Short reply (at work!) to some of your questions - Edit 1
Before modification by RugbyPlayingAshaman at 08/09/2009 07:00:35 PM
Wow.
While I don’t necessarily agree with everything you state, I think that you certainly have a great deal of knowledge on the subject, and your long-windedness was greatly appreciated. In fact, your overwhelming confidence in your statements is actually quite refreshing. I like the way you phrased some things, although a part of me wished you hadn’t provoked all of these thoughts. The other posters helped a great deal and made me weigh out the various factors that place “the Five Powers” against “the One Power,” but you really got me worked up.
Might I suggest you look into the rules for the 4th Edition? I haven't purchased the guidebook, yet - it's actually been years since I've played at all, but I do enjoy reading the various scenarios. Some of the 4th edition rules, IMHO, are actually very conducive to the Wheel of Time setting with modifications to the setting.
The system that we’ve created out of the ashes of the d20 system is entirely “point-based.” You spend Discretionary Character Points on all of your physical abilities (your attributes, as it were), as well as skills, saving throws, defense bonus, base attack bonus, the whole nine yards. Everything has an equivalent cost attached to it, which (in my opinion) makes it easier to plug in a d20 Channeling System that doesn’t make me sick when I look at it (read: The Wheel of Time d20 RPG).
Taking it away from tabletop gibberish, there are two points that you make that I’d like to reply to as best I can. Replying to everything that you’ve stated would take an eternity, I think. I’m just as long-winded as you.
In fact, channeling the One Power can be done without rendering it into one of the five flows. Channelers do it all the time. When they channel, the “flows of the One Power” enter their body. Notice it’s not “the One Power and the five threads” but just “flows of saidin or saidar".
I think your being too literal in your reading of my words here - which was one of the things I pointed out that fudges discussions of the One Power in my last post!
When I say "flows of the One Power", I mean it in the most rough sense - for example, RJ described the point of view of channelers who are performing weaves. After they embrace the Power, to the channeler wielding the flows, they seem to originate in front of them, while to a channeler looking at the one channeling, the flows seem to emanate from within. What I'm referring to is saidin and saidar. RJ often makes the distinction - "the One Power flowed into her" or "she channeled a trickle of saidar into the ter'angreal" is distinctly different from "she channeling Fire to warm up the tea" or "she wove Air, Earth and Fire into a weave".
I'm talking aabout the difference between channeling saidin and saidar, and actually doing something with them. The best example would be how Elayne studied the ter'angreal to determine their subatomic properties - she directed flows of the Power into them, somewhat like Delving, to sense their subtle differences, but this was neither an elemental flow nor a weave. The One Power can be used to extend your senses, and this is often what is done when a Healer Delves, or when a channeler tries to locate ores or a quantity of water.
But by far the strongest example I am talking about is when a channeler senses a massive weave being assembled from far away. If that channeler is too far, they can't see what is being woven, but they do sense massive amounts of the Power. If they are close enough, but still distant, they might see a weave being formed with the Power, but not what the individual flows are. The flows themselves can't be determined until the channeler is closer, so IMHO this indicates that the flows are just expressions of an extension of saidin or saidar - they are the Power, but the channeler modulates the energy signature making them into a different form of the same energy. Somewhat like dealing with various wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrume - light, x-rays, ultraviolet rays, etc all behave differently but they all are essentially electrogmagnetic radiation. In the same way, you can channel a great amount of the Power, direct it towards an area, even manipulate it, and you don't necessarily need to channel it as a discernible flow: This is what Rand and Nynaeve did at the Cleansing - Rand created a tube of saidar and channeled saidin through it. He didn't render saidin or saidar into Earth, Fire, Spirit, Wind/Air or Water - he manipulated the stream of the Power in it's most pure form to accomplish this. This in it's most basic sense is all a "weave" is - a shape or energy pattern that needs to be modulated in a certain way in order to obtain a particular effect. However, the important thing to keep in mind is that the elemental flows tend to be connected to physical or biological matter - channeling pure saidin or saidar doesn't really have an effect on the physical world. Thus while Rand and Nynaeve were using the Choedan Kal, every channeler in the world felt what could only be immense volumes of saidin and saidar being drawn somewhere, but at the scene itself, the two halves of the One Power were only acting on each other, not on the surroundings. In fact, you'll notice that the vortex somewhat resembling a mushroom cloud that formed and collapsed at the end was formed because the taint was being pushed through Shadar Logoth, not through any weave or effect triggered directly by saidin or saidar.
