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Oh, yeah, Death's another easy Arcanum to cut, assuming you can shunt off, like, raising the dead to Life and dealing with ghosts to Spirit. You definitely want, in a WoD Mage game, spells that can deal with Halloween monsters, but a Halloween Arcanum isn't strictly necessary.
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Jul 17, 2014 14:40
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Stripped down Mage WOULD be cool. If I had to cut three Arcana, they would probably be Death, Fate, and Prime. Life, Matter, and Spirit can handle all death magic, covert/subtle spells in general can handle Fate magic, and Spirit would pick up a little of Prime's slack while the rest of Prime would just vanish. Alternatively, I might cut Spirit and allow each Arcanum the power to deal with related ephemeral beings - Death for ghosts, Forces for elementals, etc.
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Jul 17, 2014 14:53
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Ferrinus posted:Stripped down Mage WOULD be cool. If I had to cut three Arcana, they would probably be Death, Fate, and Prime. Life, Matter, and Spirit can handle all death magic, covert/subtle spells in general can handle Fate magic, and Spirit would pick up a little of Prime's slack while the rest of Prime would just vanish. I can get behind most of this, but I still like Fate being a thing, even if it was compressed with Time like Attorney at Funk proposed. The existence of Fate magic, for me, implies that probability and chaos are fundamental forces that can be manipulated and tapped into, which I think is pretty cool.
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Jul 17, 2014 15:18
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Combine Fate and Space, call it Correspondence. 
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Jul 17, 2014 15:29
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I'm sympathetic to an argument that sees Fate deleted outright rather than merged with Time into some kind of Destiny arcanum just because a lot (a lot, a lot, a loooooot) of Fate spells are, while they suggest cool things about the setting for existing, kind of boring and narratively inert. So much of what Fate offers you is just flavorless, contextless increased success units whether in the form of buffs or dice tricks or what have you. A Fate spell that can produce the same mechanical and narrative end-effect as a spell of some other Arcanum (often these are buff spells) is just, sort of, less visible to and less interesting in the actual narrative. Like Ferrinus says, that kind of coincidental or blink-and-you'll-miss-it subtle magic is properly the domain of the covert aspect (the way you can tell this is true is that it's very difficult to envision what distinguishes a vulgar Fate spell from a covert one). However, there are things within the Fate Arcanum that aren't luck manipulation and dice tricks that I'd hate to see vanish from the game entirely, things like power over narrative roles and destinies, and the ability to just exert the pure, abstracted fiat authority that other games give you when they say "use this, and you can declare that you were prepared for whatever you're facing all along". Merging these effects into the Time arcanum is my initial idea, but you could easily do other things with them depending on which other Arcana you cared about keeping or deleting.
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Jul 17, 2014 15:31
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Time magic's potential for retroactive continuity is criminally unexplored, and proved to be really fertile ground for the rewrite AaF and I did. I'm inclined to prune Fate and keep Time (or to make Destiny more like Time than like Fate) because spells that let you have seen this coming, or spells that let you have asked your future self for advice, or spells that let you summon things from nearby yet alternate timelines, are cool as hell. Fate's "I will transform you from a mighty hero into a despicable villain because that suits my plans better" is definitely worth keeping around, as is its "I can tell on sight that you're an extra so I'm going to ignore you". I hear that FWC is going to be dialing back on the Acanthus reputation for flightiness and laconic detachment and play up the Acanthus tendency to study and plan, but I hope the former isn't to entirely replace the latter - those Acanthus fucks are so infuriating precisely because, by virtue of playing a game others don't realize exists, they're much better at ignoring irrelevant details and living in the moment. An Acanthus tells you "chill out, it doesn't matter" is speaking with divine authority.
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Jul 17, 2014 15:49
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Attorney at Funk posted:I'm sympathetic to an argument that sees Fate deleted outright rather than merged with Time into some kind of Destiny arcanum just because a lot (a lot, a lot, a loooooot) of Fate spells are, while they suggest cool things about the setting for existing, kind of boring and narratively inert. So much of what Fate offers you is just flavorless, contextless increased success units whether in the form of buffs or dice tricks or what have you. A Fate spell that can produce the same mechanical and narrative end-effect as a spell of some other Arcanum (often these are buff spells) is just, sort of, less visible to and less interesting in the actual narrative. Right, I can definitely understand the arguments for abolishing it, but I feel that the hit the setting takes as a result is too big. Fate, to me, should be the sphere of hidden strings, and unseen forces. Part of me wants to link Fate to covert magic the way Space is to sympathetic, though not as severe. I'd have a tough time convincing even myself that Fate should be required to cast covertly. "Covert magic is of the Fate sphere, not from it" -Peleps Deled Ferrinus posted:An Acanthus tells you "chill out, it doesn't matter" is speaking with divine authority. This is rad.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:16
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Ferrinus posted:Time magic's potential for retroactive continuity is criminally unexplored, and proved to be really fertile ground for the rewrite AaF and I did. OMage had a dude who basically existed to stop the creation of time paradoxes. 
