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Dienes posted:You know, normally X on LA by Night grates on me, but in the most recent epilogue X uses memory projection to communicate with Jasper and it was really clever and well done. I like this so much better than "dress pants Huh. I've never watched L.A. by Night, but I just saw a captioned picture of the cast, and... turns out I know the guy who plays X. Well, sort of. We acted in an indie movie together years ago. But while we were in a lot of the same scenes and so we spent a fair amount of time together during filming, I never hung out with him off set, and I haven't really kept in touch with him since. I think we may be Facebook friends, but given that nowadays I log in to Facebook maybe once or twice a year, that doesn't mean much. So... when I say I know him, I don't mean we're close friends or anything, but I did work with him once.
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Apr 8, 2020 03:13
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That's wild
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Apr 8, 2020 15:23
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Dienes posted:You know, normally X on LA by Night grates on me, but in the most recent epilogue X uses memory projection to communicate with Jasper and it was really clever and well done. I like this so much better than "dress pants That's nice to hear. Sometimes X borders on fishmalk and I dropped the show for a while when it looked like he was going to be a regular.
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Apr 8, 2020 15:29
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so Hunters dropped their first big writers announcement for Werewolf V5; I don't know if it's a good sign but no one's talked about "the lure of heroic fascism" so that's something https://www.huntersentertainment.com/single-post/2020/04/08/Werewolf-The-Apocalypse---5th-Edition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzfAWlJkshE
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Apr 8, 2020 17:53
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Derek Fcking Carr posted:I'm running V5 for my players and I have some problems. The best way to be creepy is to hide information. Nothing scarier than the unknown Also, man I can't believe swedracula invaded your game and made a wacky monkey cheese lmaolk
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Apr 8, 2020 18:15
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Jerik posted:Huh. I've never watched L.A. by Night, but I just saw a captioned picture of the cast, and... turns out I know the guy who plays X. Tell him ober fro.m the internet says sup and also X sucks good god
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Apr 8, 2020 18:16
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Hopefully optimistic.
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Apr 8, 2020 20:11
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MAGE CHAT: My Mage game is about to kick in. So rank 3 in an arcana allows direct damage by Fraying, the flavor text mentions shooting electricity for forces, but wouldn't shooting electricity like Palpatine be a master level effect? Can forces 3 create fireballs and ice spikes?
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Apr 8, 2020 22:36
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Soonmot posted:MAGE CHAT: It sure can; just remember that the fire and ice generated does not follow the general rules for fire. It does bashing damage as described in the spell. It might be able to start a fire if you hit something flammable though and that does follow the standard rules for fire.
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Apr 8, 2020 22:47
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The main difference being that a fireball (aside from anything it might have ignited) is going to vanish, whereas a blaze just conjured into being with forces 5 would stick around for the spell's duration?
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Apr 8, 2020 22:56
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Soonmot posted:The main difference being that a fireball (aside from anything it might have ignited) is going to vanish, whereas a blaze just conjured into being with forces 5 would stick around for the spell's duration? And, honestly, an instant effect that does bashing damage is a fairly good reflection of Palpatine's lightning from Return of the Jedi. Now, the poo poo that Rey did knocking down a spaceship in flight or that Palp did EMPing a fleet from The Priapism of Skywalker was clearly more advanced, but RotJ's "cause serious pain to somebody without instantly electrocuting them" Force Lightning could easily be reflected by a Forces 3 effect.
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Apr 8, 2020 23:18
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Remember that "create from nothing" and "enhance from almost 0" are really key differences in Mage, but "stuff nearly but not actually at 0" is a really low bar to clear. Sure, it takes Arcanum 5 to create stuff with no consideration for where it comes from, but there's electromagnetism literally everywhere, so if you can hang an effect on that you can justify a lot. It just might be hard to do really outlandish things, since you still have to go to the effort if scaling it up, depending on what you're doing. Also, while it's a fun aesthetic constraint, physics and chemistry and what not are ultimately costumes you're putting on rolling some dice. The guy with Mind 3 giving people mini-strokes doesn't have to do a lot of extra work to justify his poo poo, so don't worry about it too much.
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Apr 8, 2020 23:31
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If I recall correctly, the first available .pdf version of the 2E Mage book still did the dumb 1E thing where dealing targeted bashing damage was always a *** Fraying effect completely regardless of the fiction, but quickly rectified itself such that what Practices a particular attack spell took were based on actual in-game logic rather than an arbitrary damage-scaling-by-dot system. So if you actually want to shoot lightning spontaneously from your hands you need to perform a Making of Forces, but you could probably gently caress someone up by just Fraying and therefore randomly scrambling up the electric charges already in their body, or Ruling the current in a nearby appliance to come arcing out into their face. You could fake the Palpatine trick by gathering charge up from your environment with Weaving (I think, I may be forgetting what the Ruling/Weaving distinction looks like in 2E), or by using Patterning to turn ambient heat, sound, or light into charge and shooting that.
