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The Unlife Aquatic posted:Why would you read any beast books unless you were posting snide comments about them on the internet. i recall seeing something to this effect in a FATAL & Friends post, i just don't remember the context
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Mar 28, 2017 06:02
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:Please tell me this isn't actually in it. Please. The pills are implied to be going to Trump 
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Mar 28, 2017 06:05
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Cease to Hope posted:isn't that a thing from a previous beast book already I think you are talking about the same supplement, "Tooth and Nail".
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Mar 28, 2017 06:10
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Kavak posted:The pills are implied to be going to Trump I am going to write an entire ring of demons that just goes around killing beasts for sport/community service because seriously.
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Mar 28, 2017 06:09
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:I am going to write an entire ring of demons that just goes around killing beasts for sport/community service because seriously. TBH the book wants you to side with Cheiron.
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Mar 28, 2017 06:10
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Well, that's a relief. I was really worried it was like the rest of Beast fluff, honestly. Still writing the ring of community service demons though.
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Mar 28, 2017 06:20
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I feel like Thyrsus mages probably disappear the most once they get to Adept level or higher? Like after a certain level depending on if they focused Life or Spirit one of the following happens: 1. They spend literally months healthy but also super-high in some super-colorful place just watching the world go by 2. They just go "gently caress it I'm a bird now" 3. They go "haha I'm totes gonna be a spirit king now" and that even possibly works for up to a year and then they get taken down by some extremely angry werewolves
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Mar 28, 2017 06:36
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Thanks for all of the Wisdom responses. For those of you ditch Wisdom altogether, do you do anything to make Paradox have any teeth? I'm not really down for questioning Mage's intent or culpability via Wisdom mechanics, but I do find Paradox and struggle against reality appealing.
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Mar 28, 2017 06:39
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bewilderment posted:I feel like Thyrsus mages probably disappear the most once they get to Adept level or higher? Mastigos'd be a candidate. At Adept of Mind, Incognito Presence'd make it so that nobody would ever be aware they are there. And Disciple of Space makes it easy to gently caress off to wherever anytime they want, thanks to modern conveniences making it simple to find photos of anyplace on the planet.
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Mar 28, 2017 07:31
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And Obrimos easily bend light to become invisble, Acanthus are always overlooked, and Moros are shadows. They all have a way to gently caress off, and need to, to better evade the Seers Hit Marks.
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Mar 28, 2017 07:49
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tokenbrownguy posted:Thanks for all of the Wisdom responses. For those of you ditch Wisdom altogether, do you do anything to make Paradox have any teeth? I'm not really down for questioning Mage's intent or culpability via Wisdom mechanics, but I do find Paradox and struggle against reality appealing. If you want paradox to have more teeth make more things cost Reach as a general funhaver tax. I'd share what I'm doing but I kinda haven't gotten around to writing much of it out.
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Mar 28, 2017 10:30
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tokenbrownguy posted:Thanks for all of the Wisdom responses. For those of you ditch Wisdom altogether, do you do anything to make Paradox have any teeth? I'm not really down for questioning Mage's intent or culpability via Wisdom mechanics, but I do find Paradox and struggle against reality appealing.
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Mar 28, 2017 14:03
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I honestly like Wisdom for the same reason I like Humanity; it gives a nice little benchmark for just how steep the slope the train to Hell is going down. I think that all morality systems should probably embrace the concept that you shouldn't be able to just buy it up with XP but, rather, regain it through right action, but that's a general beef, not one with Wisdom specifically. Wisdom kinda has the deck stacked against it, though, by dint of being a mechanization of a Mage's foresight and self-control in a tabletop RPG; a thing in which the characters are controlled by players with a theoretically unlimited amount of time to make their decisions and consider them carefully. Thus, snap judgements are limited. Vampire and Werewolf, the two other big lines that deal with distancing yourself from your locus of self-control, have Lose Your poo poo buttons to push to at least force a player to deal with powerful instincts. It tends to take dedicated and experienced players who want to see their characters go where their stories lead - and suffer the consequences - to have it play out properly. Sometimes, not even then. As far as Wisdom punishing you goes, though, you get an A-Beat every time you risk it, so there's that. There's at least some encouragement to be a monstrous rear end in a top hat. Once you lose that first point, you kinda get over fear of losing any more and the game gets more fun. The first sin is always the hardest, y'know? bewilderment posted:I feel like Thyrsus mages probably disappear the most once they get to Adept level or higher? It's really fun to see that happen in game. I had a Thyrsus who, after getting into a really angry argument that did not end happily, just decided "gently caress it, I'm out" and was about to take off and leave their family behind. "gently caress it, I'm a bird now" was a pretty sweet deal. Got talked down from it, but the option always exists.
