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Mulva posted:I can honestly say I spend the overwhelming majority of my life not biting apples. So it must be pretty easy.
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Apr 29, 2019 08:08
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Nessus posted:Most people spend the overwhelming majority of their lives not having heart attacks, and yet. Yes, much like heart attacks Supernal Magic is to be avoided at all costs! And may be a side effect of diets high in saturated fats. Mulva fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 08:12
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So, now the debate has died down for a moment, I'm curious about something. I don't play tabletop games. I got into 40K and now WoD because I love reading the lore. It's so much fun to jump into a new setting and devour all the info on how the world works and all the fascinating creatures that inhabit it. And also because I love discussions like the one that was going on here. (40K was such a popular topic elsewhere I started reading it so I could participate in the many threads talking about it) Is that common? Does anybody else here just like reading the books, learning about the world and maybe writing their own stories based on it all? NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 08:28
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NikkolasKing posted:So, now the debate has died down for a moment, I'm curious about something.
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Apr 29, 2019 08:31
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Rand Brittain posted:Guide to the Technocracy was deliberately written as parody, but unfortunately satire is opaque to a lot of people, especially if they were perfectly happy to believe what it's telling them. 1) How do you know it was satire? 2) Brian Campbell seems earnest enough 3) If satire is opaque to a lot of people maybe that's less on them and more on the person who decided to communicate entirely through satire 3.1) There's a saying about people who communicate badly and act smug about it afterwards. 3.2) How do you play satire? Like if I buy GttT because I want to flesh out my antagonists in my Traditions game, how am I supposed to use it if it's satire? It's only natural to assume that you can take a game supplement at face value, because if you can't, it has almost no value as a game supplement. (Like, if we want to get into the personal failings of the people who read GttT and came out thinking it was earnest, maybe we should point less to their inability to "get" satire about themselves and more about how they're so naive they don't believe White Wolf sold them a useless supplement.)
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Apr 29, 2019 09:34
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Guide to the Technocracy seemed like it was playing it straight to me. Like they did have disclaimers that I recall to the effect of 'hey, this is the Technocrats book, so obviously we're writing from the Technocrats' perspective here' and lacked the "if you find the Nephandi deeply persuasive and compelling, seek therapy" note in the Book of Madness. But it wasn't like... SUPER goofy. There were some Men in Black references but Men in Black was pretty recent and was probably a good look at how to do a "heroic technocrats" storyline anyway. I think the goofiest thing was that there was some kind of supertech motorcycle you could use, and which was "normal" enough that you might be able to officially buy it from the Technocracy for your personal use instead of just making use of it. It had a really funny picture of some Agent J motherfucker riding this Akira motorcycle.
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Apr 29, 2019 10:34
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So, I cannot speak for everyone (usual caveat that many nWoD splats were designed by a rapist applies) but while I do like to harp on how The Pentacle aren't the good guys, and how Mages are, by and large, a self-absorbed parody of academic politics, doesn't mean that *A* Mage can't be heroic. These things are my biases, which inform anything I've touched in the nWoD in the decade J was writing it: Evil groups exist. Some organizations are just rotten at the core. Good groups do not exist. You can't be a saint automatically by joining the right gang. There are no right gangs - there are always-wrong gangs and often-wrong gangs. You can't be a decent human being and be a Seer, or a Tremere, or a Banisher. Being a Silver Ladder does not make you one, and the majority of thearchs aren't, but - and this is important - it's possible to be a high-Wisdom thearch out to better her fellow man. Forgetting that the Pentacle have flaws well-intentioned pcs must struggle against AND insisting that the out-and-out antagonists are right are both roads to the failure state that is Mage: The Ascension.
