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I've got a rules question concerning Demon/CoD. There are a few mechanics (Ripple or Call Out, for example) which use damage suffered as a variable for some purpose. Should things involving this variable (such as Ripple's extra damage or Call Out's check for Beaten Down) be processed before or after damage reduction from armor and the like? (Luckily called shots to hit specific body parts ignore armor!)
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May 7, 2016 23:19
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Ambi posted:If I remember right from the Syndicate revised convention book, didn't Pentex have an office or department within the Syndicate that mysteriously closed up shop when the avatar storm hit/2001? And all attempts to investigate it become (quite literal) dead ends. One of the things I put in Syndicate Revised that got cut (and rightly, it would have limited the setting, but I thought it was neat) was that when Pentex's board collapsed the Syndicate virtually eradicated the SPD, and the sample cabal purchased Pentex's intellectual property to patent troll with extreme prejudice anyone who tried to revive SPD projects.
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May 8, 2016 00:07
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NGDBSS posted:I've got a rules question concerning Demon/CoD. There are a few mechanics (Ripple or Call Out, for example) which use damage suffered as a variable for some purpose. Should things involving this variable (such as Ripple's extra damage or Call Out's check for Beaten Down) be processed before or after damage reduction from armor and the like? After damage reduction, I'm pretty confident in saying. If you take less damage due to armor, you didn't suffer that extra damage, it was prevented.
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May 8, 2016 00:35
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Ferrinus posted:Okay so Death spells that screw with shadows and ectoplasm or whatever just immediately ignore the established definitions of the Practices like four pages prior. Could you be more specific? One of the things I was really looking forward to in 2.0 was more consistency in the Practices.
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May 8, 2016 05:17
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Mendrian posted:Could you be more specific? One of the things I was really looking forward to in 2.0 was more consistency in the Practices. Compelling makes things do what they could already do (coin comes up heads), Ruling makes things do what they can't do (water runs uphill), Weaving gives things new capabilities or states of being (steel melts). Death 1, Compelling: Deepen shadows enough to blind someone. Death 1, Compelling: Animate shadows such that they move as you can. Also you can make fires hotter, lights brighter, sounds louder, etc. with Forces 2 (though mysteriously the Forces 2 electricity spell does respect conservation of charge). Fraying and Unraveling are explicitly described as "this Practice moderately disorders/badly undermines subjects within the Arcanum's purview... or it directs the Arcanum's purview to deal bashing/lethal-or-aggravated damage." There is more consistency in the Practices, don't get me wrong... but it's sloppy.
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May 8, 2016 05:58
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You're never going to get perfect fidelity to the Practices without biting way more bullets at the what-level-are-what-spells design level than anyone who actually wants to sell a book would be comfortable with.
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May 8, 2016 06:28
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citybeatnik posted:The entire Greek pantheon is stupid, and you can typically tell whether a female god pictured in the books if from that pantheon or another based off of whether or not they have their tits out. The fact that Aphrodite doesn't have access to the domain of Animal (Frog) is also a shame. Found a picture I took of the thing i found in the bathroom.  Apparently someone who works near the bathroom was complaining about some random person that's been in there at about the same time every day and basically coughing loudly...?
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May 8, 2016 06:36
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Ferrinus posted:Compelling makes things do what they could already do (coin comes up heads), Ruling makes things do what they can't do (water runs uphill), Weaving gives things new capabilities or states of being (steel melts). Attorney at Funk posted:You're never going to get perfect fidelity to the Practices without biting way more bullets at the what-level-are-what-spells design level than anyone who actually wants to sell a book would be comfortable with. I was going to say under those definitions life should be able to kill people trivially. Even if people aren't already considered to be able to have an embolism on short notice for compel, everyone ages.
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May 8, 2016 06:41
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An embolism is what causing someone's body to sabotage itself with Fraying or Unraveling might look like.
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May 8, 2016 06:51
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Ferrinus posted:Compelling makes things do what they could already do (coin comes up heads), Ruling makes things do what they can't do (water runs uphill), Weaving gives things new capabilities or states of being (steel melts). That's somewhat troubling. I guess if you're too consistent you run up against the intrinsic limitations of the Arcana's subject matter. That is - electricity will always be more useful than shadow, in part because electricity is real and we know what it does (not to say shadows aren't 'real' but they're just an absence of light, a fact that Mage lore rejects) and because one is active and the other largely intangible and reactive. Non-rhetorical question: what would you do to fix it with respect to the above problem? EDIT: I ask because I like Mage and I know you think about Mage a lot.
