Harry Potter+Narnia=Me Caring

[sabs]

The Narnia adventures take place during World War 2 in England.

While it is technically correct in that several of the Narnia adventures do take place concurrently with the time when World War 2 was ongoing in England, they do not take place in England and it is therefore about as relevant as the fact that the Harry Potter adventures take place during the Yugoslav Wars. In the actual text of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe the blitz is mentioned exactly once, when it is used as an excuse to put a bunch of children in a strange house. An entirely different excuse is used for Prince Caspian. Yes, Panzer tanks exist in the story, but they are not in Narnia, and when the Pevensie children summon up actual armies to go to war, they don't start by requesting that the British government send them a Mk VIII Cromwell. Despite revolving entirely around perilous journeys and warfare, none of the Narnia books involves sniper rifles. When Hogwarts is besieged, nobody busts out the RPG launchers. The "Narnia" part of "Hogwarts in Narnia" means that at some point our characters graduate and start stamping around in Narnia starting and fighting wars and they need to still not be in a position to call in helicopter gunships for backup when they do.

And why is that? You're already massively violating the aesthetic of Narnia by assuming you only get to go make war on Notnia as a graduated adult instead of as a bumbling child.

I grew up with the Potter series and am still annoyed that all the foreshadowing of Mr Weasley's Muggle obsession never translated to him smuggling Muggle weapons, tactics, or utilities into Wizarding Britain to aid in the battle against Voldemort. I seriously thought at age 10 that he was going to personally kill Voldemort with a sniper rifle.

That outcome would have been contrary to Rowling's objectives, granted, but not because of the sniper rifle, and that's no excuse for Molly VS Bellatrix not involving an Uzi or something.

To be fair, Molly is from a Wizarding familuy. And they are all freaking British. The fact that guns don't show up in a british fapping fantasy to colloquial Pastoral England with Magic, isn't really a shocker.

The fact that Mr Weasley is a Muggle Items expert, who enchanted a car to fly, and he has no clue what a rubber duck is insults everyone's intelligence.

[Username17]

The fact that Mr Weasley is a Muggle Items expert, who enchanted a car to fly, and he has no clue what a rubber duck is insults everyone's intelligence.

Pretty much. I mean, Chamomile is so wrong about Narnia that I have to assume he's ranting directly out of his ass. I mean, it's literally a major plot point that Jadis runs around England fighting police officers and crashing fire engines and shit. And the sections of Potterverse that he is passionately defending are literally indefensible. They are stupid, senseless, not internally consistent, and in no way derivable from any possible set of rules or limits.

If you want to preserve the core aesthetic of "there are a lot of old things around the school and the main characters are forced to write with quills" that is easy enough to do. It rests on three pillars, none of which involve anti-science fields:

• Bringing things to Notnia is difficult. With a high cost to bring stuff across to Notnia, things that were brought in a long time ago will stay in use until they fall apart.
• The instructors are from Earth, but have spent most of their lives in Notnia. Because they aren't subjected to modern fashions and media, they have really retro tastes.
• There are incentives for using locally made stuff, even if it's very low tech. For example: various magic can be done by writing things with gryphon quills, so all students have to practice quill writing.

But I'm not done making fun of Chamomile for having shitty ideas. Mostly because he doesn't stop having shitty ideas. Bakuhatsu High has absolutely fuck all to do with any of this. Bakuhatsu High is about anime school children who are demons and robots and shit having high tech, high magic super hero adventures. Which has absolutley fucking nothing to do with "normal modern school children go to school in a magical world and learn magic." I remind you of the concept as described in the first fucking post:

If you just bolt Narnia onto Harry Potter you get a setting cool enough that I might write an RPG for it. It's a world in three parts. There's the mundane world, the halfway house of the magical schools, and the wild west of a magic alternate dimension. Humans come from the mundane world and are taught magic in schools full of wonder and danger in well supervised amounts. Once they've been taught they're allowed to stay in the mundane world if they wish keeping the Statute of Secrecy of course. Or they may leave to try to make their mark on the magical world of Narnia, or Amber or whatever the fuck you call it.

The entire point, literally the entire fucking point of sticking the two world concepts together is that by having an actual untamed magical world to colonize and explore there is actually things for the characters to do after they graduate from school (as opposed to Harry Potter, where there really isn't).

But of course, once you have trained adults exploring a magic world, you aren't doing Harry Potter or Narnia. And that's OK. You're doing something like Stargate if you're lucky and Gor if you aren't. But it's an emergent setting where you have Earth adults who have already taken a level in badass and know how to use magic exploring and conquering a fantasy realm.

Getting your vagina full of feces just because step three isn't part of either of the primary pieces of source material is insane. Of course it isn't! It's step fucking three!

-Username17

[virgil]

Once again, can't you just have a diplomatic treaty with whomever controls Hogwarts to include a technology-ban? If you're really concerned about iPads and any part of the world (even if you never go near it) having Apache helicopters, that seems a more justifiable conceit than any kind of anti-tech aura.

