Better Guns for Dresden and Co.

[Quantus]

Which is kind of my point really. If those circumstances haven't aligned, then they must be so specific as to not be much a a problem in general.

Because Harry's personal experiences are Universal?  The hazards of Radiation Poisoning have not come up in my own personal experience, but that doesnt mean they arent still an entirely valid a concern, one I should absolutely acknowledge if it /does/ become relevant. 

[Mr. Death]

Because Harry's personal experiences are Universal?

Wait, I thought he was an unreliable narrator, though?

[Shift8]

Jim is saying, directly, that a wizard handling a gun in his hand and using it is likely to cause a malfunction. He lays out several reasons for that.

If I'm not mistaken, you're still arguing that wizards (i.e., the type of person Jim's WOJ says would have trouble with guns) should use guns (i.e., the items that Jim's WOJ just said wizards would have trouble with).

Do you not see the issue with your assertion here?

No, because Jim is just clarifying that the direct factors of the effect differ based on circumstances. But then then goes on to say that the reason it appears to have "gone away" is because Harry's impression of its function is incomplete. In the context of the books, it clearly shows that he hugely over estimates the effect and how it works based on the fact that is seems like the effect doesnt do much most of the time. Hence why the stars havent aligned as it were.

[jonas]

Not to beat a dead horse, but waaay back when I responded to Namkas I had an alternative theory that would completely cover said holes you perceive.
*horse ain't dead until you acknowledge the body. It was never found.

The rules are not readily apparent without thought, but they exist and while they are mutable, they haven't changed yet in the pages of the stories that I've noticed. This isn't odd to me at all. You have to examine the evidence, both book and woj deductively. uhh let me try it this way.

Wizards effect technology because they are conflicted. that confliction this is what causes machines to break down. Said effect is actually wizards effecting probability, the randomness of luck.
 It's contained to machines as even top wizards don't usually put off enough magical aura to do what say, meeting with mother winter would do, but the transfer can happen. Also because they are 'spirit callers' not necessarily of previously living beings but the spirits of the elements themselves, like in GS the ghosts can effect the van but not people. they aren't supposed to, and without manifesting(whih is bad juju) they can't. Wizards can effect people and obects inside others aura's because wizards are mortal, they possess the free will to do so.(technically, ghost can screw with the nautral order too, but notice if either a wizard or ghost do so they tend to go kooky for cosmic reasons)
Now notice when said conflict or belief of conflict fails to come into play, is when they aren't conflicted! guns pointed at Dresden misfire all the time. Dresden himself enjoys blowing out technology, that's prime reason why anything around him would go bonkers, deep down he wants it somewhere. Notice now that NEVER not once has Harry's gun ever misfired? He doesn't want it to! it's very clear cut to me but I might not have explained well enough. however I take great offence to the statement no single theory can explain it, mine can... if only I could explain it lol. Oh, and yea... that's totally an underestimation of jims ability to say they're that way to make the story work. of course they're there to make the story work. But not as silly plot devices that go one way or another depending on what makes the current story. the over arcing story.
I use this connection between magic and random luck to make my own connection between the 3rd fate, the chooser, Nemesis who meets out punishment and literal fortuna, luck.  it's all the same thing. Before she was ousted she controlled magic to decide the fate of everything as much as MW destroys and MS is the source of creation.
*Notice milk stopped spoiling and skin conditions desisted as part of the magical effect, right around when people started to learn more about the world and contributing those things to reality based effects instead of bad luck or 'little demons', Ahhh think about it, milk was left out to ward away bad luck! It twas the focus to to be used against it, a talisman if you were. An what happened because of it? Random 'badluck' from wizarding aura's began to accumulate in milk causing it to spoil!

discuss

[Shift8]

Because Harry's personal experiences are Universal?  The hazards of Radiation Poisoning have not come up in my own personal experience, but that doesnt mean they arent still an entirely valid a concern, one I should absolutely acknowledge if it /does/ become relevant.

Not at all. Harry's use of guns is quite clearly one of many many many many examples of the effect not doing anything. Hence why the wardens use them, Vampires them, Fae use them etc. And strangely the just keep on working even when 9000 people are flinging every sort of magic possible at the same time. It is very much the opposite of his singular use.

