Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by Gaidin »

I'm not sure they'd trust Ed Greenwood when there's plenty of people they trust already already that know roughly how these things work from the game perspective, as much as you can when it was merely a gaming system and fictional world anyway.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Especially what with him being Canadian and all.

Actually that does bring up another point. Are we talking about Faerun the fictional world or Faerun the D&D setting? Because while you can reasonably interpret high level D&D characters as superhuman the novels tend to not bear that out, or at least not to the same degree. Mechanically Mirt the Moneylender, Ed Greenwood's self-insert (his words) has a Constitution score of 18 (going from memory here) and is as fit as an Olympic athlete. In the stories he's described as a fat wheezing guy who on at least one occasion I can remember came close to a heart attack during a prolonged fight.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by Gaidin »

Ralin wrote:Especially what with him being Canadian and all.

Actually that does bring up another point. Are we talking about Faerun the fictional world or Faerun the D&D setting? Because while you can reasonably interpret high level D&D characters as superhuman the novels tend to not bear that out, or at least not to the same degree. Mechanically Mirt the Moneylender, Ed Greenwood's self-insert (his words) has a Constitution score of 18 (going from memory here) and is as fit as an Olympic athlete. In the stories he's described as a fat wheezing guy who on at least one occasion I can remember came close to a heart attack during a prolonged fight.
True enough. But that doesn't change the point that if one or more of the races that have been inserted into an awkward environment(deep ocean) notices a ship above them they don't like, even if their "Level 20" wizard can't survive what a typical person can without his magic items and preparation, that doesn't stop him from casually launching his destructive spell or spells upwards and making life hell for that ship or fleet and forcing any country with a naval force into drawing new lines on the map in places they never were before until they have a dependable way to deal with it, even if that method is just sitting down and formally talking their way to "leave this area alone".
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by Gaidin »

Here's something I've been wondering. What's going to happen if one of these FR nations that's making a push actually gets a hold of a Research University Library system of even middling quality, full of novice to advanced information from across all subjects that we don't exactly keep under wraps or in technologically advanced systems(a book on a shelf), and they have their scholars and wizards of all levels go to work learning? If we can learn magic, surely this is a two way street?
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by mr friendly guy »

Jub wrote:
Okay, prove to me that current day militaries have the technology to acquire a man sized target at ground level, aim automated weapons at him, and destroy him in a way that's efficient enough to be considered practical.
Radar can detect birds which are smaller than humans, since stealth is designed to make planes appear on radar as small as birds.
Technology to detect objects on the ground exist. You might have seen your local police use one to detect speeding cars. Its called a radar gun.
Fighter planes automatically lock on objects.
Okay, but why bother with the whole 'they see us as orcs bit' at all then? Why not just say that they've been told by their gods to fight or die and leave us as is?
As per the OP I said this was inspired by the Orc thread in fantasy. You know to invert the trope that Orcs are just evil cannon fodder.
So you're handing the Earth side an advantage from the get go, by saying that they can't be scryed upon. Get fucked, if you want a versus debate you can't wave your hands and say, lol that doesn't work because I'm to stupid to think of a better way to make these sides fight than lol orcs.
It was created in response to the Orc thread to invert the trope fuckwit as I mentioned in the OP. Its quite funny since later on you pretty much admit you give the FR an advantage on the get go by letting them have spells which are from other non FR sources. And the fact you bring up Pun Pun. Your hypocrisy is staggering.
Do clerics know about us? If so then their god does as well due to basically always keeping at least part of their attention actively on each person worshiping or serving them. If their god becomes aware of humanity they can literally bend reality to answer the question asked unless another divine being interferes.
Evidence that deities are aware of things on other worlds on the material plane? Wait you're going to say google it right?
Sorry, it isn't a fair debate if you cripple on side in such a way. I'm just going to ignore this point each time you bring it up, because it's blantant BS on your part.
I didn't create this to cripple one side you fuckwit. I created in response to the Orc thread. When you pointed out scry I read it up and came to that conclusion from the description. They way its described sounds like you are trying to scry for Superman or some other fictional character.


Not true, given that AC isn't exactly a measure of just how armored you are, but also how hard you are to hit in the first place. Plus, D&D characters can take multiple sword swings or what have you, and stay in the fight.
Then saturate the area with bullets. Given with a low hit rate, sheer weight of bullets will add up.
You 'befriend' a ranking general, ask him to do something stupid, and capitalize over and over again. The trick literally works every time because a modern force has no way to stop it short of figuring out that a key person is compromised, changing him out, and hoping this trick doesn't happen again.
Or they replace the General for incompetence even if they didn't suspect he was compromised. The US publicly say the first step is to gain air superiority. If a general suddenly advocated the opposite of "textbook" warfare voices are going to raised.
Sorry, but I assumed you knew the basics of the D&D setting before picking it to go up against.
Hey dipshit, read the rules of the board. You make the claim, you back it up when asked. Don't just whine hur hur I expected you to know about D & D.

Actually given that you don't seem to even know that radar guns are used by police I can turn it around and say, Sorry I assumed you knew the basics of the real world before going against it.
They might start there and work their magic on other people after learning a few things. Perhaps they go after the sort of people that back major political campaigns instead, they might not even need magic for that. Think of how happy some ailing rich person would be if he was told you can literally cure every ailment he has with a wave of a hand. What would they give in exchange for that sort of miracle?
That might actually work if you did that first. However since you decided to attack head of states, chances are the real world would just take your stuff instead.

Again, show me where radar has been used in the fashion you describe and prove that it's ready to go fast enough to keep enough people out to matter.
You want me to prove radar won't detect the illusion? :D Are you saying it can?
Seriously, you just have a bunch of humans on the other end. If they see something and radar doesn't detect anything they hit the button. If radar can detect illusion then my set up would be unnecessary. Take your pick.

First of all, it says you get 25,000gp worth of items. It's not my fault that GP has a ton of value in our world and less value in others.
No it doesn't. It says a nonmagical item of up to 25,000 gp in value.

You're just buttsore because FR are getting hurt. That's why you try to sneak things in like this one and hope no one reads your link. No wonder you got pissed when I asked you to provide evidence, because people can actually read your link and show that you are exaggerating. And that's why you start off accusing me of setting things up to bash D & D even though I stated it was because the Sauron vs modern world thread had Sauron outmatched, so I gave the modern world a more powerful adversary.

I suspect this is you projecting onto me. You assume I must have secretly set this up to bash FR (you mentioned this several times) and is buttsore that one of your favourite franchises might get smashed.
Second, most of that spending on nuclear weapons is going to be in upkeep on the weapons system and payment to personnel. This is especially true as most nations aren't exactly cranking out nuclear weapons. Now think of a mage ordering as much nuke as he can for the money, that surely wouldn't get him a modern ICBM with penetration aides, but it might get him a basic gravity bomb, or even multiple nuclear artillery shells instead.
And if he uses a nuke on us, they are just inviting nuclear retaliation and FR loses. We have more nukes. There is a reason why even batshit insane states like NK would think twice before nuking the US.

Of course since you like to talk about how its played in official tables, I would like you to show where a character wishes for an equivalent of a nuke. This is frankly acting a rules lawyer which some gamers like to do. Like I said, under this logic FR arserapes the culture because we can produce infinite Culture level ships.
Secondly, those were simple examples, it's obvious that just wishing for tanks is a bad idea (unless you set up a Djinn farm of course), but nothing in the wish spell says you can wish for a load of assault rifles and ammo. Or a load of modern medical supplies, or a pile of books on how to get from the tech they have to our tech.
1. You came up with the tank idea. Don't whine because it was proven to be a bad idea. Didn't realise how many tanks modern nation states can produce? Imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese forces find an intact M1A1 Tank because the FR folks ran out of petrol.

