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In general, I dislike all attempts at franchise blending in WoD in the same way I find the idea of a combination Pizza Hut / Taco Bell to be tacky and a cheap gimmick. However, Spirit is already fully folded into the Supernal Framework through the Arcana, and the nature of Pangeans as being ancient, unknowable, and epic scale makes the whole thing published fanon anyway. Its "Jesus was an alien", so go off I guess.
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Apr 1, 2019 05:48
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I legitimately don't know what 'published fanon' is supposed to mean there. Like, the only implication I can wring from that, besides disdain, is that the current developers are somehow violating the intent of the original setting by... writing more optional material for players to use, and expanding the line with the new edition. Also, in terms of Mage Chat, I was struck again recently by how Benjamin's essay On the Concept of History describes, effectively, the Time Arcanum's model of Time. There's an ever-moving present in which true change can occur, and time travel literalizes the 'activation' (or as he says, explosion) of past history into the present, by changing thing which then 'roll forward' into the real present, only becoming true and stable when the present itself is changed. I think that's neat. Also, it means my Spirit/Time Legacy for the Free Council remains entirely possible if I ever figure out how I want to write that up. Gotta weaponize the Spirit of 1789. E: Walter Benjamin: Free Councillor, or Guardian of the Veil? "For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter."
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Apr 1, 2019 06:26
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Published fanon, both the phrase as I use it & the implementation itself (!), can be interpreted in many different ways by many different people. Some people take it to heart and have it alter their entire world-view of the game and its writing; others can ignore it because it is esoteric and ephemeral enough that it does not matter to the things they do with the CoD franchise! What I personally take to heart is the understanding that the corporate level decisions to make sales via forcefully blending discordant games is as distant and unimportant, to me, as whatever bleak and uninspired franchise agreement results in a bag of KFC chicken with an A&W rootbeer float at the drive-thru. So long as I can see that the minimally compensated implementors didn't try and forcefully add the herbs & spices to the vanilla ice-cream and make an Actually Bad product, its just a convenience when I am trying to blend two separate tastes at the same time.
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Apr 1, 2019 07:07
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"I don't like it, thus it's fanon and doesn't count" is a stance a person could have, sure.
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Apr 1, 2019 07:09
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Writing about ancient, all powerful, unapproachable and unaccounted for ur-examples- like the Dark Mother, an easily enough at hand example that keeps this out of personal range- sure can get you a paid gig but doesn't really do anything for a table of adults that probably only have one copy of the core book between the five of them.
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Apr 1, 2019 07:17
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Gerund posted:Published fanon, both the phrase as I use it & the implementation itself (!), can be interpreted in many different ways by many different people. Some people take it to heart and have it alter their entire world-view of the game and its writing; others can ignore it because it is esoteric and ephemeral enough that it does not matter to the things they do with the CoD franchise!
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Apr 1, 2019 07:33
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Gerund posted:Writing about ancient, all powerful, unapproachable and unaccounted for ur-examples- like the Dark Mother, an easily enough at hand example that keeps this out of personal range- sure can get you a paid gig but doesn't really do anything for a table of adults that probably only have one copy of the core book between the five of them. Your standard is garbage; just admit you use what you like and ignore what you don't like everybody else. I don't actually like canon Archmasters, for a number of reasons, and so I've significantly modified both them and Imperial Magic at my table. Which doesn't matter at all to whether or not the Archmasters source material is well written for what it's doing, I just don't want to implement it. And that further has no standing as to whether Imperial Mysteries is, ugh, 'published fanon.' If your complaint is 'I dislike this style of gameplay and feel it contradicts what I want out of the line' then say that. Don't try to claim a formal distinction between what you like and what you don't like unless you can back it up. There's not even a reasonable formal distinction between Beast and the good lines; Beast is just bad and I hope it doesn't get referenced directly in lines I like.
