Hi,
Note kefitzat haderech.
Anyway,
Ken
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The tricky point is, what does instant really mean? Is there at all any medieval notion of a zero duration moment?
Consulting a modern dictionary, instant does not necessarily imply zero duration; giving «I shall be back in an instant» as an example. Thus, «transport the target instantly» may very well be interpreted as having the target traverse the intervening space in the blink of an eye (whose duration can easily be measured as strictly positive). Whether this is near or beyond the speed of light is hardly relevant to the medieval paradigm AFAICS.
There are two potential problems with the modern fantasy concept of teleportation. Firstly, it has no apparent basis in historical myth. Examples have been quoted both from the Bible and from Norse myths of instant travel through space; similar examples of literally instant relocation have not yet been found. Secondly, what is the plausible narrative. What is really happening in instant relocation? How do we reconcile it with the continuity of time and space?
I reckon the latter could be resolved by travelling through the magic realm, which would also generate some interesting botch options. However, the duration would then almost certainly be non-zero, although negligible.
But then, concepts like zero and arbitrarily close to zero (and infinitesimals in particular) took the mathematical community an awful long time to grok. Is there really a case for having anything of strictly zero duration in a medieval paradigm?
So, where does this idea that instant travel takes absolutely zero time come from?
BTW. For one of our sagas we ruled that all teleportation is effectively rapid (instant) traversal of the physical space. While it solves some problems (e.g. requisites), it creates others, and I would not recommend it. Arguing that it violates RAW OTOH, takes a very particular and naïve interpretation of instant.
I would still rather keep both versions, if for no other reason than there are places you cannot get to without teleportation. Those types of locations also appear in publishes story seeds.
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Sure; I did not really object to that. I am happy with the instant teleportation, as long as it takes a whole blink of an eye to arrive. Not that that matters to to the narrative, where anything shorter than a combat round is an instant.
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I would point that there seem to be two fundamentally different issues under discussion here.
The first is how much time elapses between the last moment the target is at its starting point, and the first it is at its destination. We know it can be less than a round. I would contend that for all game purposes it really makes no difference if it takes a single heartbeat, a nanosecond, or zero time at all; though it could be an interesting "in game" line of research for magi.
The second is whether the target travels along a(n open) path from the starting point to its destination ("fast travel"), or simply ceases to exist at the starting point and reappears at the destination, without ever being somewhere in between ("teleportation"). Note that "teleportation" could, in principle, take a full round (during which the target is neither here nor there, like what happens to some magi in Twilight). I agree with Troy that having both makes for a richer game.
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I'd claim that there are three.
- What does RAW imply?
- What is founded in actual medieval myth, and thus within the paradigm of Mythic Europe?
- What do we want to play?
I tend to agree with @InfinityzeN and yourself as far as (3) is concerned, but I still find the other two questions interesting.
If it takes 0 seconds, or 0.001 seconds to travel from point A to point B is really uninteresting as far as the game is concerned. The practical difference is none whatsoever.
A much more interesting question is if you can move into or out of a fully enclosed space.
That should be possible with teleportation, but not with really, really, really fast travel.
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Yep. "In ictu oculi" as a concept is well known to Christian intellectuals from the middle ages and Mythic Europe. Especially from 1 Corinthians 15:52 (ISV):
52 in a moment, faster than an eye can blink, at the sound of the last trumpet. Indeed, that trumpet[a] will sound, and then the dead will be raised never to decay, and we will be changed.
I think what RAW implies is pretty set:
- It says Gift of the Frog's Legs is an example of using the instant transportation guidelines to travel very quickly without teleporting.
- It says you could reconfigure instant transportation to get rid of teleportation.
So canonically you can definitely use instant transportation for super-fast movement. And, as there would be nothing to reconfigure to rule out teleportation if it weren't there, RAW quite strongly implies teleportation is also possible. The more open issue is actually if requisites are needed for teleportation.
