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JackMann posted:I now want to write up a campaign where you're programmers/troubleshooters for a giant undead computer system, debugging per PublicOpinion's suggestion. Traveling through dark tunnels, fighting worms, viruses, and trojans sent by rival syscromancers. nimby posted:So what I'm taking away from this discussion is that an enterprising necromancer could found Intelligent Bone Machines and use his skeleton computers to store data in the cloud.
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Oct 5, 2015 13:26
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 06:42 |
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Siege weapon trajectory is thinking so small. Manage a kingdom's finances! Start running simulations! Investigate the mysteries of the Universe! It's the Information Age, but with Skeletons, and thus better!
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Oct 5, 2015 13:27
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Also, they're wizards, who don't explicitly need a reason to do anything. Why did they build a skeleton computer? To see if they could.
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Oct 5, 2015 13:28
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Magic (like p much everything) can be described with the right kind of math. This has been understood for hundreds of years, but it's always been relatively useless knowledge because the calculations necessary to do anything worthwhile would take years. Once you've got a the computing power to work with those equations, deconstructing existing spells and reconstructing them to be more powerful and efficient is trivial. Creating brand new spells is somewhat difficult, but really not a problem. The first thing that the compumancers did was to create cheaper, faster, more efficient skeletons. Computing power is now increasing exponentially. They were creating 256th level spells within 10 years. Within 20 years, 2048th level spells were commonplace. It's been mathematically proven that if you can get enough skeletons together, Nth level spells can be produced at will. And the skeleton computers keep getting smaller, cheaper, faster, more common. Portable. Wearable. Implantable. Skelularity is imminent. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Oct 5, 2015 |
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Oct 5, 2015 13:47
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And they'd let it run for centuries undisturbed, leaving only arcane scribblings on the wall for some enterprising adventurers to ignore as they carouse through the "dungeon" wrecking all efforts on finding the optimal parameters for the perfect cup of tea. This is also why early RPGs tended you to fight arrays of undead.
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Oct 5, 2015 13:48
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AlphaDog posted:Magic (like p much everything) can be described with the right kind of math. This has been understood for hundreds of years, but it's always been relatively useless knowledge because the calculations necessary to do anything worthwhile would take years. We need to ask the last question. RESPONSE: INSUFFICIENT SKELLINGTONS FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
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Oct 5, 2015 13:51
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Sage Grimm posted:This is also why early RPGs tended you to fight arrays of undead. Literal arrays. How fast would the computer run though? I am going assume that lifting a finger is at least a free action, so each skeleton can move once every six seconds. That strikes me as slow, but I'd love to see some math from someone who understands computers a lot better than me. Also: If I was a dick GM, the first thing I would do was to require spot checks of some kind every time a skeleton has to notice a change. Even with a lot of positive modifiers, one in twenty would fail, which would give the a terrible computer.
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Oct 5, 2015 14:14
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Build in enough skeletal redundancy, and you can make the failure probability as low as you like. 1/20 per operation is a pretty horrible failure rate. 1/1013 is a bit more tolerable, and only requires a single order of magnitude more skeletons.
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Oct 5, 2015 14:44
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BonHair posted:Literal arrays. Take 10 exists, though. I doubt it's more than a DC 10 check to see how many fingers someone is holding up 5 feet away. As for how fast it goes, you could easily make the argument that raising/lowering your hands/fingers is a free action, as is the passive Spot check. In that case, you can go through infinite cycles in six seconds, producing your result in constant time no matter how complex it is. If you have to take some sort of action, or other 1/round thing, then each skele-gate can only fire once per six seconds (possibly twice, if it's a move action equivalent), making it painfully slow.
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Oct 5, 2015 14:46
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It's not combat, the skeletons could Take 10, reducing your failure rate to zero. Now, if some rear end in a top hat adventurers come by and start knocking skelbits out of your array you'd start seeing failure cascades.
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Oct 5, 2015 14:48
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AlphaDog posted:And the skeleton computers keep getting smaller, cheaper, faster, more common. Portable. Wearable. "They all laughed when I created Animate Bedbug..."