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Mar 28, 2017 15:33
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Wisdom has the problem of mostly being a stick instead of a carrot. It makes being good boring when being good should be the most difficult and interesting thing.
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Mar 28, 2017 15:34
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The Sin of Onan posted:Well, the Middle Empire is not exactly my period Wow, thanks for this. I added those books to the front of my reading list, gonna get them before I head out on vacation this week.
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Mar 28, 2017 15:39
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One interesting thing you might note from the recent Dark Eras Companion is that there's a (relatively) large population of wolf-bloods in the Roman core of the Legions - two families, who by and large have a pact with the Camarilla to not gently caress with each other and both support the City. (They are almost exclusively Iron Master and Ivory Claw.) If you can get your hands on that, it's a useful read to supplement Requiem for Rome.
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Mar 28, 2017 15:54
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Rand Brittain posted:Wisdom has the problem of mostly being a stick instead of a carrot. It makes being good boring when being good should be the most difficult and interesting thing. I agree. I think morality ratings that punish you for sinning are fundamentally backwards. It should be easier to do the wrong thing, because that's almost always why people do the wrong thing in real life. Punishment and reward should both be located at high morality ratings, whereas for low morality ratings opting out of that mess entirely (and just doing whatever you want) is both the reward and the punishment. If you want to encourage characters that don't give a poo poo about the consequences of their actions, then you have to make those actions generate consequences that the players of those characters can afford not to care about. That's why I also tend to like Paradox mechanics that are both unsoakable and don't gently caress with your spellcasting at all. The point of being a monster is that the consequences of your actions befall other people.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:08
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Yeah, the idea that low Wisdom is opting out of the system on a player level works for me, with high Wisdom giving you both a bunch of bennies and harsh punishments for falling.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:11
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BTW all, here's a skinny version of what happened with my first Hunter session Friday. I had five players, and another prospective player who is totally sold on joining now who watched us play. Our Not-Detroit/Not-Chicago city of New Carthage is rife with corruption, rampant crime and all that fun stuff. However, in the past week a string of five people seemingly unconnected to each other went missing. Each of the characters had plans for St. Patrick's Day celebration. For the sake of simplicity they are their own loosely organized Hunter cell and decided to meet up early in the evening to go over what they've heard about spooky stuff around town. I felt I really shoehorned this but they didn't seem to mind. Each got a short session online of some interesting things they saw or heard during their morning before the group got together. After contacting the family of one of the missing men, who turned out to be a construction supervisor for New Carthage Excavation and Erection, the computer tech of the group received an anonymous text message: "Masks show more than faces." And five random words: Aegis, Thorn, Tungsten, Tyson87 and Papermill. The techies (two in my group) set about searching online, diving into public records and what-not crossreferencing those words with the names of the five missing. Turns out, those are their usernames for a Union forum based in their region. They had found the connection between the missing and through the county registry discovered a *nearly* off the books safehouse out in the country registered under a false name by one of the disappeared Hunters. It was their only lead to discover what had happened to the missing cell, and they went for it after the police showed up for the second time in two hours looking for several of my group about what they may know about the missing. It was a good time to duck out the back door of the bar. They pile into the mechanic's 69 charger and drive up the coast to the safehouse. They bypass the bear traps (taking them with them, in true D&D fashion) and get to the door. A hidden SMG hooked to a motion detector swivels to shoot them but is out of ammo. They find the door ajar, a woman's size 9 boot print dented into the solid metal. Inside, three of the missing Hunters are found, suffering catastrophic trauma: One is pinned against the concrete wall in a crater, his chest caved in from an apparent industrial strength blow ot the sternum. Another is pinned to the ceiling, same reason. A third is on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen across the room, his head turned around completely, snapping his neck. On the floor they find a 2-handed sword coated in a mixture of still uncongealed blood/oil. None of the dead have any lacerations, just blunt force trauma. While the techies check out the computers and security system/cameras, the others go downstairs and find a holding or dissection cell, a ring of salt around the door. Inside is fourth missing hunter, dead from an apparent overdose of anesthesia judging the needle sticking out of his arm. They find the computer server and turn it back on. They find the last recorded security video before