Sending Spell: How many words to send teleportation circle sigil sequence?

[jgsugden]

I'd have the wizard roll an arcana roll. The goal would be 20. If he gets that or above, he could do it in one sending. If he had less, I'd have it take more than one - and anything beneath 10 would make it impossible. Once we establish the difficulty, that would stick for the campaign for the PC.

 

[Yaarel]

Minimally, as few as six or so words for a Teleportation Circle. If the origin and destination are on the same planet, then one just needs: longitude, latitude, and altitude for each point. Plus perhaps a ‘password’ is necessary for the Teleportation Circle spell.

That said, both the sender and the receiver would need to be knowledgeable about the Teleportation Circle to translate the message from and to spellcasting.

Any unusual use of a spell is an ‘Arcana stunt’, and a skill check for success is sometimes appropriate.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'd say six words, and 5 more to remind them to "add the point of origin." It might take another word or two if the address is for another galaxy.


. . . Because I can't think of any way to answer this except to turn to Stargate.

Agreed. When in doubt about how a fictional entity would behave, it's often appropriate to draw upon its most significant representation. It's one of the major benefits of using established tropes in the first place. If they hadn't intended us to think about Stargate, then they wouldn't have referenced a sigil sequence.

 

[the Jester]

Anyway, Jester - if he's the DM - is gonna need to answer this question for himself, after he decides how he wants the teleport network to behave.

My answer has long been "Three words", probably because I think in terms of x, y, and z coordinates. But there's absolutely no rules support for any particular answer, so I was curious how others rule.

 

[the Jester]

Agreed. When in doubt about how a fictional entity would behave, it's often appropriate to draw upon its most significant representation. It's one of the major benefits of using established tropes in the first place. If they hadn't intended us to think about Stargate, then they wouldn't have referenced a sigil sequence.

Hmm. I saw the movie back in the day, when it was in theaters, but have never seen more than a few minutes of any episode of any of the shows, and don't recall anything about sigil sequences. But that's probably just something that whooshed past me.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

Since you can commit a new sigil sequence to memory in only 1 minute, they can't be very complicated.

I imagine them being something like an ip address or a bank account number. That is, a sequence of known glyphs rather than an arbitrary drawing.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Unless the teleportation circle has an 'alphabet' on it (a la stargate), then I'm going to go with "However many words you need for the plot to work". The sigils themselves could be anything from letters in the common alphabet to complex interwoven symbols with a specific motion required for drawing them. One is going to be trivial to transmit (and, indeed, to randomly guess). The other is going to be a fairly mammoth task to accurately transmit, and I would also throw in a high probability for getting the sigil wrong and ending up somewhere completely unintended, preferably complete with side-track.

Of course the smart way to get such sigils remotely is to use sending to arrange for your intended recipient to scry on you, then write out the sigils as if you were using the circle (or stand at the circle itself).

 

[Ganymede81]

You'd need one word, either one or zero, for every pixel of the sigil image. The number of words total would depend on the number of sigils you need and the minimum resolution needed to transmit them clearly.