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Doodmons posted:Nah man you're fine, just mind crush the motherfucker. Mages can dunk on pretty much anything these days. I am filing this advice under "suspect".
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Dec 15, 2016 00:24
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citybeatnik posted:There's some other stuff involving an Abyssal wound of Greed (thus why my Silver Ladder guy though "well gently caress it we're doing it live" with the charity goetia) and a Seer NPC that's the head of the local church and is trying to convert my guy but yeah. Well, the presence of a greed wound will probably keep your spirit busy for a while, since it's probably going to home in right on that as the #1 problem as far as it is concerned. That said, if it doesn't die in its attempts to wipe out the Wound, there will most definitely be Long Term Consequences.
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Dec 15, 2016 00:48
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Doodmons posted:I'm going to go against the grain and say that Mage is also pretty much a garbage fire. I was initially positive on Mage - I love the way Reach works and they've fixed some of the bad things about 1e - but honestly the more I play it the more I just sink into despair about how hosed so much of the magic is. The running joke amongst my gaming group at the moment is that there are only 9 Arcana because Time is totally unplayable - and Acanthus still don't give a poo poo because why would you need anything but Fate? What's wrong with Time? I haven't actually played 2E, just the proto-2E my friend and I cooked up independently, so I've no idea how it plays. I do remember giving the 2E Time Arcanum the side-eye when I read it because it seemed like a lot of its basic functionalities either demanded solo vignettes or heavy fast-forwarding to actually use.
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Dec 15, 2016 01:09
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Yeah now I'm curious, considering I'm planning on running a very Time-focused Acanthus in an upcoming campaign.
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Dec 15, 2016 01:41
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah now I'm curious, considering I'm planning on running a very Time-focused Acanthus in an upcoming campaign. Dormammu! I've come to bargain!
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Dec 15, 2016 01:46
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Personally, I prefer the 1E nWoD over the 2E. I feel like it breaks more than it fixes, although I do like some of the new rules and plan to backport them.
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Dec 15, 2016 02:15
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I say Mage is a strict upgrade and Vampire and Werewolf are sidegrades (both of which are, if nothing else, full of great material to mine).
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Dec 15, 2016 02:28
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Kurieg posted:Dormammu! I've come to bargain! Even for a day about modern day wizards hiding in plain sight, that movie was so unbelievably Mage: the Awakening and I love it.
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Dec 15, 2016 02:29
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All the way down to magically-buffed normal attacks being more efficient than one-off damage spells. Kinda hosed up that it had Seers, Scelesti, and Banishers but no Pentacle mages, though.
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Dec 15, 2016 02:33
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citybeatnik posted:I am filing this advice under "suspect". Gnosis 2 + Mind 3 + Shadow Name 3 (you do have shadow name 3 right?) + Cabal Theme (same) + 3 for Willpower (which you have infinite of) -> Psychic Domination cast as a Praxis,, on average you should get the 3 successes required for an exceptional, which means they can't Withstand it, which means they're your bitch now (for a turn). You can do this every turn. Add in 8-again rote action and an arbitrarily high dice bonus if you have an Acanthus in the party and you might as well do it as a Rote with a +5 dice bonus instead of a Praxis, so that you get the free reach and you really can do it all day, no paradox. I imagine there are more optimal ways to do this, but that one seems pretty foolproof. It shouldn't be difficult to set up some method by which the goetia can kill itself and then give it the suicide command. Or hell, give it the command "do nothing" while the party wail on it. If you have an Acanthus in the party, its Ban and Bane can just happily fall into your lap any time you like. If you have an Obrimos in your party, the Prime 3 spell Ephemeral Enchantment can whip you up a bunch of aggravated damage baseball bats which can hit Twilight entities. Your varying shielding spells and all the magical armour the party should have will see you through any combat with it. Mind 2 should let you channel Essence away from the Goetia, and without Essence it can't do a whole lot. Really there's a wide variety of tools at your disposal. I think when we fought a Rank 4 Spirit on the second session of our 0xp Mage game we had its Bane fortuitously fall into our laps and then copied the mystical power of being its Bane onto the surrounding environment so the Spirit blew up. Either that or we transmuted all the matter in the area around the Spirit into its