2. Actually IMO FR healing potions are most probably superior to modern medical supplies with the exception of antimicrobials for certain pathogens. But hey I don't mind wizards wasting their XP on modern medical supplies. :D

3. Great waste your XP on one book each. You are really desperate if you think books can get medieval level technology close to early 21st century tech. Seriously? Good God.
Look at China. They had students attending Western institutions and not just books. Yet it took them decades before they approach close to non obsolete tech in their military. And they are also starting from a higher base than medieval level of technology.
Now how about we go with a druid with a 4.5 mile radius spell (if you're going to do this you might as well get a metamagic rod or two) that lasts 96 hours, again might as well go big. Now have him make something nasty, like summer hail, or really violent storms. Suddenly he's swinging for 2,020 acres a pop and removing entire large farms in a single go.
Naturally FR will have so many of these druids who conveniently powergame.
Then wish for something exactly like thousands of AK-47's but connected to a plastic sprue. Or, you know, realize that wishes can summon more than a single item as you can stretch the bounds of a wish spell in such was with limited, if any, consequences.
Your dungeon master engaging in a masturbation session are we? The problem is, no such item exists as you describe it. Plastic sprue's exist. Ak-47s exist. But your item does not. If you are going to wish to describe any item you wish even if it doesn't exist, then frankly its pointless. I can wish for thousands of Culture ships connected by a plastic sprue. After all, they don't exist either.
I'm going to assume any and all spells from all books are allowed and that anybody with reason to have learned or researched them will have done so.
Funny how you assume my plot device to get the sides to fight is a deliberate attempt to cripple FR, yet you blatantly state you are giving FR things which aren't even from Faerun. Did you type that with one hand?
You have heard of things like still and silent spell right? You might also be aware that these metamagic feats can also come in item form so as to not raise the leave of a spell.
Still the problem that we can relatively easily replace our generals.

Even in medieval times you'd have guys in charge of running places. It wouldn't be hard to look at a factory and figure that going after the guy in charge might be a good way to get some of what he's making.
How would they know which factories are the relevant ones for military hardware. Waits for you to say Google. How would they identify quickly among the multitude of employees. I gave FR information about us so that both sides have a rough idea about the other equivalent to what we could get from RPG sourcebooks. You are literally giving FR more information and then whining that I am crippling FR.

1. You could, but that wouldn't actually work. You see stone has hit points and hardness and still goes poof, so simply having hitpoints doesn't work.
2. You keep forgetting simple tricks like invisibility or meld with stone.
3. See 2
4. Fireball and then disintegrate. Same round too if you quicken one of them. Or you simply aim at the tank, after all bacteria on human skin are separate organisms and we can still be hit by the spell just fine.
1. The moment the fireball is cast infantry just shooting at that direction. Saturate the area.
2. You can aim at the tank, but if its a small gap between the covering organisms you might hit the organism instead. I mean a person can step in front of disintegrate right and take the blow instead right? Or is this a no limits fallacy.

How does one exactly go about studying something that doesn't interact with non-magical matter unless it desires to and that can't be held captive?
Observation.

Does it interact with gravity? Does it interact with light? Does it interact with sound?

Pun-pun could potentially exist, he wouldn't have much of a reason to make his presence known if he did. The same goes for the other broken outliers. They might, or might not, exist, but they could and they could only exist for one side.
Potential to exist doesn't mean much when no one in FR knows how to make a Pun-Pun. Talk about desperation. Has any NPC in FR act like a powergamer? The only powergamers will be us.
Then suggest a better way to do things?
I did dipshit. Convert it into real world figures, like you know how we do with Star Wars Vs Star Trek. I said in the very post you replied to, so you have no excuse.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by mr friendly guy »

Alyrium Denryle wrote: RADAR is light. If you are making the claim that RADAR will work on an invisibility spell, the burden of proof is on you to prove it. If there is no reflection, there is no doppler effect.
Not visible light.

Wont matter. Scry works through illusions. All that is required is knowledge that the person exists to scry. If you have studied the history of the subject, you will qualify for them only having a small bonus to their unconscious attempt to resist. The illusion is irrelevant. Aliases are irrelevant.

If the scry fails due to will save, you try again. There is no impediment. They dont even know they are being scried.
So simply say scry for "potential enemies" is enough to see something?

Espionage and Sabotage. Insert disguised as an insect. A few relatively cheap magical items let you pass for a local when you revert to human form, or you can rely on your own spells. From there you can do all sorts of shit. Shit that makes the SOE look like incompetent pussies. Single use Gate grenades in industrial areas for example. A ravening demon is a ravening demon (more on damage momentarily).
Are you suggesting they can knock out enough of an industrial power to make a difference?

There is nowhere on the planet a tornado cannot occur. They even happen in Northern Europe. They are just rare. You can still arbitrarily use locally possible weather to fuck with all sorts of things.
Yeah, as I pointed if used against crops it might work against countries which struggle to feed their own population. But countries with excess production can get by. Or switch to eating less meat.
Many many may spellcasters (druids in particular) are not burdened by that requirement. Baseline spell description that is true, but there are feats that permit otherwise routinely taken by spellcasters who like to change shape. In non game mechanical terms, some spellcasters have particular skills when it comes to polymorph effects.
Fair enough.
Lets assume for a moment that Faerun unites to invade earth, that seems to be where you are going with your scenario. Thayan divination specialists. What good are they for? Intel gathering. Thay has a magic item construction industry. Make a bunch of scrying mirrors with unlimited uses, set the lower echelon wizards to work with row upon row of scrying mirrors. If one fails, they switch mirrors and try again with no impediment.
No I didn't think they unite. Some will try to bargain with us, some will attack us individually. I expect us to do the same. So in the real world the US might work with the USSR to fight Germany, but they aren't going to tech share dramatically.


It is magic. It is allowed to be idiosyncratic. It could be that for that particular spell, it is just less effective against living tissue.
Hence my insect idea. Camouflage branches, stick lots of insects on them.
Spelljammer ships are magical constructs. No dice. Tanks may have longer range weaponry, but a mage of sufficient power to cast disintegrate who knows what they are up against will have defenses. Ironguard spells. Your shells (and shrapnel) go right through, no damage. Concussion? Fire? There are spells that grant flat out immunity to those as well. Even lower level versions will offer enough protection that the wizard (who has super-human endurance. More on that later) should be able to survive considerable punishment.
Ok with the Spelljammer ships. However your immune to fire is a no limits fallacy which the rules of this forum have spoken on. How long do these spells last for? Can they last as long as our tanks can which are plastered with organic tissues.
And that is if they give you a target at all. There are numerous ways to prevent that. Everything from invisibility to passwall to meld with stone (which gives them a no clip mod with respect to the ground). Or hell, a wand of Sanctuary, which makes it very difficult for anyone to attack the user while allowing them to use non-attack spells (like act as battlefield medics, use illusion spells to induce tank crews to shoot at phantasms, summon shit etc)
Saturation tactics then. Just like what the Russians did in the second Checynan war. Use troops to probe the generic location then blast the shit out of it. Even if they have teleport, chances are some will be killed.

............................
Now for things like damage, and how game mechanics translate to the actual world.

D&D PCs should be modeled as superhuman.
The problem with this is, in FR novels short of Liches, Chosen of Mystra or some other special thing, they aren't that superhuman. Drizzt is a level 16 character but I don't remember him surviving lots of sword blows. This means that game mechanics don't quite translate the way you think they do. I don't think Mirt the Moneylender is exactly superhuman either.

A non-magical sword is a non-magical sword that imparts energy on a target. The same thing with bullets. Now, a M16 bullet has about 3.9 kj of force behind it, and it only may or may not kill a given person when it hits them. A crossbow bolt impacts with 80 or so. Both are comparably lethal (discounting range differences etc), despite multiple orders of magnitude in difference in KE.

So just positing that PC HP and various spells work by absorbing KE etc does not work, because the damage to the human body does not scale linearly with those things. Instead, anatomy, mode of delivery of the energy, all that stuff matters far more. But the capacity to absorb damage in D&D does not work that way.
I thought the damage was in terms of momentum and pressure rather than KE per se?

So, we get to something like a demon. Say, a Pit Fiend summoned using a gate spell. None of our guns can touch it. With HP alone, it can take enough bullets to kill 57 people (so, at best a pair of 30 round mags, if everything hits, which they wont, see armor class discussion below) which is not much. However, its damage reduction is sufficient to stop cold anything not guaranteed to kill 3-4 baseline humans outright. Per hit. It also regenerates at a rate sufficient that physical trauma sufficient to kill a baseline human outright is regenerated every few seconds.
They can theoretically be hurt by normal weapons if struck with enough force right (depending on your strength modifier) right?

Now, the cumulative probability curve for armor is supposed to be somewhat normal. So we will set hitting AC 10 as the mean with an SD of 7 (which is approximately where it should be given the cumulative probabilities). So, lets take a reasonably powerful wizard equipped by communal effort or LOTS of money (because why not?), ring of protection +6, dex of 16 magically enhanced to 22, dodge bonuses stacked to a total of +5, and a luck bonus of 1.

