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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.
Modern gliders aren't like that at all.
At their ideal speed, hang-gliders have a lift-to-drag ratio of 10-1. Someone skilled with a hang-glider can ride it more than five thousand feet into the air, and fly for hours before coming down.
High-performance sailplanes, with humans inside closed cockpits rather than dangling below, have lift-to-drag ratios greater than 50-1.
It's an interesting piece of path-dependence that Earth's humans spent so long fascinated with bird flight, and only finally learned the principles to fly with even less effort than they do after we'd already brute-forced the problem with internal combustion.
On Golarion, though, the people fascinated with bird wings should find the problem more tractable than old Otto Lilienthal.
They have magical flight! And feather fall! And they've had thousands of years to iterate on designs!
Once you have a glider as good as Otto Lilienthal's - modeled, as his was, off the wings of birds - how far can you fly with it?
The oversimplified answer is "you can go lengthwise as far as the height you jumped from, multiplied by four." In practice, with practice, you should be able to do better - riding updrafts and thermals.
A third-circle wizard casts fly at CL 5 and goes straight up; she makes it 36,000 feet before the spell wears out. Multiply that by four, and we know she can glide at least 27 miles.
Within ten years of Lilienthal's glider we had the Wright brothers' flier, with its lift-to-drag of 8.5-1. Dropped from cruising altitude of 36,000 feet, it could glide at least 58 miles.
We'll add an aerodynamic cockpit - it's pretty chilly way up in the stratosphere - and say that gets us 10-1, same as a modern hang-glider. 68 miles and change. We'll say competent flying gets us half-again the gliding distance, and round that down to a range of 100 miles.
So what does the fantasy setting look like where wizards can cause people to fly?
Trained beasts of burden (ant hauled, in settings that have it) lift big ol' sailplanes that fit dozens of people or thousands of pounds of cargo, take 'em way up into the sky, let go of them and let 'em land on other cities.
Now, 100 miles of range is pretty okay.
It gets you a sixth of the way from Korvosa to Egorian on a third-circle spell in less than two hours.
(And obviously, since they've had thousands of years to work on this, it'd make sense for them to have gliders as good as Earth had in the seventies, which would get them 5/6ths of the way there, but we're using conservative assumptions.)
But I feel like we can do better, right?
It'd be good for the Empire if we could fly back and forth from the new capitol.
Let's set our target at 300 miles per fly, so that a wizard with two third-circle transmutation spells per day can do this all on their lonesome.
(Not every CL 5 wizard can cast fly twice, but if you add up the transmutation specialists, bonded objects, and sixth-level-or-higher characters, it's got to be a decent fraction of them.)
(Or so a CL 10 wizard could do it with one casting of the spell.)
We can always stand to increase the lift-to-drag ratio of our glider. We could increase the length of the wings with darkwood or magic (if the bottleneck is the strength and weight of the materials), or magically levitate it to increase lift without increasing drag, or increase its speed (this has a dual benefit in that it gets you where you're going faster).
One obvious solution is to ask an air elemental to push or/and carry it, which should in and of itself be sufficient to make air travel a favored mode of transportation, but that would take a fifth-circle wizard to planar binding the elementals and we're wedded to our vision of doing this on third-circle spells.
Floating disk? No, it sticks to ground level... Decanter of Endless.... nah... you could command undead a poltergeist and task it with spinning a propeller, but I'd like for this to be something a third-circle can do without help or specialized equipment...
If the propeller weighs 5 lbs or fewer - a wooden propeller could be a hundred inches long and weigh well less than 5 lbs - you could use mage hand on a handle at the base of a blade. Mage hand lets you move an object fifteen feet per round, assume a complete rotation of your handle takes six inches of that, that's 30 rotations a round and 300 a minute...
Ladies.
And.
Gentlemen!
We are mechanized to the tune of, if this online calculator is giving me the right numbers, 140 lbs of thrust!
If our glider weighs less than 450ish lbs it can take off from the ground and stay up there indefinitely.
Which isn't really a glider, at that point.
You heard it here first, folks; laundry wizards are airborne.
...I'm a laundry wizard! I can do this! No need for friendly NPCs!
Lyvina Mayyad has wings!
...But I still want my big beefy glider that can carry a dozen people or a thousand lbs of cargo 300 miles on a third-circle spell, so I'm going to keep whittling away at that...
Oh!
Oh!
Oh!
I have discovered the one reason to prepare open-close.
Simply affix a sliding cabinet drawer to a piston to a crankshaft to a flywheel to a propeller, open-close the drawer to make the propeller spin. You can open-close as a standard action so long as the drawer weighs 30 lbs or less, but the mass of the drawer is only as important here as its acceleration; if you make the drawer long enough, it could apply arbitrary levels of force in the course of three seconds.
Your only limit is the strength and weight of your materials!
We have airplanes, powered by cantrips.
This was always the risk we ran, when we turned on our brains.
If OPEN-CLOSE worked like THAT, it would be the PRIMARY MEANS of PROPULSION.
You're not GETTING THROUGH THIS without Golarion should-have-having a PRIMARY MEANS of PROPULSION unless you ban HALF the SPELLS in the BOOK. And then people would just exploit monsters!
Spot-removal does nothing for you here, I'm swinging at you with lethal damage in 1/1 squirrels.
...and some 12/12 squirrels too! But too many for spot-removal.
You, you say that it's an open world, you say that you won't be angry if I, if I screw up the lesson plan, but when I actually try - no, sorry, if I actually tried, because nothing I've said so far looks like me actually trying, you'd shut me down. You only feel safe to say you won't because you have a bad intuition for what's possible.
And if you didn't know that, now you know.
Pick a, pick a spell out of a hat. Pick one at random, or one that's too iconic to change or delete, and I'll tell you how if you think through the implications it pulps your medieval fantasy setting.
It, it, hurts less, if you tell me that I'm not allowed to optimize too hard, than if you try to convince me that I'm allowed, but you snatch it away when you realize what you've given me.
If you want, I, I'll go back to, I'll go back to not looking closely at or - or - thinking deeply about any of the spells in the rulebook, except insofar as they're useful in combat and if they're too useful in combat I'll stop using them.
Just tell me to do that and I will. You, you can have your fun, open world game where everyone is free to try as hard as they can. Everyone but, but me. Barry isn't going to break anything by trying his hardest, let alone Cheryl, and Arthur's the best at what he does but what he does isn't wide in scope.
You can have a game where they come up with clever tricks and they won't be too clever. But don't tell me that I can do anything I want to do when it isn't true, it hurts too much.
I'm the one who's been in the wrong. I'm, I'm sorry for lashing out so hard.
It was disproportionate.
I should have taken a walk and written a letter.
I have on net enjoyed and anticipate continuing to enjoy your game.
The timing is absolutely horrible, and yet.
Can we have a conversation "in character"? I think that would really help me right now.
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