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I was trying to figure out what the Mysterium and general archaeomages would do in Australia where the prevailing culture for forty thousand or so years was nomadic and didn't settle down for a long time so there's no particular lost civilisation to 'copy from'. Already I'm toying with the idea that the sparseness of the population makes the Gauntlet so thin it's almost a Pangaea out there (and that's why Alice Springs is so screwed as a lone settlement easily influenced by angry spirits). I'm considering as a background detail having totally ahistorical, 'Atlantean' structures of the more 'impossible angles' sort regularly rise and fall there, untraceable to most people but trackable with magic. It being so sparse and empty there that if you have a secret history you need hidden, it's a good place to 'put' a building and have very low odds of anyone seeing it while you've got it there.
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Feb 13, 2018 13:33
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scion: hero is in post-editing *mashes F5 on backer kit*
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Feb 13, 2018 13:59
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Get this... World of Dorkness.
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Feb 13, 2018 14:22
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Blockhouse posted:scion: hero is in post-editing You're gonna be there at least a week, maybe three
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Feb 13, 2018 14:36
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Rand Brittain posted:Also, it looks as though Wraith20 can be safely filed under “unreservedly good” based on my current progress and what people are saying, so the 20th Anniversary line is now at 3.75/5 for quality.
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Feb 13, 2018 14:43
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Warthur posted:Where would you say the 20th anniversary line lost points? And is that just core books or are you including supplements? At a guess: Mage20 for sure.
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Feb 13, 2018 14:45
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Mors Rattus posted:At a guess: Mage20 for sure. Probably Vampire being a bit of a dry run and I'm gonna guess that most people in this thread don't like Changeling to begin with anyway
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Feb 13, 2018 14:46
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Lightning Lord posted:Probably Vampire being a bit of a dry run and I'm gonna guess that most people in this thread don't like Changeling to begin with anyway (For that purpose I'd junk the rule that says that you get all your permanent Banality back when you exit the Dreaming, and adapt the quests that currently exist to let you reduce your personal Banality and make them ways to actively counteract Banality and/or make a new foothold of the Dreaming in the mundane world, so that stuff would still be relevant but managing personal Banality would be substantially easier. It'd mean that Changelings can be way, way nastier, but that's fine because I like my fae folk to have a nasty edge to them.)
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Feb 13, 2018 14:55
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Banality has always been and will always be a stupid loving concept both in form and function because it is inherently poisoned by writers' biases against things they personally do not find interesting.
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Feb 13, 2018 15:07
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Changeling 20 is arguably the best book, because it started way, way down in the hole and had to climb it's way out just to reach "average". And it wasn't average, it was actually a really good book that paid due to what came before while making the entire thing way less redonkulous and creepy child-worship-y. On the flip side pretty much everyone was already down to clown with Vampire and Werewolf and Mage, so you had less intrinsic bias against [Although of course not none]. And Wraith is just a miracle, because holy hell were the gods against the publishing of that book. Like I fervently believe the editing process of this book involved Dansky having to climb a mountain top to turn in the completed draft, and at the top of the mountain is a desk, a little box that says "In", and Yahweh. And he had to wrestle Yahweh to put the draft into the box.
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Feb 13, 2018 15:18
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If you wrestle Yahweh well enough, though, he has to give you a blessing. It rules, actually.
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Feb 13, 2018 15:21
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Yawgmoth posted:Banality has always been and will always be a stupid loving concept both in form and function because it is inherently poisoned by writers' biases against things they personally do not find interesting.
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Feb 13, 2018 15:22
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Warthur posted:Yeah, the "MMOs and cooking shows = Banality, tabletop RPGs and cheap fantasy novels = Glamour" thing is infuriating. I'm surprised it doesn't say wild sex orgies and rock music are also glamorous, considering the author.
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Feb 13, 2018 15:24
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Night10194 posted:If you wrestle Yahweh well enough, though, he has to give you a blessing. It rules, actually. Just be careful, dude's stiffer than fuckin' Vader and has been known to cause lasting injuries even when he loses.
