New OOTS products from CafePress
New OOTS t-shirts, ornaments, mugs, bags, and more
Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 123 LastLast
Results 31 to 60 of 71
  1. - Top - End - #31
    Firbolg in the Playground
     
    Metastachydium's Avatar

    Join Date
    Jul 2020

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Accelerator View Post
    I would deal with the problem by making my elves more powerful, and far more sociopathic. Ignore the 'nice, hippy' elves. These are the fair folk. Their weakest magic lets them match veteran mages. Their regeneration abilities lets them recover from deadly wounds in weeks. And they are very hardy, and live for very long.

    This also makes them weaker.

    Why?

    Because humans band together because they are weak. A single human out in the wild is going to die when he gets sick, drinks bad water, breaks a leg, or just can't find food. Not so for elves. A dozen humans? That gets better. And it gets even better when there are hundreds of them. Humans are a whole hell lot more social than elves, even though they're weaker. And this innate sociability lets them form huge societies.

    This means they form big groups. Big empires. Elves just don't have the tendency for teamwork, which works against them when several dozen veteran mages attack them at once, harrying them and chasing them down like a wolf chases down deer. And the sheer sociopathy of the elves means that they're prone to backstabbing, betraying, or just not caring when one of their own gets hurt.
    That just invites an „all elves are Lawful Good dissenters” kind of approach, though.

  2. - Top - End - #32
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    sandmote's Avatar

    Join Date
    Oct 2017
    Location
    US
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Accelerator View Post
    I would deal with the problem by making my elves more powerful, and far more sociopathic. Ignore the 'nice, hippy' elves. These are the fair folk. Their weakest magic lets them match veteran mages. Their regeneration abilities lets them recover from deadly wounds in weeks. And they are very hardy, and live for very long.
    Alternatively, the elves are simply to stubborn to work in large scale groups, and are to 'nice hippy,' for large scale farming or industrialization. Although note none of this specifically applies to Phoenix's specific case.

  3. - Top - End - #33
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Flumph

    Join Date
    Feb 2005
    Location
    Santa Barbara, CA
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Rule of the very old. . . this does tend toward both stability (as that which may change things internally are repressed and external changes there is the well of experience to deal with) and could be a large factor. By the time a new person joins the geriatric oligarchy there have been centuries of normalization to fight against.

    The second things I'd lean toward is that is that sociability is inversely correlated to lifespan. This could well be a matter of soul if you want. Elves could well be good at lots and lots of things but have a very low level of social specialization. This might not work for your world but would explain where all their skill points end up.




    In a more multicultural ever-changing situation: Elves tend to prepare to fight the last war, they see so much of history that they are often thus not the best choice in some place of leadership. As new technology or social structures enter an environment the elf that was the master of the previous one may well be behind the 8 ball now. This doesn't translate well into most game mechanics but does in terms of how people generally work. So a human led tribe is far more likely to have the right person for today's challenge than the elf tribe who is looking at preindustrial economics or Napoleon's tactics as standard. And those groups who are able to balance the two would probably be the most successful.


    .....Idea is developing.....

    actually you could just make it harder to learn things as you get older in general.

    Goblins generally die before anyone notices, it effects humans somewhat, only in the very long lived races are full effects seen.

    Young elves could well be quite creative but their elders are basically trapped in the past....this drives them to keep things the same as they remember it (just to avoid embarrassment and getting lost) and frustrates the younger ones (some of whom respond by going on adventures)...its why Wyrm dragons regularly make references to long forgotten tribes as if they were still neighbors...its why the true immortals can fall because after a couple of draconic eras they can't learn at all and are as trapped in the past as the undead that can remember their births.

  4. - Top - End - #34
    Ogre in the Playground
    Join Date
    May 2013

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    The situation presented in the OP is really, really janky, in that while it does give an explanation for the long-lived races not dominating everything, it doesn't give a realistic outcome for how its proposed process would play out. Generalized plateaus work just as well with the underlying "normalized soul" explanation, but this then faces serious issues with the spectacular divergence that is the truly monstrous races like Dragons, given they are reliant on being well above average in most respects as a quite defining feature.

    This can be worldbuilt around pretty easily by having the various scales within varieties form different distributions and play around with averages to fill in a lot of the flavor, such that every species has negligible differences in the theoretical average member, but the concentrations and emergent properties form all manner of stereotypes by the usual generalization of impressions method. For example, Elven longevity may give the appearance of on-average superiority, because their rolling totals get to be skewed to the ends of careers so much more heavily. You don't see the apprentices, because they're a smaller proportion of any given field.

    And Dragons may specifically be the outcome of the upper end of a bi- or tri-modal distribution, such that being a Dragon is just the same as the various archmages, but that particular species almost always expresses this potential anatomically instead of professionally, such that you get ridiculously huge Great Wyrms instead of Dragon Archmages because all the supernatural capacity is taken up by their body.

    There's also just not having science. Long-life superiority doesn't mean much of anything when your advancement is based on flat-out guesses, however educated they may be. Empiricism is a big thing for societies, and without it you don't exactly get very much advancement, because so many things are coming down to guesswork. The image of the experimenting Wizard is nothing like the image of the experimenting Scientist, and leaning on this with judicious application of Divination can keep the roots of the society firmly black-boxed and utterly immune to the exponential shenanigans that make spectacular longevity actually an advantage.

    This then allows for Liches to progress with time, so there's a reason that people do it, and things being largely a black box with all sorts of obvious differences in the "usual" nature of the various races hides the fact you're not actually going to be any better than a fully trained mortal, you just have the time to be sure you reach that point, so while most Liches are Archmages, they're not any better than a mortal Archmage, and this is in no small part because the lower-quality Liches don't last very long. In choosing Undeath, they near enough guarantee survival to see their limits.
    Last edited by Morphic tide; 2020-10-10 at 07:49 PM.

  5. - Top - End - #35
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    But then saying "elves are rare and player character elves that can find new ideas faster are double rare snowflakes and those with high stats in addition are triple rare" might displease the player who wants to play an elf but not be recognised by other elves during their childhood as being the exceptionally fit elf that had ten ideas in a single week while most elves have one idea per week and being renowned for that.
    Also how do you explain that those elves were supposed to be rare after your tenth elf player character fighter that got killed?
    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    I think PP's concept here is more about solving the worldbuilding conundrum that can fairly be perceived in long-lived and ageless at the level of cultures, societies, and politics -- not so much about limited individual PCs.
    PCs (and "adventurers" more generally) are an exceptional case. Specifically, PCs are drawn from the set of exceptions to the rules. For one thing, they grow really really really fast compared to everyone else. For another thing, their "potential" is indeterminate at the start, bounded above only by the limits of their reach. Most people, no matter how they work, can never reach "level 20". Heck, only a tiny fraction can reach a single class-level-equivalent power. Instead, the cap for a PC is based entirely on their own drive and reach for their goals. When they retire from adventuring (ie the campaign ends), they plateau pretty fast. So while active PCs, they can grow basically without limits. Once they're NPCs after a campaign ends, they're much more fixed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Morphic tide View Post
    The situation presented in the OP is really, really janky, in that while it does give an explanation for the long-lived races not dominating everything, it doesn't give a realistic outcome for how its proposed process would play out. Generalized plateaus work just as well with the underlying "normalized soul" explanation, but this then faces serious issues with the spectacular divergence that is the truly monstrous races like Dragons, given they are reliant on being well above average in most respects as a quite defining feature.

    This can be worldbuilt around pretty easily by having the various scales within varieties form different distributions and play around with averages to fill in a lot of the flavor, such that every species has negligible differences in the theoretical average member, but the concentrations and emergent properties form all manner of stereotypes by the usual generalization of impressions method. For example, Elven longevity may give the appearance of on-average superiority, because their rolling totals get to be skewed to the ends of careers so much more heavily. You don't see the apprentices, because they're a smaller proportion of any given field.

