Staking out some rules on transmutation seems pretty necessary, especially in a game which has modern physics available to player characters. Inviolate rules like "no changing mass" or "no changing state"
sound like a good idea, but transmuting 100 kilograms of solid floor to 100 kilograms of solid nitrogen has extremely explosive implications (see nMage). The reality is that different substances have massively different densities, melting and boiling points, and specific heats. Clearly, if you set pretty much any physical values as
constants and then let physics runs its ugly course, the results are going to be a catastrofuck. The goal is to provide concrete goals for what Waidan can accomplish and what it can't, and then use those data points to do a regression as to what the actual physics are. So things that want to happen:
- A channeler waves his hands and a metal wall or chain link fence turns into water and splashes down onto the ground.
- A channeler raises his fist and a tree grows out of a pond.
- A channeler snaps his fingers and a dude bursts into flames.
- A channeler holds out his hands and fires blow away as dust.
- A channeler puts his fist into the ground and metal spikes burst out of the earth.
All of those things want to happen because they are awesome and because they have simple and obvious source material in Chinese alchemical thought. Characters using Waidan in various ways to kill people is not actually particularly threatening to the world
because there are lots of ways to kill people. As long as someone can use Shakti Vajra Lightning to kill someone or Thaumaturgical Nod Decay to end someone's life, anything which appears in any other context that maps to an attack is meaningful only in that it makes magical specialists a little more rounded.
What I'm actually concerned about is not the ability to kill
people - guns do that pretty well - but to kill
the setting. That is: an ability like Movement in Shadowrun has incredibly far reaching implications that I happen to know were not thought out even half as well by anyone who ever designed for the game (other than me) as they should be. So transmuting things into valuable things at a rate that alchemists wouldn't want to have jobs is probably right out. Transmuting mass in such a way as to get really substantial amounts of energy to the point where it starts rivaling solar cells is also a bad thing. Fundamentally: the ability to turn a wall into water is a bigger deal for the setting than the ability to turn a man into a dead man.
So here's what we get from the simple cases: transmuting needs to allow you to
grow things. Dirt to metal just isn't useful for much of anything except impromptu bunker construction unless the metal can grow out of the ground somehow. But we still don't want people transmuting dirt into radios or some shit, meaning that when alchemy grows stuff it grows organically in a vaguely predictable/controllable fashion.
So when you make water, you can have it come out in a geyser. When you make metal it can pop out in the multi-drills from Gurren Lagann. When you make fire you can have it flare up. When you make wood, you can have it grow like a plant. And when you make earth, you can have it... something something darkside. I'm actually not sure whether it should rain down like a dust devil, bulge up like a molehill, or crater up like you just dropped a space rock. But anyway the point is that having the element grow in organically allows us to sidestep issues like mass and pressure differences - since we can actually have the water geyser in over enough time that we don't have to explain why pressure differentials don't blow up the whole building.
-Username17
