Quiconque

As I explained, ADoS, the "phrasing" that you called into question (you said "This seems to be phrased as a positive assertion") relied on interpreting part of my sentence without the rest of it (which you omitted when quoting it). Scraped together evidence is still evidence. Scraped together speculation is not. If Ess thinks his view is different from what I've understood, he can say so. Respectfully, I would appreciate it if you would stop trying to declare what I mean and what Ess means. Precision of phrasing has not been your friend in this thread. What you state here is completely different from what his last post says. If you want to declare what you think and argue for it, great. But right now it kind of feels like you're spitting from the peanut gallery. It's nonsense to suggest that there is a difference between a global principle about how to do something, and a specific action? Um.

Again, View B is not what I am arguing for. In this case the actual views are: View A: Information about a creation’s mind may survive absorption by a Shaper, and be passed on to a new creation made by that Shaper. View A-: View A is not supported by evidence. "Shapers can fly" is implausible, for the reasons you describe above, whether or not someone is proposing "Shapers cannot fly" as an alternative argument. The same thing is true (albeit less strongly) for your View A. Let's use the flying analogy. You wrote: "Flying is a method of movement, and the game does talk about how Shapers move about. It shows Shapers walking, and running, and riding on boats, and so on. Since the game shows these means of locomotion, but doesn't show flying, it seems fair to say that the latter methods of locomotion follow from the game, but that flying does not." (In fact, we could state this much more strongly -- it doesn't simply not follow, it's truly implausible, as there are so many situations where flying would be an easy and obvious solution to something, e.g., the 30 different bridge blockades that the PC and various NPCs have to deal with, rather than simply flying across 100 feet down the river.*) Well, your view A is -- actually, let's clarify your view A. You have not simply been arguing, as you state above, that this thing is theoretically possible under the laws of physics/magic of Geneforge. You have been arguing that shapers, in Geneforge, at least some of them, can actually do this thing. The capability View A suggests is one way Shapers can utilize their creations effectively and shape them as they desire. The game does talk about other ways that Shapers do these things.** It shows Shapers putting essence into their creations' stats; using techniques to shape creations in combat, or to shape creations that don't permatap the shaper's essence; creating new generations, varieties, and species of creations; using behavioral techniques, leadership, mental magic, and/or shaping to control or influence the way creations act; absorbing essence directly from creations; creating nutrients that nourish a creation's mind; creating canisters that reshape whoever uses them; creating Geneforges... the list goes on. Since the game shows these means of utilizing & shaping creations to fit shapers' needs, but doesn't show View A, it seems fair to say that the latter methods of doing so follow from are explicitly depicted in the game, but that View A isn't even suggested by anything that is depicted -- it doesn't follow from the game. *There are a lot of bridge blockades. **This is, in fact, pretty much 90% of what the game shows us shapers doing, period.

I just took it again, despite all my many qualms and things I hate about this. My results were bizarrely identical to what they were 8 years ago, to the point that maybe 75% of the scores I mentioned by name in the first post here were identical.

Thank you for the suggested change to my word order. That would actually distort what I was saying, which is that the default is "no", not that we don't default to that particular theory. As I said in the next sentence: "we assume not Y." Anyway, back to the actual discussion, I hope.

ADoS, you're quoting out of context. "by default it's not how things work" is not the same as "it's not how things work". You can call the global principle an assertion if you want to, but even then it's an assertion about how to approach making determinations about any fictional world, not an assertion about the substance of the world in question.

You're collapsing a continuum into a binary. My phrasing all along has been "follows from the game", not "is explicitly spelled out in the game". In this situation, the game says X. You have theorized Y. We both agree that Y is not part of the game lore; and, I think, that there are plenty of other possible theories that are not part of the game lore (whether or not they have been enumerated here). You prefer Y to the other theories you've considered based on factors that are not part of the game lore. "Y makes sense, so let's take that to be the truth" and "Y does not follow from X any more than other theories, so let's not" are simply not parallel assertions. You can keep straw manning my "there's nothing to suggest it works like that" into positive assertions if you want, but that's not what they are. Here's that straw man in the flesh. View A is not based on evidence from the game world. View B is literally just saying "there's no reason to assume that stuff can happen without evidence." It's not saying View A is impossible, it's saying there's no reason to think it's true. Absence of the evidence critical to theory Y does not mean we throw up our hands and say "every theory is equal"! Basically, I'm saying that the default position is "if it's not part of Geneforge lore, by default it's not how things work in Geneforge." If Y doesn't follow from the lore, we assume not Y. This is a global principle, not a positive assertion made independently in response to a given Y. I mean, the games never explicitly address whether or not shapers can fly. By your logic here, "shapers can fly" and "shapers can't fly" are equally valid. I'm going to keep on assuming they can't (at least until Jeff remakes the series as Drakonball G).

