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Sendaz
Now SR is built around the concept of magic and machine co-existing, if a bit tentatively at times, but what if YOU could have had a say at the early days?

Now this is going to divert a bit from canon, so please bear with me as we play with this a bit....


Imagine it's the regular real world as we know it today. No spike babies yet, no confirmed psi or magic results, though some research is showing some tantalising data.

Now imagine you discover some information about magic/mana cycles and see that the mana IS rising, but at a bit slower pace than what the game did. That initially small magics will work through lengthy rituals requiring gestures, incantations, reagents. Over the next few decades this would slowly improve, and larger magics would be possible, but would overall be a much slower process until it reached levels equivalent to current SR levels by the 2080's and later.


But now let's throw in the monkey wrench. The data goes on to reveal an artefact at a hidden location that basically cause a big spike in the mana cycle, knocking the world up to Classic SR levels today, with all the resulting shake up that would happen with it, with everything from kids suddenly shooting fireballs to goblinization and more...

The same artifact could also be used to act as a brake on the coming mana cycle, keeping the magic partially suppressed so that it may be another 100 years before even small magics would even have a chance to work and major magics much further down the line.

So the question would be if YOU could affect the mana cycle, would you kick it up to SR levels or let it slowly rise on its own even if it might be 50 to 100 years to reach its full potential or would you shut it down for as long as you can to keep the world as you know it?
Jaid
do i know about the horrors?
Toptomcat
Given that the peak of a mana cycle neccesarily leads to a civilization-destroying cataclysm, I should hope the answer would be reasonably obvious.
Sendaz
QUOTE (Jaid @ Apr 17 2014, 12:15 PM) *
do i know about the horrors?

You know that the Horrors will be able to cross over as mana increases, just how much impact they will have is still debatable as several threads touch on this, especially with the addition of technology to the mix.

QUOTE (Toptomcat @ Apr 17 2014, 12:19 PM) *
Given that the peak of a mana cycle neccesarily leads to a civilization-destroying cataclysm, I should hope the answer would be reasonably obvious.

I could argue that it is not necessarily so obvious.

It is coming regardless of the effect of the artefact, the device hurts let's us jump in that much faster or buy some time for tech to improve. But waiting too long can be a hindrance as well. Imagine a situation not unlike Warhammer 40K where emerging awakened (psyckers) are hunted down and co-opted by the various governments or killed if rebellious and the general population believe that any level of psi/ magic automatically marks you as a hazard.

Or you could look at how much SR history would differ if magic came more gradually on. If the world governments had been given more time to have accepted magic and prepared for it, would the First Nations been able to pull off the GGD or would the now aware gov squelched it fast?
Jaid
yeah, i'd buy some time to deal with the horrors. or, more likely, since i probably wouldn't be able to afford repeated leonization, never have to personally deal with the horrors at all.
Draco18s
Would I flip the switch?

Is my avatar a dragon for a reason?
Stahlseele
< = look at that and ask me that question again with a straight face . .

i'd do it just to fuck with other people.
cold war? nuclear weapons enough to destroy the planet several times over?
racism? sexism? many other isms?
fuck that, look at this and shut up!
Not of this World
Power to the Awakened people. Time for a Revolution.
FuelDrop
Meh, magic's not all its cracked up to be. I prefer tech anyway.

EDIT: That said, the possibility of hooking up with a smoking hot elf chick is tempting. Just not tempting enough.
Drace
At first I thought it would be great to have the magic ramped up, he'll higher chance I would be the 1+% that's awakened that way. But then I thought about all the other people that could be awakened, and then the comment about kids hurling fireballs.

And kids are dicks to begin with.

Like really giant, sociopathic dicks.

Look at the comments on any random YouTube video, especially a video with a black person or other visible or open minority (gay, disabled, non-white etc). Would you really risk giving any one of those people commenting the 1% chance to fling fireballs and turn off someone's brains for shits and giggles? For that alone I would try to turn the world into a massive mana sink.
FuelDrop
Agreed. And that's why we need these. Buy yours today!
DMiller
Short answer...
Hell Yea! The world needs VITAS!
Elfenlied
To hell with the Technocracy, give me mah magic!
binarywraith
Given that my dumb ass would probably end up goblinzing anyway, sure, why not.

Always wanted to be a troll anyway. wink.gif
Faelan
I would hold it back and use the knowledge to place myself in position to take full personal, and economic advantage of the situation. After all if you know even a little bit of what is coming, you are in a much better spot, and if you can time it...well power, sweet, sweet power.
Draco18s
QUOTE (Faelan @ Apr 18 2014, 10:54 AM) *
I would hold it back and use the knowledge to place myself in position to take full personal, and economic advantage of the situation. After all if you know even a little bit of what is coming, you are in a much better spot, and if you can time it...well power, sweet, sweet power.