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Jul 17, 2014 16:39
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Pope Guilty posted:OMage had a dude who basically existed to stop the creation of time paradoxes. An excellent case is made that Omage is really silly, but gently caress, I kinda miss 'intelligent paradoxes' like that.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:41
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Ha ha, like A Wrinkle in Time. I get it. I get jokes.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:46
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How would a cut-down set of arcana work with the Watchtowers? If you have Acanthi wielding the power of Destiny, then having Mastigoi and Obrimoi wielding split Mind/Space or Prime/Forces seems to break all kinds of Atlantean symmetries. 'Splendour' seems pretty good for the path of the Mighty, but I can't think of an equivalent for the path of Scourging that evokes both 'mind' and 'space' ... Dominion, maybe? I realise that this line of thought might draw you towards more changes than you initially wanted - maybe you'd keep Acanthus as 'destiny', give everyone a ruling arcanum and let them choose another, or something.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:50
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Wrinkle is the exact opposite of what I want. Time should be inherently messy and disjointed when you look at it closely, such that it's entirely possible to use Time magic to rewind, undo, or distort elements of the past and future without causing the whole game to explode until an omnipotent NPC comes to fix it and punish you. Less Back to the Future, more Looper.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:50
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Fortunately, nWoD seems to take the tack of time being quite malleable if you don't mind the occasional time traveling angel getting annoyed at you interfering in its project.
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Jul 17, 2014 17:29
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WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:How would a cut-down set of arcana work with the Watchtowers? If you have Acanthi wielding the power of Destiny, then having Mastigoi and Obrimoi wielding split Mind/Space or Prime/Forces seems to break all kinds of Atlantean symmetries. 'Splendour' seems pretty good for the path of the Mighty, but I can't think of an equivalent for the path of Scourging that evokes both 'mind' and 'space' ... Dominion, maybe? At that point you are basically playing a chopped down oMage, with each tower getting a splash of a few other rote effects rather than a real flavor of power.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:21
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Ferrinus posted:Yes, all the more for how useless Mana is. It's the ultimate insult, basically. This reminds me of that scene from Boardwalk Empire when that guy busts his rear end to make a ton of money in a little time for Thompson, hands him the cash and Thompson just gambles it away in one bet like it doesn't matter. But with souls and poo poo.
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Jul 19, 2014 06:09
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Attorney at Funk posted:Which three? I could easily see Fate and Time getting compressed into one Arcanum, and Prime deleted. You guys are good. Early in Awakening's development I proposed eliminating Prime and making its metamagic functions innate, collapsing Fate and Time into one, and cutting Space, making sympathetic magic a set of requirements, spreading out ban/ward functions among existing Arcana. I'm back and forth about Death--splitting necromancy is thematically cool, but many functions work for Spirit. However at the time I left it because at the time, there were 7 player-default factions. Keep in mind that I didn't want to just mash Arcana together, but remove certain functions. Time travel has always sucked and been a poor thematic fit, for example. If I had my druthers I would also remove the ability to easily use directed-energy magic like fireballs because I think it's cheesy, but it's far too ingrained. How would I do 5? Hmm. Maybe: Destiny (parts of Time and Fate)-- gross (that seems strange but "gross" in this case refers to the Phenomenal/Fallen, and not simple material nature) Arcanum of Arcadia Elements (parts of Matter and Forces) -- gross Arcanum of Stygia Life -- combined gross/subtle Arcanum of the Primal Wild Spirit -- subtle Arcanum of the Aether Soul (Mind and soul manipulation) -- subtle Arcanum of Pandemonium This obviously changes the Paths and setting a bit. For Spirit and the Obrimos I would add a class of spirits that are more likely to deal with mages--this moves away from treading on Forsaken as a nice side effect without completely closing the door. Prime metamagic is an innate set of abilities controlled by Gnosis. Sympathetic magic is a practice unrelated to any particular Arcanum that requires effort outside of innate ability (like getting part of the target). Necromancy is a similar practice. These join summoning and magic item creation as things that harness Arcana but are not simply spell-driven. These are things that require names, items, places and research to do.
