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Cultivating Magic

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Aylor_Aivo said:
As a bonus it's powered by the spirit of the dead, not the soul so you can happily use it without worrying about negative karma from torturing someone too much!
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Amusingly you could actually net positive karma from that if the torture is beneficial to others. Because the tortured soul, in suffering that others might prosper, would then gain positive karma through being so tortured.

Which in turn gives you, the one who architected that torture, positive karma because you induced positive karma.

Positive karma ain't about being a good person.

That being said; even the use of the spirit would potentially be absolved if you could rip out the language processing part of the command obedience from the v Animate Dead binding. You don't need an actual spirit to obey or understand here. Just to hook in.

Also: researching spells on it's own is already a thing Wizards can do. So Meri had that out of the box. She's already extending that by merging her Wizardry with formation arts.
 
SpiraSpira said:
I didn't think Mandarin back on Earth had phonetic-only characters, either. I remembered that they used Roman letters called pinyin to create phonemes, just as we did.
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There's also bopomofo, but that is Taiwan specific and also within the last century. And there are quite complicated input systems based on strokes, as well, but those are the beneficiaries of a lot of processing power and iteration.
 
kaosisreality said:
Point of order! We use AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, XNOR, and NOT gates to create micro circuits. Let's be complete.
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Point of fact: points of order are not disputes of fact, they are an interruption specifically to address a rules violation. Your post is more of a nitpick.

Nitpick: I said, "Of the eight dual-input gates that are possible for binary," so the NOT gate should not be listed. It's a unary operator. NAND, NOR, XNOR, I might grant you? They're the compliments of the three I listed. TBH, it's been about twenty years since my one and only electrical engineering course. If you're better versed in the subject, you might know: which do we actually build?

The remaining two hypothetical operators are not commutative, so I'm pretty sure you cannot build logic gates out of them, but would be delighted to learn otherwise.
 
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kaosisreality said:
Point of order! We use AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, XNOR, and NOT gates to create micro circuits. Let's be complete.
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You're forgetting some of the most important gates, so crucial that they just get assumed. Until you can't use them, when it all suddenly becomes much much worse, such as CLONE and TRUE.

Honestly that would be a way to make magic computing more magical: give it the kind of power and restrictions that quantum computing has, though you'd probably want to gloss over the details unless you really love doing maths that's both completely useless and the kind of cutting edge algorithm research that would get you a PhD.
 
Ketrus said:
Point of fact: points of order are not disputes of fact, they are an interruption specifically to address a rules violation. Your post is more of a nitpick.

Nitpick: I said, "Of the eight dual-input gates that are possible for binary," so the NOT gate should not be listed. It's a unary operator. NAND, NOR, XNOR, I might grant you? They're the compliments of the three I listed. TBH, it's been about twenty years since my one and only electrical engineering course. If you're better versed in the subject, you might know: which do we actually build?

The remaining two hypothetical operators are not commutative, so I'm pretty sure you cannot build logic gates out of them, but would be delighted to learn otherwise.
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1) Are you familiar with cheek? These are not parliamentary proceedings here.
2) You could, technically speaking, build all of the gates (and therefore processors) out of AND, OR, XOR, and NOT, since you can use the NOT unary gate to modify the other gates to do NAND, NOR, XNOR, and other things. The NOT gate having a single input does exclude it from your specific sentence, but my POINT OF ORDER was about you leaving an incomplete set of gates needed to build a processor.
 
Prodigous said:
Wait isnt talent draining just a way to steal feats. That seems so abusable...
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It does seem incredibly useful. Kinda hard to use though because she doesn't seem to have the ability to steal specific talents, just whatever is the one she steals. There is probably something that determines this but I don't think it's mentioned. Probably something like their biggest talent or the most compatible with her. She also doesn't want to use it on mass, only on evil people which definitely slows her down. Granted it's not like there is any lack of evil people for her to use it on. I kinda want her to find a demonic sect and for her to go on a shopping spree.
 