Does that option offend your "Potter in Narnia" aesthetic too much? Wouldn't Grek's magic rules be even more offensive since that's demonstrably not how magic works in either setting and thus breaking your demand? If you're going to be that adamant about "Potter in Narnia," then you are required to be fated to slay Hitler/Satan, and probably have that built into the rules, because that aesthetic is more important than whether they had contemporary technology.

[Tumbling Down]

You mean, use one of the unforgivable curses?
If mind control is black magic that doesn't get taught in wizard school. Then the chances of it happening are approaching nil.

Actually, the chances of it happening are exactly 100%, because Harry Potter-spells are powered by knowing their fucking names at all.

If you're so worried about people bringing in bullets and bombs, then just fucking disincentivize that shit by having the dragons/wizards/frost giants/whatever be resistant to [muggle] damage. No one is going to bring over a gunship to deal with the talking beavers.

[Chamomile]

I've never actually argued in favor of the anti-tech murphy's field. I've never argued against it, but I'm not exactly a fan of it either. The conversation I would actually like to have, and the one which Frank refuses to, is the one where we talk about how we could make our Harry Potter adventures actually resemble Harry Potter. Frank discards this as immediately impossible, but offers no justification as to why except for an argument against one specific means of enforcing the ban. Treaties and embargoes and, oddly enough, even just the scarcity of a frontier society that Frank himself is positing would work fine. I'm pretty sure I made it explicit a while back that the part of Frank's argument that I'm not on board with is the part where Hogwarts students all get cell phones and microwaves and mini-fridges. Also, it occurs to me that if the school is indeed located in a castle, who is going to do the electrical work to make sockets for appliances? Rigging up stone walls for electrical wiring can't be easy.

I mean, it's literally a major plot point that Jadis runs around England fighting police officers and crashing fire engines and shit.

And this contradicts my position...How? Every post you pull out a completely separate justification for your argument, but up until now you've at least managed arguments that are factually wrong rather than incoherent.

Bakuhatsu High is about anime school children who are demons and robots and shit having high tech, high magic super hero adventures. Which has absolutley fucking nothing to do with "normal modern school children go to school in a magical world and learn magic."

Make the eyes smaller. Make the mouths bigger. Your conversion is complete. I mean, yes, you'd need to change the setting and a couple of the character types will need to be refluffed. Granted, it does not cover the 11-13 adventures, because it starts with Freshmen year when characters already have fairly impressive magical powers of various sorts.

And hey, you want to talk about the concept as described in the first fucking post? Okay, sure:

It's a magic world. In fact it's a place with all the magic in the world condensed into one realm though it leaks into the real world from time to time. It would be morphic and slightly unstable so technology with combustibles or too many moving parts doesn't work there reliably. So it would be an Iron age setting in many ways. There are only a couple hundred thousand people so real empires or nations just couldn't be. You'd have city states each with their own power structure and leaders and identities. A young wizard could find the place that suited him best and try to make his way in the world through might and magic. He could tame wild beasts, settle wild lands, create new magics and just generally have adventures while occasionally heading into a tavern to find someone who might have gone to the same school he did. And if you also had the same house it'd be like finding out you were both Oxford men or something. Fast friends.

You'll notice a distinct lack of any mention of helicopter gunships, assault rifles, or the spread of any other advanced technology in this paragraph. And also that the idea of the murphy field is first posited in this same post, to keep things Iron Agey. And while I agree that the murphy field specifically is a bad idea because mucking with the fundamental laws of physics will screw up the Iron Age as much as the Information Age, trying to insist that the premise of the thread is the exact opposite of what was actually written in its first post is inane.

And concerning "step three": You're trying to imply that steps one and two are Hogwarts and Narnia, but what you've described is Hogwarts Part One, Hogwarts Part Two, and Stargate. There is still a distinct lack of Narnia.

If you're going to be that adamant about "Potter in Narnia," then you are required to be fated to slay Hitler/Satan, and probably have that built into the rules, because that aesthetic is more important than whether they had contemporary technology.

You are confusing staples of the plot with staples of the setting. Playing Hogwarts in Narnia does not mean you are playing Harry Potter meets the Pevensies.

[Omegonthesane]

I've never actually argued in favor of the anti-tech murphy's field. I've never argued against it, but I'm not exactly a fan of it either. The conversation I would actually like to have, and the one which Frank refuses to, is the one where we talk about how we could make our Harry Potter adventures actually resemble Harry Potter. Frank discards this as immediately impossible, but offers no justification as to why except for an argument against one specific means of enforcing the ban. Treaties and embargoes and, oddly enough, even just the scarcity of a frontier society that Frank himself is positing would work fine. I'm pretty sure I made it explicit a while back that the part of Frank's argument that I'm not on board with is the part where Hogwarts students all get cell phones and microwaves and mini-fridges. Also, it occurs to me that if the school is indeed located in a castle, who is going to do the electrical work to make sockets for appliances? Rigging up stone walls for electrical wiring can't be easy.