IIRC every ter'angreal is activated in a different way, and sometimes with a different flow. There were ter'angreal that Elayne was studying that you needed to direct Fire into in a certain way, for example, as the other flows did not do anything.
Going further, I might even chance to say that “a flow” is more accurately identified as a combination of threads – not necessarily of different elements. For example, it could be that “flow” is a term used to identify something that is greater than “a thread” (a single string with an elemental identity) and less than “a weave” (a combination of flows that are woven carefully together to achieve a greater magical effect.)
I don't think so, mainly because the descriptions are pretty clear IMO - Asmodean's first trap for Rand in Rhuidean, for example, were razor sharp flows of Air, that were so minute you could barely see them. A flow and a thread seem to be the same thing. Indeed, when Aes Sedai channel a flow of Fire into tea to warm it, that term is still used. I think if there is any disctinction to be made, it would be that the word "flow" might be used to indicate active channeling, while a thread might be the identifier used when tying off a weave, and even then the terms are interchangeable (as you note below).
Sadly, I think RJ might use the words “flow” and “thread” a little too interchangeably for that theory to hold weight, but that doesn’t mean that the intent was never there. As you said yourself, RJ is a very wordy man. The words “flow” and “thread” may have been used to promote word variation, but I think it’s still worth noting that my theory might very well constitute the “text-book definition” of thread and flow.
When I first finished reading the series, I had very strong beliefs about the way that things worked. Many of these beliefs were often reinforced by message board role-playing, chat-based role-playing, or tabletop role-playing games with various interpretations of the system.
This is the way I used to imagine the Five Powers and the True Source.
<I>As you embrace the source, you become more in-tune with your surroundings. Your senses become heightened, and you can feel the radiance of the One Power inside of you. Whether this radiance is born from the adrenaline rush of a fight for your life or from the overwhelming ecstasy of surrender depends on your gender, but in the end, the result is the same. How much of that radiance you pull inside of yourself is a representation of your “Magnitude” (ie: the sheer volume you can hold). If you draw too much, you can burn yourself out or die, but if you draw too little you know you’ll only be teasing yourself, so you must always be aware of how much is stored within you.
If concentrate, you can see that somewhere between you and the Power are five spools of thread. The white spool is spirit, the green spool is earth, the red spool is fire, the yellow spool is air, and the blue spool is water. If you have an “affinity” for one of these spools, it comes away so easily that you don’t even have to think. If you have “little to no ability” with the spool, it fights you at every turn and exhausts you while you try and guide/force it to your will. </I>
Somehow this belief got a little shaken up when I started reading the series a second time. I’ve seen so many other systems that I’ve begun to doubt myself. Many people rate channelers strengths in each of the Five Powers as if it were completely separate from everything else, and only treat their total strength as if it were an accumulation of these five separate strengths – but if you ask me, I think that sounds like bull.
The trouble comes when I start to think about what the difference is between “holding a vast reserve of the One Power” and “Channeling an enormous flow of the One Power” and whether or not having an “affinity” in one of the Five Powers allows you to channel more of it than you could if you hadn’t. The more and more I think about it, the more and more I begin to agree that there are points where the difference between a channelers dexterity, experience and practice and the magnitude of the power that she can work with without exhausting herself are invariably blurred.
Where I really start to get tripped up when I think of a channeler who can hold high volumes, but channel so weakly with one element that they can barely wield a thread. My only guess is that having a high “power level” allows said channeler to overcome that handicap with a great deal of practice, but makes it so that the element that she is impaired with will always exhaust her and cause more difficulty than it will with others.
I don’t know that I’d say that a Talent is quite the same as an individualized skill. Wheel of Time d20 RPG classifies Talents the way D&D classifies “Schools of Magic” but I don’t think that’s right at all. A Talent can be composed of a truckload of different weaves, but when you really get down to the nitty gritty, I think that “Talents” are the weaves that a channeler knows how to channel based on instinct alone, as well as a general representation of aptitude for channeling within a specific purview.
For example, some people are very good at drawing and sketching, so much that they hardly require any guidance at all, and when they receive instruction they only get better. It’s the same with Talents. Some people just naturally know which weaves will produce an effect similar to Compulsion, or which flows they need to thread together for Healing, and when they’re taught how these weaves are supposed to be done, they catch on much more quickly than people who have no Talent.