More sprites are fine. Sprite options that happen to look conventionally male or female, are also fine. (Particularly if there are multiple options, but even GF's one agent sprite was an OK situation.) Forcing the player to explicitly choose a gender doesn't add anything, and comes with some real negatives depending on how it's done. Forcing the player to choose a specific gender in order to play a specific class doesn't add anything either, and comes with a lot of negatives.

I think highlighting this one sentence, without comment, is the best response I can possibly give to all of the above.

There are some assumptions about our world here: 1) You have to be larger and more muscular in order to be an effective melee fighter (hugely false) 2) You have to be larger and more muscular in order to have effective physical prowess in general (also false) 3) Men are consistently larger and more muscular than women (definitely false) This is the reasoning that game designers used in 1980. It didn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense now. Beyond that, there are positive reasons that games today are more likely to offer choices about your character's appearance than actually asking you to specify their gender (let alone anything about sex). Having this be open-ended still works fine for people who like the old view -- they can pick an appropriate image for their soldier and decide that he's a dude. Nothing is lost. But people want to play different kinds of characters. People often want to play a character who looks like them. And not everyone is a dude. "Male" and "female" don't cover everyone, either.

It makes basically zero sense that the shapers do, either. These were bad design decisions transparently made to accommodate limited art assets. See also: Avadon 1, where both physical classes were male only and both magical classes were female only. The Guardian and Agent sprites could be universal-gender almost as easily as the Shaper sprite. There's no reason not to do this. I sincerely hope the remakes fix this.

I certainly see the scientific standpoint. I'm not sure where philosophical comes into things. Definitional or textualist, maybe. I'm not philosophizing; as you complain later, I'm not putting forward "solutions"; I'm just cleaving to the game world. SLARTY: But starting with the journals describing the "tiny scrolls" and Heustess's stories, from G1 on, it's been very clear: shaping combines the brute force manipulation of genetic material with the synthesis of organic matter from essence. ESS: an example... generate an adult version of Wesley Crusher from nothing more than his genetic material... genetic material only includes information about the base structure of a being, not any information that such a being would have learned through interactions with its environment having been born and gone through a conventional childhood. The genes tell you how to make a living brain, but they can’t put much more than the most simple information in it, nor can they teach a brain how to interact with the world – it seems to me that such information arises through a learning process... SLARTY: ...breathing is not a learned behavior... The ability to exert muscles isn't learned either, but, as you point out, coordinating those movements is definitely learned. ESS: ...breathing... As you point out, it is indeed an instinctive behaviour, not a learned one. Of course, this is an excellent demonstration that knowledge can arise in a brain solely from genetic information. SLARTY: "Brainstem operation of muscles that is totally divorced from consciousness" and "knowledge" are definitely not the same thing. ESS: I doubt I am suitably equipped to argue you on an epistemological point, so let me at least explain my thinking to you... could it not be argued that the brain ‘knows’ how the breathe, in the sense that... To recap: 1) I asserted that the game presents shaping as basically just genetic manipulation plus some synthesis/growth action. 2) You said this could not explain shaped creations being able to function in any way without having to learn first - bringing up the speculatory Wesley experiment 3) I agreed in part but brought up breathing as an example of things that genes _are_ enough to "teach a brain" how to do. 4) You said this demonstrates that genes can create "knowledge" in a brain (clearly pointing towards your original thesis, that shaping can duplicate a brain complete with acquired knowledge) 5) I said that those are two different things 6) You said, essentially, why can't we just call them both "knowing" how to do something and thus treat them the same way In this case, you suggested the change in vocabulary explicitly. I thought this was silly -- deciding to refer to two distinct things with the same word does not in any way change the fact that they are distinct. But you suggested it specifically in response to my saying they were different -- the difference in usage was explicitly acknowledged here, not something you missed. And my speculation was that this may have been happening previously, without explicitly having attention called to it. If you want a theory based on speculation + the physical laws of our own universe, yours can absolutely be on equal footing with other suggestions. If you want one that follows from the games, well, yours simply isn't in that category. This is exactly the distinction I brought up in my last post. I will add one point, though -- there isn't even agreement that this "odd behaviour" is a "problem" in need of an explanation. If you're me, this "problem" is simply part of the world of Geneforge as it is defined. It's not in any way internally inconsistent. Geneforge doesn't provide all the details of how it might or might not fit with "the physical laws of our own universe", but shaping is literally magic. So I see no reason to assume that it does, or that it should. -- I think the precision of vocabulary you impute to the thahd is bonkers, but I'm not sure there's anything more to discuss on that thread of argument.

