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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MarkB" data-source="post: 5201590" data-attributes="member: 40176">I rather like the way it's handled in the Stargate TV series.A Stargate is a flat, shimmering plane through which one steps to emerge from another gate. It's one-way, at least for solid objects, but an object does not begin its journey from one gate to another until it has passed completely through the gate - defined, simply, as the gate's surface no longer having any obstruction penetrating it.Until then, an object that has passed partially through the gate is held in a timeless, spaceless 'vestibule' just beyond the gate's surface - a 'pocket plane' in D&D parlance.So if you send someone through the gate tied to a rope, and haul them back five minutes later, they won't be able to tell you what's on the other side, because they never got there. In fact, as far as they're concerned, they didn't have time to go anywhere - to their perception, you hauled them back out the moment they stepped across the threshold.It's a fairly neat solution to making a one-way gate without having to worry too much about issues like "what if I send someone through on a rope?" or "what happens to the blood trying to flow back across the threshold within my veins as I step through?"The series also has a few examples of other 'portal' standards - there's the 'ring transporter', a short-range teleporter that drops a stack of rings around a designated transport zone, forming a vertical cylinder, and then teleports anything inside the cylinder. That one will sever anything that's partially within the zone of effect when it activates.There's also the 'alternate reality mirror' - a seemingly-ordinary mirror, which is in fact a window to parallel worlds. The moment you touch the mirror, you cross over to the parallel world without any sensation of physical movement, and are now peering back through the mirror to your former reality. That one appears deliberately keyed to living beings, so a thrown rope would not cross over. What would happen if a tethered character crossed over is pure speculation, but most likely they'd either leave the rope behind or take its entire length with them.</blockquote>

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