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Apr 1, 2019 09:04
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Joe Slowboat posted:I legitimately don't know what 'published fanon' is supposed to mean there. Like, the only implication I can wring from that, besides disdain, is that the current developers are somehow violating the intent of the original setting by... writing more optional material for players to use, and expanding the line with the new edition. I'm still of the opinion that, being that the present is all that exists and the past is simply a trail that the present leaves in its wake, Time magic shouldn't involve actual "play out what you do using normal task resolution" time travel unless you're using Dynamics or other super-powerful plot device magic. Shifting Sands-like spells should let you spot-edit scenes as if you did something differently ("I brought some silver bullets, actually"), or otherwise use your rewinding time to futz with things as flavor text for things changing in the present-day scene rather than put the present-day scene on hold. Completely unrelatedly, the newly-released puzzle game "Baba Is You" is extremely Mage. It's all about manipulating and reorganizing supernal symbols in order to reconstruct the fallen world to your will, and it makes me want a rules variant of Mage in which you have to find or unlock particular Practices in the world or only get access to a few at a time as though drawing from a deck or something.
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Apr 1, 2019 09:12
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Ferrinus posted:Completely unrelatedly, the newly-released puzzle game "Baba Is You" is extremely Mage. It's all about manipulating and reorganizing supernal symbols in order to reconstruct the fallen world to your will, and it makes me want a rules variant of Mage in which you have to find or unlock particular Practices in the world or only get access to a few at a time as though drawing from a deck or something. also if you try to verbally tell someone how to solve later levels you cast a spell
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Apr 1, 2019 11:45
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Sometimes the Dark Destiny books are charmingly terrible and absurd, since despite being under the official label they really weren't at all concerned with canon. Today's entry: Dracula supplied arms and vampire insurgent fighters to the Confederacy from 1863 to late 1864 as part of a plan to seize Georgia as his domain.
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Apr 1, 2019 12:11
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The Son Of The Devil Went Down To Georgia
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Apr 1, 2019 12:20
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There's a fight between Dracula's agent in the matter, in chiropteran marauder form, and Sherman and his men. Sherman wins, of course, because somehow he got a bunch of crossbows and fitted his crack squad of vampire exterminating blue coats with them and heavy wooden bolts which bring it down, and then he stakes the thing with his cane and burns it alive. And it's all because P.T. Barnum introduced him to a vampire before the War that he had the foresight to prepare to fight vampires at some stage during the War.
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Apr 1, 2019 12:32
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Joe Slowboat posted:Your standard is garbage; just admit you use what you like and ignore what you don't like everybody else. I don't actually like canon Archmasters, for a number of reasons, and so I've significantly modified both them and Imperial Magic at my table. Which doesn't matter at all to whether or not the Archmasters source material is well written for what it's doing, I just don't want to implement it. And that further has no standing as to whether Imperial Mysteries is, ugh, 'published fanon.' I never denied that I use what I like (Changeling) and igore what I don't (non-Changeling supplemental material). I'm more likely to use splashes in my game straight out of the core books of those lines because 80% of my players are only familar with those core books. Supplemental material has a very clear and formal definition, in that it is things added after a core-book, and as such can only assist in the development of the game rather than being a requirement. However, some of the supplementals go beyond the task of adding to their gamelines and instead rely on the gimmick of creating a deeper, 'true' understanding of forces beyond the scope of a table that isn't in its 52nd week of granting 20xp a week, or even beyond that scope. That is published fanon; that is the Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand and its cosmic disease Viscissitude or the Dark Mother and its claim to being an ur-monster. You are right that there is no reasonable formal definition between Beast content and gamelines that weren't written to celebrate and center the experiences of abusers of the vulnerable; this means it is actually more likely that the Dark Mother is revealed to be a Pangean in future supplements! It becomes very easy, in fact, because both of them are published fanon figures of such platonic and universal scope that it is actually cleaner to catagorize them together than to try and create the justification of three to seven separate creation myth figures interacting in the same pre-written history of the world that never touched.
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Apr 1, 2019 15:12
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Mendrian posted:Mage chat, in a nutshell: This is a fair assessment of how at least one part of each of my mage sessions ends up.
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Apr 1, 2019 15:36
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Loomer posted:There's a fight between Dracula's agent in the matter, in chiropteran marauder form, and Sherman and his men. Sherman wins, of course, because somehow he got a bunch of crossbows and fitted his crack squad of vampire exterminating blue coats with them and heavy wooden bolts which bring it down, and then he stakes the thing with his cane and burns it alive. And it's all because P.T. Barnum introduced him to a vampire before the War that he had the foresight to prepare to fight vampires at some stage during the War. That is somehow perfectly keeping with Sherman's personality.
