13 KiB
[Q][MK] Help me break my magic system
Post:
Heyyyy guys,
Its been a minute huh? I'm not dead or anything, I just got really busy with work and haven't been able to contribute much to discussions.
Just so anyone who might have been reading it are aware, Fall of Oso isn't dead. I'm just not very happy with it. I will continue it, but as I've improved as a writer I'm coming to realise its just...not very good. I didn't hash the plot out enough ahead of times, and writing on the seat of my pants like I had been resulted in a work I can't say I'm particularly proud of. That was mostly my fault, I set myself a waaaay too ambitious goal of updating three times a week, which just was not remotely sustainable. I'm definitely still interested in telling the story of Fall of Oso though, and its currently my only outlet for sharing the Aeria universe. What will probably happen is I'll pull down all the existing chapters, do some heavy editing on them, finish writing at least rough drafts for the rest of the story, and start reposting again from the beginning. I worry a lot that I'm just not a very good writer, and that I won't be able to create something that is actually up to my standards as a reader. But then, you learn by doing, only way to strengthen those neural connections is by doing the thing. If anyone is interested in helping me with behind the scenes plot related stuff for Fall of Oso, hit me with a PM. I don't want like, editing help or anything that meticulous, just feedback on characters, how to improve the plot flow, general things like that. I might also switch from first to third person, I'm not sure about that yet and I'm curious about people's general attitudes towards first vs. third person perspectives.
Okay so anyway, one of the few things I'm pretty pleased with is how the magic system came out in Aeria. I think it's pretty interesting. However, I'm also concerned that it has some...bugs that would give a sufficiently munchkinned characters effective omnipotence. I'm not opposed to leaving some channels for misuing the magic for fun and profit in, but it needs to be non-obvious. I worry there's some obvious things you could do with the magic system that I'm author-blind to catch. This not only limits what I can have the characters do, since if I can't think of some niche use for magic, then they can't either, but it also leads to "Why didn't they just do X" scenarios, which are generally something you try to avoid in rational fiction afaik.
Thus I come to you all, with the question: Given the system of magic I describe in this article (magic system) and this article (magic particle physics) How quickly can you break the magic system and achieve effective omnipotence? What are some patches I can introduce to it to make it less prone to potential godmoding while still keeping in a few non-obvious godmode hacks for the main characters to potentially exploit?
Comments:
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u/AmeteurOpinions:
> Aara can be given five basic commands, on which the foundations of Amat constructive and destructive magic are built. These five commands are: move along a specified path, accelerate at a specified rate, respond to a specific instruction from another specified aara or set of aara, consume a specified material, and extrude a specified material. It'd take me an afternoon to start walking the path to godhood. The first question for breaking a magic system is always "Can you make a computer" or, more generally, "Can you automate the magic?" In your system, not only is the automation built into the base level, but so is material manipulation, granting nanotechnology. It'd take anyone with a decent amount of math-related knowledge a week to ruin the local economy, but worse, only a few hours to come up with some recursive world-eating grey goo. You need some hard, hard limits on the capabilities of Amat.-
u/thrawnca:
> not only is the automation built into the base level Ah, I didn't notice this phrase the first time I read it: "respond to a specific instruction from another specified aara or set of aara...The full extent of this center command is unknown, but it is theorized to be Difference-complete" The path to omnipotence is pretty clear: https://xkcd.com/505/- u/xkcd_transcriber:
[Image](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/a_bunch_of_rocks.png) [Mobile](https://m.xkcd.com/505/) **Title:** A Bunch of Rocks **Title-text:** I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34\. [Comic Explanation](https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/505#Explanation) **Stats:** This comic has been referenced 322 times, representing 0.2713% of referenced xkcds. --- ^[xkcd.com](https://www.xkcd.com) ^| ^[xkcd sub](https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/) ^| ^[Problems/Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd_transcriber/) ^| ^[Statistics](http://xkcdref.info/statistics/) ^| ^[Stop Replying](https://reddit.com/message/compose/?to=xkcd_transcriber&subject=ignore%20me&message=ignore%20me) ^| ^[Delete](https://reddit.com/message/compose/?to=xkcd_transcriber&subject=delete&message=delete%20t1_d5j8oay)
- u/xkcd_transcriber:
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u/Sagebrysh:
Yes, you can make a computer. This is definitely something I wanted to be possible when I first came up with the magic system. However, there is *some* inbuilt balancing, and it *seems* like enough, but it might not be. I don't know enough about ground up basic computing and programming to know how exactly you would do that though, which might be a problem. The short of it is that aara essentially [lacks ontological inertia](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoOntologicalInertia), it takes a constant focus from the mage to keep the aara doing stuff. A mage could create a computer out of Aara, but it would take a certain amount of mental concentration to control the computer the aara is made out of. If they for instance, passed out, their computer might evaporate.- u/Frommerman:
Or their computer might become self-replicating. The way you described it, Aara can receive orders from each other effectively indefinitely.