SpiraSpira said:
She has fairly positive karma at the present time, although not enough to have a visible merit halo that regular people can see if she wants them to, which is possible for people sufficiently "good." When she killed a bunch of evil people and gave their souls to Judge Wu, she still has all the karmic virtue from stopping those people in the first place.
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The idea that she could tip over the scale to visible karmic goodness while executing or murdering someone is kind of an ironic idea to me.

I think most people if asked who they would expect to visibly have good karma in a xianxia setting would say someone like a Buddhist, or something analogues. The quote above however, makes me think an executioner would be the most likely to gain visible merit, which would make it a coveted position, as long as visible karmic merit has an effect beyond simply being visible in this setting. Evil people, sects, etcetera... might even be hunted down for good karma, which really has weird implications.

For instance, wouldn't punishment for crimes lean more towards immediate death sentences when people have something tangible they gain from killing, "bad" people. It's not really relevant I suppose, but in character, if she gets accused of a crime like stealing or something, there would be a good chance the punishment would be execution simply because they would gain merit from killing her.

Imagine someone is a serial killer and they just happen to kill enough evil people that they have a halo, wild.
 
Aylor_Aivo said:
Actually speak with dead is probably better, it's already been compared to a SQL query after all. So if she's capable of arbitrarily mixing in specific bits of DnD magic with her Qi formations (which is something that I think is explicitly beyond her current capabilities but that she's edging towards) then that'd be a good starting point.
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It would be bloody complicated to pull it off. The reason D&D magic outperforms Qi techniques in many cases is not only due to refinement that wizards did over the centuries but also due to how it works at the fundamental level. At its core spells are overlappings of multiple Planes that wizard pulls closer to the one he is currently on with their mind (Astral) and soul (Ethereal). Which is why spells don't really have an upper power limit and don't care about such minor things as conservation of energy, momentum and everything else for that matter.

You are poking holes leading to infinite power sources and then clash them against each other until the result gives the desirable effect. Apprentice wizards blowing up is an everyday occurrence outside of Faerun with its Weave.

So yeah every time Merildwen is invoking her magic she pulls on powers that dwarf all the Immortals like bugs.
 
Zoolimar said:
It would be bloody complicated to pull it off. The reason D&D magic outperforms Qi techniques in many cases is not only due to refinement that wizards did over the centuries but also due to how it works at the fundamental level. At its core spells are overlappings of multiple Planes that wizard pulls closer to the one he is currently on with their mind (Astral) and soul (Ethereal). Which is why spells don't really have an upper power limit and don't care about such minor things as conservation of energy, momentum and everything else for that matter.

You are poking holes leading to infinite power sources and then clash them against each other until the result gives the desirable effect. Apprentice wizards blowing up is an everyday occurrence outside of Faerun with its Weave.

So yeah every time Merildwen is invoking her magic she pulls on powers that dwarf all the Immortals like bugs.
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I mean, huh, D&D magic doesn't really outpetforms Qi techniques as a whole? We have seen plenty of techniques in Qi condensation levels that are roughly on part with level 3+s, it's just that what each are good at seems to be slightly different.

That, and there is a significantly bias in the school being a sword school, so we aren't seeing a lot of the more common blasting or esoteric disciples we would see in other types of schools.
 
Prodigous said:
Wait isnt talent draining just a way to steal feats. That seems so abusable...
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There's the problem that she's stealing the feats of known evil criminals. Presuming they had a financially useful feat, they would presumably be doing whatever they're good at for a living.

That said, she's still going to get lots of feats of marginal utility and some that are useful for criminal activities.
 
Martin Rudat said:
There's the problem that she's stealing the feats of known evil criminals. Presuming they had a financially useful feat, they would presumably be doing whatever they're good at for a living.

That said, she's still going to get lots of feats of marginal utility and some that are useful for criminal activities.
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Perhaps they were using their talents in a stupid way? Even if they weren't, combining a bunch of otherwise useless feats into something useful should be possible.
 