[Quantus]

Not at all. Harry's use of guns is quite clearly one of many many many many examples of the effect not doing anything. Hence why the wardens use them, Vampires them, Fae use them etc. And strangely the just keep on working even when 9000 people are flinging every sort of magic possible at the same time. It is very much the opposite of his singular use.

Vampires and Fae dont have a murphionic field, that's only mortal practioners of sufficient Power.  And the only Wardens that use guns are the youngest and most inexperienced of them. 

And STILL, just because it has not been plot relevant enough to have appeared on stage, doesnt prove that Harry's experience isnt anything less than an extreme outlier. 

[Mr. Death]

Not at all. Harry's use of guns is quite clearly one of many many many many examples of the effect not doing anything. Hence why the wardens use them, Vampires them, Fae use them etc. And strangely the just keep on working even when 9000 people are flinging every sort of magic possible at the same time. It is very much the opposite of his singular use.

Harry never uses automatic weapons. To the best of my knowledge, he's used revolvers, a double-barrel shotgun and a lever-action rifle, each of which have far fewer moving parts -- and little to no "automatic" parts.

To my knowledge, we've never seen a wizard firing an automatic weapon. Even the young wardens appear to be using, at most, semiautomatic pistols.

The RPG books put a qualitative assessment on it, with a table on hexing. The higher the number, the more power a wizard has to put into the spell to deliberately hex things. "Conceptually complicated, more modern guns (automatic weapons, etc.)" are listed as 4, in the same category as older cars from the last few decades (like Harry's car) and "The exciting technologies 1967 had to offer."

At 5 are "Some smaller firearms may be affected, though conceptually simple ones still work pretty well, at least for a time."

It's not till 7 -- and the chart tops out at 8+ -- that you get to, "Simple guns may stop working at inopportune moments."

For further reference's sake, Harry's power level circa Storm Front has a base of 5, his rote Fuego spell is a power of 4, and he only gets stronger from there.

So that lays it out pretty neatly. The kinds of guns that Harry tends to use most often, revolvers, require more magic being flung around to malfunction, while more complex, modern, automatic weapons, are nearly half-way down the scale -- and they're right under the threshold of his base power.

(Incidentally, when my players found out about that chart, it made any kind of encounter with mortal hired guns trivial, since they could just cast a zone-wide hex to wreck their weapons. It also made some encounters hilarious, such as when a wizard took out a mortal driver by hexing his airbag into going off.)

Whenever fully-automatic weapons are used, they're always in the hands of non-wizards and they are usually a considerable distance away from the wizards they're firing at. And out of the four instances I can think of where fully-automatic weapons are used in the middle of wizard throw-downs (Storm Front, Grave Peril, White Night, Turn Coat), they're specifically noted as jamming in two of them.

As for Changes, the automatic weapons we see there are in the hands of the mercenaries, who are all up on the walls and not down where people are using magic... and out of those 200+ hired guns, their impact on the battlefield is a grand total of "wound an apprentice with a stray shot, while the wizardly targets shrug off every bullet harmlessly, then literally kill every single one of us with a wave of his hand."

You're right that we don't see wizards having trouble using automatic weapons. But the reason jams don't happen isn't because it isn't a problem. It doesn't happen because everyone who it would affect is avoiding the circumstances that would create the problem.

Nobody in my family has had a skydiving accident. This isn't because there aren't real risks inherent in skydiving, but because none of us are crazy enough to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

[Shift8]

Harry never uses automatic weapons. To the best of my knowledge, he's used revolvers, a double-barrel shotgun and a lever-action rifle, each of which have far fewer moving parts -- and little to no "automatic" parts.

To my knowledge, we've never seen a wizard firing an automatic weapon. Even the young wardens appear to be using, at most, semiautomatic pistols.

The RPG books put a qualitative assessment on it, with a table on hexing. The higher the number, the more power a wizard has to put into the spell to deliberately hex things. "Conceptually complicated, more modern guns (automatic weapons, etc.)" are listed as 4, in the same category as older cars from the last few decades (like Harry's car) and "The exciting technologies 1967 had to offer."

At 5 are "Some smaller firearms may be affected, though conceptually simple ones still work pretty well, at least for a time."

