RE: (TFT) Reliability of flickering Gates

["rsmith" <rsmith@lightspeed.ca>]

Hi Thorn,
	Since the players knew about that house
rule, there is much less desire to run a brigade
thru a flickering gate.  I mean, if you know 
even if the gate fails on the first person who
goes thru, that you will have time to run your
entire company thru, then gates are a pretty 
reliable means of transport for large groups of
people even if you don't have a high IQ wizard 
to fix a malfunctioning gate.

	I don't know, I remember hearing about a 
GM in D&D who 'should' have killed a PC from a
long fall into a pit trap.  Instead the GM caused
the PC to break a leg and an arm.

	I thought that the exchange of bad luck to
be kind of cool.  I mean, the PC did not die and
the PC experienced role playing an injury that 
can not happen in the normal D&D rules.

	If it is not cannon, any rule that makes
gates more unpredictable and unstable would be
welcome.  I think if I were to rewrite TFT, I
would drop them altogether.  They take the 
adventure out of traveling, they destroy any
sort of medieval economies, they make a mockery
of medieval military tactics.

	My last campaign, I thought of as 'magical 
industrial' with magic taking the place of high
technology.  

	There are a number of books that are written
where magic is so predicable that it takes the
place of technology.  (See Harry Turtledove's 
excellent story, "The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump" 
for an example.)  However this is not what I would 
think of high fantasy.

	I was kind of dragged kicking and screaming
into industrial magic by my PC's.  Things were 
going along like a primitive economy, then the PC 
wizards built magic items and techniques to make 
things run more efficiently.  "Hey, black snakes
are a common ingredient, let's raise them!"  "Hey
gates only fail on a 18, that's a 1/216 chance of
failure.  We can build a set of gates in a 
warehouse with a good wizard in the middle.  They
will last long enough for him and his apprentice
to run that far, and still have time to cast the 
spell twice incase he fails on the first try.  We
can then put this trade family out of business..."
etc.  I did not want my NPC's to seem stupid by
comparison so they HAD to get with the times and
start using dependable magic.

	Having gates become deadly dangerous once 
they start to flicker, slowed down but did not put 
a stop to that sort of nonsense. 

	In a 'industrial magic' world, using gates
to transport magma into castles, relativistic 
speeds catapult launchers and sewage disposal via
gate make perfect sense.  


	There was a debate a while ago about how
reliable magic was.  Most people seemed to say 
that having it be less reliable would be nice 
altho people disagreed as to how unpredictable
it should be.

	In addition, how do you make magic less 
predictable?  My friend Steve, GM'ed a campaign
with unpredictable magic where the GM just said
what happened.  It pissed off the PC's when their
spells didn't work, and they blamed the GM.

	(See the discussion on 'crunchy bits' & GM
power in Robin's Laws for more on this subject.)

	There are tables of 'spell misfires' which
are clunky, but perhaps the best of a bad 
situation.

	Anyway, making flickering gates dangerous
to use seemed like a good idea at the time.  The
one time that the rule bit the PC, (the party did
not want to get trapped on two different sides of
a gate) didn't kill the PC, and it put at least 
some additional trouble and expense into using
the gates as military transport / mass movement
of supplies.


	However, gates and the Transe spells are 
the two spells I would most like to get rid of in
TFT.



	Rick



-----Original Message-----
From: tft-owner@brainiac.com [mailto:tft-owner@brainiac.com]On Behalf Of
Ed Thorn
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 6:36 PM
To: tft@brainiac.com
Subject: RE: (TFT) Gates?


--- rsmith <rsmith@lightspeed.ca> wrote:
> Hi all, 
> 	In my campaign, if someone risks going thru
> a flickering gate and another 18 is rolled, then
> I have the gate fail instantly cutting the what
> ever in half.  (Or is this cannon? I don't 
> remember.)  I always make this roll cackling 
> evilly, with paroxysms of great disappointment, 
> when an 18 is not rolled.  On one occasion, a PC
> was cut in half, and I cheated and claimed he 
> rolled a 17.  And then inflicted the worst luck
> on him for the next couple sessions to make up
> for my kindness.
> 
> 	Rick

It's not canonical to have gates fail in mid-use. 
It's the sort of house rule that gives house rules a
bad name.  It harkens back to the days when being a
great GM required no more than a long list of traps.

I remember once a GM said gleefully, threateningly, "I
know 3000 ways to kill PCs.", patting his binder.

A Marine at the table replied, "I know 18 ways to kill
GMs.", grinning from ear to ear.  We all laughed, but
the point was made.  Neither of them had either reason
or right to do either.

And it's not fair to 'make up for' the 'kindness' of
not inflicting a rule.  Or at least, the logic escapes me.

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