    And Dragons may specifically be the outcome of the upper end of a bi- or tri-modal distribution, such that being a Dragon is just the same as the various archmages, but that particular species almost always expresses this potential anatomically instead of professionally, such that you get ridiculously huge Great Wyrms instead of Dragon Archmages because all the supernatural capacity is taken up by their body.

    There's also just not having science. Long-life superiority doesn't mean much of anything when your advancement is based on flat-out guesses, however educated they may be. Empiricism is a big thing for societies, and without it you don't exactly get very much advancement, because so many things are coming down to guesswork. The image of the experimenting Wizard is nothing like the image of the experimenting Scientist, and leaning on this with judicious application of Divination can keep the roots of the society firmly black-boxed and utterly immune to the exponential shenanigans that make spectacular longevity actually an advantage.

    This then allows for Liches to progress with time, so there's a reason that people do it, and things being largely a black box with all sorts of obvious differences in the "usual" nature of the various races hides the fact you're not actually going to be any better than a fully trained mortal, you just have the time to be sure you reach that point, so while most Liches are Archmages, they're not any better than a mortal Archmage, and this is in no small part because the lower-quality Liches don't last very long. In choosing Undeath, they near enough guarantee survival to see their limits.
    Yes, there are different distributions. But since dragons come from a different primordial stock, theirs and that of humanoids is quite differently allocated. And differently sourced. Dragons have huge amounts of potential energy, but most of it isn't theirs to begin with. Same with giants. Instead, they draw energy from other things. In the case of dragons, it's elemental energy channeled through their hoard (which may be physical or may be abstract). Without their connection to the greater pool of anima, they could never eat enough to have the energy to move. So theirs isn't learned anima, it's innate. In effect, they cheat, and pay a price for that cheating.

    And dragons aren't particularly innovative. For most of them, it takes all they can do to hold the status quo. Some dragons learn "mortal" magic (becoming the metallics), but dragons don't generally develop their own spells. They are magic (channels for elemental anima in its rawest form). This is in part because of their ultimate origin--their ancestor race, the Wyrm, was the servant race to the Primordial of Destruction, of Ending. The titans shaped, the wyrm broke down those parts that were wrong. Once the titans and wyrm had their powers broken (long story), the races degenerated. But that legacy as agents of destruction rather than order (I intentionally don't use chaos here, that's different) is still with them. Their "genetic" makeup balks at building or inventing; even societies beyond the level of a Flight (basically an extended family group) are unusual. For most dragons, only their hoard matters--finding it (the life-or-death task of young dragons, and why they're so often the ones causing problems) protecting it, building it (by theft or domination, only rarely by trade or other "normal" means). Dragons hold grudges not because they're particularly vindictive, but because that's what they've got, along with habits. And old habits die really hard among the dragonfolk.

    There are exceptions--there are always exceptions. The Landlord (adult silver) spends most of his time in human form, maintaining his real estate empire in a particular nation. That's because he hoards architecture. Buildings. He's more than happy to rent them out, but is pure death on anyone who causes property damage. The Prophet of Peace and his two companions in Bel's Kush have taken that nation as their collective hoard, and work continually to make it a place of peace and prosperity and order. They all adapt and change. So it's not a uniform thing--low probability events happen way more frequently than seems normal. But that's because humans are bad with probability.

    As for liches, I know exactly why they don't progress. Becoming a lich involves anchoring your soul to an object and caging a Jotnar, an elemental (and beyond elemental) entity of negation and entropy, in its place and harnessing its drive to destroy for your own power. But you have to keep it fed (on souls and anima) lest the bonds weaken and it devour you. Eternal life and rebirth (if the phylactery is intact) at the cost of never being able to create again. All the anima you produce falls down the endless gullet of the jotnar. It's actually a refinement of the ritual that produced the first vampire lords (not these modern degenerate blood-suckers, creatures more powerful and more glorious)--instead of the constant hunger for life and sensation, you have dispassion and endless rebirth. Less likely to destroy your own mind, more stable. But the cost, your mortal capability for growth, is the same. That's the intrinsic price of letting a jotnar into your soul. You have become a gaping wound in reality where anima falls into the abyss.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  6. - Top - End - #36
    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Since adventurers are some sort of odd phenomenon is it in theory possible to give adventurer powers to someone?
    Or are adventurers people possessed by fire spirits or something?
    Is it possible to exorcise the adventurer quality out of someone?
    Also if a lich never had the idea to do searches about its opponents before becoming a lich is it unable to get that idea for all of its nonlife(likewise for the idea of getting an advisor)?
    It would be hilarious to see a poor lich who literally can not get the idea to recruit an advisor and which is struggling with managing the kingdom it conquered after becoming a lich.
    Anyway the lore rework makes becoming a lich no longer be an as much interesting prospect: before it was mostly breaking your spirit and making an hole in it (in your previous fluff) which loses anima constantly now the mix have a dangerous element which is a being of entropy and thus probably a quite lethal thing to work with.
    It would not surprise me if half of the people trying to become liches just dies.
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-12 at 04:43 PM.

  7. - Top - End - #37
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    Since adventurers are some sort of odd phenomenon is it in theory possible to give adventurer powers to someone?
    Or are adventurers people possessed by fire spirits or something?
    Is it possible to exorcise the adventurer quality out of someone?
    You can certainly try. Since it comes down to the spark itself (basically the core of the self), any such experimentation would be very black magic (ie demonic) unless it was a voluntary sacrifice.

    Not only that, but the spark is...not well understood. In fact, it rather defies understanding--every time you think you have it figured out, it changes. For all intents and purposes, it's a black box that comes from ????? and goes to ????? and not even the gods know what's inside or how it works. It simply is. Case in point--a whole group of constructs suddenly grew souls about 50 years ago (and some percentage of construct bodies of certain types spontaneously produce souls even now). No one knows why, or what the conditions are.

    But Oro-laen, the Black Lord, Demon Prince of black magic is certainly working on that. Because being able to produce artificial "unrestricted" souls would go a long way toward his goal of plugging the Oblivion Gate.

    Also if a lich never had the idea to do searches about its opponents before becoming a lich is it unable to get that idea for all of its nonlife(likewise for the idea of getting an advisor)?
    It would be hilarious to see a poor lich who literally can not get the idea to recruit an advisor and which is struggling with managing the kingdom it conquered after becoming a lich.
    They can learn, they just can't create new ideas. Hence the whole "liches collect libraries" thing. And why liches generally come from people who are at the "peak" of their power anyway.

    Anyway the lore rework makes becoming a lich no longer be an as much interesting prospect: before it was mostly breaking your spirit and making an hole in it (in your previous fluff) which loses anima constantly now the mix have a dangerous element which is a being of entropy and thus probably a quite lethal thing to work with.
    It would not surprise me if half of the people trying to become liches just dies.
    The two are actually the same, it's just that one of them (the newer version) has the explanation for why they're constantly losing anima. The jotnar consumes it (being the hole in your soul).

    And making it much less interesting is a feature, not a bug IMO. Seeking for bodily immortality being a bad thing is a core underpinning of the setting. "All that lives must die" is literally the First Law, established at the foundation of the Mortal Plane.

    And you underestimate it. It's more like the vast majority of those who attempt the rite fail. Most don't die (at least their bodies don't). Instead they become the "lower" undead, the wights, etc. Some believe that the Black Lord, who pioneered the lichification rite way back when and is the major source of the knowledge needed to become a lich even now, actually publishes/teaches a limited, sabotaged version instead of the true rite. Just like the current Rite of Blood (designed to create a vampire from scratch instead of doing the whole bite/drain thing which makes weaker versions) is a weakened, distorted copy of the original, which produced the Nightlords of yore.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  8. - Top - End - #38
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Max_Killjoy's Avatar

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    The Lakes

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    I don't want to nitpick, but how do you draw the line between "learning" and "new ideas"?

