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Warthur posted:Shall we all assume 10 pages of magechat happens here and move past it?
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Jun 28, 2019 16:15
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Warthur posted:A game about steampunk advocates of unfashionable cosmologies rebelling against modern science sounds fun to me! It also doesn't suggest "wizards". This sounds exactly like modern magic to me, in all honesty. And I would play the hell out of it.
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Jun 28, 2019 16:21
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Metapod posted:alright yall i confronted him i think it went well hell yeah!
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Jun 28, 2019 16:23
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Warthur posted:- If you're doing a radical update of Ascension anyway, do you need the Technocracy? Does it make sense for them to be the antagonist faction when the major IRL antagonists out there include Moon Landing deniers, anti-vaxxers and Flat Earthers among their number? "Antagonists". These are the PCs defying the powers that be.
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Jun 28, 2019 16:25
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Rand Brittain posted:I feel like having "wizards" who aren't obviously "magic users" is important, though. The Sixth Watchtower of Close-up Magic and Horoscopes.
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Jun 28, 2019 16:35
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My opinion is that if Mage: The Ascension wants to have more than a vague, self-contradictory and weirdly right-wing idea of how politics and ideology work, it can't be about fighting for the right to functional Brain Force Plus pills and against Jewish Physics. If you want to make Ascension only by tortured analogy about fighting to change the world by changing ideology, then stick with the whole 'flat earth heroes, assemble!' But it really is a tortured analogy: 'every part of this metaphor looks exactly like the right wing's conspiracy theories about science and modern culture, but since we as creators and players know that it's about antifascism, that's really what it is despite the framework being also perfect for describing climate denialism as the hero.' It's just a lot of work, and also not a good look. Ascension would be a different game if 'magical traditions' really meant 'magical traditions' and not 'the UFOs are real, also race science can be real, stop suppressing my theories!' Also frankly 'actual scientists who are fighting for climate action now' are much more interesting and anti-authoritarian than the denialists as a model, and are facing more actual suppression (Like murder). Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Jun 28, 2019 |
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Jun 28, 2019 16:45
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nofather posted:The Sixth Watchtower of Close-up Magic and Horoscopes. This is a way better post than my  and I salute you
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Jun 28, 2019 16:46
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Lord_Hambrose posted:"Antagonists". These are the PCs defying the powers that be. if you are suggesting that people should want to play flat earthers, anti-vaxxers and so on, uh no? no.
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Jun 28, 2019 16:54
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If you want to play a game where being a dysfunctional weirdo with an idiosyncratic world view makes you a wizard, and allows for the possibility that you might save the world from itself, Unknown Armies is right there.
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Jun 28, 2019 17:09
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Mors Rattus posted:if you are suggesting that people should want to play flat earthers, anti-vaxxers and so on, uh Tuxedo Catfish posted:If you want to play a game where being a dysfunctional weirdo with an idiosyncratic world view makes you a wizard, and allows for the possibility that you might save the world from itself, Unknown Armies is right there. Ars Magica is the only game about wizards worth playing, frankly.
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Jun 28, 2019 17:28
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Warthur posted:If 1E Mage had gone to press without the Hollow Ones, Sons of Ether or Virtual Adepts, nobody would be saying "Hang on, this game is woefully incomplete because it's missing out entire iconic archetypes of what we consider wizards to be!" because of the lack of goths, steampunk scientists, and Neuromancer-style hackers. The Hollow Ones were just the Caitiff of the Mage line, people out of the mainstream of Mage society. That always needed to be an option in Mage.
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Jun 28, 2019 18:30
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Ars Magica is the only game about wizards worth playing, frankly.  Awakening is right here in this thread
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Jun 28, 2019 18:32
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ulmont posted:The Hollow Ones were just the Caitiff of the Mage line, people out of the mainstream of Mage society. That always needed to be an option in Mage. Yes, but Orphans were a better solution.
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Jun 28, 2019 18:40
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The problem is that the Hollow Ones equate "none of the above" with a laser-specific and annoying take on 90's goth club culture. They were annoying even then and they have zero traction in the present.
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Jun 28, 2019 18:45
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Ascension has aged very badly in a very idiosyncratic way. Hollow Ones are probably the biggest indicator of this, but so much of the rest in what what Ascension is trying to be feels somewhere between quaint and exasperating nowadays because its feel, themes, and position are all aggressively 90s. If you really wanted to update it for the modern day you'd have to do some really heavy pruning and replanting. Mage in 2019 needs to account for the fact that the assumptions behind the pitch of the Traditions vs Technocracy simply no longer works and to account for that maybe it would be a good idea to recast the factions and maybe accept that there's going to be dissent as to who the "good" and "bad" sides are and perhaps you should even lean into that and try to make it more personal so it's up to the individual players and indeed the various Mages in the orders to figure out what they want and what the ascension of the world should even look like and...Tuxedo Catfish posted:If you want to play a game where being a dysfunctional weirdo with an idiosyncratic world view makes you a wizard, and allows for the possibility that you might save the world from itself, Unknown Armies is right there. Yeah, basically this.