Given the superhuman endurance, it is unlikely they can bring him down in the 3 seconds they have before he obliterates them (30 rounds, 3 will hit on average, which should be enough to reliably take down 1-3 people, while he should have the capacity to endure 10-20 humans worth of punishment without protection).

And that is if he ever presents a target. Incorporeal undead are a bitch.
Yet in novels Wizards can be killed by a knife in the back just like normal humans. Take pool of radiance. Shar's master was killed in that manner. If they are superhuman just by gaining a few levels, I don't think they are even Spiderman level in terms of physical prowess.
The problem you are not grasping, is that while some things can be directly compared, we are talking about people who, as far as we are concerned, are not subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology as we understand them. A wall of force DOES violate the laws of thermodynamics as far as it matters to us. They can control the time and place of any engagement such that there is no reason to EVER suspect that they will give us a standup fight.


Firstly we still compare with sci fi even though FTL violates the laws of physics.
Secondly I suspected they would try to avoid a stand up fight. However it can still be forced if we say march into their cities. Or we could not give a stand up fight and just use artillery or missile spam.
We cannot even counter-attack for fuck's sake. It is a 5 KM cube, but they only have to defend one face. They can put up anti-intrusion wards big enough for that with ritually cast epic spells easily enough, and even if they cant, standard spells will work just as well. It would only take 300 10th level wizards to completely hedge out anything we might send, in perpetuity. Wall of force + Permanency. Done. Leave door open so they can send things through, leave some guards with staffs of Prismatic Wall to close the door on us if we counter-attack. Done. And even through that, they can send casters in at will to just... fuck with us.
Are you using a no limits fallacy with wall of Force AD?
Will they be an existential threat to us? Not if they use the tactics mostly discussed above. That would just create chaos and pain. But there are other ways. Necromancy would be Fucking Horrible. What with controlling incorporeal undead that spread exponentially in a populated area. Opening up a permanent portal to Hell somewhere with a covert insert would just be horrendous from the thermal flux alone. To say nothing of the Horrors that would come through.
If medieval armies are a threat to them, eg Moonshae saga then I suspect FR doesn't have that many high level characters to make a difference.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by Gaidin »

mr friendly guy wrote:
Alyrium Denryle wrote: RADAR is light. If you are making the claim that RADAR will work on an invisibility spell, the burden of proof is on you to prove it. If there is no reflection, there is no doppler effect.
Not visible light.
What makes the visible spectrum special. It works the same as radio.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Gaidin wrote:Here's something I've been wondering. What's going to happen if one of these FR nations that's making a push actually gets a hold of a Research University Library system of even middling quality, full of novice to advanced information from across all subjects that we don't exactly keep under wraps or in technologically advanced systems(a book on a shelf), and they have their scholars and wizards of all levels go to work learning? If we can learn magic, surely this is a two way street?
Of course. However just memorising a few lines is enough to be useful for spells, and no doubt it will take longer to learn their principles so we can research.

However memorising a few lines of scientific knowledge isn't going to be enough churn out technology.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by mr friendly guy »

Gaidin wrote:
mr friendly guy wrote:
Alyrium Denryle wrote: RADAR is light. If you are making the claim that RADAR will work on an invisibility spell, the burden of proof is on you to prove it. If there is no reflection, there is no doppler effect.
Not visible light.
What makes the visible spectrum special. It works the same as radio.
This is just some speculation, but we can make stealth which reduces effectiveness of radar, but not visible light. So I am reasoning it doesn't always follow that what blocks out one thing doesn't necessarily block out another.

I mean if you are going down the route of both are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we can come up with lots of funny statements like gamma rays are as harmless as visible light.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by Gaidin »

mr friendly guy wrote: Of course. However just memorising a few lines is enough to be useful for spells, and no doubt it will take longer to learn their principles so we can research.

However memorising a few lines of scientific knowledge isn't going to be enough churn out technology.
You've also handed them a bootstrap scenario. Sure, they're in the medieval ages, but damn if they don't living demonstrations of all this technology right in front of their faces. And from there, it's also only their creativity stopping them from coming up with their own stuff. The magical bootstrap scenario is...not so easy from the other direction. They're literally not helping us, and we're literally not accepting help from them. We're trying to kill them. We have to research what we see from scratch and figure out the laws of magic from Square One.
mr friendly guy wrote: This is just some speculation, but we can make stealth which reduces effectiveness of radar, but not visible light. So I am reasoning it doesn't always follow that what blocks out one thing doesn't necessarily block out another.

I mean if you are going down the route of both are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we can come up with lots of funny statements like gamma rays are as harmless as visible light.
That's because we engineer technology that has to account for specific parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. You're dealing with a spell where the light just flat out doesn't reflect for the invisibility spell to work. This means unless there's a canonical reason to assume otherwise, given radio waves are exactly the same as visible light, just a different frequency, radio waves flat out don't reflect. RADAR does jack. We're stuck researching our asses off to try to figure out a way around this once we even know it's a problem.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by Jub »

mr friendly guy wrote:Radar can detect birds which are smaller than humans, since stealth is designed to make planes appear on radar as small as birds.
Technology to detect objects on the ground exist. You might have seen your local police use one to detect speeding cars. Its called a radar gun.
Fighter planes automatically lock on objects.
Yet we never see radar used in this capacity by modern militaries even when it would be useful. You don't see military bases with radar dishes pointed at the ground to detect people sneaking up on them, nor do you see this technology used to point at roads to pick up insurgents planting IEDs. The burden of proof is on you to show that that we have radar that is used to specifically find man sized targets and target ground weapons systems at it. You can screech and point to planes and missile locks all you want, but that's ignoring the work and it takes to make a weapons system compatible with a plane's fire control systems. You literally can't just attach a radar set to a gun and have it work without millions of dollars of R&D going into the setup.
As per the OP I said this was inspired by the Orc thread in fantasy. You know to invert the trope that Orcs are just evil cannon fodder.
Yes, but you use your scenario to say, you can't scry on anybody on Earth because you think they're an orc, if you were making any attempt to be fair you would have allowed for scrying and disguise to work as normal. By not doing so you take away a major advantage that one side would normally enjoy. So don't use your contrived scenario to limit one side's abilities in what you've stated to be a versus debate.
Its quite funny since later on you pretty much admit you give the FR an advantage on the get go by letting them have spells which are from other non FR sources.
Except that these spells are in sources stated to be compatible with the FR campaign setting. Hell, I could bust out shit from Dragon Magazine in this debate if I wanted and it would fit the cannon policy for the universe we're discussing.
And the fact you bring up Pun Pun. Your hypocrisy is staggering.
Where did I ever state that he will fight for either side in the debate? I merely stated that such things as nigh infinite beings and infinite damage/action loops are possible using the spells in D&D. It was an example of their top end ability, not some statement that these beings show up and thus modern earth instantly gets wiped.
Evidence that deities are aware of things on other worlds on the material plane? Wait you're going to say google it right?
The fact that Clerics can cast spells and pray for new ones on our planet is proof that the gods are able to exert their power on our world. If the god can grant power and channel power through a follower it follows that they must be aware of and interact with that follower. Thus their reach extends to our world. There is also the fact that there is no reason why they shouldn't be able to see Earth when they can see into our Faerun from whichever home plane they happen to be resident on.
I didn't create this to cripple one side you fuckwit. I created in response to the Orc thread. When you pointed out scry I read it up and came to that conclusion from the description. They way its described sounds like you are trying to scry for Superman or some other fictional character.
Then why even have the debate about scrying? Why not simply say, it works as normal, I just wanted to make this sort of like that one orc thread and am so uncreative that I had to literally make one side orcs?

Then saturate the area with bullets. Given with a low hit rate, sheer weight of bullets will add up.
We try that in real life and it doesn't always work, let alone against a being that can literally dodge or deflect projectiles. Hell some monks can scoop them out of the air and toss them back with roughly the same force you fired them at.
Or they replace the General for incompetence even if they didn't suspect he was compromised. The US publicly say the first step is to gain air superiority. If a general suddenly advocated the opposite of "textbook" warfare voices are going to raised.
Use mass charm (a logical extension of the ability to charm one person) and nail the entire command staff in what is likely only a few castings. Then there's nobody at the command level to speak out against things.
Hey dipshit, read the rules of the board. You make the claim, you back it up when asked. Don't just whine hur hur I expected you to know about D & D.

Actually given that you don't seem to even know that radar guns are used by police I can turn it around and say, Sorry I assumed you knew the basics of the real world before going against it.
I've been backing them up thus far have I not?

