worries about hole in the univers

[Deremir]

so in my campaign i am going to be dropping hints about the next major quest. one of these is going to be a hole in the universe.

what it is meant to be is that the gods are having full frontal fights and it is tearing the planer wheel apart starting from the outer planes and heading in. so one of the effects of this are holes in the universe. they are white holes where reality bleeds away into white nothingness. and anything that gets dropped into them never existed.

basically i'm stealing this http://www.goblinscomic.org/12092011-2/ and hoping they do this:http://www.goblinscomic.org/12132011/

so i wanted the community's advise on what kind of impact this will have on the game, and what kind of horrible things the pcs might use it for.

in order to stop things from going to far to fast i'm not going with the purist look so instead of this happening:
pc: i throw in a cp
dm: what copper piece? you've never gotten your hands on a copper peice.
pc: what? look right here i have 30 of them!
dm:*erases copper pieces* no you don't.

it will be this:

pc: i throw in a copper piece
dm: ok
pc:... so what happens?
dm: what happens when what?
pc: when i throw in the copper piece!
dm: you never threw in a copper piece.
pc: yes i did!
dm: no you didn't.
pc: fine i throw in another!
dm: k
pc: so....?
dm: so what?

and so on until they get it because i don't want them to say that they throw in a gold piece and i have to say that they just lost their 12000 or so GP due to them not remembering throwing one in. this would cause them to repeatedly throw coins in till they were out of coins.thanks for your help!

[JoshuaZ]

Can you work on the spelling and formatting? It makes this post very hard to read.

[Deremir]

Can you work on the spelling and formatting? It makes this post very hard to read.

is that better?

[Mr Beer]

it will be this:

pc: i throw in a copper piece
dm: ok
pc:... so what happens?
dm: what happens when what?
pc: when i throw in the copper piece!
dm: you never threw in a copper piece.
pc: yes i did!
dm: no you didn't.
pc: fine i throw in another!
dm: k
pc: so....?
dm: so what?

and so on until they get it

I personally would find this incredibly irritating. YMMV.

[NichG]

I personally would find this incredibly irritating. YMMV.

IME, the players will get the idea immediately and not even bother with the second copper piece. This kind of idea is pretty well-established by now.

[visigani]

But it relies on metagaming.. if we follow its internal logic.

If the PCs throw in a copper piece they never threw in a copper piece. More to the point, the PCs would be required (unless they metagamed) to eternally throw in copper pieces or find other ways to experiment until they're drawing straws to find out who puts their hand into it.

The ramifications of "it never existed" are immense. It's a kind of butterfly effect in reverse. Take a quarter out of your pocket, especially an old one. Now imagine that quarter had never existed.... for the past 25 or 30 years... imagine the vast influence that would have.

Now instead of a quarter you have a magic sword with a particular set of properties...

Toss "Sting" from the Lord of the Rings in there because F$@#k The Police. Now consider all the time you spent trying to figure out wtf the hidden meaning to the lyrics of the Inna Gadda Devito.

See how it works? It gets crazy.

And it requires too much metagaming to be effective.

[NichG]

Metagaming or not, the players will get it and they won't feel forced to 'play along' for very long. It won't take too much for them to figure out a way to 'test' it and then just 'happen' to use that test. Thats just kind of a consequence of using a puzzle like this. You're basically asking for OOC reasoning.

IMO, the only real problem is if the DM uses this as an excuse to start saying 'no, your character wouldn't stop' or the like. Metagaming or not, its easy enough to justify the understanding in character without breaking continuity - "We saw a giant glowing hole and its been like five minutes without us trying to toss something in? Obviously whatever we toss in is erased from our memories."

Then of course once the players understand the thing, its an insanely potent tool for them.

[Deremir]

Then of course once the players understand the thing, its an insanely potent tool for them.

that's why i posted this thread. i'm not sure if its too dangerous, whether i make it impossible to get back to the hole through some means later or not, too allow in game.

The ramifications of "it never existed" are immense. It's a kind of butterfly effect in reverse. Take a quarter out of your pocket, especially an old one. Now imagine that quarter had never existed.... for the past 25 or 30 years... imagine the vast influence that would have.

so long as they don't throw in something of significant importance, a wand of magic missile they found for example, i can limit the change to the world that happens from what they throw in to a minor change like a known shop not existing anymore.