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Jun 28, 2019 19:13
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LatwPIAT posted:Yes, but Orphans were a better solution. Exactly, having them automatically be goths is the sort of poo poo a really shallow, obvious parody of a WoD game would do but lo and behold, only three games deep into the line and already the reality is even more ridiculous than the jokes. EDIT: Then again, I am the guy who ran a Unknown Armies game where Mak Attax ended up heavily infiltrating the juggalo subculture so maybe I'm not one to talk here. Warthur fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jun 28, 2019 |
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Jun 28, 2019 19:27
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Warthur posted:EDIT: Then again, I am the guy who ran a Unknown Armies game where Mak Attax ended up heavily infiltrating the juggalo subculture so maybe I'm not one to talk here. Yeah, but that only makes sense.
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Jun 28, 2019 19:34
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Omnicrom posted:Yeah, but that only makes sense.
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Jun 28, 2019 19:37
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Hollowers as endlessly shifting through subcultures and finding magic in the zeitgeist is a cool idea, especially as the internet fractures culture and subcultures into a kaleidoscopic rainbow of variations and permutations.
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Jun 28, 2019 21:20
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The fundamental purpose of the Technocracy is that it's based on, spreads, and draws power FROM conspiracy theories. For example, the Black Suits are soulless government homonculi originally created through ALCHEMY. The Technocracy takes things that are wonderful spiritual pursuits (attempting to usurp/emulate the divine through repeating the act of creation) and makes them mass-produced weapons of terror (soulless clones to find you and coerce you into denying miracles, because to shame a man is worse than death). Like, the only "good" Agent in NWO Revised is the "Glenn Beck is a deep cover government plant who has realized that his masters are monsters who seek the total conquests of the human spirit and is fighting the system from within through passive aggressive sabotage." the others are FYGMillenial, the prisoner of war who was tortured until he broke and was remade into a trained killer, and Wil Wheaton.
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Jun 28, 2019 21:32
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Pope Guilty posted:Hollowers as endlessly shifting through subcultures and finding magic in the zeitgeist is a cool idea, especially as the internet fractures culture and subcultures into a kaleidoscopic rainbow of variations and permutations. The best way to rework asscension would be to make the hollows less goth and have them be the protagonists. The traditions are the old guard who are kind of on your side but ultimately failed and are now stuck in their ways.
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Jun 28, 2019 21:37
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neaden posted:The best way to rework asscension would be to make the hollows less goth and have them be the protagonists. The traditions are the old guard who are kind of on your side but ultimately failed and are now stuck in their ways. I, too, despair about the Democratic party.
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Jun 28, 2019 21:38
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I realized a while ago that the modern equivalent of the Hollow Ones are the people making complex troll zodiacs on Tumblr.
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Jun 28, 2019 21:44
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I feel like if you wanted to fresh this stuff up you actually want to step a little bit back from the reification of the zeitgeist, both because the zeitgeist now moves so fast that by the time your book is published it has moved on, BUT ALSO because it's gonna look just as dumb in ten years, and you can never play Mage or whatever for the first time again. But it can still be the first time for other people, and the experience can be valuable even if it's no longer brand new.
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Jun 28, 2019 21:51
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Metapod posted:alright yall i confronted him i think it went well Well this situation wouldn't have arisen if youd picked consensualist. It's really the only ethical feeding type. You shouldn't want to play a horrible nighttime blood thief
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Jun 28, 2019 21:52
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I'm mostly with Ferrinus in the "don't fix what ain't broke" position, but if the goal is a "palatable" update, where "palatable" means "agreeable to people who don't like the Trads already", the Etherites have to go. I think their Revised take is great, but there's two problems. One is that the various WoD Revised updates can't (and didn't) unseat existing expectations, so for most people (including most of the people who write other books for the line) we're always dealing with "The Etherites/Malkavians/Setites I read about in '95 or have learned about second-hand from Internet Mage Chat" The other is that the Etherites in particular are a nexus for people's distaste for the line - anything that so much as sniffs of them is going to produce an immediate negative impression. The brand's toxic. SorcCrusade convinced a lot of people the Craftmasons were the Good Guys so just putting their successors more explicitly in the Trads (possibly just as their own Trad) would right the ship for some folks. You could do what Awakening did and do horizontal slices, so that you have non-cultural Traditions arranged by factional role with favored Sphere by subfaction. The "Lawkeeper" Tradition is made up of your Vrata (Death), Quaesitors (Mind), Sacred Flames (Spirit), Twisters (Fate), etc. This has the dubious benefit of making your Trad something of a "character class" choice but also evades the thornier problems of the stereotypical Trads (looking at the Dreamspeakers here.)
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Jun 28, 2019 22:04
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I'm honestly really against rewriting the thesis of the game in response to aggressive misinterpretation of the text, but I have to say having a Tradition who are basically "trade unions, with wizards" sounds awesome.