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Jul 19, 2014 09:33
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Attorney at Funk posted:I'm sympathetic to an argument that sees Fate deleted outright rather than merged with Time into some kind of Destiny arcanum just because a lot (a lot, a lot, a loooooot) of Fate spells are, while they suggest cool things about the setting for existing, kind of boring and narratively inert. So much of what Fate offers you is just flavorless, contextless increased success units whether in the form of buffs or dice tricks or what have you. A Fate spell that can produce the same mechanical and narrative end-effect as a spell of some other Arcanum (often these are buff spells) is just, sort of, less visible to and less interesting in the actual narrative. Well, this is the trouble: Buffs, like fireballs, are kind of part and parcel of fantasy games. Designing flavour into the systems is tricky, because actual stories about curses are often if/then statements that require a high degree of GM/ST competence to manage lest they become Mother May I. A better solution might be to make all Fate stuff material. "You will meet a tall dark stranger" may cause an NPC with certain Trait parameters to show up and be a hassle, for example. At that point of course, we need to come up with a bestiary of people, places and things. Staged sensory/information stuff is easier though, especially if you drop Time and give prophecy to Fate/Destiny--plus, lending it to an Arcanum innately related to chance takes some of the pressure off finding a way to make things absolutely certain without the same level of weasel language in the text.
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Jul 19, 2014 09:40
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Gerund posted:At that point you are basically playing a chopped down oMage, with each tower getting a splash of a few other rote effects rather than a real flavor of power. Again, keep in mind that I first proposed this like two drafts before what got published, when the game was radically different.
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Jul 19, 2014 09:43
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Well, this is the trouble: Buffs, like fireballs, are kind of part and parcel of fantasy games. I'm not sure whether or not this is true, but even conceding that it is, I think that the kinds of buffs that Fate offers are less cool than the kinds of buffs that more phenomenal Arcana can offer. (And, when you get right down to it, every Arcanum is more phenomenal than Fate). It's been my experience that in gameplay terms, Fate is at its most engaging when it lets you sneak into the Storyteller's chair for a minute, whether to make direct claims about the content of the story, or learn direct facts about the relative narrative significance of things in the scene, or just to spin around and go 'wheeeee!'. Fate is at its least engaging (but often its most effective) when it's just editing dicepools directly without any intermediary narrative presence. In Atlantis on the Moon I'd like to see Fate's ability to do the dicepool editing reined in or at least made more visible while Fate's ability to do scene editing is made more prominent. eta: I'm delighted whenever anyone says they think time travel and fireballs are lame, though.
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Jul 19, 2014 10:13
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Attorney at Funk posted:I'm not sure whether or not this is true, but even conceding that it is, I think that the kinds of buffs that Fate offers are less cool than the kinds of buffs that more phenomenal Arcana can offer. (And, when you get right down to it, every Arcanum is more phenomenal than Fate). Breathing fire? A curse that causes fires? An alchemical solution? Mass pyromania? All good. It's mostly spells that are really D&D 6d6 fireballs reskinned for a different game that I don't go for. Time travel as a story element is cool, but I'm not hot on it as a standardized power.
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Jul 19, 2014 12:14
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Meld fate and death, call it Entropy.  Also, sometimes throwing fireballs and lightning bolts is just plain fun, and if you took that out of mage for any reason you'd have a loving riot on your hands.
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Jul 19, 2014 15:00
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Well, that explains why a Master of Forces' fireballs currently roll roughly the same number of dice as a machinegun (or less, if you don't spend XP on a rote)
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Jul 19, 2014 16:08
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Tezzor posted:Well, that explains why a Master of Forces' fireballs currently roll roughly the same number of dice as a machinegun (or less, if you don't spend XP on a rote) A machine gun is efficiently designed to kill a human being, while a fire is best at cooking meat from the outside-in. Space-Mind message sending spells are considerably more complicated and titchy than a cellphone too.
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Jul 19, 2014 16:38
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On the other hand, with sufficient Forces I can change my TV channels without getting up, or indeed even having my TV on or in the same room.