It's not till 7 -- and the chart tops out at 8+ -- that you get to, "Simple guns may stop working at inopportune moments."

For further reference's sake, Harry's power level circa Storm Front has a base of 5, his rote Fuego spell is a power of 4, and he only gets stronger from there.

So that lays it out pretty neatly. The kinds of guns that Harry tends to use most often, revolvers, require more magic being flung around to malfunction, while more complex, modern, automatic weapons, are nearly half-way down the scale -- and they're right under the threshold of his base power.

(Incidentally, when my players found out about that chart, it made any kind of encounter with mortal hired guns trivial, since they could just cast a zone-wide hex to wreck their weapons. It also made some encounters hilarious, such as when a wizard took out a mortal driver by hexing his airbag into going off.)

Whenever fully-automatic weapons are used, they're always in the hands of non-wizards and they are usually a considerable distance away from the wizards they're firing at. And out of the four instances I can think of where fully-automatic weapons are used in the middle of wizard throw-downs (Storm Front, Grave Peril, White Night, Turn Coat), they're specifically noted as jamming in two of them.

As for Changes, the automatic weapons we see there are in the hands of the mercenaries, who are all up on the walls and not down where people are using magic... and out of those 200+ hired guns, their impact on the battlefield is a grand total of "wound an apprentice with a stray shot, while the wizardly targets shrug off every bullet harmlessly, then literally kill every single one of us with a wave of his hand."

You're right that we don't see wizards having trouble using automatic weapons. But the reason jams don't happen isn't because it isn't a problem. It doesn't happen because everyone who it would affect is avoiding the circumstances that would create the problem.

Nobody in my family has had a skydiving accident. This isn't because there aren't real risks inherent in skydiving, but because none of us are crazy enough to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

Lever actions are extremely complex relatively speaking. And again, fully automatic weapons are meaninglessly more complex. Feel free to look this up. Its not like full auto weapons have some ultra complicated mechanism for this.  And additionally, you would rarely use full auto anyhow in most situations.

I could care less about the RPG, thanks.

It has been suggested already that the real reason the old wizards dont use the guns as much is they they are just that, old backwards farts. If wizard interference was that good that they could just boink out all the guns, they would do this every single fight. Except they dont.

More to the point, the level of complexity between a revolver and a automatic pistol is tiny really. Unless you think springs are complicated.

[Blaze]

Before another thread gets locked down, please take deep breaths and review the
 Forum Rules.

Keep your arguments to I/me statements, and fact based citations.

Blaze, as Mod 

[Mr. Death]

Let's try breaking this down to the numbers.

Any gun, regardless of its cycling mechanism, has a chance of jamming with any given shot. This is true in the real world on a normal day. Even with a double-barreled shotgun -- which doesn't have a cycling mechanism -- wear and tear and dirt in the barrel can make an empty shell stick when you go to reload. At the end of a long day of trap shooting, I've seen it happen.

Therefore, the more often a gun is fired, the more opportunities it will have to fail. Additionally, the more a gun is fired, the more likely subsequent shots will jam or otherwise fail, thanks to the accumulation of powder, oil and other grime.

By that metric alone -- totally ignoring the hexing field -- fully-automatic, high-capacity weapons are more likely to jam in the same time frame as single-shot revolvers, shotguns or rifles.

Now let's say, for the sake of argument, that regardless of the gun's cycling mechanism Harry's ambient hexing field creates a flat 5% chance of jamming on any given shot.

Harry's 6-shot revolver, given a 1/20 chance of failure, can be generally relied upon to get off its shots without malfunctioning.

A 30-round assault rifle, given the same 1/20 chance of failure, is much more likely to jam before it gets through all its shots.

To go a little further, if Harry goes through a reload and empties his revolver a second time, he's still looking at pretty good odds of going without a jam.

Harry could certainly fire his revolver 30 times, but he's very unlikely to. If he's fighting something that can soak 30 shots from a .44 (be it one really tough creature or 30 individuals), he's honestly better off running away. Hell, if he fires six shots into something and it hasn't gone down yet, chances are the other 24 aren't going to make much more of a difference.

If he reloads the assault rifle and empties it again, then statistically speaking, he's looking at three jams.

[Serack]

How about this. 

