This page is not to be taken as canon or any sort of ruling. Contents may vary. May contain nuts. Consult your ref if you are unsure. The following has been subjected to alarmingly high levels of ignorance.
Okay. The multitude of Talk To Stuff spells around means that we (and by 'we' here I mean next year's ref team) are going to have to write some guidelines on what information they get. Not having them has made for some inconsistencies. The following is approximately how I've been deciding it, and is not canon in any way - each Talk To casting in downtime this year has produced a long discussion by the refs and each case was taken on its own merits. We still prefer Talk To to any other means of acquiring information, by the way, because it's the most interesting to use in uptime (which is what the game is about).
Comments under the line, please.
There are four levels of information gathering.
- Detect gives presence or absence.
- Recognise gives one-line summary.
- Talk To as below.
- Compel - high level Talk To variant, see under Compel Truth.
Talk to Magic
- Magical effects are sentient but not necessarily intelligent.
- They cannot see spirit at all, and half-spiritual beings such as mortals are blurry - elves less so of course.
- They know all about themselves.
- They know magic theory to a greater or lesser extent.
- They might well be malicious or otherwise uncooperative.
Talk to Inanimate
- Inanimate objects are, in general, stupid. The smaller the object the less intelligent.
- The less intelligent the object, the shorter its memory for things that do not interest it.
- The main senses of inanimate objects are touch and balance. They also have dim sight and hearing.
- They cannot see spirit at all, and half-spiritual such as mortals are blurry - elves less so of course, especially tomten.
- In general they are quite short-sighted, and they don't recognise languages other than Tengwar as anything more than background noise.
- They know all about themselves.
- They will remember their personal history to a greater or lesser extent.
- They are highly interested in other inanimate objects, far more so than in people.
- Their personality follows their form. Some might well be malicious or otherwise uncooperative.
Talk to Air
- Air is, in general, incredibly dumb. The stronger the wind the more intelligent.
- The main sense of air is hearing.
- Air cannot hear spirits at all, and half-spiritual such as mortals are hard to make out - elves less so of course, especially aerokin.
- Air moves, and can't tell about something it hasn't heard.
- In general, air gains only the vaguest impression of its sutroundings, but it will recognise speech and remember at least some facsimile of what was said.
- The more intelligent the wind the more self-willed, but air is rarely malicious (unless it's poison gas or something).
Talk to Water
- Water can be quite intelligent but you need a lot of it. Drinks and the like are not. A body of water is anything that is referred to by one name, metaphysically speaking - you can speak to The Granta, for example, or 'this specific tributary', or 'this drink', but not 'all the drinks in the bar' without a different spell.
- The main sense of water is touch.
- Water cannot feel spirits at all, and half-spiritual such as mortals are hard to make out - elves less so of course, especially hydrokin.
- Water moves, and can't tell of something it hasn't met.
- Water knows all about itself, including its history from spring to bottle, though probably not much outside the bottle. A potion will know its ingredients and probably its effect but likely not the alchemical process that made it - feels like going through a rollercoaster and involves several changes of state...
- Personality follows function for a potion or drink. Bigger bodies of water such as the Granta are likely to be much like water elementals in nature.
Talk to Light or Dark
- These spells are likely not much use. Light wouldn't know anything and Dark wouldn't tell anything.
High level / researched spells
- High level spells can get everything out of a Talk To target that that target knows. They cannot get more than that - they cannot give the target supernatural powers of memory or whatever. They can have permanent effect.
- Lower level spells can get one piece of information out of a Talk To target - that you could have got out of it with Talk To - but do so reliably regardless of the target's personality so long as the target knows that information.
Spirit
- Spirits are in general highly intelligent and wilful.
- They can see and hear just fine, but they can't see or hear magic and elves are hard to make out.
- Basically, think of them as people - that's the intelligence level, that's the amount of memory, that's the level of personality, etc.
- See miracle descriptions.
In general
- Magical investigation < spiritual investigation if the spiritual investigation can get a suitable target.
- Magical investigation should also be less good than investigation by a suitably skilled wilderness / subterfuge (delete as appropriate) character, with the blatant exception of Talk to Magic, because the wilderness / subterfuge character will get unsolicited information and be able to interact with people too.
- Spiritual investigation will not get unsolicited information, but will get information pretty well perfectly. The problems with it are mostly metaphysical rather than due to lack of capacity.
Comments.
I like- it is consistent and sane and stuff. People don't say "I like this" often enough on the wiki.