the power generator eventually turned off. The video shows the four now dead hunters showing up to the safehouse, complaining their fifth member, Irene Bailey, called for the meeting on short notice saying she had something "important" to tell them. They pass the time inside waiting for her. Irene is shown on the outside camera walking up to the house instead of driving and knocks on the door instead of entering the code to get in. "Who goes there," one of the hunters inside calls out, figuring she forgot the password. He unlocks the main lock, she kicks in teh door and proceeds to kill them with obvious inhuman strength. Bullets don't phase her as the third man hacks her arm off, blood/oil leaking from the wound. "You're not her," he says before she backhands him across the room. She heads downstairs to kill the last but security video shows her stop at the saltline, the hunter in the holding cell paces back and forth, calls over and over on his phone but has no signal. Two days pass, she stands completely still with one arm missing while he takes stock of his options. Faced with a brutal death or a painless one, he chooses the later and opens the medkit inside the dissection toolbox. She goes back upstairs and the camera static worsens as she bends over each dead hunter, their faces suddenly gone. She changes into one of the dead, head to toe, and walks out, shutting the door. There were some breaking point rolls throughout all this and everyone passed each time. My group gathered evidence, the sword, some of the oil/blood and downloaded the files from the server to decrypt later. On the drive back to town, they are chased by two long black buicks with what appears to be animated mannequins dressed as classic G-men: suits, shades, black ties and SMGs. They shoot 3000 watt light out of their mouths to blind the driver after hoping on the hood. The hunters take turns shooting them but bullets don't have much effect. One of the hunters leans out the window and hucks a beartrap at the g-man on the hood, risking willpower and crits, clamping the trap around its head before it stumbles off, getting run over by the hunter car and both buicks. The first car gets firebombed by another hunter with a Molotov and then they speed away from the second g-men car. They reach the safety of the mechanic's garage and we called it for the night as it was suddenly 2 a.m. We started playing at 7:30. Running the system was great, everyone told me they had an awesome time and I woke up to a million text messages and FB posts from our game group asking questions about what happens next, next time we can play. I gave out beats every time someone did some great in-character RP, gave 3 XP at the end of the session and I think 3 practical XP for the group to spend on tactics and what not. I feel I railroaded them heavily but next time they'll have a load of options which way they want to go. Hopefully we can keep the fun alive next session. TLDR: My first session with my Hunter group they have to investigate a God Machine version of The Thing. crime fighting hog fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 16:15
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Rand Brittain posted:Wisdom has the problem of mostly being a stick instead of a carrot. It makes being good boring when being good should be the most difficult and interesting thing. Having carrots for being "good" would make it easy, though, not difficult. Mages should get A-Beats from chasing Obsessions in dangerous ways and risking their Wisdom, because the pathway up to Heaven and down to Hell is lubricated with the same grease. Wisdom isn't about being good, though, it's about being thoughtful. Wise sages can be, and are, dubious motherfuckers. Tetrarchs are outright one of the major examples of a Wise Mage. Problem is, being thoughtful is really hard to quantify what situations are unWise and, as soon as you try to, it often breaks flow. No-one is going to argue a vampire being bisected by a truck and surviving - reattaching their legs and standing back up, angry but no worse for wear - is a serious "Oh my goodness, what am I?" moment and worthy of a Humanity roll. But is a Mage who casts a spell in self-defense acting unWisely? Does a Mage need to check their Wisdom if they buy a house at the height of a pricing bubble? e: Attorney at Funk posted:I agree. I think morality ratings that punish you for sinning are fundamentally backwards. It should be easier to do the wrong thing, because that's almost always why people do the wrong thing in real life. Punishment and reward should both be located at high morality ratings, whereas for low morality ratings opting out of that mess entirely (and just doing whatever you want) is both the reward and the punishment. I like this.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:20
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In regards to Wizard Jail, couldn't you just lobotomise them? Can't cast spells if you can't think. And if you ever plan on letting any of them go it's nothing a bit of Life won't fix.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:28
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There's something tremendously fitting about all the ways to rules-lawyer out of just capping a Seer guy in the skull so you don't lose wizard morality being fates worse than death.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:31
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crime fighting hog posted:Our Not-Detroit/Not-Chicago city of New Carthage Interesting facts: Carthage, IL is a real place and it's where Joseph Smith was killed
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Mar 28, 2017 16:34