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Oct 5, 2015 14:48
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Long ago the Precursors transcended the physical world through the miracle of skeleputing. In the millions of years since then new species have evolved, and their adventurers explore the giant necroframes where the skeletal logic gates still run the computations that sustain the Precursors' simulated afterlife. After too many of these skeletons are destroyed, the Precursors are forced to turn their attention back to the physical world, sending their armies of bonebots to squash your annoying civilizations.
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Oct 5, 2015 14:58
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Pfox posted:We need to ask the last question. Unfortunately, the Modrons bulldozed the Prime Material Plane to make room for a transethereal bypass mere hours before its great task was complete.
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Oct 5, 2015 15:13
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AlphaDog posted:Magic (like p much everything) can be described with the right kind of math. This has been understood for hundreds of years, but it's always been relatively useless knowledge because the calculations necessary to do anything worthwhile would take years.
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Oct 5, 2015 15:15
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BonHair posted:Literal arrays. AIUI, if it's a free action, you can do as many of them per round as you want. So any computation, no matter how complex, will take at most six seconds. Infinite computing power! No-one cares about multithreading or gate counts in this universe, since anything can be computed effectively instantly no matter how simple the computer is. (As far as I know, RAW doesn't care about lightspeed delays. If it does, you need to take that into account and speed is no longer infinite, just very fast, limited by the longest distance between two connected skeletons -- the critical path.) If it's a non-free action, skeleton->skeleton propagation delays are negligible (as long as no skeleton is more than six light-seconds from its inputs, the limiting factor is how fast the skeletons themselves can switch) and your IBM mainframe runs at 0.16Hz. Perhaps you can double this with Haste (I don't remember the rules)? In either case, massive parallelism becomes important. Here, increased transistor counts resulted in faster single-core processors for a long time; there, multicore computers with huge bus widths take off early, since there's no other way to speed things up. Human skeletons are rapidly discarded in favour of smaller options, ultimately settling on 8mm frog skeletons for the most advanced computers. Even with these improvements, interactive use remains an unattainable dream; you submit your job and get your answer back at best minutes (and more likely hours or days) later. Useful for finance, not so much for gaming.
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Oct 5, 2015 15:20
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Nessus posted:Are you telling me that, rules as written... I can get a skeleton inside of me? 
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Oct 5, 2015 15:21
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I don't remember how take 10 works, isn't there a time component to it? Isn't there also the thing about it being impossible to see objects far away? I definitely remember that you cannot see the moon in Pathfinder because the rules are stupid, but the same would go for skeletons just half a mile away. Still though, frog skeletons and clever placement solves this. Or possibly a gate/window opening second computer.
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Oct 5, 2015 15:30
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Pfox posted:We need to ask the last question. And then, at the end of all things, the grand deathtelligence said but a single sentence. Let there be Light(cantrip). BonHair posted:I don't remember how take 10 works, isn't there a time component to it? Taking 10 doesn't take any extra time, taking 20 does.
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Oct 5, 2015 15:30
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BonHair posted:I don't remember how take 10 works, isn't there a time component to it? Take 10 just requires you to not be threatened, it takes no extra time. There's a cumulative -1 to Spot/Perception checks per 10' of distance between two targets, though, so skeletons too far apart can't see each other.
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Oct 5, 2015 15:34
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BonHair posted:Also: If I was a dick GM, the first thing I would do was to require spot checks of some kind every time a skeleton has to notice a change. Even with a lot of positive modifiers, one in twenty would fail, which would give the a terrible computer. Actually, no, in many versions of D&D you don't fail skill checks on a natural 1. Keep it low enough, and the skeletons will always succeed.
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Oct 5, 2015 15:56
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ToxicFrog posted:AIUI, if it's a free action, you can do as many of them per round as you want. So any computation, no matter how complex, will take at most six seconds. Infinite computing power! No-one cares about multithreading or gate counts in this universe, since anything can be computed effectively instantly no matter how simple the computer is. (As far as I know, RAW doesn't care about lightspeed delays. If it does, you need to take that into account and speed is no longer infinite, just very fast, limited by the longest distance between two connected skeletons -- the critical path.) 