Harry's magic is tied up in his belief of what reality should be.

Harry believes revolvers are older, more reliable technology, and thus are less susceptible to his wizard's aura. 

Harry believes automatics are newer, less reliable technology. 

Automatic weapons fail around him more frequently than his revolver.

Actual complexity and failure rates may matter, but what really matters is what Harry believes about his magic.  And thus, his natural hex is more likely to cause failures in the automatics who's technology he is suspicious of. 

And even if that understanding is incomplete, it explains the body of evidence well enough that I'm satisfied. 

[Zaphodess]

How about this. 

Harry's magic is tied up in his belief of what reality should be.

Harry believes revolvers are older, more reliable technology, and thus are less susceptible to his wizard's aura. 

Harry believes automatics are newer, less reliable technology. 

Automatic weapons fail around him more frequently than his revolver.

Actual complexity and failure rates may matter, but what really matters is what Harry believes about his magic.  And thus, his natural hex is more likely to cause failures in the automatics who's technology he is suspicious of. 

That's probably a part of it, but it doesn't explain very well how that belief came into existence in the first place. It's not something Harry alone believes, it's shared by all wizards as far as we know.

We'd have to look at instances of Harry interacting (badly or otherwise) with technology when he isn't aware of it. Cell phones in peoples's pockets malfunctioning when he had no idea there was a cell phone or something like that.

ETA and btw: Butters is using the Murphyonic field theory in Day One to sense the final attack. It caused a conflict with the electromagnetic field in his ear plugs or something. He theorized that magic is something similar to electromagnetic waves that disturbs normal electromagnetic fields. It reminded me of the problems I sometimes have with my WLAN: too many interferences from neighbor's WLANs and my own electronic stuff.

And even if that understanding is incomplete, it explains the body of evidence well enough that I'm satisfied.

Great read. Thanx for the link. 

[Serack]

That's probably a part of it, but it doesn't explain very well how that belief came into existence in the first place. It's not something Harry alone believes, it's shared by all wizards as far as we know.

Ok, so are you familiar with Jim's comments about... blah, I'll blanket quote em.

As technology advances, will wizards become marginalized?
It sort of depends on where magic goes.  Magic wasn’t always screwing up post WW2 tech.  Before WW2 magic had other effects.  It sorta changes slowly over time, and about every 3 centuries it rolls over into something else.  At one time, instead of magic making machines flip out it made cream go bad.  Before that magic made weird molls on your skin and fire would burn slightly different colors when you were around it.  I do mention this in Ghost story (in passing).  It’s not really aware or something like that, but it is something that changes along with the people who use it. 

PR: So, do you, yourself, when you're writing them, do you draw lines in your head between, say, the sort of magic that Harry does and the sort of magic the people in Bayport are capable of? Or is it just an issue of skill and quantity?
JB: Well, it's all a little bit different, but everyone interacts with that kind of energy in a different way. For instance, wizards cause disruptions in technology and other things around them because, you know, people are never all one thing or all the other, people are a conflicted group of weirdos, and so when you have human beings that are using magic, that sort of self-inner conflict, that's one of the side-effects that comes out, that's why they wreck things that are around them. If you're a fairy who's using magic, you're doing the same thing as a human being, but you don't have that cluttered human nature. You can sit around as a fairy and play X-box all you want, you're never going to ruin it, and still be an awesome wizard, but not as Dresden.

Now here's my more detailed theory on how the murpheonic field came to be.  Quoted from my theory on black magic. (note:  I wrote the below outside of the context of this nit-picky argument about gun mechanisms.  I'll try to tie it to that after the quote)

Reality Pushes Back
In other words, if you use your will/mind as an applied force to change reality, reality will exert an equal and opposite force upon your will/mind that could be changing it as well.

My thoughts on this idea of reality pushing back come from multiple inspirations.  One of the most poignant is how Harry insists to Lash that if she has been changing him, she pretty much has to have changed in return.xrt#X 

Even more fundamental is the nature of the "murpheonic field."  Or at least why it exists from my theorizing PoV.  As a wizard develops his ability to shape reality according to his will, he is coming into direct conflict with the fact that humanity has been doing a pretty dang good job of defining just exactly how reality is supposed to work, and as a result is accomplishing all these really cool technological things.  But because the wizard is a member of humanity, and is breaking these hard and fast "rules" that this cool technology is based off of, his magic interferes with it and makes it likely to fail. 

