God." Between the two is "neutral" which includes all supernatural beings who have not, or have not yet, committed to one side or the other. It is tacitly assumed that such beings eventually will pick sides as the war in heaven draws its lines more closely, but given that those events occur over the course of all time it is rare for it to matter in game play. (Besides, even if you move from the Armageddon of one universe to the Creation of another, there is a sense in which you are more closely connected to whatever "time" is in the supernatural real--just as to you yesterday had you at Ragnorak and today has you in Eden, so too your own deity is connected to the sequence of time in your life and perceives those same events as "yesterday" and "today".) So you cannot really be an "enemy of God" if you are of an alliance faith. It thus would not apply to you.
On the other hand, that does not mean you cannot be, shall we see, confused by a misunderstanding into thinking that the deity worshiped and promoted by Christians is not that God, and thus consider yourself enemy of a fraud and deceiver. After all, it is entirely possible for Zeus and Hera to be fighting with each other to the point that their entire cults are at war, while both of them are actually alliance deities trying to serve the Creator. It has happened with petty human nobles that two lords ostensibly sworn to the same liege are battling each other over some squabble, a disagreement about land rights or boundaries or something, appearing to be enemies of each other while asserting that they are both subjects of the same master. So in short, it is not unreasonable for you to harbor animosity for other servants of other alliance deities and even of the Creator God himself, but by definition a devotee of an alliance deity is not an enemy of the Creator.
Now, as to the definitions of "demon":
First, there is no way in hell that an ordinary human being can be considered a "demon", no matter what his affiliation or his attitudes. Even using the rather comical definition proposed by Robert Asprin, that "demon" is a shortened form of "dimensional traveler", that would still limit it to those humans able by some magical means to travel between related universes in the Mythadventures world.
Besides, if by "demon" you mean "enemy of God", as I read St. Paul that means absolutely everyone and everything, including you. That would not be a limitation at all, and therefore I would have to eliminate all the bonuses you got for limiting the targets you identified. That is, there is a big difference between "a weapon that will be mighty against the Dragon Tiamat" and "a weapon that will be mighty against everyone and everything". The very reason the former is easier to cast is that it is only useful against the one enemy. You asked for your weapons to be powerful against "demons" as if that were a limitation on what sort of beings would be affected. That limitation gave you bonuses on the magic.
I think two things on this that are relevant.
First, Eric is sort of right about his notion of there being different sorts of evil spirit beings, and I would agree in this to a certain degree; but I think he overdoes it a bit. That is, you were fighting "demons", by which everyone understood we meant powerful embodied evil spirit beings from a supernatural realm. You prayed for bonuses against "demons" by that definition. I would be justified in excluding:
- angels, who are powerful and supernatural but not evil;
- technological zombies (virus, implant), which are powerful and evil but not supernatural;
- ghosts, which are powerful and supernatural and evil, but not embodied.
- djinn, who are powerful and supernatural but not evil even if not good, even if "wicked" such as Jafar;
- efriit, who are powerful, supernatural, evil, possibly embodied, <i>but not from the right supernatural realm</i>.
Thus for example if I dropped you into Asprin's Mythadventures world, a vampire would be a demon if you met him on Earth, and a human would be a demon if you met him on Vamp, but if you met a vampire on vamp who had never left vamp, he would not be a demon because he had never traveled to any other dimension and was presently in his own dimension. On the other hand, if I dropped you in Dungeons & Dragons, there would be demons from the Abyss, but there would also be daemons from Hades and devils from Hell, and devils and daemons would not be demons--and I think that is unfairly narrow, because in some overarching sense these are all demons, whatever distinctions we might make between kinds. Put more reasonably, had I intended that the word "demon" should be strictly interpreted to refer to a specific subclass of evil supernatural beings from a specific other dimension, I should have given you much greater bonuses; and had I meant (as Eric seems to think reasonable) that your definition of "demons" was very narrowly limited to that very narrow class of creature that happened to be the problem in that universe, I would have had to bonus you considerably more, very close to the bonuses for a weapon used against a unique enemy, because the spell would then be very nearly worthless once you left that world.
That's one of my rules: skills you learn in any world can be used effectively for the same purpose in any other world in which the bias rules permit them. I cannot void your skills (or your equipment) by making rules that have no purpose other than to void your specific skills (or equipment) to disadvantage you against other characters who are doing something that is really exactly the same thing in a different package.
That's why if you go to Haston (where all wizardry and sorcery is done by singing) without knowing anything about magic, it is quite reasonable for you to learn magic as music while you are in Haston, and not entirely unreasonable for you to continue to believe that magic has to be music when you leave; but if you already know magic when you go to Haston, you can do that magic as well as anyone else can do their song magic, because magic is magic and the musical limitation on the ritual is nothing more or less than the expectations of the people who live there: they believe that they cannot do magic without singing, and so they cannot, but if you believe you can do magic without singing, then you can.
So since your use of "demon" in Dancing Princess rather clearly meant embodied anarch spirit beings from the supernatural realm, that is what your skill does. It does not work on "undead" that are not demons unless those particular undead are defined as embodied anarch spirits from the supernatural realm. It does not work on humans, unless those humans are fully possessed by demons in a way that makes them embodied spirits. It does not work on most werewolves, because there is nothing in most werewolf lore that makes them embodied anarch spirits (they are, at best, the bestial in man unchained). I think that's fair. If you think otherwise, we can eviscerate the spell and go back to see whether it ever worked to do anything at all once the bonuses for "limited to demons" are removed.
--M. J. Young