Mythruna

What are the actual symptoms of exhausting life energy? Like, when you start using your own life force, what does that physically do, aside from the hit point penalty? Does it just start shredding your insides? Necrosis? Internal hemorrhaging? I must know. :U

Google is your friend. :) And so am I, but I don't know.

Sometimes when questions like this arise, I have to recite the ancient mantra: "Itza Viddy O'gaym"  :)

Since we are (allegedly) actual human beings and not projected physical constructs... I doubt we really have proper reference to understand what it would be like for our characters.

Well, I suppose ATP(Adenosine Triphosphate) may be our form of life energy. ATP is what fuels... just about everything. Muscle movement, thought, regeneration... it all requires ATP to function. Plants are the primary source of the world's ATP and they make it from using the sun. ATP's energy  can be converted to heat energy, kinetic energy, etc, but at a loss. Really, it would seem life energy is practically parallel with ATP. I'm surprised it took me so long to notice that. xD


A lack of ATP would likely be signified by 'brain fog'(Neurons use active transport to create a concentration gradient to become batteries...blah, blah, blah. They need energy to make thinking happen), fatigue, muscle stiffness(Muscles need ATP to relax, this is why rigor mortis happens), and slowed healing(Cells need ATP in several stages of the cell cycle). It may also decrease heart rate and breathing, and would definitely cause a decrease in body temperature for endotherms(ATP = Energy, Heat is one of the possible energy products, as I said before). In low levels, it basically slows everything down... And if they get low enough, you'll slowly die.

Same goes for plants, sort of. They use ATP to the same ends.

Thoughts, Paul?

We also eat our own bodies when we run out of excess energy. So fats, and muscles. All of it. If we'd be realistic in being that life force is energy, then we'd probably just get skinny if we overdid it ;)

Lipids are inefficient sources of ATP, actually. It's much more efficient to tap into sugars and starches that are in the bloodstream. Metabolizing lipids would probably be what would allow you to actually restore life energy the day after a battle, but it wouldn't be able to instantly restore it, or even quickly restore it. If that was the case, you'd be able to exercise all day if you were fat. That doesn't happen, though, and you don't lose any weight after a day of exercising aside from water weight. The lipids are used up afterwards, to rebuild the muscles and help build more muscles fibers.

We don't actually "consume" our muscles when we have no food, either. Muscle atrophy from starvation is due to the muscles not having enough energy to be maintained(Since the metabolism has to slow down to keep you from dropping, and the body has to choose between giving your biceps or your vital organs energy), and consequently breaking down on their own. Our receiving usable byproducts from the atrophy is just coincidental(Note: There is a net loss from muscle atrophy so your body doesn't really want your muscles to break down). Overdoing it would, really, only have an effect on muscles if you were overdoing it all the time.


Real talk, only a biology major would know some of this stuff. Or anyone in the medical field, I guess. What's important is that you made a reasonable assumption. :3


P.S. Since we're talking about biology, here's an interesting article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12paleo.html?scp=2&sq=rna&st=nyt) I just finished reading. It discusses our intimate relationship with viruses, so it's not entirely relevant, but it's really cool. Viruses are AWESOME! ^_^


EDIT: "Inefficient" may not be the right word for fat energy. It's energy dense and very useful, but lipolysis is slow compared to glycolysis.

EDIT2: To clarify, here's an example. If you use up 200 units of life energy, you'd only be able to effectively use lipids to replenish those 200 units of life energy after the fact, and probably over the course of a day or two.  The life energy you have at your immediate disposal would be akin to glucose and other sugars. That would also mean that eating a meal half an hour before a fight should actually increase your available life energy(But not your hit points, of course)... which makes sense, actually.

I also forgot to add, that this normally only happens during starvation. Since this is magical lifeforce, I imagined the energy being directly tunnelled to the needed task. And nah, you'd literally just need to pick up a book on lipids. ;P No specialization needed to understand something.

