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  1. - Top - End - #31
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by ORione View Post
    Picture the surface of the sun.

    Your thoughts are now at the sun, and it took them about a second to get there.
    If this is a valid means of measuring the speed of thought, it leads to a strange contradiction.

    Picture the nucleus of an atom. Now picture an electron in the first, inner-most shell of that atom.

    Your thoughts have moved an infinitesimally small distance, in the same span of time that it took for your thoughts to reach the sun. Thus the travel time is constant, and the speed varies inversely with distance. Therefore, thoughts can be both infinitely fast and infinitely slow, depending on what you're thinking about.
    The Giant says: Yes, I am aware TV Tropes exists as a website. ... No, I have never decided to do something in the comic because it was listed on TV Tropes. I don't use it as a checklist for ideas ... and I have never intentionally referenced it in any way.

  2. - Top - End - #32
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Fish View Post
    If this is a valid means of measuring the speed of thought, it leads to a strange contradiction.

    Picture the nucleus of an atom. Now picture an electron in the first, inner-most shell of that atom.

    Your thoughts have moved an infinitesimally small distance, in the same span of time that it took for your thoughts to reach the sun. Thus the travel time is constant, and the speed varies inversely with distance. Therefore, thoughts can be both infinitely fast and infinitely slow, depending on what you're thinking about.
    That's not really a contradiction. Look at it this way: a cheetah can run at 50 to 70 miles per hour. But the meat the cheetah wants to eat is only ten feet away from it.

    Does that mean the cheetah is out of luck as it cannot possibly move slowly enough to reach that meat? Or does the fact that they could move at 50 to 70 miles per hour not imply that they cannot move slower?

  3. - Top - End - #33
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by RatElemental View Post
    Debatable that thought is nonphysical, but the closest we could get to a concrete 'speed of thought' would be to measure how fast impulses travel along nerves I think.
    Agreed. Which, again, has nothing to do with the distance from your brain to the object you're thinking about. Your thought did not travel along a pathway to the sun. There was no instant in which your thought was above your head, followed by an instant in which it was in the troposphere, followed by an instant in the stratosphere, followed by the mesosphere, thermosphere, etc..... Your thought did not travel that distance. It just didn't.

  4. - Top - End - #34
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Kish View Post
    That's not really a contradiction.
    It contradicts what we have been told is true about thought, vis a vis this comic: that thought moves quickly.

    Thus, it is a contradiction. What it is not is a paradox.
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  5. - Top - End - #35
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by GloatingSwine View Post
    Your thoughts are probably at a special effect from Star Trek, because nobody has ever pictured the surface of the actual sun in a way compatible with human visual imagination.

    Anyway, the "speed of thought" is not a uniform property because it depends on the type of thought. Reactions to an anticipated stimulus can be very quick, ~150 milliseconds, but decisions are considerably slower and the more complex and the larger the number of factors involved the slower they get.

    However, the comic is also based on D&D where you get unlimited* "thinking time" before having to choose what to do, so the "speed of thought" in a D&D universe is functionally infinite.


    * Or at least until the other people at the table start throwing dice at you.
    Yea, I was gonna say: thinking is a free action, thus takes no time. It's like talking. You can recite the bible in a whole 6 seconds. ;)
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  6. - Top - End - #36
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    It's pretty common to all fiction that subconscious thoughts and memories happen in a flash, much faster than, for instance, the time it takes for me to think up this post. These thoughts and memories are always incredibly detailed and often more fully developed than our conscious thoughts.

    Certainly this is totally unrealistic, but it's such an accepted trope that probably everything from Star Trek to The Flintstones has used it at one time or another. (Okay, maybe not The Flintstones... )
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    Also, everything Darth Paul just said.
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  7. - Top - End - #37
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Darth Paul View Post
    It's pretty common to all fiction that subconscious thoughts and memories happen in a flash, much faster than, for instance, the time it takes for me to think up this post. These thoughts and memories are always incredibly detailed and often more fully developed than our conscious thoughts.

