What happens if you hex something designed not to work?

[robertliguori]

Once, one of the electronics magazines to which he subscribed had published a joke circuit which
was guaranteed not to work. At last, they'd said in an amusing way, here's something all you ham-fisted
hams out there can build in the certain knowledge that if it does nothing, it's working. It had diodes the
wrong way round, transistors upside down, and a flat battery. Newt had built it, and it picked up Radio
Moscow. He'd written them a letter of complaint, but they never replied.

The above quote describes someone a character in a novel who has a unique gift (or lack thereof) when it comes to dealing with technology.  Rereading the passage made me wonder about this sort of thing in the context of wizardry.

Hexing breaks technology.  That is to say, successfully hexed technology can fail in a number of ways, but the only guarantee you have is that the technology will stop working as intended.

So, what happens when you hex technology that was made to not do anything?  It can't just keep not doing anything; if hexing worked like that, you'd see a lot more things like hexing a gun drop the maximum range of the fired bullets by 10%.  The way hexing works is to change machinery so that it no longer works as it was made to work.  So, presumably, an enterprising wizard could build a computer by meticulously collecting computer parts that were engineered not to work, rigging them to fit together incorrectly, and then hexing it until you managed to randomly tune its nonfunctional state to "Work as intended (mostly)" and deal with the side effects.

The real danger of doing this sort of thing would be that you'd have only the vaguest idea what kind of broken state nonfunctional technology would end up in, since hexing it would also change it every time.  Worse, while accidental hexing puts ordinary machines into a generally predictable state (not doing much of anything), hex-enabled technology could fire up at completely random times.  Still, if you're the kind of wizard with big, big books on underlying theory and stubbornly maintain that the universe is rational and understandable, you might have a big-ass hex-enabled gun loaded with an bullet that can't fire as an emergency measure.

[Belial666]

Something made not to do anything isn't technology, even if its parts are technological.  Technology, by definition, is the building of non-living objects that transform or transport energy towards a specific goal.

[Shecky]

Good Omens was comedy. Outstanding comedy, to be sure, but comedy all the same.

[GrinningIdiot]

I actually both agree and disagree here.

I found there are two kinds of thought for hexing. They're both covered in "Your Story" (p. 229) really well.

View one: Improbability

Maybe the root cause is magic’s bending of probability. That’s certainly supported by the facts; after all it’s very improbable that when some lady points at an insolent minion, fire will leap from her hand and burn his face off. That’s assuming probability enters into it at all. A scientist looking at this might say quantum mechanical effects rely on probability, and magic
messes up the math.

If you look at it this way: It's "unlikely" that the gun will jam/resistor will give out/camera will short circuit, because these things are made to function and bear the stress of normal operation.  Magic brings that small (but present) likelihood that a component will give out at THAT PRECISE MOMENT to the front of statistical chance. 

Under that definition: Yes.  Hexing the technology that is designed to not work will bring forward the chance that it functions.

The second view on hexing: Overload.  I don't have the quote, but it's basically that excess energy floods into the target and "breaks the dam" so to speak. 

Under THAT definition: No.  Hexing the technology that is designed to not work is basically the same as hitting it with a golf club.  It will just stubbornly insist that it remains useless. :-)

[WillH]

The idea of something poorly designed or broken working better for a wizard is funny as a fluke. But, I wouldn't go for it as any sort of reliable end run around hexing.

[Becq]

Hexing causes technology to stop working, not to work in odd ways.  Hexing a gun will cause it to fail to shoot or to misfire, but not to fire out a cascade of roses.  Hexing a TV will cause the image to get grainy, static to appear, or the TV to blow up, but not to show a channel it might not otherwise show.

Of course, that's wizard-style hexing, whether purposeful or accidental.  The character you're talking about might well be workable in the Dresdenverse, but probaly as a Scion of some form.  Perhaps the Scion of Murphy (you know, the one held responsible for some rather colorful laws, not the Chicago cop...)