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Apr 29, 2019 11:00
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Nessus posted:Guide to the Technocracy seemed like it was playing it straight to me. Like they did have disclaimers that I recall to the effect of 'hey, this is the Technocrats book, so obviously we're writing from the Technocrats' perspective here' and lacked the "if you find the Nephandi deeply persuasive and compelling, seek therapy" note in the Book of Madness. But it wasn't like... SUPER goofy. There were some Men in Black references but Men in Black was pretty recent and was probably a good look at how to do a "heroic technocrats" storyline anyway. I mean, there's also a mechanical section on the Social Conditioning trait, which describes it as "brainwashing" and mostly cites Nineteen Eighty-four for its examples of each effect level. That part is not subtle. I agree with LatwPIAT's post from earlier in the thread on this one, and I extend it to say that introducing major expository premises in-voice is overall a fraught exercise. Which has me frustrated with some of Onyx Path's more recently-developed CofD books, because that's been on the uptick.
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Apr 29, 2019 11:29
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TheNamedSavior posted:This is why I took me a while to actually like NWOD. You have to make up the heroes, really. IMHO, the only good Mage game is one where you beat the ever loving poo poo out of the pretentious "gently caress curing starvation, lets just circlejerk about how totally not awful and horribly classist Atlantis was" Mages, and focus all of your goals on beating the poo poo out of capitalists and fascist mages. I like the idea that there are more stories to tell than "a good person, who we identify with, struggles against something bad", and in particular I think we suffer as a culture for that model being overwhelmingly represented in media to the point where when someone tries something different it's wildly misinterpreted, even by its advocates (see: Breaking Bad fans who think of Walter White as the "hero" and not the villain). On the other hand, given the time requirements of an RPG campaign I would never blame someone or think less of them for saying "no, that poo poo is not something I want to spend X hours per week immersed in." Like, if you cannot invest in any story where the protagonists aren't fighting against the evils of capitalism, I understand why that may be the case - politics is important - but equally I'm sure you can understand why some people want *other* stories (examinations of how lovely people justify their poo poo to themselves can be politically illuminating, sometimes people want actual escapism rather than a restatement of major IRL problems, etc.).
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Apr 29, 2019 11:48
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I'm not actually convinced our culture is bad at producing stories in which 'really, it's all shades of gray' or 'there's no good guys.' Especially not in games spaces. That's not to say nuance isn't useful, but I would say that in video games and to a lesser extent traditional gaming, the impulse has been to erase the distinction between flawed, even fatally flawed heroes, and fundamentally bad-for-the-world antagonists. Again, you're not wrong that plenty of other game styles are aesthetically and experientially valuable! But the equation of sophistication with a morass in which there can be no moral accounting is alive and well in popular culture. It leads to the idea that idealism is always naive, and having ideological dedications is just a route to fanaticism and black and white thinking. Which, fair enough if that's really what a work wants to argue, but I am personally exhausted with that style of storytelling at the moment and I certainly disagree with the claims. One insight a friend once pointed out to me, that I found trenchant, is that a lot of the AAA video games of the last decade or so have the protagonist switching sides constantly or set up to thread the needle of a quest of personal revenge or duty between two sides that are meant to be morally indistinguishable. The effect is not to undermine the idea that the protagonist is always right, but rather to reinforce it, because everything works out properly in the end despite the protagonist basically just constantly moving forward and fighting whatever fights them. That narrative structure, while in theory demonstrating the complexity or amorality of the character's situation, works out to just denature the idea that sides in a conflict can be right or wrong, instead locating that entirely in the protagonist, who almost inevitably will be 'right' by their own lights. Amid constant shades of gray, there's no reason not to just go with the protagonist as the hero, even if they're the cast of Always Sunny in Philadelphia but with character sheets. This isn't really directly applicable to the whole Technocracy/Traditions brouhaha, though that absolutely centers on the idea that actually both sides are equally bad and should be written as such for the sake of nuance. It does, however, make Vampire look quite good: There, you are almost certainly in the wrong, and the game goes out of its way to say it. You're a blood-sucking predator. Good guys quite possibly exist, and you are not one of them.
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Apr 29, 2019 12:53
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Sometimes I just want to be Vampire super hero and throw a dumpster at a guy.
