[OSSR]Factol's Manifesto

[Username17]

Why not just tie it to circadian rhythms? Rather than try to make personal powers or abilities tie into an external measure, make them tie to internal measures, and everything just happens to have a 24 hour rhythm for the purposes of what would normally be "per day" abilities.

Because that's stupid. Also because as soon as you pull out crappy pseudoscience like that, you're going to get people pulling reverse pseudo science bullshit on you about how corticosteroids and melatonin can reset your circadian rhythms. Fuck. That.

You just want to pick an arbitrary amount of time, or have the count down semi randomized each time. Faffing about with pseudoscience technobabble can only end in tears.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Well, presumably there's a lot of magical radiation involved. Every jump through a gate probably has like a 0.05% chance of sterilizing you and if you don't do the cooldown the cumulative instability in your aura causes you (and/or the portal) to messily explode. Maybe the gates even have a safety feature where they won't turn on if someone trying to go through isn't stable.

[virgil]

Why not just tie it to circadian rhythms? Rather than try to make personal powers or abilities tie into an external measure, make them tie to internal measures, and everything just happens to have a 24 hour rhythm for the purposes of what would normally be "per day" abilities.

Circadian rhythms are by definition an expression of an external measure, so it's not gaining an advantage there. Directly tying it to the planewalker's internal nature will open a mess of questions that will waste everyone's time.

The waiting time between planar jumps has two options; a cooldown or a refresh point, and in both instances it must be magically arbitrary. A multiplanar culture will define their own time cycles around this. With a refresh point, portals will have a literal rush hour as travelers try to hop through one before the refresh and then the next immediately after. With a cooldown, I can see whichever planar metropolis is the most culturally significant comparing it to some outside measurement to determine the name; call it a 'march' it's as long as the average warhorse can be force marched before collapse, call it a 'sob' if it's as long as the Grand Sultan of the Efreet can have sex before his first climax, whatever.

[Vebyast]

Tables won't work because you'll potentially end up tracking different timers for everybody in the party. That would be annoying. Random cooldown dice might be a reasonable thing to use: every $time, everybody rolls some dice and if they hit their target number their body has fully aligned with the local physics and fast travel will be safe for them again.

It might also be reasonable to make it possible, but unsafe, to use fast travel faster than normal. It's a very good way to add tension or urgency on a strategic scale: the bad guy always has a little advantage over the good guys because he's willing to lose 2% of his army on every transit, and in extreme emergency the good guys can push it to get there in time at the risk of bad things happening.

You probably want every fast-travel system to be on the same cooldown timer, otherwise people teleport through the defenses of a heavily-guarded gate room and step through the Gate. Similarly, Gates should still have a cooldown time, albeit one that's only relevant on tactical timescales. That prevents the reverse problem where people step through into the heavily-guarded gate room and teleport out.

Another option might be for areas to have cooldowns rather than travellers. When you cast Planeshift, it depletes the local supply of travelonium, which takes some time to regenerate to the point where anybody can travel from that area (or maybe to that area too) for a while. Gates work by providing huge quantities of travelonium to the surrounding area. This also gives nice behavior when you're trying to move armies around, particularly by making it harder to assault strongpoints by throwing constant streams of transits at them. If you really wanted, you could add some kind of magical travelonium battery for ninja teams.

I wouldn't be surprised if a massively multiplanar society ended up defining time in terms of the fast travel system instead of the other way around. Something somewhere defines a "zero", and then you measure time using the number of transits you could have made since then.

[Prak]

Why not just tie it to circadian rhythms? Rather than try to make personal powers or abilities tie into an external measure, make them tie to internal measures, and everything just happens to have a 24 hour rhythm for the purposes of what would normally be "per day" abilities.

Because that's stupid. Also because as soon as you pull out crappy pseudoscience like that, you're going to get people pulling reverse pseudo science bullshit on you about how corticosteroids and melatonin can reset your circadian rhythms. Fuck. That.

You just want to pick an arbitrary amount of time, or have the count down semi randomized each time. Faffing about with pseudoscience technobabble can only end in tears.

