DeSchedule is a smartphone app described in Nameless and Accursed. Here's its magic:
So... if the phone has DeSchedule installed, then anyone who has something like administrator creds for the app can achieve a sympathetic connection with the phone. Then they can use that connection to cast Prophecy or similar and it will reveal things in the future of the person who has the phone? And the DeSchedule system somehow automates this as the secret sauce of its predictive scheduling function?
I have an interest in the idea of magical computer programs, but Mage's rules don't seem well set-up to support them because it's trivial and cheap to duplicate a computer program but difficult and expensive to duplicate an enhanced or imbued item. This is probably why the examples of magical computer systems aside from DeSchedule have all dealt with enchanting pieces of computer hardware that happen to run some software too.(e.g. Data Hog from SoS). It's a little awkward because it seems like Matter is as good or better a fit than Forces for that kind of thing; Matter has spells defined already that deal with electronic devices. It would be nice to be able to enchant a computer program itself, which physically is a particular configuration of electromagnetic forces that could manifest on a variety of different devices.
I'd like to hear your conjectures about how something like DeSchedule works in terms of the game system (basically, how could player character mages do something similar) and beyond that how "magical" computer programs can work in general. I'll admit that my intuition is that DeSchedule is a "Rule of Cool" thing that doesn't really work according to the published rules and STs are on their own with houseruling in similar sorts of things.
Phemonoe hides just enough High Speech in the code so that it serves as a sympathetic tap anyone with the requisite skill (and appropriate permissions, or a way to convincingly fake them) can use to predict events anywhere in the proximity of the phone hosting DeSchedule.
I have an interest in the idea of magical computer programs, but Mage's rules don't seem well set-up to support them because it's trivial and cheap to duplicate a computer program but difficult and expensive to duplicate an enhanced or imbued item. This is probably why the examples of magical computer systems aside from DeSchedule have all dealt with enchanting pieces of computer hardware that happen to run some software too.(e.g. Data Hog from SoS). It's a little awkward because it seems like Matter is as good or better a fit than Forces for that kind of thing; Matter has spells defined already that deal with electronic devices. It would be nice to be able to enchant a computer program itself, which physically is a particular configuration of electromagnetic forces that could manifest on a variety of different devices.
I'd like to hear your conjectures about how something like DeSchedule works in terms of the game system (basically, how could player character mages do something similar) and beyond that how "magical" computer programs can work in general. I'll admit that my intuition is that DeSchedule is a "Rule of Cool" thing that doesn't really work according to the published rules and STs are on their own with houseruling in similar sorts of things.
Comment