I've asked for proof that they've ever been used to detect invisible people or that the military would deploy this as a method of detecting things coming out of these portals.
That might actually work if you did that first. However since you decided to attack head of states, chances are the real world would just take your stuff instead.
When have I ever made the claim that one thing happens before another? I've never written up any kind of plan of attack, I've merely given examples of what certain powers can be used for and set them against the backdrop of the most guarded man on the planet to show that modern Earth has no way to stop them.
You want me to prove radar won't detect the illusion? :D Are you saying it can?
Seriously, you just have a bunch of humans on the other end. If they see something and radar doesn't detect anything they hit the button. If radar can detect illusion then my set up would be unnecessary. Take your pick.
Again show me an example of soldiers using this sort of kit in the field. You can't just asspull weapons systems that we don't have out of no where.
No it doesn't. It says a nonmagical item of up to 25,000 gp in value.
Not that it also says that these aren't the entire limits of the spell and that more can be done, with some results being dangerous to the caster. It's right in the rules text that I quoted for you.
And if he uses a nuke on us, they are just inviting nuclear retaliation and FR loses. We have more nukes. There is a reason why even batshit insane states like NK would think twice before nuking the US.

Of course since you like to talk about how its played in official tables, I would like you to show where a character wishes for an equivalent of a nuke. This is frankly acting a rules lawyer which some gamers like to do. Like I said, under this logic FR arserapes the culture because we can produce infinite Culture level ships.
That may be so, but it doesn't make this any less possible. It merely makes it a tool that might not be used.

I seriously doubt that there has been an official game where such an interaction has been possible. Also, in the Culture example, that 25,000gp would summon nothing as gold has no value to such a society.
1. You came up with the tank idea.
Yes I did, and I did so to show the sorts of things that can be done. Note how I made no claim that summoned tank brigades would suddenly win us the war.
Actually IMO FR healing potions are most probably superior to modern medical supplies with the exception of antimicrobials for certain pathogens. But hey I don't mind wizards wasting their XP on modern medical supplies. :D
Mages and Clerics can't be everywhere at once, so gaining an additional advantage wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Great waste your XP on one book each. You are really desperate if you think books can get medieval level technology close to early 21st century tech. Seriously? Good God.
That one book could doesn't need to be an exact copy of an existing book. You could instead wish for a combined, non-magical, tome of all knowledge on a subject. Given that, as per this link parchment is 1/5 of a gold piece you could get a tome containing 125,000 pages on any subject you desire. It might not be enough to bootstrap them anywhere, but it's going to give them some idea of how our world works.
Naturally FR will have so many of these druids who conveniently powergame.
Druids know every spell on their list and are only limited by how many spells they can prepare each day and meta-magic rods are items common enough to be found in the core game material. Thus if the druid decides that ruining our crops is the only way to get ahead it doesn't take more than some rest and time to meditate before they can cast such a spell.
Your dungeon master engaging in a masturbation session are we? The problem is, no such item exists as you describe it. Plastic sprue's exist. Ak-47s exist. But your item does not. If you are going to wish to describe any item you wish even if it doesn't exist, then frankly its pointless. I can wish for thousands of Culture ships connected by a plastic sprue. After all, they don't exist either.
Would you use this same argument to say that a mage couldn't summon a staff with a unique pattern on because that specific staff doesn't exist?
Funny how you assume my plot device to get the sides to fight is a deliberate attempt to cripple FR, yet you blatantly state you are giving FR things which aren't even from Faerun. Did you type that with one hand?
These spells are cannon to the universe and, in many cases, explicitly compatible with the FR campaign setting. Unless you have a reason to believe that they only get spells, feats, and classes from the books specific to the FR campaign, there is no reason to assume that these spells aren't known among the people of the realms.
Still the problem that we can relatively easily replace our generals.
How many potential generals do we have compared to the ease the FR side has in killing them?
How would they know which factories are the relevant ones for military hardware. Waits for you to say Google. How would they identify quickly among the multitude of employees. I gave FR information about us so that both sides have a rough idea about the other equivalent to what we could get from RPG sourcebooks. You are literally giving FR more information and then whining that I am crippling FR.
They could pray to the gods and ask for advice on how to proceed. Or cast something like, say, find the path and set the destinations to be the most important factories to the world's war efforts. Then you get a literal glowing path that even gives advice on getting past mechanical obstacles (so much for that automated radar idea).
1. The moment the fireball is cast infantry just shooting at that direction. Saturate the area.
Transform into a creature with DR, cast protection from arrows, laugh as bullets literally can't hurt you.
2. You can aim at the tank, but if its a small gap between the covering organisms you might hit the organism instead. I mean a person can step in front of disintegrate right and take the blow instead right? Or is this a no limits fallacy.
Again, humans are literally covered in microorganisms and the spell never fizzles because it accidentally hits one of them. So the burden of proof is on you to show an example of this technique working the way you claim it will.
Does it interact with gravity? Does it interact with light? Does it interact with sound?
No. Only if it chooses to be visible. Only if it chooses to. You literally have no way of confining them or observing them if they don't wish to be observed.

Potential to exist doesn't mean much when no one in FR knows how to make a Pun-Pun. Talk about desperation. Has any NPC in FR act like a powergamer? The only powergamers will be us.
Yet we can't power game because, by the rules of D&D, it takes years of study to the near exclusion of all else to gain access to even first level spells.
I did dipshit. Convert it into real world figures, like you know how we do with Star Wars Vs Star Trek. I said in the very post you replied to, so you have no excuse.
Except that very few spells have verifiable interactions with the sorts of objects that we can base power levels off of. Plus, we have it stated in the books how, in a hit point system, bullets compare to slashes from a sword.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by eyl »

Jub wrote:
mr friendly guy wrote:Radar can detect birds which are smaller than humans, since stealth is designed to make planes appear on radar as small as birds.
Technology to detect objects on the ground exist. You might have seen your local police use one to detect speeding cars. Its called a radar gun.
Fighter planes automatically lock on objects.
Yet we never see radar used in this capacity by modern militaries even when it would be useful. You don't see military bases with radar dishes pointed at the ground to detect people sneaking up on them, nor do you see this technology used to point at roads to pick up insurgents planting IEDs. The burden of proof is on you to show that that we have radar that is used to specifically find man sized targets and target ground weapons systems at it. You can screech and point to planes and missile locks all you want, but that's ignoring the work and it takes to make a weapons system compatible with a plane's fire control systems. You literally can't just attach a radar set to a gun and have it work without millions of dollars of R&D going into the setup.
While I'm not conversent with the details, There are radars whgich are intended to detect man-sized targets on the gounrd - Google "foliage penetrating radar" (example). I have no idea what the probability of detection or false alarm rate are (Doppler filtering alone isn't enough to filter people from foliage, since the foliage isn't static, e.g. moving branches).

Of course, this assumes that someone who is invisible reflects radar waves, and that they're not using shapechanging spells to sneak past.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by Jub »

eyl wrote:While I'm not conversent with the details, There are radars whgich are intended to detect man-sized targets on the gounrd - Google "foliage penetrating radar" (example). I have no idea what the probability of detection or false alarm rate are (Doppler filtering alone isn't enough to filter people from foliage, since the foliage isn't static, e.g. moving branches).

Of course, this assumes that someone who is invisible reflects radar waves, and that they're not using shapechanging spells to sneak past.
That's actually a cool bit of tech and hopefully it serves to make things safer for soldiers working in hostile regions.

As for it detecting invisible people, we know that Infravision and Darkvision also can't see invisible things, so we know that invisibility blocks at least some non-visual portions of the EM spectrum. I think it's fairly safe to say that it blocks all of them because we never see an example of it not working and have no reason to assume that radar would detect an invisible person.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

Post by Alyrium Denryle »

Not visible light.
True, but this is magic, it does not work like out stealth materials or conform to the laws of physics. Invisibility DOES render one undetectable from forms of sight (Darkvision, which is not IR) which do not rely the EM spectrum to work.
This is just some speculation, but we can make stealth which reduces effectiveness of radar, but not visible light. So I am reasoning it doesn't always follow that what blocks out one thing doesn't necessarily block out another.

I mean if you are going down the route of both are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we can come up with lots of funny statements like gamma rays are as harmless as visible light.
The reason our systems work the way they do is because we are using specialized equipment to project a wavelength of light that is not normally present in abundance and then picking it up when it reflects off an object. RADAR works like using a flashlight in a dark room, save that an electronic detector must be used.

We create stealth technology by A) selecting materials through which radio waves are more transparent or absorptive and B) by playing with the geometry such that what does not pass through is scattered rather than reflected in a coherent way.

