Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[Lokathor]

And it's not just deniability. No one makes freon cannisters for cooling anymore, but if you upgrade an old fridge to newer specs, the freon can it has inside it is pretty fucking awesome.

Query: Wat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGU8CkOG9a8

[Stahlseele]

It will be 3 hours before i can watch that link.
Fucking work computers crapping out every time i click on a youtube link -.-

[Username17]

And it's not just deniability. No one makes freon cannisters for cooling anymore, but if you upgrade an old fridge to newer specs, the freon can it has inside it is pretty fucking awesome.

Query: Wat.

Freon is, at sea level kinds of room temperature and pressure, an inert and highly compressible gas that conducts heat quickly. That has a considerable use in refrigeration. Refrigeration operates on the principle that when you compress things they get hotter and when you expand things they get colder - Boyle's Law shit if you care. So you compress the gas, let it cool off, and then expand it next to something you want to cool down and you've just cooled it down. That is why warm air flows out of the backs or bottoms of refrigerators.

Anyway: no one makes freon anymore because it's hell on the environment (in the upper atmosphere it becomes reactive and breaks down ozone), and their production requires non-renewable chemical resources. But looting old freon from old refrigerators is still a reasonable thing to do. There was a whole aside on bootleg freon in Snowcrash, and while it was a little over-done, that sort of thing would in fact happen.

Anyway, I've been thinking about how to get the looting thing going. One of the big ways is to make recycling be a time consuming low end career. Yes, you could go collect bottles and return them for the redemption value now, but unless you're a hobo you probably have better things to do with your time. The future of 2075 has a lot more hobos and aluminum collecting is a respectable thing to do. But it's not amazingly well paid, there's just lots of people doing it. Of course, one thing I noticed in Africa was that even though scrappers and recyclers were combing over things looking for quality trash, there was still trash every where. The completely recyclable plastic bags that water came in just lay strewn about on the street all the time. That was because most people lacked the ability to get those bags recycled. Not because it wasn't economically viable to do so, but simply because the infrastructure and training to do that was actually pretty rare.

So if you want to get meaningful returns on recycling combat drones or something, you need to be talking higher up the food chain - you need to have contacts that will be using those chips as chips rather than melting them down for resin base. Which gets us to a Mechwarrior-style salvage mechanic. Where getting repurposable materials out of a fallen combat droid is a question of your skills, your contacts, and the amount of time you're willing to spend and the amount of evidence you're willing to have pointing at you.

-Username17

[fectin]

Well if nothing else, if you're careful, you could turn two enemy droids into one friendly droid, plus some bits.

I like the subsystem you're describing for recycling drones. It looks great generally, and I especially like the way it looks like it supports a drone-poacher profession. How can you keep that without making it too crunchy for everyone else?

As purely informative asides, which don't undermine your actual points:
- Circuit boards are nearly always thermosets. You can't melt them down; they just burn.
- Recycling is usually not worthwhile. In the US, unless it's metal, it's basically only worthwhile because someone subsidized it. Metal is worthwhile enough that people will pay for it, which is why hobos collect cans, not newspapers. Plastic bags are particularly uneconomical: if you collect them free, you can generate material that is worth $32/ton at a cost of $4000/ton. That may change in the future, but it would take a radical new technology. Maybe bacteria that can eat plastic and spit out something worthwhile?

[RiotGearEpsilon]

As current methods of recycling are really energy intensive, I'm assuming that energy is either much, much cheaper in the future, or recycling is far, far more energy efficient.

[Stahlseele]

Probably both because: MAGIC!

[RiotGearEpsilon]

I keep forgetting that happened, largely because I have absolutely no idea what it does in this setting aside from superluminal communication.

[Username17]

- Recycling is usually not worthwhile. In the US, unless it's metal, it's basically only worthwhile because someone subsidized it. Metal is worthwhile enough that people will pay for it, which is why hobos collect cans, not newspapers. Plastic bags are particularly uneconomical: if you collect them free, you can generate material that is worth $32/ton at a cost of $4000/ton. That may change in the future, but it would take a radical new technology. Maybe bacteria that can eat plastic and spit out something worthwhile?

I know those numbers were just pulled out of your ass, but the point is that the realities of recycling economics are already changing. With the difficulties of getting oil and the constantly rising demand for plastics, the cost of recycled plastic more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2010. One the cost end, the price of recycling plastics has dropped every year. As of last year, you lost about $50 recycling a tonne of plastic. Predictions are that it will be a money gaining proposition in a few years.

