Magic through the looking glass

So I was twiddling with magic systems, ways to make the magic work different in different connected planes.

Aspected mana would do some stuff, like only air spells working in the air elemental plane, but then you couldn't Gate out because Gate is not an air spell, and elementals couldn't get in without being summoned, which is probably what you want. Same like demons, you could make it so there's mana too limited to sustain a Gate, which would make going to hell a one way unless you've got friends back home. Or you could make the mana levels really low, make magic difficult for everything and everyone.

But I was thinking a bigger change. Something to do with time.

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I just want to use it to mess with my characters. Because I've got someone who can make a door, especially if there's a real door to use, but someone has them captured so obviously they'd need an area where the effectively teleport version of doors doesn't work. They drop them and their friend in a jar with a lot of counterspells on it. But our gate maker still has some options. ( Read more... )

(no subject)

Today I read once again about the replication crisis in psychology
where only like one in three experiments can be replicated, and probably not the famous ones
https://thenib.com/repeat-after-me (thanks conuly for link)

and I'm just like
people's entire lives are shaped by the popular perception of these experiments
the story gets written around shit that was maybe true that one time with a tiny group of people
and nobody replicated
and humans just... rewrite themselves in light of these fictions
which scares me more than the fiction presented as fiction influencing people we studied in cultural studies
and the idea humans have a programming language is pretty inherently scary
because what goes in and what results it has are very not simples.




Meanwhile I remember my ongoing frustration with science fiction not changing the world
and how science has solved so many problems but only in theory because in practice there's just... just noise, and wrong, and stuff not getting distributed.

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science fiction group

I took two games because I had not watched or read anything this past two weeks and had no talk in my head. Which is always awkward. I was willing to listen but he has been watching Teen Wolf and I have not. So. We played.

Rising Tide takes slightly longer than we spend at the pub, at least with all the reading the rules and fiddling about setting up, and it takes way more concentrate than we had available by the end of the night. So that was not a good choice on my part. But we played. And we lost. And that's a more interesting evening than if I had not gone.

Now I will have the bit of the evening where I worry that someone who meets me twice a month secretly does not want to :eyeroll:

But I ordered drinks correctly and we got home despite roadworks eventually so we did pretty okay.

And we double checked next week times so that's sorted too.

Nice evening.