Ask a Simple Question - Get a Simple Answer

Hayatecooper wrote:What happens if you give Adorable Assistant derp? Does it gain a Magic-point or just make it fail more? Also while I'm thinking on it.

Does AA count as an Ally for purposes of awesomeness(giving or using) and such?

I think the answer is yes for everything. The Assistant gains both the Magic Point and the Extra Fail, and counts as an ally for stuff that affects allies (but not stuff that specifies players, such as the gameplay bonuses from Instant-Party)...

ZamuelNow wrote:Is Derp the only way to gain additional Magic Points in the system?  I know that some systems mention players being able to gain extra during a session due to especially heroic acts or good roleplay.

Instant-Party and a number of destinies also give Magic Points, although not reliably, but those are the only official ways. If you are DMing a game though, feel free to give Magic Points as a reward for those heroic acts and good roleplay if you feel the player deserves it, it just isn't an official rule in the system (usually good thinking/roleplaying will give an off-screen boost to a skill check the player is most likely rolling at the time)...

I has qvestion!

Flight or Weathercrafter. Which do you need to stand on clouds?
I would assume the second, but Gilda stands on clouds, and afaik, griffons generally aren't given WC....

I'm pretty sure that at one point it was Flight, but that was before the rework, and it was given at a certain point in the Flight Upgrade Table instead of gaining it when you gained any form of flight...

Personally, I can dig it if both talents gave cloud-walk, now that you don't need to fly in order to Weather-Craft...

Guys, is there a rule that says that you have to be outside to use Weather-Crafter?

If it's not included in the talent itself, then no.

Okay, New Question: While Weather-Crafter does not say that you have to be outside to use it, it does specify that you change the atmospheric conditions. So, can you use Weather-Crafter to make weather conditions indoors, especially in caves, dungeons, and the like?

Personally, I'd allow it indoors pending on situation but with penalties since there's less to work with and no pre-existing clouds.

Probably something of a rhetorical question but why is Ring of Resilience a trinket? Not that RoR should be removed, just curious to why a save ends bonus item wasn't created as an armor instead.

I'd disagree with you on the penalty thing but, that's pretty much a GMs discretion subject.

The ring being a trinket is likely because that's the kind of item you'd get in D&D. You'd get rings or cloaks that granted bonuses to saves while armor typically did more reducing damage or such.

When in Form of X utilities.
How does speech work? Is it Equestrian? That creatures? DMs choice?

It's really up to DM choice. Neither answer is going to wreck balance.

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:It's really up to DM choice. Neither answer is going to wreck balance.

Is that an answer to indoor weather conditions, speaking while in a different form, both, or neither?

Speaking while in a different form.

Atmospheric conditions go by roughly the following definition - the atmospheric conditions that comprise the state of the atmosphere in terms of temperature and wind and clouds and precipitation; "they were hoping for good weather"; "every day we have weather conditions and yesterday was no exception"; "the conditions were too rainy for playing in the snow".

So unless your DM has a *very* liberal interpretation, you need to be outside.

But that clearly clashes with the ability to use different skills for weather-crafting. There's no reasonable in character explanation for why using Mechanics or Stealth or other ways of weather-crafting don't function indoors.

Any place large enough to have weather, I would allow weather crafting. That includes large caves and aircraft hangers ... the latter of which are actually known to have thunderstorms form within them under sufficiently adverse conditions.

Inside a house, you don't really have enough air to create drifting weather currents, so you'd need to grab a cloud from outside or something.

Unless you're in an Fo:E setting, in which case it's known certain computer terminals are made of pure cloud.

What about inside of a large freezer, are you claiming that it's easier to make snow out of moisture in the air than actual frost all around you? Also, this means you can't take a flooded house and clear out the water by making clouds. Or push wind through a house... even though that will happen if you just leave the windows open. And it still doesn't explain why your Mechanics based weather making machine cannot release a cloud it has made at ground level and how it fails to function inside a house.

