Quote:Well, that's what you get when all the mages on the team are engineers, both in-game and out... The magic system starts looking very non-mystical.
One of the things that I like about DW is that it seems really good at covering (almost) all of the bases, and Doug weaves together tech and magic to excellent effect. None of this, "I'm a magician, I don't need to understand all this silly tech" stuff!
We had a GM some years back, the one who ran the vampire invasion. He did a quite few unpopular or simply bad things as GM, like trying to turn Shadowwalker into a vampire, but one of the very few undisputably good things he did was he imported the magic systems from the ultra-level unlimited powers book (I forget the proper title) of the old Marvel Super Heroes game into V&V. These rules broke magic down into several categories: stuff done with internal energies, stuff done with external energies, and stuff done by bargaining with extradimensional entities for it. The rules change/additional catapulted Dwimanor from a guy with a few spells under his belt to a truly versatile wizard (with sufficient study to learn these "new magics" he'd just discovered).
At the same time, this GM was also the first to declare Doug's powers were magical in nature, not just some unspecified "mutant power". Reconciling his ex cathedra pronouncement with the fact that I had used V&V's "Mutant Power" option to create Doug resulted in the "mutated mage gift" concept. But I digress...
Anyway, this sudden expansion of the magical options, and the fact that the engineer-types on the team were the most affected, resulted in a very "scientific" approach toward in-game magic. Between Dwim studying the new avenues open to him and Doug trying to get a handle on what his power was really doing, the two of them acquired quite a considerable body of mystic knowledge -- from a thoroughly scientific and mechanistic viewpoint. (And diplomatic, where extradimensional entities were concerned.) And that's the kind of flavor I've been trying to get across with Doug -- to misquote Harlan Ellison, "Magic ain't nothin' but science misspelled."
(Another side effect is that Doug is, entirely accidentally, one of the best-trained theoretical magicians on Warriors' World, familiar with any number of different styles, their uses, their strengths and weaknesses, and so on. He knows it well enough to teach quite competently...)
Anyway.
Back to the question of simulacra. You're overthinking it. Doug's simulacra have exactly the same kind of reality as the projections from Green Lantern's ring. They are solid, having (temporary) mass; they reflect light, sound, radar and most other means of detection, but below their surface level they are blobs of undifferentiated energy. Doug's metagift provides their power effects, not anything inherent in their structure. They have no genetics to scan or clone; they have no minds save that provided by Doug's own subconscious, which puppets them independently of his conscious will.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.