You might like to include Talk To Plant- my experience so far is that plants aren't all that intelligent but you can get a sensible conversation out of them, their main senses are touch and time- plants are sensitive to light/dark, day length, seasons etc. Presumably they also know about water... "I was trying to sleep and someone splashed blood on me and there were bright torches, and then something heavy landed on me, look at my trampled leaf here" is about the level of Stuff I've been able to get out of a Talk To Plant in the past, which feels about right for a first level spell. --Pufferfish
Talk to air is a bit of a tricky one. How long term a memory does the air have? How can you tell if you're talking to the same bit of air that overheard people talking a few minutes ago? etc. It also worries me slightly in that whilst talking to most things will give clues to be followed up later (A sword might say that it hit another sword a few times before hitting a person, the ground might be able to say which direction a heavy caravan went in etc), actually being able to hear what went on in a conversation is 1) Really quite a lot more powerful - you can 'overhear' things in which people incriminate themselves directly - there's no real way to guard yourself from this, as well as being 2) Hard to ref - having to actually go and ask players what they were talking about. I'd personally prefer it if any 'Talk to' spells involved talking to actual physical objects, rather than more nebulous concepts like air or light. -- Flying_O
- The most successful use of Talk To Air I've seen is asking 'where did this crossbow bolt come from', having started casting immediately on spotting the bolt flying through the air. I'm not sure that Talk To Air to hear voices is a good idea. I do think that Talk To Air to discover, say, how many people have been in and out of a room lately, the general course of events happening upwind, is good - air, in this case, would have its primary sense as Touch. --ChessyPig
I tried and failed to come to an objective opinion on this, and failed. What I will say is that this makes psychometry more limited both than it is currently reffed as, and than I would like to see it as. At present, (N.B - this is not common knowledge IC) several of my most useful psychometric spells do not come under the four categories listed above - they provide visions or similar, with both sight and sound components, of different degrees of accuracy, rather than conversations, and I'd be very sorry to see this rendered impossible. I'm not sure that magical and spiritual investigation are comparable - one only works on things, the other only works on people. A "tracking" spell should definately be less effective than the tracking skill of the equivalent level (or rather level/2), but there should be all sorts of things garnerable by magical observation that can't be learned physically; obviously you can learn things from talking to people that you can't learn from either magical or wilderness skills, but that shouldn't be dependent on class.
The obvious disclaimer that I play a psychometer and am not in any way a neutral observer applies to all this. OTOH, given that it was all possible when I started playing one, I'd be slightly unhappy at it being rendered impossible now, especially as people have also been talking enthusiastically about nerfing buff-and-fight mages (slightly lame indeed... :-p).
--Jacob
I quite like this. A couple of times (although I can't actually think of any now, but I recall thinking so at the time) it's felt that Talk To has been really quite good, especially for what is effectively a level 1 skill. One time that I did like how Talk To worked was when Charridy and Skraal were killed (well, at least that's what we think happened) outside the bar, and a better idea of what happened was gained through a combination of skills that each agreed with each other, and highlighted different things without actually giving us a full picture. Anything else we had to fill in by guesswork.
--Androidkiller
- I definitely agree with this - I'd like magical methods to complement non-magical methods in an investigation, rather than give full answers in themselves. Getting actual 'solve plot' answers should not be something acheivable by one person working by themselves, with the possible exception of high level knowledge miracles. -- Flying_O
- I strongly disagree with this. It should be possible for one person working by themselves without any skills whatsoever to obtain many answers, let alone through the use of relevant skills. --Jacob
- There's a big difference between "getting useful answers" and "getting an answer that solves the plot straight away". --Valtiel
- Quite. And I disagree that plot ought to be solvable by one character working alone - most plot is specifically designed to require more than one PC to be involved - the Refs do NOT in general have time to run plot solely for one person (being specific to one character's fine, but it ought to involve their friends too). Having investations require more than one skill-set to be certain of the answer is a very effective way of doing this. --Koryne
I also like this. The 'Talk to Magic' and 'Talk to Inanimate' effects as written above were, I felt, quite well demonstrated when we had Power in the WA ritual circle. --Bluebottle
How much do spirits that are not bound to a task move around? Does being bound to a task (i.e. into an armour miracle, blessing, weapon buff) affect the new information the spirit can pick up? The stuff it remembers from when it was floating in the general area? --Felicity
Something would like to add is that (especally with magical talk-to effects) 'preparing' an object beforehand ought to increase the accuracy and detail of the information gathered. If I spent several weeks sneaking into the Council Chamber to cast Talk to Inanimate on the table and chairs explaining exactly what information I wanted I'd expect much better results than simply going in once after the relevant meeting and interrogating the furniture. --Koryne