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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 3:16:32 GMT
Ahahahaha.
I mean, if the Super Creepy People are going after a list of customers that includes actual forum users... are they?
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Post by Daniel H on May 16, 2015 3:44:03 GMT
Atelos, I actually wrote a paragraph about that but decided it was irrelevant and deleted it. On worlds with standard physics, and assuming that the tuning forks are nonmagical, there is something called the Berkenstein bound which limits the amount of information which can be in a physical space, and thus the possible number of configurations. It might be that the Dungeon physics works differently and has no Berkenstein bound or equivalent. However, I would be surprised if the focus had to be magical in any standard type of world, and there are not an infinite number of small metal rods that can nonmagically exist on a standard-physics world even ignoring tolerances. To give actual numbers, if we assume a small metal rod can mass no more than 2.5 kg (a bit more than 5 lb) and be no longer than 1 meter long, and we forget about the “metal” requirement, the “rod” requirement, and the “anything resembling a single solid object” requirement, then we can say that the focus needs to be some system with a mass of no more than 2.5 kg and a radius of no more than 0.5 m. Plugging that into the equation on the Wikipedia page gives gives us about 32 tredecillion (3.2×10 43) bits of information, or around 10 1043 possible configuration. Only a tiny fraction of these are small metal rods, but even all of them together is much less than infinite.
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Post by Daniel H on May 16, 2015 3:45:48 GMT
Or, in terms that work for any world: there are not an infinite number of types of sci-fi metal unless you get to arbitrarily-precise alloys, and there are not an infinite number of sizes if you allow any precision whatsoever.
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Post by Archangel on May 16, 2015 4:24:33 GMT
If Andrew's not on that list, then they can just miss him. The thirty were the people who were might find out about the forum, as judged by the QDS people. Going after actual forum users that they identify from this end would be a separate project. One that I kind of want to delay or avoid, as it seems impolite.
Maybe the type of tuning fork isn't assigned for a given world until someone who knows the spell visits there. This does absolutely nothing to actually solve the problem, since there are still more universes than reasonably-differentiable forks, but it does delay it enough that the problem won't have come up yet. There are going to be more forks than worlds that have Dungeon magic.
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 4:28:41 GMT
I mean, if they want to go after Leaf and/or Nifl, and it's within their power to do so, and you think it might be fun to play out, that can potentially be arranged.
(Likewise if they want to go after Esthfora or the keeper, but that's less relevant to Dungeon-related discussions and the outcome is much more of a foregone conclusion.)
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Post by Daniel H on May 16, 2015 4:38:02 GMT
If the Foundation were to go after Andrew, what would they do? Just distribute an amnestic to him and let him go? That would be a bit lax, but is in line with what they often do when SCPs come in contact with the public.
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Hadassah
Regular
Posts: 107
World: Pantheon
Pronoun: She/Her
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Post by Hadassah on May 16, 2015 11:07:13 GMT
Hadassah, is that in any threads yet? I must have missed it. If so, the Super Creepy People Foundation might try interfering with them, too. What next depends on whether any known amnestics work on Standard Fantasy Species. If not then the manager, acquisitions person, and the thirty relevant customers get gemmed until they find something that does; if so then the customers lose two weeks of memory and get sent back. It's the QDS people themselves who pose the most risk and get engemmed either way. I think it is very vaguely alluded to at one point or another, but not really. They are just sliding into more and more interuniversal problems, with more and more permanent or semi-permanent connections between tertiary worlds. I am working on slowly revealing that Hadassah's organization is working against an interuniversal weapons smuggling operation that is using Pantheon as a go-between right now, but they are running into an interuniversal "event", sometimes big but usually very small, about every other day right now, just in Pantheon's version of New York City. Obviously, it isn't nearly as progressed as Sanctum, and Pantheon is far more on the "protect and contain and manage" side of things, but they are still playing catch-up after the world realized how serious they need to take other universes when south Florida became infected by a serious memetic ideological virus. They've gotten to the point where they can divine the location of portals that remain open for longer than a few hours on the planet (there are only three or four of permanent ones right now), but they are still struggling with periodic and temporary portals. Pantheon might even appreciate a little guidance or assistance from these Super Creepy People (or Screople) but I don't know how SCP operates when they aren't operating in the "Gate In, Amnesia Everyone, Erase Everything, Gate Out" mode. Do they play well with others?