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Apr 29, 2019 13:35
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What's stopping a vampire (of any Clan) from being a good guy? You don't even have to kill to feed in this setting. Your bites even make your victims happy.You can share your blood with mortal friends too and judging from Knox and Mecurio, they are very grateful and it's very beneficial to them. I did miss out on Heather though and I am told she shows that Ghouls are actually slaves and it's all very unhealthy....
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Apr 29, 2019 13:45
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I just meant that Vampire: The Requiem tries very hard to posit that being a good vampire pretty much means not taking part in vampire society and probably not taking part in any society, and living somewhere you can feed on animals and not people. But, y'know, nobody's playing that character, because that's a boring story, and there's much more interesting stuff to be done with vampires who are, in fact, a net negative for humanity and probably lying to themselves about it.
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Apr 29, 2019 13:53
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NikkolasKing posted:What's stopping a vampire (of any Clan) from being a good guy? You don't even have to kill to feed in this setting. Your bites even make your victims happy.You can share your blood with mortal friends too and judging from Knox and Mecurio, they are very grateful and it's very beneficial to them. The emotions that ghouls get towards the people at they feed upon are entirely unnatural though. They can't not feel those things. That's the thing about vampires, they corrupt "pure" emotions in the people they interact with. Say you were a vampire and ghouled a willing partner, you'd never be 100% sure than any feelings in the future coming from them was real, or if it's just the blood. It's basically a form of mind control, and at the very best, it would lead to a highly irregular relationship between the vampire and ghoul (as they'd be both drug dealer and whatever else).
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Apr 29, 2019 13:54
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So hey. If I can step away from mage chat... have a hot take from Martin.
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Apr 29, 2019 14:23
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Kurieg posted:So hey. If I can step away from mage chat... JFC
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Apr 29, 2019 14:27
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Kurieg posted:So hey. If I can step away from mage chat... Please do for the love of all that is good and holy. Kurieg posted:
...what? "Experiences from our life on the edge of polite society informed every step of the way." 'The edge.' Oh my lord, Martin. Playing what you think is an edgy LARP does not mean you actually live on the edge.
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Apr 29, 2019 14:52
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NikkolasKing posted:I did miss out on Heather though and I am told she shows that Ghouls are actually slaves and it's all very unhealthy.... She scrounges up some jewelry to give to you while trying to look up while you live. You take her in and after a few interactions you come back and she has, completely unprompted, dropped out of college so she can give you the money from her tuition loans. The next time you catch up with her she's kidnapped a man and locked him in your bathroom because she thought you would appreciate a free drink. The writers did a real good job with her sidequest in making the player feel things they really don't want to feel.
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Apr 29, 2019 14:54
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Kurieg posted:So hey. If I can step away from mage chat... ...he's still writing on Vampire?
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Apr 29, 2019 14:55
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oh good, he's decided to make this an explicit addressing of classism and racism great greeeeat. at least he's stopped signing off 'blood and souls'
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Apr 29, 2019 14:55
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gourdcaptain posted:...he's still writing on Vampire? For the Bloodlines game, at least. I don't think he's working on the books? Mors Rattus posted:oh good, he's decided to make this an explicit addressing of classism and racism AMERICAN Classism and Racism because that poo poo doesn't happen in Europe. Nope. Never.
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Apr 29, 2019 14:56
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Kurieg posted:AMERICAN Classism and Racism because that poo poo doesn't happen in Europe. Especially not in Sweden, apparently, as his innocent mind was terribly shocked indeed.
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Apr 29, 2019 15:09
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Forgetting that the Pentacle have flaws well-intentioned pcs must struggle against AND insisting that the out-and-out antagonists are right are both roads to the failure state that is Mage: The Ascension. drat, that's good. I wonder of that failure state could have been avoided if instead of the GttT, they had published "An Ex-Technocrat's Survival Guide", a book on deprogramming from the Technocracy's conditioning, figuring out how to construct a new paradigm that without the aspect of Control, and finally using all your cool spy gadgets to fight back. Hmm, I have an idea for a storyteller's vault product. Octavo fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 16:08
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gourdcaptain posted:...he's still writing on Vampire? Bloodlines 2 has been in the works since before WW was mandated to not write any more books in house. What he's talking about would have been discussions and materials in the past two years. And what he's talking about 'designed the Thin Bloods' he's talking about the design of the Thin Bloods as even worse second-class citizens than they were for the V5 core. Chill.
