Gilded castles

There's a story I remember from school assemblies and tried to google just now to get an attribution for, but I don't really know how, without a title, author, or quote. But it goes something like:



A man dies and arrives in the afterlife, and the guy who comes to greet him asks exactly how he wants to spend eternity. And he says he wants a gold castle, a full roast dinner daily, and deliveries of the Times. Which he duly gets.

Every day.

For years, and years, and years.

And after a while he's sick of roast dinners, and he doesn't recognise anyone in the Times, and why should he even care when it's nothing to do with him any more?

And he gets progressively more fed up.

Until he sees the greeter outside his castle and flags him down and yells at him, "What kind of heaven do you call this?"

And the guy is just like "Who said this was heaven?"




Which is your basic be careful what you wish for as suitable for making an impression on twelve year olds, unless it was elevens or tens or under eights.

But it makes a good point.

And it just idly crossed my mind to see who wrote it, or a thing like it, but it turns out that if you mention roast dinners and the times you don't google stories, so. Heck if I know.




But it's right up there with the one about heaven and hell both involving very long spoons. Like, someone has to have written it, but I haven't heard it in a context that would tell me who. And it still seems like a good idea.

Magic College

I have been playing with imaginary numbers and considering the social results again.

So, magic in Gurps, hours of study per spell learned, and the way extra magery makes you so much quicker.

Everyone they let in to magic college has magery 0. They can see magic and are technically a mage. Yaay.

But there's also people there studying up to 40% quicker (30 if you only have M3 in that universe, which was the assumption of my math.)

How do you schedule lessons so everyone can study?

At lower levels you'd have mixed Magery classes.

I did some maths and a M3 mage needs 17.5 days of 8 hour classes to learn a single spell. They are just that good. So to optimise use of teachers time, that's what you schedule. Do it across 28 days, four weeks of 5 days of lessons and some weekends and half days, and you leave enough time for M0 students to keep up. If they do the reading. For enough hours to round up to 12 hours a day studying. Every day.

So that means the most basic students, the ones who know there's an upper limit on what they'll ever be able to do, are having to study all the hours of all the days, while M3 gifted types can stroll it.

Resentment seems to naturally follow.

But on top of that there's all those hours the M3 can be pursuing their own studies. ( Read more... )

Going to effect how mages see themselves, each other, and the kinds of magic they do. How long someone had to study and if they needed a teacher? A hierarchy gets built in.

And if some colleges are simply not taught there, but make excellent prerequisites? There's another complex hierarchy to bump into.



Is fun.