Ramsus wrote:But that clearly clashes with the ability to use different skills for weather-crafting. There's no reasonable in character explanation for why using Mechanics or Stealth or other ways of weather-crafting don't function indoors.

Yeah there is, because if there's no atmospheric conditions to manipulate then there's no... Atmospheric conditions. No matter how you go about manipulating the atmospheric conditions, you still need to have atmospheric conditions to manipulate.

In other words you're telling us how to play our characters. We can't actually use Stealth or Mechanics for weather-crafting because to do so we have to violate your rule or fail to make sense. We also can't do other very logical things you should be able to do with weather-crafting that weather actually does.

Also:
atmosphere (plural atmospheres)

   The gases surrounding the Earth or any astronomical body.
   The air in a particular place.
   The mood or feeling in a situation.
   A unit of measurement for pressure (symbol: atm)

Are you saying a house is not a place with air? Or that it's not on the earth?

Additionally, are there really no examples in the show of someone doing so?

Edit: Also... the current answer means we can't make fog. Unless the magic of being in a building prevents that. Except it doesn't because fog machines are already a real thing.

Not allowing weathercrafting indoors is a bit nonsense - pegasi have houses and furniture made of clouds, and can make/gather rainbows as a liquid (rather than it being a visual illusion created by a mixture of sunlight and fine raindrops).

It also more or less makes the weathercrafting line of talents severely situational (not that they aren't already - there's only so much you can do with the weather, with or without extra talents to supplement it).

Weather can be replicated by applying sudden (or gradual) changes in air pressure, humidity, static charge, chemical composition, temperature, or volume on virtually any liquid, with more or less drastic effects depending on the physical properties of such (e.g. boiling points, freezing points for water, behavior of air and water under changes of pressure, chemical reactions, radiation, convection, static buildup...). And since any indoor area is full of air, this allows any area to be subject to weathercrafting. The question arises as to how drastic these changes are, depending on how the ability is put into effect (e.g. how does a pegasus create clouds of out nothing, or how do they cause a normal cloud to shoot lightning when kicked).

Atmospheric conditions can exist anywhere that the atmosphere enters, which, unless one is dealing with an isolated system (hermetically sealed, for example), would include any indoor area with air that originates from the atmosphere. When you turn on your air-conditioner, you're affecting the atmospheric conditions of the room it is installed in. A glasshouse is a building with atmospheric conditions tailored to growing plantlife, differing from that of the surrounding environment (a partially isolated system).

It's all a clash of thermodynamic science and acceptable breaks from reality / rule of magic.

n other words you're telling us how to play our characters.

No, I'm telling you what this particular utility talent does. There's lots of legitimate points to be made about the ability to mess with weather inside, but this isn't one of them. Talents don't let you do everything possible you can imagine. If you want to have a fog machine in your backpack, this talent doesn't support that unless your DM has a liberal interpretation of atmospheric conditions (which I did say could work). If they consider the airflow inside a house to be part of atmospheric conditions and are fine with you making it rain indoors or causing indoor lightningbolts and hurricanes, that's cool. It could well be a good idea to specifically allow that sort of thing, but right now the talent isn't intended to (unless your DM interprets 'atmospheric conditions' rather loosely).

While 'atmospheric conditions' is a bit vague - the examples make it pretty clear it's intended to manipulate the exterior weather. If you interpret 'atmospheric conditions' without the examples as a blank check to alter the atmosphere in general - you could fill a room with poison gas. Clearly not the intent of the talent.

@Zarhon - As Pegasai make their homes out of clouds - the whole house counts as part of the atmospheric conditions.

TLDR; Currently, the talent isn't intended to do this and interpreting it that broadly could lead to some problems. However, I do want Weather-Crafting to be a bit cooler; so I'm fine with changing the phrasing and updating it to make it clear that some indoor stuff can absolutely happen.

I'm not sure how making rain, snow, wind, or thunder storms inside a house is going to cause a problem when these are already things you can do irl. (Well, the thunder storms would be tricky.)

