From:	Marc Renouf renouf@********.com
Subject:	fox special: when MetaBeings attack!
Date:	Tue, 16 Feb 1999 08:58:19 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999 Ereskanti@***.com wrote:

> > Sims involving magical plotlines always use special effects for
> > astral sequences, because astral perception just don't show on the
> > recording.
>
> Why Not? My reasoning behind this is simply, ASIST has to do with
> recording sensations and translating them into a representable medium.

This is not entirely true. The point that people are trying to
make (and which I tend to agree with) is that simsense is recording what
you hear, see, smell, feel, and taste, or rather the sum total of the
things going on in the sensory centers of your brain.
But astral perception is different. It's not hooked to your
eyes. You're not "seeing" into the astral plane, you're "perceiving"
in
the astral plane. When you consider that a mage who is blind or who has
cybereyes can still astrally perceive, it pretty much clinches it that
it's a different and totally unrelated sense all together.
As such, simrigs don't pick it up, because it's going on in
different, highly specialized areas of the brain, and doesn't lend itself
well to encoding.

> It is recording an "event" (such as the events that may actually be
> transpiring in astral space a magician is viewing), it is recording the
> "perceptual sensations" of the magician who is doing the perceiving.

Again, you're assuming that the astral sensations are "seen."
They're not. How can the simrig record an "event" happening elsewhere in
the brain? They don't record memories. They don't record thoughts. They
don't record fears and dreams and hopes and all the things that make the
human mind individual. How would activity going on in a different area of
the brain (i.e. astral perception) be recorded? And if it were, how would
it be encoded? You can show a person an orange ball, record what his
visual cortex is seeing, and say "this response is equivalent to seeing an
orange ball." You need this kind of in-depth understanding of the
mechanics of perception to even attempt to undertake simsense in the first
place, else the Matrix wouldn't work. Even if you could record the
sensory centers that govern astral perception, how can you achieve such
controlled circumstances on the astral?

> Personally, humility aside, the reason for this is simply to create a "cut and
> dry" ruling concerning magical/matrix interaction.

That may be, but it's consistent with pretty much everything else
FASA has put out concerning both simsense and astral perception. In my
mind, this consistency is a far more persuasive argument than game
balance.

Marc