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Apr 29, 2019 16:10
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Dave Brookshaw posted:So, I cannot speak for everyone (usual caveat that many nWoD splats were designed by a rapist applies) but while I do like to harp on how The Pentacle aren't the good guys, and how Mages are, by and large, a self-absorbed parody of academic politics, doesn't mean that *A* Mage can't be heroic. Yeah, I never said that you couldn't have individuals or groups within the various Pentacle Orders that were good. I actually even pointed out that mages are no exception to that concept in one of my earliest posts in this debate. It's just that the groups in question are often depicted as not really being a net positive on reality barring keeping the Exarch's in check. Which undermines the assertion that we should be rooting for these guys in favor of all of them getting equally kicked to the curb since the scale of some of the crap they do wrong or just mess up can get pretty huge. And to be clear, I do like CofD/NWoD Mage despite my complaints about it. A lot of what I posted was due to the thematic and narrative differences I had noticed in what was displayed, if that makes any sense. Also that there's a third perspective to the Pentacle Orders/Seers-Exarch line-up. Just saying gently caress it, and making it so that supernal mages and the Exarch's can't make reality and the people within it their plaything's by entirely cutting off their access to influencing the world through it. Which, if it's as much of a do-anything sort of powerset as Ferrinus and company say should be entirely possible if not fraught with insane amounts of danger. Mulva also raised another good point that I was about to get too before I called it quits due to being tired from a lack of sleep and being fed up with the little rhetorical and debate tricks I kept having to deal with. That there's plenty of other forms of magic out there in the setting that can do miraculous things as well. If supernal mages are consistently depicted as being such a threat to the general stability of the world then my take on it isn't "maybe the Exarch's are right and some people deserve to have all the power" but instead "You people are by far and large awful gently caress ups and need to have your toys taken away from you so you can never hurt anyone again.". IE: A more benevolent (and sane, given what some Banisher's are depicted as believing) take on the general Banisher's look at things. Somehow, in folks like Ferrinus and jakodee's minds this translated too "He wants to support Exarch-lite!" positions. But in doing that they glossed over several important parts of what I was saying. Namely that the Exarch's and their servants too should be cut off from influencing the world. Also, that there's plenty of other ways to do incredible, miraculous things in the setting outside of supernal magic. My opinion was that no one should be using supernal magic to mess with the world if supernal mages are able to (and have been repeatedly shown having done so) go around doing things like wiping out major facets of the setting's time-line or ripping Pangaean super-entitities souls out for batteries and magical shelters. There's a point where the atrocities committed start to undermine the stated intentions of the protagonists and generally just color the narrative of a thing as a whole. Things like the stuff i've posted about veer dangerously close to that point. It also kinda reeks as a justification of extremism in of itself not just from a real world point of view but from the stated mechanics of how wisdom and hubris work. Likewise, going all "Sword of Truth" where your collective protagonists can either do no wrong or their destructive excesses are hand-waved away through the stated good of the end result is just as bad of a narrative as one where the bad guys win. Especially if you want people to sympathize with those protagonists and believe they're in the right. And after a certain point of seeing ____ horrible thing occur by an anti-Exarch mage it's hard for me not to think that both sides really ought to just get the poo poo kicked out of them to the point that neither group can gently caress with the world any more. Ironically, after I went to sleep we went right back to where this debate ended up the last time we had it. What with Mulva pointing out that in a world with other types of magic that supernal mages don't have nearly as much of an excuse to consistently screw up as badly as they're shown doing. Also, that we already have a fairly good idea of what a mass awakened group of people looks like, and it did not end well. And finally, if i'm reading the posts right that maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to cut off the Exarch's and supernal mages from messing with reality for the same reasons that the Silver Ladder rejiggering reality to be (and i'm just trying to sub an applicable word in here for it) anti-harm might not be a good idea. Which itself is an entirely valid point too. Kurieg posted:So hey. If I can step away from mage chat... Also, what the gently caress is going on Ericsson's twitter avatar? Is he posing shirtless while covered in fake blood? Or are those tattoo's? Also, lol at the whole "Experiences from our life on the edge of polite society informed every step of the way." thing. Dude doesn't get that being deliberately edgy does not make you a social outcast, I guess. It's like reading a twitter post from a goth kid currently in middle school. Or I guess he could be smarting from the smack down Paradox gave him after the Chechnya incident. 