That is hard to do with visible light because it is ambient. The problem has little to do with the properties of light (other than transparency etc of materials to given wavelengths), and more to do with the fact that visible light is everywhere. We are however starting to make progress with predator cloaks.

Magic does not have this problem. It is fucking magic. So whether RADAR will work is an open question (because we dont know the mechanism of action. Whether it bends light, or more likely I think, prevents observation), and one for which the burden of proof would fall to you.
So simply say scry for "potential enemies" is enough to see something?
Actually, yes. Though narrowing it down is better. That is what fruitfly polymorph espionage is for.

I mean, fuck.... you think Escape and Evasion tradecraft is a pain in the ass? Comes in as a fly, changes shape at some point to a sparrow, then the spider who hangs out under the desk, use of clairaudience. It gets nasty.
Are you suggesting they can knock out enough of an industrial power to make a difference?
Depending on what they do, yeah. A pit fiend is harder to defeat in actual combat than a lot of other things, but there is some nasty shit that could be unleashed on major cities. One medium-high level caster gets through into say... St. Louis. Casts Create Greater Undead in a city cemetery to conjur forth a Shadow, then simply leaves, because that shadow is now a permanent resident.

Shadows are incorporeal, so we cannot do anything to it. When it kills someone, and it will, that person rises as a shadow. Exponential growth in a major city. St Louis becomes a Necropolis in days. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Or dont, it is just a matter of time before our world is populated by nothing but incorporeal undead. At that point, faerun just wards its portals against undead and forgets we exist.

Or say they dont. Say they just drop tornadoes and hurricanes when seasonally and geographically appropriate. St. Louis (or whatever other city you want) gets hit with a squadron of tornadoes that last anywhere from 4 to 48 hours. Cast by a stray cat who disappears after jumping into a dumpster, repeats in chicago that same day. And that is one dude (Wizard). In one day. A druid would be worse. So much worse...
No I didn't think they unite. Some will try to bargain with us, some will attack us individually. I expect us to do the same. So in the real world the US might work with the USSR to fight Germany, but they aren't going to tech share dramatically.
Problem is, every faction has a branch like that. They are organized a little differently, of course, and some have specialties. The problem is, the ones best suited to doing the mass divination are ALSO the ones who will be willing to commit crimes against life itself.
Saturation tactics then. Just like what the Russians did in the second Checynan war. Use troops to probe the generic location then blast the shit out of it. Even if they have teleport, chances are some will be killed.
Might work if they decided to face you on the open field. They wont. I wouldn't. They have to use field battles in their own world, because mages cancel out mages if they are evenly distributed and the battle comes down to the infantry (some of which are superhuman). In battles where there is a disparity in the presence of superhuman entities, it is a slaughter. All the time.
The problem with this is, in FR novels short of Liches, Chosen of Mystra or some other special thing, they aren't that superhuman. Drizzt is a level 16 character but I don't remember him surviving lots of sword blows. This means that game mechanics don't quite translate the way you think they do. I don't think Mirt the Moneylender is exactly superhuman either.
Problem is, it varies. It goes author by author as to how shit actually works. Sort of like in Star Wars novels where in some books combat ranges are measured in AU, while in others they are measured in single digit KM. The most consistent and easiest to interpret ways of dealing with everything is to use the game mechanics.

And even if their bodies are not superhuman, spells and magical protections make them that way, and if I were a commander in this war on the faerun side, I would never send anyone who is not a high level caster through the portal. Everyone else works in support.
I thought the damage was in terms of momentum and pressure rather than KE per se?
For bullets, yeah. That and simply cutting through vital tissues. But it does damage differently from a sword, which causes a different type of bodily trauma than a mace, which does damage to tissue differently than say.... an RPG (pun intended)
They can theoretically be hurt by normal weapons if struck with enough force right (depending on your strength modifier) right?
If your modifier is beyond normal human limits, yes. In theory. But if we are going to try modifying these things in a semi-realistic way, a sword, halberd etc would fracture before it penetrated the pit fiend's armored hide. The only reason they dont in D&D is because anyone who survives combat with one long enough to attack it is using weaponry that is magical and no longer has the properties of steel (or tender human flesh in the case of monks).

Now... artillery would probably do it. But if I were summoning the thing, I would not summon it anywhere near artillery or heavily armed troops.

Remember, people who can travel disguised as <Insert innocuous thing here>, invisible/ethereal, or simply teleport always get to control the terms of engagements. So you either have to spread your military assets thin in order to cover everything, or leave large swaths of your countryside open to attack at will, in order to protect key assets.
Yet in novels Wizards can be killed by a knife in the back just like normal humans. Take pool of radiance. Shar's master was killed in that manner. If they are superhuman just by gaining a few levels, I don't think they are even Spiderman level in terms of physical prowess.
Wizards are squishier, yes. But as mentioned before, between authors, hell...within novels, things can be really god damn inconsistent. In childhood, Eminster fell off a cliff and survived without actual injury for example.

But as mentioned before, even if the tender mortal flesh of a wizard IS both tender and mortal, the spells make that less relevant, and because they control all engagement terms and there is no possibility of counter-attack across the portals, you wont catch them unprepared. If they are smart, you wont even be able to get them while resting thanks to Rope Trick. The 2nd level spell that makes Alarm and Secure Shelter spells completely superfluous by way of climbing a rope into a pocket dimension that lasts for any wizard of even middling power, long enough to rest, prepare spells, and then hang out for a while completely immune to everything from gunfire to nukes.
Firstly we still compare with sci fi even though FTL violates the laws of physics.
Not the same thing. FTL at least pretends to operate by laws of physics that are manipulated with technology. We compare FTL based on travel speed. We compare weapons by estimating how much energy it takes to vaporize an object of known composition like an asteroid. We operate under a set of assumptions because we can assume the universes operate on a few basic rules like conservation of energy. They have power generation that requires fuel.

Magic, at least D&D magic, does not have that limit. Explicitly. A wall of force is a perpetual motion machine. A single mage casts disintegrate, and that spell has an arbitrary power output depending on its target because it vaporizes a set volume rather than input energy to vaporize a variable volume due to the properties of the target. And it does not take any more or less effort from the wizard to cast it, irrespective of target. And yet it cannot always vaporize a single human target.

If we were to calculate the energy output of disintegrate, it would range across several orders of magnitude (from the tons of TNT range for ice, just eyeballing it, to the KT range for iron, to higher for other metals like tungsten). But Disintegrate does not even work that way. Otherwise, it would never fail to disintegrate a human target.
Are you using a no limits fallacy with wall of Force AD?
Lets compare the Borg adaptation by way of contrast. It takes energy to maintain a shield, so even if they optimize their shield matrix to repel specific attacks, there is bleedthrough, and they are still ultimately limited by power generation. This is why the feddies can take down a cube with sufficient raw energy output from multiple ships, and why a stardestroyer can do so effortlessly.

Magic is not subject to that. It is idiosyncratic. There are spells that have specific conditions for ending the spell, but raw energy input will not do it no matter how much you might want it to. A Wall of Force is like that Turn People to Stone spell in Gargoyles. There are conditions to end the spell. Either its duration ends, or specific other spells (or things that mimic those effects, if we want to be generous) are cast in the proper sequence to end the spell. So if we can develop a Disintegration Beam, we might be able to get through a wall of force.

In other words, it is not a No Limits fallacy to operate as if a thing which explicitly does not have a limit, has no limit. It is a No Limits fallacy to operate as if something has no limits, when that is not necessarily the case.

And even if we accept that a wall of force has some energy limit somewhere in the cosmos, the burden of proof is on YOU to show where that is.
If medieval armies are a threat to them, eg Moonshae saga then I suspect FR doesn't have that many high level characters to make a difference.
They are, and are not, medieval armies. See above with respect to mages canceling out mages. I have not read that particular trilogy, so I cannot comment on the particulars. However, there are enough high level wizards, clerics etc to form hierarchical organizations, large churches, societies etc in virtually every populated area, and entire kingdoms with brutal magocracies and benevolent magocracies, and clerical theocracies.

If you want me to really whip it out, there are enough high level individuals to keep the various incorporeal contagious undead from multiplying exponentially and cover the world in undead inside a month, without that being a full time occupation in itself, for all of them.