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 16, 2015 21:34:21 GMT
A few of the listed customers are likely to have always-on precautionary defenses, so it's entirely possible that the Foundation will take some losses.
I am officially Undecided regarding the number-of-tuning-forks problem until it comes up in practice. Each fork is a single type of metal, which may be an alloy and/or include fantasy metals. The fork is always tuned, so you never get a fork intermediate in size between e.g. C and C sharp.
Since the Foundation "command them to provide a list of who else knows about the forum or might find out in their absence", they provide a list of forum users (excluding strictly OOC accounts ofc) in addition to listing customers and such.
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Post by Andrew on May 16, 2015 23:07:19 GMT
If you know a spell, is there a way to teach it to a specific person without scribing it?
Would it be possible for a spell to exist which prevented magic from being undone (like with dispel magic), similar to how dimensional anchor prevents dimensional travel? What would its MP requirement be? If so, could it protect itself?
Would it be possible to temporarily boost maximum MP, especially if this can be cast on somebody else or provided with greater enchant weapon or greater enchant armor? Various settings have equipment or other bonuses which can give bonus MP, but is that possible in Dungeon? If it’s a spell other than one of the enchants, what is its MP requirement?
How much can these requirements be reduced if the spells are made more specific (like the MP booster only working on one specific person)?
Finally, what’s the schedule for the weekly updates? When will people start noticing those stopped happening?
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 23:23:08 GMT
Has there even been a single weekly update in the time between Andrew's subscription and the takedown? Also: There are more than a hundred spells in that world, right? Would it be fun if the keeper located Dungeon and gained access to every spellbook every used; and if she did, what kinds of things would she get that aren't in the QDS catalogue? Also also: Because I'm a wee bit nuts (again), I'm considering actually writing up the Thing Explainer-style descriptions of all of the spells that Leaf is going to write for Lurking.
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Post by Daniel H on May 16, 2015 23:30:14 GMT
There’s been a real-time week. I don’t know if there’s been an update or not.
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Post by Archangel on May 17, 2015 0:12:24 GMT
If it's just a few losses to people's defenses, well, they have reserves. If any of the adventurers manage to make it an actual battle, they can escalate to get it over with. If there's anyone who's categorically immune to spells and bullets then they evacuate the universe to try again later. (This is just the non-forum-user customers for now.) Is it possible to forget a spell? Amnestics are at least kind of analogous to a potion of amnesia. If so, the Foundation could theoretically remove the forum users' planar transport spells along with anything that could be used to get them back, and not have to make people forget about the forum. (Which they'd totally do anyway, but I don't want to.) It would be entertaining if this worked but was foiled by Simon Illyan having a memory chip. Or if they fail because Miles and Cordelia are just that much higher-level than they're expecting, but then they know that people still know the spells.
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Post by Leaf on May 17, 2015 0:23:39 GMT
Miles and Cordelia are going to be much higher-level than they're expecting, and both have Facet arcany, as does Aral (Illyan is waiting on Cordelia's return).
Actually, what's the relationship between somebody's max MP and the max MP needed to force-gate them? Could they be stalled by Cordelia's outrageousness?
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Post by Daniel H on May 17, 2015 0:35:35 GMT
If Andrew forgot about the forum but the Foundation weren’t careful, he’d be reminded, re-read everything, and realize that the Foundation probably had done something to him. I’m not sure what he’d do about it after that (given his 2 MP and lack of interworld transport), but he wouldn’t be happy.
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Post by Leaf on May 17, 2015 0:43:47 GMT
Well, one thing Andrew could do about it is contact Leaf (and/or Nifl) to complain.
That would certainly get results.
Also, my brain is now conjuring scenarios wherein they successfully gatenap Miles, only for him to say "Before you get any further with your bloody stupid plan, may I point out that by kidnapping me you are effectively declaring war on an interplanetary empire with technology a thousand years more advanced than your own? And if you go after Nifl, you'll be declaring war on a different one?"
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