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Apr 1, 2019 15:44
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I mean, you can use whatever words you want and use whatever supplements you want, that's fine and good, but don't expect other people to get on board with or even understand without explanations your personal definitions such as "anything added after the core book is an optional supplement, and thus i will call it 'fanon.'" Especially since that word usually means extra-authorial stuff brought onto a consideration of a text and not authorial content of a text released after the initial text. like, a while ago I went into the TVIV thread here about the show "prison break." In the OP there was a joking subsection about how the show got progressively worse and worse, and at what point (the second season, the first, halfway through the first...) the viewer should consider the show's canon over and everything after non-canonical. This was a joke, though - they were claiming the later part of the show is so bad you should pretend it never happened . No one, probably not even in that thread, would understand if someone claimed (without humorous intent) that season three of Prison Break really wasn't part of the fictional universe of Prison Break because it came after the first episode, or because it started sucking. Use whatever books or supplements make you and your table the happiest. By all loving means, tell us what you think of using later sourcebooks, or of the difference between WoD as read and as played - this is the right place for that. But you're using a term that's commonly used in like, the exact opposite of the way you're using it. (And, for the record, I think that nMage in particular massively improved by moving it's material slowly away from the 1E corebook - so if your argument is that newer texts in RPGs are often bad or whatever, rather than just idk, not the default, I totally disagree.)
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Apr 1, 2019 16:56
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Gerund, your definition of published fanon is incoherent on its face. You've made a distinction between 'supplements that reinforce the setting' and 'supplements that expand the setting' - but unless a book literally adds nothing to the gameline, supplements always expand the setting. There are always new elements that change how one interprets the original book (assuming you intend to use both). The introduction of Fractals and so on in Demon completely changes certain thin aspects of the setting; I would be quite surprised if you called that 'published fanon. Moreover, the Sundered World is a playable setting for any EXP total of Woof or Mage, so your contention there doesn't apply either. And various gamelinesnstarted out with theories about the big monsters behind the scenes; Changeling has developed its image of the True Fae, and their interactions with the world, over time and supplements. Is Equinox Road published fanon?
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Apr 1, 2019 16:57
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Part of the reason I don’t get on with the oWoD revivals (never been much interested in x20) is that I already have all the oWoD books I care to have, and they don’t add enough that’s new. So Sundered World adds to both Werewolf and Mage’s backstories. Isn’t that the whole loving point of doing a Dark Era? I’m trying to imagine devving or writing a book for any CofD game that doesn’t tell the reader anything they didn’t already know, and it’s a soul-crushing prospect. Edit; yes, I’m aware that there’s some Dark Eras that really are just a brief history of a period you can get from Wikipedia and a few stated characters, but those are the poo poo ones.
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Apr 1, 2019 17:34
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The X20 lines bother me because the nostalgia factor became an excuse to not do any game design on systems that desperately need an update. I'd like one version of Mage the Ascension with well designed spheres that are easy to adjudicate and a base system where I don't have three separate difficulty systems: floating target numbers, dice pool penalties/bonuses, and number of successes. Hell, I'd love a core Ascension book that reduced combat to one roll per turn. I can sort of hack this into nWoD 1e with the Mage Translation Guide, but there are a lot of complex subsystems (void ships, cyber augmentations, Talisman creation, bio-engineered templates) that I don't find super easy to convert over. Octavo fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 18:09
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Gerund posted:You are right that there is no reasonable formal definition between Beast content and gamelines that weren't written to celebrate and center the experiences of abusers of the vulnerable; this means it is actually more likely that the Dark Mother is revealed to be a Pangean in future supplements! It becomes very easy, in fact, because both of them are published fanon figures of such platonic and universal scope that it is actually cleaner to catagorize them together than to try and create the justification of three to seven separate creation myth figures interacting in the same pre-written history of the world that never touched. There's no real chance of that; the Dark Mother is clearly just an old and powerful astral archetype, like the Death character you see in the Astral Realms book who rules an entire kingdom and can instantly kill with a touch. Looks like Mage wins again!