    Certainly this is totally unrealistic, but it's such an accepted trope that probably everything from Star Trek to The Flintstones has used it at one time or another. (Okay, maybe not The Flintstones... )
    How long did it take the Great Gazoo to come up with a complex plan?

  8. - Top - End - #38
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Devils_Advocate View Post
    we can think faster under some circumstances[/URL], such as while dreaming
    For me it varies, when I was a little child I had a dream where I lived through my life, became an adult, etc. and was extremely happy when I woke up, perhaps I remember it wrong, but I think when I woke up I had the impression that my dream had went on for a long time.

    On the other hand, not too long ago I had a dream about me walking a small distance or something similar, that dream lasted all night and when I woke up it felts like it couldn't have been several hours already.

    Quote Originally Posted by RatElemental View Post
    the closest we could get to a concrete 'speed of thought' would be to measure how fast impulses travel along nerves I think.
    I think we'd still need to be able to quantify how much information the entire system of nerve pulses accounts for, after all, if I'm not mistaken, our brains are very similar, but our skills can be very different. It is my understanding that abilities such as how well you remember something, or how fast you e.g. can calculate stuff is mainly about efficient nerve wiring.

    ---

    About ORione's post regarding speed of thought and the distance to the sun. I read it more as a fun post than anything to be taken too seriously, and I think the level of negative attention it is getting is detracting from the value of an otherwise nice thread.

  9. - Top - End - #39
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    Thumbs down Re: Speed of thought

    In a comic book, thinking is, like talking, a free action. Albeit the characters do not take advantage of the former as often as of the latter.

  10. - Top - End - #40
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Jay R View Post
    How long did it take the Great Gazoo to come up with a complex plan?
    I stand corrected.

    And a great example of this kind of thing occurred to me today. In the film The Whole Nine Yards, the scene in which Oz meets Jimmie:



    Objectively about 2 seconds pass, but in Oz's mind, "at the speed of thought", we see headlines and stories from several newspapers in a great stylistic sequence as everything he remembers reading about his new neighbor suddenly flashes through his mind. This is a terrific illustration of the "speed of thought" as we're discussing it here, even if it's a relatively short one.
    Last edited by Darth Paul; 2018-04-15 at 11:18 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Grey_Wolf_c View Post
    Also, everything Darth Paul just said.
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  11. - Top - End - #41
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Personally, I've a hunch that, while memory-absorption is extremely fast, it's not quite instantaneous. Durkon's plan for the battle is to unleash his memories, all of them, all at once. Can Not-Durkon absorb all of that in six seconds? Twelve? A round or two of the villain being lost in thought might be all it takes for the heroes to defeat him.

    It's an extreme measure, to be sure, and not to be taken lightly, because it hastens Durkon's oblivion. But when the Order is right there, it might still be worth it.

    And that's why he did the Workplace Orientation Seminar memory, and the Zit-Popping memory, and so on: He wasn't just trying to annoy Not-Durkon; he was testing whether Not-Durkon could choose to not experience the memories. Now he knows that he can't, and so the plan is a go.
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  12. - Top - End - #42
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    I don't think we have any evidence that Durkula *has* to view a memory Durkon is showing him? Surely he can just ignore what his host is babbling on about while he concentrates on the battle.

  13. - Top - End - #43
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    I don't think we have any evidence that Durkula *has* to view a memory Durkon is showing him? Surely he can just ignore what his host is babbling on about while he concentrates on the battle.
    If he could avoid viewing the memory, why didn't he choose to do so when he watched the zit-popping?
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    Player: Well, Bob thinks it. And since Bob has high Int and Wis, and a lot of points in Dungeoneering, he would probably know a thing or two about how to open vault doors.
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  14. - Top - End - #44
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    The question remains, whether "speed of thought" is slow enough for Durkula to waste one or even two actions...

