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I'm sorry. This is dumb. But I have to vent.
The technology color scale is screwed up in so many ways. In order of lowest level to highest, it goes Brown, Black, White, Gray, Green, Red, Blue, Orange, Prismatic. I'm sorry, but this is complete gibberish. Let me tell you how many ways this makes my head asplode.
Headsplosion 1: The inclusion of Prismatic if both Black and White exist makes my head asplode because color either goes subtractive (like light waves), in which all colors combine to make white, or additive (like with pigments), in which the addition of certain colors makes black (like how some color printers can simulate black ink if you run out).
So Prismatic is supposed to be "all colors", but that should be either Black or White.
Headsplosion 2: If we go by the placement of Prismatic at the highest level to mean that this is an subtractive scale, where all colors equal the best, you must subtract colors from the high end to give you individual colors.
Which means that Black should be the lowest value, where there are no colors left to subtract. But Black is after Brown. Which brings me to..
Headsplosion 3: The inclusion of both Brown and Grey in a chromatic scale is nonsense, because grey only exists in monochrome scales. There is no color grey. If you add a color, or hue, to grey, it becomes a brown. (Try mixing random paints willy nilly, you get a muddy brown color). There ARE certain pigments that when mixed can give you a grey (which is why grey paints exist), but that is actually the carefully formulated combination of many pigments, and not a color all on its own. At the very least, grey should be below Brown, as it contains "less information" than a brown would. (A brown contains a hue and a shade, where a grey just contains a shade.)
So here we are so far: Keep "Prismatic" just because you want to be fancy, fine. But then White should be second highest. Black should be lowest. Grey should be second lowest, and Brown should be after that.
But what are we left with?
Headsplosion 4: THE ACTUAL ORDER OF REAL COLORS DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE EITHER! Green, Red, Blue, Orange? What? How do you even? Colors are actual measurable wavelengths! You can put them in a sequence! Scientifically! Red has the smallest wavelength! Then Green! Then Orange! Then Blue! This is not a subjective decision by a culture, this is SCIENTIFIC FACT! Even if you decide to jump to an additive scale for the colors, why are Orange and Green, both non-primary colors, at opposite ends of the sequence? And with the subtractive scale, you're jumping all over the place!
Just.... ARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!
I'm not even going to begin to fathom why you didn't just go Black, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, White, Prismatic. You picked your odd color choices, so be it. But it should have looked like this:
Black, Grey, Brown, Red, Orange, Green, Blue, White, Prismatic.
That at least would have made some sense.
Creative Director
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Correct. The ascending order of colors matches the rarity of skymetals, with the lowest level (brown) being basically "dirt" or the like (base metals, in other words) and the highest level being a combination of all colors.
The pattern does makes sense, in other words, but it follows something from an alien culture that wouldn't make sense if you look at it from other angles. Which is actually on design, since that helps to not only make the color code feel to us as if it IS from another strange culture, but it also means that the PCs won't necessarily immediately suss out how it's organized as well.
And yes, this is described in the Technology Guide, page 19.
it's magic
thumbs down to this one
Red has the shortest wavelength in the visible spectrum? Since when?
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Red has the shortest wavelength in the visible spectrum? Since when?
Derp, sorry, got my science facts mixed up. It is the least energetic, so that would make it the longest, right?
Anywho, so, yeah, I do have to own up to not noticing the bit about the starmetals. What threw me was I was reading this from the Pathfinder Reference Document, where I thought they had removed most campaign setting details. I wasn't expecting non OGC stuff to be informing the content.
I understand that the choice was made to make tech seem alien in yet another way. I can understand why that choice was made, but I'm not sure I agree with it. It forces players to devote additional headspace to this alternate color scale, and that seems like just more mental arithmetic that's unnecessary.
You made identifying items in PF easier than 3.5 for exactly that reason. Because it was a hassle and dumb to make players jump through hoops to figure out what's better than what. If you have a color scale in place to easily grade tech, just make it one every player will recognize, so there are no hoops to jump through, having to learn a scale that is completely arbitrary. (And it is abritrary, your assignment of which starmetals go where on the scale is simply a design choice, adhering to no laws of physics or universal constants. It's an artistic decision with no reasoning behind it other than what makes internal sense to the fiction, and is therefore arbitrary.)
That's why it doesn't make sense for universal application in the PRD. This weird alien color scale only makes sense to one alien culture using made up magic materials as its basis. If you wanted to include this stuff in a PF campaign set in a homebrew setting (or another publishers settings), you'd need to import all this color business into it, or go through and manually change it all to a different one.
When all along, a color scale based on UNIVERSAL SCIENTIFICALLY MEASURABLE DATA, ie, visible color spectrum and wavelengths, has existed.
So, sure. I can understand how this makes sense for the Pathfinder Campaign Setting now. It just isn't as useful as it could be to people wanting to use it as a "tech source" for other PF games.
You mean it's not a Paranoia reference? D:
it's magic
thumbs down to this one
That's an interesting interpretation. I like JJ's better.
so
Look at it this way: the crew wouldn't be thinking of "Red Clearance," they'd be calling it "Djezet Clearance."
I'm sorry. This is dumb. But I have to vent.
I anxiously await your rant about how there are only 4 elements in Pathfinder as well. No periodic table there you know. :-)
Wow, this is about the nitpickiest thing I've seen this week.
Why do they have to be organized by wavelength spectrum, or match the technical terms for the colors? Also, prismatic is different from white/black because it's not just a single color/hue, it's a rainbow of them (like the prismatic spray/wall spells)
Wow, this is about the nitpickiest thing I've seen this week.
Why do they have to be organized by wavelength spectrum, or match the technical terms for the colors? Also, prismatic is different from white/black because it's not just a single color/hue, it's a rainbow of them (like the prismatic spray/wall spells)
It doesn't. When I originally wrote the rant, I was ignorant of the actual skymetal spectrum that was in use. So that was my failing.
I still think using the visible wavelength spectrum would be a better choice, but I now understand the reasons why the tech color spectrum is the way it is. So at least my head not asplode now.