But the issue is still that you're talking about making noticeable numbers of SpDRs on tonnes of material. And for a secret agent character, that just isn't meaningful. We can totally have "ghouls" who are people in rags who sift through old trash heaps for reusable materials and still have the players not have to worry about how many kilograms of cardboard they can haul before they are encumbered.

As current methods of recycling are really energy intensive, I'm assuming that energy is either much, much cheaper in the future, or recycling is far, far more energy efficient.

Actually, the energy issue is one of the driving forces for recycling. It takes only 79% of the energy to make glass from glass as it does to make glass from raw sand. It takes 24% of the energy to recycle a plastic bottle, and only 4% of the energy to recycle an aluminum can. The energy savings on recycling materials are intense. The issue is 100% the higher labor costs. As labor became more expendable and energy became more dear, recycling would by definition become much more attractive.

Well if nothing else, if you're careful, you could turn two enemy droids into one friendly droid, plus some bits.

I like the subsystem you're describing for recycling drones. It looks great generally, and I especially like the way it looks like it supports a drone-poacher profession. How can you keep that without making it too crunchy for everyone else?

I view the requirements as being:

• Can't be too fiddly. If someone tries to get me to calculate how many conduit components I need to make a vibro katana (I'm looking at you: Iron Kingdoms), I am out.
• Players should be able to ignore it if they want to.

What I take from that is that firstly it should be pretty abstract. You might have the ability to salvage a kind of thing, and for the most part you don't have to care about stuff other than the stuff you personally get a bounty for looting. The real issue is to give people some sort of compelling incentive to not do it, in order to make players feel like they are not being punished for failing to pack broken droids in suit cases.

My initial though would be to have people collect wanted stars that fade in time or with actions to throw people off your trail. Keeping looted electronics or whatever gives you wanted stars. So if you choose to skip the looting mini-game entirely, you have a deeper "star reserve" to take other actions with.

-Username17

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Actually, the energy issue is one of the driving forces for recycling. It takes only 79% of the energy to make glass from glass as it does to make glass from raw sand. It takes 24% of the energy to recycle a plastic bottle, and only 4% of the energy to recycle an aluminum can. The energy savings on recycling materials are intense. The issue is 100% the higher labor costs. As labor became more expendable and energy became more dear, recycling would by definition become much more attractive.

Did not know that. Gracias.

[fectin]

As current methods of recycling are really energy intensive, I'm assuming that energy is either much, much cheaper in the future, or recycling is far, far more energy efficient.

That's true too. But for example, take PETE, which is about the easiest plastic to recycle, still needs a large amount of ethylene glycol (which is made from oil) to turn it back into raw materials. Then you need crazy acids (made from benzine!) to turn it back into useful plastic.
If you're okay with just getting a carpet out of it (or whatever), you still need crazy acids, which are not exactly easy to get either. If you go that way though, you will not get good quality materials. Plastics basically all decay in UV, and only the ethylene process gets around that.

Pretty much every other plastic is worse.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

So, energy efficiency of recycling compared to manufacture from raw materials varies based on what you're recycling. Accursed real world complexity!

[fectin]

Quick rule of thumb: if it's not metal, it's more efficient to just make more.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

So we might actually finally reach that distant future where everything is either shiny chrome or rusty iron?

[DrPraetor]

Dr. Arroyo taps another button. "Yep, they're really eyeballs."

Marionette peers quizically at the tanktainer. It was *supposed* to be full of about twenty million dollars worth of liquid helium, but Chun had noticed the weight discrepancy as soon as he'd latched the tanker onto their employers rig. "I was hoping it was full of Halloween confectionery or something."

Arroyo says, "Dude, what?"

"Uh... like Dia de Los Muertos, right? But with witches and goblins and things. Candy made to look like body parts. It's eyeballs all the way through?"

Arroyo taps a button, and the camera they'd snaked into the tanktruck swims forward. "I don't see anything else in there."

"Why would someone fill a tanker with human eyeballs? They're not even cold!" Marionette really doesn't like surprises.

"Dunno, M. I'm the only one here with no magic, not my department."

Chun has gotten out of the Cab and begun reassembling the ultralight, which they had strapped to the tanker during the heist. "Why do you think it's magic?" he asks.