I don't quite undstand the first two sentences(but I'll try to answer it anyway). To my understanding, without life force, life doesn't happen. That means there is something inside you metabolizing life energy at all times, and, since you can replenish your life energy by waiting, but cannot instantly replenish it(And will run out if you stop eating), there is likely a place where life energy is stored in a stable, nonreactive form. This means a few things:
1. Some life energy is constantly metabolized in order to maintain life. That means some available life force must be tunneled to vital organs and the like constantly. Otherwise, exhausting available life energy would not kill you.
2. Some life energy is constantly available to fuel vital processes, with  some excess  available that is naturally intended to allow for physical exertion. Otherwise, our stamina would be determined by the speed at which we can metabolize the stable form of life energy, after supplying vital organs.
3. Exhausting available life energy does not mean exhausting reserve life energy.
4. Reserve life energy, whatever that is, is not available and is what allows for regeneration of available life energy over time.
5. Available life energy is the the only energy that can be used for magic, aside from stable crystallized energy.
6. In most if not all playable races, consuming food is essential. This denotes food as the primary source of life energy; despite the food itself not being alive. This is significant because it further supports the concept of stable form life energy(Otherwise, the player could just eat a steak and start lunging fireballs at people, since the life energy would just go from stomache->body instantly).
7. If life energy is a resource that the body cannot manufacture, then reserve life energy is dependent upon food consumption and metabolism of available life energy. A lack of sustenance, thus, puts your life on a timer as expected.
8. Starvation results in re-allocation of  budgeted life energy away from vestigial tissues like muscles and back into vital organs. The decrease in available energy would realistically cause atrophy of energy deprived tissues, since life energy is needed to maintain living tissue.
9. Given that the above eight statements are true, there must be two forms of life energy that behave vastly different. These two forms can be identified as stable life energy, like lipids or the energy potential in wood, and reactive life energy, which is what is respired and metabolized by lifeforms in Mythruna, and is the form usable for magic. If life energy was always in the reactive form and available to be "tunnelled to the needed task", there would be no life energy in food, because it would simply radiate out of the dead organic material or be exhausted by the tissue the life energy is supplying.

Basically, all this indicates a strong likelihood that our interactions with these energies is also physical in addition to the less corporeal form; basically, it means that while, yes, life energy can be tunnelled places freely in its' raw form, it cannot always be so freely influenced(or free at all) inside your body if you are to survive. Even if reactive energy held its own as the sole form of life energy and didn't dissipate from carrion, that  would mean that we'd be able to use roadkill the same way we'd use an energy crystal. Of course, we can't do that. The only way to extract the energy from the carrion is to eat it, or light it on fire and capture the heat energy. Again, this all points back to the idea that life energy isn't always behaving like energy, per se. Thus, if it takes life energy to create and maintain tissue and consuming tissue gives you life energy, then life energy is likely an intrinsic factor of every tissue in the body, structurally. Flesh must be, at least in part, physically comprised of stable-form life energy.



As for the last two sentences, I meant you'd only expect people with bio and health majors to know. :p

I meant in real life, but yea. It makes more sense in the way you describe it if you mean ingame xD.

And yea, exactly. But all you really have to do is be interested in the process to read up on it. Hehe.

... I don't think anyone is interested in the metabolic pathways for lipolysis. xD


I guess I should have expected to confuse people since i didn't make it terribly clear that I was focusing on in game theory. my b.

Mostly this thread is interesting but perhaps a bit over thought. :)

...but I thought I'd clarify something.  I'm 99.99% sure that it will be possible to "cast yourself to death" by using too much life energy.  One of my favorite RPGs from the past stacked magic points right on top of "life points" and you could literally cast a spell so powerful that you died.  I like that idea a lot.

Random other thoughts:
The "magic energies", in my current thinking, can kind of be thought of like the electromagnetic spectrum.  I'm pretty sure they are just variations of one another or at least have a neighboring relationship.  So the life energy that plants produce is a simpler form than the life energy that an NPC produces... and the player life energy is more complicated still.  (Spirit energy to the extent that it will exist will fall between these two layers.)  Much like passing a wire through a magnetic field, passing certain crystals through a player's extraspectral life force will generate a small "current" that other magic energies can be piggy backed on top of.  Like, in the presence of a player, things that were inert become activated and can function as pathways and converters, etc..