-Username17

I actually didn't know circadian rhythms were psuedoscience. Given who I picked up the term from, I really should have checked into that a bit more...
Mea culpa.

given that they’re a loose affiliation of people that basically don’t like to be told what to do, instead of an HQ the Free League tends to gather around the Grand Bizarre, which they act as unofficial market wardens of

So.... the fatalistic arsons run the soup kitchens, the super-capitalist cashmongers collect taxes, the necromancers run the mortuary, the order-fetishists keep records, and the libertarians guard the market...

I think I figured out the reasoning behind Sigil. It's Hell.

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the
mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it's all organised by the
Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the
lover's Swiss, the police German and it's all organised by the Italians.

[Whipstitch]

If you want something simple just require people to create bullshit widgets (I'll call them gate stones, because I am lazy, and this kinda stuff is usually made of crystals or alchemical metals and other glowy shit) in order to gate safely and then stick these widgets with the following qualities:

1. These stones are needed to travel through a gate and have an arbitrary recharge time between opening gates, because that slows things down for your GM.

2. There's an attuning process that must take place before you can activate your stone, and it is as long or longer than a stone's arbitrary recharge time. You can only be attuned to one stone at a time, because of bullshit--attuning to a new one blanks your old one, for no reason. So ditching your old stone isn't ever a time saver.

3. Are far simpler than the rest of gate tech and thus replaceable. It may even be possible that the Professor can cobble together a handful of one-use gate stones out of coconuts and other sub-standard materials in the event the team's stones are destroyed but everyone gets sick of adventuring on the Plane of Gilligan.

Such a setup is roughly as easy to GM as just tying the cooldown to characters but it gives the proceedings a thin veneer of phlebotinum in the event that people ask why they can't just hop through gates willy-nilly. It also opens up things for having gate stone technology McGuffins, as well--IE, there can be old legends of a stone with no recharge time that a famous rogue used to cheat his way across the planes, that sort of thing.

Big drawback is that this begs questions like how much shit can you bring through with you per stone and all sorts of other happy bullshit.

[fectin]

I don't really like that plan. Gates being linked into the hearts of stars doesn't feel like a D&D problem, and you're begging for the Union issue where there's a bunch of world-wrecking badasses sitting around as glorified town guards. I think gates should be paired and not swappable, to maintain the limitations of the portal network on travel times.

Flavor-wise, anywhere unpleasant works. You don't have to link into stars; it could be the plane of fire, or of negative energy, or to a slaad nest in limbo, or the bottom of a desert of black sand, or whatever. In any case, you get a situation where gates are heavily guarded, instead of in the middle of markets.

If gates are just two-way bridges, they're like passes through the mountains. Specifically, they're exactly like passes through the mountains, and your DM is just describing the scenery a little differently. That's cool and all, but it's a lot of conceptual overhead vs. just putting some mountains on your worldmap, and no net benefit.

Now, I thought, perhaps wrongly, that the design goals for this thought experiment included (1) gates are something people can make, and (2) people still fly spelljammers about. For spelljammers to be worthwhile, there has to be a reason not to take gates. Specifically, there has to be a reason not to just ship goods through gates, and that reason must translate into a lower cost for shipping via spelljammer than via gate. since making spelljammer shipping cheap is fairly impractical, you have to make gates expensive. It's not as cool, and doesn't make for as good of a game if gate travel is inherently limited (because you can't march armies through them and have games about taking a beachhead, but also because the obvious solution is "build more gates"), so either you have to directly charge for using the gates (e.g. they run on souls) or add significant risk to using gates.

Stargate went with adding risk, and I thought that worked out pretty well. Heck, half their story mileage came from stories about new ways the gate could be used against them; why not select a proven concept?

[Username17]

Now, I thought, perhaps wrongly, that the design goals for this thought experiment included (1) gates are something people can make, and (2) people still fly spelljammers about. For spelljammers to be worthwhile, there has to be a reason not to take gates.

This really doesn't seem like a difficult design challenge. If a world is "adjacent" to more than one world and a gate travels to exactly one location which may or may not be "adjacent", then planeshift and gates have selling points. If a spelljammer travels to adjacent worlds in more time than it takes to cast planeshift, but has a larger cargo capacity than six people linking hands, then spelljammers, planeshift, and gates all have selling points. Clear and unambiguous selling points.