"Every single one of these eyes is blue, but they're not clonal. Tanker truck full of eyes from... 15 tons or so, 60 grams for a pair of eyes, call it 100 grams with that goo they're swimming in... about 100,000 people? All blue eyes? Magic."

"Hey, Doc, whose are they? I mean, you can pull DNA with that thing, right? Let's look some of them up." Chun comes over and plugs his DNI cable into one of the other prongs on Dr. Aroyo's device, his eyes go glassy.

"Oh, that's a good idea!" Dr. Arroyo mumbles, "we'll want to get at least a dozen samples to make sure we can get a hit."

Marionette opens herself to the spirit world and senses.... nothing. Usually, the spirit world in a place like this s filled with a background lament, the spirits of broken and abandoned streetlights pleading to be powered back on, and so forth. But the aether is eerily silent. "Chun, according to your traditions, is it advisable to hang out in an abandoned parking lot near a trucktainer full of magically significant human eyeballs?"

Chun's eyes snap back into focus. "Uh.... probably not. I'll finish reassembling the ultralight."

"Even better idea." Marionette mumbles, scanning the area around them with her hand on her sword.

[DrPraetor]

Okay, we *know* the following:
* Magic enables more legwork. Eventually this will involve a link to Dan Dennett talking about how a religion is a "domesticated meme", but for now the crucial issue is that magic gives you access to an entire extra universe full of agents with whom you can bargain.
* Summoning magic is simply another way of having an ally. The actual *power* is that you have a *magic cell phone*, with which you can call your spirit buddies; also, your spirit buddies have some improved mobility vs. the more typical pals-with-shotguns whom you can also have. Ritual Summoning doesn't even have this advantage.
* Likewise, most divination magic is simply contacts, whom you consult, either via your *magic cell phone* or by going home and invoking the five princes of the firmament to figure out what is going on.
* So, you have magic resources and ritual magic is how you access them. In addition, you may have some magic skills which are accessed via ritual, which game-mechanically can work exactly the same as going home to your laboratory and doing chemistry on something, vs. using the science-fiction-level portable laboratory which you'd have if you cared. So Ritual Magic is balanced against Backgrounds/Resources like Contacts, Laboratory, Allies, etc. rather than being another list of spells which you get for cheaper but you have to do the hokey pokey and wear a blue ribbon to get your fire immunity.
* That said, another chapter worth of guidelines and rules verbiage on the balance and proper use of backgrounds and contacts would do the genre good.
* I should emphasize, however, that destructive magic is generally not where you summon a spirit, which looks like a spear made of bone (because you are a necromancer) and hurl it at people. That said, when you pull a Prospero and summon an actual storm, that storm probably is a spirit and an agent with which you and others can bargain.

* Magic does not spontaneously eradicate the dystopian post-scarcity hellscape we have constructed. Among other things, this means that magic cannot do any of the following in industrial scale:
* Produce energy or material from nothing.
* Free people from the intellectual or cultural shackles of the hideously unjust new world order.
* Overthrow traditionally/technologically-armed human governments with ease.
* Assassinate anyone you please (see previous point.)

This does not mean that the wilderness can't have white-hat utopianist hippy good guys, but that if they have an army of angels at their beck and call, that army of angels is not sufficient to liberate Syracuse from the iron-fisted rule of Dow Chemical.

[Grek]

3D printing is going to almost certainly be a Big Deal™ in the future. How it works is you get a 3D printing machine and then fill it with a box of very finely ground metal and/or plastic powder, a canister of liquid adhesive and some dye. A robot arm with a little needle at the in dips into the box of powder and starts moving around, layer by layer, letting out a little bit of adhesive and dye, glueing the powder together. The same arm also dyes the powder the correct colour for whatever it's making. Once the arm has glued all of the powder required for your design together, you take your newly printed object out of the powder and shake off the extra powder. You can also use a 3D shredder to turn a 3D printed object back into powder and then use the powder to print off more stuff.

The main limit on 3D printing is not having the materials or machinery to produce whatever it is you want, but rather having schematics for it which can be used to get the printer to do what you want. And, because these schematics are electronic computer files, you can seriously get yourself a new pair of Nikes by torreting a pirated schematic for the shoes you want and feeding the file into your printer.

Most communities will probably want to get a set of community printers that allow you to print off goods from a catalogue of "approved" goods, either in exchange for the materials or for a nominal cash payment. You'll also want to have a community shredder in the same room which allows you to weigh your recycled goods and then get either their weight in printing powder or credit for the same at that recycling centre.