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Feb 13, 2018 15:27
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Warthur posted:Where would you say the 20th anniversary line lost points? And is that just core books or are you including supplements? Mage is the zero, obviously, and Changeling is the one I give the .75. And really, Changeling probably deserves better, because it solved the game's critical problems, made changeling magic cool and useful, and actually made the weird medieval setting into something relevant to modern issues. I'm just peeved at it because it made some really bad decisions about wordcount (cramming all the Gallain in in a way where they're technically there, but so compressed that nobody could actually find them interesting), and made some real howlers like making the Shadow Court secretly run by Thallain, and references to sidhe babies even though that's not how new changelings work. And it doesn't look like Changeling is getting the equivalent of a Fera book? That's too bad, because it needed one the most. Vampire is a little inefficient for being first, but it's very solid as a line and has a bunch of good supplements. Werewolf is very solid all around, and Wraith looks to be at the same level of quality.
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Feb 13, 2018 16:25
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What's that bad about Mage? I know it's got a lot of Phil on it and the Disparates didn't need to become Council of Traditions 2.0, but it generally seemed to hit the right feel for me. (Then again, I tend to regard Mage as the game where you all get around the table and have a debate about how it works, because it's the "Bargaining" spot on the oWoD Five Stages of Grief theme.)
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Feb 13, 2018 16:50
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Mulva posted:Changeling 20 is arguably the best book, because it started way, way down in the hole and had to climb it's way out just to reach "average". Also known as the Clanbook: Malkavian Revised Principle.
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Feb 13, 2018 17:24
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Since I like all the stuff that originally influenced Changeling (Charles De Lint, Emma Bull, etc) and always felt it fell short of those I should probably take a look at C20
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Feb 13, 2018 17:26
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Warthur posted:What's that bad about Mage? I know it's got a lot of Phil on it and the Disparates didn't need to become Council of Traditions 2.0, but it generally seemed to hit the right feel for me. (Then again, I tend to regard Mage as the game where you all get around the table and have a debate about how it works, because it's the "Bargaining" spot on the oWoD Five Stages of Grief theme.) 1) The book really shits on the Traditions, which is the opposite of what needed to happen, because people have developed a serious hate-on for them as a result of everything that's happening in the world right now (waves hand vaguely at the universe), but they got a blackwashing instead of a whitewashing so now it's canon that wizards hate light bulbs instead of insane fanon. 2) Brucato thinks his opinions on sex and gender are progressive and edgy when they haven't actually changed since the 90s. 3) Revised took Ascension from "we can fight to shape the world for the better" to "fighting to shape the world is just forcing your views on people with violence, find a better way." M20 goes all the way to "trying to convince people to share your views is violence, stare into your navel until you reach enlightenment". It's really in favor of magic but it disapproves of any specific thing you might think magic is for. 4) It tries to update things to be more progressive but in a really haphazard and inconsistent way, so the Dreamspeakers have abandoned their "slave name" to become the Kha'vadi, except that name never gets used, and the Virtual Adepts are the "Mercurian Elite" because having two Traditions named after Hermes isn't confusing at all.
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Feb 13, 2018 17:34
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Also, Brucato has never met an editor he didn't like because he's never met an editor. I know the 20th Anniversary editions are massive prestige books by definition, but Mage20 really needed more editing passes than it got on top of everything else. Not necessarily for grammar or anything, just to make Brucato not give too many things too much pagecount when the book's already stupidly large.
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Feb 13, 2018 18:02
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Warthur posted:What's that bad about Mage? quote:it's got a lot of Phil on it
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Feb 13, 2018 18:15
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Also, Brucato has never met an editor he didn't like because he's never met an editor. I know the 20th Anniversary editions are massive prestige books by definition, but Mage20 really needed more editing passes than it got on top of everything else. Not necessarily for grammar or anything, just to make Brucato not give too many things too much pagecount when the book's already stupidly large. Yeah, it wastes huge amounts of space on things like "huge arguments about the vampire lawnchair thing that makes it clear Brucato didn't understand why it was an issue for some people" and leaves out things like "clear expressions of what the Spheres do."
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Feb 13, 2018 18:20
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Didn't Brucato leave out information on Paradigms from 2nd Edition because he was afraid people would cast actual magic in their games?
