----- Original Message ----- From: <Jon_Lincicum at stream.com> To: "Louis Eastman" <almagaiz at gmail.com> Cc: "Dragaera" <dragaera at dragaera.info> Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 8:06 AM Subject: Witchcraft vs Sorcery, who wins? > >Yeah, but get enough witches and you can do anything. > >I wonder if you had enough witches you could get something from There to > There. > >That would be interesting, because if you got a few thousand witches you > >could do the equivalent of teleporting an invading army into the Furnace. > > > That's really the biggest thing that stands out to me about the advantage > witchcraft has over sorcery. > > A sorcerer has to be extremely powerful in order to channel and contain > the amorphia that forms a spell without having it destroy them. A witch > has the same kind of problem if they run themselves out of pyschic energy. > > When you put two sorcerers together, their abilities can operate > simultaneously, but are entirely separate. So it's an arithmatic function. > 4 sorcerers + 4 sorcerers = 8 sorcerers. > > But when you put two witches together, their abilities interact and > enhance each other, meaning it's more like they are multiplied... 4 > witches x 4 witches = 16 witches. > > With low numbers like one or two witches, this doesn't make much of a > difference, 2+2=4 and 2x2=4 also, so this is a wash. > > But the larger the numbers are in your groups of sorcerers vs witches, the > more of an advantage the witches would have. > > In addition, there seem to be extra bonuses for the witches when they form > a circle of 34... And when the number of circles reach specific points. > (17 and 34 maybe?) > > So, with 289 witches vs 289 sorcerers, the sorcerers are really only as > powerful as their strongest member. Whereas the witches power just keeps > growing with their numbers. > > What could they do with such power? Teleport an invading army into the > furnace? Sure. But why think small? > > Majikjon > > > > > > But. . . . With 289 sorcerers you can have 289 different spells, whereas witchcraft does not seem to be good at multitasking. Also, is there any textev showing sorcerers cannot work together on a spell? It is implied by the works of most of the characters that we see, but they are all sufficiently powerful that they don't require any assistance. The concept of spell wagons, sorcerers corps, hint that same sorcerers work together, and Daymars offer of assistance to Vlad while performing a spell (a witchcraft spell, I know) shows that the concept at least exist. Jeff P.S. Also, didn't Sethra and Daymar work together to "avoid" the Phoenix stones? Or was that simply two concurrent spells? I don't know if that was ever definitively answered in the text.