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Apr 29, 2019 16:19
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On the one hand, an all-thinblood game where you play people who've been brushed by a terrible power which has set you aside from the rest of humanity and you have to learn to cope with it without being consumed by the deeper horrors (or falling into the temptation to become one) sounds like a perfectly good concept for a standalone RPG. (In fact, it's such a good concept, it's already been done: it's called Changeling: the Lost.) On the other hand, I can't believe he thought that Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition could have been that game without prompting a fanbase revolt that made 4E D&D or Traveller: the New Era's backlashes pale in comparison. As a separate game of its own, it could work. As a supplement to regular Vampire, it could work. As the brand new edition of Vampire, intended to replace and supplant what has come before? No. It shits away too much of the original game's basic premise to even merit keeping the same name.
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Apr 29, 2019 16:36
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NikkolasKing posted:What's stopping a vampire (of any Clan) from being a good guy? Other vampires, mostly.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:11
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Joe Slowboat posted:I'm not actually convinced our culture is bad at producing stories in which 'really, it's all shades of gray' or 'there's no good guys.' Yeah, absolutely. The cynical, world-weary, "all the sides are bad, I've just got to do...what's right... for my family... (or whatever)" pose is itself an extremely conservative position, an excuse not to engage in any kind of mass politics or, indeed, moral judgment. Is there something wrong with the world? No matter, keep your head down! Just try to do what's right on the personal level, because any attempt to change the system is inevitably, nay automatically as bad as the system! So you just end up with Liams Neeson murdering swarthy guys in pursuit of daughters, over and over again. For some reason, people can't make the last leap in this sequence: Tiny brain: There are good guys and bad guys Normal brain: Sometimes the good guys do bad things and the bad guys do good things Awakened brain: Despite this, it is possible to take an accounting and decide which side is good and which side is bad, rather than simply washing your hands of everything and cheering for the status quo to win Archonex posted:Mulva also raised another good point that I was about to get too before I called it quits due to being tired from a lack of sleep and being fed up with the little rhetorical and debate tricks I kept having to deal with. That there's plenty of other forms of magic out there in the setting that can do miraculous things as well. If supernal mages are consistently depicted as being such a threat to the general stability of the world then my take on it isn't "maybe the Exarch's are right and some people deserve to have all the power" but instead "You people are by far and large awful gently caress ups and need to have your toys taken away from you so you can never hurt anyone again.". IE: A more benevolent (and sane, given what some Banisher's are depicted as believing) take on the general Banisher's look at things. That is the exarch position. It's not even exarch-lite. The exarchs, I'm sure, would love to cut their servants off from magic and leave our world a perfect self-contained bubble through which not one casting of Prestidigitation can ever filter through, except those pesky watchtowers keep uplifting human souls at random. Therefore, whose people who unfortunately do Awaken need to be made to police themselves and each other, in order to keep the situation from spiraling out of control, because magic's just so, so bad for people to have. As has been pointed out to you, you need magic to defeat the exarchs and end the prison-world they've built. So, if you don't want anyone to use magic, and you think all the magic-using groups are if not equally then certainly all sufficiently bad to need to be opposed and suppressed, you are actually fine with the prison-world. You think the prison-world is superior to the alternative. You want to keep things as they are. This is why Banishers are effectively agents of the exarchs - when you keep mages down, you keep the exarchs in charge.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:13
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I think it's been mentioned before that unlike Masquerade vampires, who need so much blood that violence is inevitable, Requiem vampires could probably just be considered to have a regrettable blood disease if they had a healthy support system instead of, um, what they have.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:14