The scarcity of a frontier society does not get you parochial England on its own - it gets you a society equipped to handle long pauses between resupplies. This is multi-author fiction, so ultimately the result has to be founded in what would actually work given physics, not in what "looks cool" or "fits the original aesthetic".

It has already been covered, of course, that the way to make wands the personal sidearm of choice is to make them better than guns that are within your budget, so I will skip that argument for now.

The fact is, every single piece of technology you take away from schoolkids that they have IRL - every fucking one - subtracts from your available conceptual space, because you are starting from "normal schoolkids" and then adding magic and subtracting assorted shit. "Not having a mobile telephone" is an expenditure of conceptual space if you play a modern-day schoolchild. Not only that, but many functions that magic ought to have to allow for graduate plots will also replace technology - Sending spells are a good stopgap while you make the Notnia mobile phone network, and cost more conceptual space than just saying you have signal within a mile of Not-Hogwarts and not outside that radius.

Treaties, though... treaties just make me think this: "The Beavers wanted us to leave our guns on Earth. We didn't. They fought. We won. That's why there are no Beavers."

[Fuchs]

Harry Potter adventures that feel like Harry Potter adventures require you to dial down your intelligence by a factor of 10. You do not want to have Harry Potter adventures since all characters are acting like they have no brain.

Dumbledore thinks his last year of life, knowing he is dieing from a course, is spent best to teach Harry in small, miniscule amounts about how Voldemort grew up. Like very second saturday or so, using a pensieve to show his memories. And not, like, train Harry to fight the bastard. Harry actualyl learned far more from the notes in Snape's old potion book than from Dumbledore.

All of Harry's adventures fall apart as soon as you have some RPer tackle the challenge because the characters in the book never even come close to any logical solution for their problems, and never even come close to exploit all their tools and abilities.

No, having Harry Potter adventures is no option at all.

[Username17]

The conversation I would actually like to have, and the one which Frank refuses to, is the one where we talk about how we could make our Harry Potter adventures actually resemble Harry Potter. Frank discards this as immediately impossible, but offers no justification as to why except for an argument against one specific means of enforcing the ban.

The actual reason why no one in Harry Potter brings a fucking gun to any of these life or death battles is that everyone is a fucking idiot who struggles with the great mystery of the rubber duck. That's seriously the actual reason in the actual books. If any single person had more than two brain cells held together by a spirochete, things would not resemble Harry Potter in that respect. Since we are talking about a role playing game, where you don't fucking control how fucking retarded the characters played by other players are, that is simply non-functional.

There are lots of ways to get players to not carry guns around if you don't like the aesthetic. The simplest is to make it so there are incentives to use wands instead. But to be honest, we're talking about middle school students for the lower years, and there's no reason for any of their adventures to have any guns at all. And for the later years and graduates, their basically grown ups and have access to Walmart, if it's for some reason important to the player that their character go get a firearm it is deeply insulting for that to not be an option. But the game mechanics and the relative effectiveness of fire wands can make that option be not very good most of the time.

Also, it occurs to me that if the school is indeed located in a castle, who is going to do the electrical work to make sockets for appliances? Rigging up stone walls for electrical wiring can't be easy.

I live in a country with a lot of old castles (in fact, the most preserved castles per square kilometer of any country on Earth), the electrical wiring is run through conduits that attach to the walls, it's a non-issue. Just like all of your other objections are non-issues.

---

But let's talk about Grekian magic, because unlike Chamomile's bullshit, it's actually interesting. A big advantage of the "spells only work once" thing is that it patches a major hole in spontaneous magic systems.

When you have spontaneous magic, the MC is asked to make a lot of spot rulings, and they aren't all going to be very good. What this usually results in is for players to do various magic shit and some of it is really disappointing and some of it is crazy overpowered. And then the players get stuck in a routine using the same couple of overpowered things over and over again - taking advantage of a poor spot ruling by the MC and degrading the "spontaneity" of the magic.

With Grekian magic, the MC doesn't feel obligated to keep consistent with a ruling that made a stunt more powerful than it should have been. Indeed, the MC is encouraged to tell the player to go do something else entirely. And unlike the "stunt is getting stale" modifiers in games like Exalted, it's actually in-character that it is really working like that.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

The scarcity of a frontier society does not get you parochial England on its own - it gets you a society equipped to handle long pauses between resupplies. This is multi-author fiction, so ultimately the result has to be founded in what would actually work given physics, not in what "looks cool" or "fits the original aesthetic".

This is Argument From Realism. We're creating the world. We can start with the result we want and work backward to find the justifications we need to get there.

The fact is, every single piece of technology you take away from schoolkids that they have IRL - every fucking one - subtracts from your available conceptual space, because you are starting from "normal schoolkids" and then adding magic and subtracting assorted shit.

Okay, yes, and? Has it not yet been communicated that modern kids being thrust into a different world that is not very much like our own is kind of a thing that I want this game to be able to do? The entire idea I'm resisting here is "modern schoolchildren get taken to regular modern school with particle effects," because Hogwarts is what sold Harry Potter and that is where I want to be spending the game's conceptual space.