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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Emanick View Post
    If he could avoid viewing the memory, why didn't he choose to do so when he watched the zit-popping?
    Because he eventually has to see all the memories, so he might as well watch that when it's offered providing it doesn't interfere with anything else he's doing.

  16. - Top - End - #46
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Jannoire View Post
    The question remains, whether "speed of thought" is slow enough for Durkula to waste one or even two actions...
    Untill now, it doesn't seems so. The chief way Durkon seems to be able to foil Greg is to feed him memories whose importance isn't the memory itself, but the connections beetween them and the things he learnt from them.
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  17. - Top - End - #47
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Jay R View Post
    Speed is distance divided by time, and is therefore about a change in physical location.
    "Speed" can be and is used to refer to anything divided by time, not just distance.

    Quote Originally Posted by Jay R View Post
    The phrase "speed of thought refers to how long it takes to reach a specified conclusion
    Exactly!

    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    In OotS, though, it seems clear that "thinking" is not something that requires any physical presence at all--Roy was still able to think while in the afterlife, after all--so we're well into the realms of metaphysics here.
    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    In the case of OotS we know for a fact it's nonphysical--Roy certainly wasn't thinking with his decaying brain and nerves when he was in the afterlife, after all.
    Huh? That's like saying that we know that sword fighting is nonphysical in OotS because Roy was able to do that in the afterlife and he certainly wasn't using his inanimate remains for that.

    Roy obviously had a different body while he was dead. We know that because we saw it and saw him use that body to interact with his environment by doing things like climbing a mountain. He may have no longer been subject to hunger and thirst and exhaustion, but demons and angels aren't either, and they're still organisms with vital organs (and thus e.g. still subject to sneak attacks and other forms of precision damage). This is D&D we're talking about, where even being "incorporeal" just makes you intangible and floaty and see-through. Straight-up disembodied minds, as a rule, just plain do not exist. "Spiritual" places and entities like the afterlife, ghosts, and even gods aren't more abstract than mortals, just more magical, and with enough magic of your own you can travel bodily to one of the Outer Planes and punch a god right in the face. (Please note: This is inadvisable.) That's just how this genre works.

    Why would characters even have brains if mental processes had no physical component? What would brains do, cool the blood? Why would a brain-eating monster nutritionally evaluate characters' mental traits if they didn't have anything to do with the brains that it would be eating?

    The available evidence suggests that the brain is indeed the organ of thought, from which we can infer that Roy had a brain in the afterlife, because he still thought there. Regardless, it plainly doesn't make any sense to say that he couldn't have had a brain because he didn't have a body. We saw that he had a body. And if you think that his body "wasn't physical", I'm going to have to ask you what you think the word "physical" means, because at that point you certainly don't seem to be using the term normally.

    Quote Originally Posted by BaronOfHell View Post
    About ORione's post regarding speed of thought and the distance to the sun. I read it more as a fun post than anything to be taken too seriously,
    It didn't read as a joke or as having any obvious non-literal meaning to me.

    Quote Originally Posted by BaronOfHell View Post
    and I think the level of negative attention it is getting is detracting from the value of an otherwise nice thread.
    If simple disagreement bothers you that much, a discussion forum might not be the best social environment for you.

    It's not like we've derailed the thread with lots of criticism. Given that there are less than two pages after over two months, there's barely even been any activity at all. Not that the subject warrants a lot of discussion, but what little there's been hasn't struck me as unpleasant.
    Quote Originally Posted by icefractal View Post
    Abstract positioning, either fully "position doesn't matter" or "zones" or whatever, is fine. If the rules reflect that. Exact positioning, with a visual representation, is fine. But "exact positioning theoretically exists, and the rules interact with it, but it only exists in the GM's head and is communicated to the players a bit at a time" sucks for anything even a little complex. And I say this from a GM POV.

  18. - Top - End - #48
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Devils_Advocate View Post
    Straight-up disembodied minds, as a rule, just plain do not exist.
    The description in Complete Divine seems to suggest that a "soul" in most afterlives is not a creature, but a disembodied entity, with no stats.