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Ferrinus posted:That is the exarch position. It's not even exarch-lite. The exarchs, I'm sure, would love to cut their servants off from magic and leave our world a perfect self-contained bubble through which not one casting of Prestidigitation can ever filter through, except those pesky watchtowers keep uplifting human souls at random. Therefore, whose people who unfortunately do Awaken need to be made to police themselves and each other, in order to keep the situation from spiraling out of control, because magic's just so, so bad for people to have. No, you are wrong. The Exarch's are pretty firmly in the "create a despotic dystopia of such proportions that it's unheard of in history" category. Hence why they're in charge of principles like "spread racism", "spread paranoid control over the masses", and other awful concepts. The claim that they want to police the power or keep it from being misused is just a flimsy cover for what they really are after. Even the books address this. They aren't the technocracy. There's no remotely sympathetic view to be held there. They're power-mad bastards that are out for themselves and nothing else. If, in the setting, tomorrow a Banisher tried to ascend and get rid of supernal mages and Exarch's of all stripes they'd drop everything they were doing and team up with the Oracles and anti-Exarch arch-mages to stop him. Rand Brittain posted:I think it's been mentioned before that unlike Masquerade vampires, who need so much blood that violence is inevitable, Requiem vampires could probably just be considered to have a regrettable blood disease if they had a healthy support system instead of, um, what they have. Yeah, I even posted a bit about it not a few pages ago before mage chat made a comeback with a vengeance. If Requiem's vampires weren't trapped in such a poisonous society they'd probably be alright so long as they received some sort of healthy support system. As it is, hell is other people. Heck, that's literally the blurb describing alternate mechanics in 1e. From what I sort of remember the mechanics basically showed just how vampires suffer as a result of the situation they're in along with how they tend to go nuts over time. Archonex fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 17:22
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Archonex posted:No, the Exarch's are pretty firmly in the "create a despotic dystopia of such proportions that it's unheard of in history" category. The claim that they want to police the power or keep it from being misused is just a flimsy cover for what they really are after. Even the books address this. They aren't the technocracy. They're power-mad bastards that are out for themselves and nothing else. If, in the setting, tomorrow a Banisher tried to ascend and get rid of supernal mages and Exarch's of all stripes they'd drop everything they were doing and team up with the Oracles and anti-Exarch arch-mages to stop him. Several mistakes here: * The dystopia of the present day is required to prevent humans from Awakening. The less miserable people are, the more likely they are to discover magic, which you and the Iron Seals agree is basically the worst thing that can happen. Therefore, people must remain divided and desperate. * The Technocracts are power-mad bastards out for themselves and nothing else, strictly homologous to the Seers. * A Banisher can't Ascend and couldn't get rid of diddly squat if they did; it would require a mass movement of anti-exarch mages (we could call it "the Pentacle") to overturn the current supernal status quo. In the course of becoming big, organized, and powerful enough to storm the heavens, those mages would inevitably make so many mistakes, commit so many crimes, etc. that you would immediately denounce and reject them. And the thing is, if all the mages instantly died, if all the Exarchs evaporated, if all the supernal were sealed off from the physical world permanently, we'd still find ourselves in a hellish dystopia in which the strong rule the weak and rich subsist on the life-force of the poor. And the moment anyone got together to try to stop this, you'd be like no! Stop! Revolutionaries did a bad thing once! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 17:27
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The Exarchs don't want to create such a world. They already have. That is the world of the present in the Chronicles. What we consider mundane evil is in fact supported and undergirded by the Exarchs. They don't need to do any more intervention in reality to keep it bound by what Neoplatonists called 'chains' (and the Seers do too) of symbolism to their principles. They have ready won. The fight now is to break that hold, not prevent them from winning even more. As such, the status quo is the Exarchic prison. Not some possible Seers endgame that looks like 1984, conditions right now. They are already part of the structure of the universe. E: I mean obviously I'm sure the Seers would love to win some more and do things like invent the Hive-Souled and new kinds of fascism, because that's how they get promoted and it deepens the exarchic hold. But Hive -Souled are icing on the oppression cake, part of the efforts to make change in the status quo impossible. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 17:32
