Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[PTTG??]

I think it's been settled that while our avatar is a liberal arts student, we, his loyal advisers, have full access to what information we know... with the limitation that we must explain our actions through this most unusual interface. For instance, we could not tell him to "make a car", we could explain the operating principles and tell him that a smith over here has the materials and sooner or later make, say, a piston... and through a long, laborious process, make that work.

So, a question for our glorious GM: Would it be possible to simply tell Michael "Draw this thing" (Or, something simpler), and assume that he receives the image in the same way he receives our commands? Or would it be necessary to describe the contents of the image like you would over a telephone ("There's a circle in the top right, kind of like a frisbee set on edge. It's behind this big blocky thing...)? If that's the case, would it be acceptable to say "Draw this thing, it looks like [I describe the drawing here]", or would it be necessary to write out the description?

And action to take:
I Largely agree with the "provide info subtly" plan. Let's keep it subtle, though. Say we "heard" that there's very powerful spellcasting enemies at the target. If we need to go into more detail, let on that we met with Vivec... we did, after all. But don't claim any special knowledge as our own action, and if things get dicey, say you only know what Vivec told us, and that he told us to "keep his council close."

Long-term, let's use the legion as a stepping-stone Get some time in training, get our resources, and eventually get that magical training... Why? Because either we're going to make ourselves powerful here and part of the world, or else we're going to try to escape back to the realer world. In either case, we're probably going to need real magic to succeed.

[wierd]

A better turn, would be for the avatar we are attempting to convey information to, to lack sufficient experience or educational background to comprehend even the descriptions, and further, to suspect being influenced by daedric princes, like sheogorath and hermaeus mora.

(I could easily see a knockdown drag out between those two should I be at the wheel, fighting over who gets to play with the addled engineer. There is a fine line between brilliance and madness. And complex knowledge often has maddening effects, when natural limitations are lifted, such as through magical intervention. The afore mentioned CE trinkets I mentioned would let you build a high performance tesla roadster, for instance, that completely violates the laws of conservation of energy, and the second law of thermodynamics. Madness in a metal box. If it makes enough shock to harm you, it makes enough shock to power the car in place of the battery array, and if it makes things cold, without offsetting heat someplace else, it is destroying entropic energy. Ever wondered what a superconductive magentic drive in an electric car with an inexhaustible power supply is like to drive? Given those two curious items, an old wagon, a kiln, some copper wire, and lots of free time, I could very well show you. efficiency wouldn't matter a whole lot. The power plant is inexhaustible, and heat can be destroyed. The pandora's box that combination offers is maddening. Likwise with feather and burden enchantments. Oh, the fun I could have with those...)

The point is that those concepts would be radically alien to our avatar, and thus would appear as unintelligable hallucenations. Look at a complex wiring diagram sometime. Does it make sense to you? Likewise, the subject of your compulsions would not comprehend the meanings behind what he is drawing, and thus could not convey such meaning to artisans. Education does not make someone smarter, but it empowers a smart person to understand and do more.  A LA major would probably be good with artistic things and with languages, but wouldn't know the first thing about designing resonant tank circuits, what a youngs modulous is, etc. 

The avatar isn't dumb, but lacks the understanding to comprehend the compulsion. Receiving concistent and regular compulsions of such a nature may well make them question their sanity.

[Man of Paper]

Madness in a metal box defines the Dwemer.

[wierd]

Not really.

The dwemer were, for lack of better terms, religiously skeptical, and zealous fundamentalist atheists.


Their pursuits, and the fruits of their pursuits, demonstrated that they had discovered that their world was fundamentally impossible, and or, conflicted. They had determined that the laws of nature were being broken left and right capriciously, leading them to question the very basis of reality itself, and even the actual existence of anything at all. It is the natural consequence of objectivity being applied to a fundamentally subjective universe. (The subjectivity of the universe is the very basis behind the school of alteration, for instance.)

Since the universe could not POSSIBLY hold ITSELF together, and since the various "divinities" were little more than high energy manifestations of that clearly impossible reality, then they deduced that there must be a more perfect and more orderly layer of existence above and beyond the one they inhabited.  Using the objective principles (for their universe) of sympathetic magic (like above, so below; conversly, as below, so above--- "walk like they do, until they must walk like you do.") They sought to trancend the mundus via the creation of a mirror manifestation of that more orderly universe,  to directly couple to and control the higher subgradient of creation they had deduced must exist. That was the true purpose of the numidium. It was a new god, created from the essence of the force of limitations. (Lorkhan was the god of mortality, but also the catalyst for mundus's creation. He litterally established the concept of limitations. He is the god of limits.)

The dwemer were far more than "eccentric scientists with a robot fettish." They were hardened logicians in a world where objective logic is nonsensical.

[Putnam]

At least they were right about reality being subgradient. The question is: did they succeed or fail?

[Descan]

Maybe we are the dwemer...

They did it a LONG time ago. Enough time to forget our roots.

[Sensei]

At least they were right about reality being subgradient. The question is: did they succeed or fail?

That's legitimately debatable, but the ash piles left where they stood (See: Tribunal main quest) suggest they didn't turn out so well. In most circumstances, and I emphasize most- having your physical form reduced to base components is a bad sign.

[Putnam]

Not when your goal is apotheosis!

But this is off-topic and should be continued (if at all) in the Skyrim topic or maybe a new one.

[wierd]

Indeed.

I just popped in because I found myself with a forum search, looking for a previous topic I participated in recently, and found myself referenced by name.

