This post has the following content warnings:
He should have fallen on his sword. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
Punched his ticket for Elysium right away, no waiting around.
He thought they'd only kill him.
Why did he think that? How stupid was he? Why in the world did he think that?
And now instead of his next great adventure he's flubbed a save against dominate person.
Otolmens has a MACRO to squish ALL of those AND their casters whenever She presses the SPACEBAR.
...Instant summons exists TENTATIVELY.
What is it you WANT with INSTANT SUMMONS?
Wrap a chunk of graphite in something heavy, toss it in your local gas giant, instant summons it back out.
It doesn't work. You're going to think it over and realize that you don't want it in your setting.
And then you're going to realize that putting graphite under a few hundred thousand atmospheres of pressure in a world without thermodynamics is trivially easy, and you'll have to make a sweeping rule, and you'll have to know about yourself that your game has rails.
And every time I'm asked for my ideas you're going to realize more rails.
My headcanon is that diamonds have to spend millions of years in the ground soaking up magic energy before they're useful as spell components, maybe you could use that.
...But do you know any reason that it shouldn't work?
Has anyone actually tested it?
Does this look like a world where diamond manufacture is that easy?
If it were that easy, wouldn't someone have already done it?
Cressida Kroft has an interested layman's knowledge of the sciences. Particularly but not exclusively in their practical applications.
She knows that "graphite", more commonly known as "black lead", is not a type of lead at all (nor even a metal) being instead an allotropic form of charbon, like charcoal or, yes, diamond.
And she's aware that diamonds are formed when charbon is compressed by the gargantuan pressures within Golarion (a planet which has understandably put rather more thought into how diamonds are formed than Earth had at an ~equivalent level of technological progress).
She knows that the worlds of Liavara and Bretheda are giants with titanic gravity, because she's read things written by adventurers who've visited them.
She knows that the weight of gas exerts pressure, and that sufficient pressure will liquefy it even at great temperatures.
She knows that deep water will crush you to death, because sometimes she has to kill things which think they can hide from her down there.
She can make the inferential leap that beneath the atmosphere and oceans of such a titanic planet the pressure must be immense - possibly of a level with the depths Golarion's mantle.
And she knows about the seventh-circle arcane spell instant summons, and can readily generate substitutes (cast life bubble and teleport straight to the bottom, wait for your charbon to cook, teleport back out) because sometimes she works with or against some of the most powerful wizards in Varisia.
But thinking up this method of diamond manufacture requires several concepts none of which are widely known. And, where they are known, or known-of, concepts which aren't familiar enough to most people to incorporate them in their plans.
There are intelligent, educated men and women who think that the world's diamonds were hidden with individual care and foresight by Torag when He built Golarion.
How many people on Golarion have all the component parts to understand Lyvina's plan once spoken, or the potential to produce it themselves? Less than a million people? Probably less than half that?
I would expect, if you could get diamonds by dropping them in gas giants, for it to have been uncovered already.
Honestly, I'd expect the Azlanti to have known, and for Aroden to have recorded it in The History and Future.
And if they didn't and He didn't, there's been a lot of motivated and intelligent people who've tried and failed at diamond synthesis.
But you can't just assume.
It's worth testing.
Sometimes you really are the first person to think of something big, it isn't even all that rare.
A sense of... despair, is what comes over her.
She tried to explain, and it just bounced off.
They're still trying to reassure her that she's free to, and encouraged to, optimize within the setting.
Even if the GM winds up banning manufactured diamonds, which they seem to be on the fence about. (Do they not realize what she could do with diamonds?)
They don't get the scale of the problem.
They still think that their setting is workable at its core, and only needs a few problem spells removed and a handful of customized justifications for why no one has tried one thing or another yet.
They don't get that "Europe circa 1750, mostly farmers, except, just stapled on, some people can violate the conservation of mass and energy on a whim," is, for all its representation in fiction, not a normal place.
They have no conception of the fractal impossibility.
The GM has this vision where intelligent and creative people use the spells that exist in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game against the monsters that exist in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and the GM thinks they'll get a long and interesting story out of that, and they can handle whatever problems come up with lampshades and spot-removal and tweaks.
Which the GM could, if they were only playing with Arthur and Barry and Cheryl.
None of them are going to realize big things that the GM hasn't.
The GM and those three could have a really fun game, together. They'd be pressed to their very limits, and come up with so many ingenious things.
But if Olivia tried to play the game that they were playing...
She doesn't want to upset the GM by torching their game, or push them into figuring out where the limits they don't know about really are, and she doesn't want to put a ton of effort and thought into something that'll somehow fail to pay off.
So her role in this is to sit quietly, help improve and implement Barry and Altronus's ideas, and just enjoy playing games with friends.
...It's just, she'd find going with the flow a lot more fun if the game weren't so self-directed.
Her heart yearns for a true Open World Experience, as a Player and not as a forever GM watching, and it hurts that other people get to have that right in front of her but she's still not allowed to have that type of fun.
"How many things like instant summonsing diamonds out of Liavara are you willing to come up with contrived explanations for?
I don't buy that manufacturing diamonds has never been successfully tried, even after accounting for how sometimes you'd expect someone somewhere to have done a thing but no one has.
But, say that I did buy it!
Basically every spell with a measurable duration could transform the setting, Barry and Arthur were talking about permanent image and they were being Innovative or they thought they were, but the spell is visible for dozens of miles day or night and a first-level wizard could cast it from a staff and you mentioned renting pearls of power so renting magic items is clearly a thing so why don't people use permanent image for mass communication? Mass media? You could build an entire Fantasy Setting where the setting conceit was that some people could cast permanent image, and it would be a fantastic story full of genius shit I'd never come up with in a million years and the minute after it was published there'd be people on AO3 pointing out how clearly they should already be doing this that and the other thing.
Or what about fly? What would you do if the setting were wildly inconsistent with people being able to cast it? Fly is a D&D staple, but have you ever really thought about the spell fly?"
...Kroft's disinclination to conduct the conversation under false pretenses is deeply at odds with how Lyvina is upset whenever her occasionalist Gamemaster chooses to cause Cressida Kroft to say things "in character."
She's super not sure how to handle this.
...She suspects that she's never "really" thought about the spell fly.
People on Golarion have been flying for thousands of years.
They also have the concept of a hang glider.
The rules for a hang glider don't give a maximum distance, and that's fairly realistic.
Albatross ride the wind around the world, barely flapping their wings. With their long skinny wings, they have a lift-to-drag ratio of twenty to one (20-1), which is very impressive... for a bird.
In theory they should lose one foot of altitude for every twenty feet they glide. In practice, they effortlessly gain altitude, riding updrafts.
The question of how far a glider can travel is therefore a complicated one.
Early human-built gliders had a lift-to-drag much worse than an albatross. Otto Lilienthal's Normalsegelapparat had a lift-to-drag of 4-1, no better than a house sparrow (and you've seen how those poor things must flap). Launched from the top of a hill, no one flew further than a few hundred feet.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post