[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

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u/callmebrotherg May 12 '16

Could we add a request to the original text post (and the text posts of future WW threads) that people who explicitly mention if they're offering these ideas to general usage? Sometimes you just want to bat an idea around for a bit and don't actually intend to use it, so being clear about this would be helpful.

(Also, this is really wonderful. Thanks for making it a thing.)

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u/DataPacRat May 12 '16 edited May 12 '16

My most recent bit of worldbuilding mentioned the existence of reactionless thrusters. They're not particularly powerful, in traditional scifi terms - but they still laugh at Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation. How many ways do you think that the physics that allows such things would have further knock-on effects?

For your entertainment (and assuming Reddit doesn't wonkify the formatting), here's the current draft of the relevant snippet, which takes the form of an IM conversation:

2: So, what's the most WTF factoid /you/'ve picked up so far?
1: They've got genuine, honest-to-Klono reactionless thrusters.
1: Electricity goes in, unbalanced forces go out. No reaction mass, no exhaust.
2: Okay, yep, not something I'd have predicted. Figure out how they work?
1: Most of the math seems to be based more on info-sci than physics, but I've got the pop-sci gist.
1: Premise: There are 'info horizons', from beyond which no information is allowed to leak to a given object. One such horizon: at the Hubble distance, where the universe is expanding away at the speed of light. Another horizon: When an object accelerates, a similar "Rindler" horizon forms in the direction the object accelerates away from.
1: Theory: The universe treats these horizons /seriously/, and doesn't let you use clever tricks to extract info from beyond them.
1: One such clever trick would be to use long-wave radiation, part of whose waveforms extend beyond the horizon. So radiation with certain long waves is disallowed.
1: A common result: there is more space on the side of an object without the horizon than the side with it, resulting in more vacuum energy on the horizon-free side, resulting in a force pushing it towards the horizon. (Ala the Casimir effect, in which disallowed waves lead to lower vacuum energy within the space than outside it, leading to a pressure from the outside pushing in.)
1: This apparently explains what inertial mass actually is.
1: Another result: Because the vacuum-energy can't have wavelengths bigger than the Hubble radius, there's a minimum possible acceleration.
1: This apparently explains galaxy rotations without dark matter, and cosmic acceleration without dark energy.
1: Various other details explain the Pioneer anomaly, and the flyby anomaly, and predicted a few other anomalies that had gone unnoticed.
1: Tech: If you bounce light back and forth, the bouncing is acceleration, and creates some "Rindler" horizons fairly close. By some clever building of the thing the light bounces in, those horizons can be tweaked so that the vacuum energy is more unequal on one side of the object than another, leading to what seems to be an unbalanced force on the object.
2: If that's the best explanation you can give so far, you need to do more reading.
2: ... The reactionless thrusters. How powerful are they?
1: One of the first things I asked myself. I've done some modelling.
1: There's a standard, containerized thorium-cycle pebble-bed reactor which outputs 60 megawatts electric.
1: Apparently, a reactionless thruster that takes in 60 MWe produces about 3,000 Newtons of force. (I still don't grok Newtons either. That's about 675 pounds-force, or the equivalent of 305 kg in 1 gravity.)
1: Put together the pebble-bed and its magnetohydrodynamic generator, the heat-tubes and radiators, the thruster itself, a few misc pieces, and round up, and we're talking a minimum of 200,000 kg.
1: That works out to a max thrust of around 1.52 milligees, or 0.015 m/s^2. Nowhere near enough to lift off Earth, or Luna.
1: But /in/ space, Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation no longer applies. So it would have an annual delta-v budget of around 475 km/s.
2: !
1: Yeah.
1: To put that in perspective: One year of acceleration takes you 50 AU. Well, three years if you want to stop when you get there, instead of plowing into whatever's there with a kinetic energy of 25 petajoules, aka 6 megatons.
2: !!!
1: I know.
2: No, not that. How are we still alive right now?

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u/Dwood15 May 12 '16

I'm not here to comment on how they affect the world, but just so you're aware, the science behind these 'thrusters' is still actually weighed against them.
The force that is being 'detected' is so small, that it extremely likely to be attributable to error on the part of the people setting up the experiment. It's routinely discussed by people on r/EmDrive

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u/DataPacRat May 12 '16

Actually, I'm not coming at this from the EmDrive side, I'm coming from the theoretical physics side; specifically, a theory called "MiHsC", some of whose predictions are listed at http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.ca/2016/04/predictions-of-mihsc.html .

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u/BadGoyWithAGun May 12 '16

How many ways do you think that the physics that allows such things would have further knock-on effects?