No. It cannot. This isn't epistemology, this is you choosing to use words in completely different senses than they are clearly being used in when you respond to them. I'm now wondering if this is what has been happening all along, and you just haven't been saying so. That could explain all the disagreements. For the love of Shanti, don't do this. Yeah, this is where we are living in completely different universes of argument. You want a detailed, mechanical explanation of how this could work, but don't care if it follows from the games, or is supposition. I want an explanation that follows from the games, but don't care if it's mechanically detailed. That difference is completely fine. If it's acknowledged, and assertions about one aren't stated as if they apply to the other. (Because they don't.) If you're employing supposition, own it -- being mechanically detailed doesn't make a supposition follow from the games. It's still a supposition. Yes, that's not evidence at all. Ambiguity is evidence of ambiguity, not something you can use to justify one of many possible meanings. I feel like a lot of your arguments have run like that first paragraph there, with supposition and chosen meaning being used as if they are game-reality fact. I don't care about the thahd. The point here was that you are using two very different standards for how loosely you are willing to interpret dialogue from the game. That's inconsistent. It doesn't matter if example B is a broken-English thahd or Khyryk -- it's inconsistent, and it's inconsistent in a way that conveniently lines up with your arguments. (You could make an argument based on reliability, maybe, if you were taking the shaper's words closely and the thahd's loosely, but it's the opposite.) I feel like there have been some steps backwards here.

Jeff apparently compared Geneforge 1 to Fallout when it was still being developed. So hey.

Alwan and Greta have a ton of dialogue. It's not everywhere, but they are not really in the same boat as player-made drayks who never say anything...

"Brainstem operation of muscles that is totally divorced from consciousness" and "knowledge" are definitely not the same thing. There is, in fact, something that distinguishes the player's creations from other creations. We see other shapers doing things that the player can't: in particular 1) shaping on-the-fly during combat -- I think first witnessed in Crowley in G4 2) shaping creations that can exist indefinitely without permanently depleting their creators' essence reserves I think this is commented on a few times -- there are aspects to shaping with alternate approaches that the player simply never learns, due to lack of opportunity. In particular, point #2 I think could explain why those battle betas needed a growth period to function, but the player's creations can function in a flash. I'm not asserting this, but the game describes it that way at least sometimes. My point here was just that this is at least possible (and it's a point on your side if anything). Unless my memory is extremely faulty -- I don't have the games on hand to check -- but I think this is described specifically in the dialog that appears in G1 when you use that very first Firebolt canister. Probably a useful thing to look up whether or not it supports my position, if someone has it handy. (And if you're going to, quote the whole thing so we don't have to play games 🙂 ) Hugely disagree. I asked for evidence that they can copy the fruits of experience, rather than genetic material and its procedural fruits. Gibbons says "a copy of that bit of me." "That bit" is the bit that has been "changed so that magic is part of us, so that our power is as natural as lifting a finger." That's a description of what has been changed, not how it has been changed. If the changes come from genes and their highly expedited expression, this is still just copying genes -- not the fruits of experience. No. He explicitly says it is "a copy of that bit of me." Maybe that encompasses all of the changes, maybe it doesn't. If the reshaping is modular -- and given that canisters are modular, it seems quite possible it could be -- then it just has multiple bits, one of which is being copied. No, it does not. How is it that you are willing to be very loose with terminology when dealing with the words of a skilled shaper, but suddenly are an extreme textualist when we are dealing with a thahd who clearly has not mastered the vocabulary of grammar of their language? This thahd doesn't use articles. It's not smart -- I mean, it thinks it's capable of killing the PC and also that it's capable of convincing the PC to let it kill them. And yet you expect it to be precise in distinguishing between "copy" and "clone"?