As soon as you start "tuning" gates like in Stargate to get to multiple locations, they start really shitting on planeshift. But if they don't, the problem never existed in the first place to need any solving.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

The reason not to take gates is that gates can be defended. Planeshift and spelljammers can depart from and land anywhere on a plane, which means that you can get into or out of a plane even if Big Brother owns the gate room. Think about Stargate: up until the bad guys got starships, Earth's iris and gateroom made it an utterly impregnable fortress. The only things that ever got through were information attacks (pretend to be a refugee, mind control, steal a radio) and unconventional warfare (disease, computer viruses, unsuspecting human bombs). Things are even worse in DND-land because adventuring parties pack as much military might as an entire nation-state into a single room. Planeshift and spelljammers let you walk right around those defenses, planeshift with an adventuring party or VIPs and spelljammers with cargo.

[fectin]

Now, I thought, perhaps wrongly, that the design goals for this thought experiment included (1) gates are something people can make, and (2) people still fly spelljammers about. For spelljammers to be worthwhile, there has to be a reason not to take gates.

This really doesn't seem like a difficult design challenge. If a world is "adjacent" to more than one world and a gate travels to exactly one location which may or may not be "adjacent", then planeshift and gates have selling points. If a spelljammer travels to adjacent worlds in more time than it takes to cast planeshift, but has a larger cargo capacity than six people linking hands, then spelljammers, planeshift, and gates all have selling points. Clear and unambiguous selling points.

As soon as you start "tuning" gates like in Stargate to get to multiple locations, they start really shitting on planeshift. But if they don't, the problem never existed in the first place to need any solving.

-Username17

I don't disagree, but any volume of cargo serious enough to support a trade route is probably serious enough to just build a new gate, which crowds out the trade routes. That means Spelljammers are basically playing in the fringes only (a la Firefly), which doesn't suck, but also isn't normally what I think of as Spelljammer.

I completely ignored Plane Shift, because its operation is undefined (are planets planes, or does plane shift just get you ethereal/astral/shadow/elemental fudge access?). Also, you have to clear a 500 mile radius around your target thoroughly enough to get cargo from anywhere you land to where you actually want it to go.

The reason not to take gates is that gates can be defended.

Not only that, but once you have one, you really, really, want to defend it. That drives an overhead cost onto the gate though (like TSA is an overhead of air travel, but probably more so with gates), which is what I said originally.

[Chamomile]

I don't disagree, but any volume of cargo serious enough to support a trade route is probably serious enough to just build a new gate, which crowds out the trade routes.

If we want spelljammers to be regular cargo ships and not just fringe traders (and I'm not convinced I even want that), then we just make the cost of building a new gate really obscenely high. Potentially make it outright impossible, because of the precursor artifact thing.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Can't the portals themselves be on a set schedule? That's a pretty classic plot conceit used even by Time Bandits.

Efficient gate chains exist where 'the stars are right' for all the gates in the chain at about the same time; the maximum length of an efficient two-way chain would depend on how long the gates can stay open.

This sort of a thing makes gate mechanics more arbitrary (entirely in the hands of the GM), but it makes them seem less arbitrary in the setting.

[zeruslord]

Some numbers on gate travel: assuming Wolfram Alpha is right about walking speeds, there's a three foot separation between people going through, and a person-sized gate is being walked through two thirds of the time, you can put about 70000 people through per day. If they're each carrying 50 pounds of stuff, that's 1750 tons per day. If we swap over to camels, the carry 300 pounds but are a bunch longer - it'll double or triple the capacity, but you're also doubling the size of the gate. Finding real estimates of historical cargo capacity is a pain, and there's like 5 different units and things getting measured, and they're all called a ton, but it looks like most sailing merchantmen are way under 1750 (weight) tons of cargo.

Now, that's assuming no security, so people move at walking pace, about 1 a second, and that the line is single-file. If security isn't letting someone through every 10 seconds, a smallish cargo ship arriving per day in each direction is winning. If you want spelljammers to win, and wagons are going through these things, you're talking crazy inspection times or getting real security clearances just to be in the room.

So, you can have

• crazy inspection times (don't get TSA in my D&D)
• stargate-level secrecy (Sigil doesn't get to feel like Sigil, gates aren't really useful travel mechanisms for adventurers)
• gates being the primary trade mechanism instead of spelljamming (it doesn't really feel like Spelljammer)

I think there's stuff you can do in option 3 to provide spelljammer-like gameplay, if you're willing to have gateless or low-gate backwaters as an endpoint on most journeys. There's certainly plenty of room for something between TSA and open wagon-scale gates chilling in the town square.

