Notices by Shimmin Beg (he/him) (shimminbeg@masto.ai)

Writing a thing about Knowledge spells in GURPS (your divinations and suchlike) and one of the first sections is "why you might want to ban some or all of these spells"...

Magic is always potentially tricky to game with, especially in settings where it's restricted to a minority of people, and even more so when it's not widely known to exist. The more magic departs from the capabilities and limitations of mundane skills and technology, the more of a risk this is.

Someone who can fire lightning from their finger is broadly a similar problem to somebody with a really well-hidden firearm: they're a physical threat even in situations where nobody should have a weapon.

You can still use mundane countermeasures. Having people ready to respond to such threats helps. Making it hard for even such people to target important people or things helps. Being good at not getting shot helps. You do not need to know that lightning wizards exist for these to help.

Somebody who can read minds, or infallibly detect lies, or pass through solid objects, or project their senses to a distant place or time, in a mundane setting, has capabilities nobody expects. Mundane countermeasures like "keeping secrets", "being a good liar", "convincing fake documents", "hiding in a well-defended bunker", and "holding the secret meeting in a place nobody can possibly have bugged" do not help.

In some systems/cases, the only way to counter these things is to know that magic exists and use specific magical countermeasures. This means mundane people are completely powerless against the magic even if they learn about it.

If there's a spell that can track a known individual or object to anywhere in the world (which exists in at least several systems), a person cannot disappear if wizards are looking for them, especially if the wizards are prepared to cast repeatedly in case their spell failed without them knowing.

A known object can't be stolen and hidden away.

In many cases, these spells also work to confirm whether a person is still alive.

This is where you get problems like "wizards can secretly locate and then spy on their enemies and wait until they're asleep, then walk through the walls and kill them". Or "wizards can secretly watch over any person's shoulder to steal their passwords".

Things that an ordinary person simply cannot do anything about. If ordinary people are meant to be a credible opposition, that's a problem.

Obviously in some settings wizards *are* meant to completely dominate any interaction or conflict with non-wizards, in which case this isn't necessarily an issue.

It can still make things *boring*, though, by shortcutting a potential adventure. "I could do an elaborate series of investigations to identify the werewolf amongst the castle residents, or just cast Reveal Werewolf. Oh, hi Jim."

@cwebber Yeah, a lot of the angry reactions have people saying "I can't possibly verify whether every citation in this multi-author paper fully backs up the point it's being cited for because I lack the specific expertise" and... okay, but you can check whether the work being cited *actually exists*, friend. You can probably even tell whether it's about epigenetics or C14th Italian commercial law.

Do I know anyone working in the NHS who can tell me what is in various rooms? Interested in equipment and supplies etc. you'd find in A&E assessment rooms, resus, etc.

I promise this is for roleplaying games and not some kind of poorly-planned heist.

@GreenSkyOverMe sorry I got interrupted while posting! I have stolen your description and added it

Genuinely shocked by this degree of coordination between the papers.