CryoZenith

Here's my bucket list. Although arguably it wouldn't be a bucket list as it would (ideally) prevent my own death.

• Worldhop to Nalthis, get very rich.
• Buy enough Breath to become immune to aging.
• Retire in Celebrant and chill.

2 minutes ago, Bzhydack said:

Magic worked differently on Ashyn when Heralds where there.

It'd be weird for it to have been so different that microbes weren't involved at all. But I guess it's plausible, so I'll cede here.

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In fact, you dont even need microscope to tell apart blood types.

This goes back to scientific progress being a hard problem and things not necessarily being discovered in the most likely order.

Like, if we're considering real life. Blood types were discovered in the 20th century, *way* after microscopes were invented. Even though, yes, their discovery doesn't require microscopes. You can do the ABO test pretty easily without much tech.

Yep. The Heralds come from Ashyn, and anyone who spent time in Ashyn knows about microorganisms for obvious reasons.

Speaking of Rosharan technology, keep in mind that they have clocks. That's huge. And indoor non-fire lighting. They're gonna do fine technology wise. Also once more Elsecallers bond spren they will be able to go to Shadesmar and do tech trades with the worldhoppers.

35 minutes ago, Ixthos said:

Knights themselves must be cracked for a spren to weave into their spiritweb, but Lopen shows you don't have to have that, yet it makes the process easier. 

I mostly think of "you need a damaged spiritweb to use arcane arts" as a generally useful heuristic rather than as a Law of PhysicsTM. We have at least one example already of a magic systems where (seemingly) no spirit web damage needs to happen before you can do stuff, forgery (it's not like allomancy where you need the gene actively snapped, it seems to work off being born in MaiPon and then just studying the thing). So most people who can use some form of arcana do have a cracked spiritweb, and it does help, but it's not as strict a requirement as we've been lead to believe.

Either that or *everyone* naturally has sufficient microcracks to use at least minor magics (sort of in the vein of how IRL you can say "everyone is subconsciously racist to some degree") but that leads us in the same direction, instrumentally.

Favorite quote: "I am a stick" - Words of Radiance, Stick

Second favorite quote: "I am a stick" - Words of Radiance, Stick

1 minute ago, Ixthos said:

Wit assumed that whatever happened everything would be fine, that either way Rayse would be trapped, but then realised there was a loophole

Ooh, *that's* what I was forgetting about. Good catch.

I mean, does it? He's still stuck on Roshar. The contest specifically doesn't address his ability to leave the system, right?

1 hour ago, Ixthos said:

It certainly could go either way, though I'm hoping we get a slightly bittersweet ending, as it can't just end on a down note or fans will demand the sequel series immediately. Maybe we can still get both.

Well, Todium is not Rayse. Todium is a *relatively* reasonable lad. Him winning the contest of champions doesn't spell doom for Rosharan humans or anything, just doom for Dalinar.

This thread reminded me of this very interesting WoB.

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Avivsm

Can a Nahel Bond be stagnant because of a spren's inability to progress? If the spren has a character deficiency they cannot break through or something?

Brandon Sanderson

Can a spren cause the Nahel Bond to not progress? This is possible. Not very common but it is possible.

Tel Aviv Signing (Oct. 18, 2019)

It really feels like, if it is the bondsmith 4th ideal, "I accept that some oaths must be broken, if they are no longer honorable" is a concept that the Stormfather is not ready to accept yet. He seems like the type of person who has a hard time stomaching that level of flexibility, given how he reacted to the Recreance, for example.

The concept of hiding something out of guilt feels very un-Truthwatchery. Especially for a high Oath level Truthwatcher. In fact, it feels so un-Truthwatchery that it feels oathbreakish.

The stigma associated with telling the future exists because different shards have different levels of future sight. Honor is particularly bad at it, and Odium is decent, so all instances of future sight (on Roshar) could be rule-of-thumb attributed to "being of the enemy" (in-canon wording) with some measure of reliability. I don't think it's necessary to posit that regular standard radiants can do it, of any order, for that cultural taboo to emerge.

1 hour ago, Nnatel said:

Does somebody agree? Or maybe you can add more emotions or come up with a Shard that goes well with happiness?

I don't know if I agree with 100% of your perspective (motivation/drive is arguably not an emotion, and curiosity feels more like an Invention thing than a Whimsy thing; there's also the WoB where Brandon said that Hoid would be a horrible vessel for Whimsy, and Hoid is a pretty curious lad) but the WoB about Devotion is definitely relevant here, that's a pretty safe clue that there's some emotion to the Intent of Devotion, so not all emotion is of Odium.

This makes me feel even more confident in my hypothesis that when Odium was telling Dalinar that he understands human emotion to a greater extent than other shards, he was talking about Honor and Cultivation, not about all other 15.

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the temperature of the fluid you're moving through negligible for the thermal effects of drag? I mean, sure, you are converting kinetic energy into heat through friction, and that heat will dissipate in the mist until it reaches thermal equilibrium, so the mist being colder will mean you heat up less and cool down faster, but that entire equilibration takes minutes, you're still spending enough time at a temperature that human skin cannot survive.

