Post:Insert Expletive Here - 06/08/2014 - 05:32

Re: Insert Expletive Here · on 06/08/2014 05:32 AM CDT	3172
>>The distinction between "sorcery" and "Sorcery" is purely an OOC one. It absolutely is not. >>But would they be able to distinguish between sorcery and Sorcery? Yes. >>Essentially, capital S sorcery is every bit the same as lower case s sorcery ... except where law is concerned (and according to the law there is no distinction. Sorcery is sorcery.) No. >>Sorcery in all its forms is illegal, "forbidden practices." No. >>I'd imagine that'd be a big problem for most Paladins who would like to practice sorcery, on an internal level. Internal conflicts aren't inherently a bad thing. >>This thread as a whole. Would it be nice to have a better separation between sorcery and Sorcery for the sake of OOC discussions? Yeah. But the IC confusion is absolutely intentional and part of the IC environment. Sorcery is scary, dangerous and ill-understood by many people. That doesn't prevent them from discussing it or thinking they understand it, or trying to regulate it. Our society does that all the time and it drives people who actually are involved in the specific field being maligned at the time nuts. To use a real world example, I use to work at a (very small) nuclear reactor. They had a fuel leak a few years before I worked there (And some while I was there, but those are stories for another day) and we had some film of the media coverage of the event. In in the reporter is trying to explain the fuel leak and make a news worthy story out of things and at one point zooms in on the logbook, "And as you can see the final word in the logbook is 'scram'." The obvious implication they were going for was that the staff had panicked and for some reason written down "scram" before running off. So what was this phrase doing there? Within the nuclear industry 'scram' means to instantly power down the reactor through releasing the control rods back into the core. In our case we had a button you'd press and it would kill the electromagnets that held up the control rods. We used it all the time, nearly every time we shut the reactor down. We'd use it for when we gave tours to show how fast we could cut the power since it gave a very nice instantaneous drop in the visible Cherenkov radiation. Using it wasn't a big deal, at all, but it's existence was an important safety measure and scramming the reactor was absolutely the proper response to any suspected problems, such as the detection of a fuel leak. So why the weird term scram? The story our tour groups at the time was that it was an acronym s.c.r.a.m. for 'Safety Control Rod Axe Man" that dated back to early nuclear testing, though The Internet claims may be an urban myth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scram for more. ...never mind that there was actually a line in the log book below 'scram' that read 'power off, key out' like it properly should and both lines were initialed by the operation. Language can be confusing in real life and that sometimes has very major consequences. Having that carry over to the game is okay. -Raesh (People also sometimes twitch when we say the reactor was going critical or super-critical which just means it was at a stable power or increasing in power respectively. They aren't too fond of the term "fuel leak" either...)
This message was originally posted in Abilities, Skills and Magic \ Magic - Suggestions, Discussions and Thoughts, by DR-RAESH on the play.net forums.