Supplemental worldbuilding questions

[DanielH]

Assuming that the plan involved takes longer than a day, how much sleep would you be able to get? Would you need to get the minimum you thought you could still function on? Could you get a full 8 hours because you’d heard people think better with that much sleep even if you personally thought you might be able to work perfectly well on fewer?

[Alicorn]

You could pretty much sleep however much, the phrasing doesn't demand a lot of urgency.

[DanielH]

But presumably I couldn’t take a several-years-long break to get a Ph.D. in ancient Chinese literature unless I could come up with some excuse for why having one might help? I might not be able to justify ancient Chinese literature, but I could certainly justify language classes and some computer science. Would that mean I could stall for years by telling myself I was working on it?

If the excuses don’t need to be very strong then the order is almost worthless, especially when applied to a mortal. I thought it might have problems, given that people rarely seem to use that kind of order, but that’s still interesting.

[Alicorn]

There isn't a *bright* line on excuses, but definitely no Chinese literature and probably not even many language classes or computer science.

[DanielH]

Re: the currently-unanounced go not to the elves for counsel

Does Materia have Detect Good and Detect Evil? Can Boots recreate them or steal them out of a library? They seem like the perfect solution to knowing how much to trust a hypothetical repentance from Evil Maitimo. They might even lead to a real repentance where he otherwise would not have one.

[atheistcanuck]

Detect (Alignment) spells are divine magic in D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder.

[Moriwen]

In any case I am deeply skeptical about trusting Materia's definition of """good."""

[AndaisQ]

It would definitely be trivial to reconstruct them, given Detect Magic and Protection from Alignment, but, uh, yeah. Also, I have a weird feeling Evil Maitimo would detect Lawful Neutral on the weight of his accumulated good deeds, which are non-negligible despite him being super evil.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Do you really think he'd qualify as Lawful? He did do an awful lot of taking drugs to avoid deific scrutiny. I'm thinking True Neutral.

[PlainDealingVillain]

I was thinking that too, but the personal organization of everything into a big well-ordered, low-crime country isn't something someone who was neither lawful nor good would really care too much about, I think.