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Braininthejar2
2018-07-01, 04:59 PM
There is supposed to be a rank squared of modron hierarchs for each type (one primus, four secundi, 9 tetrians etc)

But with the 'unbroken chain of command' requirement that comes with modron way of thinking, there is no way that would work - such a pyramid of power is much too steep, because of the number of hierarchs stuck as "translators" in their higher-ups' retinues.

Any way to headcanon around it, or should I just drop the notion?

Keltest
2018-07-01, 05:05 PM
Theyre beings of pure law, not pure effectiveness. It makes a certain amount of sense that they would be bloated and inefficient since theyre more concerned with the order of things than accomplishing things with the minimal amount of waste and effort.

Braininthejar2
2018-07-01, 05:11 PM
Or so good at multitasking, that a sexton will simultaneously manage his army, and relying the statistical data between his superior quinton and the septons ruling the nearest region? :smalleek:

Assuming that every hierarch needs a direct line to non-hierarch modrons, there are only 5 tetrians not stuck with any secundus, 7 quartons not stuck with any tetrian, and +2 each rank down, with 19 decatons at the bottom. That in a realm with at least a million non-hierarch modrons that each decaton should oversee.

Keltest
2018-07-01, 05:15 PM
Or so good at multitasking, that a sexton will simultaneously manage his army, and relying the statistical data between his superior quinton and the septons ruling the nearest region? :smalleek:

Yes. Theyre magic not!robots from another dimension. they do what they want.

Braininthejar2
2018-07-01, 05:25 PM
Hmm, standard modrons are numbered up, from the number of things they can do at the same time (with modrons doing exactly one thing until ordered to stop, and duodrones barely smart enough to oversee them)

If you extend it up, it makes sense for hierarchs to do some inhuman stuff (though they'd still need some long distance telepathy to get their jobs done.)

And now I have an urge to have another go at trying to homebrew the modrons. :smallconfused:

Goaty14
2018-07-01, 05:47 PM
(though they'd still need some long distance telepathy to get their jobs done.)

*cough* formianQueen (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/formian.htm#queen)Has50-MileTelepathy *cough*

:smallwink:

KillianHawkeye
2018-07-03, 12:27 PM
*cough* formianQueen (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/formian.htm#queen)Has50-MileTelepathy *cough*

:smallwink:

I get that the Formians and the Modrons are competitors for control of Mechanus, but I don't see how this is directly relevant. If we're talking about Modrons at all, then it's safe to say it's probably a situation where the Formians haven't completely taken over the plane yet. Either way, the Modrons can hardly use Formian telepathy to communicate amongst one another.

JoeJ
2018-07-03, 12:44 PM
Modrons are not mindless, they're lawful. They only need orders from their superiors when they have to do something that isn't within the scope of their normal duties or standing orders.

Braininthejar2
2018-07-03, 07:11 PM
but a lot of natural duties require communication. If you're a hierarch, there is likely only about hundred modron out of millions that could understand what you're saying.

Grim Portent
2018-07-03, 09:09 PM
The idea of Modrons as a group suffering severe lag in orders being transmitted due to limited time on the part of the upper and middle echelons of the heirarchy actually seems kind of fitting to me. Inefficiencies steadily piling up and unable to be corrected because of their rigid adherence to doing things the way they're doing them, like a clock growing more innacurate as it slowly winds down.

Nifft
2018-07-03, 09:16 PM
https://thumb.ibb.co/kdfDMd/modron3.jpg (https://ibb.co/kdfDMd)

Nonsense?

In my modrons?



It's more likely than you think.

ross
2018-07-04, 07:46 PM
A race constructed of pure order should be perfectly efficient, rather than the opposite - or at least, that's what I would expect the average human mind to expect, given average conceptions of order and disorder. A modron may only need a few planck times to communicate a message to another modron, and their messages would be perfectly unambiguous. A race made entirely out of entropy, on the other hand, would be perfectly inefficient - all of the actions of all of its members determined entirely at random. I would expect a message from an "entropion" to contain the maximum amount of information density possible, and therefore be completely useless (from a human perspective only); they would be impenetrable to any method of analysis available to humans.

