This does not change the fact that torturing someone still yields less useful information than plain interrogation. The torture is cruel and unnecessary.
If you have JET this isn't true anymore. Without torture there is far less compulsion to speak, and JET solves the problem that you don't know if what they said is true.
This is part of why JET is an unfortunate charm: because it incentivizes players to torture people for information.
This does not change the fact that torturing someone still yields less useful information than plain interrogation. The torture is cruel and unnecessary.
Well, most competent military or, for more appropriate example in Creation, religious fanatics would simply refuse to talk and meet the interrogation attempts with stone cold silence. Now, the social-optimalized Solar can sway someone with high Conviction/Integrity/Temperance in no time, but for all the rest..
The torture makes the victim speak and JET demonstrates futility of lies.
Note that JET does not actually verify objective truth. It only pings if the target is willfully lying. One of the easiest ways around JET is to give a patsy bad information and have THEM talk to the Solar.
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but yes, a canon character pretty much did this.
He shows up in some of the between-chapter comics with his kid.
If they are made of one of the Magical Materials?
Difficult, probably requiring more-than-human strength just to do effectively, to the point where just using mundane weapons( or even not using a weapon at all) would be much better.
If you have JET this isn't true anymore. Without torture there is far less compulsion to speak, and JET solves the problem that you don't know if what they said is true.
This is part of why JET is an unfortunate charm: because it incentivizes players to torture people for information.
Well, most competent military or, for more appropriate example in Creation, religious fanatics would simply refuse to talk and meet the interrogation attempts with stone cold silence. Now, the social-optimalized Solar can sway someone with high Conviction/Integrity/Temperance in no time, but for all the rest..
The torture makes the victim speak and JET demonstrates futility of lies.
I have no idea where you guys are getting this from. Torture is less effective to get someone to talk in general, not just getting someone to tell you lies. If a guy won't talk in interrogation, he probably won't talk in torture either. And if someone would talk in interrogation, you don't need torture in the first place.
If you have a religious fanatic, I think they'd probably accept their terrible fate and suffer in silence rather than talk.
If you actually look into torture, it still doesn't work, because torture literally breaks people's brains to the point that you can ask them what their spouse's name is, and the more intelligible answers still have decent odds of being on the level of, "I'm married?!"
Torture is like... fractally bad as an interrogation method. It's just layers of terrible, all the way down, from every perspective.
Note that JET does not actually verify objective truth. It only pings if the target is willfully lying. One of the easiest ways around JET is to give a patsy bad information and have THEM talk to the Solar.
But it would be so hilarious if Judge's Ear Technique verified objective truth!
Then you could use it as an instantaneous communications method by asking random people questions like "My ally on the other side of Creation is planning on doing X, yes or no?" Since it's a yes or no question, so long as they make any guess you'll automatically know the correct answer.
Instantaneous (but low bandwidth) communications over arbitrary distances!
Do you know how heavy a normal short sword is?
Do you know how carefully it has to be balanced?
And do you believe that an Artifact weapon would be balanced for use by people who are attuned or people who are not attuned, because if you believe the latter then I have a bridge to sell you.
Iron is ~8g/cm^3. Starmetal is often another name for "meteoric iron" so there's a reasonable argument that starmetal weapons will weigh no more than iron ones.
Orichalcum is perfected gold, so it should weigh ~19g/cm^3. There's no indication it's any denser than real gold. So a weapon made of orichalcum should weigh about 2.5 times as much as a weapon made of iron.
Silver is ~11g/cm^3, so 1.5 times as much for moonsilver.
Not sure, but we know how much a finished product is supposed to weigh: According to 3E, it takes around 5 Talents of a MM to make a Daikalve (from the fluff of the Wyld-Shaping Techique). We know a Jade Talent's weight because it is an official unit of currency: 68 pounds. This gives us a weight of 340 pounds for a Daiklave. This assumes that 1) none of the MM is wasted in the process and 2) that no other materials are included.
If you ment how much would a normal-sized sword made of those materials weigh, no idea, as we have no size measurments for a Jade Talent.
Do you remember which book or edition it was?