True, but it becomes an issue when instant, as used by RAW, is taken to imply zero seconds, and this is used to deduce one interpretation or other. Whether it takes zero or even three seconds is immaterial to the wording of the guidelines.
Which is a reason to keep both. Dropping Teleportation makes using those Bases to get to unreachable locations impossible, which is something seen in published story seeds. Dropping the Very Rapid Movement results in a few published spells and a section of a book being invalid.
As Callen points out, the question is what is the differences between the two in play? Things like does Teleportation require requisites (the published fast movement spells don't)? Can Fast Movement be countered by hazards (environment, traps, a knowledgeable attack along the path of movement)? How much time do they take?
A few examples from my group on our differences between the two:
- Teleportation requires Requisites. It is unaffected by anything between the two points. The Target disappears the very instant the spell finishes and reappears at the target location about a second (a heart beat) later. Distance used is limited to vision without an AC, by the Base with an AC.
- Fast Movement does not require Requisites. Hazards in the path of movement can damage the Target or even interrupt the movement (you have to be able to physically get there). The total time taken for the movement is no more than a round (6 seconds), though you only get near that with the longest movements (5 paces is less than a second). We limit it to moving to locations you can see which caps it at about Base 20 (with Base 25 possible sometimes), no AC allowed even on shorter distances.
This makes them different in play. It is easier to use Fast Movement due to not needing Requisites but it has drawbacks to make up for that.
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I'm not really interested in earning a PHD in medieval comparative mythology when I'm adjucating spells. It suffices to me that we have a game system to use. Hermetic magic as it exists in Ars Magicka has no real basis in myth either.
There are some issues with long range near instant teleportation guidelines while moving through space. Things like adjucating what you can see, who can see you, whether you can move to the spot you see because of physical obstacles, whether you should be required to roll finesse, etc. Also it opens up the question of whether such travel can be slowed down by adding a non-momentary duration. If Hermetic magic can use a fast travel option, why doesn't it have fast travel guidelines in Rego Corpus? And I would globally prefer to leave fast travel to hedge traditions and mystery cults, using powers like Dislocation, Portage, etc.
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But it does. «Transport the target instantly up to ...» is exactly that. It does not say how the target travels, only that it does so instantly, which is fast, but not necessarily faster than a blink of an eye.
You choose to read this as discontinuous relocation, aka teleportation, but the core rules do not necessarily imply that.
I do not necessarily disagree with your choice, only that it be the only valid interpretation of RAW.
And your question about what happens if the spell duration is extended, is as much of a problem as you(r troupe) wants it to be. I would say that any guideline for a spell to do something instantly only makes sense for a momentary spell, but if your troupe can make sense of something else, who am I to object?
... and even if I would be interested in that PhD, I don't have the time. However, this is not about the myths that we could research for a PhD, but the myths that are immediately known to the troupe at hand, in this case the forum.
No, and that's a flaw of the system, given that the setting and lore is supposed to draw so much upon actual myth. If somebody were going to write Ars Magica from scratch today, I don't think Hermetic magic would have had much in common with the rules we know.
But that does not matter much either, because in the case of instant transport, RAW is sufficiently ambiguous that the troupe can read it the way they wish.
nods I'm not saying it's wrong for a troupe to take the opposite call either. But this is the fan grimoire, and we ideally want spells that will not need to be reevaluated by every gaming tables for inclusion. Perhaps it's just me, and if so, by all means go ahead.
I've tried to search the supplements to see whether we have cases supporting one way or another.
RoP:M has several ReAn effects based on ReCo guidelines:
- Sprint of the Zephyr (59) take the fast travel option. Using Base 15 with diam duration, it doesn't map out to the distance I'd expect if we had a "Transport the target instantly up to 50 paces" multiplied by 20 times (this would be less than a mile) added to the horse's regular speed. Most likely, we have a "Move a target quickly in any direction you please" effect.