Keltest
2018-07-04, 07:53 PM
A race constructed of pure order should be perfectly efficient, rather than the opposite - or at least, that's what I would expect the average human mind to expect, given average conceptions of order and disorder. A modron may only need a few planck times to communicate a message to another modron, and their messages would be perfectly unambiguous. A race made entirely out of entropy, on the other hand, would be perfectly inefficient - all of the actions of all of its members determined entirely at random. I would expect a message from an "entropion" to contain the maximum amount of information density possible, and therefore be completely useless (from a human perspective only); they would be impenetrable to any method of analysis available to humans.

Order doesn't necessarily lead to efficiency. The very concept of "red tape" requires that efficiency be impeded due to an excessive amount of rules that need to be followed and dealt with before getting a result.

ross
2018-07-04, 08:23 PM
Order doesn't necessarily lead to efficiency. The very concept of "red tape" requires that efficiency be impeded due to an excessive amount of rules that need to be followed and dealt with before getting a result.

Red tape exists to the extent that a system is disordered. A perfectly ordered system has exactly the number of rules necessary to perform its function, and will have no delays anywhere.

Keltest
2018-07-04, 08:51 PM
Red tape exists to the extent that a system is disordered. A perfectly ordered system has exactly the number of rules necessary to perform its function, and will have no delays anywhere.

Order is not synonymous with efficient. Adding in additional forms to prove the identity of the person executing an action is orderly, for example, but not efficient.

braveheart
2018-07-04, 09:01 PM
The purpose of red tape is to prevent chaotic people from manipulating the rule system too much to their advantage. A system designed for a perfectly lawful orderly society, could work without the immense amounts of red tape that bog down real world systems.

Braininthejar2
2018-07-05, 05:38 PM
Hence why modrons don't have paperwork at all among themselves, but create ridiculous amount of red tape when dealing with humans.

ross
2018-07-05, 05:43 PM
Hence why modrons don't have paperwork at all among themselves, but create ridiculous amount of red tape when dealing with humans.

Yeah that actually makes sense. I imagine we would have difficulty dealing with a fundamentally alien race from a different dimension no matter how efficient we were.

War_lord
2018-07-06, 01:39 AM
Even the most orderly human bureaucracy is probably horrifically chaotic by Modron standards. A perfectly ordered system has no need for red tape. It's just that Modrons seem overly bureaucratic to humans because we're chaotic in comparison. The low number of "officer" Modrons to lower ranked Modrons isn't an issue, because the high ranking Modrons are always were they need to be for maximum efficiency.

MrSandman
2018-07-06, 05:12 AM
It seems to me that there is too much of an emphasis on lawful=efficient. But as far as I can recall, lawful alignment doesn't necessarily indicate efficiency. It indicates adherence to social norms, laws, and traditions. A lawful system as a bureaucratic mastodon that's completely inefficient makes sense because that's how things have always been done, and tradition is enough reason to keep doing something in the same way, even if what was a reason to do it that way has long disappeared. Also, a completely lawful society still needs red tape because using the letter of the law to do something against the spirit of the law is a perfectly lawful action (often LE or LN, but lawful nonetheless).

Obviously that's not the only way, a lawful society can be extremely efficient, but it needn't be so simply because there's a big L.

ross
2018-07-06, 06:12 AM
It seems to me that there is too much of an emphasis on lawful=efficient. But as far as I can recall, lawful alignment doesn't necessarily indicate efficiency. It indicates adherence to social norms, laws, and traditions. A lawful system as a bureaucratic mastodon that's completely inefficient makes sense because that's how things have always been done, and tradition is enough reason to keep doing something in the same way, even if what was a reason to do it that way has long disappeared. Also, a completely lawful society still needs red tape because using the letter of the law to do something against the spirit of the law is a perfectly lawful action (often LE or LN, but lawful nonetheless).

Obviously that's not the only way, a lawful society can be extremely efficient, but it needn't be so simply because there's a big L.

Probably people are equating law = order, since they're both antonyms of chaos. Of course all these words are ambiguous and I doubt you'd get anyone to agree, word-for-word, on a definition of any of these terms that wasn't defined in terms of any of them. (That is, for example, describing what "order" is, without using "law", "order", "chaos", "entropy", or any similar words in the definition.)