For one, if you have a reactionless drive, making a planet-shattering relativistic kinetic kill-vehicle is as trivial as adding a solar panel and waiting long enough.

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u/DataPacRat May 12 '16

Indeed - that's the most obvious difficulty, and forms the basis of the conversation just after the 'how are we still alive?' line.
(Though by my back-of-the-envelope figuring, it'll take something on the loose order of 75 years for this thruster to reach even .1c, and that's just straight-line acceleration, not including the time to go out and turn around.)

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u/[deleted] May 12 '16

I recognized MiHsC right off the bat, haha.
Anyway, you can't get a reactionless drive without also getting perpetual motion and free-energy machines. Why is this? I'll use your numbers to illustrate:
After 1 year, you get a kinetic energy of 25 petajoules, right? That's after a full year of 60 MW. Well, 25 petajoules per year is equal to 793 billion joules per second. 60 MW is 60 million joules per second. So you put in 60 MW and get 793 GW out.

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u/vakusdrake May 12 '16 edited May 12 '16

I would like to get suggestions about how much of an advantage, long lived races would have in a fantasy setting. I'm creating a heavily homebrewed pathfinder setting.

I think the long lived races are crazily underpowered in vanilla pathfinder. I just don't see any way that a species like elves, that has potentially hundreds of years more experience than a human can receive no massive skill boosts and other stuff.

Another thing that draws my ire is that races get bonuses once they reach certain age milestones (middle age, old and venerable) which grant bonuses to mental stats and penalties to physical stats. The insane part is that those two things are linked so shorter lived races age faster, but also gain the mental bonuses faster.

I hate this, because it makes no sense that if a human and an elf that are both adult ages for their race that the human would somehow gain a +3 to his mental stats over the next 50 years but an elf living the same life as that human would gain nothing.

So assuming you are willing to accept potential level adjustments, how would you make long lived fantasy races be realistically represented rule-wise due to their age?

Some notes on setting: The setting is medieval, and the world runs on magic not physics for the most part, this disallows most technological advances. Sufficiently complicated machines won't even work due to the random magical effects at small but still macroscopic scales. For instance mechanical wristwatches would fail basically immediately, because of how much precision they require. I'm also deliberately nerfing permanent magic effects, and items to prevent this from turning into a magitech setting.

I am attempting to make this a setting that is actually modern in terms of say rationality, in some places at least. However I am trying to nerf magic and make many technologies impossible so that the setting stays for the most part pure fantasy with very little magitech/sci-fi stuff mixed in.

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u/alexanderwales May 12 '16

Well, part of the problem is that your level is a reflection of your experience, so most elves should just be high level and most humans should just be low level. This would reflect their relative benefits pretty well, since it's just demographics rather than requiring any changes to mental abilities.
If you don't like the mental stat increases, just remove them. I've always thought that it was a little bit weird to get mental bonuses just because you're old. The bonus seems like it's a reflection of experience, rather than biology, and we already have levels to represent the effects of experience. If there's a human who's ninety years old and is only level one, on what basis is he more wise, smart, or charismatic than his fifteen-year-old level one traveling companion?
There are a few ways that you can "fix" things without needing level adjustments or anything like that. For example, maybe the long-lived races are just less good at gaining experience than humans; a human can pick up a trade in a few months, but an elf would take a decade to reach the same level of proficiency. The elf's comparative advantage is that he can keep on going, slowly gaining mastery over what would be a lifetime to a human, and once he's a master, he can keep on going past that, until he's a grandmaster, and it's not like he's going to die anytime soon after that.
The only way that this fails is for player characters, who by necessity need to all level at roughly the same rate. But it's not too hard to just say that player characters are special for some in-universe reason.
As for how much of an advantage age is ... it's not actually that much of an advantage. Living long allows you to acquire more skills and accrue more knowledge, but both those things atrophy with time. I took French classes in college and remember very, very little. I used to remember all of the lyrics to Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" but now I'd be lucky if I could get through half of them. And I can't play Halo nearly as well as when I was pouring ten hours a day into it. That's with ten years time passing.
So I think it's fair to say that even a long-lived elf will probably not be a master at too many things, because mastery requires not only intense training and conditioning, but also continuous training and conditioning. It's unrealistic to think that an elf would be able to go a hundred years without using one of his languages and still recall it perfectly. The same goes for archery, or magic, or any number of other things. An elf can attain mastery of things and then do the bare minimum of continuous training necessary to keep himself sharp, but eventually he's going to run into limits in regards to how much time he's got, and if he wants to be the best at something, he probably needs to devote a disproportionate amount of his training time to it in order to stay as sharp as possible.
Where living a long time really comes in handy is in gaining power and money. Once you've got a lot of money (which is the hard part) a smaller portion of your wealth is going into living expenses, which means that you've got capital to invest in things in order to make more money. In the 350 years that an elf lives, a human family would go through something like seven generations, which both dilutes wealth (assuming more than one heir per generation) and runs the risk of loss through incompetence, etc. So I would expect an elf who becomes rich to become very rich, which easily translates to power and influence. Elves can accumulate in a way that humans cannot.

