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Impractical Applications (Changing and Communication)

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One of the things that most interested me about the idea of certain types of communication as game-changing is its near-ubiquity in the games I play in with my primary group. If it doesn’t come naturally, we try to arrange it; I had one character who took on magical abilities she never even got to use just so she could telepathically link with her teammates when the situation required it, which the situation almost always did.

The primary example of this is in my game, with what my group calls “the links”. They’re a Type Yes communicator: telepathic, therefore hard to detect, and with apparently unlimited range. Most sane GMs probably wouldn’t want anything to do with them. Fortunately, I’m not a very sane GM, and the things provide me with hours of entertainment. (If nothing else, because the group is prone to being very snarky where their opponents can’t hear.)

They’re not without issues. I lose a certain amount of suspense from the group’s ability to check in with anyone who has one of the things anywhere, since they give them to a lot of their friends. Every now and then, things do turn into telepathic planning sessions, in ways that can’t just be worked around by having a snarky NPC toss a lampshade on it. Splitting the party… really doesn’t mean much. But they aren’t without advantages, either.

I’ve used them to kick off plots a few times. Yes, there are very few things that can happen in central locations (and particularly to their friends) that the group isn’t almost instantly aware of, because they have friends with the silly things everywhere. On the other hand, that does mean that I can kick off a plot in the Celestial City when the group is out in a glorified architectural iceberg in the middle of nowhere. Or kick off plots based on the realization that someone’s been gone too long when it’s only been a day or two.

Then there are complications. What happens when the group adds a new member who isn’t in the relay? I’ve actually gotten kind of tired of that one, because it happens a lot. Read: every time we recruit a new player or two. Mostly, this involves a lot of switching devices between people.

What happens when people start Knowing about the devices? Actually, not too much. Yet. The group’s pretty good at hiding the things, mind you, covering their mental tactical efforts with small talk or relevant questions. But there are a few people who know, for various reasons—and mostly, they haven’t done anything. Yet. They’re semi-allies, after all. But they know.

My favorite trick, though, is toying with the devices getting jammed or hacked. We’ve had one really powerful entity who managed to detect the things pretty straightforwardly (to be fair, he had a History with their maker), we’ve had several cases of people ending up in places where the service didn’t reach due to magical wards, and there was the one time when Luath was modifying his, went into a chaos zone and started spouting seemingly random (his player actually had a Wikipedia-based algorithm) words that had nothing to do with anything over the link. And every now and then I’ve gotten to take advantage of utter coincidence to make them think somebody knew more about their devices than they actually did.

The links. Game-changer? Definitely. Mistake? Maybe. Fun and useful on both sides of the screen? Yep!


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