However, the description of modron society in the sourcebook implies that they are bureaucratic at least with respect to outsiders, so that position has more evidence behind it; whether it makes sense is left as an exercise for the reader. While I would normally say "they're whatever you define them to be, they don't exist," the whole point of a sourcebook is to provide a definitive, objective, common reality for fictional concepts, so that doesn't really hold up here.

War_lord
2018-07-06, 09:56 AM
But as far as I can recall, lawful alignment doesn't necessarily indicate efficiency. It indicates adherence to social norms, laws, and traditions. A lawful system as a bureaucratic mastodon that's completely inefficient makes sense because that's how things have always been done, and tradition is enough reason to keep doing something in the same way, even if what was a reason to do it that way has long disappeared.

Lawful does not equal traditionalist. Traditionalism causes that kind of decay. Modrons aren't conservative, they're programmed to solve tasks in the most efficient way possible. They're just not going to say, change the optimal route of their march because a village was founded there in the last 100 years without a compelling rationale from an efficiency standpoint.

ross
2018-07-06, 09:59 AM
Traditionalism causes that kind of decay.
Any evidence?

King of Nowhere
2018-07-06, 10:13 AM
1) red tape is there to prevent different interpretation. In order to avoid red tape, a society needs a loose system of laws, so that everyone is fee to interpret them to some extent. red tape specifically tries to prevent that and keep everything exact. This is not necessarily a bad thing: rules can be abused with liberal interpretation. But anyway, an embodiement of law will have a lot of red tape, more than the worst human society in that regard. Even if said red tape is probably efficient in each step, the sheer amount of it would make it a big burden.

2) Why do you get the idea that the pyramid of command is "too steep"? Past the first few ranks, there's hardly any increase in numbers. For example, rank 10 will have 100 members, rank 11 will have 121, for an increase of 20%. rank 30 will have 900 members, rank 31 will have 961, for an increase of roughly 7%. In fact, I'd say the pyramid is not steep enough

Tanarii
2018-07-06, 10:49 AM
2) Why do you get the idea that the pyramid of command is "too steep"? Past the first few ranks, there's hardly any increase in numbers. For example, rank 10 will have 100 members, rank 11 will have 121, for an increase of 20%. rank 30 will have 900 members, rank 31 will have 961, for an increase of roughly 7%. In fact, I'd say the pyramid is not steep enough
A small increase on the next base down is a steep-sided pyramid. A large increase would be a shallow-sided pyramid. Steepness of the sides goes inversely with the increase in each layer of it.

MrSandman
2018-07-06, 11:01 AM
Lawful does not equal traditionalist.

Let's see what SRD has to say about that, shall we?


Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, honor tradition, and judge those who fall short of their duties.

And

. On the downside, lawfulness can include close-mindedness, reactionary adherence to tradition, judgmentalness, and a lack of adaptability.
Link: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/description.htm

Also, for the record, I never said that lawful equates traditionalist. I said that lawful indicates adherence to traditions (as well as law and social norms) and that means that an inefficient lawful society makes sense. I also said that this is not an inevitability. If you continue reading, you you'll get to the place where I say that there are other options that also make sense.

Quertus
2018-07-06, 01:19 PM
Wait, um, where did you get these numbers? Afb, but those don't sound line the original old-school numbers.

Which means that modrons have broken from tradition.

Which means that they are chaotic?!

Braininthejar2
2018-07-06, 04:11 PM
2) Why do you get the idea that the pyramid of command is "too steep"? Past the first few ranks, there's hardly any increase in numbers. For example, rank 10 will have 100 members, rank 11 will have 121, for an increase of 20%. rank 30 will have 900 members, rank 31 will have 961, for an increase of roughly 7%. In fact, I'd say the pyramid is not steep enough

The rank squared thing is only for hierarchs. Below decaton there are suddenly thousands upon thousands of drones.

(though these too provide some space for comedy. Today my party met a pentadrone working for a lawyer's office. While they were talking with it, a messanger monodrone flew in, dropping a note on the table. The pentadrone read it, wrote a response on the spot, but needed to pass the order through three assistants to give the monodrone the return address. )

Rockphed
2018-07-06, 05:12 PM
Red tape exists to the extent that a system is disordered. A perfectly ordered system has exactly the number of rules necessary to perform its function, and will have no delays anywhere.


