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2011-11-10, 05:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
In a population of millions in a single city, I don't think inbreeding and incest is an issue that would ever come up. The total population of all Europe at some points in history is speculated to have been around 30 million.
-Do you honestly think that we believe ourselves evil? My friend, we seek only good. It's just that our definitions don't quite match.-
Ailanreanter, Arcanaloth
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2011-11-10, 05:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Here's something. Space. Do Tippyverse cities make use of Enveloping Pits and Bottles of Air as housing projects? You could build an entire modern-sized city that can house something like a thousand times what a modern city does in the same amount of space by using layered Enveloping Pits and Bottles of Air to create entire sections of the city.
Otherwise you wind up with massive city sprawls that are even more impossible to defend.Now if you don't mind, I am somewhat preoccupied telling the laws of physics to shut up and sit down.
I cast irresistable phantasmal killer as a 4th level spell. No save, just die.
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2011-11-10, 06:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2008
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Minimum population for sufficient genetic diversity depends heavily on how strict breeding control is; I've heard numbers as low as 27, if you're going to mandate breeding pairs. The standard number bandied around for a viable space colony is usually closer to 160-180.
Anything with a population over a thousand can avoid significant inbreeding without any difficulty. Anything with a population over a million doesn't even care; as long as siblings or cousins aren't going at it, it's a non-issue.
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2011-11-10, 07:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Plague Doctor by Crimmy
Ext. Sig (Handbooks/Creations)
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2011-11-10, 09:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2006
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
If a tree falls in the forest and the PCs aren't around to hear it... what do I roll to see how loud it is?
Is 3.5 a fried-egg, chili-chutney sandwich?
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2011-11-10, 10:19 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Tippy, what prevented wide divination magic from predicting attacks when the mega city wars broke out?
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2011-11-10, 10:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
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2011-11-10, 10:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2011
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Spell compendium, pg 13 Anticipate teleportation, level 3
enlarge it, becomes a level 4 spell,
create items that cast it once each day, for a CL of 10 it would affect 100ft
towers that predict where enemies are going to teleport exatly, and have a full round to teleport defenses in or cast a spell to insta kill them
if you have the money, use the level 6 version and CL of 20
now you have a tower every 400 ft and delays enemies for 3 rounds.
i bet someone smarter than me can think of a cheap spell to kill anyone you know is going to appear in an exact location in 3 turns
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2011-11-10, 10:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Re: Anticipate Teleport
It is debatable whether Wish's transportation clause is a teleportation effect. Nothing in the Wish text says it gains any descriptors, it's not duplicating another spell, and Wish is not even conjuration. It "lifts you" and "places you" - that's it. So AT and GAT don't work by RAW.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
Ext. Sig (Handbooks/Creations)
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2011-11-10, 10:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2005
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- Earth
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Practically everyone being covered by Mind Blank made it a real problem.
Also the fact that many cities are covered entirely in a permanent Mage's Private Sanctum made it a bit worse. Without such defenses you were open to enemy scrying and divination, with those defenses you can't divine your own cities or future either.
@Anticipate Teleport items
AT is an emanation and needs line of effect. It's quite easy to break that.
Again, getting inside the critical infrastructure and secure locations in the city can be (and is) a cast iron bitch; but the defenses used to do that can't reliably be applied to an entire city of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people.
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2011-11-10, 11:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2011
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
How to get power? Depends on what you want. If you simply want heat (or heat-related stuffs like boiling something) you'd go for the fire spells, or there is probably some elemental plane of fire solution the optimizers here will go for ;)
But for turning something around and around (for mills, electricity or whatever) using teleportation circles (or some other Teleports) maintaing a reservoire would be king. Building some turbine that goes around with the water should be straightforward (I think the playgrounders should be able to build alot of it given materials and some time). A heat engine, complete with a boiler of water to vaporize, to be sent trough the tubines to make it rotate has got way more issues.
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2011-11-10, 11:23 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2009
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
It's harder to make yes.
