[TORG] Philosophy of Polymorphism

[Travis James Hall]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com 
> [mailto:torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com] On Behalf Of 
> Dominick Riesland
> Sent: Monday, 22 December 2008 5:17 PM
> To: torg at justintimeadventures.com
> Subject: Re: [TORG] Philosophy of Polymorphism
> 
> On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 11:52 PM, Travis James Hall
> <travisjhall at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> > Eh. I think a lot of people put way too much stock in the 
> "one spell, one
> > effect" rule. Really, I think all that was ever intended to 
> mean was that
> > the purpose of a spell should be statable in a fairly 
> simply, single-clause
> > sentence.
> 
> Not quite. "Summon a friendly demon" is quite simple, but a clear
> violation of the rule.

But we were only discussing a spell summed up as "summon a demon", not
"summon a friendly demon".

> The problem here is with the adjective; not all
> demons are friendly, therefore that part is a separate effect.

I'm not sure that adjectives are necessarily disallowed. There happens to be
another rule of magic that says that the emotional state of a spell's
prospective target cannot be taken into account. One could possibly "summon
a red demon", but one could not "summon a friendly demon", because even if a
friendly demon exists, the spell can't distinguish between it and an
unfriendly demon.

And this is why I say people put too much stock in the "one spell, one
effect" principle. There seems to be this assumption that if we can't
declare a spell to be in violation of that principle, we must allow it.
That's simply not true. There are quite a number of restrictions on what
spells are allowed, and we can add to them if we need to - the same way in
the Aysle sourcebook, we learn that there is no type of fire that burns only
dwarves (or somesuch) so such a fire cannot be conjured.

So if a suggested spell seems unreasonable, just don't allow it. To me,
though, a spell that allows a vampire to assume traditional vampiric
alternate forms seems pretty reasonable.

> It's worse than that. Both spells were "alteration/entity" and the
> witch is clearly a folk, not an entity.

You'd have to take that up with the writer. It's yet another example the the
dodginess of some of the Torg material.

> The first is
> one of whether there should be spells that are fundamentally the same
> built for more than one of the greater kindred (Polymorphism for
> entities, polymorphism for enchanted, polymorphism for folk,
> polymorphism for elementals) or if the fact that multiple greater
> kindred can use the same spells means that they should fundamentally
> be living forces spells so as to apply to them all.

And the answer is "both". The spell design rules clearly allow for both
options to be exercised, and that is quite reasonable. A version that
applies to only folk is clearly more limited than one that applies to all
living beings, and is somewhat cheaper as a result. And there's no reason
why a vampire mage couldn't create a polymorph spell almost identical to a
human mage's polymorph spell.

(You can even get more specific if you care to - there's a theorem for
that.)

> The second is one
> of definition - "turn me into a creature with which I have affinity"
> seems to be a bit more dodgy than "turn me into a cat" or "turn me
> into a wolf". Is the first definition simple enough to seem like one
> effect?

Can you name two distinct effects there? I know I can't.

Ruleswise, it looks to me like a limited version of the standard polymorph
spell ("turn me into an animal"). It probably just needs a theorem built
into it.

Travis Hall