Treaties, though... treaties just make me think this: "The Beavers wanted us to leave our guns on Earth. We didn't. They fought. We won. That's why there are no Beavers."

The source of the treaty is not hard to imagine: The Satyrs know that the Earth colony has machine guns that are terrifying in their capacity to murder and the fact that they can be used by anyone, not just the one person who created it. The Earth colony has access to like a zillion of these things back home and can easily conquer the Satyr kingdom once they bring enough of them through. However, the rate at which they can bring them through is limited, and the Satyr kingdom currently has a big enough population advantage that they could overwhelm the Earth colony. So the Satyr kingdom and the Earth colony strike a deal: The colony doesn't import any machine guns or other gamechanging weapons, and in exchange the Satyrs won't nip the whole problem in the bud by exterminating the colony outright while they still can. Depending on whether or not we want the Satyrs to be viewed as complete assholes, they might additionally pledge to aid the colony in defense if they're ever attacked.

And the reason I changed from Beavers to Satyrs is because I find it difficult to imagine that Beavers would actually be able to pose much of a threat to the Earth colony even with a numerical advantage.

You might say that this is a necessarily temporary arrangement because sooner or later the Earth colony is going to bring in a bunch of machine guns anyway. Maybe the Satyr kingdom gets overthrown, or the Earth colony has enough wizards to fend off Satyr attacks while they bring the machineguns through, or the alliance between the Satyr kingdom and the Earth colony gets solid enough that the Earth colony is able to persuade the Satyrs to start importing machineguns for themselves while allowing the colony to bring them in as well. But placing the industrialization of Notnia in the future rather than the present allows us to do three things:

First, it means we can run the actual Harry Potter in Narnia story where machineguns never show up, because even though that's going to happen eventually the group can just declare arbitrarily that it won't happen during the story.

Second, it means that we can run the story where someone brings an uzi to a wand fight and it is actually a surprise and not SOP.

And third, it means that you can run the story where you make magitech to weasel out of import bans because you made the stuff locally and there's no treaty against that.

EDIT:

Harry Potter adventures that feel like Harry Potter adventures require you to dial down your intelligence by a factor of 10.

Again: Staples of plot are not staples of setting.

The actual reason why no one in Harry Potter brings a fucking gun to any of these life or death battles is that everyone is a fucking idiot who struggles with the great mystery of the rubber duck.

No, the actual reason why no one in Harry Potter brings a fucking gun to any of these life or death battles is that JK Rowling didn't want them to. The idea that because JK Rowling did not bother to justify something means it cannot possibly be justified is inane. Likewise the argument that because a setting's aesthetic was not properly justified means that it's aesthetic is actually something completely different is inane.

[Voss]

And concerning "step three": You're trying to imply that steps one and two are Hogwarts and Narnia, but what you've described is Hogwarts Part One, Hogwarts Part Two, and Stargate. There is still a distinct lack of Narnia.

No, there isn't. That is exactly what he means by the 'Stargate' reference. Going out from the portals and/or bastion (ie, Atlantis; or Hogwarts if it is actually in Notnia) and interacting with all the low-tech natives (and some not so low-tech natives). But the natives are faeries, beavers and griffons, and the Go'auld or alien Wraiths are actually Dragons, or Witches or fantasy wraiths (or whatever); and really do have high-powered magic of their own. It really isn't hard to follow at all.

[Chamomile]

And concerning "step three": You're trying to imply that steps one and two are Hogwarts and Narnia, but what you've described is Hogwarts Part One, Hogwarts Part Two, and Stargate. There is still a distinct lack of Narnia.

No, there isn't. That is exactly what he means by the 'Stargate' reference. Going out from the portals and/or bastion (ie, Atlantis; or Hogwarts if it is actually in Notnia) and interacting with all the low-tech natives (and some not so low-tech natives). But the natives are faeries, beavers and griffons, and the Go'auld or alien Wraiths are actually Dragons, or Witches or fantasy wraiths (or whatever); and really do have high-powered magic of their own. It really isn't hard to follow at all.

Yeah, so he's talking about putting a fantasy coat of paint on Stargate. That is still not Narnia where you fight wars and go on perilous quests using primarily the methods and materials that the natives do. The extent of the modern tech that shows up in any Narnia adventure is the clothes the protagonists start out in, a flashlight Edmund brought with him in the Prince Caspian movie, and a lamppost.

[Voss]

No, he's just not getting hung up on the fucking props. You can kill as many beavers and dragons as you like. You can even do a little dance with Lion Jesus if the crazy takes you there.

If you want kids in their bathrobes getting enslaved by witches and riding around on horses, you can have them kidnapped out of their beds or caught in surprise slave raid, and railroaded to whatever point in the Wild you want. But no matter how many tantrums you throw, sane players with preparation time are going to make rational preparations. And that doesn't involve willingly wandering out into a hostile wilderness without their stuff.

[Omegonthesane]

No, he's just not getting hung up on the fucking props. You can kill as many beavers and dragons as you like. You can even do a little dance with Lion Jesus if the crazy takes you there.