"Yes, I'd like to make a bet. I want to put $10,000,000 on 'by this time next week there will be real magic.'"
"Sir, the odds on that are one in never."
"Then I'll be rich if it happens, yeah?"
Shortstraw
"Am I awakened?" is the question that must be asked
Tyro
Its, not it's (option 2)
Elfenlied
QUOTE (Faelan @ Apr 18 2014, 03:54 PM) *
I would hold it back and use the knowledge to place myself in position to take full personal, and economic advantage of the situation. After all if you know even a little bit of what is coming, you are in a much better spot, and if you can time it...well power, sweet, sweet power.


I will do what David Gavilan did wink.gif

And besides, there are ways for a mundane to become awakened.
Sendaz
QUOTE (Tyro @ Apr 19 2014, 10:50 PM) *
Its, not it's (option 2)

Corrected, really hate the iPad for predictive spelling sometimes.
Shinobi Killfist
Do I awaken as a mage? If yes, then hell yeah. If no, frag you all I'm a petty selfish bitch and I'd be too jealous.
Rubic
The world needs something to shake up the foundations of power and break the yoke that has been placed upon the world. Besides, I'm not particularly fond of humanity in general. Welcome to the new world, without order.
Draco18s
QUOTE (Rubic @ Apr 20 2014, 05:17 PM) *
Besides, I'm not particularly fond of humanity in general. Welcome to the new world, without order.


High five fellow antihumanist.
Rubic
QUOTE (Draco18s @ Apr 20 2014, 10:39 PM) *
High five fellow antihumanist.

Eww! Not with THAT anatomy! Filthy primate!
Jaid
based on what the majority of the people in the world have chosen as far as who's in control, i feel pretty safe in saying that i'm pretty happy with the current crop of idiots. sure, they may be incompetent, selfish, lying bastards, but at least we have a system where i live that i do not, for example, have to worry about the government sending thugs to kill me because i disagree with them.

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." - Sir Winston Churchill
Rubic
An important consideration for those who want to flip the switch for a chance to gain power:

Yes, there's a chance, however small, that you will be a special person and end up with gobs of power... but the same is true for all of those people that you do not like. And there's more people that you do not like than there are of you. Those who were bad people that masked it well to be in your good graces will have new opportunities to mistreat you for whatever reason happens to be handy, and those in power may yet yank the reigns tighter with their new-found advantages. When kicking the mana flow into overdrive, you're not playing the lottery, you're playing Russian roulette with yourself and everything you love and care about.

Just saying, keep that in mind.
Draco18s
QUOTE (Rubic @ Apr 21 2014, 10:56 PM) *
Eww! Not with THAT anatomy! Filthy primate!


Primate?
*Looks at his claws in confusion*
Sendaz
QUOTE (Draco18s @ Apr 22 2014, 10:43 AM) *
Primate?
*Looks at his claws in confusion*
uh oh, guess those stories about the milkMAN may have had a kernel of truth. nyahnyah.gif
Rubic
QUOTE (Draco18s @ Apr 22 2014, 10:43 AM) *
Primate?
*Looks at his claws in confusion*

We're not post-awakening YET, buddy! There's no reports of dragons walking about, or super-intelligent apex animals of non-human make, I ain't taking the chance!
Draco18s
You must have missed me at the Philadelphia Geek Awards, then.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/clevergirlpho...157635164661372
Umidori
QUOTE (Draco18s @ Apr 22 2014, 08:06 PM) *
You must have missed me at the Philadelphia Geek Awards, then.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/clevergirlpho...157635164661372

That is the worst case of Chicken Pox I have ever seen.

~Dr. Vindaloo
Draco18s
Hey man, I was nominated for an award and Skeletor was presenting!
Umidori
QUOTE (Jaid @ Apr 21 2014, 10:12 PM) *
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." - Sir Winston Churchill

Spoken like a true advocate of limited suffrage. nyahnyah.gif

Churchill was an interesting man living in interesting times, but he was quite often misguided when he wasn't flat out in the wrong. This famous quote of his is popular because it is cheeky and memorable - a fine quip to bandy about - but it really isn't accurate to reality in any regard.

Democracy doesn't exist on any national scale. What we typically think of and refer to as "Democracy" is in fact a form "Republic". In a true Democracy, every citizen has a direct vote, and all votes are weighted equally. In a Republic, voting is conducted by elected Representatives who ostensibly vote on the behalf of large numbers of others, and typically the numbers or weights of votes are at least partly disproportionate to the number of citizens whose opinions are ostensibly being represented.

