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It's kind of impossible for me to stomach "the Traditions are actually kind of bad if you think it through, so just gently caress it I guess" from the guy who wrote Book of the Fallen where he selfsucks about the seriousness of Real True Evil™ for a dozen pages and "there's no character sheet at the back of this book, because evil isn't cool and you shouldn't play these characters" but it's still got plenty of black lightning katanas, cutesy references and jokes like a Cujo stat block, and of course a bushel of fiddly character-building bits.
That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 01:23
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The bit about replacing the Traditions with the Disparate Alliance that also drives me crazy is that I literally can't see how, if you didn't like the Traditions, the Disparates are supposed to be an improvement. They're just more Traditions, only much smaller and regionally-specific! (Which is one reason why them all being in an alliance makes no sense but whatever)
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Jan 30, 2020 01:26
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Brucato seriously needs to stick solely to churning out his most Kirby-esque extradimensional fantasies, with a stern editor tapping their foot behind him the whole time, and let literally any other experienced WoDhand do all the other poo poo like making a nostalgia product for a game line he kind of hates the premise of. EDIT: 80 pages of secondary Abilities and Merits & Flaws. 80 pages of secondary Abilities and Merits & Flaws. 80 pages… 80. And that's terrible.
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Jan 30, 2020 01:31
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It's too bad the fans drove Jesse Heinig to hate Mage, otherwise maybe he would have done the 20th Anniversary edition (or M5 should such a thing exist.)
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Jan 30, 2020 01:55
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Octavo posted:It's too bad the fans
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Jan 30, 2020 02:10
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Rand Brittain posted:The bit about replacing the Traditions with the Disparate Alliance that also drives me crazy is that I literally can't see how, if you didn't like the Traditions, the Disparates are supposed to be an improvement. They're just more Traditions, only much smaller and regionally-specific!
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Jan 30, 2020 02:27
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My takeaway from the ouroboros of Magechat is that oMage has the deep problem of being extremely 90s in a particularly lovely, Gen X-y way. It's "everything sucks, everyone sucks, nothing matters" edge, but from the immensely privileged and blinkered viewpoint that so much of that 90s tryhard nihilism is mired in. Thus you have the Technocracy which is the most "The Man, man" kind of The Man and the traditions who are extremely 90s White Guy takes on "Exotic" counterculture ideas thrown about with little real understanding towards either group. I think it was Mors who ages ago described oWoD as people arguing about the wallpaper in a house falling off a cliff, and if so I hand it to them, that's a really pithy way to say it.
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Jan 30, 2020 02:37
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Nckdictator posted:Extremely dumb and subjective question here but which line of books tend to be more fun to just read and enjoy for the themes and worldbuilding, CoD or oWOD? If you haven't read the other Promethean books yet, Saturnine Night is really enjoyable. I wish I had a group so I could play an Osiran created through cryogenics, with a wasteland effect that slowly freeze-dries the landscape... YMMV, but I also like the Gehenna books. Wasn't a huge fan of the Book of Nod - found it pretentious. Has anyone read the Vampire clan novels?
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Jan 30, 2020 02:39
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As somebody who relies on modern medicine to be, you know, functional, and considering things like the anti-vax movement, the whole "Science is the bad guys" really does not sit well with me.
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Jan 30, 2020 02:56
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Nessus posted:Perhaps the theory of "they haven't done anything that bad yet - even if that's probably because they lacked the ability to do so"?
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Jan 30, 2020 02:59
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Zereth posted:As somebody who relies on modern medicine to be, you know, functional, and considering things like the anti-vax movement, the whole "Science is the bad guys" really does not sit well with me. This and also practically every other X-tremely 90s Zeitgeisty conspiracy that got wrapped up in the Technocracy. The only side of them that doesn't have that is the Syndicate, who are just straightforwardly evil capitalists, but even then the manner in which they're evil capitalists seems much more 'the banks control everything!' than 'the banks get rich off of things being lovely, so they have a vested interest in things remaining lovely' (which is the NMage model the Seers follow). The 'evil' in 'evil capitalists' is redundant but it feels warranted here.
