![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI've been thinking on how magic shall work in my virtual reality world. The one run in 100 brains linked by a giant capertiller.
The GURPS rules books for VR just says run it like an alternate universe. So it can have any rules. So I could just use the Magic rules as written. But then I would have nothing to think on when I'm insomniac or attempting to stay awake through the day time.
So, I was thinking on rules for VR. Every user needs a VR interface and every ten users need a VR manager. Also they need a lot of data storage to be the world, or possibly galaxy. It didn't say if they still need all those programs if they are themselves programs, but say they do. And further say that the VR interface is about ones own perceptions and presentation to the VR world, but the VR manager is about how you interact with it, the local rules and stuff.
There would be things that are trivially easy for VR beings, like changing their avatar. All the kinds of spells that change your personal form should be easy for anyone with any tiny ability to hack their own parameters. Also all the Detect spells would be simples. Those kind of balance out, so almost everyone can shapeshift, but the same almost everyone can see who it is who is wearing that av, like the context hover menu on a journal. Or like See Aura I think, I haven't got the Magic book down off the shelf yet.
Not everyone would wake up able to see auras. When first loaded into the VR the nature of the VR is not immediately apparent, and appearances can be deceiving. Storytelling is more fun that way. So not everyone has Magery yet. But it can be acquired through experience with the VR.
There are also magic items. The little glasses that let you see who it is you're talking to would be ubiquitous. Only total newbies wouldn't know that you needed the magic monocle or stone with a hole in it or whatever.
... magic items can make the world weird *fast*, especially if they're easy to create. Think carefully on availability.
So any Magery at all can see auras and figure who they're talking to.
The simplest, lowest level, things are the changes one does to oneself. That includes Body of Fire though, so there's plenty of powerful stuff that would be really low level that way. It has logic though. Makes the VR world a very dangerous place.
And that's just things one can do to one's own VR Interface.
Next level up is ability to hack the VR manager. Altering the parameters of how one interacts with the Matrix makes much more magic possible. But the fun of this level is, you can't have less than ten people empowered at once. Whatever spells you have made possible, all ten of you can potentially do them, if they learn the way to access them. You all get Magery 1, or possibly 2 by now, and if you learn the spells you can all do the same things. If you seek this level of magic, there's ways to attain it, but doing so powers up 9 others, and you do not know who they are. And even if you somehow learn, if any of them get deactivated (that is die back to being stored memory), then whoever replaces them gets the same privileges. Anyone attempting to Highlander the rules will swiftly learn there can never be only one. They will have equal power to the other nine, but perhaps more knowledge.
One level more complex is the VR Interface of other MEs. Your own is easy to reach, the VR manager running it is next hardest, and past that is the other VR interface. That would let you shapeshift others, but it's also the level that enables all the direct damage spells. Which spells are direct there's already rules for, I think. If you've tweaked your VRM so you can direct lightning, it's still basically the world throwing a lightning bolt at someone. If you want to wave a hand and open up cuts on someone else, that's the VRI of another ME, a higher level of Magery required. So you wonder why anyone would bother. But it's also the level of all Healing spells. Healing yourself is simple, healing others is very hard. Easier to be selfish.
... what healing represents in a VR world is a bit lalala We Say So, because really there's no physical damage involved, so how can you ever 'kill' another player? Well it's possible to knock them back to stored data, and if I'm not going to use the rules for hit points, what rules to use?
Maybe there's something in the Spirits rules. Ghosts shouldn't have hit points either. I've got the 3rd ed Spirits book, that would need some translating for 4e.
The absolutely most difficult spells would be those that effect the minds of others. That would involve actually hacking another Mind Emulation. The highest level of Magery would be required, and considerable skill.
Plus, while I can see there being short cuts to certain effects written in to the VR worlds, spells pre created that are accessible without actually learning the code they involve, why would such things exist to hack Mind Emulations?
... because the Matrix might want a few tools hand?
... the existence of such spells implies dark and nasty things about the purpose of the world...
So are all spells these short cuts, activated by people who have a certain level of privilege, as represented by Magery?
Or are some people actually, with full understanding, working on the base code of their universe?
The rules for GURPS Mage the Ascension have a panel on that, how ordinary GURPS magic fits with the extremely powerful and flexible Awakened stuff. Actually I think it also has a section for basing Magic skills off Computer Hacking rather than Thaumaturgy. You could have a VR where both work but Computer Hacking can make new spells.