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Oct 5, 2015 16:27
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So, in 3.5, Barbarians don't have spot as a class skill. Seeing requires double effort. Yet they can learn how to make fantasy napalm and ye olde flash bangs with no penalty With Craft Alchemy, which they could take as a class skill.
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Oct 5, 2015 17:01
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In 3.5, Knowledge checks cannot be made untrained. Knowing about mundane animals is a DC 10+HD knowledge check. 99% of people in D&D have no idea what a chicken is. Knowing about humanoids is a Knowledge: Local check, so most people don't even know what a human is.
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Oct 5, 2015 17:11
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ToxicFrog posted:If it's a non-free action, skeleton->skeleton propagation delays are negligible (as long as no skeleton is more than six light-seconds from its inputs, the limiting factor is how fast the skeletons themselves can switch) and your IBM mainframe runs at 0.16Hz. Perhaps you can double this with Haste (I don't remember the rules)? In either case, massive parallelism becomes important. Here, increased transistor counts resulted in faster single-core processors for a long time; there, multicore computers with huge bus widths take off early, since there's no other way to speed things up. Human skeletons are rapidly discarded in favour of smaller options, ultimately settling on 8mm frog skeletons for the most advanced computers. Even with these improvements, interactive use remains an unattainable dream; you submit your job and get your answer back at best minutes (and more likely hours or days) later. Useful for finance, not so much for gaming. If you are playing 4E, you can increase calculation throughput by using Opportunity Attacks instead of reactions. Since you get one for every enemy turn, you can have another set of skeletons whose only job is to run through your circuitry, generating OAs. Then, you command the skelegates to either perform or not perform an OA based on whether the other two skelegates it observes also attacked or not (depending on the logic you want to implement). A skeleton has a base speed of 6, so every turn it can run for 16 squares ( (6 + 2) * 2). Assuming it runs down a straight line and provokes OAs from either side of it, it can activate 32 skelegates. This means that just to get the same throughput as traditional boneputers, you need ~3% more skeletons. However, each additional 3% doubles it's calculation speed. Also, you need to somehow negate the damage done by the skelegates, or tell them to make the attack, but intentionally miss.
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Oct 5, 2015 17:23
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Not phone posting, so here's some threads on the matter for whoever's still into Deep Rot. Original thread (Dated 4 years and 10 months ago): http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12936417/ Interesting bits: Equipping Skeletons with quills to act as a printer, using skulls rather than a whole skeleton to act as a single bit, achieving displays using a system of torches and lenses per skeleton, the equivalent number of skeletons to make a Quad Core desktop circa 2010 (40 Million), a skeleton based programming language quote:There are things present in the system I have not foreseen. For example, demiplane 0x10034881, layer 0x00018A54, skeleton 0xF0C5609D always shows value 0x0000000E, no matter of the calculations I do. I tried to trace the flow of information through that part of the Machine over the last centuries. The skeleton causes constant rewrites in data storage in demiplane 0xF003D811. First of all, I didn't know I had that much storage. Second of all, it's unused, besides that skeleton. It's overwritten with constant value: 0xDEADDEAD. Standard for unused memory. It's like a component was added without my direction. What am I looking at? The complexity of the Machine starts to approach my limits. Offshoot Thread before the original became stickied and was under threat of auto-sageing: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12939196/ Featuring Crawling Claws which are smaller and have a clearer command limit (15+Caster Level words in the command)
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Oct 5, 2015 17:30
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Kwyndig posted:computational necromancer guilds. AlphaDog posted:Intelligent Bone Machines These are the two finest phrases I've ever seen on something awful dot com. I am totally making a dungeon world adventure based around them.