[Lokathor]

There's at least one option that you didn't consider: Gates can't operate 24 hours a day.

Either they open up for fixed periods at specified times, or they can be opened at any time up to a limit after which they enter a cooldown, or anything like that. Just something that limits how long a gate can be kept running would allow gatejamming to be the best personal travel while allowing spelljamming to be the preferred method of cargo.

[virgil]

There are multiple reasons to support spelljammers in a Gatejammer multiverse. If you want to explore, spelljammers allow for people without planeshift to do so. Even for those who can planeshift on their own, if a spelljammer can move 300 miles in less time than it takes to walk (because of the 5d100 inaccuracy), it's an advantage. Even in the cargo instance, a spelljammer flying through a gate allows for far greater efficiency.

Gates are at greatest efficiency if they connect distant planes rather than adjacent ones. Gates should ideally be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than a spelljammer. If those two elements are used, then the planes near Clangor are going to have spelljammers to reach Finality rather than gates; especially planes with more than one trade city.

One of the flaws of Spelljammer proper was the value of the jammers being too high for PCs' relative WBL. If you make them cheaper, then that's less of a problem

[Pulsewidth]

I actually didn't know circadian rhythms were psuedoscience. Given who I picked up the term from, I really should have checked into that a bit more...

Circadian rhythms are a real thing, the pseudoscience is in tying them to teleportation timing.

[virgil]

Are we doing a Finality project with a Gatejammer backdrop, or a Gatejammer project where Finality is one of several planar metropolises?

[sabs]

I was under the impression that it was going to be:
Finality Projecg with a Gatejammer/Spelljammer backdrop.

[fectin]

Phase One - User Requirements Definition: What the hell do you want?

Until you get that nailed down, it's pretty hard to deliver against it.

[zeruslord]

I'm more interested in Gatescape + Spelljammers than in Spelljammer + gates. I'd rather see an overall setting book rather than a finality book, but I'd be onboard for either.

[Wiseman]

http://www.pathguy.com/planesca.htm

some stuff on the factions. Warning: Preachy

[tussock]

Gatescape+spelljammer is just massively expensive gate use plus slow spelljamming. You can send special teams through to deal with emergencies (the PCs), and diplomats (the PCs) and assassin squads (the PCs) but armies and common trade goods are only affordable by spelljammer fleets.

And even then, not affordable in that almost everything is still gathered locally, so you have a medieval milieu. You can even do zero-net-treasure because there's huge rewards found on adventure but they just go to running the gate, for episodic play.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You know, I just plain don't get the whole appeal of 'the archon and devil come together to share a pizza' that's supposed to be the big selling point of Sigil.

It's really stupid. And even kind of offensive. It's not like we're talking about some fascist and a communist having a spirited debate; we're talking about a gleeful untouchable war criminal having a debate.

The fact that this detente is enforced by an uberdeity who doesn't care what people does in their offtime as long as they follow some vague rules just makes it worse. Apparently some people have tried to circumvent this by going 'but then you can dicker around in the shadows and get your convoluted revenge as long as you follow some specific rules', apparently not grasping what the original problem was.

If this was played for grimdark in the sense of 'people try vainly to convince Nog Soggoth to not kill the orphanage' that would be one thing.

[Ted the Flayer]

EDIT: Thought I was in the Finality Brainstorming thread, so never mind

(\/) (;,,;) (\/)

[hyzmarca]

You know, I just plain don't get the whole appeal of 'the archon and devil come together to share a pizza' that's supposed to be the big selling point of Sigil.

The Devils and the Angels, for all of their differences, are ultimately on the same side. The entire reason that the Nine Hells exist at all is that Asmodeus, a kick-as Angel, thought his fellows weren't being proactive enough in their war with the Abyss, got thrown down for his troubles, and landed so hard that the crater formed a new plane. Both of them can agree that demons are bad.

Given their historical ties and mutual goals, it makes sense that they'd at leave retain basic diplomatic connections.


But beyond that, it's just realpolitik. They might be evil, but they're not going anywhere. Negotiating with them just makes sense.