But its also more powerful. I could try calculating Carnot efficiency of a wall of fire boiler (and it will be higher than the equivalent in the Industrial Revolution), but that is just an upper bound.
Cost for cost, I strongly doubt even a 10% "heat to movement" efficiency wall of fire boiler will lose in energy production to many things.
One of those things is a modified ring gate. You thread an open portable hole (stuck to a suitably stiff backing) through a ring gate so both sides have a bit of the hole open.
This allows you to run a pipe through one end of the hole, and out the other end on the other side of the ring gate. Any water being pumped through it doesn't count to the ring gate's 100lb per day limit.
Ring gates can go 100 miles apart, IIRC? That's alot of energy if you send it straight up. Doubly so if you do this on a high gravity plane.
But then if you're going to play games with portable holes and ring gates that way, you can do far far worse.
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showp...1&postcount=20
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2011-11-10, 10:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2009
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Teleportation circles are 9th level and this is ei
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2011-11-10, 10:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
I want to set my next game in this campaign setting !
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2011-11-10, 10:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2008
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
It can't be made permanent, it only covers a relatively small area, and you'd need to cover every cubic foot of your city with them. A TC attack only needs one significant opening to mount a serious invasion.
However, as someone else pointed out earlier, Hallow is a 5th lvl spell and Dimension Anchor is a 4th, and tying the latter to the former covers eight times the volume that Dimensional Lock does, with a duration of Instantaneous (effectively one year).
Oh, and Weirdstones cover a 6-mile radius.
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2011-11-10, 10:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
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2011-11-11, 12:17 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2006
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of the trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise.
-Camus, An Absurd Reasoning
Fourth Doctor avatar courtesy of Szilard
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2011-11-11, 12:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
RAW Hallow and Dimensional Anchor is useless for preventing invasion.
The Hallow applies the spell to all creatures of the type you specify within the area of the spell. So AFTER I come through into your area I'm Dimensionally Anchored and can't teleport!
There is no statement anywhere in the Hallow description that the spell applies to entities prior to entry to the area. So I have to enter the area to be hit by the Dimensional Anchor. Dimensional Anchor has no ability to stop someone from teleporting in, it just stops them from using teleports to manuever or leave once in (which is valuable enough that you probably want to do it anyway).
Finally, Hallow has expensive components and a small area compared to a city and needs to be recast every year. You can use traps to cast it and avoid the components, but it's a marginal value and I at least tend to rule that magical traps are non-mobile so there are better defensive traps.
Wierdstones have been extensively discussed in the thread, they don't stop a wide range of other attacks including simply wishing the Wierdstone was somewhere else.
My question for Tippy is why there's more than ONE city per world? I mean, the original development being through teleport circles makes that hold for the start, but with food from traps and the cost of setting up a city why build one rather than joining an existing one? I simply can't see the incentive for anyone who wants to live in a City and can cast Greater Teleport to start by building one rather than moving to one.
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2011-11-11, 02:55 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2010
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- The depths of my insanity
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
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2011-11-11, 04:44 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2008
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Except that caveat is not actually in the spell text. It doesn't say anything about within or without. It doesn't affect creatures "within the area of the spell", it simply affects creatures.
Finally, Hallow has expensive components and a small area compared to a city and needs to be recast every year. You can use traps to cast it and avoid the components, but it's a marginal value and I at least tend to rule that magical traps are non-mobile so there are better defensive traps.
Wierdstones have been extensively discussed in the thread, they don't stop a wide range of other attacks including simply wishing the Wierdstone was somewhere else.
1) It's uncertain Wish bypasses Weirdstone's warding
2) Even if it could, Wish-porting only ignores restrictions on the LANDING side, not the TAKING side
3) Even without that, Wish-porting only targets CREATURES and Weirstones are OBJECTS.