The purpose of red tape is to prevent chaotic people from manipulating the rule system too much to their advantage. A system designed for a perfectly lawful orderly society, could work without the immense amounts of red tape that bog down real world systems.

Red tape is designed to make sure the process never arrives at the wrong result. It calibrates all decision paths to the length of the longest decision path. The more a group is willing to accept making the wrong choice, the less red tape they introduce. A perfectly lawful society will probably be designed so that every choice must be the most logical, and thus will have red tape in spades.

Maelynn
2018-07-07, 05:05 AM
Red tape is designed to make sure the process never arrives at the wrong result. It calibrates all decision paths to the length of the longest decision path. The more a group is willing to accept making the wrong choice, the less red tape they introduce. A perfectly lawful society will probably be designed so that every choice must be the most logical, and thus will have red tape in spades.

This. People who say that 'lawful = efficient' and state that red tape is only necessary when dealing with humans, fail to acknowledge naturally occurring chaos. It's not just other creatures, even nature itself is pretty chaotic (I dare even say that nature is the perfect example of chaos, adapting and changing constantly). It's perfectly logical to have a set of rules that deal with the possibility of something chaotic happening, no matter how small the odds, just because something happened that required it.

Example: several years ago a squad of Modrons visited the Material Plane, hunting down a Rogue Modron. They ended up in a foresty/wilderness area with a lot of undergrowth, which severely slowed down their progress. The area of vegetation was too large to simply travel around, so the decision was made to cut down all undergrowth in their path and keep a straight line. This process delayed their march significantly, but it was nonetheless considered to be the most efficient way to deal with this difficult terrain. Since then, this method has become law/tradition/whatever, so all Modrons facing this terrain will meticulously cut everything down in their path. Even if 30 metres to their right, the vegetation is low enough to provide a clear path. Lawful? Yes. Efficient? No.

Zombimode
2018-07-07, 08:30 AM
A race constructed of pure order should be perfectly efficient, rather than the opposite

There is no necessary connection between "ordered" and "efficient".

This becomes evident when you realize that a sentence like "X is efficient" has no meaning. It has no meaning because "efficient" is a relational term. "X is efficient" is simply an incomplete sentence. A meaningful use of the term would be "X is efficient with respect to Y". Thus, the truth value of "X is efficient with respect to Y" depends on Y.

I'm quite sure that you can come up with a matter so that some kind of order will make you really inefficient with respect to this matter.

Nifft
2018-07-08, 02:33 PM
This. People who say that 'lawful = efficient' and state that red tape is only necessary when dealing with humans, fail to acknowledge naturally occurring chaos. It's not just other creatures, even nature itself is pretty chaotic (I dare even say that nature is the perfect example of chaos, adapting and changing constantly). It's perfectly logical to have a set of rules that deal with the possibility of something chaotic happening, no matter how small the odds, just because something happened that required it. That seems like a relevant criticism everywhere except Mechanus.


Example: several years ago a squad of Modrons visited the Material Plane, hunting down a Rogue Modron. They ended up in a foresty/wilderness area with a lot of undergrowth, which severely slowed down their progress. The area of vegetation was too large to simply travel around, so the decision was made to cut down all undergrowth in their path and keep a straight line. This process delayed their march significantly, but it was nonetheless considered to be the most efficient way to deal with this difficult terrain. Since then, this method has become law/tradition/whatever, so all Modrons facing this terrain will meticulously cut everything down in their path. Even if 30 metres to their right, the vegetation is low enough to provide a clear path. Lawful? Yes. Efficient? No. Wouldn't a rogue hunting squad have a small number of high-mobility members, rather than being an army on the march?

"Delayed their march" seems like a thing that could plausibly happen to an army, not a rogue-hunting squad.

MrSandman
2018-07-09, 02:32 PM
That seems like a relevant criticism everywhere except Mechanus.


Maybe? I guess it depends on what exactly the books say about the nature of Mechanus.

Red tape doesn't exist merely to ensure that chaotic guys don't break the rules and get away with it. It exists to ensure that there is one single interpretation of the law for everyone. As long as there are individuals with independent cognitive structures, red tape makes more sense the more lawful a society is.