Bane, I don't recall. I definitely remember the Spirit blowing up on contact with a massive amount of its Bane. Ferrinus posted:What's wrong with Time? I haven't actually played 2E, just the proto-2E my friend and I cooked up independently, so I've no idea how it plays. I do remember giving the 2E Time Arcanum the side-eye when I read it because it seemed like a lot of its basic functionalities either demanded solo vignettes or heavy fast-forwarding to actually use. Mainly the fact that every Acanthus and their mum has access to paradox free (and Paradox free) at-will time travel, so they can just go back in time and kill their enemies' parents without them being able to do a drat thing about it if they don't have any dots in Time. It's not even that it's overpowered - and it is - it's the fact that I can barely keep up with Mages and their multiple levels of reality in which they can exist, their mage sights, the alternate dimensions and the many powers at their disposal and in no way do I also want to have to deal with casual time travel and worrying about what Abraxas is doing right now last week. Shifting Sands lets you go back a whole scene, and can be chained together. Character gen Mage 2E is Doctor Strange. High level Mage 2E is Nobilis. And the fact that Aspirations and Obsessions refresh on a scene by scene basis compounded by the fact that you can go back in time and get the same Beat again if you alter the timeline a bit, combined with sitting in your basement scumming for Arcane Beats being encouraged means that if you're not all Gnosis 5 Masters by a couple of sessions' time I don't know what you're doing. I dunno, maybe it's the fact that my gaming group is a ruthless powergamer game designer, a ruthless powergamer game editor and a ruthless powergamer who's played Mage since it was released means that my gameplay experience is not the standard but what seemed fine on first glance is becoming increasingly untenable the more we play it. Mage isn't even poo poo, it's super fun! It's just impossible for me to call it a good game or recommend it in good faith.
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Dec 15, 2016 02:50
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Ferrinus posted:Kinda hosed up that it had Seers, Scelesti, and Banishers but no Pentacle mages, though. No surprises there, Disney is basically the Exarch of American Pop Culture.
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Dec 15, 2016 02:50
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Doodmons posted:*STUFF* Gnosis 2. One Yantra, not two. And I do not have system mastery on account that it was, I repeat, my first mage. Dave Brookshaw posted:You, sir, win the prize for best Mage player anecdote this year, and you are doing it exactly right. Do tell us if you survive! He survived! Thanks to the cabal's basically Disney Princess Acanthus taking over talking from my Banker Mastigos who couldn't figure out why treating a conversation with a demon-god of Charity as a business transaction was not working. Didn't even lose Wisdom for it.
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Dec 15, 2016 03:47
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Ferrinus posted:All the way down to magically-buffed normal attacks being more efficient than one-off damage spells. Kinda hosed up that it had Seers, Scelesti, and Banishers but no Pentacle mages, though. I think somebody made a decent point about Strange and Co. being the only decent pitch of the Mysterium ethos they've ever seen, but the baddies as Scelesti and Mordo as a Banisher is really accurate.
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Dec 15, 2016 04:13
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Doodmons posted:Mainly the fact that every Acanthus and their mum has access to paradox free (and Paradox free) at-will time travel, so they can just go back in time and kill their enemies' parents without them being able to do a drat thing about it if they don't have any dots in Time. It's not even that it's overpowered - and it is - it's the fact that I can barely keep up with Mages and their multiple levels of reality in which they can exist, their mage sights, the alternate dimensions and the many powers at their disposal and in no way do I also want to have to deal with casual time travel and worrying about what Abraxas is doing right now last week. Shifting Sands lets you go back a whole scene, and can be chained together. The best way to do that kind of "I go back in time and ____" stuff is definitely to treat The Past as a largely static record of events left behind in the wake of an ever-moving The Present whose ability to affect said Present is incomplete, limited, and mediated by the strength of the time magic being used. Like, rather than literally rewinding the scene and replaying everything right up until someone shoots my friend but this time I shove them out of the way, I should just cast a spell that alters the past such that, on the spot, my friend's wounds vanish (at about the same rate as they could be expected to for a similarly-powerful healing spell from another arcanum).
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Dec 15, 2016 04:42
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Ferrinus posted:I say Mage is a strict upgrade and Vampire and Werewolf are sidegrades (both of which are, if nothing else, full of great material to mine). I am going to keep getting books, and create my own horrible 1.5 hybrid that will only work for my table.