    Is it as simple as external vs internal origin?
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

    Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.

    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

    The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.

  9. - Top - End - #39
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    I don't want to nitpick, but how do you draw the line between "learning" and "new ideas"?

    Is it as simple as external vs internal origin?
    Pretty much. Learning from someone else produces basically no new anima (absorb some, create some, net basically zero), while figuring out something yourself or transforming someone else's idea into something new is a net producer. Even reinventing the wheel counts as long as behind a veil of ignorance (you didn't know you were doing it or didn't copy/learn directly from anyone). For most wizards (especially), learning a spell from a book or scroll counts as learning, while developing spells for yourself (for PCs, these are the two free spells on level-up) counts as creating new ideas.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  10. - Top - End - #40
    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    Pretty much. Learning from someone else produces basically no new anima (absorb some, create some, net basically zero), while figuring out something yourself or transforming someone else's idea into something new is a net producer. Even reinventing the wheel counts as long as behind a veil of ignorance (you didn't know you were doing it or didn't copy/learn directly from anyone). For most wizards (especially), learning a spell from a book or scroll counts as learning, while developing spells for yourself (for PCs, these are the two free spells on level-up) counts as creating new ideas.
    That is nonsense.
    Due to the imperfect nature of language and due to the way language evolve someone who is unable to "have ideas" would after some time be unable to understand a portion of the new texts without external help due to the fact that very few texts describe the evolutions of language and due to the fact that many connection between words can contain meaning that the grammar and the words together do not have.
    It is also impossible to understand the way other people write spells (unless wizard did standardisation relatively to the assumptions of the system) because wizards write their spells fundamentally differently from each other and as I said a text does not contain all the ideas that can be found by reading it.
    It is even worse if the text is not written by someone that specifies absolutely everything because for each thing that is not specified (for example demonstration skipping) you are literally unable to find it unless you already knew it from another source.

    Not having ideas basically makes basic language nearly impossible(after a while) unless there is some extreme force of stagnation enforcing complete non variance in the language and making so that people who write texts are forced to be extremely specific and to write everything in detail. (or making an assumption of the text magically imprinting with anima pertaining to the contained ideas but then someone who did not understand what they wrote despite writing the same text would have an impossible to understand text for people who are unable to make new anima which would result in many mortal wizards asking someone who does not understand magic to recopy their symbols in order to have a spellbook that can not be read easily by people who are long lived or eternal and other weird shenanigans like books being printed through automation being unreadable for immortals)

    You made eternal life not being desirable due to the imperfection of the processes people uses instead of making it be a result of the fundamental mechanics (which is a bad thing if you fundamentally want eternal life to be bad).
    And you have not proven how it is bad to become immortal through being a demon if you are a person which does not care about murder (which is the baseline for evil people wanting to be immortal).

    Also you did not answer my question: would a lich be able to get the idea to research an assistant after taking a kingdom if they never had an assistant before?

    By the way you have proven even more the overwhelming superiority in terms of intelligence of dragons hatchlings: due to them having an absurdly short lifespan they would have an absurd rate of idea creation (combined with their insane learning rate and the ability to generate lacking information out of nowhere proves them to be so much more intelligent than any other creature that measuring this intelligence would be nearly impossible).

    also
    And you underestimate it. It's more like the vast majority of those who attempt the rite fail. Most don't die (at least their bodies don't). Instead they become the "lower" undead, the wights, etc. Some believe that the Black Lord, who pioneered the lichification rite way back when and is the major source of the knowledge needed to become a lich even now, actually publishes/teaches a limited, sabotaged version instead of the true rite. Just like the current Rite of Blood (designed to create a vampire from scratch instead of doing the whole bite/drain thing which makes weaker versions) is a weakened, distorted copy of the original, which produced the Nightlords of yore.
    is incompatible with
    "there is enough lich variety to have one pacifist lich"
    Because people wanting to become liches and having the possibility to try to do so are insanely rare because you need to be very powerful(like level 12 when many lower levels were already told to be extremely rare), evil (because most people do not necessarily knows that it is possible to become a lich and not drain people to death), think they have the right ritual (which involves a high level of delusion or making yourself all the ritual from scratch with no outside sources in which case it is unlikely the lich would decide "it is a good idea to use a jonthar" and would probably devise another way which might be as much lethal but without that added risk) and also be willing to give up the pleasures of the flesh (which is unlikely if you are evil because let us face it: it is common draw toward many evil behaviours) on top of that you need to be a caster(ex: a bard, a wizard, a cleric, a sorcerer etc) which are also rare.
    If you combine all that and make so that most who tries dies then you have like 1 lich every 10^12 people who lives or some other stupidly low value and it would prevent having liches that strand away from the norm too much. (ex: the lich which decided to use a hoard to feed itself)
    So you need to make all of the following statements false to get sufficient liches despite the death rate: "High levels are rare", "Most people are not casters", "Knowledge about vampires is comparably rare to knowledge about liches" (because it is a very seducing alternative if you can just try to outsmart a low grade vampire to make it die just after it converts you even if you are likely to fail or to get trouble with higher rank vampires)
    That or make so that somehow liches never ever get killed and that the setting had living sentients for so long that the only way for the state of things to be as it is currently would be an extreme force of stagnation causing medieval stasis for such absurd time spans it is unbelievable or that it is just a rule of physics of that setting like "it is impossible to create ideas that advance civilisation beyond the medieval era" or a recent apocalypse.
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-13 at 04:43 PM.

  11. - Top - End - #41
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Max_Killjoy's Avatar

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    The Lakes

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    That is nonsense.
    Due to the imperfect nature of language and due to the way language evolve someone who is unable to "have ideas" would after some time be unable to understand a portion of the new texts without external help due to the fact that very few texts describe the evolutions of language and due to the fact that many connection between words can contain meaning that the grammar and the words together do not have.
    Unless that's not a concern in this setting.


    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    It is also impossible to understand the way other people write spells (unless wizard did standardisation relatively to the assumptions of the system) because wizards write their spells fundamentally differently from each other and as I said a text does not contain all the ideas that can be found by reading it.
    I don't think we know that either way about this setting, I've never seen it specified.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

    Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.

    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

    The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.

  12. - Top - End - #42
    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    Unless that's not a concern in this setting.




    I don't think we know that either way about this setting, I've never seen it specified.
    How would you make a setting where people can put truly all the needed ideas about a subject under the form of a text?
    How do you make a language that does not suffers from the fundamental imperfections of language?
    It would make a setting much more alien relatively to reality.
    It is like when I wanted to make a setting entirely made of floating islands that was as simple as possible and where I decided "there is no atmosphere, life uses other sources of oxygen and communication is not through soundwaves but instead through light" people considered it was alien despite many people in real life being actually restrained to light based communication
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-13 at 05:00 PM.

  13. - Top - End - #43
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    That is nonsense.
    Due to the imperfect nature of language and due to the way language evolve someone who is unable to "have ideas" would after some time be unable to understand a portion of the new texts without external help due to the fact that very few texts describe the evolutions of language and due to the fact that many connection between words can contain meaning that the grammar and the words together do not have.
    It is also impossible to understand the way other people write spells (unless wizard did standardisation relatively to the assumptions of the system) because wizards write their spells fundamentally differently from each other and as I said a text does not contain all the ideas that can be found by reading it.
    It is even worse if the text is not written by someone that specifies absolutely everything because for each thing that is not specified (for example demonstration skipping) you are literally unable to find it unless you already knew it from another source.
    Yes...and? That's a fundamental problem with being immortal in this setting. You constantly need someone else's input to keep you functional. The gods/ascended get it from their connections to the world (in a bunch of different ways, whether worship, downloaded from the Great Mechanism, or whatever). Those that try to be "independently immortal" fail. Because the First Law is that everything that lives must die. Whether physically or not, there are no true immortals. Without input from the outside, all creatures stagnate and fail.