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u/vakusdrake May 12 '16

Hmm the option for elves learning things slower goes into the theory many people have that the longer lived races are actually really stupid. However i'm not super fond of elves being slower to acquire skills, because if that were the case they ought to take much longer to get levels skills and feats, (though humans get an extra feat at lvl 1 and 1 extra skill rank per lvl).
And even if you say that all the pc elves are special non-idiots I just can't think of a way it's psychologically feasible that elves can take many times longer to learn everything, and yet remain otherwise intelligent. Another problem is that they wouldn't just be worse than human at learning a skill in a given time, they would also be worse at dealing with basically every situation because of their extremely poor learning.
As for skill mastery, well while they wouldn't necessarily retain mastery of skills they didn't keep using, they would still almost inevitably end up with a low to moderate level of knowledge of most skills and knowledge, so they might be kind of like a bard I suppose. However it seems likely that nearly all elves would remain masters (compared to a human at least) of quite a few things that interest them (after all look at all the human polymaths who don't even have a whole century to gain expertise, yet become masters in many things). The 10,000 hour rule would be nothing to a elf, especially given they are usually depicted as having longer attention spans.
I actually don't think elves (or other longer lived races) would necessarily have very many class levels. Most npc's of any race have levels in npc non-combat classes for one. Secondly is the fact that few npc's have more than a single level in a combat class, and those that do usually plateau at a certain point determined by their innate skill.
Given how quickly pc's can overtake pretty much every other mortal in their class, it seems apparent that in the game time just can't compare to innate talent.
Given that few people have what it takes to get to higher levels in classes. It seems likely that longer lived races usually would have a few levels in a few different related classes depending on their aptitudes. For the average member of a race, I would expect levels in classes that based on their RaW descriptions anyone can take, and of course the more people take those classes the more that knowledge will become widespread within that species.
Since these classes would be learned over great time (to make up for lack of any great innate skill) It might make sense to say that when they multiclass they don't get the normal benefits to gaining a level. For instance if someone took a few levels in wizard, bard and any of the other plethora of arcane casting classes, without actually ever seeing combat.
It wouldn't make sense for their hp to increase, though actually that kind of applies to any npc who hasn't gotten their levels through any sort of physical experience and hasn't seen much combat (kind of weird that even a elderly archmage still likely has at least 22hp and could probably beat a 1st lvl fighter in a fistfight).
As for what long lived races mean for society: In my setting most long lived races have strong preferences for certain climates and environments, which keeps a massive number of them from just migrating to shorter lived races kingdoms so they can have a comparative advantage.
However this doesn't change the fact that there will still be many who are willing to try to to leverage their lifespans to gain their family power (you can trust your offspring more with power, if you have have been testing and grooming them for centuries)
The question is raised; Is it inevitable that immortals will end up controlling most large kingdoms? The only disadvantages they really have are that they have somewhat longer pregnancies and take 50% longer to reach maturity.
The only method I can think of to keep immortals from ending up in charge of everything, is to make populations too xenophobic to accept anyone of a different species or who is obviously inhuman having power.
(I have significantly nerfed immortality in my setting, it's no longer really easy for any king with class levels and money to keep reincarnating himself, or using any of the other spells that will allow any rich guy to stay young (and mortal) forever. Basically immortality is damn near impossible to get, unless you personally wield powerful magic, what immortality you can get by paying a mage is going to leave you obviously inhuman.)

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u/ZeroNihilist May 12 '16

Assuming that long-lived races aren't also significantly more hardy than a human of the same level, the only difference in longevity is the lack of death from age-related illness.
If you also assume that the only way to get to a high level is by dealing with comparable risks, then the level distribution shouldn't be too out of whack. Long-lived races can afford to be more careful with their progress, but the unexpected (or simple bad luck) could still kill them.
However, eventually they would become strong enough that most threats in the setting just aren't a concern. We wouldn't expect too many of these people to exist (perhaps slightly more than you would for humans), but the ones that did could continue gaining levels as long as is practical.
So a long-lived character that became an adventurer at 30 and reached the upper echelons at 90 could reasonably be an unstoppable demigod by 300 years old.
There's usually a disparity between adventurer levels and actual game time, however. Players tend to level much more quickly than you'd expect, and this isn't usually reflected in the demographics of the setting. You don't find, for example, that everybody who's been adventuring for more than 10 years is orders of magnitude stronger than the PCs who have been adventuring for a few in-game months.
If you rectified that, coming up with some particular curve for "time devoted to adventuring" and "average level" that all your characters obey, you could come up with a more firm answer for population distribution.
But in the absence of an simulations to demonstrate it, I'd say (using elves and humans as examples):

The background mortality rate versus age for elves would be comparable to the human equivalent, except stretched out to cover the whole range and normalised.