The thing is we also have examples of stuff like short swords made out of the magical materials, they aren't going to be particularly heavy.
Entry for the Short Daiklave, page 386:
"Short daiklaves are small enough that mortals and unattuned Exalts can wield
them as awkward chopping swords (as mundane chopping sword, but requiring Strength 3)."
Stat Comparison:
Speed 4, A +4, D +4L, Def +1, Rate 2
Speed 4, A +1, D +5/2L, Def -1, Rate 2
2.5:
Speed 4, A +2, D +3/2L, Def +1, Rate 2
Speed 4, A +1, D +4L, Def -1, Rate 2
Most of the other artifacts are stated to be unweildable if not attuned, or would count as improvised weapons(Daiklave is specifically called out), so a maximum Accuracy of -3 and rate of 2, with an ST specified Damage, speed, and defense values(though all should be lower than normal). Going by the Short Daiklave example, the str requirement should also go up by around 2.
Entry for the Short Daiklave, page 386:
"Short daiklaves are small enough that mortals and unattuned Exalts can wield
them as awkward chopping swords (as mundane chopping sword, but requiring Strength 3)."
Stat Comparison:
Speed 4, A +4, D +4L, Def +1, Rate 2
Speed 4, A +1, D +5/2L, Def -1, Rate 2
2.5:
Speed 4, A +2, D +3/2L, Def +1, Rate 2
Speed 4, A +1, D +4L, Def -1, Rate 2
Most of the other artifacts are stated to be unweildable if not attuned, or would count as improvised weapons(Daiklave is specifically called out), so a maximum Accuracy of -3 and rate of 2, with an ST specified Damage, speed, and defense values(though all should be lower than normal). Going by the Short Daiklave example, the str requirement should also go up by around 2.
Well, it could go up by around 2, or it could be tripled. Tripled seems better since I did napkin calcs which put a grand daiklaive at ~200 kg if made of gold/orichalcum, and I figure that Str 9 seems like a more reasonable number than Str 5 to wield something that weighs that much.
"The nuclear device is going to go off in less than four hours," says Brad.
"And we don't even have a suspect," sighs Steve.
They look gloomily at the dingy gray wall of their lab.
"Would it help? I mean, at this point?" Brad says.
"We could torture them," says Steve. "And find out where the device is. Then we could evacuate people and save thousands of lives."
"Point," says Brad.
Both of them sigh.
"What if we torture you?" Brad asks.
"What?"
"Well, it's doing something," Brad points out. "I mean, at least it's not just sitting here."
"I can see how you might feel that that might be necessary," Steve says.
He doesn't mean that. He's actually retreating, just a tiny bit, while watching Brad very carefully for indications that Brad is kidding.
Unfortunately for Steve, he isn't.
"Gya!" screams Steve, not much later. Then he babbles. Then he begins to talk. "I'll tell! I'll tell you anything!"
"Where's the nuclear device?" Brad demands.
"It's at 1010 Rue de la Forge!"
Steve pauses. He blinks. Even through the mist of pain, he's surprised by the fact that he said that.
"I'll send someone to check that out," says Brad, darkly, threateningly. He does.
"It's the truth," says Steve. "I don't know how I knew. But it's the truth."
A few minutes pass. Brad's phone rings. He listens to it. He hangs up. Then he stares at Steve in growing wonder.
"It was there."
"It was there?"
"It was there."
Brad shakes his head.
"Wow," Brad says. "It must be the torture."
"Let me try!" says Steve. He flails his shackled arms.
"Not on me!" says Brad, looking a little ill.
"Maybe on Helen?"
Experimentally, they torture Helen. "Surely, you're familiar with Godel's subversive theorem," Steve interrogates. "But can you actually give a statement that's true but unprovable within the logical framework in which we live our lives?"
"This one!" wails Helen.
Steve frowns. "Hey, is that right?" he asks Brad.
"I think so," says Brad. "But I can't construct a proof, offhand."
"Ha!" says Steve.
It makes big news. Defusing nuclear devices in the nick of time always does, and the bit about Godel keeps the story alive in the mathematical journals. Soon everyone understands just what forcibly destroying a person's mind can do.
