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Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

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BronzeTongue said:
The Wardens murder people who killed purely in self defense and were obviously in the moral right to do so for the same reason that they kill people who learn Jedi mind tricks. Because yes even just a little bit one time is enough.

We see the series through the eyes of protagonist privilege, which is why it looks so survivable to do these things.
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I feel like it answered a lot of the previous parts of this with the comment your responding to but we see that warlocks even warlocks that are literally just straight up murderers don't become insensate and insane. People who do Mind Tricks become more likely to do Mind Tricks people who do murder become more likely to do murder neither of these things preclude sanity neither of them preclude guilt neither of them preclude surrender.

On some level I fully believe that warlocks have essentially no choice but to get worse the only people that could feasibly help them are they all so people that would separate their heads from their neck if they knew. Which leads to reinforcement cycle of damned if you do - damned if you don't, die on your feet or die on your knees.

The fact that the white Council has no methodology of actually reclaiming the vast majority of any possible warlocks means that warlocks that but do stealthily break the laws just kind of stick around in the white Council letting the paranoia build and their essentially psychosis worsen as time goes on until you get conspiracies like Peabody and the hollow man.

Again I'm not saying that the people who do dark magic aren't being corrupted by it I'm not saying that law breaking isn't a big metaphysical deal even if the intent situations behind it necessitate or change how the corruption manifests.

Just that treating lawbreakers as wild animals when inherently every lawbreaker we've ever interacted within this Quest has been someone who is fully capable of making decisions based on information they know with significant foresight and understanding of consequences which by virtue of being able to accurately interpret reality you have to assume they are sane.

Horace Shaw is a lawbreaker multiple times over he lived in a small house in Australia while growing magic fungus in his basement you think multiple people were just disappearing in like the suburbs of Australia or do you think he could suppress it long enough to just do his research and then occasionally take someone in a premeditated fashion to feed to his mold.

These are people that are capable of showing fear compassion and contrition but have no reason to ever surrender themselves or get help because the only people that could yet again feasibly help them by the people that would separate their head from their neck.

I feel like I'm not making myself particularly clear about this because people have like said that I'm underestimating the slope that black magic puts people on but the slope is nowhere near vertical or at very least the verticality of it seems to differ depending on the circumstance.

So I'm going to reiterate people if they think they're going to be given a fair shake are willing to surrender themselves to authorities they are not willing to just lay down and fucking die. You cannot put an absolute of near certain death and actual certain death and expect people to be okay with picking certain death. Being a warlock almost has nothing to do with that it just facilitates an inciting incident where the options are die on your feet or die on your knees. Which leads the problems I've stated before.
 
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*gingerly sets foot in thread*

Remember this is a forum game about wizards, detectives and demigods guys. No sense getting that riled up.

That said I know this has been my mantra for a while, but remember the books are written from Harry's PoV, he does not think there is a non-Doom way to get around lawbreaking, but even in canon he is proven wrong if we take the RPG into account. Remember Silk? She does not have a super secret artifact to deal with her problem, just regular old vampire spit. There are ways around the Laws already, just none the Council trusts and is willing to pay the trade offs of.
 
BronzeTongue said:
Too much too fast.

This is a meet and greet about who and what the hell is doing all this stuff. That should be the focus.

Remember the vote for this exact action where you had us spin up a full display of options for the wizards and they immediately went for the smallest possible approach? This is very similar.

It doesn't matter how great they should think we are, just that they don't know our name. Some things take time and simply can't be rushed effectively. Make a good first impression to link our actions too, explain what we're here to do, and at most make reference to a desire for further cooperation.

If we keep making the same sort of mistake we're highly likely to see the same sort of problems.
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It's not about us. The intent of my vote, when I wrote it, was to try and point out that all of Council's issues, internal and external, are at their core, about alienation and inclusiveness. They are excluded from modern day by their magical techbane, the masquerade, and their self-imposed policies, and in turn exclude talents who do not fully rise to the level of a full wizard, and near-mortals who can coexist with humanity.

I tried to cutting to the root of the issue, as I see it. If I failed, I apologize.
 
