James Walker wrote:
Question for GM's - how many of your PC's use watches?
Not something your ever thought about? Nor had I, until it struck me:
When a Celestial changes or leaves their Vessel, it stays unchanging: you
got it, the watch isn't ticking. Sure, that isn't a major problem when
they're leaving Earth for an extended period of time, no more than when
flying around the globe, it'll obviously need changing. But - if they go
Celestial for short periods of time, say for Celestial combat, to get into
locked buildings, search sewers etc, they're watches will be a few minutes
behind; not long, true - just long enough to miss that flight, or bus, or
appointment...
Walter Milliken wrote:
There are a number of variants of this that we've played with a bit,
including the "Malakite bomb": you start with a Malakite with a cheap spare
vessel. Add a good-sized bomb in a backpack or whatever. The Malakite
turns on the bomb's timer, waits for it to count down close to zero,
and then switches to his primary vessel, suspending the countdown and
concealing the bomb.
The next time he's surrounded by demons that he can't otherwise cope with,
he simply switches vessels....
This is probably a Windy trick, mostly.
Oh, a note for the Jeanites out there: there are a few timing based devices
that will be very messed up by "gaps" in time. The one that immediately
comes to mind is a credit-card-sized device called a "SecurID", which
is used by some companies (including the one I work for) as a way of
generating one-time passwords to get through the company's firewall.
SecurID cards are basically digital watches, whose time value is encrypted
before display. They depend on the fact that time advances at approximately
the same rate for the card as for the firewall password-validation system.
Oops.
Any computer running the Network Time Protocol (which includes Macs running
OS X) will also get very confused, since NTP estimates the computer clock's
drift rate relative to the time references, and generates a correction
factor. The result would be a computer clock that runs very fast for a while
to compensate for each "gap". (Probably the Jeanites have hacked their NTP
implementations to fix this, though. Or they just have a GPS receiver in
their machines.)
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