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Dec 15, 2016 04:52
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Doodmons posted:Mainly the fact that every Acanthus and their mum has access to paradox free (and Paradox free) at-will time travel, so they can just go back in time and kill their enemies' parents without them being able to do a drat thing about it if they don't have any dots in Time. It's not even that it's overpowered - and it is - it's the fact that I can barely keep up with Mages and their multiple levels of reality in which they can exist, their mage sights, the alternate dimensions and the many powers at their disposal and in no way do I also want to have to deal with casual time travel and worrying about what Abraxas is doing right now last week. Shifting Sands lets you go back a whole scene, and can be chained together. On Acanthus, munchkins, and time travel stuff: Put some ethical concerns on it. Outright power gaming and being a munchkin is anathema to any sort of Mage game that isn't intended to be an Exalted-esque joy ride across the heavens since Mage is at it's core basically a multi-tier game that can reach above all but the undescribed T4 powers. If you aren't willing to enforce consequences then poo poo gets out of wack fast. Even if you set aside paradox then doing something to alter the timeline is actually really hubris ridden as all hell. You're basically murdering everything that ever was or would have been by invalidating their existence through a series of changed events. Mage is absolutely the sort of game where the Butterfly Effect goes into overdrive and wreaks havoc in unforeseen ways too. For big examples just see any time an arch mage gets it in their head that they're going to "fix the world". Your PC's ought to be getting the poo poo dinged out of them in Wisdom and risk becoming one of the Mad any time they try to explicitly say "gently caress the world" and outright custom tailor and realign events to their will since that's literally the sort of thing someone would do when they have pretty much no wisdom left. You're basically putting your own desires above the current existence of literally everything. Alternatively: I forget which book it was but if none of that is your thing then one of the God Machine related books introduced beings that are basically time cops that exist to destroy and correct anomalies in the timeline. They're a hard counter against "I go back in time and shoot your mother when she's pregnant with you.  " bullshit. If nothing else it'd interesting to see how your players react when there's a never-ending tide of demigod-like time traveling Terminator knockoffs coming at them to "set right what once went wrong". Archonex fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 10:51
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citybeatnik posted:Gnosis 2. One Yantra, not two. And I do not have system mastery on account that it was, I repeat, my first mage. Cabal Theme just pumps up Shadow Name, it's not actually a separate Yantra. Sorry if the last post came off as snarky or anything, I was not having a good day yesterday. For real, though, by the sounds of it you're all having a lot of fun playing Mage and therefore are Doing It Right, but imo your capabilities and power level are a lot higher even at Gnosis 2 than I think you are giving yourselves credit for. Mage is a game about power and consequences and using your fearsome wizard powers to their fullest capabilities is both in theme and a whole lot of fun! If you like casting spells you should all definitely buy Shadow Name and Cabal Theme, though, it's the cheapest and best dice-adder to spellcasting rolls in the game to the extent that next time I run mage I'm just giving both of those merits to everyone for free. Archonex posted:On Acanthus, munchkins, and time travel stuff: Put some ethical concerns on it. Outright power gaming and being a munchkin is anathema to any sort of Mage game that isn't intended to be an Exalted-esque joy ride across the heavens since Mage is at it's core basically a multi-tier game that can reach above all but the undescribed T4 powers. If you aren't willing to enforce consequences then poo poo gets out of wack fast. Going all Bill & Ted (or Terminator) on the timeline is absolutely a ding on the Wisdom, I agree. Unfortunately, Wisdom checks are not that hard to pass at all and the threat of Wisdom loss is a bit of a paper tiger in practice. Additionally, if you're doing it exactly as you describe (ie risking becoming Mad every time you try to use Time to realign events to your will) then there might as well actually be 9 Arcana because why would you ever use Time if the consequences are that bad? The latter part is complete anathema my general gaming philosophy and how I like to run and play games. Presenting the players with a never-ending tide of demigod-like Terminators without warning for having the audacity to use the basic spells available to them in their simplest and most obvious ways is not the kind of good gaming practice I like to encourage. Now, I'd definitely agree that if the God-Machine is in play the ST should keep in mind what effect the players are having on its plans in the local area - particularly if your game is taking place in Paris or Seattle or anywhere the God-Machine actually is doing a load of time travel poo poo - and have it react accordingly. Also I'm reasonably sure you're either thinking of Triage or the Blind Serpents. The former doesn't have stats and is more a plot device than an opponent and shouldn't really be being rolled out to smack down the players in anything less than an archmaster game, and the latter are scrubs who will get dunked on in infinite numbers by literally any mage.