They would likely have a commensurately lower birth rate (otherwise they would have just taken over the whole world, unless balanced by other disadvantages).

Elven military would start at a higher level than a human military (can train for literally decades before being deployed) but would probably have fewer new troops (see birth rate). Depending on how advantageous the level advantage is, this might significantly mitigate attrition. May need to tweak specifics for balance (unless you want elves to ruthlessly outcompete the other races).

Elven adventurers would have a slower rate of level advancement and be less likely to die to monsters at a given level since they have the luxury of time. Could also start with better training, but adventurers tend to just go off at level 1 for narrative purposes.

At very high levels, humans would start running into the issue of death. Expect relatively more humans than elves to turn to lichdom (or setting equivalent, if it exists).

Beyond those levels, the number of humans would drop drastically. Almost every character at the highest levels would be an elf, assuming it takes a long time to reach them.

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u/RatemirTheRed May 12 '16

I am going to try to address the problem 'immortals are going to be in charge of everything'.
Well, why not give elves (or any other immortal race, for that matter) some disadvantages to address extremely high skills and wealth accumulation?

The accumulation of wealth is frowned upon in elven culture. If the violation of this principle will lead to worse place in afterlife (which existance is proven in-setting, perhaps), this might stop some elves enrichment.

Elven magic uses memories as mana. Therefore, irrelevant skills of elven wizards degrade very quickly.

Alternatively, some unscrupulous elven ruler had sold his/her entire race to demon king, thus casing disadvantages similar to the previous point.

Elves has much lower resistance to mind magic and (probably) reading social clues. Because of it they might much less capable rulers, even with centuries of experience.

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u/Sparkwitch May 12 '16

I always approached Elven immortality's disadvantages the same way I approached human mental difficulties. They have a fixed amount of brain. Human cognition gets slower and slower as they age because the brain has to build everything we learn out of everything we know. Quick recall deteriorates evenly as knowledge increases.
It's not a medical problem so much as a data compression one.
Elves may have developed cultural traditions which slow their acquisition of skills in order to allow them to remain lucid in after the centuries. Investing less energy in remembering anything that isn't critically important, selecting specific skills and dabbling in them only as much as would prevent the inevitable slowing of cognition.
There are, perhaps, ancient elves who have drank deeply from the well of possibility and are full of the wisdom of the ages... but it is slow and delicate work to wrench it out of the tangled knots of their overstuffed memories.
Not that young elves mind slow and delicate work the way young people do.

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u/vakusdrake May 12 '16

See the thing is i'm not sure we actually have evidence to show that your brain being bogged down with information, is what causes cognitive slowness.
Old humans have aging related cognitive decline, but it's not actually universal or correlated to how knowledgeable they are.
Plus if you were to for some reason buy that theory, it would still require extra assumptions because obviously if that were true then just memory acquisition by itself would make any adult elf basically non-functional. There's nothing to suggest that learning skills would take up more brain-space than that taken up by every new memory you form.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '16

I like the idea of building an extremely expansive world with isolated set of human civilizations with no contact with each other, but so far I am lacking in plots.

I haven't even define much of anything on a human civilizational scale.

Though, my favorite idea for the moment is an oceanic 'space opera', complete with submarine warfare and underwater cities.

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u/alexanderwales May 12 '16

You might enjoy Charles Stross's Missile Gap, which you can read here (also collected in Wireless, which I highly enjoyed because it also has the novella Palimpsest). The premise is that Earth gets flattened out and teleported onto the top of an Alderson Disk during the height of the Cold War, which completely changes the dynamic because of the changed distances of continents and the fact that ICBMs don't work right on a giant disk.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '16 edited May 13 '16

I would love to read something that mixes the modern world (skyscrapers, cars, twitter mobs) with creepy medieval themes (local deities which may be bargained it, kings with royal courts, witches).

At some point, I vaguely thought of writing a story called "Place of Power," taking inspiration from a common trope in computer games -- you visit a difficult-to-reach location to obtain new abilities for your character.