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Oct 5, 2015 19:00
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ToxicFrog posted:AIUI, if it's a free action, you can do as many of them per round as you want. So any computation, no matter how complex, will take at most six seconds. Infinite computing power! No-one cares about multithreading or gate counts in this universe, since anything can be computed effectively instantly no matter how simple the computer is. (As far as I know, RAW doesn't care about lightspeed delays. If it does, you need to take that into account and speed is no longer infinite, just very fast, limited by the longest distance between two connected skeletons -- the critical path.) Really if you want the most efficient skeletal computing you need to cast Genesis. This gives you a small demiplane (180' radius per casting). The important part is that you can determine its traits, one of which is the flow of time. There is no stated limit, but the example given is six seconds in "real" time is one year inside the demiplane, so we can at least get a time ration in excess of five million to one. The only question is if the spell to control the undead runs on the caster's time (meaning a spell to control the skeletons would give many millenia of computing time per cast) or on the demiplane's time (which means you need a caster inside the demiplane to control them).
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Oct 5, 2015 19:11
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Xelkelvos posted:a skeleton based programming language Visual Bone++
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Oct 5, 2015 19:14
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I'm pretty sure there are ways to send information back in time in D&D. I know psionics has some - if nothing else, the save point trick has to have some gimmicky applications, as long as you can break a calculation down into steps that can be performed within its time limit. Now your skeleton computer is even faster, because it doesn't even have to do the work.
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Oct 5, 2015 19:17
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Comrade Koba posted:Visual Bone++ We program this in the Visual Spookio IDE, right?
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Oct 5, 2015 19:21
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Public Static TheEndlessVoidofDeath Skeletons(Inputs:Corpses)
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Oct 5, 2015 19:34
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Remember: Juju and JujuCrypt are different.
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Oct 5, 2015 19:36
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I feel like if you were going to put a gold value on setting up animate dead for however-many-thousand skeletons through however-many-hundred necromancers who will be voluntarily never making another skeleton again because they're at their limit, a place to store them (whether in a massive underground cavern or another plane), and a way to contact their controller(s) reliably and at long distances -- again, possibly in another plane -- every time you need an answer I feel like you could just pay for room, board, and a generous salary to a dozen living mathematicians and let 'em live on contract in that one item that's a portable pocket dimension mansion you can carry around, and still save a fortune. Labor and living expenses are the cheapest item in D&D.
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Oct 5, 2015 19:49
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But then you don't have a skellington computer.
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Oct 5, 2015 20:00
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Technically, you could make all the skeletons with a Lyre of Building, as they fall under the category "whatever", as long as your theoretical necromancers (you don't acutally NEED any, just the concept of them) are human*! *You could extroplate the Lyre to other races, but messing with its RAW at all is dangerously close to fixing the hilarity that is "or whatever" in the list of things it can make
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Oct 5, 2015 20:04
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ellbent posted:I feel like if you were going to put a gold value on setting up animate dead for however-many-thousand skeletons through however-many-hundred necromancers who will be voluntarily never making another skeleton again because they're at their limit, a place to store them (whether in a massive underground cavern or another plane), and a way to contact their controller(s) reliably and at long distances -- again, possibly in another plane -- every time you need an answer I feel like you could just pay for room, board, and a generous salary to a dozen living mathematicians and let 'em live on contract in that one item that's a portable pocket dimension mansion you can carry around, and still save a fortune. Labor and living expenses are the cheapest item in D&D. Yeah, but you couldn't use them to play Minecraft.
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Oct 5, 2015 20:04
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Instead of using actual necromancers, have some Artificers craft some items that cast the spell! Far more efficient use of your casters. The Skeleton Computer is awesome and deserves to exist. Also, it's a good gold sink to keep the latest wizarding scheme from breaking the economy.
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Oct 5, 2015 20:06
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You guys are just opposed to the industry competition offered by Mordenkainen's Research Park.
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Oct 5, 2015 20:12
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A normal computer can't have each individual bit grab a club and start smacking one's enemies. The skeleton computer can.
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Oct 5, 2015 20:13
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Plus humans have to eat, and sleep, and all sorts of stuff that interrupts their work. Skeletons don't.
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Oct 5, 2015 20:13
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