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Apr 1, 2019 18:16
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Ferrinus posted:I'm still of the opinion that, being that the present is all that exists and the past is simply a trail that the present leaves in its wake, Time magic shouldn't involve actual "play out what you do using normal task resolution" time travel unless you're using Dynamics or other super-powerful plot device magic. Shifting Sands-like spells should let you spot-edit scenes as if you did something differently ("I brought some silver bullets, actually"), or otherwise use your rewinding time to futz with things as flavor text for things changing in the present-day scene rather than put the present-day scene on hold. I recently ran a very time-loop-centric session and this is more or less how it operated; everything is assumed the same except for whatever the changes made would do specifically. Longer-range time travel might have more side effects, and at Time 5 and Corridors of Time I'd start having actual scenes in the past, but I also don't expect any players to snap-cast Corridors of Time to deal with minor problems any more than I expect Death Masters to go around instantly killing people at the drop of a hat (or resurrecting them).
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Apr 1, 2019 18:23
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Octavo posted:The X20 lines bother me because the nostalgia factor became an excuse to not do any game design on systems that desperately need an update. I'd like one version of Mage the Ascension with well designed spheres that are easy to adjudicate and a base system where I don't have three separate difficulty systems: floating target numbers, dice pool penalties/bonuses, and number of successes. Hell, I'd love a core Ascension book that reduced combat to one roll per turn. Did they ever come up with a Paradox system for Ascension that wasn't just, 'here's a list of poo poo Paradox might do and some systems I guess, idk.'
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Apr 1, 2019 19:26
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Mendrian posted:Did they ever come up with a Paradox system for Ascension that wasn't just, 'here's a list of poo poo Paradox might do and some systems I guess, idk.' Not really, what's worse is that when MachineIV developed the quickstart guide, the guide included a fixed paradox chart so that the math worked. When M20 came out, the math was broken again.
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Apr 1, 2019 19:36
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World of Darkness Megathread: [quantum framework] is [dick joke].
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Apr 1, 2019 20:00
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Crasical posted:World of Darkness Megathread: [quantum framework] is [dick joke]. World of Darkness Megathread: The Math was broken again.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:09
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Octavo posted:The X20 lines bother me because the nostalgia factor became an excuse to not do any game design on systems that desperately need an update. I'd like one version of Mage the Ascension with well designed spheres that are easy to adjudicate and a base system where I don't have three separate difficulty systems: floating target numbers, dice pool penalties/bonuses, and number of successes. Hell, I'd love a core Ascension book that reduced combat to one roll per turn. Yeah. When Mage20 came out my reaction was you had one job... On the other hand, I've tried to go back and extensively houserule it myself quite a few times, and yes. It is really hard to make work within the framework they've set up. You'd be better off burning it to the ground and rebuilding it along the same themes.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:11
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Gyrotica posted:Yeah. When Mage20 came out my reaction was you had one job...
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Apr 1, 2019 20:16
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Gyrotica posted:Yeah. When Mage20 came out my reaction was you had one job... I kinda think that Mage: the Ascension would be better as a powered by the apocalypse game with no common sphere system. Specific moves for rotes and general moves for improvisation based on splat specific domains like Primal Utility, Goetia, Alchemy, Dimensional Science, etc. Octavo fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 20:20
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Octavo posted:I kinda think that Mage: the Ascension would be better as a powered by the apocalypse game with no common system. Specific moves for rotes and general moves for improvisation based on splat specific domains like Primal Utility, Goetia, Alchemy, Dimensional Science, etc. That's one approach. I'd also like mechanization of paradigms - in a system where your paradigm directly impacts your ability and flexibility with magic, they really ought to have had a way to represent that in the mechanics. That part, I actually did manage to construct to my satisfaction, awarding or subtracting bonus points depending on how restrictive/flexible people's paradigms were.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:31
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I have a Mage question that hopefully won't devolve into Magechat. So I played 1e Awakening. Like, a lot. I ran a Seattle setting and a Victorian setting and both times I had a lot of players who had never touched Mage or WoD before and a couple that had. I just printed out all the spells in little packets (we only had one core book to go around). The inexperienced players were amused but slightly overwhelmed by just the number of things they could do in the core book alone, and that was before rotes, rote factors, spell factors, and all that other stuff. My question is, is the 2e version of Awakening accessible to new players at all? It sounds like there are a ton of subsystems hanging off of it that are harder to ignore than there was in 1e. In 1e some of my players just straight up ignored everything that wasn't improvised spellcasting and still had a ton of stuff they could do. Also is it possible to play 2e without Conditions? I hate conditions so much and I'd rather not use them.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:53
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Mendrian posted:Also is it possible to play 2e without Conditions? I hate conditions so much and I'd rather not use them. I mean it's kind of the de facto state that a lot of inexperienced ChroD GMs fall into, it's just kind of a waste? Like the whole point of the nWoD as a system is that it has incentives and rules designed to encourage you to play characters who exist in a horror setting, and to provide them with mechanical hooks for being emotionally overwhelmed, scared out of their wits, despairing over the monsters they've become, etc, basically making the game and the narrative sync up in terms of those aspects. Conditions are the engine that drives that. If you don't like conditions and only ever use improvised spellcasting you might honestly be better off just nicking the setting and running a lighter system, because that sounds like what both you and your players want. And there's no shame in that, it's a great setting; on top of that, premade GM-facing content like NPCs / monsters is one of the biggest weak points in the nWoD so you're not even losing that much by going to another system, if you don't like the system itself.