[NichG]

I would say that because of the way most campaigns are structured, there won't be many objects the PCs have access to that are significant in a negative way on their own history to the point where they'd use it. E.g. rather than throw the sword that killed a fellow PC into the hole, its easier to pay for the resurrection. And even if you do throw in the sword there's no guarantee the enemy wouldn't've just brought another weapon that day (or has trained in unarmed combat since his birth now, because he never had a sword...)

The big obvious use for it is eliminating 'evil artifacts of power' and the like. Another use would be to use it for a nearly untraceable form of assassination that goes something like: find parts of day-to-day safety gear used by an important person years ago and since discarded and toss them in the hole to engineer a retroactive accident.

The biggest use I see it getting after the glamour of hunting for the king's childhood riding saddle wears off is for timeline randomization 'Lets throw this thing in and see what changed? Do we like the new timeline better? No? Lets throw something else in!'.

You could also I suppose use it to trick certain deities into suicide. 'Augury - if I stick this copper piece in here, will the future be better or worse'. 'Okay, Cleric, one sec while I stick my divination powers into the hole in - huh, what was I a god of again?'. I don't see this working but malicious players might try it.

[ryu]

I would say that because of the way most campaigns are structured, there won't be many objects the PCs have access to that are significant in a negative way on their own history to the point where they'd use it. E.g. rather than throw the sword that killed a fellow PC into the hole, its easier to pay for the resurrection. And even if you do throw in the sword there's no guarantee the enemy wouldn't've just brought another weapon that day (or has trained in unarmed combat since his birth now, because he never had a sword...)

The big obvious use for it is eliminating 'evil artifacts of power' and the like. Another use would be to use it for a nearly untraceable form of assassination that goes something like: find parts of day-to-day safety gear used by an important person years ago and since discarded and toss them in the hole to engineer a retroactive accident.

The biggest use I see it getting after the glamour of hunting for the king's childhood riding saddle wears off is for timeline randomization 'Lets throw this thing in and see what changed? Do we like the new timeline better? No? Lets throw something else in!'.

You could also I suppose use it to trick certain deities into suicide. 'Augury - if I stick this copper piece in here, will the future be better or worse'. 'Okay, Cleric, one sec while I stick my divination powers into the hole in - huh, what was I a god of again?'. I don't see this working but malicious players might try it.

There's a basic problem with assuming that a given object not existing will negatively impact the person who used it any way. Namely what's preventing them from simply having picked up a different one than the no longer existent one the day they picked it up? This is especially true of items acquired through the stockpile of commerce. Interpretations that have such easily calculated effects on the future are vast oversimplifications of the problems such a hole creates in terms of predictive causality just by existing.

[JusticeZero]

I had a related effect in a campaign. Whenever a god would die, their name and likeness would be erased and their responsibilities awkwardly reassigned. The players kept walking through temples with paintings with vaguely person-shaped silhouettes, and religious texts that looked as though the CIA had taken a pass over it with a magic ink eraser. It__________________________________________________ ______________
_____________the___________________________________ that. They could infer that________________
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________, but they couldn't actually find any information about__________________________________________________, given the condition of the documents they had.

[JoshuaZ]

I had a related effect in a campaign. Whenever a god would die, their name and likeness would be erased and their responsibilities awkwardly reassigned. The players kept walking through temples with paintings with vaguely person-shaped silhouettes, and religious texts that looked as though the CIA had taken a pass over it with a magic ink eraser. It__________________________________________________ ______________
_____________the___________________________________ that. They could infer that________________
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________, but they couldn't actually find any information about__________________________________________________, given the condition of the documents they had.

That doesn't involve metagaming in the same way though but rather relies purely on in character knowledge. This is substantially more awkward.

[JusticeZero]

I did not want to "erase" things retroactively because of the awkwardness. Thus, the method I used deletes the object, and references to the object, but does not require the setting to be rebalanced or modified retroactively.

[Deremir]

i had the thought that the amount the hole could erase the object from the world would be based on the size of said hole. so throw a coin into coin sized hole it just disappears. throw a coin into a three foot hole the players never got the coin and don't remember it, throw a coin into a ten foot hole the ore that was gathered was never made into a coin, twenty feet the metal never existed.

[Mastikator]

If you think the players can handle knowing the rules, tell them. If they can't, forget it.