Re: (TFT) Is this a decade of thought? SO SAD!

["Jay Carlisle" <Maou_Tsaou@charter.net>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Tapley"
> At 19:36 -0400 4/15/10, Jay (reasonably) wrote:
> > Hi Mrs. T.
>
> er, that would be *Miss* T (my daughter).
>
> :-)

My goodness!
How well spoken she is.
My apologies Miss T.


> At 19:36 -0400 4/15/10, Jay wrote:
> > Is the friction twixt science and religion really there?

> I think they are not in conflict, but orthogonal.

I see where she gets it from... straight-angles indeed...

> Spirituality should
> address the things that can't be experimented on, proven or disproven
> - by-definition matters of faith. Science gets the disprovable and
> provable matters.

I'm with you here.

> Clearly, Earth history shows that matters *can* move from one sphere
> to the other ("and yet, it moves!"). I claim that means we have
> gotten neither our science nor our spirituality "right" yet.

Nice point.
I'd like to mention that in a campagin that allows research this situation 
is a good thing.
Astrology becomes Astronomy, Alchemy becomes Chemistry, and so on.
Of course, this implies that you have to have a pretty solid grasp of 
Chemistry to begin with...
I actually find this easier with magic because I'm imagining it outta whole 
cloth so to speak.
I have a MUCH harder time with near-future tech.
Take the issue of power or energy requirements for a socieity.
A culture that has their main power source as campfires is only gonna get so 
much done in a day vs. a socieity that uses a coal-hydrogen hybrid power 
plant.
Resources are a big limiting factor here, but there is still the "how many 
ways can one skin a cat?" question.
Without the Hindenburg disaster we may well have gone a diffrent direction 
with air travel, see the militarys current dirgible transport projects for 
examples (or R.A.H.'s Job).
Allowing for those kind of divergences, or orthogonic paths, is an 
intresting problem.



> Margaret's question is still a good one though, even if my
> orthogonality characterization applies. If in Cidri (or wherever),
> demons are unreliable, not subject to experiment, test, provable or
> disprovable - are they a "science"? If magic is reliable in that it
> always works the same, can it be a matter of spirituality? I suppose
> there *could* be overlap ... I guess I still have neither my (Cidri)
> "science" nor my (Cidri) "spirituality" worked out "right"...

I think that alot of these problems become clearer with clearer imagination.
What does it actually mean to "Teleport"?
There's the tesseract, 4d fold idea.
On the other hand, they might just be capable of moving really, really fast.
Maybe the spell works one way and the demon ability works the other way.
Choices like that make a big diffrence I'd think.
One "Teleport" allows movement into any open space reguardless of 
topography, the other dosen't for starters.
It's fine to have just a generic teleport result for something like an arena 
combat, but waiting till the question comes up in the middle of a campaign 
to define it can cause real problems.

To focus stuff like this, I use the idea of a Timeline.
I basicly choose a culminating point on the Timeline and work backwards by 
assuming that the story would play out like this without any players 
involved to find a natural starting point for my campaigns.
Players either assist or oppose culmination or ignore the larger campaign 
world to the point that the culminating point can be a moot consideration.

"Unless it is strategically decisive, every offensive operation
will sooner or later reach a point where the strength of the attacker no
longer significantly exceeds that of the defender, and beyond which
continued offensive operations therefore risk overextension,
counterattack, and defeat. In operational theory, this point is called
the culminating point. The art of attack at all levels is to achieve
decisive objectives before the culminating point is reached. Conversely,
the art of defense is to hasten the culmination of the attack, recognize
its advent, and be prepared to go over to the offense when it arrives."
US Army Field Manual
(FM) 100-5, Operations.

This is a recognization of Clausewitz long after the fact, and he goes on to 
mention that when the attacker has overwhelming strength and resolve, the 
point occurs only as an imaginary locus far behind the opponent's main 
battle lines.
Conversely, when the attacker is hopelessly weak, the point coincides with 
the line of departure.

During the 1987 Wimbledon tennis matches, Pam Shriver, having been 
thoroughly trounced in the semifinals, said afterward that the turning point 
(read culminating point) of the match occurred when she walked out onto the 
court.

One example of a culmination point might be the date that the dark lord 
launches his invasion of so and so.
Another way of describing a culmination point is to assign requirements to 
reach the point, things like build 2 cities, buy 3 colours of civ cards, own 
180pts of civ cards, etc.
This can at least help with things like answers to fundamental questions by 
setting the scope of the campagin on the Timeline sufficiently far away from 
those issues.
I probably don't have to worry too much about an alchemist (a spiritual 
approach?) creating a super stable element with a very high atomic number.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology and 
vice versa.
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