If you want kids in their bathrobes getting enslaved by witches and riding around on horses, you can have them kidnapped out of their beds or caught in surprise slave raid, and railroaded to whatever point in the Wild you want. But no matter how many tantrums you throw, sane players with preparation time are going to make rational preparations. And that doesn't involve willingly wandering out into a hostile wilderness without their stuff.

This, combined with the fact that functionally the first-contact explorers are Muggle PCs with preparation time. So, there's almost certainly a stack of assault rifles from the day of Planetfall when nobody had any fucking magic yet.

The Narnia protagonists use exclusively native tactics because they do not have time to pack, and even if they did, they are schoolchildren with schoolchild restrictions on their purchases, as opposed to grown-up explorers with military backing and funding. Graduate-level PCs are automatically the latter, so there has to be a non-insulting reason why a person with full access to both worlds and full time to prepare would choose Notnian sorcery to the utter exclusion of Earthside tech.

But let's talk about Grekian magic, because unlike Chamomile's bullshit, it's actually interesting. A big advantage of the "spells only work once" thing is that it patches a major hole in spontaneous magic systems.

When you have spontaneous magic, the MC is asked to make a lot of spot rulings, and they aren't all going to be very good. What this usually results in is for players to do various magic shit and some of it is really disappointing and some of it is crazy overpowered. And then the players get stuck in a routine using the same couple of overpowered things over and over again - taking advantage of a poor spot ruling by the MC and degrading the "spontaneity" of the magic.

With Grekian magic, the MC doesn't feel obligated to keep consistent with a ruling that made a stunt more powerful than it should have been. Indeed, the MC is encouraged to tell the player to go do something else entirely. And unlike the "stunt is getting stale" modifiers in games like Exalted, it's actually in-character that it is really working like that.

-Username17

How does that interact with the model of "cast a repeatedly activateable spell on a Minor artefact, duration: Mortal" to justify players using magical trinkets and being able to repeatedly cast Avada Kedavra? Is even "repeatable" magic varied enough between castings to allow the same handwavium, or does the rulebook ship with a fixed spell list of "repeatable" spells that can be embedded in your trinket collection?

[Sashi]

No, the actual reason why no one in Harry Potter brings a fucking gun to any of these life or death battles is that JK Rowling didn't want them to. The idea that because JK Rowling did not bother to justify something means it cannot possibly be justified is inane. Likewise the argument that because a setting's aesthetic was not properly justified means that it's aesthetic is actually something completely different is inane.

Authorial Intent can be brought to bear on literature when talking about themes, but when characters do stupid things because it's what the author wants them to do without any justification that's called a plot hole, and Harry Potter is full of them.

And a lot of the fixes to those plot holes could have been solved easily. For example, a magical airbag force-field that stops arrows/bullets and also protects you from falling (like off a broom that you're riding hundreds of feet in the air with no safety equipment) would be so useful that literally everyone in the Wizarding world would have it up all the time. It would be one of those things that people get renewed once a year on their birthday. And it neuters guns/crossbows as well as explaining why the way beginners broom riding was handled isn't staggeringly negligent (seriously, their first lessons are outside and not in a heavily padded room with a low ceiling?)

[Chamomile]

But no matter how many tantrums you throw, sane players with preparation time are going to make rational preparations. And that doesn't involve willingly wandering out into a hostile wilderness without their stuff.

I don't know why you people keep saying this sort of thing like I'm expecting PCs to not bring assault rifles for no reason at all. Yes, Harry Potter did that, and yes, it was stupid, and yes, the game should not expect players to likewise be idiots. I have never, ever argued to the contrary of any of those. There are plausible reasons why it would not be rational to pack an AK-47, call in Apache choppers, or keep a minifridge in your dorm room, and the game is better off for having them.

so there has to be a non-insulting reason why a person with full access to both worlds and full time to prepare would choose Notnian sorcery to the utter exclusion of Earthside tech.

Yes, there does, and that is why I am having this argument at all! Because until Frank shuts up and people accept that being inundated with modern tech is not what the thread was ever supposed to be about, we are not going to have a conversation as to how we might reasonably arrive at that end state.

Authorial Intent can be brought to bear on literature when talking about themes, but when characters do stupid things because it's what the author wants them to do without any justification that's called a plot hole, and Harry Potter is full of them.

Yes. Yes it is. And yes, JK Rowling should have provided some kind of actual explanation as to why the wizarding world doesn't use any muggle tech more recent than the radio. And Mr Weasley, a muggle expert who can seriously just walk up to muggleborns and ask them about stuff, should not be baffled by the function of the rubber duck, particularly not considering that he has dismantled, enchanted, and subsequently reassembled an entire car. But none of that changes the fact that if you sell people on Hogwarts, they're probably not going to want to see a cell phone in every student's pocket.

[Mask_De_H]

[*] What should magic be able to do? More importantly, what can it not do?

