Re: exposure difficulties

From: Steven White <fringe_worthy_at_...>
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 18:41:27 -0000

> > I wrote:
> > >
> > > I saw that surviving full winter in Dragon Pass is 5w3 and
> > > Molten Iron is 10w4 (or something like that, my book is at
> > > home). That seems kinda close to me. Calling Carmania 12w3
> > > and Valind's Glacier 18w3 just don't seem fair. They are both
> > > much colder than Dragon Pass. But I don't think that either
> > > of them compare to molten metal. Am I getting wrapped
> > > up in details again? It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
>
> First comment: I screwed up those numbers, they should all be a
> magnitude higher.But my point was not the absolute values,just the
> delta between Dragon Pass and molten iron doesn't seem far enough.

I think part of the idea is that the difficulty is high enough that you're doomed.

But.... Certain difficult things are much easier to augment yourself to resist....

So frankly, if I grab you off the street, wrap a hood around your head, Brazil style, and drag you off, either tossing you out into a Dragon Pass Winter, or a basin of molten steel.... You'd dead, dead, dead, dead. (You're warm in both case. Well, at least until the Trollkins visits the outhouse)

Now... Surviving your winter at 10w3 is very hard to do. Until you start bringing in augments like warm steed +10, huge tracks of harvested grain +20, friends nearby to watch for mauranding trolls +5, smoke house filled with deer +5. Frankly... you've spent the other 6 months doing the equivalent of a "survive winter" ritual. And a number of Orlanthi don't. Or they survive unhappily. "We don't talk about Grandma, but she'll always be with us."

Now there are a couple augments you can do against molten iron. but a +3 resist pain isn't going to take you far. But it should be possible for some extreme characters (My uber smith... Tongs are for weakling!)

So don't just consider the difficulty; consider how easy it is to augment in order to handle that difficulty. Winter, you can augment to. So you can do winter, with difficulty. Iron.. take a lot else. But you don't want to stick iron up to a difficulty where only Orlanth (I have a big ton^H^H^H^Hw9 hah!) can reach. Mr Uber Smith, with his great secrets, should be able to do it.

And Carmania? Maybe you have smaller family groups and such.... Winter is maybe not difficult for the Inuit as it is for those french that came in large groups wondering what snow was. (Winter is for skating, right?)

That or the only People going to the nasty sections are prepared expeditions, and so they use a slightly different scale.

I think it's a mistake to try to have exact relative difficulties.

Steven White