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May 8, 2016 08:42
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I think they ran into the problem, yet again, of Death as written just not really being all that useful or fun or interesting in most games, and they ended up throwing up their hands just like they did in the first edition.
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May 8, 2016 09:03
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Yeah, as much as I love the idea of shadow barriers and reanimating revenants and dealing with weird ghosts and constructing deathly palaces in Twilight, it's a bit harder to make those an every-session useful skillset.
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May 8, 2016 09:45
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You know, if the new Planet Nine turns out to be real, it'd make a badass centerpiece for a M20 supplement. Each of the planets (also Pluto) has a shard realm for one of the Ten Spheres, so Planet Nine (Ten, with Pluto) should have its associated shard realm. Cue the mad scrabble to reach it first by literally everyone.
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May 8, 2016 12:32
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Loomer posted:You know, if the new Planet Nine turns out to be real, it'd make a badass centerpiece for a M20 supplement. Each of the planets (also Pluto) has a shard realm for one of the Ten Spheres, so Planet Nine (Ten, with Pluto) should have its associated shard realm. Cue the mad scrabble to reach it first by literally everyone. The new planet is obvs the physical manifestation of the red star
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May 8, 2016 14:39
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Mendrian posted:That's somewhat troubling. Unveiling and Knowing Death spells are plenty easy to come up with and the ones in the book are fine (although the book sometimes takes Unveiling as "make things notice me" rather than "make me notice things", you cold just imagine that something like the Speak With the Dead spell merely uses Compelling and Unveiling together to permit two-way communication). Compelling would have to act on literal-deaths/ghosts/ectoplasm/shadows/lingering-memories/irreversible-transformations-in-general/souls/inborn-capacities-for-change that could be doing something but aren't, or are doing something but don't expressly need to be, or could be one way but happen to be another. So, you could logically force someone barely clinging to life to die (or force them not to), turn a ghost's Manifestations on or off, decide whether ectoplasm successfully performs weird tricks like reflecting/responding to ghosts or else just sits there as weird goo, make mementos or old possessions produce poignant feelings in onlookers or call out to those who knew the old owner, make a rusty chain finally snap or keep a decaying rope bridge together while you cross it, give someone at a Breaking Point a bonus or penalty on relevant rolls, make a chrysalis begin to hatch into a butterfly or make someone's wisdom teeth start to come in... Shadows in particular are tricky just because they're cast, and behave, in such a straightforwardly mechanistic way - there's not a lot of space into which the covert magic of 1E or the Compelling Practice of 2E could insert a prybar. Probably rather than visibly and explicitly moving or controlling shadows themselves you'd control how they happen to interact with other things - like maybe a target blends into them unusually well or fails to hide within them, or they interfere with reading or observation more or less than normal, or they're unusually spooky. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 15:22 on May 8, 2016 |
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May 8, 2016 15:17
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One thing I thought of a while ago for my houserule project and that I'm sad we don't seem to be getting is a continuation of the idea that fantasy necromancy is evil/unnatural expressed in the Practices rather than in the Wisdom chart. Which is to say, Death spells which put the dead to rest or set the world in order should use the positive/constructive Practices, while Death spells that create undead minions or otherwise twist the line between this world and the next would classically use the deconstructive Practices. So, with Perfecting Death you force an incomplete death to complete itself, shunting a ghost to the underworld or destroying an animate zombie. Meanwhile, rather than Weaving, you use Fraying to make a corpse get up and start walking around, because you erode the very fact that it's supposed to be dead until the corpse itself has forgotten what it should or shouldn't be doing. There IS an Unmaking Death spell that straight up resurrects someone (albeit only for the spell's duration, and the subject's soulless), but I'd have liked to see that continued all the way down. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 15:28 on May 8, 2016 |
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May 8, 2016 15:21
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Page 115: "The mage cannot spend more Mana then she is normally allowed to spend per turn..." Shame! Although the new spellcasting rules are really making me want to play this the more I read them. Someone run a chat game I can join, please?
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May 8, 2016 17:22
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Okay, the reasoning behind a sub-Making Matter spell that increases or decreases an object's size (you move the object's supernal symbol closer or farther away from the fallen world, changing the size of the shadow it casts) is pretty cute.