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Dec 15, 2016 13:55
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Doodmons posted:Cabal Theme just pumps up Shadow Name, it's not actually a separate Yantra. Sorry if the last post came off as snarky or anything, I was not having a good day yesterday. For real, though, by the sounds of it you're all having a lot of fun playing Mage and therefore are Doing It Right, but imo your capabilities and power level are a lot higher even at Gnosis 2 than I think you are giving yourselves credit for. Mage is a game about power and consequences and using your fearsome wizard powers to their fullest capabilities is both in theme and a whole lot of fun! If you like casting spells you should all definitely buy Shadow Name and Cabal Theme, though, it's the cheapest and best dice-adder to spellcasting rolls in the game to the extent that next time I run mage I'm just giving both of those merits to everyone for free. Don't have much time to type this unfortunately but I didn't mean that the entire Arcana was off limits to people that didn't want to become Mad. Acanthus is more than just time. It's also about fate. There's a reason why all but the craziest mages use it to weigh the stakes in their favor and alter the odds instead of just going wholesale a god am I and rewriting reality to their whim whenever it suits them. Also time has uses outside of "I want to go all Terminator and fix this.". The stuff you're talking about is typically pretty hard to pull off without consequences in 1e. Though maybe it's different in 2e? I've not have a chance to actually playtest 2e yet. Also i'm pretty sure the agents in question are either part of the God Machine or some part of the Principle. Though I don't have time to check, unfortunately. Got a doctor's appointment in a few. I'll try and look them up in my books when I get home. If it's the former then you really are going up against an endless army of demi-god like terminators sent after you since it's literally the God Machine you just pissed off. If it's the latter sending poo poo after you then whelp; you just literally picked a fight with one of the concepts of reality itself. Assuming the latter at that point even a group playing arch mages should probably be passed a copy of the stats for Vampire: The Masquerade's Caine to get an idea of what they're actually up against and what's about to happen to them if they don't fix their mess ASAP. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 18:22
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I got to introduce Mage to new players last night and it went anywhere from Ok to Great depending on the reaction. A couple characters were made, and there was some excitement about just how broad the magic system is. I still don't care for all the creation rules or merits, but that's not likely to change. So, I house rule the social status merits to free and earned in play, and advised against actually buying artifacts/imbued items. I'd rather they look for those in game or build them once they can do it themselves. I'm not particularly worried about them breaking the system, because I made sure they knew that there would be other mages to balance their desire to completely remake the world. Sure, you can go and change the past, and I'll probably encourage it sometimes. It's when it moves into the realm of hubris that we'll deal with the consequences. It was really easy to relate the crazy that will be in the game as everyone had seen Doctor Strange, and it was asked more than once how Dresden would fit into the game. So we're kind of getting to the theme and they have an idea in mind of what sort of game it will be while we uncover the mysteries of modern Chicago. I'm looking forward to breaking things and putting them back together. One of the players is really excited about the abilities of Time, so I'm just going to roll with it. So yeah, Mages are super powerful even without using your imagination, but if the min-maxing isn't helpful for the story, you're just being a munchkin and I'll smack it down with supernal authority and give you a big problem to deal with.
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Dec 15, 2016 18:54
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It really does not seem good to give one out of ten Arcana insane irresistible narrative-changing powers that are balanced out by the ST's willingness to be a dick. Now, my totally baseless tummyfeel is that the uncontestable power of Time isn't quite as bad as Doodmons says if only because other people can probably also use Time to counter you and surely your ability to personally change the past by visiting it is limited by some extent when your main power is to visit the past in the first place. But, like, nobody feels the need to talk about or defend Life or Prime or whatever in this way, so there's clearly something off kilter here.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:30
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My impression is that all arcana get insane irresistable narrative-changing powers... if you put some thought into it and have five dots. Time just gets it at three dots and the rulebook literally spells it out for you.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:38
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Also the stuff you can do to people with Prime 5 or whatever at least requires that you be in the same time and place as they are (or at least be in the same time as they are and have a functional scrying window connecting them to you)(that might actually be a lie if they kept the "you need +1 dot to do things remotely" thing from 1E, I forget). Generally, it seems like "I shoot your grandfather, causing you to vanish from continuity" should be an Unmaking Time spell that works along the same principles as Making Death: "You loving die" or Unmaking Prime: "You're no longer real".