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Ferrinus posted:* A Banisher can't Ascend and couldn't get rid of diddly squat if they did A whole lot of ascended immortal beings go through a whole bunch of effort to stop a thing that can't happen. Which is referred to as a "universe-threatening circumstance". Good thing it can't happen, guess they should stop caring about it.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:33
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Mulva posted:A whole lot of ascended immortal beings go through a whole bunch of effort to stop a thing that can't happen. Which is referred to as a "universe-threatening circumstance". Good thing it can't happen, guess they should stop caring about it. I always assumed this was because it's much easier to blow things up than make concerted efforts to change things carefully to fit a vision. All a Banisher is expected to do in the Supernal is smash the nearest concepts with a hammer, since it's all made of magic, and we better hope they didn't smash the Supernal origin of light, or heat, or compassion. Which, in Ferrinus' conception, is pointless nihilism that does nothing to improve the world, and therefore is meaningless. I'd add 'also incredibly dangerous to themselves and others.' On the other hand, a principled rather than afflicted Banisher could try to undermine the Supernal grammar that supports Gnosis and magic, and that could be more subtle and harder to do, putting them on par with other Ascended mages, except also they are attempting to lobotomize the human capacity for Gnosis. Which isn't that different from what the Exarchs want except that the Exarchs might have a vested interest in not breaking whatever that grammar is, who knows? Maybe they literally can't conceive of that, being so deeply invested in Gnosis. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 17:38
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You know what's cool about Mage? The Exarchs stole magic and you're gonna get it back and give it to everyone* *if you can avoid tripping up on your own stupidity and distractions first. Also I really like the early WoD as opposed to whatever the gently caress all this poo poo is, don't @ me
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Apr 29, 2019 17:39
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Mulva posted:A whole lot of ascended immortal beings go through a whole bunch of effort to stop a thing that can't happen. Which is referred to as a "universe-threatening circumstance". Good thing it can't happen, guess they should stop caring about it. Yeah, pretty much. No Banisher is actually going to change anything - they'll just unwittingly reinforce and/or justify the status quo. Like you said upthread, individuals ascend all the time.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:44
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Ferrinus posted:Several mistakes here: The technocracy was, thanks to Phil Brucato, rewritten so that they at least had the minor note of some of their more misguided members genuinely wanting to keep order. It may have been really stupid. But it exists and acts as a metric to the Exarch's and the Seers. Who are pushing their system of dystopian principles solely for their own selfish gain. They have fundamental tenets like "Regulate the Abyss" and "Divide Humanity". No one can join the Seers unless they are willingly deceiving themselves or are fantastically ignorant of what it is they're working towards. That's why they're a damned sight worse than even OWoD's Technocracy was, in fact. That's why even public aggregate sites (Sites that are prone to a hell of a lot of bickering over the finer details of settings and have been mocked on these forums plenty of times in the past.) like TVTropes point out that unlike the Technocracy there is nothing there that is worthy of consideration in the Exarch view point. Because it's fundamentally a system meant to ensure that a minority keeps control of a majority to the detriment of the majority. Incidentally, they do this by --- among other things --- pushing dystopian principles on the public at large. A fact that, assuming they win, leads to a nightmarish dystopia that'd make 1984 seem tame and freedom loving by comparison. How you managed to miss this when it's practically screamed out loud in the books is beyond me. Not going to address the rest of it. Since poo poo like "Oh, here's what you actually think.  " is the usual smug nonsense you post. Nor does what you've posted actually provide any proof to anything you have claimed. It's just straight up claims. Meanwhile i'm wasting my time typing frigging essays to address stuff you, Slowboat, and jakodee claim. It's not worth my time given that, and i'd rather talk about how Ericsson has issues than argue with a brick wall.Edit: Oh hey, now we've got one line poo poo posts involved. gently caress it, i'm done. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 17:54