After 100 years of VR how many spells exist?
When were they created, why, and by whom?
So, Magery 0 can see, Magery 1 can hack ones own VR Interface, Magery 2 can hack your own VR Manager, Magery 3 someone else's VR Interface, and Magery 4 can hack other minds.
That gives you a rather different hierarchy of difficulty from the standard assumptions.
Also there are things that should be trivially easy in VR, like moving around. Perhaps flight or super fast running would involve tweaking the local physics, VRM, Magery 2. And the world would have to build around you faster, which could be a resource hog. But just gating from place to place? Should be simples. You're only changing yourself, your location parameter. Yet gate spells are really difficult, iirc, in standard rules. Probably because of what they make difficult and easy. If you can just walk away from any fight, how to make it challenging?
Could make it just as easy for everyone else to walk after you.
Could make Teleport impossible and Gates stay open for long enough people can run after you.
That happens a lot in movies.
Or, if teleport is easy, make tracking it just as easy. Tracking is a simple perception sort of spell.
Anything that tweaks the Magery levels and which spells are more complicated is a major rule change. There's a whole Thaumaturgy book to explain how to do major magic system rule changes, but it also explains how you can totally break game balance that way. It's the easiest thing to do, to make a new system that just fries balance.
Keep the prerequisite chains just as long even if the Magery lines move and is less likely to break.
Still, is a pretty huge change.
Hmmm, if perception is a VR Interface thing then hacking someone else's VR Interface would alter their perceptions. All the Illusion college opens up at the same level as Healing.
Actually building things, in the VR Manager level of real, would be easier than an illusion!
And illusion would be targeted at only one person at a time.
*blinks*
Perhaps the perception and illusion part needs some more thinking on?
But if you hack the VR Manager then you just make it contain objects that are visible but not substantial ie illusions. That's simpler again.
The spells that I want to keep hugely difficult are ones involving brainwashing, memory alteration, and enslaving other minds. If you hack someone's ME you can rewrite them as a person. That should be the hardest thing ever, because the whole point of this VR is to preserve all the people.
(Also because if you invent a character you don't want someone going lalala you're my slave now and also you think only my things lalala, because it's no fun.)
Spells about body swapping make no sense within the VR. You can change your own avatar to look like someone and change someone else's av to look like you, but you are always only your own program. If you want to copy yourself into their program space and run instead of them then that's a... wait, it isn't a ME hack, their ME remains preserved but cut off. That's a total hijack of their VR Interface. Huh. That's up there with healing, but still simpler than brainwashing.
The Landlord would not approve of such shenanigans. Getting caught would mean all your instances being shut down.
So then there's the Sleepers and the way dead in this realm never actually means dead. People go and hang out being empty in some kind of place for dead people. They're asleep, memory stored. Nothing can happen to them, and they can't do anything to people. But there's no particular reason to get rid of their avs or their buildings or anything. It's just data storage, and they have plenty of that. So when someone 'dies' they really just hang around not being interactive. Like the whole world is full of Snow White.
That would clutter up the streets in a weird way.
Probably they have their own corner to sleep in.
There's a world of the dead, and people can be retrieved from it.
But to get them run time means swapping them for someone who is currently active. Again, total hijack of a VRI. One mind goes dormant and another wakes up. So resurrection is the same difficult as healing ie very difficult, plus you need to learn lots of prerequisites first.
If you just kill someone then a random person gets woken up. Or someone the Landlord chooses. Which seems pretty random to the inhabitants.
If you do magic on someone you can swap them for a dead person.
Cool.
(It would be like making their mind be in the VR 'body', then altering that avatar to suit. Or you could just leave the av the same and have a new mind in an old body. Would that let you cheat the aura, the person labels? Hmmm. Ability to cheat those labels be the ultimate sneak. Ability to cheat them well enough the Landlord can't untangle them be... a really good way to get so lost you can never be woke up again. Huh. Interesting curse, may the Landlord forget you...)
So then there's the level of magic that interfaces with actual meat bodies and what passes for the real world.
That is even harder than hacking a Mind Emulation.
There shouldn't be anyone with that level of privilege.
Who would ever design a VR where plugging in let people hack your body?
But the Landlord can decide who wakes and sleeps, and has the physical access to download and upload minds. It's intended for use with empty clone bodies, but there's no technical difference when using a previously inhabited bod. Scan a mind out, pour a mind in.