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Feb 13, 2018 18:25
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Kavak posted:Didn't Brucato leave out information on Paradigms from 2nd Edition because he was afraid people would cast actual magic in their games? That's the story I've heard, yes. I don't actually have a primary source on that.
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Feb 13, 2018 18:28
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Kavak posted:Didn't Brucato leave out information on Paradigms from 2nd Edition because he was afraid people would cast actual magic in their games? Sssooort of. You may also be remembering that Brucato is opposed to playable Nephandi because he considered getting into that headspace psychologically or spiritually deleterious. Here's the bit of Book of Mirrors that people are recalling when they bring this up: The Book of Mirrors, Pg 46 posted:Q: Why doesn't Mage go into more detail of real-world magical practices? Edit: Also, Rand is more generous than I am, as I would award M20 negative points.
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Feb 13, 2018 18:47
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Rand Brittain posted:1) The book really shits on the Traditions, which is the opposite of what needed to happen, because people have developed a serious hate-on for them as a result of everything that's happening in the world right now (waves hand vaguely at the universe), but they got a blackwashing instead of a whitewashing so now it's canon that wizards hate light bulbs instead of insane fanon. 1) and 3) I don't mind because I mentally put M:tAs in the same category as W:tA - the "I can only appreciate this game as an absurdly cynical parody where everyone is a different flavour of total rear end in a top hat" category, to be specific. So it doesn't particularly matter to me that the Traditions are shitbirds because I think any single one of them (or any particular Disparate Craft, for that matter) has the seeds of a new tyranny embedded in them anyway, and that the Marauders are the only faction who can truly be said to be "correct" in the sense that they're the only ones who actually take the whole consensus reality thing to its logical conclusion. Likewise, it doesn't matter to me that the book says that doing poo poo is badwrong violence because I don't put a high premium on PCs being nice role models. I think the reason the amount of Phil in M20 doesn't bug me more is that at least he very brazenly wears his biases on his sleeves and you can correct for that. (He also, I seem to recall, usefully says "Oh, by the way, you mustn't do X, Y and Z when it comes to interpreting what your spheres can do because it means the PCs end up with too much power", so I can make sure to do X, Y and Z because I prefer my Mage to be a cartoon shitshow where absurdity rules all the time.) Kavak posted:Didn't Brucato leave out information on Paradigms from 2nd Edition because he was afraid people would cast actual magic in their games? (Which makes you wonder what happens to the GM, who has to NPC all the Nephandi at once...)
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Feb 13, 2018 18:48
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Rand Brittain posted:1) The book really shits on the Traditions, which is the opposite of what needed to happen, because people have developed a serious hate-on for them as a result of everything that's happening in the world right now (waves hand vaguely at the universe), but they got a blackwashing instead of a whitewashing so now it's canon that wizards hate light bulbs instead of insane fanon. I got the sense that originally Brucato or other people working on M20 wanted to update the Traditions, placing the metaplot sometime after Revised and making them more culturally aware and playable. That's where the new Tradition names come from. Somewhere along the line it was decided that M20 had to function as fanservice first, so the new Tradition updates were relegated to a hypothetical sidebar and haphazardly throughout the book because editing 800 pages is hard.
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Feb 13, 2018 20:00
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My review-in-a-bottle for M20 from a few years back:quote:On the technical side of things, M20 commits several acts of poor writing by having self-contradictory rules that are badly organised. One example that comes to mind is the rules for destroying objects, which are in two different parts of the book, and don't describe the same thing. It has a very complex dice-rolling system with two immediate scales of difficulty, but makes very poor attempts to explain the difference between the two, with examples often contradicting the descriptions, and some dice-rolling rules are described as optional and used anyway, or described again as a new rule to get around the optional-ness in certain passages. The rules are often surprisingly complex (combat is declare-down-resolve simultaneously, which requires significant overhead and makes high-Initiative characters worse than low-Initiative characters, and can easily involve three or four dice rolls per turn per character) yet at times vague (like poisons inflicting damage "1-2 times", which can be the difference between a survivable poison and a non-survivable one) and produce nonsensical results (smoke yourself to death with marijuana, at most a 3% chance of dying from falling damage) especially if taken at face value (you can't die from starvation, because you heal damage faster than you take it from starving). It's a book that OPP should frankly be ashamed to have published because of how it shows they did pretty much no quality control or exercised any meaningful level of editorial oversight. Printing two different versions of a rule in the same book is something that should simply not happen in the new tens.
