White Haven wrote:I admit I'm more than a little surprised to see the resistance to some vague, loose guidelines to esper abilities. I'm one of the ones who was specifically requesting that Simon lay some down, not because I wanted to crimp people running esper-heavy setups, but because it helps my writing to know in very loose terms what is and isn't possible in the universe. It's the same reason I asked 'vaguely where in a system would a hyper limit probably be,' and 'assuming non-stealth conditions, how far would ships be from the average border posts when they were picked up.' It helps give enough rough structure to the underlying mechanics of the universe and technologies that we can all write in frames of reference that possess relevance to each other.
White Haven, let me clarify:
When I give you answers to questions like that, I'm usually giving them from the "Simonverse" version of SDNW4. Which is based on a rough grab bag of approximate numbers and estimates and rules of thumb I've thrown together for my own purposes
as a player, not as a mod. By and large, "Simonverse" estimates aren't enforceable on anyone, but I use them for my own purposes to create a self-consistent milieu in which I know what the hell is going on when I talk about "the battleship opens fire."
For instance, in the Simonverse, the average firepower per point of ship is... [redacted]. Now, obviously a lot of people would object to that figure, either because they want the numbers to be higher (Siege) or lower (I don't know who, but I'm sure there's someone). Likewise, the average tonnage per point of ship is [redacted]. Again, people will disagree about this- Fin's 400 point warships will be a lot bigger and more voluminous than my 400 point warships.
So none of this is, or should be, enforceable.
However, the Simonverse at least provides a common frame of reference, which is what you, White Haven, would appear to want. But there are other frames of reference. To take an obvious example, the Elysians don't actually fit in the Simonverse, because seriously what the fuck triremes. And that's just me being schizophrenic and having two mutually exclusive 'milieus' in my own head at the same time. There are other milieus created by other people, too.
To prevent clashes where milieus collide... well, that's mostly a job that the players have to settle between themselves on an ad hoc basis. I am trying not to impose my 'Simonverse' expectations on anyone else. In this case, I'm not sure it's possible to have a rule about what psychics can do that fits with 'Simonverse' standards (where ESP is relatively weak) without clipping the wings of, call them 'Siegeverse' standards (where it's glouriously powerful).
So the more I think about this, the more I think that
yes I will, as Siege wants, retract my attempt to make a formal ruling. I think I will restrict myself to the following:
[modhat on]
Telepathic communication over interstellar distances is pretty darn hard. That is all.
[modhat off]
Now, if I actually see anyone doing anything bluntly abusive with psychic abilities, I will by golly come down on them like a ton of rectangular building things.
If you want the Simonverse version of what SDNW4 espers are capable of, I'll tell you (it looks a lot like the pseudo-ruling I just made), but don't consider that enforceable on anyone.
Siege wrote:I don't want a rule that is flexibly interpreted. Rules should aspire to create clarity, not confusion, and being flexible until you're not is the opposite of clear. If a rule isn't universally applicable it shouldn't be a rule; I don't think it should be universally applicable (apparently neither do you) so I oppose it vehemently. It's stifling and obnoxious especially because we already have a perfectly good way of dealing with people who flagrantly abuse the freedom the game offers to them: that method is called the moderators, and you're it.
Your job is to come down like a ton of bricks on those of us who misuse their literary discretion. It is most empathically not to threaten the creative freedom of everybody who isn't with unnecessary and nebulously bendy rules.
I can work with this, as long as I have freedom
to come down like a ton of bricks without people bitching or ragequitting. Or the freedom to come down like a ton of bricks and have the fact that the target will bitch of even ragequit be accepted.
This is something that concerns me, because I remember the last time I came down like a hundred kilos of bricks (the other 900 kg being held in reserve) on someone for bending the rules: Pollux. And I remember hearing some bitching about that, although to be fair it was coming from an expected direction, and not from you. So far, if I make an arbitrary ruling not supported by some specific written rule, I
expect to hear complaints, whether I actually will or not. Which makes me kind of paranoid, and probably distorts my mod-behavior.
