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Post by Mother Starlight on May 17, 2015 0:55:49 GMT
If you know a spell, is there a way to teach it to a specific person without scribing it? No. 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? It would target only a single casting of a single spell, similar to permanency. It would have temporary duration, and would not be dispellable, but if you permanencied it then that permanency would be dispellable. It would cost about 70 MP and consume a number of zorkmids that depends on the spell to be antidispellabled. 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? It's not one of the enchant spells. Enchanted weapons are easier to hit with and do more damage; enchanted armor is more likely to block a hit and absorbs more damage. The greater spells just do that more so. Special-effects magic equipment, like a flaming sword, would require something else than just spellcasting, like a feat. It might be possible, but it would be moderately expensive; note that e.g. fox's cunning explicitly does not confer a spellcasting boost. As an example, I'd suggest around 30 mp for a spell with the following limitations: * Touch range, willing target. * Shortish duration, like 1 second per caster max mp. (Pre-boost max, if casting on oneself.) * Doesn't increase current mp, so you have to meditate (within the short duration) to make use of it. (Or drink a potion of mana regeneration, which is the more likely use case in Dungeon.) * You can't have more extra max mp than 25% of your base max mp. * The boost is definitely always less than the casting cost. How much can these requirements be reduced if the spells are made more specific (like the MP booster only working on one specific person)? Working on one specific person isn't generally a type of thing that spells do; installing such a requirement would likely increase the cost. You could reduce the cost some (maybe about 10-20%) by making it personal range (affecting the caster only). Finally, what’s the schedule for the weekly updates? When will people start noticing those stopped happening? Updates normally go out late Sunday morning.
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Post by Captain Viridian on May 17, 2015 0:59:25 GMT
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? It would target only a single casting of a single spell, similar to permanency. It would have temporary duration, and would not be dispellable, but if you permanencied it then that permanency would be dispellable. It would cost about 70 MP and consume a number of zorkmids that depends on the spell to be antidispellabled. Would it be possible to antidispell and permanency a spell, then antidispell the permanency?
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 17, 2015 1:06:11 GMT
Yes, but the second antidispell would still be temporary. And a second permanency would still be dispellable, and so forth.
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Post by Leaf on May 17, 2015 1:09:34 GMT
It's not clear to me whether permanency needs to be cast by the same caster as the spell being permanentized, or whether it's supposed to come before or after.
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Post by Daniel H on May 17, 2015 1:09:59 GMT
I assume so, but then you’d still need to permanency the antidispel on the permanency, then antidispel the permanency on the antidispel on the permanency, etc. Those rules don’t allow you to make magic truly permanent if somebody wanted to take it down, unless you could cast all the spells at once targeting each other in a loop; in that case they wouldn’t do anything else.
If you attempt to invent a spell which is impossible to create, how long before you realize this? Andrew is currently working on inventing the antidispel spell, but he wants something beyond what this allows. Does he still need to put in about 70 hours (the amount of time to learn the mana cost of the spell you described) before he figured that out?
Can somebody with wish create a spellbook for a spell that somebody with less than 10 MP invents, or would that count as not-theoretically-producible because the inventor can’t scribe magic?
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 17, 2015 1:15:42 GMT
Nonanomalous/nonmagical amnestics can't make you unlearn a spell, but can make you forget that you know a spell. Any given type of anomalous/magical amnestic has about a 50% chance of making you unlearn the spell (and the other half of the time they work like nonanomalous/nonmagical amnestics); any given type should always do one or always do the other.
To force-gate and magically control a single creature, their level has to be at most twice your caster level. For purposes of the Foundation going after Cordelia, that means the caster's max MP has to be at least half the target's max MP. If targeting a group, the caster doesn't get the x2 multiplier; their caster level has to be at least the sum of the targets' levels. (So the caster's max mp has to be at least the sum of the targets' max MPs.) Note that if someone not targeted happens to be nearby to the target(s), they can come through the gate uninvited and uncontrolled. Also, Cordelia and Simon are not on QDS's customer list.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 17, 2015 1:37:29 GMT
You cast most of permanency, then cast the spell to be made permanent as the final step. From a technical perspective, the two spells happen simultaneously, and the spell to be made permanent is transformed by the permanency's magic as it happens. It has to be the same caster.
There are few things that magic can't do if given enough power. After working on a new spell for N hours, you know either how much mp it costs, or that "either it's not possible or it costs more than N mp". It's not possible to distinguish between "this can't be done at all" and "I haven't figured it out yet".
You can wish for a spellbook of a spell known only to someone who can't scribe magic.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 17, 2015 1:39:26 GMT
Special-effects magic equipment, like a flaming sword, would require something else than just spellcasting, like a feat. Or you could wish for it, of course.
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Post by Daniel H on May 17, 2015 1:44:53 GMT
So would a permanent, non-dispellable antidispel be possible for more than 70 mp? How long would the 70 mp version last? If somebody were trying to invent the permanent version, would they know that a non-permanent version were possible after 70 hours of work, or would they need to give up and start all over on the new one?
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 17, 2015 2:05:17 GMT
You can start trying to invent a spell with whatever level of specificity you want, and you'll get information about a random possible spell within the given parameters, biased towards lower-power spells. If you're specifically working on a permanent version, you won't get information about a temporary version; if you don't specify whether it's to be permanent, you'll probably get a temporary version. This feels subjectively like exploring the possibility-space and noticing possibilities rather than submitting a query and receiving a response.
A permanent, non-dispellable anchor magic would probably be around 150-200 mp.
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Post by Archangel on May 17, 2015 2:15:33 GMT
Hm. The Foundation's amnestics are all nonmagical, but (in some interpretations) one of them renders the person incapable of remembering the thing even if they encounter it again. That'd be almost as effective as actually forgetting the spell, but reading a spellbook might beat it. When you read the book, does it magically insert the knowledge that you know the spell along with the spell itself, or do you just keep track of that the usual way?
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Post by Daniel H on May 17, 2015 2:42:34 GMT
Andrew is not being particularly specific. If he notices the temporary one, it sounds like he could keep looking for the permanent one and (if he gave up) would be able to go back to the temporary one (presumably with the remaining 80–130 hours spent looking ending up wasted). Is this right? Or would he inevitably notice the permanent one was possible after the the 150–200 hours, even if he had started working on the temporary one, and be able to work on that one then?
Whether he would actually spend over a decade working on the spell is a completely separate question. What level of working on it is the one-month-per-MP estimate based on? Full time job, hobby, monk-in-the-woods, dedicated college student?
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 17, 2015 3:01:59 GMT
Magically, but the anti-rediscovery amnestic would beat it.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 17, 2015 3:13:47 GMT
To a first approximation, you decide the parameters/constraints when you start researching the spell, and which spell you're working on is secretly determined at that time. If you don't like what you can find, you can start over; the progress is not totally lost, in that you can go back later and pick it up where you left off, but it doesn't count towards researching other similar spells.
This is unrealistic, but the subjective experience is enough like normal research/development that someone who's not closely familiar with research or project management might not notice anything amiss, or might assume that it's something mundane/structural about the nature of the subject matter. (Consider the differences between e.g. carving a marble statue vs. writing a novel vs. developing a computer program; the weirdness of spell invention could easily be mistaken for a difference of this kind.) This is the result of Dungeon magic trying to make its gamelike mechanics and sensibilities look plausible for the ungamelike worlds it's being transplanted into.
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Post by Daniel H on May 17, 2015 3:35:24 GMT
So my current plan is for Andrew to start researching a spell to prevent magic from being canceled, and find the temporary version after about 70 hours of research. When he does, his reaction will depend on how long “temporary” is.
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