Re: Regular Day-Night - proposed SJ spell

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Dreamer wrote:

>>> This spell is useless and will not work anywhere where the
>>> day-night cycle is between forty-eight hours long and twelve
>>> hours long.
>>
>> And why not? That is pretty arbitrary.
>
> The reason for that is that this spell produces a 'regular' 24-hr
> day, and those times are half that day length, and double it, so
> they are too close to 'regular' be able to be altered.

But shouldn't it be easier to affect a small change rather than a big 
change? Say, make the days 10 minutes shorter should be easier than halve 
them. And if you use the spell over an extended period of time you'd have 
to maintain the artificial day/night most of 24x7 anyway becuase the local 
days will quickly be out of sync with your desired 12/12 schedule.


>> I still think such a spell serves no purpose in the first place.
>
> Plants from Maj will expect to live and grow in a Maj-like day.
>
> Try and grow them on Selene and you have 14-days of sunlight,
> which they might be able to tolerate, followed by 14-days of
> night, where they will likely have to become nearly completely
> dormant, or die.
>
> Are you claiming that in some way this being a SJ universe will
> mean that this is not a problem?  I'm afraid that I don't follow
> your logic...
>
> Another application would be somewhere where there is very far
> from enough sunlight, and you open a continuous portal to the
> elemental plane of fire, to act as an artificial sun.  You may
> not want to keep opening and closing this portal, to provide day
> and night, so you use this spell as well.

Well I have a couple objections. One is that I don't see why anybody would 
need to change the day/night cycle. So the plants from your main world 
won't grow. Big deal - import food. You have a huge agricultural society 
just in front of your door.

If you don't get along with them or do not have enough transport capacity, 
you could use native plants. And I am not a botanist, but I do not see why 
plants shouldn't be able to thrive in an altered day/night cycle. Granted, 
it might take breeding for that trait, but you can still rationalize it. 
If all else fails, magically altering the wheat might be more convincing 
than changing the day/night cycle via a spell.

The second objection is that you don't really need to come up with a game 
mechanic. GM's fiat works wonders. But, okay, I can see how working it out 
might help, especially if the players ever want to set up their own 
colonies, and of course it'd be nice to have new spells because we don't 
have enough already.

Even then the spell is still out of whack with what's around. The daylight 
spell lasts for 10min/level and covers a 60 ft area. It's level 3. "Widen 
Spell" (the feat) increases that area by 100% but increases the spell 
level by 3. Now compare that with your spell, and it simply doesn't fit. 
The purely artificial restriction that makes it unusable on the main world 
is just an obvious hack.

If it is important enough that your colony has an area covered by a 
"normal" day/night cycle, you could always enchant a number of 
things, say, little crystall balls, with the daylight spell and put 
permanency on them. Mount them on the ceiling. Provides plenty of light 
for the day. Then, when nightfall is required, you put those little 
crystal balls into leather bags. Done. No new spells needed. You could 
even "automate" it or remotely control it by using a mechanism similar to 
window curtains. To maximize utilization of those light-spheres, the farms 
would be in roughly hemnispherical caves where you can grow things on the 
walls too (relatively easy in a lighter gravity), and you'd have many 
small farms instead of huge fields, but that's okay in my eyes; it shows 
you're on an alien world and not just outside Adventurersdale (and over 
time, when enough light-spheres get enchanted, you COULD have huge 
complexes of those farms too).

Or you could just have your moon rotate faster, since you are just 
building your setting anyway.



- Nils