You could even say that the wizard's mind has been warped by his continued use of magic to reshape reality, until the parts of reality that utilize highly specialized physical laws that his magic flies in the face of [I.E. technology] become highly unreliable to him.

Ok, back to gun mechanisms...  let see.  Another way of framing the above murpheonic theory is that modern mankind has used the Scientific Method to nail down the mechanisms of how stuff works pretty well.  But outside the lab, things break down, or have failures.  Somehow when the side effect of magic making cream go bad, morphed into the murpheonic field, it manifested into emphasizing the things brake down or have failures aspect of technology, and even though the M1911 was a WW1 service semi-automatic pistol, the fact that it's generally perceived that it has modes of failure that are a part of it's technological advances over Harry's trusty '38 make it susceptible to his murpheonic field. 

Here are two anecdotes slightly offset from this discussion but that are relevant. 

Compared to me, my step father is a gun nut.  He prefers a trusty revolver too, but he doesn't have a problem with an "automatic" so much as a problem with a police force deploying them without sufficient training in how to clear a failure.  And he once stopped and showed me the house that was involved in a shoot-out when the local county sheriff's office converted from revolvers to automatics across the force.  Several deputies died during that shootout, and he blames it on their not being sufficiently trained in clearing a failure in their automatics. 

When I was a soldier, in basic training, they drilled me in clearing my M-16 to the point where we did it in synchronized formation step by step, eyes front until we all in synchrony slanted our weapons and looked down to check that the chamber was empty.  Look up and tilt the weapon back to the vertical plane.  Release the bolt. *Slam* the entire formation's bolts slide home at once.

Ok second anecdote.  As a green beta I once tried to call out referring to the P90 as a carbine in a beta comment.  Jim responded with a WALL of text about the P90, carbines, sub-machine guns, and the differences between them.  So Jim knows more about guns than me.  Although I doubt he's spent as many nights cuddling with an M-16.

[Independent George]

How about this. 

Harry's magic is tied up in his belief of what reality should be.

Harry believes revolvers are older, more reliable technology, and thus are less susceptible to his wizard's aura. 

Harry believes automatics are newer, less reliable technology. 

Automatic weapons fail around him more frequently than his revolver.

Actual complexity and failure rates may matter, but what really matters is what Harry believes about his magic.  And thus, his natural hex is more likely to cause failures in the automatics who's technology he is suspicious of. 

This is more or less how I've always assumed it works. Harry is conflicted about newer technology because it's not something he doesn't 'get' on a fundamental level. If I lived in the DF universe and knew Harry, I'd suggest Harry try detail stripping & re-assembling a Glock and a revolver, and then see how well each one worked afterwards.

But I don't live in the DF universe, and don't think this really matters much in the story. Unless somebody sits Harry down and points out how much more mechanically complex a revolver is to a modern semi-auto, it's not going to affect Harry. Butters is the person most likely to try experimenting like this, but he doesn't strike me as a gun guy (especially now that he's got a light saber).

Of course, there's always the possibility that once Harry learns how complex revolvers are, they won't work in his presence, either. Actually, scratch that; of course they won't work once Harry learns how complex they are. It's Harry.

[jonas]

How about this. 

Harry's magic is tied up in his belief of what reality should be.

Harry believes revolvers are older, more reliable technology, and thus are less susceptible to his wizard's aura. 

Harry believes automatics are newer, less reliable technology. 

Automatic weapons fail around him more frequently than his revolver.

Actual complexity and failure rates may matter, but what really matters is what Harry believes about his magic.  And thus, his natural hex is more likely to cause failures in the automatics who's technology he is suspicious of. 

And even if that understanding is incomplete, it explains the body of evidence well enough that I'm satisfied.

That's an incredibly generalized idea. It aligns the info we already know quite well, don't get me wrong, excellent organization on it. I just can't see it being the definite answer to anything. With all your inside info your theorizing has suffered with this generalization effect in recent years. Even what you choose to respond to as far as others theories has changed... avoiding heavy or major topical theorizing. Not really fair that, as the main chooser of 'quality theories'.