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Apr 1, 2019 21:00
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like several of the nWoD games I've played in have basically turned into "we're going to freeform RP being vampires or frankensteins or whatever, barely using anything other than the basic dot rating + die roll resolution system, and it goes great until we get into combat or any other situation that actually requires understanding the rules and then everything grinds to a halt" personally I actually really like the complexity of the nWoD, and even some aspects of the incentive system (although I wish it used something other than XP for the carrot, as I've talked about at length before) which made the above kind of frustrating, but it's frustrating because nobody in that situation is really getting what they want
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Apr 1, 2019 21:05
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I'm also running a 2e Mage game for the first time and we also have been first time dealing with Conditions in a major way and I gotta say, it really helps. Especially as you get players to start having cards and using them with their Exceptional Successes, and I added a house rule wherein every spell is a Condition when applied to someone, and it's worked really well. The biggest hurdle is that with Reach, magic is a lot more complicated and you'll take a few sessions before it really "clicks."
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Apr 1, 2019 21:16
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Mendrian posted:I have a Mage question that hopefully won't devolve into Magechat. The pros: Creative Thaumaturgy / improvised spellcasting is much much easier than in 1e. It makes way more logical sense and has fewer steps, so once you cast a few spells, it gets easier to come up with and pull off cool ideas. The core also incorporates the very best of the 1e line. The orders are way more interesting, and the mystery generation system is fantastic. The cons: Every spell now uses the createthaum system and you can't just cast a pre-written spell and count successes to see how powerful it is without looking at charts to design the potency, scale, duration or the spell. It's a little intimidating for new players, but it's an awesome engine once you get it going.
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Apr 1, 2019 21:19
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Goa Tse-tung posted:also if you try to verbally tell someone how to solve later levels you cast a spell I’m also imagining a framework where you can build up more and more always-available/self-refreshing environmental yantras over the course of a scene like they’re land cards in MtG. Baba: the Gathering.
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Apr 1, 2019 21:41
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The forbidden yantric combo: Bofa and Ligma
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Apr 1, 2019 21:43
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Beasts are just Mages specializing in the Trauma and Being A Huge Dumb Creeper spheres.
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Apr 1, 2019 22:41
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Nessus posted:The forbidden yantric combo: Bofa and Ligma Also the two most popular Shadow Names of the last few years.
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Apr 2, 2019 00:44
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Joe Slowboat posted:Gerund, your definition of published fanon is incoherent on its face. lol True Fae are in the core book by page 34? Its always been part of CtL core? This attempt at a Epic Ancient God Own is already making the word incoherent reverberate with supernal irony I used to call the Dark Mother / Pangean type of published fanon "Platonic Psuedes" before the whole drat use of the Mary Sue concept got ruined by all the Starwars chuds. Its one of the many types of published fanon but its the type in question, eh? Figuring if the writing achieves its goals of creating sales doesn't make the bolt-on nature of some further Ancient Godhead Of Background Setting a work worthy of critical acclaim. Its the equivalent easy gig of churning out a short spread of 3.5 feats because it gets the most customer engagement per word without worrying about what it effects to the setting. Supernal casting spirits from a time before the written word is actually a pretty big, category busting creation, with multiple questions and consequences! That I also know weren't part of the core book premise that players will first be introduced to! This is the issue!
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Apr 2, 2019 02:19
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So which of the books can't be Published Fanon? Like, if you want to drill down, isn't everything outside of the World of Darkness core published fanon?
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Apr 2, 2019 02:22
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