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Jan 30, 2020 03:26
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Nckdictator posted:Extremely dumb and subjective question here but which line of books tend to be more fun to just read and enjoy for the themes and worldbuilding, CoD or oWOD? I wanna shout out CoD's Demon: The Decent. You already read and loved Promethean so you clearly dig "oh, this is a really coherent and thematically tight original take on a monster type" and DtD is probably the most thematically coherent game other than Promethean in either WoD. It's books also tend to be extremely well written and full of cool ideas - hell the premise is "fallen angels, but angels are gnostic robots in service to the god-machine" so even the brute premise is a really cool idea. I'm currently in a re-read of it and enjoying the hell out of even stuff that sounds like it should be dry like the storyteller's guide's advice on the different moods of spy fiction. I feel like the thread consensus generally agrees but there hasn't been much new Demon stuff in a minute (probably something in the new Dark Ages book, yeah?) and I don't think anyone here is running a game, so it might not come up otherwise but yeah, don't sleep on Demon.
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Jan 30, 2020 05:13
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Tetrabor posted:Twilight was written by someone who had no knowledge of vampire lore beyond "They need blood!" The thing stopping Twilight vampires from taking over is that, as illustrated by Bella, there are far more terrifying predators in the world who specifically prey on vampires. (I've only watched the first movie, don't @ me.)
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Jan 30, 2020 05:34
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Zereth posted:As somebody who relies on modern medicine to be, you know, functional, and considering things like the anti-vax movement, the whole "Science is the bad guys" really does not sit well with me. Yeah. My problem with the Technocracy is that rather than stating "Bad People Are Using Science To Do Bad Things" the game rather explicitly states "No, the very idea of codifying knowledge is in and of itself an evil", the very existence of science itself is bad within the narrative of mage. And should the trads win all that happens is we replace a dystopian hellscape with dadist hellscape that we're told is a victory because the people who have their name on the front of the book are now the ones with their boot on the neck of the huddled masses. It's the same reason I hate Bridges era Werewolf because your only provided end goal is reverting humanity to a survival of the fittest subsistence level hunter gatherer society. Also you should probably get rid of all communication more complex than grunts, that's also evil.
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Jan 30, 2020 06:03
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There's probably an article to be written about the neo-luddite underpinnings of Mage, Werewolf, and Changeling, and how they tie into the broader tendency of fantasy to trend (usually completely unwittingly) towards fascist ideologies, given the complicating factors of the gothic-punk influence.
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Jan 30, 2020 06:40
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I'm playing the first session of a new Awakening chronicle tonight and I'm so excited. It's been way too long since I got to play in one of these.
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Jan 30, 2020 07:00
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Loomer posted:There's probably an article to be written about the neo-luddite underpinnings of Mage, Werewolf, and Changeling, and how they tie into the broader tendency of fantasy to trend (usually completely unwittingly) towards fascist ideologies, given the complicating factors of the gothic-punk influence.
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Jan 30, 2020 07:34
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The Longest Journey has a Law/Technology vs Chaos/Magic duality that basically amounts to "Both extremes are poo poo, balance is also poo poo, everything is poo poo, but technology is particularly poo poo so probably magic I guess."
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Jan 30, 2020 07:46
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The Technocracy are just the Super CIA who impose global imperialism and exploitation while claiming they do it for science, while they drove away all the actual scientific minds decades ago.
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Jan 30, 2020 08:15
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Octavo posted:Not everyone knows that the revised Syndicate book wasn't written by a psychotic Ayn Rand fan, or that the author was writing viscous parodies of awful capitalist ideologies while his family members were getting foreclosed on. I came to all this stuff pretty late, poring over oWoD in about 2009-10 with some friends, but I want to highlight one thing: The Syndicate book was dedicated to Adrian Pasdar, an actor I'd only known from Heroes, "who, for a few fleeting weeks, captured the heart and soul of the Syndicate".* After glancing at that, reading bits and pieces of the book, looking back weeks later at the dedication, I found a copy online of the show Profit, which Pasdar had starred in back in the 90s. It's amazing and now I own the DVDs. Well-written, well-acted.** No character comes across as stupid. The villain protagonist succeeds not because his ambition is greater, but because he's non-stop in his plotting, because manipulating his way up the corporate ladder is his all-consuming psychopathic obsession. *It's also dedicated to Mother Jones. **Plus ridiculous mid-90s CGI computer sequences!