    Special (usually, especially devout) souls get the "turned back into a creature" template - becoming 2HD outsiders - petitioners.
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  19. - Top - End - #49
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    What part seems to suggest that?

    "The dead character doesn't perceive anything at all, doesn't think, and has no notion or memory of events beyond the moment of death."
    Complete Divine, p. 125

    Sure sounds like a "raw" soul is mindless. It doesn't think because it has no brain. It also can't sense anything because it has no sense organs. Obviously it carries information about the creature it's from, but it can't do the things that a body can do with that information on its own. Otherwise there would be no need for things like brains and sense organs. This seems straightforward enough.

    A soul that reaches an afterlife then has a new body created for it there.

    "Soul shells are not insubstantial wisps—they're creatures of flesh, blood, and bone."
    Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells, p. 9
    Quote Originally Posted by icefractal View Post
    Abstract positioning, either fully "position doesn't matter" or "zones" or whatever, is fine. If the rules reflect that. Exact positioning, with a visual representation, is fine. But "exact positioning theoretically exists, and the rules interact with it, but it only exists in the GM's head and is communicated to the players a bit at a time" sucks for anything even a little complex. And I say this from a GM POV.

  20. - Top - End - #50
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Devils_Advocate View Post

    A soul that reaches an afterlife then has a new body created for it there.

    "Soul shells are not insubstantial wisps—they're creatures of flesh, blood, and bone."
    Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells, p. 9
    Soul shells are Hellish petitioners (Manual of the Planes - page 115-116) - Lemures are an upgraded version.

    The Activities in the Afterlife section of Complete Divine discusses petitioners, and makes it clear they are the exception, not the rule:

    page 129:

    Become One with The Plane: The vast majority of souls in the afterlife silently experience their final destination, whether it's a place of great beauty such as Elysium or a place of mad cruelty such as The Abyss. As time passes, they become more like the plane, taking on its qualities and caring less about their time among the living. At some point they cease to have an independent existence and become one with the fabric of the plane itself. Essentially, souls eventually become abstract quanta of the good, evil, law, chaos, or neutrality they lived with when alive.

    This process is why every rich individual in the D&D world doesn't come back from the dead repeatedly. Whether they're good or evil, most souls find resonance in the afterlife - they have a sense that they are where they're supposed to be. Only souls with strong force of personality and unfinished business among the living (which includes many adventuring PCs) respond to the call of a raise dead or resurrection spell.


    Get A New Body: Some individual souls come to the attention of the gods and powerful outsiders that inhabit the planes, either because the souls were exceptionally good or wicked in life or because the deity sees great potential in an otherwise unremarkable soul. These souls are granted new bodies and become outsiders called petitioners. Most petitioners are 2 Hit Dice outsiders with abilities similar to those of the outsiders that inhabit their particular plane. Lemure devils and dretch demons are typical petitioners, for example. Petitioners serve gods or outsiders that created them; many are promised promotion to more powerful forms (whether demonic or angelic) if they serve well. In this way, the deities replenish the ranks of their hosts.


    It makes it clear that "regular" souls experience the afterlife - and if resurrected, have vague memories of their experiences in it - like Roy. But petitioners can't be resurrected as the people they once were:

    Page 129-130:

    Respond to Resurrection Magic:
    When you come back to the world of the living, you remember in general terms what the afterlife was like, but your memories have a vague, dreamlike quality and you're unable to recall the specifics of events. Whether the afterlife was torment or bliss to you, you have a good idea of what to expect should you die again - unless you alter your behaviour markedly enough to change your alignment.


    page 130:

    When You can't Come Back
    Characters who have been granted new bodies as petitioners can't come back from the dead, because the creation of a petitioner effectively returned them to life. They're new creatures with at least some memories - but none of the abilities or skills - from their former lives.


    Quote Originally Posted by Devils_Advocate View Post

    A soul that reaches an afterlife then has a new body created for it there.