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Jul 19, 2014 16:45
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Tezzor posted:Well, that explains why a Master of Forces' fireballs currently roll roughly the same number of dice as a machinegun (or less, if you don't spend XP on a rote) Nah, I didn't work on the magic system. It was based on a relative framework of how much damage things should do in comparative playtest. Since then, the general mood has shifted to wanting supernatural powers to have a clear advantage over ordinary ways to injure people, so that's probably going to change.
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Jul 19, 2014 16:50
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Mors Rattus posted:On the other hand, with sufficient Forces I can change my TV channels without getting up, or indeed even having my TV on or in the same room. An apprentice of Forces has full comprehension of mortal electronic communication. With this power, a mage can become a foremost scholar of middlebrow culture from the comfort of a sanctum. Such great heights.
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Jul 19, 2014 17:14
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I have opinions about Arcana: Forces: If Zeus gets to throw lightning bolts, so do I. That said, Forces-as-written falls badly short of Forces-as-posited because it egregiously ignores the Practices in order, apparently, to be more evocative of Dungeons and Dragons. For instance, you can conjure light with Forces 2... but conjuring light should, properly speaking, require Mastery of the Arcanum, same as lighting a lighting a cigarette or incinerating an entire SWAT team, because creating energy out of nothing is Making Forces!!! (You could cheat with Patterning by turning sound or gravity or something into fire instead). Forces would feel a lot more like part of Mage if it respected the progression framework more - it's cool that it's easier to bend gravity and fly than it is to light a small room. Fate: I don't think you'd need entire bestiaries of summonable monsters to use Fate for scene editing. Producing tall, dark strangers or gaps in traffic or random search patterns that happen to ignore the specific closet you're hiding in could all be done with the basic level of abstraction/improve the WoD runs on anyway. At worst you'd have to say something like "characters brought into the scene can't have a dicepool higher than ____ and take ___ successes on someone's part to defeat or dismiss". Time: Full-on Back to the Future Time travel, and even short-term combat turn rewinding, are both in my opinion pretty awful, but while time travel is not conducive to gameplay time warps are I think totally fine. All you have to do is treat them as discrete effects that don't have to stay consistent with their surroundings and resolve them like any other spell. For instance, my enemy rushes me, but I stutter him backwards through time and effectively teleport him back to the other side of the door he came through. I get shot, but I rewind the wound. I throw bolts of rippling time distortion that cause bashing damage by making people's organs fall out of sync. I temporarily replace my enemy with a version of them from an alternate timeline who doesn't know or care who I am. Buffs: Buffs are cool if they're simple to track, pretty much all use the same mechanics, and don't reward stacking, pre-casting, or other kinds of bookkeeping. Having to spend a turn casting Bull's Strength before you do anything else stinks, and having to spend a turn casting Bull's Strength and then a second turn casting Divine Favor stinks even more, but if there's a clean divide between "this action is being buffed by magic" and "this action is not being buffed by magic" and you can just instantiate a magical buff as part of taking whatever action then the bother largely goes away. Fate's problem in the original corebook isn't that it contained buffs, but that it contained at least five or six buffs each with their own idiosyncracies and these came at the cost of cooler and more noticeable narrative editing magic. If there was just a single all-purpose "you're lucky" spell (maybe in Fallen World it's a "you're lucky" Attainment that's just like, spend 1m for a bonus on any given mundane roll) or at least a "you're lucky" template (the spell for releasing a lucky shot is different from the spell for delivering a well-worded speech, but the mechanics are the same for both so it's just a matter of how many rotes you want to learn) it would've been much better.
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Jul 19, 2014 18:27
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As a longtime Acanthus player, I really liked Fate. But most of the example Fate effects were really boring and obvious "luck" spells. Most of the more interesting Fate spells were tucked away in much later supplements or gated behind Mastery. Like being able to apprehend the best or worst a person is capable of and edging them towards it - or warping/changing those possibilities - that's a really heady power. Because if you have the ability to manipulate something as powerful as True Love (for instance) you really have to have a good excuse for resolving situations in a way where Everyone doesn't get saved. Basically I found other game lines more helpful to unpack Fate and Destiny as concepts more than just getting 8-again or asking the ST where each and every clue in the scene is to find.