I also think that basically the truly magic energies exist on a separate 'plane of existence' from the mundane plan where regular electromagnetism lives but they will have some sympathetic relationships... not always just one-to-one.  The gravitonic energy may be closely related to magnetism in the superposition plane... but life force may relate to both heat and electricity.  On its own plane, life force has a relationship to gravity and spirit energy... some way to create an anchor to hold a soul to a body.  I get a little further in my thinking every time I deeply think about this but I'm still working on some of it.

Anyway, I think it's important to think of life energy separate from biology.  The "well" of life energy is more like a puncture in space-time and as such has no direct biological correlation.  Dying because of lack of life energy means that whatever tethered your spirit to the mortal plane has lost its grip and the hole has closed, so to speak.  The easiest way to maintain this well is in a biological entity, the more complex of which allows being tethered to a more complex energy source, but it's possible to generate life energy without a well (from battery most likely) within things that aren't alive biologically.  (Think something like a life-sucking battery that is used to animate a skeleton and artificially keep a spirit tethered to it.)

Whether I subscribe to the belief personally or not, the Mythruna universe definitely subscribes to the theory that if you took a brain apart and reassembled it neuron by neuron (mechanically or biologically) that you wouldn't get the "mind" back... something happens on the quantum/metaphysical level that can't be replicated through simple reassembly.  The Mythrunian universe cannot explain the player or the spirit plane without this idea that a consciousness can live beyond the mortal form.  It also allows for cool things like talking swords and animated dead, etc... which are kind of cool RPG tropes.

Actually, the common theory is pretty similar to this. If memory serves, it is believed that doing something like that would be akin to suicide due to the electrical signals being disrupted. I don't even think we know if the brain can retain information after discharging.

Yeah, I alluded to that in the first of my nine points, subtly.


It would seem that this may be an issue. You say to interpret life energy as separa tyyfrom biology, but at the same time biology is completely dependent on the existence of this energy, it would seem. It's two in the morning and I had three hours of sleep last night, so I may be wrong, but this description seems to suggest that life energy is merely a pathway for a spirit, or mind. Thus, from a biological standpoint, life energy would never be able to kill you, per se. Let's assume someone does cast all their life energy away; the tether is broken but... If the brain is intact beyond the emotional centers and all the mind stuff that the spirit hijacks, you're body wouldn't die. It'd be an empty shell, but it wouldn't be dead. None of the vital processes are regulated solely by our minds or subconscious, so we'd theoretically still have a heartbeat and all that jazz unless life energy superceded sodium-potassium pumps and heat production from inefficient ATP metabolism. And what of plants? Why are they radiating life energy and why does it have such a profound impact on them if it's a hole to a place they get nothing out of? If life energy is the energy that brings about heat and electricity in living things, what would allow a log to burn in a tundra despite recieving the energy of a single spark? ... better yet, if these energies are so detatched from the natueal world... where is the heat energy from the burning log coming from? It must be converted from something, but the log is very dead. on that topic, how does a dead body burn if it's just an energy sink, so to speak? Wouldn't it just suck up the energy from a pyre with no harm to itself? I know it's just a game and all, but stuff making sense is important to me. ;-;

Anywho, it would seem that some of the low atp symptoms would probably still stand, actually. If this spirit tether's strength is directly correlated with life energy, then it would follow that a decrease in life energy would decrease the inputs and outputs between spirit and body, much like severing small pieces of a large copper wire would. You'd probably experience a decrease in articulation, muscle weakness, and a drop in acuity of all sensations(meaning blurred vision, deafness, numbness, etc.).

Sometimes the mantra is important: "Itza Viddy O'gaym"  ;)

I ask you you  to  help me with things that don't make sense...

... and you throw a reason at me that makes even less sense. ;-;

"Itza Viddy O'gaym" = "it's a video game"... things don't always have to make sense.  In fact, there is a great deal that is pure fiction.  We already throw basic rules of Newtonian physics almost completely out the window... so why not the other sciences.