    Not having ideas basically makes basic language nearly impossible(after a while) unless there is some extreme force of stagnation enforcing complete non variance in the language and making so that people who write texts are forced to be extremely specific and to write everything in detail. (or making an assumption of the text magically imprinting with anima pertaining to the contained ideas but then someone who did not understand what they wrote despite writing the same text would have an impossible to understand text for people who are unable to make new anima which would result in many mortal wizards asking someone who does not understand magic to recopy their symbols in order to have a spellbook that can not be read easily by people who are long lived or eternal and other weird shenanigans like books being printed through automation being unreadable for immortals)

    You made eternal life not being desirable due to the imperfection of the processes people uses instead of making it be a result of the fundamental mechanics (which is a bad thing if you fundamentally want eternal life to be bad).
    And you have not proven how it is bad to become immortal through being a demon if you are a person which does not care about murder (which is the baseline for evil people wanting to be immortal).
    Making eternal life undesirable is the whole point here. Feature, not bug. Immortals (outside of those with defined roles and thus compensating mechanisms built in) fundamentally represent a rejection of the world's order. As such they are doomed to stagnation and senescence to the degree that they try to go it alone.

    As to demons...demons are not inherently evil. Dangerous, sure. Comes with tradeoffs, sure. For one thing, demons cannot interact with the mortal realm without corrupting it, because they are swarming with jotnar. As such, the structure of the world rejects them; demons without a steady food supply (the requirements for such accelerate as time goes on) in the mortal realm get ejected back to the Abyss. The only place they can exist in a stable fashion is in the Abyss. And there they have to fight both each other (for demons can feed on demons as well as on mortals, taking the stolen souls and adding them to their own supply) and the sucking draw of the Oblivion Gate. Demons are a precarious, unstable group of people. Sure, you won't die of old age. But in some respects, you're even more constrained than mortals.

    Also you did not answer my question: would a lich be able to get the idea to research an assistant after taking a kingdom if they never had an assistant before?
    The idea of having an assistant is something that anyone who reaches that ritual would have encountered, unless really really weird things are in play. So yeah, that's not a concern. In principle, they'd require someone to point it out to them.

    By the way you have proven even more the overwhelming superiority in terms of intelligence of dragons hatchlings: due to them having an absurdly short lifespan they would have an absurd rate of idea creation (combined with their insane learning rate and the ability to generate lacking information out of nowhere proves them to be so much more intelligent than any other creature that measuring this intelligence would be nearly impossible).
    Dragons have a very long lifespan as a species. Wyrmlings are dragons, they just don't stay wyrmlings forever. Those that fail to make the transformation die untimely, their potential cut short. The universe doesn't allocate based on individual lifetime as much as averaged species lifespan.

    also

    is incompatible with
    "there is enough lich variety to have one pacifist lich"
    Because people wanting to become liches and having the possibility to try to do so are insanely rare because you need to be very powerful(like level 12 when many lower levels were already told to be extremely rare), evil (because most people do not necessarily knows that it is possible to become a lich and not drain people to death), think they have the right ritual (which involves a high level of delusion or making yourself all the ritual from scratch with no outside sources in which case it is unlikely the lich would decide "it is a good idea to use a jonthar" and would probably devise another way which might be as much lethal but without that added risk) and also be willing to give up the pleasures of the flesh (which is unlikely if you are evil because let us face it: it is common draw toward many evil behaviours) on top of that you need to be a caster(ex: a bard, a wizard, a cleric, a sorcerer etc) which are also rare.
    If you combine all that and make so that most who tries dies then you have like 1 lich every 10^12 people who lives or some other stupidly low value and it would prevent having liches that strand away from the norm too much. (ex: the lich which decided to use a hoard to feed itself)
    So you need to make all of the following statements false to get sufficient liches despite the death rate: "High levels are rare", "Most people are not casters", "Knowledge about vampires is comparably rare to knowledge about liches" (because it is a very seducing alternative if you can just try to outsmart a low grade vampire to make it die just after it converts you even if you are likely to fail or to get trouble with higher rank vampires)
    That or make so that somehow liches never ever get killed and that the setting had living sentients for so long that the only way for the state of things to be as it is currently would be an extreme force of stagnation causing medieval stasis for such absurd time spans it is unbelievable or that it is just a rule of physics of that setting like "it is impossible to create ideas that advance civilisation beyond the medieval era" or a recent apocalypse.
    There is a pacifist lich despite probability. Because I've already written one in and he's appeared in play. Low probability events happen quite frequently, after all. And don't be so sure about the requirements for becoming a lich. Remember, I've already departed greatly from even the 5e canon here. The lich ritual is usually undertaken by those with arcane power, sure. But not always. Anyone can attempt it--it's not particularly complex. The moral prerequisites are non-starters for the vast majority of people, plus you need the knowledge (not power, but knowledge) to make contact with the Black Lord. The rest is pretty simple. So the primary filters are morality, knowledge, and then endurance.

    And as for durations/medieval stasis--the world has had sentient life for ~25k years. And has been in and out of medieval stasis many times. There just seem to be these pesky apocalypses that keep popping up...

    Age Timespan (before present) starting/ending tech level Ending event
    Age of Tyrants 25k~12k Non-technological - Iron Age Orb of All Might gets used, breaking both titans and wyrm. Continent gets cracked in half.
    Age of Wizardry/Age of Aelvar ~12k~4k Iron Age -- High Magitek (crystal spires/toga variety) Moon's Fall--the 3rd moon gets dropped on the aelvar capital. Eastern continent gets cracked into Noefra and Soefra
    Interregnum ~4k~2k Iron Age, venturing up as far as early Medieval. Noefra mostly depopulated until creation of humans and orcs, then constant war. Rise of the Red Fang, the War of Blood (continent-scale war of annihilation)
    Age of Man ~2k~250 ybp Iron Age - high magitek (soul-powered and mechanical this time) - mid-medieval Two events: the War of Souls (magical nuclear war) about 800 years ago, then the Cataclysm (all magic goes away for 50 years, planes changed, massive destruction, 70% mortality worldwide)
    Age of Hope 250 BC - present early medieval - high medieval None...so far

    So there's been lots of progress. It's accelerating and each cycle starts off slightly better than the last, but lots of knowledge and tech gets lost at each reset. Which usually come because people mess around with souls. Not as a direct consequence, but...
    • The Orb of All Might drew its power from most of the titan race, diminishing them to dwarves. Then it backfired and made a mess of everyone.
    • Moon's Fall capped off a continued effort by the aelvar to shape the souls of the ihmisi; they didn't like that and convinced the moon to fall.
    • The War of Blood happened because a hag tried to make a demonhost out of an orc, but the orc ate the jotnar instead, becoming a proto-demon himiself. Genocidal armies, and the rest is history.
    • The War of Souls happened because the Western Empire made dragonborn by injecting fragments of dragon souls into unborn human children. Factions didn't like that, and went nuclear.
    • The Cataclysm happened when the Nameless got free of the Abyss and led a host of demons and angry creatures around breaking things. Then adventurers got involved and...well...made a mess.


    So soul magic is considered like nuclear waste to the Nth power. Only madmen, demon worshipers, and hags touch it.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  14. - Top - End - #44
    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Lightbulb Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    Yes...and? That's a fundamental problem with being immortal in this setting. You constantly need someone else's input to keep you functional. The gods/ascended get it from their connections to the world (in a bunch of different ways, whether worship, downloaded from the Great Mechanism, or whatever). Those that try to be "independently immortal" fail. Because the First Law is that everything that lives must die. Whether physically or not, there are no true immortals. Without input from the outside, all creatures stagnate and fail.