There should be very, very few people with that kind of access. It's god stuff.
It's pretty much Planar Gate, spells to move between realities.
... I think I want to represent it as a gate, because then you can run through the wrong one.
So... so the 100 minds with meat bodies should have access to them at any time, should be able to walk out of VR on their own into their own bodies, but the Landlord is meant to keep them locked in instead.
Maybe is a bit like the SG1 Gamekeeper episode where there's exits but you have to know about them?
Insufficiently difficult.
No, wait, some of them are permitted to pop in and out, so that is precisely how it works for those that are free to leave.
But there's a lock on most of them that's meant to keep them in the VR.
So unlocking that door to their own meat would be a spell that circumvents the will of the local godlike.
Hacking into someone else's door... yeah, there's no way a regular Mind Emulation should be able to do that.
Hmmm, but if there's people who are free to leave, have unlocked gates the Landlord isn't guarding, that would be everso tempting to a local who knows how to see it. That running through the wrong gate bit, it's so much easier when the gate is already open.
I kind of want to body swap my PCs some time, take regulars and leave them in the wrong bodies. Making that too easy would also make it too easy for any old Mind Emulation to just pop out for a spin in someone else's meat.
If the Giant Capertiller has to let you go then the experience is very much like a trapdoor, like that jolt you get on the edge of sleep where you're sure you're falling and then you're sitting up in bed. Only the bed is a ten thousand year old suspended animation capsule, and you're lying on a section of Giant Capertiller. Which is a bit squishy and damp. Eew.
A mind that can find specific Sleepers, choose to wake one, swap them out for a running ME, they're like a necromancer priest. Serious power.
A mind that can find specific bodies, and choose to walk in to one? Walk, effectively, into another universe?
They're doing something the Landlord cannot.
Godlike power. Big time.
Of course once they're awake they're subject to all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
And, since they've spent really substantial character points on Magery and spells, they are seriously depowered, interacting with reality within constant rules.
Pretty good reasons to stay in the VR.
Thinking up reasons people would want out is the fun bit.
Thinking up lists of spells known in VR and how difficult they are to learn would take a bit of a while. And probably end up unbalanced and not so cool. Simpler to say magic works in the usual way, or just as the plot demands.
But that doesn't give you any skeleton to climb around on.
The GURPS rules books for VR just says run it like an alternate universe. So it can have any rules. So I could just use the Magic rules as written. But then I would have nothing to think on when I'm insomniac or attempting to stay awake through the day time.
So, I was thinking on rules for VR. Every user needs a VR interface and every ten users need a VR manager. Also they need a lot of data storage to be the world, or possibly galaxy. It didn't say if they still need all those programs if they are themselves programs, but say they do. And further say that the VR interface is about ones own perceptions and presentation to the VR world, but the VR manager is about how you interact with it, the local rules and stuff.
There would be things that are trivially easy for VR beings, like changing their avatar. All the kinds of spells that change your personal form should be easy for anyone with any tiny ability to hack their own parameters. Also all the Detect spells would be simples. Those kind of balance out, so almost everyone can shapeshift, but the same almost everyone can see who it is who is wearing that av, like the context hover menu on a journal. Or like See Aura I think, I haven't got the Magic book down off the shelf yet.
Not everyone would wake up able to see auras. When first loaded into the VR the nature of the VR is not immediately apparent, and appearances can be deceiving. Storytelling is more fun that way. So not everyone has Magery yet. But it can be acquired through experience with the VR.
There are also magic items. The little glasses that let you see who it is you're talking to would be ubiquitous. Only total newbies wouldn't know that you needed the magic monocle or stone with a hole in it or whatever.
... magic items can make the world weird *fast*, especially if they're easy to create. Think carefully on availability.
So any Magery at all can see auras and figure who they're talking to.
The simplest, lowest level, things are the changes one does to oneself. That includes Body of Fire though, so there's plenty of powerful stuff that would be really low level that way. It has logic though. Makes the VR world a very dangerous place.
And that's just things one can do to one's own VR Interface.
Next level up is ability to hack the VR manager. Altering the parameters of how one interacts with the Matrix makes much more magic possible. But the fun of this level is, you can't have less than ten people empowered at once. Whatever spells you have made possible, all ten of you can potentially do them, if they learn the way to access them. You all get Magery 1, or possibly 2 by now, and if you learn the spells you can all do the same things. If you seek this level of magic, there's ways to attain it, but doing so powers up 9 others, and you do not know who they are. And even if you somehow learn, if any of them get deactivated (that is die back to being stored memory), then whoever replaces them gets the same privileges. Anyone attempting to Highlander the rules will swiftly learn there can never be only one. They will have equal power to the other nine, but perhaps more knowledge.