"Can you solve an NP-complete problem in polynomial time?" harshes Associate Professor Kazer, the official torturer of the Stanford Computer Science Department.
Amelia, his best graduate student, whimpers.
"Please," she says. "Make it stop!"
"Can you?"
"Yes!" she snaps.
"Give me a constructive proof!"
And she does.
It is a wave of change. Suddenly from the National Center for Public Policy issue bold new programs; and everyone who reads their reports finds themselves marveling at the simplicity and clarity of each torture victim's thoughts.
The Fed no longer relies on archaic pre-torture economic theory. Screams point their way to the perfect rate.
The nation prospers as never before. Great towers rise. Flying cars are everywhere, fueled not by oil but by ordinary kitchen water.
And in Brad's lab (for it is no longer considered appropriate for such people as Steve and Helen to be considered his equals), Brad whispers gently to Steve, "How can I make such pain unnecessary?"
"You can't," says Steve.
"I can't? Why not?"
And there is a whimpering and a shout from Steve that subsides quietly into sobbing and to words.
Since you've brought him up, @EarthScorpion, do you mind mentioning your thoughts on the nature of He Who Bleeds the Written Word?
My personal interpretation is that he was the "historian" of the Primordials, a being that despised the timeless acausality that came before him and fixated on charting the way that What Was creates What Is. Elloge swathes herself in fantasy to forget the past; her former self was obsessed with genealogy, history, geology, every way and every metric by which change over time can be measured and defined. He "Bleeds the Written Word" because the written word is the crystallization of history, a way of recording events that won't twist and degrade with time the way oral histories are prone to, and such a thing is essential to his goals and desires. Without stability, without a clear grasp of your origins, without respect for what has come before, you are nothing, said the Mythos of HWBTWW.
His worshipers became powerful by tying themselves to the histories of people who were powerful: you drink the blood of great heroes to gain their heroic traits, and thus you drink HWBTWW's blood to become connected to his Primordial glory.
His theoretical Yozic "hat" (as in, what sort of supervillain his Charmset would push you toward being) would have been centered on defining people and things based on their origins & ancestry. It makes you the Gorosei in One Piece, declaring that anyone who is the child of a pirate must be killed as well, for the sin of the father is passed down through blood, and that slaves' children are meant to be slaves themselves. It makes you an agent of staunch traditionalism and caste systems, only allowing progress or change to happen on a generational scale, and only within your own personal view of what is "appropriate". HWBTWW training charms would be about creepy eugenics shit where you find a person whose grandfather was a skilled swordsman and gradually rewrite his own skills & goals & beliefs until he's a carbon copy of his grandsire, or "blessing" someone so their offspring naturally inherit the qualities of their parent and grow up to be just like them sans a few cosmetic details, or harvesting blood from someone with the skills you want and feeding it to someone loyal to you, at which point the knowledge of the blood whispers to them and shows them how to gain the skills of the donor. Because when you take reverence for the past and an interest in the origins of things and deface it, that's what it becomes - stagnant, repressive, retrograde.
But it would be so hilarious if Judge's Ear Technique verified objective truth!
Then you could use it as an instantaneous communications method by asking random people questions like "My ally on the other side of Creation is planning on doing X, yes or no?" Since it's a yes or no question, so long as they make any guess you'll automatically know the correct answer.
Instantaneous (but low bandwidth) communications over arbitrary distances!
Although I could see this as a high-essence Sidereal or maybe Infernal charm? A Sidereal can use the act of questioning someone to literally pull the information out of the Loom, so you can figure out the objective truth of a statement of fact (but it fails if you're dealing with something outside of Fate), while there's probably some Yozi like Oramus or Qaf who might have these out-of-nowhere epiphanies in-theme.
It would probably have to be expensive as fuck to discourage Judge's Ear TCP/IP Technique, but it could work.
Ultimate French intellectual philosopher-author. Obsessed with the concept of making the perfect work and on the fundamental unknowablity and the imperfection of words to the concepts he extols. Publicly bemoans how nothing is knowable and everything is imperfect and that a work is most powerful when it exists only in the mind of the author - but certain concepts and stories escape from him, unknowable works which extol tantalising concepts.
