Way
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- Dec 24, 2018
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Hmmm....ah, this is pretty inspiring. I now have a reasonably solid in-universe explanation for them butterflies and certain lore/details for them, based on these guidelines, that should be true to the spirit of their existence and broad enough to not restrict butterfly headcanons. It'll take some time to cook up as a small story.Sure! Stick it in a quest report somewhere and we can make it canon.
I like the idea of "butterflies have a notoriously poor connection" and the further out you get, the less reliable it becomes and gets increasingly garbled. Perhaps 50% of the things that you say in the butterfly simply doesn't transmit (EDIT: or maybe it sometimes transmits at unpredictable speeds, ranging from minutes to days for a message to transmit, so not guaranteed to be real-time), and so essentially there's a lot of dropped packets and a lot of things that each individual might have missed. I'm also fascinated by the idea that butterflies <-> dreams, and perhaps inaccurate things get spewed by butterflies on occasion. For instance, the butterfly may occasionally "mistranslate" red as blue, and butterflies are known to occasionally spew gibberish words/phrases even when no one is talking into them.
Example:
- Person A (speaking into their butterfly) says: "Hello, dear friend. Isn't the weather absolutely gorgeous today?"
- Person B (listening to their butterfly) might hear: "Good morning my friend. Is today's weather particularly good?"
In other words, it's similar, but not perfectly identical!
From a lore perspective, wouldn't it be creepy if butterflies really were dead spirits (like @Bochi mentioned), and frankly everyone was just talking through ghosts...
Anyways! I'm okay with whichever direction you want to take it!
I'm not as fond of clear cut mechanical explanations for butterflies, in part because this would definitively put them in the "machine" category (which introduces the social/political issues you mentioned if they are as reliable as computers). Personally, I sort of favor the idea that everyone's butterfly can be different (meaning that manifests in different ways and doesn't have strict rules), but simultaneously functions as erratically and inconsistently as a form of supernatural phenomena.
In computer science terms, I guess I'm proposing that butterflies could be non-deterministic. Sometimes, a butterfly might say 1+1=2, but on another day it might say 1+1=14, meaning you can't rely on a butterfly to always produce the same output with a given input, which would drastically limit their functional utility.
I had also headcanoned that the butterflies were strictly connected to the Queen in some unique way, so it wouldn't be easy to replicate. Furthermore, for some reason only guild members have them (but not all the citizens of the Archipelago), meaning they are most likely quantity limited. Perhaps the Queen can only maintain a certain number of connections, or maybe the butterflies really are dead souls, and the guild only has a limited number to give out.
There are still a few things that aren't addressed yet in this post, like why only adventurers in particular (considering anyone can become one) get butterflies, but my explanation should be able to address this!
Don't worry, no need to explain- the secret fact that you the queen and don't want to bother with such repercussions by only giving them to adventurers is safe with me!You're overthinking it, geez... >.>
The butterflies can't be used as drones because they can't see AFAIK... Like... Just communication devices.
And well, they depend on Queen's Magic and stuff, so it's probably only widespread between adventurers, not everyone in the world.
And lastly... Remember that you shouldn't make major structural changes to the game, so no sudden renaissance... >.>
*feels like this post is kinda pointless now that Ohko already replied, but figured I'd give my 2 cents anyways*
Though why wouldn't they be able to see?! Being a blind butterfly is just unfortunate xD
And hey, I'm not saying that I necessarily want to force one, just that if you play it straight there should logically be one, which is a bit of an issue since this RP is still mainly a worldbuilding exercise (imho) xD