    Baator appears to be the exception to "the vast majority of souls in an afterlife aren't petitioners" - though (page 40, FC2) some souls do (because of their deity) become Fiendish-Templated versions of whatever they were in life - instead of Outsiders. Kurtulmak has fiendish kobolds as what his dead worshippers are turned into. Sekolah has fiendish sahaugin.

    It's possible that in the domains of LE deities like Hextor, the same rules are followed as elsewhere - the soul is not a "soul shell petitioner", a "lemure petitioner" or a fiendish-templated being - but just "a soul".
    Last edited by hamishspence; 2018-05-05 at 09:07 AM.
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  21. - Top - End - #51
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Eh, getting a new body as a petitioner doesn't mean that you weren't a petitioner before. Evolving from one form to another is an established phenomenon for the alignment exemplars, after all.

    I agree that the text seems to strongly imply agreement with you, but FCII also seems to me to clearly imply that becoming a soul shell is the norm for souls that go to Baator. We could dig into this further, but I wouldn't count on even explicit statements necessarily being consistent with each other.

    But suffice to say that I'd expect any other book that described another afterlife in comparable detail to also portray an embodied existence for the souls of the dead. Because... well, that's just how this genre works! Most any being detailed with sufficient specificity is detailed as something that a sufficiently powerful and sufficiently determined player character can stab to death. Even if it's already dead.

    It's not like this isn't tangential to the matter at hand, anyway. Regardless of how things work in the default cosmology, Roy plainly wasn't disembodied in the afterlife, right?
    Last edited by Devils_Advocate; 2018-05-05 at 09:36 AM.
    Quote Originally Posted by icefractal View Post
    Abstract positioning, either fully "position doesn't matter" or "zones" or whatever, is fine. If the rules reflect that. Exact positioning, with a visual representation, is fine. But "exact positioning theoretically exists, and the rules interact with it, but it only exists in the GM's head and is communicated to the players a bit at a time" sucks for anything even a little complex. And I say this from a GM POV.

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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Roy's plainly visible at least. As is everyone else we see. But no bodily worries, not even those outsiders have to contend with, seem to be a thing for him:

    http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0499.html

    I would suggest that souls, unlike lantern archons, can't actually be harmed normally - they're not "creatures" by D&D standards, and don't actually have stats.


    EDIT: Apparently, The Giant has said souls in the afterlife are interactable with, by adventurers:

    http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...-After-vs-Life

    you will never improve at any skill you know, never have a say in what happens in the world, never have children if you haven't already, never talk to anyone with a different point of view, never experience any real risk, never visit anywhere else, and never see any friends or family members who did not share the exact same shade of alignment as you. Oh, and you can still be destroyed by evil adventurers, but you never get any better at defending yourself.

    And that's the Lawful Good afterlife.
    Dead souls cannot earn XP, gain levels, learn feats, or increase skills.
    so Roy's question "can I be killed in this form" has an answer - Yes:

    http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0497.html



    Quote Originally Posted by Devils_Advocate View Post
    Eh, getting a new body as a petitioner doesn't mean that you weren't a petitioner before.
    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    Get A New Body: Some individual souls come to the attention of the gods and powerful outsiders that inhabit the planes, either because the souls were exceptionally good or wicked in life or because the deity sees great potential in an otherwise unremarkable soul. These souls are granted new bodies and become outsiders called petitioners.
    So by implication, prior to becoming an Outsider and a petitioner, you weren't one before.

    Other features of a Dead Soul as opposed to a petitioner, I would suggest - not having a heartbeat, not having to breathe, and not having to move their legs to get around:

    http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0665.html

    http://www.d20srd.org/srd/typesSubty...m#outsiderType

    Outsiders, by contrast, qualify as living creatures - and they do have to breathe.
    Last edited by hamishspence; 2018-05-05 at 10:37 AM.
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    That you didn't simply answer my question in the affirmative leads me to suspect that you think what we saw of Roy's afterlife was largely consistent with him being "disembodied". As with my reply to factotum, at that point I have to wonder whether our disagreement isn't primarily semantic.