So either Marasi was tapping something in addition to f-steel, or Brandon used imprecise language and f-steel *does* confer some friction resistance, just not a ton. Both of those hypotheses seem more reasonable than the environment actually mattering.

23 minutes ago, Nameless said:

Also, @Frustration, you seem to be leaving out steel's protective effect in your calculations. We can safely assume that F-steel protects you from harm for higher than the normal speed limit without burning up. Marasi didn't cause fire around her when she went supersonic, and I don't think that tapping any feruchemical store would prevent that, so... we can assume that supersonic without burning up is easily possible.

How so? Brandon explicitly said that the protective effects of F-steel are about internal damage from high G acceleration, not about external damage from surface drag, and that surface drag can explicitly burn you up. What Marasi did was special.

1. Dalinar

Why: I think Todium is highly competent and clever and it would narratively make a nice contrast to see a Todium scheme succeed right after we've seen multiple Rayse schemes fail.

How: Losing the duel of champions.

2. Kaladin

Why: I think it has a nice rhythm to it to have his character arc move from "I want to die." to "I found meaning in life and want to live." to "I still love life and find it meaningful, but in this particular situation I will sacrifice myself because it is the right thing to do."

How: Overwhelmed by multiple high-Ideal skybreakers while protecting Urithiru.

3. Ishar

Why: This is actually tied in to Dalinar failing to win the duel of champions. Ishar being too dangerous and insane to keep alive, but also the one source of information on bondsmith powers that could help out Dalinar, but the context being such that it would be, unfortunately, too dangerous to make peace with him.

How: Nightblood go stabby stabby.

4. Venli (this is my only prediction which is a joke, I wouldn't bet money on this, but it would bring personal satisfaction)

Why: I don't like Venli.

How: Stray nonmagical arrow in the back, not even intended to hit her, fired accidentally by someone on her side.

22 minutes ago, Benkinsky said:

2. Rayse Odium calls himself Passion and sais that that's what they are. Passion. Emotion. He even tells Dalinar that he's the only one of the gods that understands human emotion, that knows it.

The question here is whether Rayse is talking relative to all the other Shards, or only relative to Honor and Cultivation. So if Odium says that he understands human emotion to a vastly superior extent than Honor and Cultivation, that's a pretty plausible and easy buy. If instead he says he understands human emotion to a vastly superior extent to all the other 15 Shards... that is genuinely interesting, yes.

It's been years since I read that Dalinar-Rayse sequence so I can't remember the exact wording to say which of the two was more strongly implied, but I will reread and return to you.

Sure, that's true. It would have to depend on how far the two combatants are relative to each other when the duel begins. If the distance you have to cover is large enough, then I can see you coming with enough time to react no matter how fast you're going. That's basically the principle of fighter plane dogfights, the speeds involved are often sonic but since the "battlefield" is miles across there's wiggle room. The question of "who would win a race when the racetrack is long between a fullborn and a skybreaker" is pretty trivial, the skybreaker wins every time. But that's different from the question of whether a fullborn can strike a skybreaker before the skybreaker even realizes what's happening at say a 30 foot distance.

Yeah, sonic speeds are roughly 760 mph, which would be 14 times more drag than 200 mph. But nothing in SA makes me think you actually *need* to be that fast to take radiants by surprise.

6 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Doesn't it really hurt to go from that to spread eagle?

I don't think I ever went above 130 mph while skydiving, but if going horizontal there feels fine, which it does, I would assume 200 mph is at least not debilitating (but yes, I am aware that at those speeds surface drag scales with the square of the speed, not linearly).

25 minutes ago, Bzhydack said:

Or maybe simply speed isnt large enough to burn Feruchemist yet. I know we have some physicists on the forum, can some of them run the math? I dont remember who they were, @therunner if im not mistaken?

Disclaimer, not a physicist, but the maximum velocity of a human free-falling head-first with aerodynamic clothing is around 200 mph. We know, empirically, that moving at 200 mph is not enough to damage your skin. So a Fullborn can move at speeds around 200 mph without burning, even if tapping speed doesn't protect you from friction drag at all. Is 200 mph fast enough to defeat a radiant's reaction speed (which, as far as we know about radiant powers, is not superhuman, or at the very least, is not orders of magnitude superhuman)? Probably yes, since 200 mph is close to the speed of crossbow bolts.

On 06.02.2022 at 10:52 AM, Ixthos said:

From Arcanum Unbounded:

  Reveal hidden contents

Giving water to the tiny plant causes a chain reaction of sudden growth, energy, and Realmic transition. Certain people can control this reaction, using the water from their own bodies to forge a brief Cognitive bond. They can draw Investiture (in very small amounts) directly from the Spiritual Realm, and use that to control the sand.
Though the effect is dramatic, the actual power used is quite small. This is a magic more about finesse than raw strength.