......
I was going to comment, AD's fairly detailed and cool post seemed to only address the casters, and as far as if they only decided to set up a defense on the portals and an intelligence operation or maybe a few operational pushes. But, what if a lot of other high levels of all the other classes decided to do something. The same principles in effect would still apply wouldn't it? Even a high level Fighter would be a nasty thing to see, much less a well balanced party treating New York City as a dungeon while they look for treasure?
I am a mage whore. Besides, you dont bring a sword to a gun fight. Enough moderate level casters can enchant a fighter's equipment such that he becomes a reaving juggernaut, but at that point you send the wizards who would be more operationally effective.

If we want to be realistic, which I think we should be, wars between magical powers actually resemble modern warfare much more than they resemble medieval warfare. Sure the weapons are medieval, but the tactical and strategic considerations are modern and in some cases transcend modernity.

Take a field battle. Ground forces control territory. Standard grunts (levies and low level fighters/warriors) are basically infantry. High level melee combatants are the equivalent of tanks. Low level clerics are field medics, low level druids are combat engineers. Low level wizards and really good archers are integrated fire support. Anti-tanks guns, machine guns, that sort of thing. Higher level casters of any variety are the equivalent of artillery and air force.

Without artillery and airforce tying eachother up (ie. if one side gains superiority), it is a slaughter. Always. Nothing else matters unless you have managed to use other means to fortify your positions or have fixed magical defenses.

Or the mages hit their preset kill limit. Wave after wave of your own men sent into the meat-grinder that are mages with bandoliers of fireball wands... and even then, you cannot kill them. They will escape and come back tomorrow to rain death upon your men again.
So assuming the the Drow, Duergar, Mind Flayers, et al. come up in deep caves suitable to them and the Aboleths, Merfolk, Sahuagin, and the like get portals to suitable ocean sites, what will they do and what do we try to do about them?
Sea Shepherd will suddenly stop being of concern to the Japanese whaling fleet, for one...

That said, we dont actually have a geology suitable for the Underdark races. The oceanic ones however...

Well, the Sahuagin will do what they do. Raiding shipping and coastal settlements. They wont be an existential threat, but they will completely fuck shipping, and will *snigger* lay waste to the Jersey Shore.

The Situation is going to have a toothy flesh-eating magic using situation on his hands.... and shall die screaming.
While I've only read 30 or so out of the 150+ FR novels, I can't remember a single instance of scry and die.
I do (Elminster Series is full of them). Keep in mind though that Scry and Dies only work with an unprepared enemy, or one who's defenses have their own countermeasures. There is a reason that the dwellings of wizards are warded to hell and back.

Furthermore, spellcasters in Faerun who aren't loners off in a tower are divided up into countless squabbling factions with mutually incompatible goals who couldn't unite if they tried.
Even if they dont, it ultimately does not matter if they are convinced that our planet is an existential threat. They may not unite, but they will be working toward the same goal.
Radar can detect birds which are smaller than humans, since stealth is designed to make planes appear on radar as small as birds.
Technology to detect objects on the ground exist. You might have seen your local police use one to detect speeding cars. Its called a radar gun.
Fighter planes automatically lock on objects.
Yeah, but the delivery system matters. By which I mean that most of our military radar is designed to detect large high speed flying objects. We dont use radar to detect incoming men, in fact, it cant. It is not pointed in the right direct. Hostile aircraft use this to their advantage by coming in under radar.

Radar guns worth with a known target and measure doppler shift. It is not useful to detect an invisible target, and it is very short ranged.

It is not so much that (assuming for a moment radar can detect through an invisibility spell) we could not do it. It is that we do not have a suitable system for actually doing what we need it to in this instance. We would need to develop one. That takes time. Time we really dont have. Unless you want to keep predator drones or blackhawks on station ALL the time, which do have a system that MIGHT work
Evidence that deities are aware of things on other worlds on the material plane? Wait you're going to say google it right?
They have a limited form of Omniscience where their followers and areas of influence are concerned. Clerics also directly channel divine power, so definitionally, if clerics can function on earth, the deities are aware.
Then saturate the area with bullets. Given with a low hit rate, sheer weight of bullets will add up.
Yes they will. If you have a target. Or a target that is not unaccountably immune to bullets.
Or they replace the General for incompetence even if they didn't suspect he was compromised. The US publicly say the first step is to gain air superiority. If a general suddenly advocated the opposite of "textbook" warfare voices are going to raised.
This is why suborning the will of high ranking individuals is not particularly useful for direct military disruption. I will grant you this.

At least not for getting Stupid Things to happen. Suborning people is good for one thing. Sowing chaos generally. You increase your enemy's costs across the board. They have to find some means to find out if any given person is a Geased sleeper agent, for example. Paranoia, witch hunts. We already know what those do to the functioning of a society, and you dont even need to do it to anyone important. Compel a bunch of university students to bomb police stations, that sort of thing.

Or you could simply create a Shadow and watch it multiply exponentially.

I am not even going to get into the wish bullshit, because frankly, there are other uses for Wish that are far far better. Like wishing Smallpox back into existence.
2. Actually IMO FR healing potions are most probably superior to modern medical supplies with the exception of antimicrobials for certain pathogens. But hey I don't mind wizards wasting their XP on modern medical supplies.
Instantly healing an injury sufficient to leave a standard human on death's door? Of course they are. And then there is the omnibus Cure Disease potion that instantly deals with all infection.
Naturally FR will have so many of these druids who conveniently powergame.
They dont really need to. Honestly, Jub is not doing his case much good.

Leveling utter devastation on a modern city would not require that. Fuck destroying crops. A druid is more likely to go after the steel and concrete abomination (from their perspective) that is an earth city.

Standard control weather in the hands of a druid will do it. And, of all casters, druids are the least likely to have the resources or organization necessary to get the metamagic rods necessary to do that.

Wizards are another story, because metamagic is their stock and trade, and they tend to be organized, even if loosely into local and regional associations or employed in national armies/have high ranking court positions.
Funny how you assume my plot device to get the sides to fight is a deliberate attempt to cripple FR, yet you blatantly state you are giving FR things which aren't even from Faerun. Did you type that with one hand?
He is indeed being silly.

I am not using anything outside the core multiverse, and FR specific material. In other words, any books I have that are of general applicability (PHB, Spell Compendium, Draconomicon) and the FR specific stuff, without going into the insanity that is Dragon Magazine, or numerous other books. There shall be no feature creep.
How would they know which factories are the relevant ones for military hardware. Waits for you to say Google. How would they identify quickly among the multitude of employees. I gave FR information about us so that both sides have a rough idea about the other equivalent to what we could get from RPG sourcebooks.
They wouldn't. Not initially. But they would know enough to know that disrupting this thing called "internet" or "power companies" might be a good idea. From there, it is just narrowing down targets for sabotage and subordination. There are divination spells that will help with that remotely, but the best way to do a lot of it would be to grab a dude off the street, rip his mind apart using various mind-reading spells, and get a start that way.
1. The moment the fireball is cast infantry just shooting at that direction. Saturate the area.
2. You can aim at the tank, but if its a small gap between the covering organisms you might hit the organism instead. I mean a person can step in front of disintegrate right and take the blow instead right? Or is this a no limits fallacy.
Bacteria coat everything anyway, so that option does not actually work. Clever, but no dice. A person COULD suicide though.

Also: Any wizard who is going to attack a tank will, given the OP, been briefed on what the tank is capable of, and would have warded himself with Ironguard (which is an FR specific spell) BEFORE casting spells at the tank.
Observation.

Does it interact with gravity? Does it interact with light? Does it interact with sound?
Problem is, you wont know how it works with just observation. Also, the answers to those questions are

No. Sometimes. Sometimes. When it wants, or when magic is applied (and even casting fireball is a coin toss).
I did dipshit. Convert it into real world figures, like you know how we do with Star Wars Vs Star Trek. I said in the very post you replied to, so you have no excuse.
Some things you can, some you cant. Armor class is easy, because that you can partition to material toughness and a statistical hit distribution that can be modeled consistently across universes. Which is nice, because the internal control already exists. A bonus of 7 shifts the mean 1 standard deviation. It does not matter what that mean actually IS. Disintegrate and its ilk do not have stable power outputs. Even fireball does not behave like an explosion. Wall of Force and Prismatic Wall explicitly do not have anything resembling a damage absorption limit.
However just memorising a few lines is enough to be useful for spells, and no doubt it will take longer to learn their principles so we can research.
No. It is not. If it were just a matter of rote memorization, anyone who picks up a spellbook or scroll could be a spellcaster. In universe, it takes years of study to be able to cast the most basic spells. You have to learn how to channel the eldritch forces of the universe through your body by act of will, with the words and gestures shaping the spell.

