The idea that your mind and body are separate entities, as it were, is supported by many RPGs. However, it is not supported by the scientific community anymore. Here's the quick why of it: An alzheimer's patient dies and his brain is weighed and compared to the weight of a brain of someone who died that had no mental diseases. It turns out that the brain of the alzheimr's patient only weighs about a third of the healthy brain, and scans and dissection of the brain reveal that large chunks of the brain are simply gone, as though they had been eaten by the disease. And, with the brain, so went the person.
This one disease, terrible in nature and ramifications, completely destroys the idea that who we are is in any way seperate from our bodies. To put it simply, I am my brain, which is just one organ among many. We are the emergent pattern of the complex neural interactions of the least understood and most radically powerful analysis engine in the world.
So, if you can copy my brain as it is right now and make it your own, you become who I am right now in a different body. If you change your body to be just like mine, then you are me. There would be no way to tell the difference, and there might not actually be a difference.
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You know what, I've got it. The one game system in all the world that can't possibly be min-maxed. I call it Do-Shit. Your characters all have one stat, at a level determined by your GM, or decided randomly by picking a die out of bag and rolling it. This stat is the Do-Shit stat, and whenever a check is called the GM determines the die your going to use (and is encouraged not to use the same type twice in a row), and he'll determine high or low by flipping a coin: heads is high, tails is low. If it's low, then you're trying to roll under your Do-Shit, and if it's high you're trying to roll over your Do-Shit.
Agreed, wholeheartedly! But how do you reconcile the scientific principles with how traditional shapeshifting magic is suppose to work? Do you just handwave it away? Run some pseudoscience around it? Or do you try to work that in the plot somehow?
Basically, do all these complications make the game more *fun*? That's my question, and it's kind of what the columns are about.
About 'knowing' everything that is necessary about the body and mind of the person or thing that you plan to transform into, well, if you can transform into a wolf, person, rock or whatever, I'm not sure that there is any need for you to explain it. If I can cast Spell X to turn into George, then surely Spell X can give me the info I need to transform as much as plot allows me to.
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Thread Necromancer Of The WUSHU CLAN Dr. Inventor (Hyperintelligent)
Liberal? Pagan? Athiest? Socialist? So we have birth control, hot naked chicks, subjective morality and workers rights...Tell me, what does the other side having going for it?-Dogstar
I once went to a con where the same guy (a MARINE) cosplayed Terry Bogard one day and Sailor Uranus the next...and was very good as both-JohnBiles
I come mostly from fantasy games, where the mind is a soul and people mostly ignore the brain. So that's that. For other issues... in Exalted, a Lunar has to study a form, actually a particular animal or human, and then eat its heart, or just tasting blood for a temporary acquisition. The study part might guide you to imitating visible form, not fingerprints or DNA; the blood can justify more intimate imitation. Actually could make it easier to imitate DNA than fingerprints, which aren't fixed by genes, if you want to be 'realistic' about it.
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Great-Contagion-Curing Starting Solar of the Exalted Pack.1 Perfect Charmless Exalted (Sex Bobomb). 1 Winner "Why Usurpation" (EpicHero) Playing: Exalted
"He who does not do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." -- John McCarthy || "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." -- Jame || "So high, so low, so many things to know." -- Sherkaner Underhill
About 'knowing' everything that is necessary about the body and mind of the person or thing that you plan to transform into, well, if you can transform into a wolf, person, rock or whatever, I'm not sure that there is any need for you to explain it. If I can cast Spell X to turn into George, then surely Spell X can give me the info I need to transform as much as plot allows me to.
Sure, and for the most part that's the way that it should work. After all, it's magic, not science, which means it doesn't actually have to follow any rules, and any rules it does follow are arbitrary in nature. So, if it's just effing magic, then it doesn't care about science.
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You know what, I've got it. The one game system in all the world that can't possibly be min-maxed. I call it Do-Shit. Your characters all have one stat, at a level determined by your GM, or decided randomly by picking a die out of bag and rolling it. This stat is the Do-Shit stat, and whenever a check is called the GM determines the die your going to use (and is encouraged not to use the same type twice in a row), and he'll determine high or low by flipping a coin: heads is high, tails is low. If it's low, then you're trying to roll under your Do-Shit, and if it's high you're trying to roll over your Do-Shit.
Re: #16: Tricks of the Body
Dr. Inventor (Hyperintelligent)
Linear Mode
