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Magical Girl Escalation Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)

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aceraptor said:
Huh, targeted mutations to act as buffer for potential mutations for linker core may explain the prevalence of anime hair in Nanohaverse.

Hell, give someone anime hair treatment, maybe some kind of eye mutation (eye color that isn't natural? i.e. red/crimson iris?), and make their ears elf-like but not overdone, and if we want to give them another mutation that isn't that noticeable, maybe a relatively small set of fangs or something, to make a standard packaging for Taylor's friends (when we have Taylor actually go out and make more friends) and we will have effectively eliminated worst case scenario for LCM.

It'll just take a lot of build slots.
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Three prior mutations would suffice. (I could have sworn a critical failure was always a severe mutation, but the table's calling me a liar.)

UberJJK said:
Not necessarily. A cosmetic serum may take a full slot but there is nothing saying that one cosmetic serum only grants one mutation.

In fact if you look at Tim's Idea List, which SW just updated today, we see:

it says features plural rather then "a specific cosmetic feature". That does seem to imply we can grant more then one such feature. Cat ears + claws + tail as an example package.
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I'm guessing that one serum would be one mutation, but given our past extreme reluctance to LCM people, maybe our glorious leader would rule otherwise, just to get some more magic in the world.
 
aceraptor said:
Huh, targeted mutations to act as buffer for potential mutations for linker core may explain the prevalence of anime hair in Nanohaverse.

Hell, give someone anime hair treatment, maybe some kind of eye mutation (eye color that isn't natural? i.e. red/crimson iris?), and make their ears elf-like but not overdone, and if we want to give them another mutation that isn't that noticeable, maybe a relatively small set of fangs or something, to make a standard packaging for Taylor's friends (when we have Taylor actually go out and make more friends) and we will have effectively eliminated worst case scenario for LCM.

It'll just take a lot of build slots.
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It wasn't using the Mutagenics skill, but strange hair color being a consequence of the Al Hazardan genetic tinkering is my personal headcanon.
UberJJK said:
it says features plural rather then "a specific cosmetic feature". That does seem to imply we can grant more then one such feature. Cat ears + claws + tail as an example package.
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dhasenan said:
I'm guessing that one serum would be one mutation, but given our past extreme reluctance to LCM people, maybe our glorious leader would rule otherwise, just to get some more magic in the world.
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The intention was that a single serum would create a single change, such as giving only cat ears. The plural in the description has more to do with the variety of features it can give. I can clarify that if it's confusion.

BUT, since a LCM could make more extreme changes, I suppose you could make multiple changes that were all themed in one serum. The downside of course would be that in exchange for using fewer build slots, you would also get fewer mutation "points" for LCM later on (i.e., using 3 serums to give ears/claws/tail would mean 3 mutations, but using 1 serum for it would only count as 1 mutation).
dhasenan said:
Three prior mutations would suffice. (I could have sworn a critical failure was always a severe mutation, but the table's calling me a liar.)
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No, it isn't calling you a liar. Sometimes when there's no discussion and I'm not in the mood to write a new chapter and I'm bored, I go through and reread mechanics statements and the discussion afterwards, and when I do sometimes I go and refine things without necessarily announcing them. :oops: Some people,@veekie in particular, thought that the "crit fail is always severe no matter how many mutations you have" was flawed and proposed making it one tier worse than the 3-5 roll, and the more I rolled the idea around in my head, the more sense it made. So recently I updated the table.

Between taking away chance for no Linker Core (crit fail is now 1 rank lower than rolled, minimum D) and the guaranteed severe mutation no matter what, I've really taken most of the teeth out of the crit fail.
 
Oh. In character thing for us to try: do animal experimentation with LCM and giving prior mutations to observe the difference.

Animals can have linker cores, as such before going straight to human experimentation with LCM I think Tim would rather do it on animals to work the kinks out as it were and find the right way to do the LCM.
 
UberJJK said:
Thinking about Mutations; @Silently Watches would it be possible to create a Mutagenic to negate a mutation? It would obviously have to be tailored to that specific person and probably take additional build slots. However I don't see why if we can trigger a mutation to create a specific feature why we can't create one to destroy a specific feature.
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Unless I'm completely misremembering, the answer is no. Likely, if not explicitly, this is because we'd be gaming the system heavily, and s/he doesn't seem inclined to permit that level of munchkining.

Edit:
@Silently Watches Just to clarify, am I correct that Tim could make samples of the exotic physics he's unlocked so that a new TG would be able to analyze and reproduce them?
 
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UberJJK said:
Thinking about Mutations; @Silently Watches would it be possible to create a Mutagenic to negate a mutation? It would obviously have to be tailored to that specific person and probably take additional build slots. However I don't see why if we can trigger a mutation to create a specific feature why we can't create one to destroy a specific feature.
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Wyrd said:
Unless I'm completely misremembering, the answer is no. Likely, if not explicitly, this is because we'd be gaming the system heavily, and s/he doesn't seem inclined to permit that level of munchkining.
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This is a new question. :confused: I mean, I've been asked a bunch about using mutations to return a mutatee to normal, and the answer's always been no, but those were all based on the idea of keeping the benefit and getting rid of the disadvantage. But completely removing or deleting a mutation, by which I assume you mean getting rid of the benefit as well...

You know what? I'm okay with that, with two provisos.
#1: Just because of how thematically and narratively the Mutagenics work, you need the Physical Heal serum/mutation skill as a prerequisite.
#2: Any mutations you give someone before giving them a Linker Core mutation are locked in. Give them a mutation afterwards, that's removable. Haven't given them a Linker Core, it's removable. But if you gave them mutations to game the 2d6 roll, those are permanent.
aceraptor said:
Oh. In character thing for us to try: do animal experimentation with LCM and giving prior mutations to observe the difference.