    Looking at that part of the story, I see that Roy is a physical being with a body moving around in a physical world. Some of the details may be different from his mortal life on the Material Plane, but he's neither formless nor intangible. One could argue that Roy's form and Roy's tangibility are illusory, but that implies that they appear to be something they're not. Words like "form", "body", "tangible", "physical", etc. to me just describe how things interact with other things; they're no more specific than that. Like, if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it seems appropriate to me to call it a duck, even if it exists in a radically different universe that e.g. isn't made of particles. It's still a duck, just implemented differently, y'know?

    So, when I say that in a D&D-style afterlife souls still have physical bodies, I don't mean anything remotely so specific as to potentially exclude Roy's experiences.


    Anyway, I was pondering my earlier thinking that souls wouldn't need sense organs if they could just sense things on their own, and I got to thinking... what if they could? If they had no particular ability to see or hear through things, then, being within their bodies, they'd still need apertures through which to sense things, wouldn't they? Isn't is often said that the eyes are the windows to the soul? Could that not be literally true with results superficially identical to our everyday experience?

    Of course, if the ears and nose were both holes that lead to the soul, then both would let in sound and smells, so maybe smell, along with the closely related sense of taste and also that of touch, is a sense of the body. But sound and sight could be senses of the soul. And if sights and sounds were simply inherently sensory in nature, then there would be no need for an apparatus to translate data into perceptions, would there? They could just flow directly into the soul through the appropriate openings. Huh!

    Seems like some interesting fantasy worldbuilding, anyway.
    Last edited by Devils_Advocate; 2018-05-05 at 01:07 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by icefractal View Post
    Abstract positioning, either fully "position doesn't matter" or "zones" or whatever, is fine. If the rules reflect that. Exact positioning, with a visual representation, is fine. But "exact positioning theoretically exists, and the rules interact with it, but it only exists in the GM's head and is communicated to the players a bit at a time" sucks for anything even a little complex. And I say this from a GM POV.

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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Roy has a form - but I don't know that it qualifies as a physical body - in the sense that's usually used for creatures.

    Based on the descriptions of how the Afterlife works in Complete Divine - souls may be more like illusion spells - major image and the like - wrapped around the ego and personality of the original living creature.

    The body used to be "a glorified sausage"

    http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0493.html

    but, separated from it - the soul has the opportunity to, over time, get over things like "messed up urges".
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    If Roy's form has a location and an appearance and a sense of touch and Roy can use it to manipulate his environment, then it's a physical body as far as I'm concerned. Like, I'm even not working off of any specific definition here, I'm just telling you that provided the truth of the proceeding, "Roy has a physical body" is true as I use the words "physical" and "body", such that anyone who disagrees with that has to mean something different by at least one of those words. This case is like an acid test to determine whether a potential definition is even possibly the right one, if you see what I mean. (Is there any "definitely true" statement that you'd use as an acid test?)

    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    Roy has a form - but I don't know that it qualifies as a physical body - in the sense that's usually used for creatures.
    What sense do you regard as being usually used for creatures?

    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    Based on the descriptions of how the Afterlife works in Complete Divine - souls may be more like illusion spells - major image and the like - wrapped around the ego and personality of the original living creature.
    Ah, but as I pointed out earlier, a raw soul doesn't have any of that going on; and neither does a living one, does it? So that manifestation around the soul isn't part of the soul itself. The soul is the ego and personality part. And the manifestation around it? Why, that's the soul's new body in its new environment! Absent overly restrictive definitions of "body", of course.
    Last edited by Devils_Advocate; 2018-05-05 at 01:08 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by icefractal View Post
    Abstract positioning, either fully "position doesn't matter" or "zones" or whatever, is fine. If the rules reflect that. Exact positioning, with a visual representation, is fine. But "exact positioning theoretically exists, and the rules interact with it, but it only exists in the GM's head and is communicated to the players a bit at a time" sucks for anything even a little complex. And I say this from a GM POV.