@TheKian right on about the precise usage of "cloning" (in what is definitely a genetics-adjacent context) -- I was sloppy there; thanks for clarifying that! Yes, definitely. And I think we are finally understanding each other. Huzzah! This is a good point with a good answer that you have led us to: breathing is not a learned behavior. It's not even a conscious behavior. The automatic output of genetics is sufficient for automatic functions like breathing. The ability to exert muscles isn't learned either, but, as you point out, coordinating those movements is definitely learned. I have no idea how much of that is instinct and how much is absorbed by observation from caregivers; I have to imagine the slider falls in a different place for different pseudo-learned physical capabilities like that. Of course, we're mammals, and we're mammals with ridiculous brains that require both experience (and ex-uterine space) to develop. But there are animals that emerge from the womb in a state where they are capable of defending themselves. I will admit this is a little harder to apply to drayks, drakons, and gazers, at the least -- OTOH, some are more intelligent than others, and Ghaldring literally took years to grow up after being created. And serviles, of course, are just like humans in this regard... One other comment here: we know for a fact that canisters can grant a shaper not just the physical ability to do something, but also the inherent knowledge of how to use it. The in-game descriptions present this as being sort of like an automatic muscle memory. (This seems harder to apply for something like a leadership canister, but we could easily interpret those as adjusting either something chemical or something visual that has the effect of improving charisma, rather than directly improving diplomatic speech.) I note, however, that 1) forging a muscle memory seems a lot less complicated than replicating complex brain function; and 2) making canisters is an art that exceedingly few people in the entire series are ever shown to be capable of -- and, importantly for the original question, the PC is not one of them. This might give us a window into whether this capability is a pipe dream for shapers, or simply more advanced than what they are normally capable of -- but either way, it's clearly beyond what even the cutting edge of Geneforge's shapers can do. Interesting, but it sort of seems like this just falls into the wild and immense hand-waving around what "essence" is and how it works. I mean, I realize he doesn't feed off your essence stat, but that's not your essence, that's the free essence you have available to manipulate and put into spells and creations.

In you, absolutely not. In the way you approach a debate, maybe. Yes, I agree that from that perspective our world is also technically finite. But that isn't the perspective we have as residents of our world. We can make theories and test them actively by doing things in whatever permutation suits our exploration and seeing what happens. We can't do that with Geneforge. Even if there were more games coming. The things we can learn about our world through empirical interaction are so large and broad that we can't see the bounds of them; and that experimental space is complex enough that it is easy to investigate a wide variety of questions "meaningfully" to borrow your word. Perhaps "finite" is a less technically accurate distinction than "has an incredibly tinier space to explore." There's nothing we can do, empirically, to shed new light on this question -- we have all the information Geneforge is going to give us, short of an act of Author. Does this come from my being emphatic about that assertion? Because I still followed it up with evidence. I have no interest in making an argument in a meaningful debate like this by assertion alone, and if you catch me doing that please call me out. You'll note that I mentioned two key sources of lore from G1. The other one -- Heustess, whose extensive recounting you may not remember, covers what they did with it. It's not in any way evidence that they never did anything else with it. But the name of the game is Geneforge. Over five games, there is endless implication that shaping involves magical genetic manipulation, and zero indication that it can duplicate an existing thing, rather than simply creating a generically similar thing from the same genetic material. This is really the crux. Please point me to any evidence that shapers can precisely duplicate (I think we agree total precision would be required for a successful re-braining?) a given piece of organic material, including any aspects it gained through experience (and which cannot be predicted or duplicated solely with DNA) rather than growth/generation/shaping. Please point me to anything that is even remotely similar to this. Any discussion that suggests it from far away. I've asked this repeatedly and not gotten an answer. I don't think there is one.

Yes. His moniker at the time of one of his very long bans was "Butt Paladin". As a result of the ban, it stuck around (and is still visible on PPP). And it really was inspired. So TM Paladin honors that, and also a non-Spiderweb circumstance I fell into, for which the phrase "Butt Paladin" is appropriate on at least six or seven different levels.

I think it's ridiculous bad faith to intentionally omit a known flaw in the hopes that you can then move the goalposts when somebody else brings it up. It's still basically a finite set of information. The difference if you know there are more games coming is simply that there's more finite information that you don't know, but it's still a finite set. The unreleased information may or may not speak to a given hypothesis. If it does, you have an answer, if it doesn't, you don't. You don't know which outcome it will be, but in neither case is there room for empirical exploration. If the PC isn't skilled enough to do this, then we have an even simpler answer to the actual question here, which after all involved the PC doing this. We know the PC can't do this. We see plenty of other people doing shaping and none of them ever attempt this, or comment on it. Nobody does anything even remotely similar to it. There frankly would be pretty obvious applications if they could -- most obviously, shapers would just make clones of very loyal creations and basically eliminate the risk of creations going rogue. Shaping is not cloning. Period. The game doesn't say this because cloning doesn't exist in Geneforge, so there's no reason to. But starting with the journals describing the "tiny scrolls" and Heustess's stories, from G1 on, it's been very clear: shaping combines the brute force manipulation of genetic material with the synthesis of organic matter from essence. It's not a transporter. It's not a replicator. It's not a holodeck. It's the Eugenics Wars, or maybe if you're lucky it's just tribbles.