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May 8, 2016 17:54
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Loomer posted:You know, if the new Planet Nine turns out to be real, it'd make a badass centerpiece for a M20 supplement. Each of the planets (also Pluto) has a shard realm for one of the Ten Spheres, so Planet Nine (Ten, with Pluto) should have its associated shard realm. Cue the mad scrabble to reach it first by literally everyone. Then you'd have to answer difficult questions like "Why doesn't Eris have a Shard Realm", "Why doesn't Ceres have a Shard Realm", "Why doesn't Makemake have a Shard Realm". "Why doesn't Quaoar have a Shard Realm" and things like "What happened after 1801 when the first dwarf planets and asteroids were discovered, quickly reaching numbers far greater than 10?", and "What happened between 1845 and 1930 when the number of planets was decreased towards eight?"
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May 8, 2016 18:12
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Just go "A wizard did it." Assigning shard realms to the planets as-is should open those up, so I don't see why we should let that stop us leveraging planet nine - which is a Big rear end Planet if it exists - for stories.
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May 8, 2016 18:29
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The ninth shard realm, Yuggoth, is somehow the shard realm of every dwarf planet simultaneously.
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May 8, 2016 21:02
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All this Mage-talk and not one single recruit up in PBP. Tsk tsk.
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May 8, 2016 22:55
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So...I'm feeling like sharing something silly that I've done with Demon. Xelkelvos posted:If only there was a system other than FATE that could emulate JoJo in its full and absolute glory. I'm only something like one hundred and fifty chapters late... So, I'm sure most of you tend to think of Stands and weird powers when you think of jojo, and Demon is surprisingly flexible. What with customizable demonic forms and ability to use such embeds as Shift Consequence, but I'm sure we ALL know that a demonic form is kinda you right? Well enter the Terrible Avatar exploit and suddenly? You've got a demonic form (And with an exceptional it can use your embeds) and you've got your cover. So...say you make a few changes like make it a mandatory power to replace other abilities. Remove covers as you are now just a stand user make it so your 'stand' does share damage with you and suddenly thing are starting to look pretty darn Jojo...now granted I had to make a few other changes...but in the end it actually functioned pretty darn well.
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May 9, 2016 11:22
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mistaya posted:All this Mage-talk and not one single recruit up in PBP. Tsk tsk. I just posted a small little one. If anyone wants to play with the new mechanics in a short low-stress adventure, check it out: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3775341
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May 9, 2016 12:12
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Loomer posted:I expect that's just part of the World of Darkness branded slot machines they've licensed. Not exactly words I ever thought I'd type, but it's nice to see Paradox getting into the same spirit as WWP had when it licensed Gangrel, the Pro-Wrestler. This is from pretty far back, but I just want to add that their Swedish offices are located on "5 West Goth* Street". *or Geat or Gaut or Gute or a dozen other possible variations. The etymology and translation of the names for these peoples is kind of a mess
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May 9, 2016 12:20
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Terrorforge posted:This is from pretty far back, but I just want to add that their Swedish offices are located on "5 West Goth* Street". So what you're saying is that Goth Rasputin Dracula works on Goth Street and has lawyers on a different Goth Street while overseeing the Gothic Horror game? 
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May 9, 2016 12:23
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Guardians of the Veil hook: a rogue Acanthus Master is meticulously building sympathetic connections to healthy centenarians. She could give any fool a Destiny in the present, but they're the only ones she can send far enough back in time to change what she has to change.
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May 11, 2016 14:32
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To bring this back to Scion for a sec, OPP shared a new bit of stuff and my desire for playing it awoke my desire to play it once again. http://theonyxpath.tumblr.com/post/144253019110/pantheons-scion-second-edition-open-development I should reread that draft they shared to get a better feel for what Paths are, for example.
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May 12, 2016 18:34
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paradoxGentleman posted:To bring this back to Scion for a sec, OPP shared a new bit of stuff and my desire for playing it awoke my desire to play it once again. If you could link that draft that'll be awesome. Wanna see what they're doing with CORN FOR THE CORN GOD!
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May 12, 2016 19:03
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So here's a puzzle for you: How do you explain/play Mage when you have only one corebook and nobody's played a nWoD/CofD game before? I feel it's the kind of game that requires PDF sharing, or if in person, having the actual book there (rather than on a tablet or laptop) to pass around in order to see what kind of spells are out there.