So, no, you very thoroughly can't Wish-port it away. You can Wish-port someone in, possibly, but then conventional defenses apply. Personally, given the cost of Wish-porting someone in compared to the cost of the Weirdstone, I'd just have multiple redundant Weirdstones each with moderate defenses, in the center of total deathtraps. Whoever ports in could destroy the Weirdstone if they were sufficiently equipped/prepared (but exact defences would vary significantly so they could always be caught off guard, especially since Weirdstones block divination), but I could pretty much guarantee that they'd be crushed immediately thereafter in the counterattack, since other Weirdstones would cover the lack and they couldn't Wish-port back out. Essentially, I'm pretty sure I could make the cost of destroying Weirdstones prohibitive compared to the cost of creating them, meaning anyone attacking me is hemorrhaging resources far faster than I am and will almost certainly lose in the long run.Last edited by sonofzeal; 2011-11-11 at 05:16 AM.
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2011-11-11, 07:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2005
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Inertia and politics are the big reasons. Those cities all initially grew out of preexisting cities that the TC network caused to expand exponentially. Once you had several cities it becomes much easier for more to form (play the preexisting cities off each other for protection initially, for example) and combining them is much more difficult because the leadership and population are likely unwilling to do so.
You can come up with various in game reasons for it, but the big reason from a setting creation stand point is that it 1) keeps the cities focused on other cities which gives a reasonable explanation for why they aren't dealing with stuff in the wilds, 2) allows the PC's to adventure in separate locals that can be wildly divergent (one city might be virtually lawless anarchy while another is a mind raped utopia), 3) allows the PC's to deal with campaign hooks that are much more difficult in a monopole world.
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2011-11-11, 09:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
Y'know, if you take this setting, run it forward to the fall of the Great Mage Empires (maybe one wizard learn epic magic and made everything fall over) and then another thousand years, you end up with Exalted.
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2011-11-11, 10:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2005
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
*shrug* I've never bothered with Exalted so no idea how accurate that is.
But I do ban epic magic in all of my games that it isn't specifically intended for (actually I ban all epic and use a homebrew mechanic for characters that get enough XP to go up a level past level 20).
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2011-11-11, 12:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
I must say, I love this concept. I'm tempted to implement it in our shared game world, except that I'm afraid it would change things too much. We have never used the trap crafting rules, largely because you can break the economy with them. And we've managed to ignore the obvious progression that would come from pervasive permanent teleport circles by not having any high level casters who were interested in doing that (I mean, at that point you're nearly a god already... why bother helping the little people get around? Money is power, and you've already got more power than all of them combined).
I'd love to drop this in some isolated part of the world, but I don't see any way to do that without it spreading everywhere... except one.
What if the cities war resulted in the MAD principle... but their leaders didn't stop. I think I'm going to introduce a continent (or perhaps archipelago) that is a Post Apocalyptic Tippyverse.-Dyllan
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2011-11-11, 06:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
The surefire way to block teleportation within the cities is to block extraplanar travel. You've got all sorts of creation traps, so just transport yourself to all of those adjacent planes and start creating a giant ball made of layers of different things, and make them MASSIVE. Miles wide, large enough to block anything traveling through that plane (and since it's onioned in inch-thick layers, trying to Disintegrate through is difficult at best). Do it on the Astral, Shadow, and Ethereal planes, and you don't have to worry about it (and you don't have to worry about hauntings or ethereal spying, either). However, the Plane of Faerie and the Planes of Mirrors and Dreams are a bit more difficult to deal with...
And have constant construct patrols that watch for sappers, who add layers and make repairs as they go.Last edited by Rubik; 2011-11-11 at 06:22 PM.
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2011-11-11, 06:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2005
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
That only works on the Ethereal Plane by RAW, and with DM adjudication it might be doable on the Plane of Shadows (doubtful however because of how it's fluffed). Astral doesn't have that kind of 1:1 congruence.
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2011-11-11, 06:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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2011-11-11, 07:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
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2011-11-11, 07:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2009
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2011-11-11, 08:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2007
Re: The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy
How would the Tippyverse function without self-resetting traps?