Even someone using a Use Magic Device skill are practicing an actual skill.

At minimum, you are looking at the equivalent of a K-12 education plus apprenticeship, but you dont have professors. The spellbooks themselves are also coded like the voynich manuscript in a lettering system that has no earthbound equivalents or linguistic connection, and particular to each wizard (such that other wizards have to use cryptography to read eachothers spellbooks). And that is JUST for the wizards who have books.

You flat out wont get clerical spells. Crossbreeding might eventually produce sorcerers, but they wont actually be useful to train our own wizards.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Jub wrote: Yet we never see radar used in this capacity by modern militaries even when it would be useful. You don't see military bases with radar dishes pointed at the ground to detect people sneaking up on them,
Yes you do, all the damn time. Search ground surveillance radar for five seconds. Every Minuteman ICBM silo is protected by human sensing radar with automatic warning triggers for example. Radars to detect personal on the ground have existed since WW2, they've worked well since the 1950s given a trained operator. They are massively employed, though FLIR reduced overall interest because it is passive and capable of greater effective ranges, under good weather conditions, in a small package. Moving target locating radars are also used for a lot of civilian security roles, not to mention the pedestrian sensing radars we already have on freaking mass production civilian cars.

nor do you see this technology used to point at roads to pick up insurgents planting IEDs.
Yeah, it is actually. Its just a limited application in that context because IED planters look a lot like random civilians on radar so you need a camera anyway. Radar can pick up insects. In fact that is an actual problem, filtering out the damn insects from radar returns. Were using 95 GHz radar now to create synthetic night vision for helicopter pilots in dust storms now. Its good enough to pick up power lines, a human is easy.
You literally can't just attach a radar set to a gun and have it work without millions of dollars of R&D going into the setup.
Well you might need millions in R&D up front, but that work was already done long ago. See for example this Russian guy with a .50cal with radar effective at several kilometers against a walking person, and using rather dated technology. A radar set could be much smaller if one desired though, and was willing to accept less range. Or had better then Russian electronics. Workable radars the size of postage stamps have been produced intended for UAV use.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Yes you do, all the damn time. Search ground surveillance radar for five seconds. Every Minuteman ICBM silo is protected by human sensing radar with automatic warning triggers for example. Radars to detect personal on the ground have existed since WW2, they've worked well since the 1950s given a trained operator. They are massively employed, though FLIR reduced overall interest because it is passive and capable of greater effective ranges, under good weather conditions, in a small package. Moving target locating radars are also used for a lot of civilian security roles, not to mention the pedestrian sensing radars we already have on freaking mass production civilian cars.
Hm. I did not know that. Fucking cool. Still, an open question as to whether or not it will penetrate various forms of concealing magic, but cool.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Sea Skimmer wrote:
Jub wrote: Yet we never see radar used in this capacity by modern militaries even when it would be useful. You don't see military bases with radar dishes pointed at the ground to detect people sneaking up on them,
Yes you do, all the damn time. Search ground surveillance radar for five seconds. Every Minuteman ICBM silo is protected by human sensing radar with automatic warning triggers for example. Radars to detect personal on the ground have existed since WW2, they've worked well since the 1950s given a trained operator. They are massively employed, though FLIR reduced overall interest because it is passive and capable of greater effective ranges, under good weather conditions, in a small package. Moving target locating radars are also used for a lot of civilian security roles, not to mention the pedestrian sensing radars we already have on freaking mass production civilian cars.

nor do you see this technology used to point at roads to pick up insurgents planting IEDs.
Yeah, it is actually. Its just a limited application in that context because IED planters look a lot like random civilians on radar so you need a camera anyway. Radar can pick up insects. In fact that is an actual problem, filtering out the damn insects from radar returns. Were using 95 GHz radar now to create synthetic night vision for helicopter pilots in dust storms now. Its good enough to pick up power lines, a human is easy.
You literally can't just attach a radar set to a gun and have it work without millions of dollars of R&D going into the setup.
Well you might need millions in R&D up front, but that work was already done long ago. See for example this Russian guy with a .50cal with radar effective at several kilometers against a walking person, and using rather dated technology. A radar set could be much smaller if one desired though, and was willing to accept less range. Or had better then Russian electronics. Workable radars the size of postage stamps have been produced intended for UAV use.
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Seeing as I'm engaged with Mr. Friendly guy, who can't be assed to google easily codified D&D spells, I wasn't exactly in the mood to look this sort of stuff up.

The above said, that's some pretty awesome gear. I had no idea it existed and nobody else in the thread seemed to have much interest in showing off this sort of thing.

-----

Now, instead of going point counter point and picking bad examples of what spells can do just to show that they can do that sort of thing I'm going to try and think of other cool things that can be done that haven't already been mentioned in this thread.

For this purpose I think we can agree that the core rule books + PHB II and DMG II, campaign setting books, complete series, epic level handbook (FR does have heroes above level 20 making it an epic setting) and the compendiums are fair game. These are all specifically compatible with the FR setting and in some cases specific examples for how new classes fit into the FR setting. This leaves some pretty cool stuff off the table, for example no nightstick + divine metamagic nonsense because the item required isn't explicitly FR compatible.

Now for some ideas that haven't been discussed thus far in the thread.

1. You might be able to cause chaos among the religious with illusions of Jesus/God appearing to the people. Bonus points if this is done in such a way that it gets people following FR deities unknowingly. This can be supplemented with liberal use of charm person and other mind control spells and would likely be carried out by evil cults or followers of less than moral gods.

2. Using spells, or preferably items, such as Master's Touch can allow insight into how modern technology works. It's a 2nd level spell and thus fairly easy to get made into permanent gloves or what have you. This allows for things like appraising or making a knowledge check about a bit of modern tech and getting insight about how the crafts man that made them did it. It might be of limited use in the short term, but long term this and other methods give the FR side a leg up in understanding technology that we don't have with magic.

3. Modern Earth forces will realize that if they destroy the magic users of the realms they lose access to the means to create free energy devices, chill things to absolute zero, and reverse entropy. Any society that understands enough about physics would have to seriously consider the costs of destroying people with access to such a thing. Hell, with the right magic users on your side, you can always make sure you conduct the right experiments by casting divination spells while in the experimental design stage, thus saving you time and money on experiments that produce nothing of use. We'd be crazy not to try and forge a peace deal to get access to this sort of thing.

Those are just a few ideas that might be worth talking about here.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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The thing is, while all these awesome tactics are possible in universe, we have a vast advantage over the natives in coming up with them because we have both a scientific mindset and the explicit rules of the universe handed to us in easy to understand form. If you asked Khelben his level or Spellcraft bonus, he'd give you a blank stare. We, as PC's, have the luxury of comparing the vast number of options available, deciding what we want, and finding ways to justify it in character, often through wildly contrived coincidences that happen to benefit us. Faerun doesn't have peer reviewed Abjuration journals, PrC career fairs, or public spell libraries. If you're a wizard from Amn, and you want to be a Red Wizard, well, IF you can even get training from a Thayan enclave, the Cowled Wizards will come a knocking. We know far more about the Realms, it's history, and it's natural laws than anyone living there. Hell, thanks to Lost Empires of Faerun, we know exactly where an ENTIRE set of the Nether Scrolls are. We are already privy to secrets and actionable intelligence that people in the Realms would quite willingly sell their souls for.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Alyrium Denryle wrote: Hm. I did not know that. Fucking cool. Still, an open question as to whether or not it will penetrate various forms of concealing magic, but cool.
That's the very thing. Radar is active. If the radar cannot penetrate a surface then it should be reflected back at the emitter creating a return aka detection. If it is absorbed but not reflected then the radar return will end up with an obvious black hole with no return against a background that does have a return. At least on the ground, that doesn't work looking up at the sky. For the magic to work well it will need to be radar transparent. Or it would need an actual intelligence, and actively adjust its return to match the background well enough not to be noticed.

Considering that many things block visual and even IR wavelengths that do nothing against radar, its a big stretch to assume the entire EM spectrum and all its widely different effects is being negated, even radar is a rather broad category of signals with some very different effects, such as only HF radar can reflect off the ionosphere and detect things thousands of miles over the horizon. This would also raise questions as to how air exchanges if at all and if they cook alive or not.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Sea Skimmer wrote:
Alyrium Denryle wrote: Hm. I did not know that. Fucking cool. Still, an open question as to whether or not it will penetrate various forms of concealing magic, but cool.
That's the very thing. Radar is active. If the radar cannot penetrate a surface then it should be reflected back at the emitter creating a return aka detection. If it is absorbed but not reflected then the radar return will end up with an obvious black hole with no return against a background that does have a return. At least on the ground, that doesn't work looking up at the sky. For the magic to work well it will need to be radar transparent. Or it would need an actual intelligence, and actively adjust its return to match the background well enough not to be noticed.