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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Devils_Advocate View Post


    What sense do you regard as being usually used for creatures?
    As in "has hit points".

    Roy says he didn't have to move his legs before, he didn't have a positive hit point total before, and so on:

    http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0665.html

    Making me think that "Roy in Celestia" (or floating around in Azure City, Sunken Valley, etc) might not have used a "regular statblock" - being a soul, not an undead, or an outsider, or a "positive energy spirit" (Deathless) like the guardians of the throne room in Azure City.

    That said, whatever it is, it's Extraplanar, being affectable by Dismissal:

    http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0572.html

    http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dismissal.htm

    so Roy's new "home plane" is Celestia.
    Last edited by hamishspence; 2018-05-05 at 01:20 PM.
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    One potential aspect of "the speed of thought" may be the per-character variance. Not in a biological sense, but in the game sense. What's the WIS score of the character involved - how "fast" can they think?

    As a cleric, the HPoH/Durkon is going to have a pretty darn high one, so his "speed of thought" is potentially going to be substantial enough to exist without delay, whereas a Sparkly Elan Vampire might find his speed of thought hindered by lag, assuming the WIS score translates.
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    I see this
    Quote Originally Posted by Devils_Advocate View Post

    "The dead character doesn't perceive anything at all, doesn't think, and has no notion or memory of events beyond the moment of death."
    Complete Divine, p. 125
    as applying to the corpse. A corpse doesn't perceive, think, or be aware of anything that happened after it died.
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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    That's at least as much of a stretch as anything I said. Intrinsic to the concept of the soul is the idea that the soul is the self. ("You don't have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.") It's described as such on the relevant page, which also asks "Where do the faithful go when they die? What do they do when they get there?" It's plain from context that those questions aren't about what happens to the corporeal remains of the faithful, I hope you'll grant.

    Besides which, if mental phenomena are non-physical, they're never done by the body anyway. In which case saying that the character's body doesn't do those things is just as true for an alive character as a dead one! So it only makes sense to specify that this is the case if thought is physical, it seems. It can't be that the soul just isn't doing those things within the body... because the quoted passage refers to the state of a character immediately after death, before the soul departs the body.

    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    As in "has hit points".

    Roy says he didn't have to move his legs before, he didn't have a positive hit point total before, and so on:

    http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0665.html

    Making me think that "Roy in Celestia" (or floating around in Azure City, Sunken Valley, etc) might not have used a "regular statblock" - being a soul, not an undead, or an outsider, or a "positive energy spirit" (Deathless) like the guardians of the throne room in Azure City.
    Um... we don't have D&D stats. Do we lack physical bodies? Or am I missing something here?

    I'm guessing that I am. I'm guessing that you see hit points and regular stat blocks as somehow corresponding to some relevant actual qualities of real creatures.

    The question then is... What are those qualities?
    Quote Originally Posted by icefractal View Post
    Abstract positioning, either fully "position doesn't matter" or "zones" or whatever, is fine. If the rules reflect that. Exact positioning, with a visual representation, is fine. But "exact positioning theoretically exists, and the rules interact with it, but it only exists in the GM's head and is communicated to the players a bit at a time" sucks for anything even a little complex. And I say this from a GM POV.

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    Default Re: Speed of thought

    Quote Originally Posted by Devils_Advocate View Post
    If Roy's form has a location and an appearance and a sense of touch and Roy can use it to manipulate his environment, then it's a physical body as far as I'm concerned.
    So why is this physical body unable to interact with the environment when he's floating around down on the Prime Material Plane? Clearly, whatever it is, it is not made of the same stuff that a normal physical body is, and it also doesn't have the needs of one--hence Roy is able to spend weeks on end fishing with his grandfather without ever needing to eat, sleep or pass waste.

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