But if I am supposed to simply have discretionary power to say "this is abusive and will be punished, this is not and will not, even though both people are nominally taking the same capability and using them in different ways..."
I can actually work with that- it's a very... Umerian way to run things. It doesn't come naturally to me, which is why I was trying to set rules instead of just making a one-off declaration.
So yeah. I can do rule by decree, if that's what people want to see, and if they will accept the basic legitimacy of my doing so as long as I don't do anything that the bulk of the player-base considers unreasonable.
Am I understanding you correctly? Because I think that may be my problem- I'm thinking in a legalistic sense instead of a 'rule by ad hoc decree' sense.
I also take umbrage to the idea that because some people don't want espers to be a "major feature of the way they run the game", nobody else should be allowed to have espers be a major feature of the way they run the game either. I don't try to legislate my preferences into the game, I would thank you kindly to do the same.
Here's a novel idea: I don't like to write about giant transforming robots. I don't tear my hair out worrying about a giant transforming robot gap, I just... don't write about giant transforming robots. Similarly if people don't like to write about psykers, they can just not write about psykers. Why does it need to be any more difficult than this?
I think part of the problem is that the "esper gap" causes problems for character-driven storylines. In particular, long-range psychic abilities raise the specter of things like easy stealing of national secrets... Which started this whole mess in the first place, because Shinn strongly implied that the Haruhiists had used psychic abilities to
somehow sniff out the Klavostani plan to chase the Byzantines far enough in advance to tip the Byzantines off.
You can see how this sets troubling precedents, and how it could reasonably demand the aforementioned ton of bricks tactics. For player-on-player interactions, "I has psychics" cannot become a free pass for the question "how the hell did your guys find out my guys' secret plans fast enough to react?" Otherwise they will also become a free pass for allowing OOC knowledge of the secret plan to bleed into IC actions. Not good.
If I have a gap in giant robots or number of gigawatts generated or physical ship size, I can handwave it without having to worry too much about its effect on things like character interactions, my ability to keep plot-relevant plans secret from the enemy until the time to reveal them, and so on. With psychics, that's threatened,
unless we have modhammers landing on anyone who tries to abuse the technique.
I can do that.
My natural reflex was to write a rule that would stop people from abusing it at all rather than just wait for the abuse to be tried and then hammer it. That doesn't mean I was right to do so.
EDIT:
PeZook wrote:Siege put a limit on submesonics himself: The smallest core is the size of a large room and draws a lot of power.
Indeed. Specifically I've used the terms 'stellar' and 'suprastellar' levels of energy with respect to sub-meson cores being used to facilitate long-distance real-time communication. I never intended the tech to be portable and usable by anything less than a starship; any mentions of personal communicators based on this tech are not mine. I generally know what I'm doing, and I would like to think this much would be obvious by now.
Siege?
You'll notice that I have
not once tried to mod-sanction any of the technology you've presented. This is because it's fairly clear to me, too, that you know what you're doing and are using the stuff responsibly. You use submesonics responsibly, you use references to "stellar" levels of energy responsibly, so that even though this is way above the energy scales a lot of people envision their hardware working on, it
doesn't matter that there's a scale discrepancy. Because, I repeat, yes you are being responsible.
I don't have to worry about you saying "I have suprastellar energies, so I can blow up planets like a Death Star!" If anyone starts complaining
now about the power levels you write your civilization slinging around, I'm going to laugh in their face, not try to impose a mod sanction on you over it.
It's when I'm dealing with people who are a risk for abusing a capability, deliberately* or accidentally**, that I have to keep on my toes. And my natural reflex is to set up regulations in advance and preempt the problem, rather than rule by decree to undo it after the fact.
I can suppress the reflex, but I want to hear from other people about this.
*As with CN trying to get away with using warp gates to move some of his supposed-to-be-fixed system defenses around his territory
**It's easy to imagine, say, Force Lord doing this just because he gets carried away sometimes...
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