Setting-wise, pretty much anything that you don't want the players to care about greyhawking should be made of this stuff. Poor people still want to steal it, of course, since stealing weather stripping translates directly into geting the weight of the weather stripping in clothing, tools, spare parts or umbrellas once you shred the weather stripping and feed the proceeds into your printer. These people will have their own, probably illegal, printing stations set up someplace where you can grind up stolen goods and get things made like guns, bullets, counterfit goods, back-ally surgical supplies and drug needles that aren't allowed to be printed on public machines.

Note that because both the time and cost to make something via 3D printing is based almost entirely on the weight of the object, anything that can be made hollow and lightweight will be. It's way way cheaper to make something out hollow with thin reinforcing struts inside than it is to make an object that is solid all the way through.

The actual printing powder can be made out of pretty much anything, and behaves essentially like a plastic regardless of what you use as the powder. The adhesive decides if it turns into hard plastic or soft plastic. I recomend that people use as cheap a substrate as possible, like metal filings or silica or whatever. Plastics, like what are used right now, are out since plastic is made of hydrocarbons and there are way better things you could be doing with those. The adhesive isn't reusable, so it should be something cheap as well, like a plant-based resin. The dyes can go ahead and cost whatever, since having poor people all wearing clothes of the same uniform shade of shit brown is probably a good thing for the setting.

The process of scrapping a drone involves cutting it open, taking out the metal bits and selling those. If you decide to steal the chasis as well, that's fine, but it doesn't get you anything that its weight in poptop lids couldn't have gotten you, especially after you shot the bot up. Also, it occurs to me that bots will probably be designed so that the actual valuable bits can be easily removed from one broken chasis and plugged into a new one. This both makes our lives easier (by making it simple to loot the innards of the machine) and makes sense to do in-setting, since printing off a new body for your bot's brain is probably way cheaper than trying to repair the old body.

Other random musings:
-It is almost certainly possible to create an set of chemicals which will explode if triggered by an appropriate trigger while still being safe to run through a 3D printer. This means that you can have arbitrarily shaped explosive charges inserted into designs pretty much at will if you're willing to pay slightly extra for it. This leads to my next point, that:
-When you buy a gun, it is going to come with a pattern that lets you print off as many magazines for the gun as you want. Bullets are cheap as free and can be made at home, so nobody has slow down the game with ammo logistics. Everyone is assumed to have brought "enough" bullets with them whenever they go out, since getting more isn't ever a problem, no matter how exotic your gun is.
-Every weapon that would at all benefit from it is going to have its own unique ammunition specially made for use with that exact model of gun. And getting custom ammuntion that does whatever you want is simple enough that you don't have to make a special order for it. As long as there is any demand at all for something, it can be purchased anywhere.
-Any item which we care about that can be printed is going to need three different prices. One for how much a single instance of the item costs, one for how much a personal use pattern costs and one for how much a retailing pattern costs. You can, of course, use a personal use pattern to make goods for resale, but that's illegal so legitimate merchants don't do it.
-Literal homelessness is a thing of the past. If you are too poor to afford an appartment, you can still afford to get a cheapass tent printed off and move into a Hooverville just outside city limits. Your real problems are going to be disease, hunger or theft, not exposure to the elements.
-Interchangable parts are also a thing of the past. There's no reason to make everything out of the same parts when arbitrarily shaped replacements are just as easy to obtain as standardized replacements while working just as good or even better than their interchangeable counterparts. Even so, everything that is printable is interchangable on the fundemental level of printing powder.

[Josh_Kablack]

That discussion of 3d printing is spot-on but kinda underwhelming for future tech.

I personally fully expect to have access to a 3d printer, 3d scanner and resin casting setup within 2012. If I really wanted to, I could with my own funds extend that to include other types of casting and forging. That's in the real world on a personal financial scale.