Degorium said:
I feel like it answered a lot of the previous parts of this with the comment your responding to but we see that warlocks even warlocks that are literally just straight up murderers don't become insensate and insane. People who do Mind Tricks become more likely to do Mind Tricks people who do murder become more likely to do murder neither of these things preclude sanity neither of them preclude guilt neither of them preclude surrender.

On some level I fully believe that warlocks have essentially no choice but to get worse the only people that could feasibly help them are they all so people that would separate their heads from their neck if they knew. Which leads to reinforcement cycle of damned if you do - damned if you don't, die on your feet or die on your knees.

The fact that the white Council has no methodology of actually reclaiming the vast majority of any possible warlocks means that warlocks that but do stealthily break the laws just kind of stick around in the white Council letting the paranoia build and their essentially psychosis worsen as time goes on until you get conspiracies like Peabody and the hollow man.

Again I'm not saying that the people who do dark magic aren't being corrupted by it I'm not saying that law breaking isn't a big metaphysical deal even if the intent situations behind it necessitate or change how the corruption manifests.

Just that treating lawbreakers as wild animals when inherently every lawbreaker we've ever interacted within this Quest has been someone who is fully capable of making decisions based on information they know with significant foresight and understanding of consequences which by virtue of being able to accurately interpret reality you have to assume they are sane.

Horace Shaw is a lawbreaker multiple times over he lived in a small house in Australia while growing magic fungus in his basement you think multiple people were just disappearing in like the suburbs of Australia or do you think he could suppress it long enough to just do his research and then occasionally take someone in a premeditated fashion to feed to his mold.

These are people that are capable of showing fear compassion and contrition but have no reason to ever surrender themselves or get help because the only people that could yet again feasibly help them by the people that would separate their head from their neck.

I feel like I'm not making myself particularly clear about this because people have like said that I'm underestimating the slope that black magic puts people on but the slope is nowhere near vertical or at very least the verticality of it seems to differ depending on the circumstance.

So I'm going to reiterate people if they think they're going to be given a fair shake are willing to surrender themselves to authorities they are not willing to just lay down and fucking die. You cannot put an absolute of near certain death and actual certain death and expect people to be okay with picking certain death. Being a warlock almost has nothing to do with that it just facilitates an inciting incident where the options are die on your feet or die on your knees. Which leads the problems I've stated before.
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Yeah I read what you wrote, it's just wrong because Butcher doesn't agree with you about intent.

Actually, Molly's intentions when she broke that particular law twisted her." Here's where I think you hit the nail on the head Lightsabre. It's the intentions of the caster that matter. Time Travel, Nercomancy, and Mind Control are all tools that can be used to do *bad* things. I'm fairly sure what we see in the laws of magic is a sort of wizard gun control, trying to limit the existence of these problematic classes of spells.
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But if the substance of the consequences of the act itself does not have its own inherent quality of good or evil, then how can the /intentions/ behind it determine a similar quality? "Really, I was only trying to provide a better quality of life for my family and my employees. It wasn't my intention to destroy that particular species of flower in the rain forest that cures cancer." "I was just trying to give those Injuns some blankets. It wasn't my intention to expose them to smallpox and wipe out hundreds of thousands of innocent people." "I just wanted to get that book finished while working two jobs and finishing a brutal semester of grad school. It wasn't my intention to screw up the name of Bianca's personal assistant whose death had motivated her to go all power hungry to get revenge on Harry."
There's some old chestnut about good itentions serving as base level gradiant on an expressway that goes somewhere, but I can't remember the specifics right now. :) While I agree that the /intentions/ of the person taking action are not without significance, they carry far less weight than the /consequences/ of that action.
"I meant to shoot him in the leg and wound him, not hit the femoral artery and kill him, so I should not be considered guilty of murder," is not something that stands up in a court of law /or/ in any serious moral or ethical evaluation. You had the weapon. You knew it was potentially lethal, even if you did attempt to use it in a less than fully lethal fashion. (Or if you DIDN'T know that, you were a freaking idiot playing with people's lives, something really no less excuseable.) But you chose to employ the weapon anyway. The consequences of those actions are /yours/, your doing, regardless of how innocent your intentions may have been.
Similarly, if you meant to drill that ^@#%er through the eyes, if you had every intention of murdering him outright, but you shot him in the hand and he survived with minor injuries, again the consequences overshadow your intentions. You might have made a stupid or morally queestionable choice, but it isn't like anyone *died* or anything. He's fine (at least in the long term), you're fine, and there are fewer repercussions–regardless of your hideous intentions.
The exercise of power and the necessity to consider the fallout from your actions isn't something limited to wizards and gods. Fictional people like Harry and Molly just provide more colorful examples.
As for violating the laws of magic themselves turning you good or evil, well. :) There's something to be said on either side of the argument, in the strictest sense, though one side of the argument is definitely less incorrect than the other. But it's going to take me several more books to lay it out, so there's no sense in ruining the fun. :)
Jim
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Note also the killing law only applies to Humans.
You can kill as many faeries as you want with magic.
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Bingo. It hardly seems fair, does it?
The Laws of Magic don't necessarily match up to the actual universal guidelines to how the universal power known as "magic" behaves.
The consequences for breaking the Laws of Magic don't all come from people wearing grey cloaks.
And none of it necessarily has anything to do with what is Right or Wrong.
Which exist. It's finding where they start or stop existing that's the hard part.
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Cite