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Jun 28, 2019 22:14
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Anyway here's an Awakening Mastigos in 1e in the Duel Arcane, I guess. https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/826441992108392453?s=20
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Jun 29, 2019 00:01
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm honestly really against rewriting the thesis of the game in response to aggressive misinterpretation of the text, but I have to say having a Tradition who are basically "trade unions, with wizards" sounds awesome. Except for the parts where it is the text. oMage is very difficult to interpret wrong, because of how many different ways its own text interprets it. You really shouldn't pretend there's a right way when you've spent so much time being mad that the text went and endorsed the Wrong Way.
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Jun 29, 2019 03:45
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Oberst posted:Well this situation wouldn't have arisen if youd picked consensualist. It's really the only ethical feeding type. its a vampire human ethics don't apply
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Jun 29, 2019 03:49
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bewilderment posted:Anyway here's an Awakening Mastigos in 1e in the Duel Arcane, I guess. https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/826441992108392453?s=20 Truth and Virtue aren't valid arcana 
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Jun 29, 2019 05:12
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm honestly really against rewriting the thesis of the game in response to aggressive misinterpretation of the text, but I have to say having a Tradition who are basically "trade unions, with wizards" sounds awesome. Even better, the perfect turf war is already right there between them and the Hermetics in the form of freemasonry as a tool for influencing broader society and politicians.
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Jun 29, 2019 05:25
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bewilderment posted:Anyway here's an Awakening Mastigos in 1e in the Duel Arcane, I guess. https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/826441992108392453?s=20 She literally challenged Trump to a duel on the astral plane, her love vs his fear, during the debate.
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Jun 29, 2019 05:43
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https://twitter.com/BoxrecGrey/stat...ingawful.com%2F
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Jun 29, 2019 05:53
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I think part of the problem with oMage is if you're going with consensual reality, having the antagonists be both The Man and also somehow still wizards makes kind of no loving sense. Turn the technocracy into mage's version of autumn people, have them be anti-magic. Make traditions like, tier one groups in nWoD terms, maybe creeping into tier 2 since the advent of the internet. There is no organized antagonist society, just creepy avatars of the status quo who are winning not because they have a massive conspiracy but because the protagonist factions are usually too busy fighting over esoteric occult minutia to actually go out there and change things. Writing this all out I realize I'm kind of failing to see how you'd run an actual game out of it... I guess you'd have to alternate fighting off the forces of the worst consensus and the political fallout that inevitably comes whenever a cabal of wizards actually gets poo poo done
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Jun 29, 2019 05:59
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Digital Osmosis posted:I think part of the problem with oMage is if you're going with consensual reality, having the antagonists be both The Man and also somehow still wizards makes kind of no loving sense. Turn the technocracy into mage's version of autumn people, have them be anti-magic. Make traditions like, tier one groups in nWoD terms, maybe creeping into tier 2 since the advent of the internet. There is no organized antagonist society, just creepy avatars of the status quo who are winning not because they have a massive conspiracy but because the protagonist factions are usually too busy fighting over esoteric occult minutia to actually go out there and change things. Writing this all out I realize I'm kind of failing to see how you'd run an actual game out of it... I guess you'd have to alternate fighting off the forces of the worst consensus and the political fallout that inevitably comes whenever a cabal of wizards actually gets poo poo done This is Unknown Armies, isn't it?
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Jun 29, 2019 06:08
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Digital Osmosis posted:I think part of the problem with oMage is if you're going with consensual reality, having the antagonists be both The Man and also somehow still wizards makes kind of no loving sense. Turn the technocracy into mage's version of autumn people, have them be anti-magic. Make traditions like, tier one groups in nWoD terms, maybe creeping into tier 2 since the advent of the internet. There is no organized antagonist society, just creepy avatars of the status quo who are winning not because they have a massive conspiracy but because the protagonist factions are usually too busy fighting over esoteric occult minutia to actually go out there and change things. Writing this all out I realize I'm kind of failing to see how you'd run an actual game out of it... I guess you'd have to alternate fighting off the forces of the worst consensus and the political fallout that inevitably comes whenever a cabal of wizards actually gets poo poo done Consensual reality is dumb as some kind of cosmic truth. (Some kind of force that requires you to play it low key with your wizardry in order to both ground things and to justify why the world is more-or-less as it is in real life is quite another.) Hell I feel most of these games could do with a fair bit less of "if you use your cool powers at all, ever, "the Man" comes and murders you."
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Jun 29, 2019 06:11
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Consensual reality is fine when you realize that it's properly read as the broad social consensus which keeps our actually-existing society running, rather than some kind of constantly-running referendum on whether humans have thumbs or not. It's like, why does owning a certain piece of paper enable some people to summon armed thugs to imprison and kill random others? The consensus.
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Jun 29, 2019 06:32
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Yeah, I generally define how the consensus works around "my neighbors believe the worst things, and they really shouldn't be allowed near cars or sharp objects, but ultimately they still get to do things." Or the shorter form, "Bill believes in dragons, and that's terrible. Also they keep eating my lobelias."
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Jun 29, 2019 07:01
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You are both wrong, let's listen to the experts: 
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Jun 29, 2019 07:09
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