Ow.
Ow ow ow ow ow.
Ow?
Fuck.
"So, physics as of your world, but what about the goodies? I assume you wouldn't want an unmodified version of your magic system, but does it have advantages you'd like to keep?"
"It does pretty good variety and it's not use-limited, as many people can touch an artifact as the owner cares to allow and it'll still work. You can change artifacts, too, weaken the drawback or improve the advantage, it just takes a long time and you have to be touching it to do it, I'd want to soup that up if I went with artifacts at all. I'd want it reversible."
"There's occasionally some disagreement about how drawbacky they are, in some cases, but maybe they could be optional or something."
"And reversible, reversible seems very important. I still think, hmm... to my eye, a world is missing something if it doesn't have a magic system that - takes design input from the user? In a way that I think even mitigated artifacts don't sound like they would."
"That's what I mean by souped up adjustments. Also, artifacts are currently made when people die based on traits of the person, perhaps instead they could be made by live people on purpose!"
"Yeah, 'made by live people on purpose' sounds more the thing - what I like about wizardry is that I can think to myself 'I want a spell that achieves this end', and then poke around and see if somebody's already done the work for me and if they haven't I can do it myself, and the end result is a spell that does the thing I wanted unless the thing I wanted was impossible. Or just impossible to fit in my CC. Altering existing artifacts doesn't sound like it has this property, or at least not very conveniently, but creating new ones does."
"I mean, we don't know how far altering artifacts can go because it's so slow."
"But even if it could go arbitrarily far, you'd still - no longer have the artifact you started with, afterward, that's what I meant by 'not very conveniently'."
"Yes, that's true. Also, I might want artifacts to have to be activated on purpose instead of whenever anybody touches them."
"Although I suppose if it worked like that being hit by a vanful might have just killed me instead of this thing, I'm not sure if my injuries would have been fatal sans healing factor."
"Yeah, that's - a concerning sort of edge case. You might want to add in some things like lights - I think every world could stand to have a better version of lights, possibly applied to the entire population."
"Lights sound great. If with a stupid limitation. That I could excise on account of designing the universe."
"Side effects of this conversation that I should have predicted but didn't: now I really want to have the opportunity to design a universe."
"In the meantime, hmm - are there any artifacts whose drawback takes the form of a physical injury that could be subsequently trivially healed by a light - or pain, that could be totally ignored by a shren - I'm trying to figure out where the low-hanging fruit are on the interaction between these worlds. Hmm, if I get a transworld scry with the right kind of targeting parameters or an analysis attached or both, that could be helpful in finding or identifying artifacts, but there's kind of too much dev time involved to call that a low-hanging fruit. That fruit is upwards of the middle of the tree."
"There's one that makes touching water agonizing and one that dissolves all the bones in your feet."
"Teleporting and super speed. Respectively. So the first one's not especially useful to you."
"Depending on how the teleportation works exactly, I might still want it! Super speed sounds interesting. —Are there any artifacts that directly grant flight—"
"Yes, although the university doesn't have one. There's a wheelchair in a country overseas from mine that does flight and - maybe that's the one where you can't heal from injuries but I might be mixing it up with another one, it could also be the one where you can't eat plants."
"I bet someone would be willing to test how 'can't heal from injuries' stacks up against lights if it meant saving the babies."