Prodigous said:
Does D&D have a way to analyse npc stats /what feats an npc has? A bit of discrimination would go a long way.
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Outside of skill checks, not really, though there's nothing actually stopping someone from creating such a divination spell now that I think about it: Identify exists and I see no reason why a sufficiently motivated Wizard could not create a version of Identify targeted at creatures instead of objects.

There are a number of Divination spells that could be finagled into something similar too; Augury for example lets you choose a specific course of action that you plan to take in the next ~30 minutes and then it gives you a very generalized idea of how dangerous and rewarding that course of action will be. So if you ask it about fighting a dude and it returns with 'extreme woe' then you can be fairly certain that dude can kick the shit out of you with ease. There's also stuff like a Paladin's Divine Sense that lets you pick a target and it tells you if the target is a Celestial, Fiend or Undead, etc.
 
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Neruz said:
Not really no, though there's nothing actually stopping someone from creating such a divination spell now that I think about it: Identify exists and I see no reason why a sufficiently motivated Wizard could not create a version of Identify targeted at creatures instead of objects.
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I always though of stats and feats in D&D as a sort of map of the character instead of the actual terrain. Meaning that a given Fighter with 18 strength represents that he is peak strength for a novice Fighter (level 1) not that there are 18 masses of "strength energy" floating around in his body.
So there would be nothing to detect, you might at most see if a character is healthy or has some affliction. You could measure his strength in the usual way by making him lift something heavy.
 
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lukethreadwalker said:
I always though of stats and feats in D&D as a sort of map of the character instead of the actual terrain. Meaning that a given Fighter with 18 strength represents that he is peak strength for a novice Fighter (level 1) not that there are 18 masses of "strength energy" floating around in his body.
So there would be nothing to detect, you might at most see if a character is healthy or has some affliction. You could measure his strength in the usual way by making him lift something heavy.
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The stats are generally considered to be a gameplay abstraction yes, but there's nothing preventing someone from creating a spell to 'Identify' an individual and get useful results back regarding their physical, mental, spiritual etc capabilities.

It wouldn't produce game stats unless it was designed to do so, but you don't need game stats to get useful information out of such a divination.
 
lukethreadwalker said:
I always though of stats and feats in D&D as a sort of map of the character instead of the actual terrain. Meaning that a given Fighter with 18 strength represents that he is peak strength for a novice Fighter (level 1) not that there are 18 masses of "strength energy" floating around in his body.
So there would be nothing to detect, you might at most see if a character is healthy or has some affliction. You could measure his strength in the usual way by making him lift something heavy.
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I see no reason why you couldn't have a spell that could detect how much strength someone has. Not looking for any strength energy or anything just looking at their biological make up. You know, spell looks at them and goes, okay they have this many pounds of muscle distributed like this. Granted, there probably is strength energy what with Qi and inner force being things.

It could do similar things as well. If not necessarily as precisely in certain cases. The other physical stats should be pretty easy to detect and quantify. Intelligence and wisdom would be pretty hard from a physical basis but if the spell is conceptual it should be relatively easy. Same with charisma. If it's physical based it would be hard to tell what talents and skills they have as well but again if it's conceptual probably probably easy.

Really the solution here is to have the inprecise physical based one be lower level, lesser identify creature. Then have the more useful conceptual one be higher level, greater identify creature.
 
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Wait, yall seem to be talking as if Mei has positive karma, but isn't she like 4000 karma points in the hole? It's going to take her a long time to send enough evil people to hell to pay that off.
 
Divad said:
Wait, yall seem to be talking as if Mei has positive karma, but isn't she like 4000 karma points in the hole? It's going to take her a long time to send enough evil people to hell to pay that off.
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No, she has positive karma.

She has a debt contracted to deliver a certain amount of karma value of souls for the underworld judge to farm, but having that doesn't impact her personal karmic status.
 
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