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ZeroCount posted:In regards to Wizard Jail, couldn't you just lobotomise them? Can't cast spells if you can't think. And if you ever plan on letting any of them go it's nothing a bit of Life won't fix. Been down this route earlier in the thread. Summarized: you create far more problems for yourself by doing so.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:36
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Why not just remove their soul and lock it away in a rock or something? I mean, sure, being soulless sucks, but hey. And you might need a Reaper of some kind to help you but you know a Reaper mage, right? Everyone knows one of those creepy fuckers. ...oh and you're going to lose Wisdom for doing it, but, I mean, it'll work.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:38
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If you're just going to torture the Mages in question, there's not a lot of point in trying to jail them, is there?
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Mar 28, 2017 16:49
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Mendrian posted:If you're just going to torture the Mages in question, there's not a lot of point in trying to jail them, is there? You need somewhere to put them between tortures.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:58
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Mors Rattus posted:Why not just remove their soul and lock it away in a rock or something? Mages still retain their ability to use magic when they have their soul removed, it degrades over time. When they're back to being a full-on Sleeper, well, now they're a liability to you, and unlikely to be able to appreciate or understand the things you're imprisoning them for, defeating the entire purpose. At that point you're just torturing some ignorant guy because it makes you feel better. Most mages wouldn't argue that soul removal is acceptable. It's a violation of the intrinsic self, much like sentencing someone to have a lobotomy--plenty of people (including the sentenced) would probably view death as a more acceptable alternative. Mage Jail doesn't really work out. Add that to the fact that, if you want something from a Mage, there are easier ways to get it from them than locking them up. Mage society at large isn't going to have much of a reason to want to keep people around as part of some supposedly-rehabilitative process, and if it's just about keeping them away from society at large, well, murder is the more obvious solution.
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Mar 28, 2017 17:05
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Axelgear posted:Having carrots for being "good" would make it easy, though, not difficult. Mages should get A-Beats from chasing Obsessions in dangerous ways and risking their Wisdom, because the pathway up to Heaven and down to Hell is lubricated with the same grease. That's why I give AXP beats when they're extra clever about how to do something with magic that is entirely nasty, but done in such a way that there's no way to question the morality/legality of it. My group gets far more out of doing clever things, and playing the characters in a way where they're thinking about what makes something a wise/unwise idea already. Paradox isn't coming up as much as I'd like, but they're spending their reaches in ways to try to avoid paradox. I think on a busy magic night we're rolling about a half dozen paradox checks, most of which are chance dice. I will admit though, we play fast and loose with some of the rules, just because it makes for smoother game play (they're all new to the system entirely) and good story and magic take center stage.
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Mar 28, 2017 17:19
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The problem with Wisdom is it's ambiguously oriented between "this is a measure of your enlightenment and caution as a Mage" on the one hand, and "this is part of the Lie and a mechanical manifestation of the shackles on your soul" on the other. To top it off a lot of the examples of un-enlightened behavior are stupid and poorly chosen and, as people have said, punish you for having fun. Mages don't have an inner demon to contain and their transition from one world / state of being to another isn't a source of horror*, it's a source of hope. Instead of caution, a Mage's morality track should represent the despair of existing in a world where the fundamental nature of his being (and that of every other human) is stifled and suppressed. Making Paradox harder or even impossible to mitigate but encouraging players to risk generating it anyways because living the Lie is toxic to a Mage's soul presents both a mechanical conundrum (which of these competing incentives do I want to privilege?) and even ties into the idea that, even when they're right, Mages are kind of dangerous to be around. tl;dr -- "Hubris is a coward's word!" should be both literally true, but also a show of compensatory bravado from someone who's seen the true nature of reality and knows poo poo is horrifyingly hosed, has to deal with that knowledge every day, and is afraid that they'll never be able to change it. *Unless they're Scelesti or something
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Mar 28, 2017 17:30
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honestly most of my objections to systems in Mage would probably be fixed by making everything work more like Werewolf, where Harmony is a balancing act between dangerous extremes and Lunacy makes people panic and forget when they witness supernatural weirdness, instead of Paradox being caused by Sleeper witnesses for some vaguely defined reason even though M:tAw explicitly disavows that obnoxious power of disbelief / consensus reality nonsense
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Mar 28, 2017 18:21
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crime fighting hog posted:Aegis, Thorn Nice. I hope your players picked up what you were putting down.