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Jan 30, 2020 10:14
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MonsieurChoc posted:The Technocracy are just the Super CIA who impose global imperialism and exploitation while claiming they do it for science, while they drove away all the actual scientific minds decades ago. The Technocracy is not one thing, because it spans four widely different editions across nearly 25 years, with immense contradictions between editions, within editions, and even within books. That Old Tree posted:Brucato seriously needs to stick solely to churning out his most Kirby-esque extradimensional fantasies, with a stern editor tapping their foot behind him the whole time, and let literally any other experienced WoDhand do all the other poo poo like making a nostalgia product for a game line he kind of hates the premise of. The 'editor' credited for M20 was apparently only a proofreader, and all actual editing was left to Brucato himself. Also 80 pages of secondary Abilities, Merits, and Flaws has nothing on the fact that two contradictory sets of rules are provided for damaging objects. Like Brucato straight-up forgot he'd written them and wrote a new set later in the book. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 12:22
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Nessus posted:I'd read that article, or one about some of the underlying assumptions that kind of became ubiquitous in the 90s (science and magic as some kind of binary continuum or opposites; gods explicitly powered by belief; etc.) I think also the examination of the conspiracy theory stuff and how we all kind of studiously ignored the antisemitism that pervaded most of it at the core.
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Jan 30, 2020 14:05
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Kurieg posted:Yeah. My problem with the Technocracy is that rather than stating "Bad People Are Using Science To Do Bad Things" the game rather explicitly states "No, the very idea of codifying knowledge is in and of itself an evil", the very existence of science itself is bad within the narrative of mage. And should the trads win all that happens is we replace a dystopian hellscape with dadist hellscape that we're told is a victory because the people who have their name on the front of the book are now the ones with their boot on the neck of the huddled masses.
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Jan 30, 2020 14:50
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Mors Rattus posted:Mostly? Eastern european legends. A whole loving lot of them. The vampire's a big part of that whole cultural sphere and has been for a lot longer than Bram Stoker. Not just them, though - vampire scares were a real world thing up until, like, the late 1800s. There was a big one in New England, centered on Connecticut, in the 1850s.
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Jan 30, 2020 14:57
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neaden posted:My point is that all of these stories contradict each other about everything except blood is somehow involved so the idea that Stephanie Meyer somehow ignored the lore when she wrote Twilight is nonsensical. People who think folklore and myths have a canon are incredibly mistaken. It's 2020, Why are you defending Twilight? In the WOD thread of all places?
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Jan 30, 2020 15:46
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neaden posted:My point is that all of these stories contradict each other about everything except blood is somehow involved so the idea that Stephanie Meyer somehow ignored the lore when she wrote Twilight is nonsensical. People who think folklore and myths have a canon are incredibly mistaken. That's fair, though there's definitely commonalities and threads one can follow through this stuff.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:00
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Loomer posted:There's probably an article to be written about the neo-luddite underpinnings of Mage, Werewolf, and Changeling, and how they tie into the broader tendency of fantasy to trend (usually completely unwittingly) towards fascist ideologies, given the complicating factors of the gothic-punk influence. I think there’s something weirder going on with Mage that has to do with the the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, which advanced the idea that idea that technology has become alienating, but is not inherently negative. That’s Stew Weick’s major source for a lot of the ideas in Mage 1E, but was not necessarily a source for the ideas in the Brucato-developed supplements that followed.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:14
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Zereth posted:As somebody who relies on modern medicine to be, you know, functional, and considering things like the anti-vax movement, the whole "Science is the bad guys" really does not sit well with me. That's pretty much where I am. If you make me choose between Anti-vaxxers + pray-the-gay-awayers and the Technocracy, then gimme some dark sunglasses and a suit, because I'm totally a Technocrat in that case. I vaguely remember a bit from the beginning the "guide to the Technocracy." It went something like, "You are a Technocrat. You like living in a house with electricity, driving a car, having toilet paper. You would not want to live in the woods and wipe your rear end with leaves while singing praises to Nature. You are one of us." Beyond all that, do we really want to live in the world of Michael Chricton's Sphere where everyone has the ability to make their thoughts real? I don't think I would. Everyone fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 16:41
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Everyone posted:That's pretty much where I am. If you make me choose between Anti-vaxxers + pray-the-gay-awayers and the Technocracy, then gimme some dark sunglasses and a suit, because I'm totally a Tachnocrat in that case. "You are not a Technocrat. You don't understand why you need to go to an office and push keys on a keyboard for a set of hours during the day in order to make numbers on a screen go up. You dislike that you are doing this to make numbers on your bank screen go up and on your student loan debt screen go down. You would not want to get an injury or illness your insurance does not cover. You do not believe the system works. You are not one of them."