From what I know about Dungeons and Dragons their magic is based on study and then when the magic is used they forget the spell and have to study it again. That could work for Invention (or any of the "blue" Shards Brandon mentioned haven't been seen yet, when someone asked him about MtG colours for the Shards). Are Sorcerers the ones who can just cast any spell without having to prepare it?

So, as a disclaimer, I haven't played any D&D edition past 3.5, so I don't know if this explanation got retconned later, but the way Wizards work in 3.5, is that what it means to prepare a spell is to mentally go through the chant required to cast it during the 1 hour spellbook study each morning, stop yourself when you're 95%-98% done, and what you're doing when you're actually casting the spell is completing the 5 to 2% left in the sequence. And then the spell is used up because it's deployed. So "forgetting" is not what's actually happening, it's a very loose analogy. A better analogy is that you're sitting at a workbench, with an instruction manual (spellbook) open in front of you, and constructing a grenade (fireball). And when you enter combat later in the day, all that's left for you to do is remove the pin in the grenade (complete the sequence) and throw it (aim the fireball).

Sorcerers on the other hand have a natural affinity for magic which wizards lack, and this allows them to intuitively and subconsciously shape the arcane magic without need for the "manual" chanting/tinkering of the grenade.

D&D tangent over; more to the point, I don't know if I would like it for Invention's magic system to be related to/reliant upon memory loss/needing to relearn things to reuse them. It just doesn't feel right.

On 07.02.2022 at 4:57 PM, HSuperLee said:

Now, that said, I understand that some people find these kind of discussions fun, but I'm just trying to point out that any conclusions drawn from them are barely even theoretical. If everyone is okay with that, alright. But we've have a lot of discussions like this on the forum, and I'd be a lying if I said I don't occasionally participate in them as well. I'm just hoping everyone realizes by now that they are endless.

I think that if 1v1 discussions like this are genuinely useless (from a practical/stats scaling perspective, ofc they can be fun) then Brandon has failed in a sense. I think, at its core, what differentiates hard magic fantasy from soft magic fantasy is that limitations should be clear enough that readers should be able to predict the outcome of a particular fight in advance without hindsight information, and only get it wrong because the characters employ unusual degrees of tactical cleverness. So, as it pertains here, I think there should exist such a thing as a "fact of the matter" as to whether fullborn are averagely stronger than 4th ideal radiants or not. That one of them would, indeed, win out over the other most of the time. It's like with chess. We say that a 2000 ELO player is stronger than a 1800 ELO player. Sure, the 2000 ELO player may have underslept the previous night, or they might have a hangover, or they might lag midgame and get flagged... nobody is denying any of those possibilities, but it still means something to say that the 2000 ELO player is stronger.

On 07.02.2022 at 5:11 PM, Quantus said:

Ah, ok you sold me, that is a pretty solid defence and attack.  A Lightweaver could probably match it if they were already in the Cognitive but the elsecaller just has to survive long enough to transition and then the Fullborn both cannot Reach them and cannot run away*.  Unless the fullborn is clever or precognitive enough to immediately compound the crap out of something to maintain their Investments (ideally flaring their Identity) the Elsecaller might even be able to Soulcast them directly by accessing their flame.

Hm, interesting. I never thought about that, but it makes sense. Normally you resist Investiture by having a lot of Investiture, but sometimes, specific arcanas have specific counters, and it makes sense realmatically that having more Identity would make you harder to soulcast. Good catch, I wonder if this will ever come up in a real fight, because it sounds really clever.

12 hours ago, Frustration said:

It was an idea that was floated, not everyone saw it as an agreement, Honor didn't.

This, pretty much. Honor's Intent isn't about taking up oaths. His Intent is about respecting the oaths you do accept to take up. If he never agreed to avoiding Investing into another Shard's world, then he's not breaking anything by doing so, oath or agreement.

6 hours ago, Kandrafish said:

(although, I give a lot of credit to Timbre)

Me too, which annoys me even more . Most Radiants we've seen so far (aside from 11 year old Shallan) attracted spren by already being virtuous, to some degree. Venli just... had nearly no redeeming qualities until Timbre started dragging her in the right direction. Again, don't get me wrong, it makes sense mechanically speaking because of Spiritual Connection reverse-causality (same as the Kaladin-Syl situation), but it's just another thing that feels unearned and grates me.

1 hour ago, Infinity Sliver said:

Damn,i am impressed that you remembered this and knew where to look for it

The funny thing is that I actually misremembered it. In my memory, in this discussion between Dalinar and Jasnah she mentions how Azir doesn't have slaves and are doing just fine. (well it's true that Azir doesn't have slaves, but that never happened, I found out on reread hahaha)

There's that whole WoB where Brandon says that some orders have more machiavellian interpretations of the First Ideal, and that Elsecallers are one of them. So I think this is less a case of individual human + spren interpretation and more a case of "because we're talking about members of this and that order". The First Ideal is probably relative, but not subjective.