The current real world issue with 3d printing is that you can only print things that fit inside the rig, so at the personal hobbiest level you can't make things bigger than large flashlights. Futuretech is likely to remove that by having 3d printers that precisely track relative positioning as they move autonomously - and so far with this setting, machines that move autonomously are called drones. I suggest that futuretech uses miniaturization, networking and specialization to simplify the process of 3d printing items with different component materials. Which is to say that 3d prints are a relic of the early 20th century - in this setting, the mainstay of fabrication are Print Swarms, composed of several mini-drones. Heck, we could even call the drones Kirbybots or something due to similiarities to old 4color 2d printing used in comics. But the idea is that each such Kirbybot is a mobile chasis with a localizer, a network node, a feed hose or material reservoir and the specialized "print nozzle" for working a particular material. Basic resin/polymer and inkpaint nozzles are the most common on such drones, but specialized versions exist for working molten metals, other conductive materials, explosives, adhesives, pharmacuticals, chemical weapons and other futuretech materials.

Thus the technology is scaleable by adding more drones, and more importantly to the setting, the technology is restrictable by the expedient of banning drones with nozzles for working various materials. This gives us a black market in acquiring, replicating and disguising certain types of Kirbybot mini-drones and their nozzles.

[Grek]

When 3D printing becomes a mainstay of the economy, you can expect to see kiddie pool sized rigs with a dozen arms printing out washing machines and Ikea-style pieces of furniture. That would almost certainly be much easier to accomplish than building a swarm of little robots that can assemble objects of arbitrary size on the fly. And, honestly, once something gets past about car sized, 3D printing stops being viable simply due to the structural issues inherent in trying to make something that big hollow enough to build at an economical rate while still being sturdy enough not to snap like a twig whenever something unfortunate happens to it.

Furthermore, I honestly think it would be a bad thing game-wise to allow people to run around with a swarm of bots building shit on the fly out of nearby materials. It means people checking the construction and equipment rules mid-play to look up how much a lawnchair weighs and how many they need to grind up to make the rocket launcher they've decided they want. That sort of thing should be happening when people are at their base or out buying equipment normally, not in the middle of a mission.

I also think you underestimate the effects that A] setting the value of most mundane objects to be strictly equal to their weight and B] making it so that everything you buy is copyable, DRM'd data rather than a phsyical object would have on the game and the setting as a whole. Adding swarms of assembly bots in is just another strain on people's WTF meter for, afict, no real gameplay or story benefit. Maybe if it could be a thing if it turns out that hackers don't have enough to do, but I'm pretty sure they've got enough now that giving them fabricate robots isn't needed.

[Username17]

Summoning magic is simply another way of having an ally. The actual *power* is that you have a *magic cell phone*, with which you can call your spirit buddies

That's a really good way to look at it. The degree to which summoning something is better than having drones or mercenaries is the degree to which the summoned creatures themselves are more competent, mobile, or loyal than mercenaries or drones. And the degree it is worse is the degree to which the summoned creatures fall short in those categories. The actual magic power is that you can talk to them and bring them into the world even though they are on a different plane of existence.

For symmetry, I would like to have a magic that defaults to humans just as I have one that defaults to elves and ogres - and that might as well be Conjuration. That has the advantage that deep one cults still drag in crazy humans to open portals and stuff.

Here are some limits to conjuration:

• No violation of conservation of mass. If you want to pull in a 90 kilogram demon, you need to prepare and send out 90 kilograms of material.
• No overall change in volume either. So in the very likely event that your prepared offerings are much denser than the creatures you are summoning, it is likely that you'll need to set it on fire before you pull the demon in so that the low density smoke and high density offerings can average out into the overall volume of the creature you are summoning.
• Possession happens, but possessing spirits are not invulnerable. My gut instinct says that they should be banished out by ultraviolet radiation so that people have a simple recourse to get rid of them, but giving them some sort of weakness you can shoot at them sounds pretty good too.

Anyway: the actual magical school of conjuration does several things:

• Let's you blow up prepared objects to get space demons.
• Let's you mark things to get possessed.
• Let's you hear voices from the other side.
• Let's you bargain with demons while they are still on the other side.
• Let's you trade stuff here for stuff from fairy land.

So the primary draw of the conjuration school is actually the thing where you have copies of cylons in your head that give you weird advice. Like Shadowrun Mentor Spirits or those frankly unexplained things in BSG.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

Heck, we could even call the drones Kirbybots or something due to similiarities to old 4color 2d printing used in comics.

If that's the reference you're going for, call them Mother Boxes. On the subject, I'd be sorely disappointed if Buddy Blank wasn't a supported character.