Well that depends. If you're trying to placate chamomile and deanrule with their horseshit demands about how there has to be exactly the right amount of technology in their magic peanut butter and there are totally arbitrary things that are not in any way discernably different from things on the allowed list that are on the banned list and vice versa - then you obviously can't have hard and fast rules about how magic works either.

Basically, just like with the technology where you constantly walk on eggshells when describing things and when someone throws a hissy fit about air fresheners or pencil sharpeners or some fucking thing you placate them by backing up and retconning the offending item out of the scene description, you free form the magic until someone calls bullshit. Everyone can do "stuff," and whenever it hits peoples' totally baseless and personal limits of willing suspension of disbelief, they get veto power.

So magic bullshit Munchausen? I'd play that, honestly.

[Grek]

How does that interact with the model of "cast a repeatedly activateable spell on a Minor artefact, duration: Mortal" to justify players using magical trinkets and being able to repeatedly cast Avada Kedavra? Is even "repeatable" magic varied enough between castings to allow the same handwavium, or does the rulebook ship with a fixed spell list of "repeatable" spells that can be embedded in your trinket collection?

The way I'm envisioning it, the chapter on designing spells would have a brief "reading the entries" section followed by ~8 Classes of Magic, which are both the names of classes your character attends at Notnian Hogwarts and "schools of magic" in the D&D sense of being a sort of magic that someone might specialize in. Each of these magical schools would have a list of Intents in them, which form the basis for your spell. Each spell gets one Intent. Each Intent listing has the following information listed under it:

• The Emotions that you can use to cast it. For our example Intent, Attack, this is Anger or Hatred.
• A description of what a spell with this intent is supposed to accomplish. This includes the mechanical effect of a basic spell, which for Attack is to inflict 1 Wound Box of injury in the intended target.
• The Base TN for a spell with that intent. This is both the TN to learn the spell in the first place and the TN to activate/control the effects afterward. Attack is has a Base TN of 0, as almost all of the difficulty of zapping something with magic lightning is the target dodging or blocking them, not the caster screwing up the spell on their end.
• A list of effects that modify that TN. This includes both increasing the TN through the obvious improvements like "longer range" or "harder to resist" and lowering by including the obvious drawbacks like "is tiring to use", but more importantly includes the (often hefty) TN modifier to change the frequency of the effect from "Once" to either "Permanent" or "When Activated".
• A list of effects that you can spend your activation roll's net hits on. This should include things that are based on the caster's skill, not on how good a spell it is. For Attack, this would mostly be increased damage, but for something like Fly, you could use it to go faster or do tricks.
• A list of magical animal and plant parts that can be used in making magic items and potions with this Intent.
• A list of example special effects. For Attack, this would be "Burning, cutting, piercing, freezing, electrocuting, bleeding and/or strangling the victim of the spell."

[codeGlaze]

Unless I'm reading it wrong, it seems like there's an assumption that the muggle world (or just government) is/will be heavily involved in Notnia.

Which is sort of shitty.

I'd prefer to stick to a Masquerade setup.
Maybe the wizards were driven to live in Notnia in the 1600s. Maybe since wizards tend to be eclectic and insular, there are more 'lone towers' or family estates than actual towns or villages.

Maybe Notwarts and other schools live in that magic 'in-between' to act as portal anchors. While also acting as Xavier schools for wizard integration. Helping to usher in new muggleborns and half-bloods.

The majority of wizards living on the other side could help explain a lot. It could also explain why the masquerade is so important. (They're terrified of the consequences of allowing muggles across the breach)

[atanycost]

I like this concept partly because I liked Harry Potter and also because I am interested in how you make rules for the nonviolent adventures(Which presumably wands might be better equipped for than say a cellphone). I also feel I should say that I am personally more interested in magical hi-jinx in a castle with the Harry Potter aesthetic than first contact shenanigans and beating up on poorly equipped natives.

As for the debate over how to deal with things like guns and avoiding PC commandos from curb-stomping all the colorful locals, I feel like that misses the point. Guns are a result of centuries, maybe millennia of weapons development and are to modern thinking, one of the most cost effective ways to turn people into corpses, trying to make magic equal or replace guns just turns this into another fantasy heartbreaker (thats what you call a dnd style rpg right?). IMHO the solution is to come up with a large number of interesting non-killing things to do and interesting magical means of accomplishing them.

Thats my idea at any rate.

[RadiantPhoenix]

A thought about Grekian magic:

One of the ways you can get reusable magic is by making a spell that creates a magical creature whose body parts can be made into something that has that effect.

e.g., a "Float-Sheep" whose wool makes things float, like an airship i.e. a magic carpet.

EDIT: and it can totally breed, so you just make sure you keep them all in a secure pen and...

[Voss]

But no matter how many tantrums you throw, sane players with preparation time are going to make rational preparations. And that doesn't involve willingly wandering out into a hostile wilderness without their stuff.

I don't know why you people keep saying this sort of thing like I'm expecting PCs to not bring assault rifles for no reason at all. Yes, Harry Potter did that, and yes, it was stupid, and yes, the game should not expect players to likewise be idiots. I have never, ever argued to the contrary of any of those. There are plausible reasons why it would not be rational to pack an AK-47, call in Apache choppers, or keep a minifridge in your dorm room, and the game is better off for having them.