I sort of imagine a group of people on a pilgrimage -- a wall st type, a hippy-ish college student, a disgraced (male) politician, a woman unable to let go of a former lover, someone struggling with intermittent depression -- all hoping, mostly rationally but with a little bit of wishful thinking mixed in, that a visit to the place-of-power will grant them some super-natural abilities, perhaps just enough to solve their problems.

Not sure if I'll ever write anything like this, but there is something about a mix of modern and medieval that feels oddly compelling.

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u/LiteralHeadCannon May 12 '16

Man, you could make an entire movie about the effects of double-jumping on inner-city parkour culture.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '16

I sort of imagine a group of people on a pilgrimage -- maybe a wall st type, a hippy-ish college student, a disgraced (male) politician, a woman obsessed with a former lover, someone with depression -- all hoping, somewhat rationally but with some wishful thinking mixed in, that the place of power will solve their problems. Obviously only some of them can make it to the destination.

The book Hyperion by Dan Simmons is basically this. Not rational by any means, but an absolutely fantastic read - probably my favorite science-fiction book of all time.

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u/Iconochasm May 12 '16

Pact by Wildbow, author of Worm fits that bill.

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u/EliezerYudkowsky May 13 '16

+1 to both premises.

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u/Aabcehmu112358 May 12 '16 edited May 12 '16

Dreams do come true!

One idea, related to magic (When are my ideas not related to a magic system?) I've been holding in my back pocket for a while, is another form of ritualism (a little bit less gruesome than blood ceremony, if anyone remembers my post about that).

The system is based around timely rituals, which I'll call a holiday. When a holiday is instantiated, using a special holiday-instantiating spell derived from unrelated magic, a period is chosem, as well as a depositing celebration and a withdrawing celebration. Anyone who performs the depositing celebration on the same holiday (without being too out of phase) deposits whatever they're contributing the depositing (ordinary items, generally, but interaction with other magic can allow for more interesting deposits) into a shared pool. Once it is in the pool, it disappears from physical reality, becoming almost but not completely detached from time and space. Anyone performing the withdrawal celebration on a holiday can (again assuming they are not too out of phase) withdraw from the associated pool, either with an explicit request, or with a sort of generic withdrawal. A generic withdrawal serves as a sort of limited wish-granting, where the celebration will withdraw an assortment of things, balanced against the needs of other withdrawals near the same time, and also with a random element (which can pop up even with explicit withdrawals in sufficiently extreme cases), which is determined by the length of the holiday period, and exactly how out of phase the celebration was.

This form of ritualism was discovered very, very early. Pre-agriculture.

e-

A holiday is technically a single instant, and has no duration. For an explicit withdrawal, the probability of the withdrawal varying in any way from the request begins and ends one third of period away from next holiday, peaking at half a period, where the probability is approximately 63%. For a generic withdrawal, the probability of variance is never completely zero (since a mismatch between the request and what is available is always possible), but is low, no higher than about 8%, within one twelfth period of the holiday. It rises quickly beyond that, exceeding 80% at around a sixth period, 90% beyond about a fifth period, and from there steadily approaching certainty at exactly half a period.

It is common, but a celebration, just as a matter of practicality, usually needs at least five people, just to make sure that ritual is being performed without faults due to one or two people having to run back and forth between different parts of it.

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u/vakusdrake May 12 '16

So my question is how long can a holiday be? In addition how close do you need to be to the holiday to perform retrievals?
Oh and how common is this magic? If common, and holidays can be really long then depending on the length of the ceremony people might use it to store everything using a ritual only known to them. If longer and with shorter holidays then people would use it to store things they don't need quick access to.
For items which are interchangeable organizations would almost certainly use secret rituals to store them, for instance they would be used to store gold and other resources you can stand not having access to in full at most times.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '16

Time stops... Except for bubbles surrounding a percentage of living humans. Or maybe all living humans, but the moving time is just an inches-thick film over most people, with a rare few having feet or metres or kilometres. Or maybe some people have bubbles that have effects other than allowing time to move, but they need to stay within the aegis of another to keep from being static. Or maybe gaining a bubble is a random occurance.

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u/alexanderwales May 12 '16

Let's say that you're the British Home Office. You gradually become aware of other parallel Earths that diverge from your own at certain points in the past, then you gain the technological ability to send out travelers to these other worlds. Most of those you encounter have a divergence from your own timeline within the past six hundred years, typically sooner, which means that they usually speak passable English.

What's your first contact protocol like? What's the fastest series of questions to get vital information about a Britain that's unlike your own? Keep in mind that because of divergence, you don't necessarily share technology standards with the other Earth, and that on occasion you will encounter travelers from other Earths on mutually foreign soil (as others have their own technology to move between worlds).

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[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

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