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May 12, 2016 22:53
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To start, take a game to just do character creation. If players have never played CofD before, there are definitely things that are unintuitive. Then go over the different Practices. Going by just the core book spells will drastically underpower some spheres (Death, Spirit both have a lot of spells that are niche or hard to get off) and horribly overpower others (Mind, Fate, Time all have stupid good spells in the core book). Creative thaumaturgy is probably the coolest thing about the game, and going without drastically weakens it. Make summary sheets of the various magic/gnosis/ritual/wisdom rules for players to refirenze if they need to. It'll help with not having to explain things every time they want to do something. As for the spells themselves, my ST printed off a couple extra copies of the example spell section in the book for reference. It's expensive, but until your group gets their own books, it'll help speed up the game.
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May 12, 2016 23:17
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bewilderment posted:So here's a puzzle for you:
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May 12, 2016 23:22
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I copied the relevant spell sections for all my players. Encourage everybody to spread their points around as little as possible. Try to get everybody to pick good rotes and cast them as much as they can, gradually adding on more stuff as you go. EDIT: In my limited experience, once one person starts to realize the potential of the spell system, the others will follow suit, if only to have as much fun as that guy.
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May 13, 2016 00:07
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So reading through the Mage 2nd Ed book and I think this may be the first time I am both familiar with and enjoy everything listed under the Inspirational Media section. That and a blatant allusion to "No one can be told what the Matrix is" earlier and I think this book is shaping up nicely so far.
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May 13, 2016 00:12
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Rohan Kishibe posted:So reading through the Mage 2nd Ed book and I think this may be the first time I am both familiar with and enjoy everything listed under the Inspirational Media section. That and a blatant allusion to "No one can be told what the Matrix is" earlier and I think this book is shaping up nicely so far.
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May 13, 2016 00:28
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Mendrian posted:I copied the relevant spell sections for all my players. Encourage everybody to spread their points around as little as possible. Yeah, once someone Gets improvised spellcasting and gives a few real-play examples, people tend to catch on very quick. As a note, I wouldn't be terrified out of my wits to teach to completely new players Mage 2e, which is basically the highest praise I could ever give any game with the name Mage. It'd still probably be rough, but it'd be doable.
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May 13, 2016 00:32
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Daeren posted:Yeah, once someone Gets improvised spellcasting and gives a few real-play examples, people tend to catch on very quick. A "fun" game to play is to open Mage to a random page and make a list of every Mage-specific vocabulary word on that page. You'll sometimes hit 20+ vocab words on one page.
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May 13, 2016 00:46
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Gobbeldygook posted:A "fun" game to play is to open Mage to a random page and make a list of every Mage-specific vocabulary word on that page. You'll sometimes hit 20+ vocab words on one page. Another thing is I'm on page 25 and I think there's been about 12 references to loving so far. I am enjoying the porn game for sex weirdos Mage: The Awakening.
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May 13, 2016 00:52
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Gobbeldygook posted:A "fun" game to play is to open Mage to a random page and make a list of every Mage-specific vocabulary word on that page. You'll sometimes hit 20+ vocab words on one page. Mage's lexicon is so big I keep it in a spreadsheet. It was extremely long in the 1st ed corebook, and every sourcebook since has added to it. Sometimes it reminds me of Dictionary of Mu. The last time I got to have direct input into a game's vocabulary, it was Demon and its "Demons try to avoid special words". Deviant will, touch wood, have smaller verbiage than Awakening. Mages are the sort of people to have ridiculously specific language for all manner of esoteric phenomena. We did use the opportunity in second edition to apply a few overarching terms to previously isolated things - "Yantra" may seem unusual at first, but it covers dozens of things that were all individual in 1st ed. Same deal with "Iris". EDIT: Oh, and I used my Developer's New-Edition privilege to change "Sanctums" to "sancta." That one's annoyed me since Sanctum & Sigil. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 01:45 on May 13, 2016 |
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May 13, 2016 01:42
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Rohan Kishibe posted:Another thing is I'm on page 25 and I think there's been about 12 references to loving so far. I am enjoying the porn game for sex weirdos Mage: The Awakening. Well now I have the overwhelming urge to remake my old Acharne character in nMage.
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May 13, 2016 01:46
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