It only has to loosely make sense within its own universe... which itself is still being defined, thus malleable, and also doesn't want to have all of its mystery ruined.  After all, it could turn out that all of this talk about magic energies is just the way the characters in the game have found to describe what's happening in practical terms.

To the other, if you die because you run out of life force then your body is technically still viable but there is nothing left to motivate it to do so.  The other implication is that plants with life force must be piercing the same plane.

I mean, I appreciate the discussion, definitely.  But no matter which way we slice this thing, at some point there is going to be a layer of impenetrable fiction involved... because without it, we'd just have 'real lilfe' and no magic at all.

I knew what you said, but the thing is... I think(and a great deal of others do, too) that a video game isn't exempt from making sense. You need an element X for scifi or fantasy, I get that. That's perfectly understandable, and certain scientific conventions have to be altered to fit the universe... Altered, not discarded or destroyed. A world that has magic can make sense, and it does. It's about creating new laws amd adjusting old ones, rather than discarding them, however. If you break newtonian laws, you don't break reality, you simply disproved it in the context of this universe. I could rewrite every law of physics in a world of my own creation, but it would make sense because it's defined, and adheres well to the laws I have on paper.

That's probably hard to understand, so let me see if I can't make an example.

"Newton's law of universal gravitation states that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them."

I create a gravity hammer using an element X that is only found in universe B. It creates a field that reverses the attractive forces of gravity when exposed to kinetic energy, so it breaks newtonian laws(Which are, really, his descriptions of "what's happening in practical terms")... But that doesn't mean that the phenomena is impossible or irreconcilable. It simply means that Newton's discovery was limited to things outside of element X's interactions. Make an addendum to the law and the world, thus, makes sense again, and is reconcilable fiction, a real life that contains entirely novel, but entirely valid interactions within the bounds of the world's own physical laws. Really, alot of the magical interactions can be easily reconciled with what we already know about it.

There will have been physicists in this world for over 1,000 years if you're modelling things after the middle ages, so it would follow that there is more effective theory than "If you're an elf and focus really hard, you can make fire with your mind". In fact, the physicists would even have compound microscopes at their disposal since it was invented sometime in the mid 1600's and the technological developments wouldn't be likely to diverge such that the sciences slowed in development. There is technology, electronics, if you will, already at the disposal of this society. These physicists would likely concur that the energy in the living elf that produces fire is also present in the log. When we get to this point, it's not even really about modelling the sciences, but the society, accurately. The society would have made these inferences; realistically, SOMEONE in this world would ask these questions and find logical answers to them. Would it be 100% complete? No, it won't, the same way we won't know what happens when a person enters a black hole. It's a base requirement to loosely make sense, as you say, but to make real people in this game you'll need to ask yourself questions that they would want to ask. You'll have Newtons in this time period, or pascals, or liebniz's, and those people will have written about this world's phenomena, they will have theories like the revised newtonian law of gravity.

Hell, there'd already be anatomical drawings and this society would already have a basic understanding of most of the vital organs in the body do. Empirical sciences would be in their infancy, but already, there would be a bastion of modern science. It's a game about magic and fantasy and realistic NPCs, but from what I've seen you want to create a world, not just a game. Worlds have scientists in their cities, even in the middle ages.

By introducing a real society, this dilemma has arisen. There does not exist a society that fails to ask why, nor does there exist a scientist that would stop when they have a practical theory. In creating a complete society, said society will seek answers even after finding ones. It would start as "What is energy?", then become "How do we interact with these energies, how do they interact with us?", then become "Where does it come from?" and "What counts as energy?", then "Can we categorize these energies?", then "how do these energies interact with eachother?", then "How do the energies behave?". And at some point in this string of asking and answering, the question would be asked, "How do logs burn if all they have is life energy in them?". The answers themselves would be questioned and, in time, the same questions would be answered again differently . In a way, I don't ask for myself, but for this society you'll create. It's the nature of life to ask, after all. To make a living world, you'd need to foresee these questions.




Anywho, I got my answer.