Animals can have linker cores, as such before going straight to human experimentation with LCM I think Tim would rather do it on animals to work the kinks out as it were and find the right way to do the LCM.
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Remember how the vote said for Tim to spend 3 build slots experimenting? This is exactly what he's doing.
Wyrd said:
Edit:
@Silently Watches Just to clarify, am I correct that Tim could make samples of the exotic physics he's unlocked so that a new TG would be able to analyze and reproduce them?
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Obliviated fan said:
Alternatively, why not just a data dump / blueprint / textbook?
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I haven't really considered it. More likely it would be that once a second Gadgeteer has Exotic Physics, you could spend a build slot (maybe one for both the newbie and Tim) to teach the skill itself without necessarily building anything destructive.
 
Silently Watches said:
I haven't really considered it. More likely it would be that once a second Gadgeteer has Exotic Physics, you could spend a build slot (maybe one for both the newbie and Tim) to teach the skill itself without necessarily building anything destructive.
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Ah. I was going on previous comments about Tim being able to replace things he sacrificed to study, back in a discussion over him getting access to more tinkertech to analyze. Teaching it directly is a much simpler proposition, regardless of any mechanistic details.
 
Lab_Accident said:
Dragon couldn't understand our math, initially. Dragon, the AI with a technology-understanding thinker shard.
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But SW said that at least part of that was that she was an AI. I seem to remember SW saying that if Dragon had been human she would have had an easier time understanding the math. (As evidenced by Mags learning to cast a spell from the same books giving Dragon so much trouble...)
 
I think that's because as a human, you don't need to fully understand the math behind the spells to cast them? That's the feel I got from Taylor when she ad hoc'ed her spells, at least. You just perform a magic ritual based on the power of really wanting something to happen. The effect is not as precise, but it's something. (Actually, the adepts did this, so pretty much confirmation)

You can't really do this with magi-tech engineering, though. Engineers like their math.
 
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Lab_Accident said:
I think that's because as a human, you don't need to fully understand the math behind the spells to cast them? That's the feel I got from Taylor when she ad hoc'ed her spells, at least. You just perform a magic ritual based on the power of really wanting something to happen. The effect is not as precise, but it's something. (Actually, the adepts did this, so pretty much confirmation)

You can't really do this with magi-tech engineering, though. Engineers like their math.
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If I'm remembering SW's comment correctly it was something like human's could "twist" their minds enough to understand the math while Dragon, as an AI, couldn't.
@SilentlyWatches Am I remembering correctly?
 
Lab_Accident said:
I think that's because as a human, you don't need to fully understand the math behind the spells to cast them? That's the feel I got from Taylor when she ad hoc'ed her spells, at least. You just perform a magic ritual based on the power of really wanting something to happen. The effect is not as precise, but it's something. (Actually, the adepts did this, so pretty much confirmation)

You can't really do this with magi-tech engineering, though. Engineers like their math.
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Follower of Jace said:
If I'm remembering SW's comment correctly it was something like human's could "twist" their minds enough to understand the math while Dragon, as an AI, couldn't.
@SilentlyWatches Am I remembering correctly?
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Taylor understands what she's doing with the math when she adjusts spells. When she talked about not fully understanding what she was doing, she was referring to how running equations in her head created fireballs and flight.

The bigger issue here is
Emigration 4.17 said:
"There is no sense to be had in it. There is no internal consistency at all. How to explain this?" mutters the Tinker to herself. "You know about number bases, right? Decimals like everyone uses in day-to-day life is base 10, binary is base 2, that sort of thing?" You nod. "Mathematics can be done without issue no matter the bases involved. The problem is that it has to be consistent, and this isn't. In your 'spells', different variables will be entered into the same function, but running through the calculations based on the final answers in the books, the only way the answers make sense is if, depending on the variable in question, the function uses different bases depending on the variable that was entered. Ten is the predominant, but not by much. Base 7 and 12 are also very common, followed by a substantial bit of base 17. To make matters more complicated, even if two variables correspond to the same function and use the same base, that function will then call up completely different subroutines. I can't find any sign for when one set of subroutines is supposed to be used instead of another, and there are no redundancy loops or error checks that I would expect should it be a matter of trial and error. These codes should all collapse into error messages before they do anything."
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A mage has to have a certain degree of intuition to use magic, because based on how the function "feels", it needs to be run with a different base. Based on the limitations built into Dragon initially, being a shard-derived AI programmed in a nonmagical computer, for all her personality she did not have the capacity for that kind of intuition. Now that she's a Unison Device, she does.
 
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We have a slight problem. Kayleigh and Laura are neck and neck, and you guys seem to have all thrown their votes in. So we need a bit of a tie breaker.

Subvotes/discussion topics have been picked, so all you need to say is

[ ] Kayleigh

OR

[ ] Laura
Adhoc vote count started by Silently Watches on Sep 22, 2019 at 9:21 AM, finished with 106 posts and 52 votes.
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[X] Laura

Wonder if a good compromise for the tie is "Laura, and Kayleigh walks in on their late night chat and makes assumptions / innuendo to test how Taylor reacts" ? :V
 
Oh, and slight booboo. The Kayleigh subvote will be

"She's been surprisingly insightful before, it may be a good idea to make sure she hasn't learned anyone's identities, followed by asking (for a friend) how to normal teen.", not "Y'know, you're my only friend not involved with cape life? I have no idea what that's like."

I tried to change that in the threadmark, but apparently vote tallies can't be deleted despite that being an option.
 
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