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Jan 30, 2020 16:44
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:If Brucato weren't so Brucato and if the whole setting wasn't a house built on sand, you could just as easily write one for the Traditions. This is it. Technology is not technocracy. Technofeudalism sucks so bad.
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Jan 30, 2020 17:20
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That Old Tree posted:Brucato seriously needs to stick solely to churning out his most Kirby-esque extradimensional fantasies, with a stern editor tapping their foot behind him the whole time, and let literally any other experienced WoDhand do all the other poo poo like making a nostalgia product for a game line he kind of hates the premise of. Well, put it this way. I am 100% down with X-card mechanics and trigger warnings and content warnings and everything else the Chuds decry as effete snowflakery. It is no skin off my nose if a product has a robust trigger warning at the front, and it might save someone with more skin in the game from being confronted with triggering content, so why not, right? The extent to which Brucato constantly disclaims the content of the book is astonishing and deeply irritating. It's like he flat-out doesn't trust people not to read the (multiple pages long!) disclaimer he put at the front, or for that matter a disclaimer he put in the book mere pages ago, but has to restate it all over again multiple times, along with a reminder that you aren't using this to make Nephandi PCs are you? Because that would be naughty and bad and make Uncle Satyros sad. Also he has an entire sidebar about "cartoonish evil" vs "realistic evil" and then claims he's serving up the latter despite the fact that it's a book about, you know, cosmic hellraisers out to destroy the multiverse with the help of Cthulhu.
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Jan 30, 2020 17:56
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Warthur posted:In terms of poo poo Brucato hates the premise of I've started to leaf through Book of the Fallen and... He literally doesn't. Before Book of the Fallen, at least one M20 book had a sidebar about how Nephandi would not and would never be playable because portraying that degree of evil would affect your real life self. (No mention of what it does to the GM, mind.)
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Jan 30, 2020 18:07
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Mors Rattus posted:He literally doesn't. Before Book of the Fallen, at least one M20 book had a sidebar about how Nephandi would not and would never be playable because portraying that degree of evil would affect your real life self. It reminds me, in fact, of the reason why Exorcist II turned into such a debacle: John Boorman hated the concept of The Exorcist and had previously turned down the director's job on the original, so when they gave the sequel to him he just did his own thing and clearly resented having to tie it into the original to the extent that he did. Except here WW have the licensing oversight to stop Brucato from doing that, so he just turns in the work but whines constantly about having to deal with the subject matter.
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Jan 30, 2020 18:25
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Mors Rattus posted:He literally doesn't. Before Book of the Fallen, at least one M20 book had a sidebar about how Nephandi would not and would never be playable because portraying that degree of evil would affect your real life self. Please ignore that the Baali exist.
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Jan 30, 2020 18:33
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Mors Rattus posted:He literally doesn't. Before Book of the Fallen, at least one M20 book had a sidebar about how Nephandi would not and would never be playable because portraying that degree of evil would affect your real life self. honestly that is a great observation, one of the things that really soured me on oWoD was the edgelord tryhardiness made manifest with stuff like the Baali, for example. Also, with the ever-increasing Games Workshop levels of "EVIL[CHAOS] IS ACTUALLY BETTER NUH UH GOOD SUCKS", which come the gently caress on. I appreciate that CofD is waaaaay loving better in that regard, although I don't have any idea of what to make about Slashers. The idea is... Alright, pulp style horror villains, but like if you are going to do the slasher from the Horror Recognition Guide, dear god just loving no please? (gently caress Beast tho)
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Jan 30, 2020 18:59
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I think I realized the real problem with the Traditions when someone defended them by saying something to the effect of, "it'd be good if my grandma could actually cure illnesses with a prayer to the right saint, and I could do it through yoga instead of relying on a pharmaceutical corporation." Which is all well and good, except your grandma doesn't pray to St. Peregrine for a pop of local color from the old country, she does it because she believes in the truth of her faith. The Traditions are just neoliberal multiculturalism, a "wouldn't it be neat if the shamans and the faith healers and the wizards were all allowed to be a little right (though I'm the guy with the real truth, of course)?" Better than the Technocracy's neoliberal homogeneity, but it's just a different strain of the same worldview. Belief in Consensus Reality is, itself, a belief system, and it's the only one that's true in the setting. That's what makes the Traditions just an argument over aesthetics, since everyone's quaint and quirky beliefs are just a different way of dressing up the Actual Truth, and it's all written from a position of unexamined privilege.