    Making eternal life undesirable is the whole point here. Feature, not bug. Immortals (outside of those with defined roles and thus compensating mechanisms built in) fundamentally represent a rejection of the world's order. As such they are doomed to stagnation and senescence to the degree that they try to go it alone.

    As to demons...demons are not inherently evil. Dangerous, sure. Comes with tradeoffs, sure. For one thing, demons cannot interact with the mortal realm without corrupting it, because they are swarming with jotnar. As such, the structure of the world rejects them; demons without a steady food supply (the requirements for such accelerate as time goes on) in the mortal realm get ejected back to the Abyss. The only place they can exist in a stable fashion is in the Abyss. And there they have to fight both each other (for demons can feed on demons as well as on mortals, taking the stolen souls and adding them to their own supply) and the sucking draw of the Oblivion Gate. Demons are a precarious, unstable group of people. Sure, you won't die of old age. But in some respects, you're even more constrained than mortals.



    The idea of having an assistant is something that anyone who reaches that ritual would have encountered, unless really really weird things are in play. So yeah, that's not a concern. In principle, they'd require someone to point it out to them.



    Dragons have a very long lifespan as a species. Wyrmlings are dragons, they just don't stay wyrmlings forever. Those that fail to make the transformation die untimely, their potential cut short. The universe doesn't allocate based on individual lifetime as much as averaged species lifespan.



    There is a pacifist lich despite probability. Because I've already written one in and he's appeared in play. Low probability events happen quite frequently, after all. And don't be so sure about the requirements for becoming a lich. Remember, I've already departed greatly from even the 5e canon here. The lich ritual is usually undertaken by those with arcane power, sure. But not always. Anyone can attempt it--it's not particularly complex. The moral prerequisites are non-starters for the vast majority of people, plus you need the knowledge (not power, but knowledge) to make contact with the Black Lord. The rest is pretty simple. So the primary filters are morality, knowledge, and then endurance.

    And as for durations/medieval stasis--the world has had sentient life for ~25k years. And has been in and out of medieval stasis many times. There just seem to be these pesky apocalypses that keep popping up...

    Age Timespan (before present) starting/ending tech level Ending event
    Age of Tyrants 25k~12k Non-technological - Iron Age Orb of All Might gets used, breaking both titans and wyrm. Continent gets cracked in half.
    Age of Wizardry/Age of Aelvar ~12k~4k Iron Age -- High Magitek (crystal spires/toga variety) Moon's Fall--the 3rd moon gets dropped on the aelvar capital. Eastern continent gets cracked into Noefra and Soefra
    Interregnum ~4k~2k Iron Age, venturing up as far as early Medieval. Noefra mostly depopulated until creation of humans and orcs, then constant war. Rise of the Red Fang, the War of Blood (continent-scale war of annihilation)
    Age of Man ~2k~250 ybp Iron Age - high magitek (soul-powered and mechanical this time) - mid-medieval Two events: the War of Souls (magical nuclear war) about 800 years ago, then the Cataclysm (all magic goes away for 50 years, planes changed, massive destruction, 70% mortality worldwide)
    Age of Hope 250 BC - present early medieval - high medieval None...so far

    So there's been lots of progress. It's accelerating and each cycle starts off slightly better than the last, but lots of knowledge and tech gets lost at each reset. Which usually come because people mess around with souls. Not as a direct consequence, but...
    • The Orb of All Might drew its power from most of the titan race, diminishing them to dwarves. Then it backfired and made a mess of everyone.
    • Moon's Fall capped off a continued effort by the aelvar to shape the souls of the ihmisi; they didn't like that and convinced the moon to fall.
    • The War of Blood happened because a hag tried to make a demonhost out of an orc, but the orc ate the jotnar instead, becoming a proto-demon himiself. Genocidal armies, and the rest is history.
    • The War of Souls happened because the Western Empire made dragonborn by injecting fragments of dragon souls into unborn human children. Factions didn't like that, and went nuclear.
    • The Cataclysm happened when the Nameless got free of the Abyss and led a host of demons and angry creatures around breaking things. Then adventurers got involved and...well...made a mess.


    So soul magic is considered like nuclear waste to the Nth power. Only madmen, demon worshipers, and hags touch it.
    about your individual over specie lifetime it is false since when an individual lenghten their own lifespan they suddenly lower their idea rate or there would be no good reason to not research a way to just lenghten lifespan.

    The hatchling dies regardless of whenever they transform or not since the transformation is equivalent to death too so a hatchling is completely guaranteed to die fast if they do not find a trick like getting drained repeatedly or being turned into an undead: it is as if because all humans can be infested by mind flayers that are entirely different from them the universe decided that it meant that humans had a longer lifespan despite mind flayers being a parasitic lifeform that have nothing in common with humans (even then they are closer to humans than wyrmlings are to hatchlings because mind flayers gains the memories of the infested human).

    I just realised since mind flayers can infest any organic race it means that if an immortal version of mind flayers was created then instantly all the thinking organic creatures would be unable to ever have ideas because all the creatures are the "larval state" of mindflayers in their vision of things.
    And you can not say "it is natural for a hatchling to become a wyrmling" because it is also natural for a thinking organic creature to become a mind flayer: it is part of the life cycle of mind flayers.
    So if all the mind flayers died would all the thinking organic creatures suddenly have their idea rate increase?
    Anyway the existence of mind flayers and the fact they are quite long lived means that most organic creatures have a highly capped idea rate: a goblin will have a similar idea rate to the one of an human meaning that an human will have more ideas than a goblin during their life due to the fact that both could be infested by mind flayers (so as humans spends a higher proportion of their lifespan as a non mindflayer they have more ideas as non mindflayers than goblins).

    In conclusion it looks oddly as if mind flayers were made by elves to reduce the advantage normally shorter lived races have in terms of idea rate and if that was true it would again cause an elf superiority problem: elves having the highest lifespan have the highest total count of ideas due to the universal potential of organic creatures to become mind flayers (which is a natural thing: you die anyway if you are eaten or not eaten by a mind flayer but in the latter case there is a creature replacing you so it is the exact same argument as hatchlings being counted as having a higher lifespan even through they die even when replaced by wyrmlings).
    Or maybe hatchlings in fact have their idea rate higly capped (except for the purpose of learning because learning from nearly no information needs the extremely fast creation of countless ideas) not because they can be parasited by wyrmling transformation (wyrmlings do not even share memories with them) but rather because they can be parasited by mind flayers (which at least keeps their memories and so are arguably more the hatchling)
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-14 at 12:39 AM.

  15. - Top - End - #45
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    about your individual over specie lifetime it is false since when an individual lenghten their own lifespan they suddenly lower their idea rate or there would be no good reason to not research a way to just lenghten lifespan.

    The hatchling dies regardless of whenever they transform or not since the transformation is equivalent to death too so a hatchling is completely guaranteed to die fast if they do not find a trick like getting drained repeatedly or being turned into an undead: it is as if because all humans can be infested by mind flayers that are entirely different from them the universe decided that it meant that humans had a longer lifespan despite mind flayers being a parasitic lifeform that have nothing in common with humans (even then they are closer to humans than wyrmlings are to hatchlings because mind flayers gains the memories of the infested human).

    I just realised since mind flayers can infest any organic race it means that if an immortal version of mind flayers was created then instantly all the thinking organic creatures would be unable to ever have ideas because all the creatures are the "larval state" of mindflayers in their vision of things.
    And you can not say "it is natural for a hatchling to become a wyrmling" because it is also natural for a thinking organic creature to become a mind flayer: it is part of the life cycle of mind flayers.
    So if all the mind flayers died would all the thinking organic creatures suddenly have their idea rate increase?
    Anyway the existence of mind flayers and the fact they are quite long lived means that most organic creatures have a highly capped idea rate: a goblin will have a similar idea rate to the one of an human meaning that an human will have more ideas than a goblin during their life due to the fact that both could be infested by mind flayers (so as humans spends a higher proportion of their lifespan as a non mindflayer they have more ideas as non mindflayers than goblins).