OK, I do think we're making some progress here. Thank you for being rigorous with the details of the reasoning now. This argument doesn't hinge on a system being physically inaccessible, it hinges on the system being empirically inaccessible in ways that are relevant to the question at hand. That last clause is why your "experiment" in Geneforge just now has nothing to say on this question. (See below) Even a domain like astrophysics, where you can't exactly set up custom scenarios, allows you to make a hypothesis that is falsifiable via future data. A sub-created world like Geneforge doesn't: the set of data is finite, closed, complete. But you aren't basing your theory on data in the first place: Okay. If you were trying to show that creations can be absorbed, and the same type of creation can be shaped afterwards, you've proved that. Congrats? But your actual argument wasn't that. It was this: "When a Shaper absorbs a creation, every detail about that creation is absorbed back into the Shaper’s structure in some way. That includes every detail, including the distribution of neurons in the brain and their firing patterns, encoding the personality and memory of the creature, but also other things, such as the tiniest scars on their hide, and the food in their stomach... All this information returns to the Shaper, and the physical system that is the Shaper is altered slightly by this. Because of this, in principle, the Shaper can examine their new state, isolate the alteration, and then reproduce the original pattern of absorbed energy in every detail. So, again in principle, by absorbing every aspect of a creation, the Shaper should be able to recreate the original creation exactly in every detail." None of these details receive any support from your experiment. Not even the fact that you've recreated the type of creation, as you're very specific above: you think the Shaper somehow knows all the specifics of that individual creation at the moment of its absorption. I don't understand how you think game mechanics in action could ever support this assertion, but it's easy to show that they don't. Anything you do to the creation in between creating it and absorbing it is not present in the fresh one you make afterwards. This includes changing its name (cosmetic, but technically part of the game mechanics). This includes augmenting its stats -- and although technically you could choose to make the same augmentations when you create the creation, you could also do that if it was the first time you ever made that creation, so this clearly is not knowledge drawn from the old absorbed one. More importantly, it includes experience points, level ups, and skill points. There is no way to recreate those. In fact, depending your skills at each time of creation, it might be impossible for the new creation to be anywhere near the old one in these parameters. And as level affects base stats, this also impacts its Intelligence score. I guess you could argue that the brain is totally irrelevant to both experience points, and Intelligence, and that they are part of some other piece of the creation that is magically left out of the freshly shaped one? Nothing in the game or its lore suggests that is a possible output. No, it's not explicitly ruled out, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- or evidence of presence. When you add that as a possible output, you are no longer pulling from the game world. Since your IO link is similarly speculative and not pulled from the game world, you're just adding two things arbitrarily. Which, again, fine as a thought experiment, but says nothing about Geneforge. So if you want to argue: "If it is possible to create a creation or its brain at the moment of its absorption, then it could work like this..." Great. Your argument wasn't conditional. Your argument was that it is possible to do these things.

Here's the first instance of our problem... And here's the second. If you are theorizing about what's physically possible in our world -- or in a world like ours where (1) it is possible to test a theory physically and make empirical observations, and (2) there is not a bible of metadata to pull from -- this is very reasonable. You aren't. You are theorizing about a sub-created world that we cannot physically access. We can only access it via its instantiation in our world, in this case, the games and their lore. (Via a bible, essentially!) These instantiations literally define this world, at least to the degree that we can access it at all. Thought experiments that don't follow from the instantiations can still be very interesting thought experiments, but they have nothing to say about that world. Now maybe you want instead to theorize about that world with a particular set of speculatory theories or extrapolations stapled onto it. That's completely legitimate, but your conclusions will be limited to the special case of Geneforge-given-certain-assumptions, not Geneforge more broadly. Your mechanism theory might be at least pragmatically usable if you started with inputs and outputs and were just making a theory about what links them. You aren't. You are proposing new outputs not extant in that world, and new functions to link inputs and outputs, simultaneously. This is why neither the function nor its output has any grounding in the reality of that world. 1. You're not proposing a mechanism that is valid for what you are attempting to do with it. 2. You have shown that your model is valid for a completely different argument than the one you are making. 3. You're the one who provided the three points to justify your model; stating that the only possible way your model could be inapplicable is it it doesn't fit the points your provided is assuming that everyone else accepts those. This is elliptical logic at best. (No, not heliocentric, just elliptical.) (Speaking of three points...) -- Most generously, it seems like what you are actually trying to do is take the general situation we're looking at in the Geneforge world, divorce its component parts from the Geneforge world, and ask if those parts (Shaper, Creation A, Creation B, etc.) can operate in the way you're proposing. But either you're talking about what's plausible in Geneforge or you're not. If you want a thought experiment divorced from "what follows from Geneforge," that's fine, but its results do not then say anything about vanilla Geneforge.

