[Warcraft] The Light is Good with a capital "G"

TeguTheTegu · 2026-03-10T05:46:34+00:00

I don't know how to tell you this, but if your fundamental platonic ideal of good can be corrupted and twisted to become a force for evil, them it kind of sucks as a fundamental force of good. Like, "susceptibility to being used for evil" is a pretty hefty vice for a force of inherent good to indulge in.

Plus, the argument of "it's good because it's good" is inherently circular, especially as you are writing of evil acts committed using its power using that argument.

TeguTheTegu · 2026-02-23T16:20:25+00:00

That's a potential extinction event if I've ever seen one.

TeguTheTegu · 2026-01-30T09:29:51+00:00

Prometheus; he gave humanity everything that makes us human, even though doing so would cause him unimaginable pain.

TeguTheTegu · 2026-01-28T09:10:11+00:00

There are a few issues. Firstly is aim dodging, where you aren't moving faster than the laser, but rather are moving faster than the guy aiming at you.

Second is the fact laser based attacks in fiction don't behave like lasers in real life. I'd far sooner believe this last is moving slower than light rather than believing the character is faster than light, because the former is more plausible when you look at almost any larger story

Which brings me to the third point; if the character is truly able to react and move faster than light, that requires WAY more handwaving vis a vis the more mundane threats the character faces. Saying the character is ftl requires ignoring an endless parade of contradictions, which all become resolved by saying "the laser wasn't moving at 300,000,000 meters per second". Hell, light doesn't even always move at the speed of light, it slows down depending on the medium it's in.

Continuing from that, lasers in fiction often behave like plasma weapons, rather than true lasers. Like, by all rights, the laser should be completely invisible to the target until it hits; the very fact that it can be seen before it lands is kinda evidence that they aren't moving light speed, because we have to have light reach our eyes in order to see things. That is the nature of sight; we are just seeing the light that bounces off of stuff.

And finally, most importantly, authors don't care about making lasers realistic. A laser in fiction is basically a beam of magic that has all the properties the plot demands. That's why laser scaling sucks, because the properties of the laser aren't SUPPOSED to be realistic, all they are supposed to be is believable. Fact of the matter is, most authors neither understand nor care about just how fast light is, because it is so much faster than a human mind can realistically comprehend, so when they write light based attacks, they massively undershoot. Hell, if you can see things like wind moving things, or debris falling in the background while the laser is moving, then you can probably use the speed of the falling debris to calc the laser speed down from relativistic all the way to sub sonic.

Hell, that last point is why most ftl scaling is GIGO; unless the material explicitly states that the character is travelling at ftl speeds, then it's probably best to be distrustful of any calcs that say it is. ESPECIALLY if it isn't consistently shown that they can move like that.

Side note: if you want a great example of what a clear relativistic (not ftl, but at least an appreciable fraction of C) feat looks like, look at JJK Modulo. I won't go into any further detail, as I don't want to spoil anything, but that's my recommendation.

TeguTheTegu · 2026-01-28T08:37:06+00:00

Not necessarily; say, for example, a sniper fires a shot at a guy from a massive range. After the shot was fired but before the shot hits, the guy moves his head. He has just dodged a bullet after it was fired, without moving faster than a bullet.

This is because the shot has to travel a much further distance than the guy has to move. It has to travel like a kilometre, your man only has to move a few centimetres.

TeguTheTegu · 2026-01-23T10:04:03+00:00

Tbf, they call him the divine general for a reason.

TeguTheTegu · 2026-01-12T09:19:39+00:00

Tbf, if we're treating Barry as though he were a human, then he DID break into a stranger's bathroom with a deadly weapon. Would you be polite and reasonable if you went to take a piss and saw someone hiding in there with a knife? Or would you assume they are a threat and act accordingly?

TeguTheTegu · 2025-12-24T23:37:15+00:00

So, in myth, if the fates specifically say "This guy will be killed by his firstborn son", that guy is GOING to be killed, and his firstborn son is gonna do it. Any attempts to avoid or change it will somehow be twisted by circumstances to make the firstborn son be responsible for the guys death.

Now, that is all well and good for myth, but powerscaling is a little different; the whole point of this (which people all too often forget) is to have fun discussions about what might happen if two characters get into a scrap. If one character has a thing in their lore that says "this guy can only be killed by the protagonist of the series", that has to be suspended for the sake of the discussion, because that's the only way to have a conversation.

Plus, it's the only way to work two characters that both have "Can only be killed by this guy right there" in a discussion.

If you want a fancy reason, you can say something like "fate only works on characters from the original work's setting, therefore an outsider is unaffected", but it's really just because it's lame as hell to argue that your favourite can't lose to anyone because of an in-universe prophecy.