    In conclusion it looks oddly as if mind flayers were made by elves to reduce the advantage normally shorter lived races have in terms of idea rate and if that was true it would again cause an elf superiority problem: elves having the highest lifespan have the highest total count of ideas due to the universal potential of organic creatures to become mind flayers (which is a natural thing: you die anyway if you are eaten or not eaten by a mind flayer but in the latter case there is a creature replacing you so it is the exact same argument as hatchlings being counted as having a higher lifespan even through they die even when replaced by wyrmlings).
    Or maybe hatchlings in fact have their idea rate higly capped (except for the purpose of learning because learning from nearly no information needs the extremely fast creation of countless ideas) not because they can be parasited by wyrmling transformation (wyrmlings do not even share memories with them) but rather because they can be parasited by mind flayers (which at least keeps their memories and so are arguably more the hatchling)
    You seem to be making all sorts of assumptions about the implementation that aren't true and turn on very literalistic readings.

    For instance, when a mind flayer is created from a larval infestation, the host dies (the soul passes on, anyway). The parasite is just body-jacking. So that's like any other untimely death. The mind flayer gets the organically-stored memories, but not the soul (which is the thing that matters for all of this). So no, being able to be jacked by a mind flayer plays no role in the anima production rate of other species. And technically (setting lore here) the whole mind flayer transformation/body-jacking is an artificial mutation, not original design. The original design was for the parasite form to sit inside a host and passively record, maybe nudging the host to go see interesting things. The whole "take over and kick the host out" thing came because the Twisted decided to whisper in the minds of the handlers in charge of actually doing this (since Leviathan doesn't exactly have the hands necessary for this project). Effectively, the mind flayers we all know and love are a rebel species.

    And no one said that the anima-generation rate is constant over a lifetime--it's not. It's generally high in the youth (if for no other reason than that they're physically growing during that period), then plateaus and falls off. The exact shape depends on the life-cycle of the creature at hand. And again, wyrmlings are dragons and maintain the same identity/soul throughout. Some live, some die. Just like some mind flayer larvae live on and transform and others do not.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  16. - Top - End - #46
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Max_Killjoy's Avatar

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    The Lakes

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    How would you make a setting where people can put truly all the needed ideas about a subject under the form of a text?
    How do you make a language that does not suffers from the fundamental imperfections of language?
    It would make a setting much more alien relatively to reality.
    You're treating the "limits of language" as asserted in one theory of language, and the minutia of one theory of how the mind supposedly works, as some sort of given and immutable laws of physical reality... latching on... and then blowing both all out of proportion to attack a rather straightforward and simple distinction between ideas that are new (to the individual) and ideas that are copied from outside sources that's being made for the purpose of an RPG setting.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

    Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.

    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

    The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.

  17. - Top - End - #47
    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    You seem to be making all sorts of assumptions about the implementation that aren't true and turn on very literalistic readings.

    For instance, when a mind flayer is created from a larval infestation, the host dies (the soul passes on, anyway). The parasite is just body-jacking. So that's like any other untimely death. The mind flayer gets the organically-stored memories, but not the soul (which is the thing that matters for all of this). So no, being able to be jacked by a mind flayer plays no role in the anima production rate of other species. And technically (setting lore here) the whole mind flayer transformation/body-jacking is an artificial mutation, not original design. The original design was for the parasite form to sit inside a host and passively record, maybe nudging the host to go see interesting things. The whole "take over and kick the host out" thing came because the Twisted decided to whisper in the minds of the handlers in charge of actually doing this (since Leviathan doesn't exactly have the hands necessary for this project). Effectively, the mind flayers we all know and love are a rebel species.

    And no one said that the anima-generation rate is constant over a lifetime--it's not. It's generally high in the youth (if for no other reason than that they're physically growing during that period), then plateaus and falls off. The exact shape depends on the life-cycle of the creature at hand. And again, wyrmlings are dragons and maintain the same identity/soul throughout. Some live, some die. Just like some mind flayer larvae live on and transform and others do not.
    No all the hatchlings dies.
    When it turns into a wyrmling not only it loses its memories but its behaviour changes and the nature of its soul change and its body is replaced: literally no important part of the being is kept: all of them are replaced and there is no continuity.
    If someone skins you alive then destroys your soul and use all that to make a puppet then the puppet is not you in any way and you are dead.
    It is not a philosophical distinction: the obviousness of the hatchling being dead is so huge and blatant that at that point arguing that there is no such thing as a creature would make more sense than saying the creature is not dead.
    So if mind flayers did destroy the soul entirely and use the sludge of the soul in its constitution then it would work at making them count as the same creature since according to you killing something and making a completely unrelated in every way creature by using all the constituents of a creature and a bunch of unrelated constituants(the environmental anima) to make something completely different is "keeping the same creature".
    Furthermore the way the hatchling works still proves that it have an idea rate incredibly far beyond all the other creatures else they could not learn that many things due to the fact that for learning when you have nearly no information you need to create heaps of information.
    You're treating the "limits of language" as asserted in one theory of language, and the minutia of one theory of how the mind supposedly works, as some sort of given and immutable laws of physical reality... latching on... and then blowing both all out of proportion to attack a rather straightforward and simple distinction between ideas that are new (to the individual) and ideas that are copied from outside sources that's being made for the purpose of an RPG setting.
    See real languages: a lot of the content of the sentence is not within the sentence itself but within the interpretation of it and multiple people interpreting it will often have different results.
    Why: because the amount of information people wants to transfer is often huger than just the words they write.
    Language evolves to be fast to use because of people wanting to communicate fast and not make a lot of effort transferring information to people who are able to think to interpret their sentences.
    If people had to specify their emotional context, the political context of their country and the specificities of the expressions they usually use then had to write dozens of extremely accurate sentences just to transfer the amount of information they transfer today in a single sentence then people would just skip as many steps of that as they can.
    It is like how people say "it is silly that in dnd by raw you can say an infinity of sentences in six seconds" no they are just misinterpreting what the people writing the book meant: they did not intend that to happen but that information is not written in clear in the book because it is way too much of a chore to write what they exactly wanted to say.

    Making a language that would make impossible the enunciation of things without describing all the information intended or needing to be transferred in detail would at the very least make communication much slower and harder and it might also make it out of reach of people not smart enough to know exactly everything that needs to be told to make the message contain all the information needed to be understood regardless of what the targeted individual knows about you or the untold things about your subject.

    Real life languages are imperfect in the way that someone who have no knowledge about you or of what you are talking about might be unable to understand despite knowing the same language but most people are able to understand thanks to the fact they are able to think and reach conclusions about the said sentences and the fact that most people acquire over time a lot of knowledge helping them to understand through communicating with people and thinking about the communications they had consciously or unconsciously.
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-14 at 12:12 PM.

  18. - Top - End - #48
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    No all the hatchlings dies.
    When it turns into a wyrmling not only it loses its memories but its behaviour changes and the nature of its soul change and its body is replaced: literally no important part of the being is kept: all of them are replaced and there is no continuity.
    If someone skins you alive then destroys your soul and use all that to make a puppet then the puppet is not you in any way and you are dead.
    It is not a philosophical distinction: the obviousness of the hatchling being dead is so huge and blatant that at that point arguing that there is no such thing as a creature would make more sense than saying the creature is not dead.
    So if mind flayers did destroy the soul entirely and use the sludge of the soul in its constitution then it would work at making them count as the same creature since according to you killing something and making a completely unrelated in every way creature by using all the constituents of a creature and a bunch of unrelated constituants(the environmental anima) to make something completely different is "keeping the same creature".
    Furthermore the way the hatchling works still proves that it have an idea rate incredibly far beyond all the other creatures else they could not learn that many things due to the fact that for learning when you have nearly no information you need to create heaps of information.