You don't actually need to change anything unless you plan to tell us what we aren't allowed to do indoors as, as written weather-crafting doesn't say where you can't do it. Which really is just telling us how to play. There's no kind of weather you can have outside a building that would cause more game mechanical problems inside of one. Otherwise you basically end up with a situation where we are forced to make rainbows two feet outside the door to our house and then shove it inside if that's where we want it. Which results in the same effect but, just more stupidity that GMs (hopefully) won't enforce.

The examples actually would need to be clarified to include indoor manipulation and the phrasing made sharper, so that questions like these won't emerge in the future. The thunderstorm is indeed what I'm particularly worried about. It seems a shame though to restrict all the interesting and fun uses of the talent to outside just because of one weird thunderstorm possibility inside.

Let's take this to the suggested errata thread and analyze it there. Might be a great chance to update the talent.

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:If you interpret 'atmospheric conditions' without the examples as a blank check to alter the atmosphere in general - you could fill a room with poison gas. Clearly not the intent of the talent.

Not quite: For one, you'd have no way of creating a toxic mixture of gas out of nothing (conservation of mass applies), unless you are somehow able to isolate the CO2 from the breathable air, which requires a high degree of chemical knowledge and ability to affect matter at a molecular level. The only way such could work is if you already had a supply of toxic liquid (or a cylinder of gas), or some other substance that when mixed with air makes a toxic, unbreathable gas (volume spreading applies here - it all spreads equally through the whole volume, so if you don't have enough to be toxic for the whole room, you don't have enough in any point of the room), and use your weathercrafting powers to convert it into a cloud (this probably isn't possible without some form of heat generation to make a liquid boil and turn into vapor/gas), which you then disperse into a fog/gas across an area.

Other ideas could be to create a cloud, dip it into a toxic substance (turning it into mass of toxic water in cloud form), then either rain it, or disperse it into the surrounding air (which, if the volume is too large, makes the gas too thin as it spreads in the whole room, assuming of course nobody inhales before it can spread, or does nothing but make the toxin drip to the surface, if it can't be turned gaseous from the cloud dispersal).

Of course, you'd be IN such a toxic surrounding as you do your weathercrafting, for potentially up to 10 minutes...

Uh.... why do you have a problem with a thunderstorm inside a house? Yes, it's weird. So are talking ponies who have houses with doorknobs. And largely a thunderstorm inside your house is a non-issue compared to a tornado someone made outside that's going to tear it apart. The where of weather-crafting isn't really game breaking no matter what you do with it since most effects it generates could be managed some other way anyway (fireborn, thunderborn, frostborn, buckets of water, fans, fog machines, or a crazy contraption that shoots rainbows at people).

Edit: There are plenty of ways to fill a building with toxic gas outside of weather-crafting anyway and like Zarhon said, you'd need good knowledge of the subject and/or actual ingredients. (Off the top of my head ways to make toxic gas without weather-crafting: Fabricate, Create Crazy Contraption, high mechanics skill check and maybe freaky knowledge science or alchemy.)

As far as creating a thunderstorm indoors goes with weathercrafting, look no further than ball lightning. It's probably the most room-efficient and most reasonable (at least for a cartoon / fantasy world) option to create.

It's not a scientific problem that I have with creating a thunderstorm inside a house, it's a game-balance and weirdness issue; as it's not clear what voltage you could create and utility talents aren't supposed to be used for hurting people in the first place.

As for creating poison gas by isolating CO2, it's totally as feasible as generating thunderstorms and, in fact, involves messing with things on a less minute scale. Electrons are pretty tiny.

Now, this isn't the correct thread for this discussion to continue. I've already started the conversation in the official errata suggestions thread. The simple question has been answered with a resounding, "Not intended to work like that, but it's a bit vague - so it depends on your DM". If you want to discuss clarification and/or changes, the official suggestion thread is the place for that. =)