I really should not participate in the game, because I know it basically inside and out, AND the combination of morrowind's enchanting system with my engineering education and hobbyist experience would result in a game breaking combination that is no fun for anyone. (Read, godmode sue is boring and everyone hates her.) It's like the netch leather + Bloatspore super potion exploit*. Stacking bonuses that negate intrinsically implied limits result in radical departures from believability, and remove any challenge from the experience.

Spoiler: *Super potion exploit (click to show/hide)

(*in morrowind, at lv1, you can walk from seyda-neen to balmora over the mountain range, walk up the road from pelagiad to balmora, and pick every plant on the way. When you get to balmora, join the mage's guild and do every quest there without ever leaving, since you already have all the flowers and mushrooms ajira wants. Sell the potions she gives you back to her for gold, buy crappy alchemy equipment, then hit up the balmora temple for netch leather, and nalcyra or white haven for bloat spores. Both are restocking merchants with an endless supply. The combination produces a potion of fortify intelligence, with no side effects. Drink the potion, then brew another. Rinse, repeat. Your intelligence stat will rise into the hundreds of millions in just a few iterations, the power of the potions produced will defy reason, and each potion will be worth litterally hundreds of each of the ingredients used to make it. A few cycles of buying, brewing, selling, and waiting 24hrs, and your alchemy will hit 100, you will have over 1million gold, and if you brew any other bonus inducing potions, they will last for literal real world hours, and confer bonuses of unreasonably unbalancing power. Hence the name, "super potion exploit". A restore health potion (such as saltrice and whickwheat) brewed while under the influence of super potion will restore hundreds of thousands of HP per second, and last for hours. It's like toggling TGM on the console, except you can do it on xbox too. It breaks the game. I am a similar exploit. I should not play.)

[GlyphGryph]

No, you should totally participate. Everyone knows that exploit... and it didn't help.

Because this ISNT vanilla morrowind and we very much do not have the benefits of your average PC.

Also, alchemy system, among other things, is modded.

[Putnam]

Michael doesn't have the tools to alchemy, hehe. They're too heavy to carry around.

[WillowLuman]

Edit: Also, while I like the idea and believe that we as B12ers could come up with some crazy stuff. If we decide to try any route in regards to introducing any kind of advanced technology, it should be kept in mind that we are dealing with a game world that at it's best only barely begins to create a reasonable facsimile of our own world's physics. In other words, we're in a game world and game world physics aren't entirely equal to our own.

We are most certainly not operating on Game physics. Everything we've seen so far has been realistic in the context of Tamriel, aside from the reality-bending PC's and such anomalies. And remember, our phone works. No exploitation or limitation based on problems in the game seems to apply so far, aside from sleeping to heal.

The point is that those concepts would be radically alien to our avatar, and thus would appear as unintelligable hallucenations.g to comprehend the compulsion. Receiving concistent and regular compulsions of such a nature may well make them question their sanity.

He knows about us, the voices, and talks back to us. We wouldn't drive him mad by suggesting he build something outside his technical experience.

And action to take:
I Largely agree with the "provide info subtly" plan. Let's keep it subtle, though. Say we "heard" that there's very powerful spellcasting enemies at the target. If we need to go into more detail, let on that we met with Vivec... we did, after all. But don't claim any special knowledge as our own action, and if things get dicey, say you only know what Vivec told us, and that he told us to "keep his council close."

Hell no. We don't want to seem unsure or dubious. We want to be believed. No subtlety, no excuses, no "um's."

[wierd]

(Psst. You don't need the full kit. Just a mortar and pestle. the other pieces just make better potions. There are other benefits to a high alchemy skill; simply eating ingredients will have a more profound innate effect from the first one listed for the ingredient. Toward the end of the game, I carried around stacks of saltrice and marshmerrow for that very reason. Just snack on a few, and be just fine.)

With the enchant system, the major limiting factor was the sEnchantMult GMST, which is set at 0.1. This makes a pair of shoes listed in the CS at 10 enchant points, show up as 1 pt in the game. It smacks of a last minute quick fix to the game's difficulty. Since I am a tad of a perfectionist, one of the mods I often ran was one that resets the sEnchantMult GMST back to 1, and which sets EVERY item down by *0.1 for its enchant points.  The difficulty doesn't change, but the values in the CS actually match what shows up in the game. (It also alleviates a silly little bug I found. The enchant points value is a signed integer, which gets processed by a math function that does not perform sanity checks! This means that if you can get the "enchant cost" to exceed -32768 or there abouts, it will have an integer overflow, and suddenly be in single digits again. Because they are abusing the sEnchantMult value to change the game difficulty because they were too damned lazy to touch all the game objects with a simple script prior to release, and because they didn't bother to sanity check their inputs, it is especially noticable when creating your own "scrolls", using blank paper, with a cast on use enchantment. I can't fix the lack of sanity checks, but keeping values from being integer overflowed on the math op by removing complexity does go a long way toward making it more difficult to trigger.

*Bet ya didn't know about THAT exploit.

[Putnam]

(Psst. You don't need the full kit. Just a mortar and pestle. the other pieces just make better potions. There are other benefits to a high alchemy skill; simply eating ingredients will have a more profound innate effect from the first one listed for the ingredient. Toward the end of the game, I carried around stacks of saltrice and marshmerrow for that very reason. Just snack on a few, and be just fine.)

Not here. You need all four to make potions

[WillowLuman]

GM's been hammering very hard that gameyness doesn't work here, at least not for us. We have no idea how magic works, alchemy needs a full set (which cannot be carried around), and it takes time to put on armor.