- u/Frommerman:
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u/Frommerman:
If you haven't read Ra, you should. That should about cover all the ways this magic system is completely broken in half. -
u/thrawnca:
Er...how, exactly, would one defend against aara? I mean, it would be ludicrously easy to assassinate someone when you can command 100,000 particles inside their body to wreak havoc. What impact do ingestion and extrusion have on conservation of momentum? If the consumed matter ceases to have inertial effects (apparently the case, since "Careful study has shown that materials ingested by the aara simply vanish"), then it's very easy to build a perpetual motion machine. If, on the other hand, the mass and momentum are transferred to the consuming aara, then it sounds like you have an efficient way to create black holes. What constraints are there on the scope of aara control? Can a mage order them to consume a planet? A star? If not, then what is the limiting factor?-
u/Frommerman:
Aara appear to be made of chemical matter, so presumably they will just disintegrate in a star. They probably also have problems in lava, just judging by their chemical structure. Aara basically are a nanotech swarm. That's the problem. -
u/Sagebrysh:
> Er...how, exactly, would one defend against aara? I mean, it would be ludicrously easy to assassinate someone when you can command 100,000 particles inside their body to wreak havoc. Its very hard. However going for those 100,000 already present particles would not be a good idea in combat. Aara are very small, they're effecting a cell-width cross section. It would take a while to kill someone with the Aara in their body, and doing so would actually take a good bit of focus on the part of the mage. >What impact do ingestion and extrusion have on conservation of momentum? If the consumed matter ceases to have inertial effects (apparently the case, since "Careful study has shown that materials ingested by the aara simply vanish"), then it's very easy to build a perpetual motion machine. If, on the other hand, the mass and momentum are transferred to the consuming aara, then it sounds like you have an efficient way to create black holes. Eat a bunch of mass, take it up high, drop it, and collect the energy from its fall? Something like that? This is the sort of thing I hadn't thoroughly considered, however, there are easier, more mechanical ways of creating an over unity engine/thruster in this setting. Those haven't actually been discovered yet either, but that's really a matter of certain other fields of engineering catching up, and there are likely rudimentary designs for non Aaara-based over unity engines floating around, its just that the level of industrialisation required to make the parts for the designs haven't caught up with the tech base. Aara is a physical object, but things passing through its centre go away and lose all previous properties until later ejected. It can also not do that. In truly massive swarms you could get some powerful stuff out of it, but that would take more aara then most armies could usually control. > What constraints are there on the scope of aara control? Can a mage order them to consume a planet? A star? If not, then what is the limiting factor? The limiting factor is the focus of the mage. For starters, a single mote has an upper limit of material it can ingest of about a gram, so doing anything involving moving large amounts of mass around, you need quite a lot of aara. But here's the thing. Each aara, and I mean *every single one* that a mage is exerting influence on require a small quantity of focus. You could tell Aara to make more of themselves, but you couldn't control all of them, so they would sit inert. I haven't done much from the perspective of an Amat character which is part of the problem, but roughly speaking, most amat don't fly, that would take more concentration then they'd be capable of without specialist training. I imagine the absolute upper limit that a god level mage could control at once would be a sphere of pure aara .25 meters in diameter. This would contain something on the order of 500 quadrillion aara. Even that number is probably too high for story balancing purposes, and it might be better to have it lower, I'm not sure yet. I don't have numbers put to the amount of kinetic energy that an individual aara can exert, which I really need to calculate so I can reverse derive how many it would take to lift a given amount of mass without consuming it.- u/thrawnca:
> It would take a while to kill someone with the Aara in their body No, it really wouldn't; you just ingest a cross-section of their spinal cord. Or, with greater medical expertise, you could target smaller and thus faster critical nerves. As a bonus, start extruding random nerve material as you go, to short-circuit things before they're fully severed. I've often wondered why more villains don't break the limbs or spines of their prisoners. If you can strike without being seen, you also have lots of ways to surreptitiously poison the target. > Eat a bunch of mass, take it up high, drop it, and collect the energy from its fall? Something like that? Attach weights to a flywheel, use computerised timing to consume at the bottom and extrude at the top. Just off the top of my head. No doubt there are endless better ways. > The limiting factor is the focus of the mage. But that cannot be irreplaceable, because aara are non-sentient, barely alive, suspected to communicate via electromagnetism or similar. Therefore, whatever controls them can be artificially simulated. Therefore, you can design a computer to do it. Bam, self-replicating nanotech. And if one aara can give orders to multiple others, then you don't even need to solve the mysteries of inter-aara communication to get astronomical force multipliers.
- u/thrawnca:
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u/Gurkenglas:
Could you use Healing/Constructive magic to copy an organism? Anyone who succeeds in copying himself achieves global victory in O(log n). Similarly, brain modification. At the least, the results of making a newborn's head gradually bigger (evolution did it too!) should tell our aspiring dark lord how to do better with the next baby. Can you implant personality/skills? Somewhere there's bound to be a cult of a guy who's managed to copy himself into other brains.