In some cases, we’ve seen that people who have little or no Talent for a particular purview can still do a number of things that fall under it. There does not seem to be a “Talent” for throwing fireballs, summoning lightning bolts out of a clear blue sky, or wielding razor sharp cable-thick flows of air, but channelers do these things all the time in the World of the Wheel. Likewise, someone who has no Talent in Healing can still heal a person, but the act requires a great deal of focus and concentration – it can never be done “without thought.”
The thing is, some Talents have a dozen different departments. Take Illusion, for example. Illusion covers everything from the Mirror of Mists to Invisibility – but some people have a Talent for Illusion. Delving is considered an integral part of Healing – but that’s a separate weave entirely. For that matter, just about everything that can be done to the body can be related to Healing in some way, but someone who possesses a Talent in Healing doesn’t necessarily know more than a handful of things.
Worse yet, it seems that Talents trip things up even more – you could even go as far as to say that Talents themselves have strengths! Isn’t Nynaeve a more “Talented” Healer than most of her Ajah? You could argue that her incredible Talent for Healing was what allowed her to discover how to restore a subject that had previously been severed from the source.
I’d really like to keep this thread going. If you enjoy this sort of banter, you may be able to help me flesh out my system (even if you’re not much of a number cruncher; we can take it from a more philosophical stance and leave the numbers out, if you want.) If you are more of a numbers person, so much the better, because I could really use some help. I have ideas, but the best way to express them would be in terms that tabletop role-players could understand.
While I don’t necessarily agree with everything you state, I think that you certainly have a great deal of knowledge on the subject, and your long-windedness was greatly appreciated. In fact, your overwhelming confidence in your statements is actually quite refreshing. I like the way you phrased some things, although a part of me wished you hadn’t provoked all of these thoughts. The other posters helped a great deal and made me weigh out the various factors that place “the Five Powers” against “the One Power,” but you really got me worked up.
While I didn’t want to state it quite so openly, the purpose of this post was to glean some insight as to how I could create a Channeling system using the constraints of the d20 system. My friends and I have overhauled D&D to the point where you might as well call our tabletop games “3.75” instead of “3.5” I don’t know how much of this will sound like gibberish, because I can’t be certain how much knowledge you possess regarding tabletop role-playing systems, so I’ll make this next paragraph brief.
Might I suggest you look into the rules for the 4th Edition? I haven't purchased the guidebook, yet - it's actually been years since I've played at all, but I do enjoy reading the various scenarios. Some of the 4th edition rules, IMHO, are actually very conducive to the Wheel of Time setting with modifications to the setting.
The system that we’ve created out of the ashes of the d20 system is entirely “point-based.” You spend Discretionary Character Points on all of your physical abilities (your attributes, as it were), as well as skills, saving throws, defense bonus, base attack bonus, the whole nine yards. Everything has an equivalent cost attached to it, which (in my opinion) makes it easier to plug in a d20 Channeling System that doesn’t make me sick when I look at it (read: The Wheel of Time d20 RPG).
Taking it away from tabletop gibberish, there are two points that you make that I’d like to reply to as best I can. Replying to everything that you’ve stated would take an eternity, I think. I’m just as long-winded as you.
In fact, channeling the One Power can be done without rendering it into one of the five flows. Channelers do it all the time. When they channel, the “flows of the One Power” enter their body. Notice it’s not “the One Power and the five threads” but just “flows of saidin or saidar".
I think that you may be mistaken here. I’ve been re-reading the books, and thus far I’ve only just finished Lord of Chaos, but I hesitate to believe that it is possible to channel “The One Power” as an individual flow without any identity other than Saidin or Saidar. Can you be certain that the person described in the scene where “a flow” was mentioned had enough rational intellect to discern which elements were which (in the earlier books, Rand lacks this.) If so, can you be absolutely certain that RJ wasn’t using that to avoid renaming the flows that he’d previously identified? For example, during the “Asha’man, kill!” scene at Dumai’s Wells, RJ states, “wherever the flows touched, men died.” This is very general, but we’ve previously seen that these flows were composed of razor sharp cables of air, made into a sort of meat grinder.
I think your being too literal in your reading of my words here - which was one of the things I pointed out that fudges discussions of the One Power in my last post!