- The Unimpeded Traveler (60) seems like a weird effect. Using base 10, it is not easily explained by a single guideline as far as I can tell. You would probably need base 5 for unsupported walk on water and chasms, for example.
- Great Leap (60) is similar to Frog's Leap, using the Base 15 guideline for 50 paces. The extra distance for horizontal movement is gone, and there is now a penalty for vertical movement. BS&S 60 has a similar effect that's a straight 50 paces.
- Fleet of Foot (132) is MuAn, which is used to triple the movement speed.
BS&S has:
- a ReCo power using base 15 to travel at the speed of a running horse (121)
- a ReCo(An) power using base 10 to throw a target.
Right now, my thinking is along those lines: Using base 15 guideline "Move a target quickly in any direction you please", the reference under Corpus is Mercury's Winged Sandals which allows a max speed of 40 miles - Load / hour. This requires a finesse roll to even reach top speed. 40 miles an hour is 211200 feet / hour or 3520 feet / minute or 352 feet per round which is just shy of 120 paces. Moderate speed, depending on the gaming table, probably is close to 50-60 paces per round. We've seen that Jump of the Lynx which uses those instant transport guidelines with a duration so that you can jump every round. Let's say I'm okay with physically crossing space with those guidelines, because we do have a bump of leaps and throws to fall back on. I don't think it's balanced to combine the high level base guidelines with actual physical movement (I just ran 7 leagues in a round), ignoring the limits of human stamina, waving Finesse checks, and running up walls to reach a destination (e.g. which elsewhere in corpus would be "even if unsupported"). Even if using more reasonable speeds, consider that 500 paces in a round is close to 150 mph. Typically, at that speed, if one collides a solid wall, one dies, and if you land on your legs, they're probably broken and you're lucky to just have broken legs. At a quarter of that speed, just slowing down of switching your direction using Mercury's Winged Sandals is a Finesse DC 12 checks. Food for thought.
For the fan grimoire, we know that canonically both versions of instant transport are valid:
We don't need to go into details about requisites.
I'm not sure why I got tagged on a post of you quoting yourself. I'm not talking about requisites.
Because I was replying to you. loke replied to
with
and then you wrote
I have identified a direct statement showing using the instantaneous movement guidelines for quick, not-teleportation movement is valid. I have also identified a statement unambiguously implying that the instantaneous movement guidelines work for teleportation. Thus both are valid canonically.
Meanwhile, the rules say you can leave out true teleportation, changing everything written as teleportation to work the other way. And the rules also say what happens if there is an obstruction. Essentially, this is start to destination movement, not controllable along the way. If you want to fly controllably really fast, that is different.
Heh, you're taking a bit of a shortcut with "the rules say", no? I'm not arguing it's impossible. I've moved from my first post - there are enough examples with low level spells. I'm not convinced the rules are unambiguous over how high level spell versions should be balanced. What do the rules say about obstruction, according to you?
If you design a spell for flinging someone, they slam into it and take falling damage. If you use a spell to move someone as though they jumped, they have a chance to land successfully based on their own reflexes (which is impractical for any large distance).
If you're using it in place of teleporting yourself to a location and there is something blocking your way
If a barrier does exist, the target is transported as far as the nearest barrier. So if he is shackled, the spell has no effect, but if the only barrier is his closed sanctum door then he simply appears outside it.
Yes, this is under an optional rule, but the option is to remove something, switching to only allowing one of the two canonical versions, not add something new. So this tells you what happens under the other version used that way.
Ideally, we avoid specifying anything outside of what has already been written. Let every reference the rules themselves, possibly with an indication of where to go. Anywhere it has been specified in a spell for us, we stick one of the versions we've been given, just like we've been doing with all these made-up rules a bunch of people threw in such as many variations of how claws behave.
For the Grimoire, I would rather not add Teleport or Fast Movement to spells that do not already specify one or the other. Having already reviewed spells which could be ether/or and spells which are Fast Movement, leave the ones that could be ether alone and only try to work out further details for ones which are specifically one.