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Mar 28, 2017 18:22
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PantsOptional posted:Nice. I hope your players picked up what you were putting down. share with the class?
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Mar 28, 2017 18:22
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:share with the class? Eisenhorn's glossia?
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Mar 28, 2017 18:29
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Exactly. It's part of a secret code language used by the titular Inquisitor and his crew in the Eisenhorn series.
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Mar 28, 2017 18:50
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crime fighting hog posted:
I really enjoyed reading this and hope you'll keep posting!
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Mar 28, 2017 19:30
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PantsOptional posted:Nice. I hope your players picked up what you were putting down. Of the two other 40k nerds at the table, one got it. I loved that book. Pope Guilty posted:I really enjoyed reading this and hope you'll keep posting! Thank you! I'm checking out those apps you guys posted for playing online and hope to have something set up for my group after I get back from vacation next week. Gotta try to fill in the downtime between sessions, or else games die (in my experience). If they need a bone to get things started next time, I think I'll have the facestealer start stalking one of the families of the now dead hunters. Basically, it's a tool of the God Machine to keep secrets... secret through assassination but has gone haywire. It was sent to kill Hunters, but now thinks to carry out its mission it needs to kill what makes Hunters.
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Mar 28, 2017 20:06
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Attorney at Funk posted:I agree. I think morality ratings that punish you for sinning are fundamentally backwards. It should be easier to do the wrong thing, because that's almost always why people do the wrong thing in real life. Punishment and reward should both be located at high morality ratings, whereas for low morality ratings opting out of that mess entirely (and just doing whatever you want) is both the reward and the punishment. This is what we did in our World of Darkness games. I'm not gonna repost the whole system again, but the gist was that with high Morality, you had a chance to recover WP spent in defense of your friends and loved ones, but also had a chance to lose WP rather than gain WP from rest if you'd recently sinned. The lower your Morality dropped, the lower your chance to instantly regain spent WP to be a good guy, but the fewer things there were that could send you into a "crisis of conscience" state in which you'd hemorrhage WP out of guilt. Then mages just used the exact same abridged sin list as humans did (hurting people, hurting people badly, killing people...) but the lower a mage's Wisdom was the longer paradoxes they contributed to would blight the landscape. Tuxedo Catfish posted:The problem with Wisdom is it's ambiguously oriented between "this is a measure of your enlightenment and caution as a Mage" on the one hand, and "this is part of the Lie and a mechanical manifestation of the shackles on your soul" on the other. To top it off a lot of the examples of un-enlightened behavior are stupid and poorly chosen and, as people have said, punish you for having fun. I soooort of can't blame them for this in mid-late 1E, since the latter was pretty much the only way to mount a consistent defense for the foibles of the 1E Wisdom scale. It's not that any of these things are actually particularly wrong or terrible, it's just that external forces inflict upon all mages weird psychological vulnerabilities to a list of arbitrary stimuli. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 21:24
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If you wouldn't mind sharing, would you PM the rules? I'd go through your posts but you have like 15 pages in this thread!
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Mar 28, 2017 22:42
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tokenbrownguy posted:If you wouldn't mind sharing, would you PM the rules? I'd go through your posts but you have like 15 pages in this thread! This is the page of Ferrinus' Rulestech Warehouse that deals with basic WOD resolution systems, including Morality and Crises of Conscience.
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