CenINGM wrote:Again, I think we may have a slight breakdown here: Nothing was stated as "fact" other than I know a thing or two about communications and Signal flow. No house rules, no indication of what I stated being Canonical, in fact, I agree with you, nothing within Canon states there is anything that prevents Radar from functioning. BUT seeing as I was offering a point of view originally on radios, and like I said, with an RPG world being malleable, Merely offering an idea of things to add flavor or grant some slight subtext to the game. If it works for you use it, if not, don't.
I would like to offer a contradictory take on canon:
The authors of the game were interested in producing a particular effect, and lacking the knowledge or time or interest to concoct a reason, simply enacted it by fiat. There is no underlying cause, nor it is likely that one could even identify a possible cause that was not repeatedly contradicted elsewhere in the game, because that is what happens when you create effects and not causes.
So there are three real courses of action you can take, based on this:
1) Accept it and move on. It is certainly the most fun choice, and the one involving the least amount of work. That it may be unrealistic or self-contradictory is not your problem if you just decide not to care about it, and at the end of the day there is only so much a person can care about things in a game and still have fun.
2) Create your own causes, and change the effects. You think rifts and supernatural activity increase background EM noise? Great! Go with it, figure out how much each class of electronics would be effected and see how the canon descriptions need to be altered to match. For example, I would say that supernaturally-instigated EM noise would mean that personal comms would be highly limited (since small sets would be unlikely to have either the transmit or processing power to handle an insanely-high noise level) and that any
local use of magic would wreak all hell with electronics - so a Shifter casting a spell means no radio! This can be fun for some people, but is limited to your level of knowledge and interest, and can be daunting.
3) Fanboy it up and invent solutions that don't work but also don't contradict "important" canon. This is a common solution, but it always seems to run into the problem of contradicting "minor" canon or,
quite often what we know of physics, engineering, and/or psychology. You can say "Y exists in canon, and it is perfectly caused by X" but barring one-in-a-billion luck someone is going to quickly find evidence that you missed something in fiction or reality that immediately contradicts it. It won't work, and is really just a way of investing a lot of time and annoying a lot of people for what is basically a more convoluted and less fun version of option #1. The only virtue of this approach is that it allows the inventor of the solution to maintain their personal belief in the perfection of the original content, at the cost of seeming like a rational human being.
Stating something is 'a fact' implies that it has more support than 'well my house rule says....'
