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

----- Original Message ----- From: "Margaret Tapley" 

You can call me Meg because that's what everyone else calls me. Except
Dad, of course :-P




Gottchya Miss Meg!


Astrology becomes Astronomy, Alchemy becomes Chemistry, and so on.


Or they were completely different to start with. ITL rules treat
Alchemy and Chemistry as two completely different fields, indicated by
the fact that Chemists don't get any "discount" when learning Alchemy,
like Physickers do when learning Vet.



DOAH! Good point!
Chemistry is IQ 13 and Alchemy is IQ 14... mainly because chemists make poision and stat manipulation plus berserker and smell heightening potion (?) while alchemists make the rest of the potions. 
Alchemists are magicians according to AW.
I wonder if they are part of the 1 in 50 with "some small ability with magic" and how that relates to apprentices? Also Chemist is a six point Talent for a Wizard... Alchemist is three points. "Three hundred years after Jen Mnoren's first jump, his dependents had found, mapped, and conqured 371 alternate Earths. Three had space travel; eleven had magic." That's over a world discovered per year, but only about 1 magical world every 25 years or so and space flight only once a century. (assuming the discoveries were spread evenly over time)
ITL also says that it's not only complexity that gives a Talent its number but also the time required to keep in practice. It specificly states that while Running is not intellectually demanding it gets a (2) because it takes LOTS of time to keep in that kind of shape. 
So what does this say about a Wizard w/Chemistry (6)?
Does a figure with magical ability (1 in 300) have to study magic for this to kick in or is it being a member of that 1 in 300 that sticks the double cost Talents on a Wizard? 
Can a Figure "forget" being a Wizard and switch to Hero?


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).


Not necessarily. If I remember right, the Wright brothers had their
airplane off the ground years before the Hindenburg blew up. And
dirigibles work fine, but you have to have a huge volume of helium (or
hydrogen...) for the amount of weight you can lift. So, even without
the Hindenburg disaster, I would bet good money that we'd still be
using airplanes for at least some purposes (if only military ones).
But I get your point. :)


Excelent point.
I forgot that the military dosen't always care about cost.
Sometimes it makes sense to spend more resourses for extra speed, etc.
I've done a LOT of stuff involving melding tech-research concepts from games like Civ or MoO ( MoM, PvK, LOL, :-} ) with the "5 second turn". 
That's what I was thinking of when making that comment.



I would say (though there's absolutely no evidence) that demons use
the plane from which they originated to teleport, by popping back into
that plane and then out again in a different spot.



This is very interesting.
Is there a one to one point corospondance twixt the demon "plane" and... Cidri's? I assume there isn't a one to one corospondance in the passage of time in such a case if the "movement" appears instant on Cidri's plane. But is there a distance that a demon could move on their own plane that would equate to less than instant? Teleport (IQ 15) is 1 ST per mega-hex distance, (Wizard only) while Long Distance Teleport (IQ 19) is ANY location the Wizard can "visualize, magical or otherwise except a magical crystal ball is forbiden for a straight 20 ST. 

...
From 1 ST per ~4m too anywhere you can "visualize" (Corwins Deck of Trumps?) 
for 20 ST within 5 points of IQ?
Your 'Pater Familias' sparked an intresting idea for me concerning this kind of thing. If I can describe "building" spells after the same fassion as constructing and electronic circut then I might be able to coax a more discriptive spell system outta this. 
ST batteries as capacitors so to speak...
That one is in its 'infant' stage but may prove somewhat promising.
I have this weird idea that the better I can "match" or describe what I'm seeing as a GM in my imagination makes the gameing experience better for everyone. Then I started thinking that the posistion of GM didn't put my imagination in some sorta 'privlidged' possition as opposed to the Players. That's when I started trying to tie "real world" reference stuff to the "statistics" in ATFT. 



Taking a cue from Einstine and asking the basic questions;
What is 1 point of ST, DX or IQ compaired to other Figures of greater/lesser "ability"?
What is 1 point of damage from a sword compaired to a hammer compaired to a projectile etc.?
What is 1 hex in the GM's imagination compaired to what a GM is trying to describe to their Players? 



I think of TFT as a kind of RPG 'Zip'-file with reasonable data.
Very basic things like the TFT damage from weapons are somewhat screwed-up however, and I can't even say it's my opinion (although I can't fault a guy in the early/mid 70's having to resort to something like this w/o any easy refrence to data-claims). 
Note the average progressions twixt blades and clubs.

Blades
1 -1
1
2 -2
2 - 1
2
2 + 1
3 - 2
3 - 1
3 + 1

Clubs
varies (? what is a point of ST?)
1
1 + 1
2 - 1
1 + 2
2
2 + 1
2 + 2
3
Now is this a studied examanation of weapons useing objective refrence or is this tieing terms onto a numerical structure the same way I'm doing with Buildings? 

I'm working on approaching half a century of hindsight here so FWIW.



What a FANTASTIC Family!
I really enjoy the intellictual challenges you throw Miss! They make me THINK!
Perhaps attempting to find objective "rules" for "make-believe" isn't such a waste of a life? 
The good-lord knows it's a 'murkey' "living" though...
Consider Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
Haydn was for the most part a vassel of his patrons for the bulk of his "career" ($ over workspan is a career?). 
Mozart broke away from this... and suffered economically.
Beethoven was able to transend Haydn's situation w/o suffering Mozarts ruin.

Beethoven was his own man, more or less.

Was this because of who Beethoven was as a Figure?
Was this because Haydn and Mozart had 'softend-up' the PTB (powers that be) in the generation (20 years per) or so that they had before Beethoven to the point that a Beethoven could "call his musical shots" against the "funding"? 


March 31, 1732 - May 31, 1809 Haydn

27 January 1756 - 5 December 1791 Mozart

17 December 1770 - 26 March 1827 Beethoven
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