If you read the explanations and do the math, that should be what you get. You'll notice that most of the spells aren't essential, and a few of the essential but expensive ones are one per party spells, not one per mage spells. Also note that it will be less for you, since this guide was written for the first release where 2nd levels of training cost double.

alhoon, what hasn't come up -- and I think you're running into -- is that A:EFTP is 100% open world. Unlike even the less linear Geneforges (2 and 5), you can go almost anywhere at the start of the game. You can go through the world in whatever order you like. As a consequence, money has a different dynamic. In Geneforge, a given area tends to supply you with what you need in order to patronize the shops there. There isn't typically stuff in the first couple of zones that you can't afford (and don't need) until much later in the game. Early areas have less loot and cheaper shops. In Avernum there's no pressure for spending opportunities to line up with loot. Expensive stuff, like skill trainers, are spread out all over. Cash is still concentrated with tougher enemies. Because you have so many more spending opportunities, you can't buy everything nice when you see it, and you'll have to prioritize. From my guide:

"'I don't invent,' Sherry reminded him. Her voice was no less steady than his, but her expression--when I got hold of my senses enough to see it--was grave. 'I only recount.' -- John Barth, Chimera Or perhaps I ought to quote Hume here. I'm not offering an interpretation, I'm challenging yours. I don't think there's any dispute about what does and doesn't happen in the games. I'm not suggesting it means something, I'm suggesting that there are more than a few leaps and bounds between what's in the games and what you are arguing. Did you mean to say "absorbed" above? The discussion was about recreating an existing mind, complete with all the cognitive pathways and memories and so on that it gained through experience and which were not shaped into being. I don't know how in the world you think I was arguing this. This is a ridiculous statement. Of course you can compare mechanisms that are different! What I argued was that you cannot declare two different processes indistinguishable simply because the outputs are indistinguishable. In this case you're arguing about something nobody else is. The entire disagreement is exactly as alhoon put it: do we think a shaper can create an identical copy of an existing brain? Nobody has argued "it's physically impossible to clone an individual brain" (as opposed to producing a new brain according to the same species blueprint) -- a brain is a physical object, that would be ridiculous, and you won't find that argument here. We've argued that there is nothing in Geneforge to suggest that shapers can even come close to doing that. As I wrote originally: "Maybe it's plausible that it could be done, and I certainly have no problem imagining that happening with a sequence of player creations for RP purposes... but that's very different from suggesting it is regularly possible in the game world itself." This is a comment on plausibility within the established Geneforge lore about shaping, not anything about the laws of nature. But is that what you've been arguing? You wrote a few posts back: "The aim of my argument is simply to try and demonstrate that a Vinlie-style approach to the game – thinking of creations as evolving when they are absorbed and recreated as a new creature type – is possible within the confines of the game lore." Where is the part about physical laws of the universe? There is no real game lore about those, but there's plenty of game lore about what shaping can and can't do... Yes, and I can propose a new function B that isn't linear but maintains the same single IO pairing. Anything you decide is a "fundamental similarity", I can propose a new function B that maintains the single IO pairing and lacks that "similarity." Because there is in fact no requirement for two functions to share one IO pairing beyond the fact that they are both functions (b/c defined in the proposition) and both have that IO pairing. Your argument here reduces to "Functions can have things in common." That is not meaningful. Ess, you're a very attractive Slith, and if I were single and you were less infuriating, I'd be happy to fork with our spears.

That is unfortunately unclear, as those hit formulas are hard to look into. But based on the way damage works, it probably doesn't -- most likely, it can affect duration (as with "blessings"), but not the chance of success. IIRC, this was a change made between the G/A4-6 engine and the Ava/AR engine.