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Jul 19, 2014 20:00
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I'm a huge sucker for Forces, because it's fun to subtly work within the established infrastructure that modern technology has provided (and I feel like Forces is the best for this), and because sometimes it's just fun to go fire and brimstone on some idiot vampire who thinks he's hot poo poo because he can shrug off bullets.
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Jul 19, 2014 23:09
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Cabbit posted:I'm a huge sucker for Forces, because it's fun to subtly work within the established infrastructure that modern technology has provided (and I feel like Forces is the best for this), and because sometimes it's just fun to go fire and brimstone on some idiot vampire who thinks he's hot poo poo because he can shrug off bullets. This. If your Obrimos isn't the Dude from Watchdogs who occasionally turns into Almighty Thor when it's time to Go Loud, what are you even playing for?
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Jul 20, 2014 00:33
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Error 404 posted:This. If your Obrimos isn't the Dude from Watchdogs who occasionally turns into Almighty Thor when it's time to Go Loud, what are you even playing for? This is the lamest possible character referencing the lamest possible media
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Jul 20, 2014 01:22
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Error 404 posted:This. If your Obrimos isn't the Dude from Watchdogs who occasionally turns into Almighty Thor when it's time to Go Loud, what are you even playing for? As someone who is playing an Obrimos in a game right now, I'm having trouble imagining a more boring character concept than "crappy one-dimensional Mad Anonymous Dad videogame protagonist stapled to crappy one-dimensional Marvel superhero," but I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more about how I'm apparently playing Mage wrong because I'm not playing Demon.
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Jul 20, 2014 01:23
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Cool.
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Jul 20, 2014 01:50
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Crion posted:As someone who is playing an Obrimos in a game right now, I'm having trouble imagining a more boring character concept than "crappy one-dimensional Mad Anonymous Dad videogame protagonist stapled to crappy one-dimensional Marvel superhero," but I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more about how I'm apparently playing Mage wrong because I'm not playing Demon. Getting a bit mad there, buddy!!
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Jul 20, 2014 01:55
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Speaking of Arcana, it would be nice if Fate didn't include the oath functionality and then make it completely useless by making them hackable.
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Jul 20, 2014 02:02
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Milky Moor posted:Getting a bit mad there, buddy!! For example: Speaking of Demon, as much as I love that there are a bunch of different "communication breakdown" Embeds, while I'm putting together a character now for a game I almost wish there were slightly fewer of them, so I didn't have "Tower of Babel," "ToB except just between two people," "ToB except just written and one person," and "ToB except just verbal and one person" making me feel like good, robust coverage of the communication-breakdowns-guy angle requires at least 2 or 3 of them, that all do very very minor alterations on the same thing. PLUS the making puns real power exists, so you're effectively at -1 power choices at chargen if you're at all honest with yourself.
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Jul 20, 2014 02:23
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Did you have anything to add to the conversation, or? I wasn't aware that there was a conversation in this specific instance beyond people getting mad at a dumb joke.
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Jul 20, 2014 02:31
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Getting either really desperate or really pissed off and then going completely HAM isn't really a matter of playing an Obrimos, it's a matter of playing a mage, full stop. Every Path offers pretty robust options for venting one's frustrations in the most memorable manner possible. (This is why any design-level distaste for fireballs is kind of suspect - are you going to take out the fireballs but leave in the flesh-melting, or the telefrags, or the...?) Really, that's what vulgar magic is for in general (and why vulgar magic should always be more expensive/risky but more full-on powerful than equivalent covert magic).
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jul 20, 2014 |
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Jul 20, 2014 03:31
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I hate Awakening Matter and Forces because they work within the province of fallen world chemistry and physics. I hated Ascension Life and then Awakening Life happened.
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Jul 20, 2014 03:38
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How do you mean? I like Ascension Forces's implementation more than Awakening Forces's implementation just because Ascension's was more consistent with its own layout - it really got you thinking about A) controlling and B) transmuting forces, and therefore thinking about your entire imaginary environment as a sort of toolkit/spice rack. The progression of Practices is cooler than just control minor -> transmute minor -> control major -> transmute major, but Awakening didn't actually stay faithful to it. I think Forces and Matter cleaving to real world science is better than them not doing so so long as it's ultimately game abstractions rather than pure narration that determines how other game abstractions are affected. For instance, if I want to shut down your brain with localized EMP, I should have to roll as many successes as if I wanted to burn you to death.
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Jul 20, 2014 03:44
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