Tangentially related, I never did find out if mechanical brain - human body was a possible thing, either by transplant or with a custom-grown body. I get that Mr. Smithing isn't desirable, but that doesn't rule out brain/AI transplants, just brain/AI copying. Even if a full AI is impractical for implantation in a human body, can you put a nonsentient mechanical brain in human body? Conversely, is transplanting a brain from a human body into an artificial support (e.g. brain in a jar) something that can be done?

[Lokathor]

[*] Possession happens, but possessing spirits are not invulnerable. My gut instinct says that they should be banished out by ultraviolet radiation so that people have a simple recourse to get rid of them, but giving them some sort of weakness you can shoot at them sounds pretty good too.

Tactical combat teams fighting off possession monsters with a UV-flashlight attachment on a rifle in place of the grenade launcher seems pretty fancy.

It seems like the limits on Conjurations make mid-battle summoning next to impossible. Even if you have a summoning stone you're ready to set on fire you have to ignite it and then let it burn to just the right point to equalize mass/volume properly before you can get your creature out.

Should Conjuration allow for you to call a spirit that can just possess nearby objects and then fight as an animated object? I'm not sure if that would violate the rules or not, because I forget if AS has an astral plane type of thing or not that things can be in without being material.

[fectin]

Heck, we could even call the drones Kirbybots or something due to similiarities to old 4color 2d printing used in comics.

If that's the reference you're going for, call them Mother Boxes. On the subject, I'd be sorely disappointed if Buddy Blank wasn't a supported character.

Tangentially related, I never did find out if mechanical brain - human body was a possible thing, either by transplant or with a custom-grown body. I get that Mr. Smithing isn't desirable, but that doesn't rule out brain/AI transplants, just brain/AI copying. Even if a full AI is impractical for implantation in a human body, can you put a nonsentient mechanical brain in human body? Conversely, is transplanting a brain from a human body into an artificial support (e.g. brain in a jar) something that can be done?

Realworld answer is that's not likely. You need way too much precision interfacing with nerves, and those are way too individual. On top of that, you need regular chemical signalling from your brain, or your body will die fast.

On 3d printing: that's a good explanation. It doesn't work for guns though, because those need much, much better material characteristics. That means guns can be always expensive (as in "not free"), because it's still cheapest to make them out of metal.
Also, extrusion-based is probably better than adhesive. You'd go through a lot of adhesive, and that seems likely to be fairly resource-intensive too.

[Username17]

Tangentially related, I never did find out if mechanical brain - human body was a possible thing, either by transplant or with a custom-grown body. I get that Mr. Smithing isn't desirable, but that doesn't rule out brain/AI transplants, just brain/AI copying. Even if a full AI is impractical for implantation in a human body, can you put a nonsentient mechanical brain in human body? Conversely, is transplanting a brain from a human body into an artificial support (e.g. brain in a jar) something that can be done?

Not really sure why you'd want to. Computer brains are big and heavy. But basically yes. You can make an animal into a biodrone if you want, and humans are animals. You can make a human into a biodrone, and then you can have an AI @man that body around. If you're willing to accept a less than human computer intelligence, you can put one of those in charge of the biodrone inside the biodrone. And then you have a Stepford Wife or something.

So, you have magic resources and ritual magic is how you access them. In addition, you may have some magic skills which are accessed via ritual, which game-mechanically can work exactly the same as going home to your laboratory and doing chemistry on something, vs. using the science-fiction-level portable laboratory which you'd have if you cared. So Ritual Magic is balanced against Backgrounds/Resources like Contacts, Laboratory, Allies, etc. rather than being another list of spells which you get for cheaper but you have to do the hokey pokey and wear a blue ribbon to get your fire immunity.

One of the basic things that must be grappled with is the difference between a bonus and an ability. It's a tough question and I don't think there are fundamentally perfect answers. Consider:

• In RIFTS, it is stupid as fuck that you need to tag "boxing" if you want to be a decent gunner, because boxing gives you a bonus attack. That is an example where getting an ability (boxing) that comes with a bonus rider (bonus attacks) seems logical but in execution is terribad.
• On the flip side, it is totally acceptable and cool that when you get a cybernetic arm you pick up a bunch of bonuses to strength related tasks because your arm is super strong.

The issue I think is that while it is fine for an ability you have tagged to give you a bonus to doing some other task, it is probably a bad thing for anything to be the only thing that gives you a bonus. And that includes being something that gives a bonus that stacks with everything else. You don't want to be in a situation where someone wants to play a melee character and therefore they have cybernetic arms. There need to be other options for the melee fighter such that any particular cuisinart may or may not choose to go the cyberarms route.