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Archonex posted:The technocracy was, thanks to Phil Brucato, rewritten so that they at least had the minor note of some of their more misguided members genuinely wanting to keep order. It may have been kind of stupid. But it exists and acts as a metric to the Exarch's and the Seers. Who are pushing their system of dystopian principles solely for their own selfish gain. They have fundamental tenets like "Regulate the Abyss" and "Divide Humanity". No one can join the Seers unless they are willingly deceiving themselves or fantastically ignorant of what it is they're working towards. "There's no good side to the exarchs" says the man desperately pretending his argument aren't just exarc proppaganda.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:57
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Archonex posted:The technocracy was, thanks to Phil Brucato, rewritten so that they at least had the minor note of some of their more misguided members genuinely wanting to keep order. It may have been kind of stupid. But it exists and acts as a metric to the Exarch's and the Seers. Who are pushing their system of dystopian principles solely for their own selfish gain. They have fundamental tenets like "Regulate the Abyss" and "Divide Humanity". No one can join the Seers unless they are willingly deceiving themselves or fantastically ignorant of what it is they're working towards. The Technocracy is a system meant to ensure that a minority keeps control of a majority to the detriment of the majority. They do this by pushing dystopian principles on the public at large. They have won, and have created a nightmarish dystopia that makes 1984 seem tame. These are all basic elements of the Mage: the Ascension setting. Although, if you think the technocrats are good (or "morally grey" or "neutral" or whatever) that certainly tracks with your holding all the Seer positions about the nWoD. The reason you're typing essays rather than short paragraphs like I am is that your beliefs aren't well-considered or, ultimately, defensible, so you end up having to meander around and repeat yourself. You're using the sheer volume as cover for the fact that you haven't answered jakodee's/my/Slowboat's/etc. fundamental point, which is this: if you oppose the only force which even has a chance of defeating the Exarchs, then you de facto support the Exarchs. If you want the Pentacle to lose, then you want the Exarchs to win. You seem to think that people aren't reading or believing your lists of every crime ever committed by a Thearch or Thearch accomplice or whatever. But none of those things are as bad as the Exarchs' basic raison d'etre. So why would that change my mind? It's the equivalent of reminding everyone about Saddam's many crimes in April of 2003.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:03
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| # ? May 24, 2024 20:59 |
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, pretty much. No Banisher is actually going to change anything - they'll just unwittingly reinforce and/or justify the status quo. Like you said upthread, individuals ascend all the time. Yes, and some of the only individuals the status quo actively take a not even once stand on is Banishers. Because at the end of the day all other mages are effectively a bunch of politicians sitting around talking about decorum, whereas the Banishers are, as a group, kind of insane and violent towards the status quo. And could absolutely start tearing things down without a single thought for what happens tomorrow. As was said earlier, the French Revolution really did lead to a lot of positive change all over Europe, and did help foster new ideas and better systems. And it did this through a process that was called, quite accurately, the Terror. It was in final estimation a bunch of murderous, self-involved assholes and deluded ideological extremists that killed loving everyone, good bad or indifferent, and ultimately killed themselves. They themselves created nothing of value, had no particularly great ideas, and were not exactly paragons of what we'd want from our heroes or leaders. It's just that in the process of imploding they managed to kill all the people in the way of progress. Sometimes that's the best your revolution gets to hope for. Hopefully not but, well, here you are. Bottom line: Would you rather have a bloody revolution or no revolution at all? You may not get a better choice.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:03
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