Let's take an easy example. There's a law that says, "You must not harm your neighbour."

This is all very cool and all that, but it begs all sorts of questions about the nature of harm, the extension of the rule, who qualifies as a neighbour, and so on.

For instance, does this rule apply in the case of self-defence? And if you're defending others? Who qualifies as a neighbour? Is that everybody? Everybody outside of my household? What is harm? Is it only physical harm? Does it include emotional harm? Is it only the person or it also oncludes his possessions? What about actions such as giving him the sack? And spreading a rumour I believe to be true?

And in order to make sure that everyone understands the same by the aforementioned rule, you can keep qualifying it ad infinitum.

Nifft
2018-07-09, 02:40 PM
Maybe? I guess it depends on what exactly the books say about the nature of Mechanus.

In specific, I'm talking about the quoted post's idea about "naturally occurring chaos".

I don't think chaos is naturally occurring within Mechanus.

If you can cite something in the books to the contrary -- something which indicates that chaos naturally occurs on Mechanus -- then you'd have a counter-argument.

awa
2018-07-10, 10:08 AM
I remember a second edition modual the great modron march, the modrons there were far from efficient they did things because they always did it that way before even if that meant trying to dismantle a building and getting into fights rather than go around it because that's the rout they took before even if the roads had changed.

I dont think modrons are supposed to be efficient their more like a bureaucratic nightmare, of dumb AIs.

Nifft
2018-07-10, 10:20 AM
I remember a second edition modual the great modron march, the modrons there were far from efficient they did things because they always did it that way before even if that meant trying to dismantle a building and getting into fights rather than go around it because that's the rout they took before even if the roads had changed.

I dont think modrons are supposed to be efficient their more like a bureaucratic nightmare, of dumb AIs.

The Modron March is all about modrons interacting with non-Lawful planes, though.

Maybe they would be perfectly efficient about marching through a city if the city planners had done a better job about picking where buildings go. What do you mean, there were no urban planners?!? Aaaaaaargh, can't even think about that, let's just make a path and get out of here.

awa
2018-07-10, 10:30 AM
If i recall they made a bargain with the city last time they went through to follow the roads, but the time between marches was so great the roads had changed in the meantime, the modrons then refused to adapt and just marched through the buildings even though this is inefficient.

This means that doing it the same way as last time was more important than doing it efficiently. Thus modorons are lawful not efficient, any system that only functions in a vacuum is not efficient unless you can ensure a vacuum which the modrons cant.

CircleOfTheRock
2018-07-11, 05:24 AM
In specific, I'm talking about the quoted post's idea about "naturally occurring chaos".

I don't think chaos is naturally occurring within Mechanus.

If you can cite something in the books to the contrary -- something which indicates that chaos naturally occurs on Mechanus -- then you'd have a counter-argument.
What is a Rogue Modron save naturally occurring chaos?

Nifft
2018-07-11, 05:36 AM
What is a Rogue Modron save naturally occurring chaos?

They're an optional variant, which means they don't exist by default.

If they do exist, their origin is either due to "natural decay" or "exposure to chaotic forces", neither of which implies that chaos occurs naturally. Decay is the thing that occurs naturally.

-- -- --

Alternate answer: You want to know what a Rogue Modron is? Hunted, that's what.

MrSandman
2018-07-11, 07:15 AM
In specific, I'm talking about the quoted post's idea about "naturally occurring chaos".

I don't think chaos is naturally occurring within Mechanus.


To me, that sounds like the kind of line in the books that somebody thought it sounded great without really thinking about what it meant and it really means nothing. What is "naturally occurring chaos"? Is it chaos that occurs in nature, that is, in the way natural phenomena happen? Does it refer to the fact that there is not a single hint of chaos withing the plane, including every individual's behaviour? If the latter, how is that achieved? A hive mind? I don't think modrons have a hive mind. Do they all individually arrive to the same conclusions from the same data always even though they've got separate minds and agencies? Then why do they need any sort of hierarchy? Or does it mean that their society will be as lawful as possible as a result of their lawful nature and, therefore, will have loads of red tape to avoid chaos within their society?

It's a very nice phrase, but it hardly explains anything.