Considering that many things block visual and even IR wavelengths that do nothing against radar, its a big stretch to assume the entire EM spectrum and all its widely different effects is being negated, even radar is a rather broad category of signals with some very different effects, such as only HF radar can reflect off the ionosphere and detect things thousands of miles over the horizon. This would also raise questions as to how air exchanges if at all and if they cook alive or not.
I'd bet that if you asked a mage how invisibility works they would tell you that it simply makes you transparent to the world around you. The truth of that statement is impossible to test or verify and the only information that we have to go by is that it is effective against vision in the normal spectrum, Darkvison which seems to be an infrared spectrum, and Infravision which seems to detect heat based on the novels. We also have things like magical darkness working differently than regular darkness, yet being distinct from something like a cloud of fog. So clearly illusion magic can do some pretty interesting things with regards to light.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Sea Skimmer wrote:
Alyrium Denryle wrote: Hm. I did not know that. Fucking cool. Still, an open question as to whether or not it will penetrate various forms of concealing magic, but cool.
That's the very thing. Radar is active. If the radar cannot penetrate a surface then it should be reflected back at the emitter creating a return aka detection. If it is absorbed but not reflected then the radar return will end up with an obvious black hole with no return against a background that does have a return. At least on the ground, that doesn't work looking up at the sky. For the magic to work well it will need to be radar transparent. Or it would need an actual intelligence, and actively adjust its return to match the background well enough not to be noticed.

Considering that many things block visual and even IR wavelengths that do nothing against radar, its a big stretch to assume the entire EM spectrum and all its widely different effects is being negated, even radar is a rather broad category of signals with some very different effects, such as only HF radar can reflect off the ionosphere and detect things thousands of miles over the horizon. This would also raise questions as to how air exchanges if at all and if they cook alive or not.
Actually infravision isn't used around by 3rd edition any more because it caused problems. And is replaced with Darkvision which reads more like ability to detect things in low light rather than heat signatures. Apparently the infravision concept caused problems because people assumed it was infra red.

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Infravision

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Darkvision

However since I was unaware of that at the time I created this thread, I am quite happy to continue on assuming some creatures see infrared and assume invisibility can block out infrared as well (which was what I had been assuming anyway). Of course if we use darkvision, there is no reason to assume invisibility blocks out infrared since darkvision isn't described as like infrared, and infra red vision doesn't exist in 3E, being subsumed by Darkvision.

If any person arguing on behalf of FR wants to forgo this advantage because its not in the spirit of the OP please state so.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Gaidin wrote:
You've also handed them a bootstrap scenario. Sure, they're in the medieval ages, but damn if they don't living demonstrations of all this technology right in front of their faces. And from there, it's also only their creativity stopping them from coming up with their own stuff. The magical bootstrap scenario is...not so easy from the other direction. They're literally not helping us, and we're literally not accepting help from them. We're trying to kill them. We have to research what we see from scratch and figure out the laws of magic from Square One.
Firstly we aren't necessarily trying to kill them. They think we are invading orcs. Jub has already postulated they attack first.

Secondly I think you underestimate how easy it is to get from medieval to modern day tech. Look at how long it took Japan once it got up to a modern day power of the 19th century. Now imagine trying to go there from medieval level to 21st century. We will struggle with magical principles unless we bribe someone who is willing to help us. However mumbling a few words seem to produce some sort of effect. Even if it takes some time to learn some other concepts besides the words, we will be just as bad as they are. Now imagine someone from their side being told that E=MC^2 is a formula which allows us to create our most powerful weapons. They would most probably try and pronounce EMC and imagine its like a spell. (Actually this happened on a Spelljammer novel).

Gaidin wrote:
That's because we engineer technology that has to account for specific parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
So?
You're dealing with a spell where the light just flat out doesn't reflect for the invisibility spell to work.
Actually the spell doesn't mention all light. It says invisible to vision and darkvision. So at best it includes possibly infra red (see my reply to Sea Skimmer) and definitely visible light. The burden of proof shifts onto the other side. Sea Skimmer pointed out the silliness of a one wavelength fits all.

In any event, even if someone it blocks out radar, there is sonar. While not as useful as radar on land and in the sky, it was originally intended for land before radar surpassed it. However we still have some use of sonar in this application, for example SODAR.
This means unless there's a canonical reason to assume otherwise, given radio waves are exactly the same as visible light, just a different frequency, radio waves flat out don't reflect. RADAR does jack. We're stuck researching our asses off to try to figure out a way around this once we even know it's a problem.
Er now, its not exactly the same. Radio are not exactly the same as visible light because one things which stopped one wave doesn't stop another.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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mr friendly guy wrote:Actually the spell doesn't mention all light. It says invisible to vision and darkvision. So at best it includes possibly infra red (see my reply to Sea Skimmer) and definitely visible light. The burden of proof shifts onto the other side. Sea Skimmer pointed out the silliness of a one wavelength fits all.

In any event, even if someone it blocks out radar, there is sonar. While not as useful as radar on land and in the sky, it was originally intended for land before radar surpassed it. However we still have some use of sonar in this application, for example SODAR.
SODAR is jammed by a silence spell, which can be made permanent on your SODAR array.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Ralin wrote:
But what you're doing boils down to following D&D mechanics when they favor you and ignoring them when inconvenient.
You totally got me there. :roll:
Like your AK-47 example. One “attack” in d20 doesn’t necessarily mean one bullet anymore than it means one blow from a hand weapon. It’s an abstract system. When a master swordsman deals 100+ damage in d20 terms it could just as easily mean that he rains down a half dozen deadly accurate blows that slip through his opponent’s guard as it could mean he cuts a stone pillar in half with one swing. Similarly, however many bullets an AK-47 can fire in six seconds that translates into one attack dealing 2d8 damage plus any relevant modifiers, or 4d8 on a lucky shot.
This just means our conversion formulae is wrong and not that I am ignoring things when they don't suit me.

Point is, you’re using rules as physics for things like spell range, casting times and so forth and crying foul the moment someone does the same to you. Given that you have no idea how Protection from Arrows or Stoneskin or whatever work disregarding the mechanics that tell us how they work in blocking attacks means that you’re tossing out the only numbers we have in favor of “Well OBVIOUSLY modern weapons are way more powerful and thus clearly overwhelm this magical effect.”
You obviously need to read the main site. Don't worry it uses a more neutral example like SW vs ST. You see, we don't necessarily need to know how the fuck you harvest hypermatter or the physics of it to work how much energy the Death Star uses in one shot? See the problem with your example there?
See the problem here?
Yeah, you missed those SW vs ST debates didn't you?
Ralin wrote:This is probably as good a time as any to mention that gunpowder canonically does not work in Faerun. Smoke powder, the Faerun equivalent, is an alchemical/magical substance that costs 25 gp to create and only a relatively small number of people knows how to make.

I can't find an online source for that with a few minutes' googling, but I know I've heard from multiple sources that Ed Greenwood has written articles saying as much. If someone can name them I'd appreciate it.
I know. That's why I stated in the OP - As with all vs threads, all powers work the same - so technology works in the FR, while magic also works on Earth.

This came about because we would have Culture fan boys say, ah, no time travel in the Cultureverse, therefore Time Travel enemies like the Daleks or the Time Lords are automatically at a disadvantage.
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Re: Forgotten realms invades Earth RAR

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Jub wrote:
mr friendly guy wrote:Actually the spell doesn't mention all light. It says invisible to vision and darkvision. So at best it includes possibly infra red (see my reply to Sea Skimmer) and definitely visible light. The burden of proof shifts onto the other side. Sea Skimmer pointed out the silliness of a one wavelength fits all.

In any event, even if someone it blocks out radar, there is sonar. While not as useful as radar on land and in the sky, it was originally intended for land before radar surpassed it. However we still have some use of sonar in this application, for example SODAR.
SODAR is jammed by a silence spell, which can be made permanent on your SODAR array.
So build more of them in different locations with the data being fed into a central source. And build most of them outside the usual range of most spellcasters, and one of them right inside the range of the caster to create a tempting target. Put something by the portal which will reflect. The moment we lose the reflection we know somethings up.
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