king_of_keighley wrote:I think a verbal force is all good and well and may make us magicians sit back and think...DAMN that's good. To a spectator a verbal force an ordinary force or an ID will have the same effect on them
It's the thing that nips at our hearts so, so often: The Silent Agony of a Different Method. I got a RaMa deck (anyone know why it's a called that, by the way?) the other day. You can riffle your thumb down a corner and ask the spec to stop wherever they want; when they do that and take the still face-down card from the pack, you know what it is. Lovely. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Except... (Ugh! It comes - the Agony!) I can do that anyway. I riffle force all the time.
The Ecstasy: 'Ah, but this is different. It's happening a completely other way.'
The Agony: 'But, as far at the spec can see, it's identical. Utterly identical.'
The Ecstasy: 'You do this totally 'openly' and 'cleanly', though.'
The Agony: 'To the spec, my riffle force is 'totally open and clean' - I'm
relying on it seemingly like that, in fact. The only way I can hit the spec with this cleverness - and have them know they've been hit by it - is if I revealed the method of the riffle force to them just so I could say, "Now, watch, you'll see I'm not doing that this time." Man, this hurts.'
(This isn't having a go at the RaMa deck, BTW - it has other things up its sleeve besides letting you know what card has been riffled to.)
Relatedly, for effect on the spec (rather than effect on the magician), I think the largest impact of a psychological force of ID magnitude would be if you really did explain what you'd done to the spec immediately afterwards. They'd then accept (if you wanted them to) that all the jiggery and every bit of the pokery you subsequently did was accomplished by clever psychology, not by naughty sleights. That's misdirection on a scale that brings tears to your eyes, isn't it? Just imagine a group of specs not burning your hands - scarcely even bothering about them - because, to try and work out the method, they are listening so avidly to every word you say.