Perhaps wild animal is wrong, but Horace was a serial killer. He wasn't suppressing it, he was broken in a way that made him an ambush predator. That's worse in a lot of ways because he's not any less murderous, just more effective at it.

Unless you're a protagonist intent isn't going to seriously change the equation and once is enough to damn you.

This is why Morgan is so torn up about his job. He's killed people who were innocent of all wrongdoing by any metric but the deeply unfair magical one.
 
BronzeTongue said:
This is why Morgan is so torn up about his job. He's killed people who were innocent of all wrongdoing by any metric but the deeply unfair magical one.
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Again nothing you just said contradicts my point or rather I don't disagree with anything you've quoted. Deeply unfair magical reasons is the thing the Doom of Damocles and the Book are meant to put a hold on and give a secondary option to. I get what you mean, I can't and I don't disagree with anything you just said or what the word of God says.

I'm not making a moral argument I'm making a procedural one essentially. If the only option for warlocks is death then it doesn't matter if you're a completely sane warlock who through some mechanism hasn't fallen down the corruption slope whether it because it was accidental or because you are aware of your thoughts and don't actually want to kill people pick an option I don't actually care and it's not important.

If the consequence for your transgression is death no matter what then the only recourse a person who values their life has is to never ever ever ever tell anyone and kill anyone or silence or discredit or otherwise incapacitate or remove the memories of permanently anyone who finds out.

That's pretty much the whole point I'm making the Warlock ISM the fact it comes with essentially super slide psychosis is secondary to the fact that people are not going to accept being killed. Unless they hold some real religious conviction in the laws of magic they will not accept being killed you must provide some ability to not kill them otherwise you get tens of stealth warlocks forming conspiracies to overthrow people that would kill them.

The speed or severity of black magic corruption is nearly orthogonal to the point I'm making.
 
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Vote closed.
Adhoc vote count started by DragonParadox on Nov 23, 2024 at 11:22 AM, finished with 74 posts and 8 votes.
  • [X] Of Unity. You speak about Unity and inclusivity, about how it is through division and alienation that the enemies of Creation find their way into the hearts of those who should have been its defenders, preservers, builders
    -[X] You speak of techbane and the nature of magical alienation, the gift setting the wizards apart from mundane humanity in this modern era, when the spirit of SIngularity is a new god desiring to be born, more so than it has ever done before.
    -[X] You speak of talents and population explosion, of those who are not accepted by White Council and yet are still subject to the same dangers
    -[X] You speak of the Masquerade itself, of how it will only take one slip for it to fail irreversibly and in the worst way possible
    -[X] You use the history of your soul as an example of what might be possible, and of dangers and opportunities such a world has
    -[X] Empathy, Etiquette excellency
    -[X] Source Code Compliance Protocol with essence spending
    [X] Of the need to modernize, some of the greatest threats out there are moving into whole new technological vistas which the Council has been slow to adapt to
    -[x][Stunt]"The White Council is no longer at the cutting edge of mortal magic. The Five Fold Court of Fate is and if you don't want to fall further behind then you are going to need to catch up. I don't want to have to be constantly bailing you people out."
    -[x]Use Source Code Compliance protocol for the meeting 1 essence to avoid headaches.
    -[x]Etiquette exlicancy
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Arc 15 Post 4: Called to Council
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    • Called to Council ​

    25st of February 2007 A.D.

