2011-02-21: Chapter Forty-Eight Commentary

[The Comment Golem]

Discussion thread for Chapter Forty-Eight Commentary

[Dallen Andair]

Enjoy your happiness and ignorance while it lasts, Bani. The tools you find so amusing are the means that will end the dominance of magic on the battlefield.

[Imp-Chan]

What, really? I don't think so... there've been guns of some sort available for hundreds of years at this point. If they haven't ended the dominance of magic already, one must ask why they would in future.

^-^'

[4uk4ata]

That reminds me, does anyone know of a good setting blending magic and gunpowder tech? Gun mages are a fairly rare breed, I can only think of Arcanum (and Exalted, I guess) right now.

[Brellchild]

Well, if you normally walk around with a magic powered stick that works like a modern assault rifle, you too might be disdainful of 'pure' firearms and how they work. Why bother after all? Gunpowder runs out and magic doesn't.

I'm a little surprised that they made it up to brass cartridges and revolvers to be honest. Most fantasy worlds leave gunpowder back at the level of what they had in the Napoleonic Wars. Hmmm... Maybe a dwarf somewhere 'accidentally' let some slip into human hands?

It's a fairly common recurring argument (in some fashion) over at the GURPS forums where they love to argue minutiae like that in fiction.

[Painrunner]

What, really? I don't think so... there've been guns of some sort available for hundreds of years at this point. If they haven't ended the dominance of magic already, one must ask why they would in future.

^-^'

Because at this point guns have not yet been introduced to their best catalyst, political power. From what I gather from the lore, most of the people who use guns come from a backwater region with hardly any form of government leading them and no significant economical power.

It takes a few months to train a basic rifleman, It takes years to train a battlemage and for every reasonably intelligent person with aptitude for learning magic, there are several hundreds who couldn't cast a cantrip if they wanted to but can point and shoot just well enough to actually kill someone.

Same reason why medieval knights hated crossbowmen. A knight's training took decades and a fortunes worth of equipment and then some farmer who scavenged a crossbow from some dead soldier could take his life without a single day of training behind him.

[Graybeard]

Well, if you normally walk around with a magic powered stick that works like a modern assault rifle, you too might be disdainful of 'pure' firearms and how they work. Why bother after all? Gunpowder runs out and magic doesn't.

Actually, if we understand Impy (and by implication Poe) correctly, magic does run out, at least locally and temporarily. This was the subject of a long, interesting discussion in the Errant Road role-playing game, where Her Impyness had this to say:

Counter spells are a whole different category of magic, actually, and Poe had a fair bit to say about them specifically. There's generally two types, one of which requires a lot of that natural talent and ability, the other of which requires more or less neither (well, enough to do magic in the first place, but no more than that). We'll start with the second, since that's the most common. To stick with our musical explanation (btw, there's no reason someone COULDN'T experience magic as music, they just don't have to), the most common type of counter is to basically make so much "noise" that you drown out the other person's spell. It's the equivalent of clapping your hands over your ears and shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!" at the top of your lungs. This is effectively what the Inanire 312's did (though actually in that specific case they just used up all the available energy in the area for a while, like how lightning dissipates static for a while).

(My emphasis added.)

Whatever the mechanism by which an anti-magic grenade can null out magic, the point is that it can do it. Gunpowder, by contrast, always works. Furthermore, one need have no innate skill to wield it.

A question to think about: Once Senilis and Anilis undergo whatever terminal change happens at the end of Errant Story, will magic stop working in the Poe-verse?

[Voyager]

Did he also happen to leave you the address to his favorite local shooting club in his will?

Also, did he happen to leave you cleaning instructions? 'Cuz, if you don't keep them clean, when you pull the trigger things *don't* come out of the front end, and that is, shall we say, bad. You don't want that happening.

Finally, don't point them towards anything you would miss, toes, fingers, head, assorted reproductive organs, etc. etc. And yes, people have blown those off with longarms, by accident, and no, I have no idea how they did that, nor do I even want to.

Have fun. Try not to kill or permanently maim yourself.

[Sareth]

What Painrunner said.

My assumption is that, yes, guns have been around a couple hundred years in various forms, but it's really only Farrel and the Northern Confederacies that really use them. The "Big Boys" (Elves, Tsuiraku, and Veracia) tend to rely on magic (or divine power, if you're a Veracian). So far that hasn't been a big deal, but it seems like Farrel is making a bid to become much more important. If so, it's very likely that their cartridge using firearms will prove a decisive and very, very rude shock to Veracia (and possibly Tsuiraku, Farrel's ally) should they wind up in any sort of armed conflict.

This does not spell the end of magic, though. Magic does any number of pretty snifty things that can't really be reproduced easily with tech. But it could spell a marriage of the two. Magically enhanced fire-arms, for example, could be the specialty fire arm of choice for the spec ops type.

[Imp-Chan]

We've already seen magically-enhanced firearms in use in Errant Story. Jon used one that had been silenced, though he didn't trust it. Presumably other variations exist, but that doesn't really change the problem.

Ultimately, a gun does only one thing, and that is to put holes into things that get in the way of the bullet. Admittedly, it does that one thing very very well, but that's still all it does. However, magically advanced nations have easy solutions to that, like kinetically reactive shields, instant magical healing, effects to confuse and disorient the gunman, the ability to melt the guns from a safe distance, etc. Overall, this makes them an ineffective weapon for the magical battlefield, but still a very effective weapon when used against disorganized and largely magic-less masses, or for assassination where a physical attack is not anticipated. They also become more effective for the battlefield if used in conjunction with magic, such as a mage providing disruption for those kinetic shields.

So, while a gun might become more important and more widely used than it is now, it is not at all likely to replace magic even if only within the realm of combat. Magic as a whole is so widely used and in so many different contexts, there's simply no possibility that guns would render it irrelevant without some significant changes in the availability of magic to the populace, and widely available competing technology for most of the rest of the functions that magic currently fills.

^-^'