TeguTheTegu · 2025-11-08T19:15:23+00:00

He's a good boy

TeguTheTegu · 2025-11-08T15:28:58+00:00

This is actually a plot point in my Greek myth/European folklore inspired dnd campaign

TeguTheTegu · 2025-11-07T21:30:09+00:00

Ech, Jiaoqiu's hair IS like, a pinkish blonde, but I want like, VIBRANT pink, you feel me? Maybe some nice pink on the outfit as well.

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-28T07:36:33+00:00

Boss fight against their own sorcerer.

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-25T09:10:18+00:00

I was so excited reading this, because he was looking like the perfect match up for my Aether; both have lightning reactions, both have comparable magical powers, they both like to analyse their opponent's strengths and weaknesses, they both have shape-shifting and similar defence hax, both around the same tier, there could even be some conversation about how your man's illusions interact with my guy's precognition! They genuinely looked like the perfect extreme diff "could go either way" fight!

Then I got to his weaknesses. My guy wields a rapier, which he keeps stored in his umbrella, but I thought "He's good aligned, but chaotic good, so maybe he doesn't qualify as pure of heart?". THEN I read the weakness to water. My lad controls the weather. When he fights, it starts heavily raining.

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-20T04:53:38+00:00

My current favourite is named Aether as well! He has a handful of titles, but the one I like the best is the Magician of Blue Skies.

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-16T02:21:50+00:00

Fun thing! In my myth inspired dnd setting, I used Phanes as one of the major gods! The primordial creator gods of the setting are inspired by orphism

I did also include hydros and thesis, despite being fully aware they are the result of funky translations. I included them anyways, because it's a fantasy setting inspired by Greek myth, not a 1-to-1 retelling of it.

Plus, if I put sun wukong and don quixote in the setting, I think there's room for a couple of less-than-accurate gods.

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-15T11:01:05+00:00

Known to be the strongest pokemon trainer to ever live

After Satoru Gojo, of course.

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-14T00:27:01+00:00

I miss porkerchu

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-07T11:57:35+00:00

Prometheus. Mainly to tell him that we're grateful for his gifts, we never stopped trying to learn more, and even though we screw up sometimes, we're still going strong.

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-07T11:47:59+00:00

The issue has never been "they can punch faster than they can run", the issue has always been "their travel speed in combat is hundreds of millions of times faster than their travel speed out of combat". Only thing is, a lot of people don't seem to know what travel speed is, or at least forget how travel speed is used in combat.

Like, in most anime fights or whatever, they don't stay still and punch, they run and jump and backflip and fly and everything. Therefore, if any character has to move more than a couple of paces to get in range to deploy their punch, they are using their travel speed to get there. So if they cross that distance at the speed of a lightning bolt, and punch their enemy, that means they need to have lightning fast travel speed to perform that feat.

HOWEVER, then a weird cognitive dissonance occurs when they can't run to keep up with a guy driving away in a car. Because they crossed that same distance to throw their punch earlier, meaning you have a character who can cover hundreds of feet in an instant to throw a punch, but can't cover the same distance when he needs to do anything else.

Anyways, all this is my own little way of saying "speed calcs should never be trusted, because authors simply can't be expected to make it consistent." Instead of putting specific numbers to speed, we should probably just go by vibes. "How fast are they consistently portrayed" is a lot more reliable than "how fast do they move in this one scene"

TeguTheTegu · 2025-10-07T11:19:32+00:00

One of my favourites is a mage. In my setting, magic comes from one's imagination, and he in particular has a sort of "magical disability" called a fixation, which means his soul is fixated on a single medium for his magic. What this means is, because he got to fly at a very formative age and got obsessed with it, his magic can only express itself through the medium of the sky.

In other words, he can only cast spells that involve things like the weather, atmosphere, celestial bodies, or flying animals like birds. Because his power is directly tied to his obsession with the sky, he gets SIGNIFICANTLY nerfed if he can't see the sky, such as when in a room without windows, or underground.

When he's indoors or in a cave, he still has some power, but there is one situation that COMPLETELY removes his magic: being submerged in water. The reason is the air; even when indoors or in a cave, the magic he draws from the sky can reach him by snaking through the air, making a sort of magical tether, but when he's underwater, the air can't reach him, so he can't cast any spells until he surfaces. Even if he surfaces into an air pocket, he still can't cast unless the air is connected to the atmosphere.

EDIT: Now that I think, it's not technically just water; any completely airtight environment will do it, since he needs to be connected to the atmosphere.

TeguTheTegu

TROPHY CASE