Top Ward Mistakes I

glegrumbles:

chaosjelly:

These are some common reasons why wards, even powerful ones, fail at times. I have noticed these over the years, through my mistakes and others. 

Not enough layers: Wards are made of pure energy, and usually aren’t sentient- meaning they aren’t smart and usually don’t adjust to different attackers. Without the ability to adjust, attackers can get by with ease. Having multiple layers of wards helps prevent this. While layers will vary of course based on your needs, I always recommend three basic layers for a ward, going outwards to the inside: 1) non-detection, 2) offensive ward, 3) defensive ward. The reason for these particular layers being: an attacker can’t attack if it can’t find you. If they do find you, they are then dissuaded by a ward that attacks them. They will have to go through the ward that hurts them to even get to the ward that defends you, thus weakening them and making it harder to get through that final line of defense at the same time.

Too rigid: What shatters more easily when hit- a plastic case, or a rubber ball? The plastic case- why? Because it is super rigid and unable to bend; thus, just one concentrated hit could break through it with ease. This applies to wards as well- you don’t want your wards to be unable to bend- else they shatter under a concentrated hit. Being flexible doesn’t make a ward weaker- you can still have a super tough and thick ward that bends!

Not selective or specific enough: “Keep out malicious entities.” Okay, well what do you mean by malicious? Being as specific as possible is best when it comes to protections. Instead of just saying “malicious” how about- “those that would bring me nightmares”, “those that would harm me”. This also ties into the next point-

…From whose point of view?: Okay, you did it, you made your ward. “Keep out anything with malicious intent.” But the key is…who judges the malicious intent? A nasty entity could easily go, “this is good for me!” and bypass the ward. Additionally, an abusive entity who believes, from their point of view, that what they are doing is “helping” you, and thus not malicious, could easily bypass an unspecific ward. It is best to say something along the lines of, “Things I deem as a malicious intention.” That way, it is based on YOUR judgement alone, what YOU deem as bad, and thus it cannot be interpreted any other way by trickster entities.

A circular wall, or a sphere?: You made your ward- it’s selective, not super rigid, and you made sure the terms were from your point of view. And yet- it’s still easily bypassed! Bad Entities appear in your room, seemingly untouched by the wards. What could’ve happened? Well- this ability called “teleportation” exists. If your innermost ward is a circular wall- not filled in- then an entity could easily bypass your wards just by teleporting directly to you or directly into your space! To protect against this, you want your innermost ward to be like a sphere- filled in on the inside with protective energies as well. Thus, the constraints applying to the outer layers of your wards (no malicious intent from my point of view) are applied to your actual space as well- thus nullifying the teleporting ability, or dealing damage to any entities that manage to teleport inside anyways.  

Accurate from my experience. Additional suggestions:

• Besides non-detection of the wards at the outermost layer, by next layer in is invisibility/passing-beneath-notice. I don’t like to rig and power one ward for two different tasks, so I prefer to have one layer to hide me and one to hide the thing hiding me and making me look uninteresting.
• Think about other types of materials you can copy. A ward doesn’t even have to be a rigid or flexible type of wall, there can be layers of nets to catch or filter different things.
• You can make defensive wards that take and absorb incoming energy/force and reuse it to reinforce and repair themselves.How frustrating for the attacker, that every move they make is just increasing your defense.
• How are you powering the wards? You do too many layers that you are powering directly, you will start to notice that you’re draining yourself. Are you plugging into somewhere else? Make sure the wards protect those power lines too, or an attacker can just “unplug” everything. Don’t just use one line in. You should have several lines in, and several lines out to dump excess energy that might hit the wards so they can drain things away instead of getting overwhelmed and fried.
• Remember to armor yourself as well, in case anything somehow gets through all the layers.
• You can make wards like sticky traps, set them places and bait them, and attach them to alert wards to tell you when and where something’s taken the bait. Good for proactive defense.
• Take inspiration from the world around you to get creative with wards.Study and know your enemies. Do something unexpected.