When I say "flows of the One Power", I mean it in the most rough sense - for example, RJ described the point of view of channelers who are performing weaves. After they embrace the Power, to the channeler wielding the flows, they seem to originate in front of them, while to a channeler looking at the one channeling, the flows seem to emanate from within. What I'm referring to is saidin and saidar. RJ often makes the distinction - "the One Power flowed into her" or "she channeled a trickle of saidar into the ter'angreal" is distinctly different from "she channeling Fire to warm up the tea" or "she wove Air, Earth and Fire into a weave".
I'm talking aabout the difference between channeling saidin and saidar, and actually doing something with them. The best example would be how Elayne studied the ter'angreal to determine their subatomic properties - she directed flows of the Power into them, somewhat like Delving, to sense their subtle differences, but this was neither an elemental flow nor a weave. The One Power can be used to extend your senses, and this is often what is done when a Healer Delves, or when a channeler tries to locate ores or a quantity of water.
But by far the strongest example I am talking about is when a channeler senses a massive weave being assembled from far away. If that channeler is too far, they can't see what is being woven, but they do sense massive amounts of the Power. If they are close enough, but still distant, they might see a weave being formed with the Power, but not what the individual flows are. The flows themselves can't be determined until the channeler is closer, so IMHO this indicates that the flows are just expressions of an extension of saidin or saidar - they are the Power, but the channeler modulates the energy signature making them into a different form of the same energy. Somewhat like dealing with various wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrume - light, x-rays, ultraviolet rays, etc all behave differently but they all are essentially electrogmagnetic radiation. In the same way, you can channel a great amount of the Power, direct it towards an area, even manipulate it, and you don't necessarily need to channel it as a discernible flow: This is what Rand and Nynaeve did at the Cleansing - Rand created a tube of saidar and channeled saidin through it. He didn't render saidin or saidar into Earth, Fire, Spirit, Wind/Air or Water - he manipulated the stream of the Power in it's most pure form to accomplish this. This in it's most basic sense is all a "weave" is - a shape or energy pattern that needs to be modulated in a certain way in order to obtain a particular effect. However, the important thing to keep in mind is that the elemental flows tend to be connected to physical or biological matter - channeling pure saidin or saidar doesn't really have an effect on the physical world. Thus while Rand and Nynaeve were using the Choedan Kal, every channeler in the world felt what could only be immense volumes of saidin and saidar being drawn somewhere, but at the scene itself, the two halves of the One Power were only acting on each other, not on the surroundings. In fact, you'll notice that the vortex somewhat resembling a mushroom cloud that formed and collapsed at the end was formed because the taint was being pushed through Shadar Logoth, not through any weave or effect triggered directly by saidin or saidar.
I seem to recall a number of ter’angreal that require the use of the One Power to be activated – but never a naked “flow.” Almost always, they’re activated by a flow of spirit.
IIRC every ter'angreal is activated in a different way, and sometimes with a different flow. There were ter'angreal that Elayne was studying that you needed to direct Fire into in a certain way, for example, as the other flows did not do anything.
Going further, I might even chance to say that “a flow” is more accurately identified as a combination of threads – not necessarily of different elements. For example, it could be that “flow” is a term used to identify something that is greater than “a thread” (a single string with an elemental identity) and less than “a weave” (a combination of flows that are woven carefully together to achieve a greater magical effect.)
This could be the reason that you see flows identified in a neutral fashion, or associated with a single or multiple elemental identities. If my theory were correct, several threads of air wrapped together into a cable would constitute “a flow” – but so would a series of threads of air and fire.
I don't think so, mainly because the descriptions are pretty clear IMO - Asmodean's first trap for Rand in Rhuidean, for example, were razor sharp flows of Air, that were so minute you could barely see them. A flow and a thread seem to be the same thing. Indeed, when Aes Sedai channel a flow of Fire into tea to warm it, that term is still used. I think if there is any disctinction to be made, it would be that the word "flow" might be used to indicate active channeling, while a thread might be the identifier used when tying off a weave, and even then the terms are interchangeable (as you note below).
Sadly, I think RJ might use the words “flow” and “thread” a little too interchangeably for that theory to hold weight, but that doesn’t mean that the intent was never there. As you said yourself, RJ is a very wordy man. The words “flow” and “thread” may have been used to promote word variation, but I think it’s still worth noting that my theory might very well constitute the “text-book definition” of thread and flow.
When I first finished reading the series, I had very strong beliefs about the way that things worked. Many of these beliefs were often reinforced by message board role-playing, chat-based role-playing, or tabletop role-playing games with various interpretations of the system.
This is the way I used to imagine the Five Powers and the True Source.