Republic has the benefits of logistical simplicity, in that it is far easier to tally the votes of a small group than of a large group. However, it has the supreme detriment of vote inequality, where the say of substantial numbers of individuals are not accurately represented. For example, in a district which has narrowly split opinion on a particular topic of concern, yet for which there can be only one vote cast by that district's representative, what would in reality be something like a 47/53 split of opinion gets reduced to a simple binary vote of 0/1 - in effect, distorting the truth of a narrowly divided populace into the fiction of a completely unified one.

Add in other problems like Gerrymandering, impartial representatives, non-proportional vote valuation, et cetera, and it becomes essentially impossible to accurately represent the true Democratic will of the people via a Republic. Instead of producing exact measures of public opinion and will, the system produces wildly inaccurate approximations that can be purposefully manipulated by corrupt parties. It turns what ought to be an absolute science of measuring the desires of the populace into a perverse exercise in game theory, with the prize being vested authority and power for whomever can exploit the flawed design of the system.

But hey, being an advocate of Representative government, I guess Churchill was fine with a rough approximation of reality that suited his own personal agenda rather than the actual thing. rotfl.gif

/off topic

~Umi
Sendaz
Interestingly, Churchill also made the following statement

QUOTE
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill
Slide_Eurhetemec
QUOTE (Umidori @ Apr 23 2014, 02:47 AM) *
But hey, being an advocate of Representative government, I guess Churchill was fine with a rough approximation of reality that suited his own personal agenda rather than the actual thing. rotfl.gif

/off topic

~Umi


Well, to be fair to Churchill (not that one must be, of course), a genuinely representative government (which is in fact often known as a "representative democracy") was far less technologically feasible in his day, when telegraphs were still in routine use, and telephones were largely connected by hand. In our day, though, there is precious little reason that it couldn't be done (though many reasons that it won't be done, few of them good!).

His comment also made more sense when one was looking at democracy versus monarchy and aristocracy, with the change to a "proper" democracy being fairly recent. Sixty or more years on, it seems like many of the perceived advantages of democracy over that system have been eroded.

That said, a more direct democracy, genuinely representative of public opinion, might well be a very mixed bag, as watch polls of the public's opinions tends to suggest - government would likely be more open, less warlike, less imperialistic and perhaps fairer to enfranchised citizens. At the same time, it would frequently be wildly and dangerously irrational on scientific or rational matters (as dumb and corrupt as politicians can be on this, they are not as dumb as Joe Public), and would make some spectacularly bad knee-jerk decisions, all of which "seemed like a good idea at the time".

It would also be less vulnerable to traditional lobbying, wherein business (or other wealthy) interests target a few key individuals and crypto-bribe (or just straight-up bully) them into helping their agenda, but far more vulnerable to the less-traditional-in-the-US method of using private control of the press to strongly influence public opinion. It would also mean that the press' love of running with a nonsense-story because it sells papers (or click-thrus or whatever) would be a vastly larger problem. A good example of this is in the UK at the moment, where, thanks almost entirely to the press basically obsessing about and telling lies about immigration for the better part of a decade, immigration, which is in reality, a non-issue, has become an absolutely huge issue. For no good reason at all other than it winds people up and most of the British public is a bit racist (not viciously, but...). The whole thing basically started as an issue to distract people from the whole "Whoa bankers screwed the economy!" thing.

Of course, one upside is that if people were voting more directly, they might feel more responsible for their results of their action, so when people are being hurt because of a dumb law, they can't say "Well I voted for that party but just for tax reasons!", they'll have to own up to it. So perhaps we'd see fewer vicious/evil laws.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaanway, getting way off-topic but your point was interesting!



As for pushing the button, well, was it ever established if VITAS is connected to magic returning? I know HMHVV (or however it's spelled!) is. So anyone pushing the button now, rather than slowing things down is essentially murdering billions of people, pretty much at random. Which makes it more or less impossible to morally justify. Indeed, you'd be history's greatest monster by a pretty large margin! That's not even accounting for all the wars and so on.

So personally, assuming I know this stuff, I would push the slow-down button, not the speed up button. If I didn't know the consequences, I'd probably leave well enough alone, and just attempt to publicize what I knew, particularly about the artifact.
Draco18s
QUOTE (Sendaz @ Apr 23 2014, 07:13 AM) *
Interestingly, Churchill also made the following statement


Fortunately, the average opinion of 100 people is more accurate than any single opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU

OTOH, that only works in a true democracy. As you slide through republic and over into Oligarchy (which the USA is, according to Princeton), that "average" result gets more and more skewed.
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