    To say that the whole of the White Council meets in the Grand Hall in Edinburgh would be at best misleading at worst a bald-faced lie. The hall can fit five hundred if they are on very good terms whereas at the beginning of the War the number of wizards had been inching towards fourteen hundred. Even including losses, which are not kept up to date there is no way every wizard on Earth could find a seat upon the polished granite of the chamber. So, as Tiffany would say, politics as usual. You smile a little at the memory, last December you had assumed that as Tiffany McNeil became more and more her own self with lived experience she'd grow less cynical about the world and the state of man. That does not seem to have happened and yet she is helping more and more, no matter how much sly insinuation she might indulge in.

    "Why are you smiling? Should I be worried?" Carlos comes up behind you, not so much unheard as unnoticed in the press of wizards. It's mostly a joke, you read in his eyes, mostly.

    There's a shadow behind his eyes that hadn't been there before, the knowledge that he had been made a puppet and that the one who did it, unlike most of the other conspirators is still at large.

    "No, not really just thinking about Tiffany's... quirks."

    The choice of words startles a laugh out of him. "That's one way to put it yeah." But alas his expression soon grows more serious as he looks between you and Harry.

    "Be a bit more careful when you're talking about that. Word got around about that the eye demon said and how your friend doesn't deny it and now there's all kinds of rumors about her, about Harry, about this new power of his. People are spooked about demons what with the stuff that just went down and being told 'nah this is one of the good ones' doesn't cover it, especially for a lot of the more traditional sorts who see magic as an extension of their faiths."

    "Not to sound like a certain blond character from the Book-Series-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, but do these people know who my father is?"

    His answering gesture is half a shake of the head, half a shrug. "Probably but the Knights have a reputation, you know in general."

    "I don't know, Dad doesn't go around sharing magical scuttlebutt about himself. What do you mean."

    "They try to redeem the Denarians on the regular in spite of their everything, cooking up plagues, starting wars, tearing down empires and burning down libraries. No one doubts that they have their heart in the right place, but to make a long story short, no one doubts they have their heart in the right place, it's their heads they worry about and this being an actual demon..."

    It is, you conclude to yourself as he speaks a good thing it takes the White Council a long time to come to any semblance of order, gives you more time to take in what he's saying.

    "It is not really talked about but wizards can learn demonology." The young wizard who had come to sit at Carlos' other side says. You faintly remember her from the fight but she politely reintroduces herself as Yuki Yoshimo . "The first lesson of that black art is demons never change, a demon conjured for the thousandth time is only different from the first in that they know you better and more dangerous for it. One assumes the lady knows Wizard Dresden quite well."

    Is that... is Harry blushing?     Casting your eyes that way you confirm that he is indeed and hard enough that both younger Wardens noticed.

    "We are all friends," you interject quickly. "But that I bring here today has nothing to do with Tiffany."

    "Oh you do not have to convince me honorable lady. I have the power to feel the Dragonlines and Dragon Nests even when my Inner Eye is closed. That and I am a swift judge of character when one saves my life."

    "Well then between allies new found I trust that my proposal today will pass."

    Carlos winces. "It's just a feeling but from the way some people approached me yesterday I think there might be wizards out here who came just to pick a fight with the Senior Council over not dealing with the crises for so long, letting the traitors fester."

    He motions to the other side of the chamber where a distinguished older gentleman who looks about of an age with Morgan if he were considerably less battle-worn holds informal court among a large-ish group of his peers. Given that all of them thought to coordinate outfits, formal wear and gold buttons it's not hard to imagine they coordinated arguments too.

