hyzmarca wrote:I've also been giving more thought to the teleporting hit-squads and the end result is no. They just cause too many problems, even if they are necessary to achieve detent.
It ultimately comes down to problem of FTL, Causality, Relativity: pick two. Now, D&D has magical time travel, canonically, so we can potentially throw out causality, but that causes a fuckton of headaches in any setting that's not time-travel centric.
That is one of the stupidest reasons I've ever heard for doing anything. First of all: we don't live in a causal universe. People who try to rescue causality are forced to invent "secret, undetectable causes that are impossible to predict or prevent that operate in all observable ways like random events" in order to explain quantum movement and radioactive decay. It's bullshit. Secondly: teleportation in D&D operates by shunting you into the Astral Plane, moving you over really fast, and then shunting you back into the material plane. There's no reason to believe that movement via teleportation is any faster than light is (portals and planeshift are, but that's a whole different issue).
But even if you were really concerned with preventing time travel
and you insisted on teleportation being
literally instant instead of
effectively instant as it is canonically, it still wouldn't be an issue. Within the boundaries of the solar system, there just isn't
space to build up enough of a time differential to get even a whole second or even a quarter second into the past. And even "fast" teleportation systems require that you say a word (Word of Recall) or take a step (Tree Stride). Which means that even if you had a space probe and an Earthbound station with word of recall sanctuaries at both ends and spent the next ten years accelerating the space probe to maximize the time differential... you still wouldn't have enough time difference built up to make up the time it takes to say the word and get recalled.
Yes, in an abstract sense, instantaneous communication or transportation implies the ability to send information into the past. But the
distance into the past we're talking about is really not very much at all. We're talking about something that is going to
maybe be a workable prognostication engine after
decades of magic/science collaboration. And there's no way it's going to be as interesting to modern science as the fact that Golems and Skeletons
literally run on zero point energy. Or you know, actual divinations.
The ability to arbitrarily change your inertial reference frame with a set finite energy cost doesn't just mean that you can go anywhere, it also means that that RKKVs are cheap and effective. Seriously, you could just teleport to an inertial Reference Frame one light minute out in space, that's moving toward Earth at arbitrarily close to the speed of light. Then you just take a copper coin out of your pocket, let it go, and teleport to some safe planetoid, preferably in Alpha Centauri
Lolwut. Teleportation doesn't let you choose an arbitrary inertial reference frame. It gives you the consensus inertial reference frame of the place you are going. In order to teleport an object to a location and vector where it will do any harm, you already have to have an object at that location and vector. Meaning that teleport is literally 100% useless for the task you are complaining about.
-Username17