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Feb 13, 2018 20:13
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He changed his name to Satyros.
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Feb 13, 2018 20:30
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Isn't that one of the bad guys from Golden Sun?
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Feb 13, 2018 21:21
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food court bailiff posted:Isn't that one of the bad guys from Golden Sun?
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Feb 13, 2018 22:32
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food court bailiff posted:Isn't that one of the bad guys from Golden Sun? A caricature of him is one of the bad guys in Werewolf, which speaks volumes about working with him.
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Feb 13, 2018 22:55
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:A caricature of him is one of the bad guys in Werewolf, which speaks volumes about working with him. Well, I mean, they have caracatures of all the various White Wolf line devs, but the ones for him and MRH are relatively scathing portrayals.
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Feb 13, 2018 22:57
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Kurieg posted:Well, I mean, they have caracatures of all the various White Wolf line devs, but the ones for him and MRH are relatively scathing portrayals. Yeah. Ethan Skemp's analogue of being a cannibalistic hillbilly is tame in comparison to Brucato's.
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Feb 13, 2018 23:39
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Warthur posted:Then again, I tend to regard Mage as the game where you all get around the table and have a debate about how it works, because it's the "Bargaining" spot on the oWoD Five Stages of Grief theme. What would be the other four stages as game lines?
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Feb 14, 2018 00:21
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Slimnoid posted:What would be the other four stages as game lines? Werewolf = Anger. It's right there in the tagline and everything. Mage = Bargaining, as mentioned, 'cuz every time you use magic it's basically a little negotiation between you and the Storyteller. Wraith = Depression. The way the Shadow works, in particular. Changeling = Acceptance. In the case of the oWoD, acceptance of the fact that life is magykal and story is magnificent and adulthood is poopy - it's the acceptance of the wonder-child within. The last is based on my belief that Rein-Hagen's early plan for the five-game arc (he refers to the whole thing as the "Storyteller saga" in writings from the time) was that in the end it was the Changelings who were going to have the right of it and be the catalysts for the victory of colour and goodness over the grey drabness of modernity. My main point of evidence for this is that Changelings are all about tossing aside soulless mass media in favour of personal storytelling and oral traditions and the like, which is exactly what White Wolf had told us the whole Storyteller thing was about ever since V:tM 1E.
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Feb 14, 2018 00:39
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Wraith 20 looks so great; can't wait for the hard copy! My only extremely petty whinge so far is that the arcanoi are listed under the name of the associated guild but are organized alphabetically by the name of the actual arcanoi.
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Feb 14, 2018 01:57
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For me, M20's biggest sin was that it seemed more interested in defending its choices from the past than trying to update it for the present. Like, one of the big selling points of the other lines is they're written by people who love them, but who also get not all of it has aged well. There's a lot of thought put into how to not just update the timeline, but the mechanics and plot points that keeps the feel of the original while limiting as much of the bad poo poo as you can without ending up with a different game. M20...spends a lot of time and wordcount explaining how all these things people complain about aren't *really* a problem and there's all these good reasons things should be this way, and of course you can change it but you don't really know what you're doing and blah blah blah blah blah. If the other 20th lines are grown ups who can still get fondly nostalgic listening to 90s music, M20 is the middle aged guy who still thinks wearing his rage against the machine shirt out in public is going to cause class revolution any day now. Its as much sad as it is annoying, but mostly just poo poo for a book you're supposed to pay for.
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Feb 14, 2018 02:46
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'As much sad as annoying' is Brucato's entire persona, though.
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Feb 14, 2018 02:51
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When's Wraith20 supposed to come out for everyone who didn't think a decade ahead and back it? It sounds really good and I would gladly throw money at them through DTRPG, but here we are.
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Feb 14, 2018 03:06
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