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Dec 15, 2016 21:06
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Ferrinus posted:Also the stuff you can do to people with Prime 5 or whatever at least requires that you be in the same time and place as they are (or at least be in the same time as they are and have a functional scrying window connecting them to you)(that might actually be a lie if they kept the "you need +1 dot to do things remotely" thing from 1E, I forget). They didn't, I don't think. Instead there's this incredibly complicated system of sympathetic magic and various factors that make it easier or harder to remotely zap someone depending on if you have their true name / a person or object of tremendous importance in their lives / etc.
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Dec 15, 2016 21:12
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There was one of those in 1E, although all it ultimately did was control whether your penalty for remote magic was -2 dice or -10.
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Dec 15, 2016 21:14
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Maybe it's still there then. The layout for Mage is kind of lovely, it's really hard to find interrelated rules sometimes.
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Dec 15, 2016 21:17
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Temporal sympathy is a pretty big deal when time traveling.
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Dec 15, 2016 21:24
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Can you do Continuum poo poo like wracking someone's injured knee that they only have because you're going to have made them trip down the stairs in your personal later?
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Dec 15, 2016 22:45
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Are "alternate timelines" a thing in the Mage cosmology? Also, followup question, would they by definition be part of the Abyss? e: I ask because I want to do the Doctor Strange thing only instead of a time loop the character casts a spell that makes it so every time they die they get replaced by an alternate universe version of themselves, while corpses of the old yous continue to pile up, in the style of Triangle or that one Doctor Who finale.
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Dec 15, 2016 22:46
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:e: I ask because I want to do the Doctor Strange thing only instead of a time loop the character casts a spell that makes it so every time they die they get replaced by an alternate universe version of themselves, while corpses of the old yous continue to pile up, in the style of Triangle or that one Doctor Who finale. The movie you're thinking of is "The Prestige".
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Dec 15, 2016 22:55
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Kurieg posted:The movie you're thinking of is "The Prestige". Wow, I can't believe that didn't occur to me first, but yes.
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Dec 15, 2016 22:56
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I always figured that alternate timelines were what Patterning Time should work on, so I transmogrify the scene in which I stepped on the pressure plate into the one in which I stepped over it or similar.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Are "alternate timelines" a thing in the Mage cosmology? You should check out... Boston Unveiled, I think. Has a big write-up of The Prince Of 100,000 Leaves, which is an abyssal alternate timeline. Not sure if it's quite what you're after, but it might be some good inspiration.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:06
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All of the above are fair points, but you can pretty much break the world will all magic so long as you're willing to play with the consequences. It may not be a spell written into the core book, but if the only reason you're breaking the world is because you can or want to, then why are you playing the game? Is it so you can break as many things about the world or is it to uncover the crazy that makes the world spin? Because each character doesn't live in a vacuum where no other mages exist. So if we're going to break the world, someone's going to be trying to fix it, or someone's going to come make them fix it. It seems like there's this knee jerk reaction to having so much power, but when you ignore all the reasons you wouldn't end up doing those things, then sure, it gets crazy stupid. But we're going to tell a story, which is what I thought this was about, not some white room simulation. It has nothing to do with being a dick, it has everything to do with providing a world in which using those powers without thinking results in consequences that move the world and story forward. If you're GMing a mage game and can't handle the idea of people bending reality in many different ways, you're running the wrong game out of the box. I fully expect them to time travel as a group (because time travel is awesome), and then I fully expect them to find out it changed the world in ways they may not have anticipated. There are many paths for time to travel, so why not explore more than just one of them? E: They put temporal and spatial sympathy in the best place possible this edition. It's at the beginning of the section on time and space. It's even better now that they actually went and defined temporal sympathy concretely this time around.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:44
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Ferrinus posted:Also the stuff you can do to people with Prime 5 or whatever at least requires that you be in the same time and place as they are (or at least be in the same time as they are and have a functional scrying window connecting them to you)(that might actually be a lie if they kept the "you need +1 dot to do things remotely" thing from 1E, I forget). Or you go handle it Demon style and now there's a timeline fracture in which your target is dead without affecting the main one that you come from. This can still have a lot of applications, clever applications of timeline fractures are evident in their usage in Demon.