Spends all his time talking about theming and the interaction of the author with the work - in contrast to Elloge, who cares about characters and their relationships and hides herself away in shells of churned out words like a snail hides in its shell.
I have no idea where you guys are getting this from. Torture is less effective to get someone to talk in general, not just getting someone to tell you lies. If a guy won't talk in interrogation, he probably won't talk in torture either. And if someone would talk in interrogation, you don't need torture in the first place.
If you have a religious fanatic, I think they'd probably accept their terrible fate and suffer in silence rather than talk.
Have you heard of Inquisition? Did you read studies about or even transcripts from trials that used torture? People talk when tortured, with negligible exceptions, and they talk fast and at great lengths about everything. The problem with torture is , to repeat, it's hard to tell when the tortured tell lies to conform to torturer expectation, like the people who described at length and in details sabbats and satanic rites that never took place and accused their own families of practising witchcraft ect.
Have you heard of Inquisition? Did you read studies about or even transcripts from trials that used torture? People talk when tortured, with negligible exceptions, and they talk fast and at great lengths about everything. The problem with torture is , to repeat, it's hard to tell when the tortured tell lies to conform to torturer expectation, like the people who described at length and in details sabbats and satanic rites that never took place and accused their own families of practising witchcraft ect.
Have you heard of Inquisition? Did you read studies about or even transcripts from trials that used torture? People talk when tortured, with negligible exceptions, and they talk fast and at great lengths about everything.
I'm aware of this, and I accept it as truth, but this does not deny my stance that the problem with torture isn't that you can't tell what people say are truth or lies, the problem with torture is that it messes with people's minds and they'd probably talk anyway with interrogation.
If you use normal interrogation techniques and JET, you'll end with better results because you could narrow things down faster. You don't need to jump straight to torture. And since it messes with people's minds, who's to say that the suspects' sense of truth and lies would be consistent? If someone would say anything to make the torture stop, there's a chance they would believe their own lies, they could rationalize to themselves that maybe they had been working off on faulty information, that since they're still suffering, maybe they can't trust their own minds.
Yes. And some other well-respected Inquisitors argued the opposite, depending on the region and or century and purpose. The offical instructo of Holy Office did included torture to the purpose of making subjects renounce their errors and save their immortal souls. The Pope in 1468 declared witchcraft to be "crimen exceptum", which removed all legal limits on the application of torture in cases where evidence was difficult to find.
Also, totally not on point. The question was: does someone tortured talk? The answer is yes.
And they're obviously Kimberian demons too, I mean it only makes sense.
Don't you understand that they're just doing this for you President-Summoner Sempai, making these tough choices so you don't have to? How could you be so cold as to reject their patriotic love, have you no pride in your people?
Yes. And some other well-respected Inquisitors argued the opposite, depending on the region and or century and purpose. The offical instructo of Holy Office did included torture to the purpose of making subjects renounce their errors and save their immortal souls. The Pope in 1468 declared witchcraft to be "crimen exceptum", which removed all legal limits on the application of torture in cases where evidence was difficult to find.
Also, totally not on point. The question was: does someone tortured talk? The answer is yes.
The use of torture to extract confession was illegal in the Danish courtly system for most of the medieval and inquisitors actively had to break the law to use it; my friend @Strypgia has a really nice post on the subject of torture and it's uses and they mostly amount to 'fucking none'. That said, this is actually on me, because I misremembered the dates of Cautio Criminalis and On Crimes and Punishments which are both 1700s publications and not 1400s.
(My argument still stands though, just pretend 4 is actually a 7.)
The use of torture to extract confession was illegal in the Danish courtly system for most of the medieval and inquisitors actively had to break the law to use it; my friend @Strypgia has a really nice post on the subject of torture and it's uses and they mostly amount to 'fucking none'. That said, this is actually on me, because I misremembered the dates of Cautio Criminalis and On Crimes and Punishments which are both 1700s publications and not 1400s.
(My argument still stands though, just pretend 4 is actually a 7.)
I mean yeah, in normal circumstances all it does is get people to say what you want them too. But with judges eat technique you just need them to say " The bomb is at x until you get one that pings as truw."
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