    See real languages: a lot of the content of the sentence is not within the sentence itself but within the interpretation of it and multiple people interpreting it will often have different results.
    Why: because the amount of information people wants to transfer is often huger than just the words they write.
    Language evolves to be fast to use because of people wanting to communicate fast and not make a lot of effort transferring information to people who are able to think to interpret their sentences.
    If people had to specify their emotional context, the political context of their country and the specificities of the expressions they usually use then had to write dozens of extremely accurate sentences just to transfer the amount of information they transfer today in a single sentence then people would just skip as many steps of that as they can.
    It is like how people say "it is silly that in dnd by raw you can say an infinity of sentences in six seconds" no they are just misinterpreting what the people writing the book meant: they did not intend that to happen but that information is not written in clear in the book because it is way too much of a chore to write what they exactly wanted to say.

    Making a language that would make impossible the enunciation of things without describing all the information intended or needing to be transferred in detail would at the very least make communication much slower and harder and it might also make it out of reach of people not smart enough to know exactly everything that needs to be told to make the message contain all the information needed to be understood regardless of what the targeted individual knows about you or the untold things about your subject.

    Real life languages are imperfect in the way that someone who have no knowledge about you or of what you are talking about might be unable to understand despite knowing the same language but most people are able to understand thanks to the fact they are able to think and reach conclusions about the said sentences and the fact that most people acquire over time a lot of knowledge helping them to understand through communicating with people and thinking about the communications they had consciously or unconsciously.
    Again, major assumptions about implementation, none of which really hold. The things that I've said here are only a tiny fraction of the whole. Especially about dragons (something that I've actually iterated on a bit since the last time I posted here on that topic). So...yeah.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  19. - Top - End - #49
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Max_Killjoy's Avatar

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    The Lakes

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    See real languages: a lot of the content of the sentence is not within the sentence itself but within the interpretation of it and multiple people interpreting it will often have different results.
    Why: because the amount of information people wants to transfer is often huger than just the words they write.
    Language evolves to be fast to use because of people wanting to communicate fast and not make a lot of effort transferring information to people who are able to think to interpret their sentences.
    If people had to specify their emotional context, the political context of their country and the specificities of the expressions they usually use then had to write dozens of extremely accurate sentences just to transfer the amount of information they transfer today in a single sentence then people would just skip as many steps of that as they can.
    It is like how people say "it is silly that in dnd by raw you can say an infinity of sentences in six seconds" no they are just misinterpreting what the people writing the book meant: they did not intend that to happen but that information is not written in clear in the book because it is way too much of a chore to write what they exactly wanted to say.

    Making a language that would make impossible the enunciation of things without describing all the information intended or needing to be transferred in detail would at the very least make communication much slower and harder and it might also make it out of reach of people not smart enough to know exactly everything that needs to be told to make the message contain all the information needed to be understood regardless of what the targeted individual knows about you or the untold things about your subject.

    Real life languages are imperfect in the way that someone who have no knowledge about you or of what you are talking about might be unable to understand despite knowing the same language but most people are able to understand thanks to the fact they are able to think and reach conclusions about the said sentences and the fact that most people acquire over time a lot of knowledge helping them to understand through communicating with people and thinking about the communications they had consciously or unconsciously.
    See my previous response.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

    Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.

    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

    The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.

  20. - Top - End - #50
    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    See my previous response.
    What I say is that the way information works is a basic assumption and changing how information works would change the very basis of logic and of mathematics and would make a setting that is completely alien.
    You can make a setting where the real life theories about information are false but it makes a setting so vastly different from real life you might even be unable to simulate it which makes immersion much harder.
    How do you simulate information that literally can not exist by using real information due to being in real life?
    It can be impossible.
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-16 at 06:30 AM.

  21. - Top - End - #51
    Troll in the Playground
     
    WolfInSheepsClothing

    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    Italy
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    Ok, it's more than just elves. But the issues surrounding long-lived creatures abound--

    * If elves live 7-800 years and mature (physically and psychologically, if not socially) by ~50-100 years, why aren't they in charge everywhere? Why aren't they all experts in just about everything? After all, one of the big issues with current scientists is that by the time you reach the frontier in your field, you're already past your most innovative early years. But if you have another 600 years to go...and things like dragons are even worse.
    * If they only mature at the same relative rate as humans, then survival goes way down.

    I'm not happy with the "oh, they just don't breed fast for...raisins" explanation. Or the "they're all such perfectionists that they take forever to learn anything."

    I also, as a matter of setting, don't want to make immortality a cost-free thing. It's a major setting constraint--everything has tradeoffs. No free lunches anywhere.

    So I came up with the following explanation to resolve both things, as it turns out that immortality is just a special case of really long life spans.
    -----------------




    Key Principle: The ability to change and grow, to innovate is a consequences of impending death.
    this is a perfectly fine worldbuilding principle.

    myself, i used different life spans as a source of conflict.
    humans resent elves because they tend to take up many leadership positions. elves resent humans because they breed much faster and are taking up all the space
    elves see humans as cursed with a quick death. humans see elves as retarded who need a couple decades just to learn to use a privy.

    in any case, longer lived creatures breed slower because they have longer pregnancies and longer time for children to reach maturity. a human woman can make a children every year. an elf woman will need over 5 years before another pregnancy. and goblins can make three children every year easily.
    In fact, the answer is not "why the long lived races do not take over", but "why don't the fast breeding races take over".

    as for dragons, i solved it by making them dependent on their hoard. something about them needing to absorb magic from the environment to sustain their physically impossible exhistance, and the hoard concentrates magic. the bigger the dragon, the bigger the hoard they need, or they'll die of slow consumption. the dragon population as a whole is limited by how much loot they can get
    Last edited by King of Nowhere; 2020-10-16 at 08:06 AM.
    In memory of Evisceratus: he dreamed of a better world, but he lacked the class levels to make the dream come true.

    Ridiculous monsters you won't take seriously even as they disembowel you

    my take on the highly skilled professional: the specialized expert

  22. - Top - End - #52
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Max_Killjoy's Avatar

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    The Lakes

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    What I say is that the way information works is a basic assumption and changing how information works would change the very basis of logic and of mathematics and would make a setting that is completely alien.
    You can make a setting where the real life theories about information are false but it makes a setting so vastly different from real life you might even be unable to simulate it which makes immersion much harder.
    How do you simulate information that literally can not exist by using real information due to being in real life?
    It can be impossible.
    None of those assertions about language are immutable physical laws, nor do they underpin anything fundamental about the real world.

    They're just largely untestable assertions about the workings of the mind, nothing more.

    Calling a setting "completely alien" because of some minute detail within one of those "theories" of language is hardly a fair criticism.
    Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2020-10-16 at 09:33 AM.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

    Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.

    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

    The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.

  23. - Top - End - #53
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    sandmote's Avatar

    Join Date
    Oct 2017
    Location
    US
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    For the specific example, would it work to say there is a big burst of elven innovation before most of the race settles into new habits and innovation slows down again?

    Another issue with the "limited new ideas per lifetime," is that a longer lived race means the old guard lives longer when everyone else switches to newer techniques. So you'd have a lot more old coots who used to be at the top of their field but no longer hold sway because everyone else has updated their thinking but they don't have the anima to make new discoveries in their own field. They're stuck in a rut unable to move forward, which would kind of kneecap advancement in research and development.

  24. - Top - End - #54
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by sandmote View Post
    Another issue with the "limited new ideas per lifetime," is that a longer lived race means the old guard lives longer when everyone else switches to newer techniques. So you'd have a lot more old coots who used to be at the top of their field but no longer hold sway because everyone else has updated their thinking but they don't have the anima to make new discoveries in their own field. They're stuck in a rut unable to move forward, which would kind of kneecap advancement in research and development.
    Feature, not bug. Long lived races end up advancing one funeral at a time like everyone else. They just have more dead time.