<I>As you embrace the source, you become more in-tune with your surroundings. Your senses become heightened, and you can feel the radiance of the One Power inside of you. Whether this radiance is born from the adrenaline rush of a fight for your life or from the overwhelming ecstasy of surrender depends on your gender, but in the end, the result is the same. How much of that radiance you pull inside of yourself is a representation of your “Magnitude” (ie: the sheer volume you can hold). If you draw too much, you can burn yourself out or die, but if you draw too little you know you’ll only be teasing yourself, so you must always be aware of how much is stored within you.
If concentrate, you can see that somewhere between you and the Power are five spools of thread. The white spool is spirit, the green spool is earth, the red spool is fire, the yellow spool is air, and the blue spool is water. If you have an “affinity” for one of these spools, it comes away so easily that you don’t even have to think. If you have “little to no ability” with the spool, it fights you at every turn and exhausts you while you try and guide/force it to your will. </I>
Somehow this belief got a little shaken up when I started reading the series a second time. I’ve seen so many other systems that I’ve begun to doubt myself. Many people rate channelers strengths in each of the Five Powers as if it were completely separate from everything else, and only treat their total strength as if it were an accumulation of these five separate strengths – but if you ask me, I think that sounds like bull.
The trouble comes when I start to think about what the difference is between “holding a vast reserve of the One Power” and “Channeling an enormous flow of the One Power” and whether or not having an “affinity” in one of the Five Powers allows you to channel more of it than you could if you hadn’t. The more and more I think about it, the more and more I begin to agree that there are points where the difference between a channelers dexterity, experience and practice and the magnitude of the power that she can work with without exhausting herself are invariably blurred.
Where I really start to get tripped up when I think of a channeler who can hold high volumes, but channel so weakly with one element that they can barely wield a thread. My only guess is that having a high “power level” allows said channeler to overcome that handicap with a great deal of practice, but makes it so that the element that she is impaired with will always exhaust her and cause more difficulty than it will with others.
Strangely speaking, the Forsaken are like uber-Aes Sedai (3rd Age Aes Sedai, that is), but we are daily meeting third-age channelers that are outstripping them and matching them in the most raw common channeling denominators which are individualized skills (also called Talents) and magnitude.
I don’t know that I’d say that a Talent is quite the same as an individualized skill. Wheel of Time d20 RPG classifies Talents the way D&D classifies “Schools of Magic” but I don’t think that’s right at all. A Talent can be composed of a truckload of different weaves, but when you really get down to the nitty gritty, I think that “Talents” are the weaves that a channeler knows how to channel based on instinct alone, as well as a general representation of aptitude for channeling within a specific purview.
For example, some people are very good at drawing and sketching, so much that they hardly require any guidance at all, and when they receive instruction they only get better. It’s the same with Talents. Some people just naturally know which weaves will produce an effect similar to Compulsion, or which flows they need to thread together for Healing, and when they’re taught how these weaves are supposed to be done, they catch on much more quickly than people who have no Talent.
In some cases, we’ve seen that people who have little or no Talent for a particular purview can still do a number of things that fall under it. There does not seem to be a “Talent” for throwing fireballs, summoning lightning bolts out of a clear blue sky, or wielding razor sharp cable-thick flows of air, but channelers do these things all the time in the World of the Wheel. Likewise, someone who has no Talent in Healing can still heal a person, but the act requires a great deal of focus and concentration – it can never be done “without thought.”
The thing is, some Talents have a dozen different departments. Take Illusion, for example. Illusion covers everything from the Mirror of Mists to Invisibility – but some people have a Talent for Illusion. Delving is considered an integral part of Healing – but that’s a separate weave entirely. For that matter, just about everything that can be done to the body can be related to Healing in some way, but someone who possesses a Talent in Healing doesn’t necessarily know more than a handful of things.
Worse yet, it seems that Talents trip things up even more – you could even go as far as to say that Talents themselves have strengths! Isn’t Nynaeve a more “Talented” Healer than most of her Ajah? You could argue that her incredible Talent for Healing was what allowed her to discover how to restore a subject that had previously been severed from the source.
I’d really like to keep this thread going. If you enjoy this sort of banter, you may be able to help me flesh out my system (even if you’re not much of a number cruncher; we can take it from a more philosophical stance and leave the numbers out, if you want.) If you are more of a numbers person, so much the better, because I could really use some help. I have ideas, but the best way to express them would be in terms that tabletop role-players could understand.