But none of that changes the fact that if you sell people on Hogwarts, they're probably not going to want to see a cell phone in every student's pocket.

So you entirely agree, but are willing to throw it all out because you think people might demand to hold the idiot ball? Because if you actually have another point, it is hiding somewhere else that isn't in your posts.

[Chamomile]

So you entirely agree, but are willing to throw it all out because you think people might demand to hold the idiot ball? Because if you actually have another point, it is hiding somewhere else that isn't in your posts.

Depends on what you mean I agree with. If you're asking if I agree that there should be a good reason why people don't use tech, then yes, of course, obviously. If you mean that I agree that people should just use the muggle tech, then no, I don't agree with that, because that is not what either Harry Potter or Narnia look like. I've only mentioned it like fifty times: If everyone has a cell phone, it's not Hogwarts. For a thread whose premise is "Hogwarts in Narnia," that is the point. Also the point:

There are players like Dean who want to play in the Iron Age, not Star Gate.

There are players like Prak who want to be the guy who brings tech into Hogwarts, and he can't do that if it's already there (note: yes there are parts of Notnia where there are no iPods, but if your story is "bring iPods to Notnia" it has to actually be difficult; "deal with the fallout of iPods being in Notnia" is a completely different story).

There are players like Omegon who want the climax of the story to be blowing Voldemort up with a rocket launcher, and he can't do that if firing a rocket at Voldemort is the very first thing you try as soon as he shows up (because again, you can't have the story of "blow up Voldemort with a rocket launcher" if it's not actually difficult to get a rocket launcher and blow Voldemort up with it).

[Grek]

So you entirely agree, but are willing to throw it all out because you think people might demand to hold the idiot ball? Because if you actually have another point, it is hiding somewhere else that isn't in your posts.

Depends on what you mean I agree with. If you're asking if I agree that there should be a good reason why people don't use tech, then yes, of course, obviously. If you mean that I agree that people should just use the muggle tech, then no, I don't agree with that, because that is not what either Harry Potter or Narnia look like. I've only mentioned it like fifty times: If everyone has a cell phone, it's not Hogwarts. For a thread whose premise is "Hogwarts in Narnia," that is the point. Also the point:

There are players like Dean who want to play in the Iron Age, not Star Gate.

There are players like Prak who want to be the guy who brings tech into Hogwarts, and he can't do that if it's already there (note: yes there are parts of Notnia where there are no iPods, but if your story is "bring iPods to Notnia" it has to actually be difficult; "deal with the fallout of iPods being in Notnia" is a completely different story).

There are players like Omegon who want the climax of the story to be blowing Voldemort up with a rocket launcher, and he can't do that if firing a rocket at Voldemort is the very first thing you try as soon as he shows up (because again, you can't have the story of "blow up Voldemort with a rocket launcher" if it's not actually difficult to get a rocket launcher and blow Voldemort up with it).

The answer to this one is really really simple: Put in even the barest of rules for setting the game in the appropriate tech periods.

1850 for people who want Modern Morality in the Iron Age.
1950 for people who want to do Narnia.
1990 for people who want to do Harry Potter.
2010 for people who want to introduce Real Life tech to a magical world.

[Username17]

No, the actual reason why no one in Harry Potter brings a fucking gun to any of these life or death battles is that JK Rowling didn't want them to. The idea that because JK Rowling did not bother to justify something means it cannot possibly be justified is inane.

While it is perfectly possible to have things happen in a story without specific explanation and have there be a good explanation that the story happened to have not gone into, that has fuck all to do with the degree to which muggle tech isn't used in Harry Potter. JK Rowling does give an explanation for it. it's just that the explanation is retarded and requires every major character in the story on both sides to also be retarded. The explanation is that wizards don't understand muggle tech literally to the point of low comedy. The "rubber duck" example is a real example, and of course requires literally everyone to have an IQ of room temperature as measured in Celsius.

That's not going to happen. As soon as you give players control of their own character, they will likely choose to not be stupid on the level of Warner Brothers cartoon imbeciles. And then that explanation falls apart.

As for the debate over how to deal with things like guns and avoiding PC commandos from curb-stomping all the colorful locals, I feel like that misses the point. Guns are a result of centuries, maybe millennia of weapons development and are to modern thinking, one of the most cost effective ways to turn people into corpses, trying to make magic equal or replace guns just turns this into another fantasy heartbreaker (thats what you call a dnd style rpg right?). IMHO the solution is to come up with a large number of interesting non-killing things to do and interesting magical means of accomplishing them.

The solution to keeping the PCs from becoming commandos who curb stomp the locals is simply to set the game during their school age years when they aren't commandos and aren't being asked to conquer anything. It's not a difficult design challenge at all.

The thing assholes like Chamomile are rebelling against is the idea that people would graduate from school and then get actual jobs that actually help the Earth forces colonize the magic world. Because of course, in Narnia the humans always came in too small numbers to really make any organized colony (the largest group of human colonists I can recall was 12, and their descendants went native a thousand years ago); and of course everyone in Harry Potter is a fucking idiot who does absolutely nothing after highschool.