    Of course the ideal situation (and this is a sub goal) is for there to be a mix of races. The short lived ones ideate, while the longer lived ones refine based on experience. Since refinement is "cheaper" (since it's small changes to an existing idea), so the old races can still do it.

    In a way, this is how real life R&D works. Except by age, not by lifespan. Young people are great at coming up with ideas. And then the older people can refine based on their own experience.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  25. - Top - End - #55
    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    None of those assertions about language are immutable physical laws, nor do they underpin anything fundamental about the real world.

    They're just largely untestable assertions about the workings of the mind, nothing more.

    Calling a setting "completely alien" because of some minute detail within one of those "theories" of language is hardly a fair criticism.
    Except I explained that this theory of language was caused by the way information itself works and it can not be invalidated without changing how information works.
    This theory I described would work even if we were not using real languages and instead giving zeroes and ones to each other or transmitting information under any form.
    You just did not think about the source of the theory I gave.

    To describe it: information is transmitted: the more you want the transmitted information to be exhaustive the more information must be transmitted or the more information the other needs to find and combine.
    That is what I described but in the context of human language even if human language itself was not needed.
    Now you want to make "you can make information transmitted unlimitedly exhaustive with finite amount of information transmitted or nothing (including combination of things) involve significant amounts of information"
    That is simply alien.
    The latter is incompatible with the rest of the setting since it already contains a lot of information.
    The former is incredibly hard to conceptualise: imagine saying or writing a few words then it created all the information pertaining to the subject needed to understand somehow.
    How would the gm simulate that at a table when the player gives a limited amount of information and now that the npc suddenly have to understand a whole bunch of things the player did not say?
    Now the player character says half truths by using the ambiguities of English.
    Should the gm say "in this setting they are not using English but instead using a language that is perfect in all the ways at once so you can not say half truths through the ambiguities of the language because when you say words the universe itself complete the information you did not make the effort to transmit" ?
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-16 at 03:47 PM.

  26. - Top - End - #56
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Max_Killjoy's Avatar

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    The Lakes

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    Except I explained that this theory of language was caused by the way information itself works and it can not be invalidated without changing how information works.
    This theory I described would work even if we were not using real languages and instead giving zeroes and ones to each other or transmitting information under any form.
    You just did not think about the source of the theory I gave.
    That's nice.

    My responses above still stand unchanged. This started with the claim that PP's distinction between new and copied ideas was impossible because supposedly ideas can't actually be copied because the mind and/or language doesn't work that way, so all ideas each person has are only different degrees of new. "But information theory" doesn't really change that assertion being an unfalsifiable assertion about "how the mind works".

    Stop trying to derail the thread with this nonsense.
    Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2020-10-17 at 06:19 PM.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

    Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.

    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

    The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.

  27. - Top - End - #57
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    That's nice.

    My responses above still stand unchanged. This started with the claim that PP's distinction between new and copied ideas was impossible because supposedly ideas can't actually be copied because the mind and'/or language doesn'r work that way, so all ideas each person has are only different degrees of new. "But information theory" doesn't really change that assertion being an unfalsifiable assertion about "how the mind works".

    Stop trying to derail the thread with this nonsense.
    Not only that, it's one more instance of taking an imprecise, rough-terms description as if it were a fully-defined mathematical theorem. My ideas are always squishy--I'm not laying out some form of quantizable definition here. I'm talking in general terms about average events at a high level. Basic principles (creating new things you've never heard of is harder than learning from someone else, a principle that's really really entrenched in real life) are not some definition at a deep level.

    Really, the implementation level is much weirder and much more different than that. Remember, this is a setting where things like "conservation of energy" and "atomic theory" and "quantum mechanics" just plain don't exist as such. It's a world where pseudo-aristotelian thought is much closer to reality than modern scientific thinking. So modern theories of mind and language (even if we take them as facts here on earth) just plain don't apply in any reasonable fashion beyond the macro-scale.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  28. - Top - End - #58
    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    That's nice.

    My responses above still stand unchanged. This started with the claim that PP's distinction between new and copied ideas was impossible because supposedly ideas can't actually be copied because the mind and'/or language doesn'r work that way, so all ideas each person has are only different degrees of new. "But information theory" doesn't really change that assertion being an unfalsifiable assertion about "how the mind works".

    Stop trying to derail the thread with this nonsense.
    You misunderstood.
    It is not at all what I meant in the first post.
    Of course if you did not understand my first post nothing after is possible to understand for you.
    What I explained in the first post is:
    1:You transmit very limited amount of information when communicating.(what I called the imperfection of language)
    2:People understand more than just the information you communicate because they also have prior information and combines this prior information with the received information to gain new information.(ex: the meaning of the words, the knowledge they had which allows to understand context and so on)
    3:People who can not combine information in new ways (which counts as an idea) will be limited in understanding new communications.

    It is completely and entirely unrelated in all but the most twisted ways from this absurd interpretation you made which is "ideas are not the same between two people" which is something I never ever meant and is questions about qualia which have nothing to do at all with the subject I was talking about.

    And sorry but whenever a lich will understand new tech just by reading a book or will need a living assistant or not have implications on the setting (it makes liches less isolated from the concerns of the living if they need a living assistant) it also makes them be or not be people who feels as if the world was becoming stranger over time if they chose to live isolated.
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-17 at 12:09 PM.

  29. - Top - End - #59
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Daemon

    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Corvallis, OR
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
    And sorry but whenever a lich will understand new tech just by reading a book or will need a living assistant or not have implications on the setting (it makes liches less isolated from the concerns of the living if they need a living assistant) it also makes them be or not be people who feels as if the world was becoming stranger over time if they chose to live isolated.
    Ignoring the rest, but this is working as designed. Liches and anyone else who isolates themselves should feel like the world is getting stranger. Hermits not recognizing society when they return to it is an old pattern. Isolation brings stagnation and distortion. That's the way of things.

    Fundamentally, becoming a lich in Dreams of Hope is a trap. It's self defeating and done out of fear of dying, for the most part. And while you may not die physically, your certainly die as a soul. Same for most other forms of bodily immortality. And even ascension has its tradeoffs. All that lives must die. That's the First Law.
    Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
    Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
    5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
    NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
    NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.

  30. - Top - End - #60
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    sandmote's Avatar

    Join Date
    Oct 2017
    Location
    US
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    Feature, not bug. Long lived races end up advancing one funeral at a time like everyone else. They just have more dead time.
    Well, for any third party looking at this, please note that goblins are going to have many funerals for each elven funeral. So "advancing one funeral at a time," means a race with 150 year lifespans is inherently advancing slower than one with 30 year lifespans (or whatever the goblins have).

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    Of course the ideal situation (and this is a sub goal) is for there to be a mix of races. The short lived ones ideate, while the longer lived ones refine based on experience. Since refinement is "cheaper" (since it's small changes to an existing idea), so the old races can still do it.
    As per the above, long lived races will be systemically wiped out as the years pass, because the elves only have time to refine existing ideas during the time your humans can invent a new tactic rendering the old one obsolete. Not exclusively, but certainly with no parity.

    Your elves may be able to train a longbowman starting from the father (rather than the grandfather). Like all longbowmen, they'll need an enemy force of mounted knights to already be in disarray before they are worth the cost. And by the time your elves have enough anima to refine lancer tactics the humans have moved on to pike squares, rendering the elves' work moot.

    So with every development on the battlefield the elves are behind, and take the brunt of each new tactic.

    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    In a way, this is how real life R&D works. Except by age, not by lifespan. Young people are great at coming up with ideas. And then the older people can refine based on their own experience.
    And pretty much everyone insists on refining what they take seriously. With older people typically requiring more prodding before they'll agree to start modifications within the new framework. Which stamps down on innovation by itself, even if the elders have more general knowledge in the old frameworks.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •