ParanetOnline
The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: LordBorsti on May 30, 2013, 02:11:10 PM
-
It may be possible that in the next few scenarios one of my players will try to look back in time using divination magic. What do you think? Is this a violation of the 6th Law?
-
Nope. You can do the same thing with a history text book. As long as he doesn't go back in time and change what happened.
My 2 cents
-
I'd say it's a gray area. The Wardens will probably still get uneasy about this, but I think they would not actually chop your head off for it.
From the metaphysical standpoint, I think you're totally in the clear. You don't swim against the currents of time, you are simply looking down the river with a telescope.
-
Heck, if you get some good teleportation magic going, you can look back in time with a powerful enough telescope (just teleport yourself far enough away that the light coming from your subject of interest has take the requisite time to reach your new destination).
-
I'd say it's a gray area. The Wardens will probably still get uneasy about this, but I think they would not actually chop your head off for it.
I don't really see it as grey at all.
While there is some overlap with Time magic and divination, divination is more about taking knowledge . That knowledge can come from the Past/present/future, but no matter what, you're acting on and aquiring that knowledge in the Present.
Time manipulation is more about acting on knowledge in different times. Or actually moving through or changing time.
Knowledge is useful in doing this, but I think they can be mutually exclusive. You can use divination to find something out in the past, but if you'd need time magic to go into the past and change that event.
-
If necessary, you could probably pull off my trick, above, using sufficiently advanced scrying spells (still functioning entirely in the present).
-
It could be a 6th Law violation if the caster wanted it to be one. But it wouldn't have to be.
-
It really depends on whether or not you think Heisenberg was right. Of course, the Wardens being as conservative as they are, it would probably be a Bad Thing. But then again, so was Sue.
-
I don't really see it as grey at all.
It could be a 6th Law violation if the caster wanted it to be one. But it wouldn't have to be.
Like this. On the metaphysical, you are absolutely fine, no lawbreaker, no warping of your mind, everything is fine, but the Wardens are a paranoid bunch, and they would probably at least investigate, if they knew about it. If you actually think this would be important enough to incorporate into your game is another story.
-
It really depends on whether or not you think Heisenberg was right.
Could you elaborate that a bit further? (I got some lectures on physics at university so you don't need to explain the basics)
@All: Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Now I'm going to be the devil's advocate:
In the novels when Harry observes Cowl using Little Chicago he gets noticed by Cowl and is attacked via magic. In Your Story on page 297 this "Extended Divination" spell is described causing "a mostly-invisible, spectral projection of the caster appearing in the location of the monitoring’s point of view". Modeling a "looking back in time" spell as an extended divination one could argue that a spectral projection would appear in the "past" and could therefore influence the past and present.
Is this lawbreaking stuff? Is it only lawbreaking if the caster willingly influenced the past? What if he accidently changes things in the past? What do you think?
(This thread is meant as a brainstorming and search for story/drama opportunities and not to shut down my player)
-
On the other hand, the caster may be only looking at an echo or shadow or representation/replay of the past...or, instead of sending an image of himself to the past, he's sending an image of the past to the present. Personally, I think the biggest hang-up the caster is going to have is a vauge representation of what happened. I think that's the nature of divinations.
Looking back in time would give you a better picture, since it's set in stone (mostly), but looking into the future would probably only give vague answers since any action can change the outcome.
Consider this also: There are lots of entities that probably know what happened. The information is "out there". He could use divination to just tap into the "collective memory" of the universe..the akashic memory.
None of this comes close to 6th law.
On that note, why use divination when you can use conjuration? There are entities that know what happened and they could give the information for a price.
-
In the novels when Harry observes Cowl using Little Chicago he gets noticed by Cowl and is attacked via magic. In Your Story on page 297 this "Extended Divination" spell is described causing "a mostly-invisible, spectral projection of the caster appearing in the location of the monitoring’s point of view". Modeling a "looking back in time" spell as an extended divination one could argue that a spectral projection would appear in the "past" and could therefore influence the past and present.
Is this lawbreaking stuff? Is it only lawbreaking if the caster willingly influenced the past? What if he accidentally changes things in the past? What do you think?
(This thread is meant as a brainstorming and search for story/drama opportunities and not to shut down my player)
Accidentally changing the past can pretty easily lead to a good story. The Gatekeeper notices the disturbance in time and finds the player character. Since the Gatekeeper is way more powerful and knowledgeable when it comes to time travel, he sends the player (and his allies) back to the point where the disturbance took place, in order for them to make things right. Where they determine, that it wasn't really an accident, but a warlock tapping into the spell to make him change the past. Depending on how long you want to run something like this, you could have them return to a different present multiple times, and there is something wrong they need to fix now. I assume that the point in time he wants to get at has some personal connection to his character?
I highly recommend "The strange affair of Spring Heeled Jack" (oder "Der kuriose Fall des Spring Heeled Jack" auf Deutsch ;) ) for a pretty well done story of that kind of time travel shenanigans.
-
In the novels when Harry observes Cowl using Little Chicago he gets noticed by Cowl and is attacked via magic. In Your Story on page 297 this "Extended Divination" spell is described causing "a mostly-invisible, spectral projection of the caster appearing in the location of the monitoring’s point of view". Modeling a "looking back in time" spell as an extended divination one could argue that a spectral projection would appear in the "past" and could therefore influence the past and present.
I don't think that's so much inherent to divinations in general as it is likely another instance of Harry being powerful but sloppy. I rather suspect that it would, in fact, have been a Compel for Harry's character based on his 'magical style' aspect. Other practitioners likely would have executed an equivalent spell substantially differently, and at least some of them would manage to avoid that particular issue.
Is this lawbreaking stuff? Is it only lawbreaking if the caster willingly influenced the past? What if he accidently changes things in the past? What do you think?
(This thread is meant as a brainstorming and search for story/drama opportunities and not to shut down my player)
The Law (in the metaphysical truth sense that produces the Lawbreaker power) does not care about intent. Screwing up because you were stupid and careless is just as bad, metaphysically speaking, as purposefully meddling with the timestream. This was addressed quite recently (again) in the "'official' perspective on lawbreaking" stickied thread by way of a Word of Jim.
The Council, on the other hand, is slightly less consistent, but on average, even less forgiving. If it even looks like Lawbreaking, there's a chance that you'll get a chopping.
-
As long as you are not actually projecting anything into the past I think you are safe. This is no more a violation of the laws than looking into the future, in my mind, which the Gatekeeper and that Paranetter with the dog are guilty of on a regular basis. On the other hand, if the player wanted to to be a violation, or at least carry the possibility of it, you could spin it that way with proper description (as other have described). Otherwise Id call it looking at the echos of the past, tapping the Universal Memory, or some such and be done with it. Then you are not actually touching the past, just a recording of it, and thus have no ability to change it.
-
<snip>Since the Gatekeeper is way more powerful and knowledgeable when it comes to time travel, he sends the player (and his allies) back to the point where the disturbance took place, in order for them to make things right. <snip>
So, Lucas Priest, Finn Delaney, and Andre de la Croix as Dresden File RPG characters? (See Simon Hawke's Time Wars.)
I don't think that's so much inherent to divinations in general as it is likely another instance of Harry being powerful but sloppy. I rather suspect that it would, in fact, have been a Compel for Harry's character based on his 'magical style' aspect. Other practitioners likely would have executed an equivalent spell substantially differently, and at least some of them would manage to avoid that particular issue.
Since the stated purpose of any focus is to improve precision and fine control, I would think that a focus as impressive as Little Chicago would drastically decrease Harry's sloppiness. This is yet again an indication of Cowl's fundamental might and ability.
Further explaining my Heisenberg comment: If the act of observation does indeed affect the observed, we end up with your standard time travel nightmare. Were the changes always intended to happen or did you actually impact the time flow? For a beautiful example of this Ouroborous, I refer you to Marvel Comics "The Starbrand."
As far as using divination vs. conjuration and the 6th law, a non-problem solution to this would be the ectoplasmic reconstructions from the Sookie Stackhouse books where the caster creates an ectoplasmic "ghost" of the entire event, limited to the locus where cast.
I again thank you for an intriguing thread and dredging up some fond memories.
-
Since the stated purpose of any focus is to improve precision and fine control, I would think that a focus as impressive as Little Chicago would drastically decrease Harry's sloppiness. This is yet again an indication of Cowl's fundamental might and ability.
Harry is often nearly as sloppy in his methodology as he is in his execution.
A poorly formulated but well controlled spell remains poorly formulated.
-
It's probably not a violation, but looking back far enough at a particular subject (say, White Council matters) might get the Wardens knocking on your door, mumbling something 'bout things better left unknown.
That said, the Ventori Umbria will definitely be interested in you, depending on how far back you look.
-
If it was a violation then people with the minor magical talent of psycometry would be in trouble a lot.
The Gatekeeper possibly sends messages to himself from the future and nobody asks him if he's breaking any laws. Doesn't even ruffle feathers as long as he keeps his use of that knowledge subtle.
Wizards develop visions of the future if they live long enough which is arguably information traveling backwards. They can't even help it, as it's just a natural development rather than an end sought after by spell work.
And as has been pointed out, the knowledge is out there already, either in books, the Akashic record, witnesses in the form of long lived entities, etc.
So yeah, scrying into the past is pretty unlikely to break any laws.
If Cold Days is right then it's damn near impossible to break that law anyways, probably harder the further back you go.
-
I am curious as to how difficult it is to scry back into the past to a specific event. How difficult is it to look back into the recent past or for that matter the beginning of time?
-
I am curious as to how difficult it is to scry back into the past to a specific event. How difficult is it to look back into the recent past or for that matter the beginning of time?
I would start with a base difficulty of 4 or 5 (or higher if you want to perceive a lot of details) and add a number of Shifts according to the time increment table.
Example: What happened yesterday in that room?
Starting from "instant" to "a day" this would sum up to base difficulty + 10 Shifts.
@all:
Since some of you asked for specifics and to keep the discussion on topic here is a short description of the situation.
The group got into a situation where they were pressured by a powerful organisation to kill the son of a white court vampire. In order to appeal to both parties (wcv and the organisation) they staged a dramatic scene were the young wcv would jump off a building commiting suicide. They used illusion magic to fake the scene but they involved the young wcv to actually play his own part. Caused by some compels the whole thing went terribly wrong. The young wcv was shot by an unknown sniper located in an apartment tower but nobody except the group actually noticed his "real" death because the illusions they used did their job.
So we have a dead white court vampire and his father believing him to be only "faked dead" and the group under time pressure to find the real murderer.
On of the characters wants to get infos about the identity of the murderer. Some ideas of our discussion involved magical 3D crime reconstruction á la Tony Stark/Iron Man 3 or time travel/looking backwards in time. So I startet this topic.
-
For a beautiful example of this Ouroborous, I refer you to Marvel Comics "The Starbrand."
Did you hear that they brought the Starbrand back this year?
-
Use the bullet as a link to the guy, obviously.
Have the scene play in reverse, starting when the wcv get shot, going further back in time to the point when the bullet is loaded into the gun. Have it all played out from the bullets point of view. They'll see who loaded it and possibly where this guy lives.
You're taking the memory of the bullet and watching it. It's not really going back in time, I'd say.
-
That makes sense to me. Id further alter its difficulty based on location and thaumaturgical Link type aid. So it would be easier to say "show me this room yesterday" than "Show me this room ten years ago." Similarly it would be easier to say "show me the last time this gun was fired" than it would be to say "show me this mummy when he was alive." And it would be easier to say "Show me this room Yesterday" than it would to say "show me that villain's lair across town yesterday" but if you had an object that was in said lair yesterday, it would make it easier. So it might be pretty easier comparatively to say "show me when this gun was fired in this room in the last year" and perhaps even easier to say "show me when this gun killed somebody in this room in the last year" since a murder would probably leave a stronger imprint. And if you were scrying a particular object and it "moved" further away geographically as you look back, you may run the risk of loosing track of it.
Thus the easiest thing to scry would be a metaphysically significant event that happened recently in your current location, while using an object involved in that event as the focus; a good example being investigating the scene of a recent murder with the bloody murder weapon on hand. At the other end of the spectrum would be trying to scry for a clear image of a thousand year old meeting on the other side of the planet where nothing metaphysically significant happened (which would probably require a ley line or better to fuel).
So Shifts based on Time Increment, Distance, the Energy Imprint strength of the event in question, and Thaumaturgical (psychometric) object link.
-
I would start with a base difficulty of 4 or 5 (or higher if you want to perceive a lot of details) and add a number of Shifts according to the time increment table.
Example: What happened yesterday in that room?
Starting from "instant" to "a day" this would sum up to base difficulty + 10 Shifts.
...So that's how that chart is supposed to work? Wish I'd known that before.
As for the main topic, I don't really see how just looking back in time would be a violation. Getting knowledge from the past is, well, pretty much what everyone's doing constantly. I think the law of magic is about affecting the past.
-
...So that's how that chart is supposed to work? Wish I'd known that before.
I wouldn't consider my ruling as official rules. But the time increment table is used troughout the book when time is important. For example Harry's Tracking Spell utilizes the time increment table to determine its duration.
-
Did you hear that they brought the Starbrand back this year?
Seriously? Any other New Universe titles coming back too? Please say DP7. Actually, this could be dangerous. The New Universe got me collecting again after a 5 year hiatus and eventually lead to a $100 a week habit. I don't think my wife would tolerate that again.
-
@Crazy Wilhelm and madvogon:
Please do your offtopic conversation via PM.
-
...So that's how that chart is supposed to work? Wish I'd known that before.
As for the main topic, I don't really see how just looking back in time would be a violation. Getting knowledge from the past is, well, pretty much what everyone's doing constantly. I think the law of magic is about affecting the past.
Technically, everyone is 'getting knowledge' from the present, and inferring things about the past, even to the extent that their memories themselves are embedded within the substrate of the present. I suspect that to actually look at the past directly via thaumaturgy rather than infer it from the present inherently involves chronomancy and thus, knowledge (and temptation?) of how to go about violating the 6th law.
-
Except there are plenty of ways to make those inferences already without using magic, so why would using magic to do it and cut out the middle man be disallowed? Its not really that different than watching security footage of the event in question.
Anyways, I think the discussion has gone on long enough to drop this.
http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,36777.0.html
-
Except there are plenty of ways to make those inferences already without using magic, so why would using magic to do it and cut out the middle man be disallowed? Its not really that different than watching security footage of the event in question.
Not that I disagree with your conclusion, but your argument is terrible. There are plenty of mundane ways to kill people, too. That doesn't put a stop to the 1st Law.
-
Eh, good point.
The argument was bad.
-
Technically, everyone is 'getting knowledge' from the present, and inferring things about the past, even to the extent that their memories themselves are embedded within the substrate of the present. I suspect that to actually look at the past directly via thaumaturgy rather than infer it from the present inherently involves chronomancy and thus, knowledge (and temptation?) of how to go about violating the 6th law.
Getting knowledge in the present isn't getting knowledge from the present.
A journal, for instance, written 70 years ago by a young girl hiding from the Gestapo, isn't knowledge from the present--it was written at the time, in the words of the time, about something that was happening at the time. It's knowledge of the past, from the past.
-
Actually viewing the past vs. acquiring knowledge in the present is probably a loophole in the 6th law, just as Sue was a loophole in the necromancy rule. The laws seem to be absolute, until the Council gets involved and they go all loosy-goosy. Besides the Black Staff (I know, the exception defines the rule), they teach young magicians anti-mental incursion defenses. The problem is, by teaching someone to defend against something, you are teaching them how to do it as well.
Real world example here: one of my organic chemistry labs in college was how to add a nitrile group to methyl bromate. This had to be done in very controlled, very cold conditions. One group is safe. Two groups is safe. Three groups makes this little compound called trinitrotoluene, thank you Mr. Nobel. My teacher told us the story of this being done commercially by an inattentive lab tech who trusted the process and blew out a large portion of the building he was in.
-
Getting knowledge in the present isn't getting knowledge from the present.
A journal, for instance, written 70 years ago by a young girl hiding from the Gestapo, isn't knowledge from the present--it was written at the time, in the words of the time, about something that was happening at the time. It's knowledge of the past, from the past.
Unless I'm pulling the journal 70 years into it's own future so I can read it, then the journal and it's encoded information has already taken the long road, when I read it in some present, at that moment, the contents of the journal is being transcoded into a pattern of reflected photons and then transcoded into neural impulses by my visual and neural wetwear. The knowledge can be thought of as being about the past, but it is inherently being acquired in and from the present. Divination via "The image of death" stuff works the same way. Same thing for actual security cameras, they recorded events as they happened and brought those recordings forward the long way. There are plenty of ways to divine already existing recordings of past events. In fact, you can accses already existing recordings of future events via oracles, if the oracle is willing. But sometimes the only recordings of some events are some combination of peoples minds and taking the photonic road out of the solar system. The first has third law issues, the second has arcane link and scale issues. In these cases, direct viewing of events is all thats left. Now, what happens if someone at the event had their own detection spells going for scrying or was sensitive to chronomancy? With the various ways of looking at a pre-existing recording, there is no risk of ex post facto detection; the transcription was detectable and detected, or not, at the time of the events. With direct viewing via chronomantic divination, while not in the normal sense going against the flow of time, you are entangling (or finding to be entangled) a past point in the stream with your current point, and while this will almost always go unnoticed, there seems to be danger in this interaction.
In other words, my position is that chronomantic divination of the past, while not directly violating the 6th law, is inherently stepping very very close to it, with the knowledge of how to step over being implicit but not necessarily the knowledge of where the line is.
Edit: I say this while playing a character whose mind-state spent two years living in an oracular array (implemented as a recursively precognitive bio-ectoplasmic processing matrix computing self inclusive sums across it's future states) of his own construction; whose doppelganger constructed a surveillance network from augmented and mind-linked seagulls. There are other ways.
Edit2: The corollary to butterfly effect with (divinitory) chronomancy is the predestination loop, which may be seen as a preexisting eddy in the flow of time. Breaking the eddy may in effect be a 6th law violation even if the eddy itself is seen as the 6th law violation by observing wardens.
-
... With direct viewing via chronomantic divination, while not in the normal sense going against the flow of time, you are entangling (or finding to be entangled) a past point in the stream with your current point, and while this will almost always go unnoticed, there seems to be danger in this interaction.
In other words, my position is that chronomantic divination of the past, while not directly violating the 6th law, is inherently stepping very very close to it, with the knowledge of how to step over being implicit but not necessarily the knowledge of where the line is.
I think this pure story gold.
So in my group it will be this way:
Looking into the past itself is not a violation of the 6th law. But if you are not careful with your action it is quite possible that the act of divination can affect the past, change the past and therefore would be a violation of the 6th law in terms of lawbreaker stunts. If this is a violation in white council terms is another story (the doom of damocles comes to mind). The temptation component of breaking the laws again is quite obvious to me. You change something and in order to repair the "damage" you start changing other things and cross this border again and again like in the movie Butterfly Effect.
-
Chronomantic divination in the sense of actually sending a magical "viewer" back in time in a way that could theoretically be detected in the past, yes, I would consider to be a gray-area Sixth Law (EDIT: if you're actually introducing "new" magical energies into a past situation).
But Lea in Ghost Story implies there is some kind of "universal memory" in the Dresdenverse and tapping into that's how ghost-Harry can remember things he had forgotten as mortal-Harry, so I think you could get the exact same effects without actually dipping into the timestream... if you knew how.
-
Unless I'm pulling the journal 70 years into it's own future so I can read it, then the journal and it's encoded information has already taken the long road, when I read it in some present, at that moment, the contents of the journal is being transcoded into a pattern of reflected photons and then transcoded into neural impulses by my visual and neural wetwear. <snip>
I think you're missing an opportunity. A first person account, particularly an autobiographical one, is probably the best available scrying focus short of the bones of an actual participant. Although this is only the written word, it represents a window into the mental state of the author and, in my opinion, would serve very well.
As far as the OP's decision on how to handle this, it seems my Time Wars comment was on point. Thank you for giving me a seed that could turn into the basis of my own Dresden campaign.
-
In Elizabeth C. Mock's Children Of Man series, there are mages called "steppers" who can physically travel back in time. However, due to the immutability of the past, a stepper essentially becomes a ghost when he travels back. He can't physically affect anything and no one can see him or otherwise interact with him. You could use a system like this to handle spells to divine the past.
-
Sounds like an interesting series, but if Jim were using that system, there would be no need for the 6th Law. I think applying the Time Wars physics would be more useful.
-
Unless I'm pulling the journal 70 years into it's own future so I can read it, then the journal and it's encoded information has already taken the long road, when I read it in some present, at that moment, the contents of the journal is being transcoded into a pattern of reflected photons and then transcoded into neural impulses by my visual and neural wetwear. The knowledge can be thought of as being about the past, but it is inherently being acquired in and from the present. Divination via "The image of death" stuff works the same way. Same thing for actual security cameras, they recorded events as they happened and brought those recordings forward the long way. There are plenty of ways to divine already existing recordings of past events. In fact, you can accses already existing recordings of future events via oracles, if the oracle is willing. But sometimes the only recordings of some events are some combination of peoples minds and taking the photonic road out of the solar system. The first has third law issues, the second has arcane link and scale issues. In these cases, direct viewing of events is all thats left. Now, what happens if someone at the event had their own detection spells going for scrying or was sensitive to chronomancy? With the various ways of looking at a pre-existing recording, there is no risk of ex post facto detection; the transcription was detectable and detected, or not, at the time of the events. With direct viewing via chronomantic divination, while not in the normal sense going against the flow of time, you are entangling (or finding to be entangled) a past point in the stream with your current point, and while this will almost always go unnoticed, there seems to be danger in this interaction.
The point is, the information hasn't changed--it's coming as directly as it can from the original source, having been written down in that time, as it was happening. It's not a source of someone looking in hindsight.
In other words, my position is that chronomantic divination of the past, while not directly violating the 6th law, is inherently stepping very very close to it, with the knowledge of how to step over being implicit but not necessarily the knowledge of where the line is.
Yeah, I agree that it's probably close to it, at least in some respects--but I maintain that the purpose of the law, the way it's written, is to prevent someone from changing the past.
And I'd venture to say that trying to change the past isn't going to be the same sort of spell as just looking at the past, any more than watching a TV broadcast of a parade in progress is going to let you derail that parade.
-
And I'd venture to say that trying to change the past isn't going to be the same sort of spell as just looking at the past, any more than watching a TV broadcast of a parade in progress is going to let you derail that parade.
It might derail the parade if a TV camera materialized out of thin air in plain view, but there's no real need for that, and most practitioners probably aren't that sloppy.
-
Divination is a viable form of magic that does not involve time travel. It uses information and probability and omens. It shouldn't break any laws. Read the definition of divination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divination
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divination
-
Sounds like an interesting series, but if Jim were using that system, there would be no need for the 6th Law. I think applying the Time Wars physics would be more useful.
That's why I said "to divine the past". Obviously, a spell could be constructed that would let you alter the past, but this was more intended to be a spell that specifically couldn't break the 6th Law.
-
That's why I said "to divine the past". Obviously, a spell could be constructed that would let you alter the past, but this was more intended to be a spell that specifically couldn't break the 6th Law.
Divination can hit wards; Divination is detectable by the target.
If you want to stay completely away from 6th law territory, then you don't divine the past directly (as then, that past scene/event/person/etc would be the target of your divination, wards/blocks/protections would apply, detection would apply, etc), you take an oblique approach, you want to look for some sort of imprint the past has made that, on it's own, has propagated/survived into the present. Harry has used the final vision of dead bodies, others have used ghosts, other suggestions in this thread include reconstructing an event from a diary of it and the emotional imprint made by the author.
-
Couple of points:
Firstly, you can kill with a gun. This doesn't mean spells that kill are Kosher. For that same reason, using time magic to look back in time isn't kosher just because psychics can do it, or there are other ways to do it. Psychic powers are not the same as magic, no matter how much it may seem like it.
Secondly, like all magic, IT DEPENDS ON THE METHOD.
Basicly, it all boils down to the method. Look at the casters preferred methods for doing things. Are they being indirect about it? Are they physically going back in time? Are they temporarily giving themselves psychic powers? It all depends on the proposed method.
-
Couple of points:
Firstly, you can kill with a gun. This doesn't mean spells that kill are Kosher. For that same reason, using time magic to look back in time isn't kosher just because psychics can do it, or there are other ways to do it. Psychic powers are not the same as magic, no matter how much it may seem like it.
Secondly, like all magic, IT DEPENDS ON THE METHOD.
Basicly, it all boils down to the method. Look at the casters preferred methods for doing things. Are they being indirect about it? Are they physically going back in time? Are they temporarily giving themselves psychic powers? It all depends on the proposed method.
Well, that's a matter of perspective. I doubt it would matter much to a being that exists at multiple points in a given timeline (as some oracles are supposed to), but the White Council doesn't differentiate much when it comes to things like this. Harry's view of the Alphas (that they're all just doing a very specific brand of magic) is almost certainly the same as the White Council's view. So if someone broke the Sixth Law with a 'psychic power' I can't see the Council approving of it any more than if a Wizard did it.
Given that psychometry doesn't break the Sixth Law in the RPG, I'd say getting information from the past is fine no matter what method you use. Sending messages back (as long as they're subtle, as Bob says in Proven Guilty) would be toeing the line. Affecting the past in a grandfather's paradox-esque manner would be breaking the Law with universal consequences.
-
Well, that's a matter of perspective. I doubt it would matter much to a being that exists at multiple points in a given timeline (as some oracles are supposed to), but the White Council doesn't differentiate much when it comes to things like this. Harry's view of the Alphas (that they're all just doing a very specific brand of magic) is almost certainly the same as the White Council's view. So if someone broke the Sixth Law with a 'psychic power' I can't see the Council approving of it any more than if a Wizard did it.
Given that psychometry doesn't break the Sixth Law in the RPG, I'd say getting information from the past is fine no matter what method you use. Sending messages back (as long as they're subtle, as Bob says in Proven Guilty) would be toeing the line. Affecting the past in a grandfather's paradox-esque manner would be breaking the Law with universal consequences.
No, you miss the point. Psychic powers are not magic. They're out of the domain of the white council. They're not going to kill people for looking through time with psychic powers any more than they're going to execute people for using guns. It's perhaps a bad idea, but not their domain. And the council is nothing if not bureaucratic.
I'd rule something like giving yourself psychic powers to look into the past as being akin to enchanting a sword and executing people with it: it's walking a fine line, but not actually breaking the rules.
As for the original question: I think people in this thread are looking for ways to make it work, while the author is looking for ways to make it interesting. I'd personally rule that depending on their method, as long as they didn't alter the past in any way, they're not looking at a lawbreaker tick. The council on the other hand would see it as skirting the rules and might even use it as an excuse to keep a close on those involved... in other words, fodder for your story.
-
No, you miss the point. Psychic powers are not magic. They're out of the domain of the white council. They're not going to kill people for looking through time with psychic powers
Given Harry's perspective on the Alphas (who also insist that they're not using some sort of specialized spellcasting, regardless of what Harry might think) and the Council's historical hard-line policies regarding the Laws, I'm not sure that they'd agree with you.
-
There is the added bit that Psychometry is a bad example since it treats object as (difficult to view) recorders of the events they have been present for. It is, explicitly, observing the echoes of the past in objects. Detection of divination would only twig if it covered the object being read in the present. The sort of thing that might violate the 6th law would be looking on a past event without benefit of something that may have incidentally recorded that past. Only when the actual target is the past event do we run into the concern of the observation itself being detectable in the past.
-
The sort of thing that might violate the 6th law would be looking on a past event without benefit of something that may have incidentally recorded that past. Only when the actual target is the past event do we run into the concern of the observation itself being detectable in the past.
Yeah, this would probably be questionable/gray area. I'm not sure why you would do it, though, since unlike some other black magic time magic seems to be really hard in the DV, so you could probably find another way to achieve the same result at least as easily. (Especially since Lea talks about the memory of the universe in GS, so you might not need a physical object at all.)
-
Had 2 cents I wanted to throw in. This could mean nothing, or could be seen in a few different ways.
Now first off, we may have an idea of just how difficult to near impossible it may be to try and look back in time. In Turn Coat, we have a Senior Council member trying to determine exactly what had happened in the murder of one of their own. Even through all his prowess, through all his attempts, and use of magic even he was a bit skeptical of, they where never able to verify exactly what had happened. Either such a thing was too difficult for him to manage, or it was simply completely outside of his realm of expertise. Note, even Harry had to do that himself the good old fashioned way, and it had to partially be confessed by one of the parties involved (note, I'm tired and it has been a while since I've read this particular book. I may not be remembering some of the finer details). Player characters can always be resourceful, they can always eventually out shine most of your NPCs. However, our Senior Council members, I would assume, should be considered as the absolute elite, the true authority of magic in most scenarios. If one of them couldn't do it, well...
Now, this could potentially be looked at another way. The Council member may have been trying to do everything he could, EXCEPT looking back in time. Through all the tools he had, he was unable to bring enough evidence to bear to verify exactly what had happened. If this is the case, than it may not be the idea that it is necessarily too difficult to look back in time, but that even this potentially minor act of chronomancy would be considered to be in violation of the 6th Law. If this was a gray area, the envolope may have been pushed. If it was not something considered to be breaking the Laws, than ALL avenues would have been pursued in attempts to verify exactly what had happened.
Now as I said, I'm tired, so I may be rambling a bit. But from my speculation at least, it could be assumed from that point in the books we may be able to assume we simply have an A) or B). That even this kind of divination or time magic is either very difficult to impossible to perform to a very definitive detail, or it is considered to be against the 6th Law, whether it would break it or not. My 2 cents to the conversation.
-
That even this kind of divination or time magic is either very difficult to impossible to perform to a very definitive detail
Probably true...I can't think of a good symbolic link to a specific point in time. Anything physical has existence across some chunk of time, you'd probably get confusing visions mixed together from its whole existence.
-
For this sort of targeting, you can get the symbolic link you need by bootstrapping. Start with one of the traditional 'echo in the present' based methods, but aimed before what you failed to observe via safe methods. Use that echo of the past as the symbolic link for the past itself and use the past itself crossed with your present as a symbolic link for the next 'moment' up your timeline. Hope your timeline already encompasses a stable time loop where you did these observations and they don't matter to the interval between the past event up to your present.
That said, a similar safe method of bootstrapping is also possible, using echoes you do have to find other echoes in the present you need to get closer to echos of your target event, but I'm generally assuming that once you are to this point, the echoes of the event itself were wiped or have been otherwise disrupted or outright fabricated (see Minority Report for a future looking version)