But of course, by having an organized school colony in the magic world, there is a graduating class of people who are competent in both Earth and magic-world concepts. And the entire point of financing such an operation is to colonize and extract resources from the magic world. There is no other excuse possible for people to invest billions of dollars into this project. The colonization deal necessarily is something that is going on. If it's not something you want to role play, you can avoid it indefinitely by playing the game as school children for whom all that colonization stuff is likely off camera. Or you could go back to Earth with your magic skills and do Delta Green stuff after graduation, as some number of graduates do that instead.

I'd prefer to stick to a Masquerade setup.
Maybe the wizards were driven to live in Notnia in the 1600s. Maybe since wizards tend to be eclectic and insular, there are more 'lone towers' or family estates than actual towns or villages.

I can't for the life of me understand why you would want to go Masquerade with such a setup. Masquerades and secret histories use up a huge amount of willing suspension of disbelief, and what they buy you is the ability to have magical conspiracies that secretly have a lot of power in our world that players can join and/or fight.

By setting the magic stuff in another world, none of that is necessary or helpful in the slightest. Any ancient wizard tower or human kingdom can just go the Narnia route and have had some random dude or small group of people get transported to the magic world a long time ago with no supplies and no way back. Since the magic stuff is going on elsewhere, there's no need or even desire for there to be a big ancient Earthside magic conspiracy.

Basically, the Masquerade or anything like it is just setting fire to a big portion of your willing suspension of disbelief budget for nothing. You already have explanations for how there can be thousand year old Goblin kingdoms and yet Earth history and modern society are sufficiently recognizable for you to make a Lady Gaga reference. The Goblin kingdoms are on another fucking planet. Having them also have secretly been on Earth the whole time is narratively pointless.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

((This post written and nearly lost before Frank posted, I may be repeating points))

Depends on what you mean I agree with. If you're asking if I agree that there should be a good reason why people don't use tech, then yes, of course, obviously. If you mean that I agree that people should just use the muggle tech, then no, I don't agree with that, because that is not what either Harry Potter or Narnia look like. I've only mentioned it like fifty times: If everyone has a cell phone, it's not Hogwarts. For a thread whose premise is "Hogwarts in Narnia," that is the point.

It's also not possible to preserve the exact aesthetic of Hogwarts in any possible way that isn't in some way insulting or stupid. The set of hotfixes needed is simply blistering. Cellphones in particular are actually a really minor background detail in either their inclusion or their exclusion, not something worth calling the banners about, and they are an absolute non-negotiable requirement of "Schoolchildren from 2004 or later go to magic school". Even if they turn out to be glorified Snake-playing instruments while in Notnia proper.

Approximating the aesthetic is entirely possible, and even Frank has already made nods in this direction by suggesting perfectly practical reasons why your writing instruments are quills instead of Biros. In addition, for communications purposes, owls are perfectly practical if phone signal does not extend further than a mile from Hogwarts, flying broomsticks have basically no material costs and therefore are quite practical all-terrain scout vehicles. Even the robes can be explained as an item of clothing that's warm and relatively easy to make if you shit raw materials - the same reason scholars wore them in real life. But equally, when the shit hits the fan humans will use human solutions. You keep saying there needs to be a good working solution for why nobody uses any top-tier tech in Notnia, and then refusing to even approximately provide one. Until you do, no one will choose a weapon of terror over a weapon of war.

There are players like Dean who want to play in the Iron Age, not Star Gate.

Until Graduate-tier, that's what Notnia expeditions look like even under Frank's proposals.

There are players like Prak who want to be the guy who brings tech into Hogwarts, and he can't do that if it's already there (note: yes there are parts of Notnia where there are no iPods, but if your story is "bring iPods to Notnia" it has to actually be difficult; "deal with the fallout of iPods being in Notnia" is a completely different story).

If by "parts" you mean "absofuckinglutely everywhere except Notwarts, because nowhere else has electricity". To my understanding the Frank proposal was that the human colony has electricity and suchlike and the task of spreading it beyond there is basically not started.

There are players like Omegon who want the climax of the story to be blowing Voldemort up with a rocket launcher, and he can't do that if firing a rocket at Voldemort is the very first thing you try as soon as he shows up (because again, you can't have the story of "blow up Voldemort with a rocket launcher" if it's not actually difficult to get a rocket launcher and blow Voldemort up with it).

That's an unfair strawman - I felt as a young child that Mr Weasley was obvious foreshadowing for Voldemort being killed with firearms, and over and above the disappointment of that being wrong I feel as an adult that that would have been a solution requiring fewer people to act like retards than what actually happened. That's not the same as feeling it makes a better game.

Unless you're proposing that Voldemort gets over his Hitler-analogue hang-ups and picks up his own rocket launcher fuelled by dark magic. Then it's indeed hard to kill Voldemort with a rocket launcher for entirely different reasons.