(TFT) In defense of the math

[Thorn <edt@dopey.ne.mediaone.net>]

"The army of the Fendorians amass outside the city, and you are-"

"How many?"

"What?"

"How many guys in the army?"

"Uh...  a LOT."



Never wanting to be without a reasonable answer, I try to prepare ahead
of time.  For my setting The Old World, I wanted such a legacy of
powerful guild-nations, building 'ultimate weapons'.  I postulated The
Rust, a blight that spreads far too quickly to stop, and wrote of how
all the wheat in Old Lian was destroyed overnight.  I postulated 'what
if you teleported a thing, not somewhere else, but just _away_?', and
wrote of the great city of Windlane, its place on a mountainous coast,
its great windmills and shipyards, its flying ships... and the mile-wide
hemispherical harbor that is all that's left of this great power of the
Old World.  The Hounds of Beklor, the Image of Arethedias, bla bla bla,
and all started from an idea, not merely conjured to answer "What's
behind the door?"

Some games want arrows to be sold by the quiver, like disposable razor
blades, and full through the end of the adventure, like the clips of
B-cinema pistols.  Some want to know how many are in the quiver, and
count off each shot.  Some games try to track the arrows fired, for
later recovery.  And I know one guy personally whose archer/ranger could
tell you the exact contents of his quiver, including who made each
shaft, where the heads were made/purchased, and how many kills each
arrow has made.  To each his own.

The math is like that.  If I use the scenario where the enemy has built
such a 'Gate Tower', and the PCs must stop the enemy mage, before he can
create an exit gate for the weapon, I can now call that gate The
Nineteenth Gate.  If the PCs hear that name from the mage or his
apprentices, they can do the math backwards, or take the clue to a sage,
and find out that while the method is being used as a weapon, it must
have been intended to produce escape velocity.  <dramatic music here> 
Alternately, they might go looking for the other 18 wizards.  <3 Stooges
theme here>

I find the math useful.  It points things out, like that Rick Smith is a
mean GM.  :)  Or more seriously, that the height of the Gate 'Tower' is
only important _with_ Rick's take on second failures of unstable gates. 
Without Rick's '2nd failure is immediate' interpretation, the gates can
be an inch apart, and the scheme still works for 18-19 gate pairs.

But what the math really does is let us think about it.  What if
Windlane made it to space?  What if there's a gate someplace to a
platform at the Grouchy Boundary, where a solar sailship is nearly ready
for a trip Out There?  Sure, we can do all this without the math, we can
wave our hands and chant 'Spelljamming Helm... Air Envelope...  Gravity
Plane...', we can just make up an answer to "What's behind the door?"

But I really want to _know_.

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