[GrinningIdiot]

Becq, that depends on your definition of Hexing.  It's purposefully undefined in the RAW beyond "causing something to fail." If you're viewing the item as a whole failing, then you're using my second definition of hexing and looking at it as a magical golf club to beat the works to submission.

But if your hex surges over poorly constructed product and causes one-way diodes to suddenly flow the opposite direction (because they chose that moment to fail) and free-flowing connectors to suddenly triple in resistance (due to poor manufacture), then it could cause an item to start functioning. 

Saying that improbability-hexing a gun causes it to shoot roses isn't really what I was going for. My answer would be more that improbability-hexing a gun causes an unlikely but possible imperfection in the casting process of the firing mechanism to pick that moment to cause the gun to cease to function. Imagine it as an even smaller version of the smaller version of entropy curse. 

[Becq]

I think this sums up my read on hexing: "Hexing cannot be used to manipulate technology—only destroy it." (YS259)

It then goes on to give an example:

"You cannot use hexing to do maneuvers unless destroying the device is precisely what justifies the maneuver.  So if there’s an advanced filtration system in a building keeping gas out of a room, you could hex the control panel to put the aspect Filled With Gas on the room, but you couldn’t selectively control the gas flow in any way."

Your example with causing a deliberate failure in the firing pin mechanism (presumably to make the gun fire in a way unintended by the gun's holder) is basically the same as the counterexample given above.  If you try to hex a gun, you are trying to destroy the gun itself, not some particular part of the gun.  That said, you *could* argue that you could focus the hex on a particular mechanism within a larger device (like the portion of the gun that holds back the firing pin until the trigger releases it), but you'd need to be able to see that mechanism in order to cast the hex, and this isn't possible for guns.

Of course, this is my opinion; you're free to play it as you like in your game!

[Arcteryx]

I think this sums up my read on hexing: "Hexing cannot be used to manipulate technology—only destroy it." (YS259)

That was my interpretation as well - there's really no fine granular control over how you wreck it. It just... wrecks, for better or for worse.

[vultur]

I agree. I think what the OP suggests is a workable power for a Minor Talent type, but it wouldn't be hexing as such.  I think this'd be a -1 refresh power that's a variant on Mana Static, losing the +2 bonus on rolls to avoid hexing accidentally, but gaining more control over how things fail.

[Lanir]

Meh. You're trying to go the wrong way down a one way street here.

Think about it like this. If you take a deliberately broken piece of electronics, say a piece of silicon with some copper in it that never meets up and can't make a circuit but has random bits and pieces like transistors and transformers soldered on, do you magically fix it when you drop it in water? That breaks normal, functioning electronic gear. You can treat hexing in the exact same way.

I get that it's magic but it's still doing something that's easily describable. If you open up this particular can of worms you've kind of tacitly allowed a whole slew of not very good things to happen. For example resurrecting someone who died in a fire because you can cast a fireball. Or maybe you'd need to make a "broken" copy of that person and "unfireball" it. Whatever the specifics, you can see it gets messy VERY fast.

On the other hand, if you want a magic way to fix technology that's fine. It might fit into the default setting better if it was mutually exclusive with the currently existing spellcasting methods but that's all up to you.

[MijRai]

I'd say hexing something that doesn't work would make it fail, only more spectacularly.

[finnmckool]

If it doesn't do anything there's nothing to hex. It's like trying to hex a rock.

[toturi]

If it doesn't do anything there's nothing to hex. It's like trying to hex a rock.

If it is designed not to do anything right?

[Richard_Chilton]

If it is designed not to do anything right?

Hexing can't make thing better - only worse.

My guess is the circuit would start emitting smoke as it burned out - assuming that the non-functioning circuit wasn't already shorted.

The only way I can see using Hexing as a positive thing is to set up something as a trigger.  E.g. Computer / smart phone / something like that sending a signal.  When the signal stops then something happens (bomb goes off, something else triggers, something like that).  The wizard hexes the trigger and the thing goes off.

Richard