Post:State of the Barbarians' Guild and some questions for you. - 1/22/2009 - 21:44:09

Re: State of the Barbarians' Guild and some questions for you. · on 1/22/2009 9:44:09 PM	17565
>>-scrolls/tablets etc. This should be based on scholarship, not MD. It shouldn't take an act of magic to simply read a word and identify it as a word. >>THIS!!!1!!!! Sure, it does not take any special knowledge to know a word. This has never been about Barbarians being too stupid or ignorant to read words, despite the strawman some posters love to vent their frustrations on. There's three elements to the process I consider important. 1: Highly technical information is a language of its own. My Scholarship skill in real life is reasonably high, but I cannot meaningfully read an MRI, the output of a radio telescope, notation for chemical compounds, or follow an indepth discussion about an obscure eastern philosopher, without acquiring a specific background in those fields. 2: Magic isn't words. The messaging is pretty specific that in addition to some written notations (see #1), the scroll is composed of the spell pattern, which would look a little something like this: http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/4487/patternwl1.jpg Bonus points if you tell me what spell I was thinking of. 3: There is an active magical component to scrolls. The argument of "it's just knowledge," could also be used by the people who actually use the scrolls. You know, the ones who have to have Harness ranks to memorize it, spontaneously lose it from their memory if they lose a certain amount of attunement, and cause even stone tablets to turn to ash just by commiting the information to memory. Further, keep in mind that magic is a psychic activity for the playable races. When you're dealing with an act that goes off when you think about it hard enough -- especially as someone who derives supernatural power from active rejection of that act -- the field between knowledge and practice becomes mined. -Armifer
This message was originally posted in The Barbarians \ General Discussions - Barbarians (3), by DR-ARMIFER on the play.net forums.