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Jan 30, 2020 19:41
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Precambrian posted:I think I realized the real problem with the Traditions when someone defended them by saying something to the effect of, "it'd be good if my grandma could actually cure illnesses with a prayer to the right saint, and I could do it through yoga instead of relying on a pharmaceutical corporation." Which is all well and good, except your grandma doesn't pray to St. Peregrine for a pop of local color from the old country, she does it because she believes in the truth of her faith. The Traditions are just neoliberal multiculturalism, a "wouldn't it be neat if the shamans and the faith healers and the wizards were all allowed to be a little right (though I'm the guy with the real truth, of course)?" Better than the Technocracy's neoliberal homogeneity, but it's just a different strain of the same worldview. I don't think this is a particularly helpful way to look at the game. The core of the Traditions v Technocracy conflict is more like the fight over the Dakota access pipeline in which agents of a state and corporate alliance seized resources from a marginalized cultural group. In Mage as in real life, different marginalized groups band together to fight against small t technocracy. A pluralistic alliance against a quasi-christian/secular exploitative tyranny is not the same thing as neoliberal multiculturalism. Consensus reality on the other hand is just a conceit to help players imagine that allegedly eternal truths like capitalism might be social constructs. If you can pretend physics is up for grabs, maybe economics and social hierarchies are too. Octavo fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 19:58
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dead gay comedy forums posted:honestly that is a great observation, one of the things that really soured me on oWoD was the edgelord tryhardiness made manifest with stuff like the Baali, for example. You can alllllmost make a case for playability for a few of them—Avengers (and the odd Legend, for a one-shot) could be former Hunters that're just very handle-with-care for the party, Brutes, maybe even Masks, are more walking claymore mines you just keep pointed towards an enemy (and, assuming they'll stay pointed towards it and not go all Emily Gillen in HRG on folks), Freaks and Mutants have nothing saying they MUST be bad beyond birth and being very bad at social skills. Charmer/Psycho and Genius/Maniacs are flat out though, those are 100% the "there's basically no story you can write up for this to be playable that wouldn't work a thousand times better by taking 20% of the crazy off and making it a PC."
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Jan 30, 2020 20:01
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Octavo posted:I don't think this is a particularly helpful way to look at the game. The core of the Traditions v Technocracy conflict is more like the fight over the Dakota access pipeline in which agents of a state and corporate alliance seized resources from a marginalized cultural group, whereas consensus reality is just a conceit to help players imagine that allegedly eternal truths like capitalism might be social constructs. If you can pretend physics is up for grabs, maybe economics and social hierarchies are too. Hard disagree. Consensus reality isn't a figleaf over a "what if", it's a core principle of the game which enforces a swathe of its mechanics and which players are more or less directly invited to engage with and think about in terms of an actual metaphysic, rather than a justification for questioning supposed facts of life. Also, if you follow that metaphor far enough, the implications of consensus reality are monstrous. If any other political system aside from neoliberal capitalism is equally workable and valid, and there aren't any constraints on that, then fascism is just as workable and valid as any other system. By its very nature consensus reality can't declare a subset of worldviews to be beyond the pale because there is no solid ground to build on, unless you insist on the Purple Paradigm being that - at which point Precambrian's complaints are dead on the money.
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Jan 30, 2020 20:08
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Slasher would make for a fantastic game where you remap them to overly-violent 80s action heroes. Just a party of Snake Plisskins, Johns Rambo and McClaine, and the cast of Predator taking on the World of Darkness.
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