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Dec 16, 2016 00:52
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Obligatum VII posted:Or you go handle it Demon style and now there's a timeline fracture in which your target is dead without affecting the main one that you come from. This can still have a lot of applications, clever applications of timeline fractures are evident in their usage in Demon. If it were up to me, you'd need Dynamics or better to treat the past, future, or alternate present as fully-formed and independently-existing places you can go to rather than weapons you wield against the present scene. Otherwise it seems that the you of Earth-2 being dead by my hand could never have practical relevance to our game set on Earth-1 without my using further Time magic as an intermediary anyway, so why not cut out the middle man? Well, that's not quite true, because jumping into parallel realities and loving around and then coming back is probably an incredible means of gathering intelligence and testing out plans, but I'd happily leave that as the default flavor of a variety of postcognition/precognition spells. So like, you could blow it all out into a solo vignette or group gaiden if you really wanted to but it wouldn't be the assumed course of gameplay.
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Dec 16, 2016 01:12
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Ferrinus posted:But, like, nobody feels the need to talk about or defend Life or Prime or whatever in this way, so there's clearly something off kilter here. I think the problem is twofold: Time allows access to an alternate field of play to gently caress people up on, which your opponent does not necessarily have access to. It is not the only arcana that does this, but it is the only arcana that allows this via a medium everyone intuitively understands. Everyone gets time travel. The notion of, like, going deep into the astral realms or across the gauntlet or whatever to somehow gently caress with a dude is way more opaque than "I shoot his great grandfather". Time travel is ironically straight-forward, considering how convoluted it gets. This is not to say everything is perfectly balanced, but that Time seems like a bigger problem because we've all been exposed to countless hours of time travel gimmicks and plots in popular culture. Cabbit fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Dec 16, 2016 |
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Dec 16, 2016 02:43
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Cabbit posted:I think the problem is twofold: Time allows access to an alternate field of play to gently caress people up on, which your opponent does not necessarily have access to. It is not the only arcana that does this, but it is the only arcana that allows this via a medium everyone intuitively understands. It's much more difficult for me to deal with people who immediately want to mess around with the spirit world or the other side of the gauntlet. Not because I'm worried they're going to break things (although that may certainly happen), but because it's more difficult for me to balance the reactions to the breaking things in a way that is balanced to put them in a mess without a completely lopsided exchange. While that would be entirely legitimate for spirits, ghosts, and goetia I wouldn't want to do it except for some giant plot point. I do see it as a bit of cop-out to say that just because something powerful is codified in the book that Acanthus are suddenly over powered. It's a completely legitimate spell if you were to make it up with Creative Thaumaturgy, so what's the real complaint? That mages can have power over all parts of everything, or that most GMs and players are ill-prepared to deal with it when it comes up?
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Dec 16, 2016 03:46
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You can gently caress around in the spirit world all you want but that won't make your enemy suddenly stop existing or get retconned into your lifelong ally on its own. At some stage of the game some kind of concrete event will have to take place that other characters can react to and resist on their own terms if they're at all initiated into the supernatural - a spirit has to actually materialize and try to bite someone's face off, or win a contested roll to use its influences to alter someone's mood, or something.
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Dec 16, 2016 03:52
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The problem with Time, specifically going back in time, is that retconning is a pain in the rear end and also has the lovely consequence of voiding a bunch of session time. So great, you cast your spell and shoot the bad guy's grandfather and now the session ends because your ST has to figure out how poo poo goes down now that an important person never existed. That's why I prefer to just say "no loving around with the past" and be done with it. You can look at the past with sufficient Time dots, but you can't touch it unless you're the prince of 100,000 leaves.
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Dec 16, 2016 04:22
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That's incredibly boring. I'm sympathetic to "find a way to model time travel that doesn't require the ST to do ten times as much bookkeeping" but that's very different from just deleting the most important power in the arcanum.
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Dec 16, 2016 04:24
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