RE: Scry region too easy?

Jay Heyman (heyman@camis.stanford.edu)
Tue, 23 Nov 1993 11:38:42 -0800 (PST)

>It bothers me that you sit-at-home folks are using Scry region to map
>the world instead of going there yourself.

That is disturbing to me. So far Scrying is just about the only really useful
magic sub-college out there. Scry location is my favorite spell. I would hate
to see it crippled. Consider the following: While scry location gives you the
same kind of report that you would get when you visit a place, there are still
some factors that make it vital to actually go to places. For one, you can't
explore through scrying, therefore any interesting hidden things can't be seen.
Secondly, it is not like you can scry a great deal more effectively than
actually running arround. Consider that my mage has 10 aura, is a grandmaster
at scry location and meditatation, at best he can keep up a rate of about 3
locations per turn, this isn't a hell of a lot better than one guy with a horse
can do. And, it keeps him ocupied the entire turn. I think this is pretty
reasonable. (This all may change somewhat as I get better at Advanced
Meditation, but not too much (probably one location more per turn).

Scry location is basically good to do a first pass over a region and find the
places that would eventually be worth sending an actuall explorer to.

Dweezil..."Foot weary and looking forward to building another tower"

>I am considering some wedges to halt this practice:
>
> 1. Require that a mage (actually, anyone from the mage's faction)
> have visited the location at some time in the past.
>
> 2. Require that the location have some human in it.
>
> 3. 1 or 2. In other words, there would have to be someone there,
> or you would have to have been there yourself in the past.
>
> 4. Require that someone, anyone, has visited the location.
>
>I prefer #3.
>
>Comments?
>
>--
>Rich Skrenta <skrenta@rt.com>
>


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