One level more complex is the VR Interface of other MEs. Your own is easy to reach, the VR manager running it is next hardest, and past that is the other VR interface. That would let you shapeshift others, but it's also the level that enables all the direct damage spells. Which spells are direct there's already rules for, I think. If you've tweaked your VRM so you can direct lightning, it's still basically the world throwing a lightning bolt at someone. If you want to wave a hand and open up cuts on someone else, that's the VRI of another ME, a higher level of Magery required. So you wonder why anyone would bother. But it's also the level of all Healing spells. Healing yourself is simple, healing others is very hard. Easier to be selfish.
... what healing represents in a VR world is a bit lalala We Say So, because really there's no physical damage involved, so how can you ever 'kill' another player? Well it's possible to knock them back to stored data, and if I'm not going to use the rules for hit points, what rules to use?
Maybe there's something in the Spirits rules. Ghosts shouldn't have hit points either. I've got the 3rd ed Spirits book, that would need some translating for 4e.
The absolutely most difficult spells would be those that effect the minds of others. That would involve actually hacking another Mind Emulation. The highest level of Magery would be required, and considerable skill.
Plus, while I can see there being short cuts to certain effects written in to the VR worlds, spells pre created that are accessible without actually learning the code they involve, why would such things exist to hack Mind Emulations?
... because the Matrix might want a few tools hand?
... the existence of such spells implies dark and nasty things about the purpose of the world...
So are all spells these short cuts, activated by people who have a certain level of privilege, as represented by Magery?
Or are some people actually, with full understanding, working on the base code of their universe?
The rules for GURPS Mage the Ascension have a panel on that, how ordinary GURPS magic fits with the extremely powerful and flexible Awakened stuff. Actually I think it also has a section for basing Magic skills off Computer Hacking rather than Thaumaturgy. You could have a VR where both work but Computer Hacking can make new spells.
After 100 years of VR how many spells exist?
When were they created, why, and by whom?
So, Magery 0 can see, Magery 1 can hack ones own VR Interface, Magery 2 can hack your own VR Manager, Magery 3 someone else's VR Interface, and Magery 4 can hack other minds.
That gives you a rather different hierarchy of difficulty from the standard assumptions.
Also there are things that should be trivially easy in VR, like moving around. Perhaps flight or super fast running would involve tweaking the local physics, VRM, Magery 2. And the world would have to build around you faster, which could be a resource hog. But just gating from place to place? Should be simples. You're only changing yourself, your location parameter. Yet gate spells are really difficult, iirc, in standard rules. Probably because of what they make difficult and easy. If you can just walk away from any fight, how to make it challenging?
Could make it just as easy for everyone else to walk after you.
Could make Teleport impossible and Gates stay open for long enough people can run after you.
That happens a lot in movies.
Or, if teleport is easy, make tracking it just as easy. Tracking is a simple perception sort of spell.
Anything that tweaks the Magery levels and which spells are more complicated is a major rule change. There's a whole Thaumaturgy book to explain how to do major magic system rule changes, but it also explains how you can totally break game balance that way. It's the easiest thing to do, to make a new system that just fries balance.
Keep the prerequisite chains just as long even if the Magery lines move and is less likely to break.
Still, is a pretty huge change.
Hmmm, if perception is a VR Interface thing then hacking someone else's VR Interface would alter their perceptions. All the Illusion college opens up at the same level as Healing.
Actually building things, in the VR Manager level of real, would be easier than an illusion!
And illusion would be targeted at only one person at a time.
*blinks*
Perhaps the perception and illusion part needs some more thinking on?
But if you hack the VR Manager then you just make it contain objects that are visible but not substantial ie illusions. That's simpler again.
The spells that I want to keep hugely difficult are ones involving brainwashing, memory alteration, and enslaving other minds. If you hack someone's ME you can rewrite them as a person. That should be the hardest thing ever, because the whole point of this VR is to preserve all the people.
(Also because if you invent a character you don't want someone going lalala you're my slave now and also you think only my things lalala, because it's no fun.)
