Futuristic Artificers

[atemu1234]

In a world that is in the distant future, with laser weapons and the all, how best could we handle artificers? What would they make, and how would it be used?

[Captnq]

Play Battlelords of the 23rd century?

[Urpriest]

First you decide how you're handling technology and whether magic still exists. Once you've solved that for the setting as a whole, artificers shouldn't be too tricky to fit in.

[cosmonuts]

I wrote a post about using magic, psionics, and crafting to emulate modern/future technologies.


This is by no means an exhaustive or comprehensive list. I mean to brainstorm.

THE OBVIOUS STUFF

Hygiene: Prestidigitation. Traps.

Agriculture: Traps of create food and water. Hero's feast. I don't know, this is a really easy field to fulfill in D&D.

Communication: Sending. Image and sound!

Medical: Healing line of spells in cleric spell list. Regeneration, cure, heal, etc. Diseases, damaged body parts, and all that stuff.

Environmental Technologies: Control weather. There are a bunch more but I don't know where to find them. Applications left as exercise to the reader.

Transportation: Uh, teleport? Fly?

Information Gathering: Divination spells, duh.

Military: Any resetting traps of a damage spell more than fulfills the role expected of a modern or even future military. Or just have a legion to wizards and/or sorcerers. Mix with information gathering as above to get good results.

Espionage: Illusion and divination spells.

Logistics: The psionic power hypercognition should manage this field that is otherwise very difficult in real life.

Production, Industry, and Output: Automatic resetting wish traps. Conjuration spells. Transmutation spells. D&D is really futuristic in this region, if nothing else.

THE WEIRD STUFF

Science and Other Academics: This one is weird. If a subject is sufficiently "legendary" (and I'm not sure if things like condensed matter field theory, paleoanthropology, or computational complexity qualify as legendary) then legend lore should do the trick. If not, then develop models of your field of study, contact other plane with a deity whose portfolio is matched with your field of study, and ask "is my model accurate within X or Y bounds". With your answers, refine your model, and you should have advanced science eventually. Nonempirical sciences like computer science, mathematics, statistics, decision theory can be partly handled with hypercognition, because they're partly concerned with pure deduction. If there's a deity whose portfolio is logic (???) then you can develop theories and contact other plane to refine them. Otherwise the only way out of this I can think of is moment of prescience to give yourself a +25 check to any and all knowledge skills. Stack with other knowledge skill boosters to repeatedly put out high quality research on your science checks. From the SRD, knowledge does include some academic and scientific disciplines at the discretion of the DM.



Computing, Data Management: It's easy enough to implement AND, OR, NOT logic gates using obedient zombies and/or constructs, but to create something that truly resembles (and in fact, can implement even in-game) modern computing science we need a universal Turing machine. Notably, AND/OR/NOT computers are not functionally complete (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_completeness).

The full construction of a universal Turing machine will not be outlined here, because it's not practical. Nevertheless, I believe I can demonstrate that it is workable with obedient fine-sized constructs arranged to stand in a manner which forms a lattice.

First have the constructs stand in a lattice and adhere to the following rules:


If currently outputting 0, and three or more neighbors are outputting 1, output 1 as well.
If currently outputting 1, and two or more neighbors are outputting 1, continue outputting 1.
If neither condition 1&2 are met, output 0.
(Optional) At command of wizard, change outputs to those requested.

The outputs can obviously be something as simple as raise/lower red flag. This is a game of life. It contains basic movements known as "gliders" which can be generated by a "gun". Glider collisions can compute. We can construct a finite state machine, a Turing tape, and a signal detector with these collisions (there's a paper floating somewhere out there about this). With these, we can get our beloved AND/OR/NOT operations, as well as a random access (in?)finite memory.

With moment of prescience/hypercognition it is possible for a mortal to parse and manipulate the information, as I believe this is either a INT or WIS skill check.