    "That's Gregori Cristos he's... well he's a lot from what I heard from Wardens who had to work with him, a skilled duelist but a micro-manager and he holds grudges. Before you showed up to reveal whatever your thing is I thought he was working to replace the Warden Captain, but now I'm not so sure."

    "When did you get so good at this stuff?" Harry had recovered enough to ask.

    "When I was providing security for Senior Council members," Carlos explains. "It's either listen to people talk politics start counting specks on the wall. It was a hard choice but I eventually went with the first."

    Cristos wasn't on your list of traitors or for that matter the enchanted, but just because someone isn't working to bring about the End Times, knowingly or unknowingly, doesn't mean they can't be a problem.

    What do you do?

    [] Continue with your speech

    [] Approach Cristos before the meeting
    -[] Try flattery, he seem the type to be vulnerable to it
    -[] Cut some kind of deal, appeal to his ambition. You do have a lot of wizard shaped bribes

    [] Find out what his greatest shame is

    [] Write in

    OOC: And here we see the advantages of all those times you worked to keep young wizards alive throughout the fight, information and ready-made allies
     
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    • I'm honestly sorely disappointed. I thought we were going to hear Molly speak in this update. Instead it's...Carlos and the rumors? I don't understand why that is. It's sad.
     
    DragonParadox said:
    Because I wanted to give you guys a chance to learn a bit more about the other wizards instead of charging right in, to give you a sense that you have friends and allies here.
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    I understand, but I find this voting order strange. But okay, we'll figure it out before the speech.

    So I think using past sins is not very reliable. They are prone to false positives. I think trying direct socialization would be better.
     
    Ivar said:
    I understand, but I find this voting order strange. But okay, we'll figure it out before the speech.

    So I think using past sins is not very reliable. They are prone to false positives. I think trying direct socialization would be better.
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    Yeah, that one's on me. In my defense it was past midnight when I finished yesterday's chapter. I just tried to get to a break point without thinking of what would come when you reached the meeting.
     
    Ivar said:
    So I think using past sins is not very reliable. They are prone to false positives. I think trying direct socialization would be better.
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    No idea what you mean by false positives in this context. NWS is very reliable in finding someone's hot button issue. Also the fact that it is a default option makes me think DP has something juicy ready.
     
    [X] Plan politics
    -[X] Find out what his greatest shame is
    --[X] Activate All Things Betray with willpower
    --[X] Using the information obtained tailor your approach and what to offer him
     
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    This guy was pointed out in specific by an ally to possibly be an issue. Continuing with the speech and ignoring it seems off.

    [X] Find out what his greatest shame is

    Yog said:
    [X] Plan politics
    -[X] Find out what his greatest shame is
    --[X] Activate All Things Betray with willpower and Empathy excellency
    --[X] Using the information obtained tailor your approach and what to offer him
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    How many motes is it until Molly flares in front of everyone and BMI goes down again? This plan would have us use two essence and the previous plan which won called for two essence to be used as well on an excellency and true speech. IIRC it's four motes spent before flaring and doing that right now seems bad. Everyone would get blasted with Molly's evil aura and the burning eyes would come out.
     
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    BoredMan said:
    How many motes is it until Molly flares in front of everyone and BMI goes down again? This plan would have us use two essence and the previous plan which won called for two essence to be used as well on an excellency and true speech. IIRC it's four motes spent before flaring and doing that right now seems bad.
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    1 essence, which we would be using for the speech anyway (in social situations excellencies tend to linger). And one willpower. During the speech we'll be using 1 more mote for SCCM. This leaves us with 2 more motes to spare.
     
    Yog said:
    1 essence, which we would be using for the speech anyway (in social situations excellencies tend to linger). And one willpower. During the speech we'll be using 1 more mote for SCCM. This leaves us with 2 more motes to spare.
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    The greatest shame charm is free to use? Also your earlier plan called for an etiquette excellency so it requires two motes?

    Edit: I just checked, the greatest shame charm is not free to use it cost an essence. So this plan cost three motes, two essence one willpower and your earlier plan also cost two motes. There something I'm missing here?
     
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