Spells about body swapping make no sense within the VR. You can change your own avatar to look like someone and change someone else's av to look like you, but you are always only your own program. If you want to copy yourself into their program space and run instead of them then that's a... wait, it isn't a ME hack, their ME remains preserved but cut off. That's a total hijack of their VR Interface. Huh. That's up there with healing, but still simpler than brainwashing.
The Landlord would not approve of such shenanigans. Getting caught would mean all your instances being shut down.
So then there's the Sleepers and the way dead in this realm never actually means dead. People go and hang out being empty in some kind of place for dead people. They're asleep, memory stored. Nothing can happen to them, and they can't do anything to people. But there's no particular reason to get rid of their avs or their buildings or anything. It's just data storage, and they have plenty of that. So when someone 'dies' they really just hang around not being interactive. Like the whole world is full of Snow White.
That would clutter up the streets in a weird way.
Probably they have their own corner to sleep in.
There's a world of the dead, and people can be retrieved from it.
But to get them run time means swapping them for someone who is currently active. Again, total hijack of a VRI. One mind goes dormant and another wakes up. So resurrection is the same difficult as healing ie very difficult, plus you need to learn lots of prerequisites first.
If you just kill someone then a random person gets woken up. Or someone the Landlord chooses. Which seems pretty random to the inhabitants.
If you do magic on someone you can swap them for a dead person.
Cool.
(It would be like making their mind be in the VR 'body', then altering that avatar to suit. Or you could just leave the av the same and have a new mind in an old body. Would that let you cheat the aura, the person labels? Hmmm. Ability to cheat those labels be the ultimate sneak. Ability to cheat them well enough the Landlord can't untangle them be... a really good way to get so lost you can never be woke up again. Huh. Interesting curse, may the Landlord forget you...)
So then there's the level of magic that interfaces with actual meat bodies and what passes for the real world.
That is even harder than hacking a Mind Emulation.
There shouldn't be anyone with that level of privilege.
Who would ever design a VR where plugging in let people hack your body?
But the Landlord can decide who wakes and sleeps, and has the physical access to download and upload minds. It's intended for use with empty clone bodies, but there's no technical difference when using a previously inhabited bod. Scan a mind out, pour a mind in.
There should be very, very few people with that kind of access. It's god stuff.
It's pretty much Planar Gate, spells to move between realities.
... I think I want to represent it as a gate, because then you can run through the wrong one.
So... so the 100 minds with meat bodies should have access to them at any time, should be able to walk out of VR on their own into their own bodies, but the Landlord is meant to keep them locked in instead.
Maybe is a bit like the SG1 Gamekeeper episode where there's exits but you have to know about them?
Insufficiently difficult.
No, wait, some of them are permitted to pop in and out, so that is precisely how it works for those that are free to leave.
But there's a lock on most of them that's meant to keep them in the VR.
So unlocking that door to their own meat would be a spell that circumvents the will of the local godlike.
Hacking into someone else's door... yeah, there's no way a regular Mind Emulation should be able to do that.
Hmmm, but if there's people who are free to leave, have unlocked gates the Landlord isn't guarding, that would be everso tempting to a local who knows how to see it. That running through the wrong gate bit, it's so much easier when the gate is already open.
I kind of want to body swap my PCs some time, take regulars and leave them in the wrong bodies. Making that too easy would also make it too easy for any old Mind Emulation to just pop out for a spin in someone else's meat.
If the Giant Capertiller has to let you go then the experience is very much like a trapdoor, like that jolt you get on the edge of sleep where you're sure you're falling and then you're sitting up in bed. Only the bed is a ten thousand year old suspended animation capsule, and you're lying on a section of Giant Capertiller. Which is a bit squishy and damp. Eew.
A mind that can find specific Sleepers, choose to wake one, swap them out for a running ME, they're like a necromancer priest. Serious power.
A mind that can find specific bodies, and choose to walk in to one? Walk, effectively, into another universe?
They're doing something the Landlord cannot.
Godlike power. Big time.
Of course once they're awake they're subject to all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
And, since they've spent really substantial character points on Magery and spells, they are seriously depowered, interacting with reality within constant rules.
Pretty good reasons to stay in the VR.
Thinking up reasons people would want out is the fun bit.
Thinking up lists of spells known in VR and how difficult they are to learn would take a bit of a while. And probably end up unbalanced and not so cool. Simpler to say magic works in the usual way, or just as the plot demands.
But that doesn't give you any skeleton to climb around on.