Anyway, how this ties back into magic: what magic is is a series of tag abilities that operate like super powers. And those abilities should be bought like Adept Powers and not like Spells. That is to say: there is no compelling reason to pretend that it is just as valuable to know how to light fires as it is to be able to make giant explosions out of your markers. Just as we expect a modest strength enhancement to cost less than a large strength enhancement and a blatant resilience enhancement to cost less than a covert one, it is perfectly natural that a large magical boost cost more than a small one. Different magical abilities do not have to cost similar amounts. And they shouldn't.

So where does that leave us? A magical ability is an ability like any other. Some of them might be "can fly now" or "can breathe fire" or some other crazy thing that is an all or nothing thing. Others might be basically for an incremental improvement like slowing down time in order to move faster or change their skin into bronze to get more resilience. But yeah: other things might be just that you can do structural analysis through psychometry rather than through gas spectroscopy.

And I think I am closer to figuring out what it means for Illusion to be "Elf Magic". The idea comes from the fact that we expect bone lacing (which is subtle) to cost more than scaly skin (which is blatant). And if you are a human wizard who learns an illusion spell, that's always subtle - and you pay for that. Until you cast it, people can't really tell what magic you know. But if you're an elf, you can take that illusion magic at a discount to get it the blatant way: you literally start getting crazy elvish traits like vestigial wings and head antennae. People can look at you and know that you're an elf who has access to illusion magic. This means that we can go beyond the fact that in the world as a whole it is easier for elves to learn illusions and that a lot of modern illusion magic is reverse engineered from the shit people in Avalon do and actually mechanically encourage players to go get illusion magic when they are an elf. And do it without doing something stupid like giving all elves +1 to Illusion magic so that people feel like suckers whenever they cast an illusion spell and aren't personally an elf.

-Username17

[fectin]

Can elves use their illusions to hide their pointy ears? If not, what good is thier magic? If so, how is that a disadvantage?

One possible solution is to give them Exalted-style "tells", some obvious physical trait that they always have. So if your tell is a hitler mustache, you can disguise yourself as a wolf, but you're a wolf with a hitler mustache.

I don't know how well that works here; it was just an offhand thought.

[Vebyast]

It seems like the limits on Conjurations make mid-battle summoning next to impossible. Even if you have a summoning stone you're ready to set on fire you have to ignite it and then let it burn to just the right point to equalize mass/volume properly before you can get your creature out.

No, it still works. You can prep an offering that's heavier than your demon and the demon leaves behind what it doesn't need, or the summoning could kick in before the offering has expanded correctly and the demon waits until exactly the instant where the whole offering is at the right average density.

Another note about energy. Energy is conserved by conjuration even though your offering and the demon have different amounts of energy in the same amount of mass. This is done by having a tiny portion of the offering converted to energy or vice-versa as part of the conjuration.

So the primary draw of the conjuration school is actually the thing where you have copies of cylons in your head that give you weird advice. Like Shadowrun Mentor Spirits or those frankly unexplained things in BSG.

I like this. Do mental spirits need physical offerings? I'd assume either "no" or "not enough to matter". Similarly, does the demon care about what your offering is made of, or only that it's made of something? Do Greek gods prefer cows and Aztec gods prefer human hearts, or can you just define a properly-prepped volume of your environment to be an offering? First makes major summoning rituals more thematic, second makes it so your conjurers don't have to lug around 180kg of bacon so they can summon mooks if they need to.

Alternatively, conjurers can use downed drones and fresh corpses as offerings. I can totally see a conjurer on a steal run taking out a camera like a normal stealth dude, then running off with the camera, drawing a circle around it, and using it to summon a demon to distract or monitor the guards.

And if you are a human wizard who learns an illusion spell, that's always subtle - and you pay for that. Until you cast it, people can't really tell what magic you know. But if you're an elf, you can take that illusion magic at a discount to get it the blatant way: you literally start getting crazy elvish traits like vestigial wings and head antennae.

This is elegant.

I don't think it was ever mentioned what human magic stress looks like. Since it's from summoning, I'll suggest empty eyes and a general descent into the uncanny valley.

Can elves use their illusions to hide their pointy ears? If not, what good is thier magic? If so, how is that a disadvantage?

They can, but it requires concentration, throws on some stress, and can be detected by people that are looking for it carefully.