Re: (TFT) Thoughts on "Industrial Disease"

["Jay Carlisle" <selfinflicted_wounds@boardermail.com>]

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: ErolB1@aol.com
>  
> o Cost effectiveness:
It's just there, it just works, the
> NPCs don't pay a lot of attention to it, and the PCs (and players) shouldn't
> either.

Harry Potter springs to mind.
What awes the new kids barely phases the seniors.
Of course, rigidly defined & detailed inputs, such as specific ingredients, is one of the most obvious controlls for this.

> o Economies of Scale:
To avoid this, the lone wizard producing magic stuff by 
> himself, or
> maybe with the help of an apprentice or assistant, > 

I think Willow.
The wizard only picks a new apprentice every few years, as the old one moves on as a wizard him/herself.
Even then, he only picks once a year, and some years there is no apprentice.
This is a good control for magic.

> o Malicious Magic:
> To be kept wondrous and properly non-industrial, magic should be subtly
> beneficent, or at least placidly neutral. Magic that's malicious or just
> dangerously fickle 
< snip >
> gets the PCs (and the players) thinking that magic *ought* to be more
> technology-like. 

This is intresting.
It's almost like your describing good magic vs. evil magic.

> o Control-freak planning and obsession with details:
 It's
> reasonable to have fussiness and careful planning be one way in which a wizard
> can be successful, but there's a problem if its the best way, or the only way.
> 

Careful, that one cuts both ways.
 
> o Rigidly defined & detailed inputs:
The abstraction allows for inspiration, for each production of an
> enchantment to be a little different in flavor, if not necessarily 
> in terms of game
> mechanics. 

Zombie powder.
Each shaman made it diffrently.
It was hard to isolate the ingreadents from the "throw in stuff", even for botonists.

> For example, it's easy for a GM to decide to make a specific
> ingredient "out of stock" in order to make things more "interesting" for the
> wizard. But if it costs ten times as much as normal, in time, 
> effort, and silver,
> to obtain a specific ingredient, then the balance against malice requires that
> for every one time this happens, that there be TEN times when the ingredient
> falls into the wizard's lap FOR FREE. And doing *that* doesn't just require an
> iron will on the GMs part, it requires a will of high-test certified exotic
> alloy steel.

AMEN!
I like this "balance".
My most common soultion to the stock problem is to provide no stock at all.
I start 'em in the boonies.
If the players don't go get it, it's not there.
 
> o Magic so good that it creates a class distinction:
 but in order to avoid the sense of "everyone (who counts) has magic" then
> the non-elites who don't have magic still have to matter. 

Yeppers.
It takes about three peasents per adventurer (per any non ag-worker) to feed the Characters and themselves.
If an enemey rides in and kills a bunch of peasents, everybody suffers.

> This way, those with
> magic aren't cut off from those without it, and so are more regularly reminded
> of the valuable edge they have.

Exactally.
Kinda sounds like the medeival church huh?
 
In fact, a GM will often be called on to
> do a lot of wonder-killing math, and economic-thinking, and general
> brain-sweat, and to forego various cool and marvelous bits - so 
> that the players won't
> have to.

No kidding!
And a sorrow of it all is that there's stuff that never gets explored.

It kinda sounds like technological models of magic are the providence of the self-absorbed and control hungry, or, as I call them, evil characters in your gameworld.

> Erol K. Bayburt
> Evil Genius for a Better Tomorrow
> 

Thought provoking stuff sir!

Now back to Dom3!
PvK used his Jedi mind tricks and now...

"This is the game you have been looking for."

..., I'm begining to think that this is the game that I've been looking for.



Jay

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