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Apr 8, 2020 23:58
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Ferrinus posted:If I recall correctly, the first available .pdf version of the 2E Mage book still did the dumb 1E thing where dealing targeted bashing damage was always a *** Fraying effect completely regardless of the fiction, but quickly rectified itself such that what Practices a particular attack spell took were based on actual in-game logic rather than an arbitrary damage-scaling-by-dot system. Personally I think that 'supernal symbolism of assault overwhelms Fallen physics' is much better, because Awakening's mechanical strength is precisely in that being a chemical engineer OOC isn't the optimal path to magical combat power. Palpatine's lightning is, basically, fraying (or unraveling) forces, and happens to appear like you're creating electricity but it's clearly not (because electricity follows different rules than an attack spell that just deals damage; Call the Lightning is the Forces attack hack, and it's kind of overtuned for a direct damage spell). Mages doing direct damage should be less efficient than mages throwing around tilts and conditions, because otherwise all magical combat is just throwing a big pile of attack damage at each other, and the fraying/unraveling damage spells not actually following Fallen physics is an important part of that. This is also why some of the example spells are bad ideas, including my beloved Call the Lightning, because they're overtuned and encourage 'I figured out a hack to do a bunch of damage totally divorced from Potency.' Call Lightning has some particular and important weaknesses that make it pretty much acceptable, but it's easily going to lead to 'if my opponent is in a building with high voltage wires in the walls, I can cast Forces Ruling to instantly deal 10B with no defense' which is bad for the game.
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Apr 9, 2020 00:06
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Even if the actual visible mechanism of action of a Fraying attack is total post-hoc "okay, you deal 3 damage, now flavor that" SFX, Palpatine lightning being a Fraying of Forces still doesn't make sense because Practices are verbs that apply to their Arcanum, not to entities in general. Maybe Palpatine was performing a Fraying of Life (or of Mind, or of Death-because-it's-applicable-to-souls) which happened to look like lightning because Palpatine's nimbus is blue and crackly, but if you actually want to cause lightning to leap from your fingertips and into someone else's body in order to burn and electrocute them Fraying is not the way you do it.
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Apr 9, 2020 01:11
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Ferrinus posted:Even if the actual visible mechanism of action of a Fraying attack is total post-hoc "okay, you deal 3 damage, now flavor that" SFX, Palpatine lightning being a Fraying of Forces still doesn't make sense because Practices are verbs that apply to their Arcanum, not to entities in general. Maybe Palpatine was performing a Fraying of Life (or of Mind, or of Death-because-it's-applicable-to-souls) which happened to look like lightning because Palpatine's nimbus is blue and crackly, but if you actually want to cause lightning to leap from your fingertips and into someone else's body in order to burn and electrocute them Fraying is not the way you do it. I think it's a perfectly reasonable visual effect for 'causing someone's nerves to scream because you're making electromagnetism sputter and spark,' which is perfectly Fraying.
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Apr 9, 2020 01:16
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I'm pretty sure Palpatine was dealing with un limited POWER at the time so the rules were probably kind of suspended. Another mage was able to parry it with his laser sword, although he was by all accounts a very mighty wizard.
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Apr 9, 2020 01:17
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Joe Slowboat posted:I think it's a perfectly reasonable visual effect for 'causing someone's nerves to scream because you're making electromagnetism sputter and spark,' which is perfectly Fraying. Well okay, but then you're not actually shooting electricity at a dude, which is the original challenge put to us. I would also shy away describing nimbus effects miming related but non-equivalent things to what a character is doing without at least using words like "phantom" or "abstracted" so as to avoid fooling players into thinking that they can try to, say, turn an incoming projectile mid-flight when in fact that projectile is just the metaphorical representation of an instantaneous point-and-click deconstruction. Nessus posted:I'm pretty sure Palpatine was dealing with un limited POWER at the time so the rules were probably kind of suspended. Another mage was able to parry it with his laser sword, although he was by all accounts a very mighty wizard. Unlimited power is well within the rules: you just Make the power, using Forces 5.
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Apr 9, 2020 01:20
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Ferrinus posted:Well okay, but then you're not actually shooting electricity at a dude, which is the original challenge put to us. I would also shy away describing nimbus effects miming related but non-equivalent things to what a character is doing without at least using words like "phantom" or "abstracted" so as to avoid fooling players into thinking that they can try to, say, turn an incoming projectile mid-flight when in fact that projectile is just the metaphorical representation of an instantaneous point-and-click deconstruction. If a spell were point-and-click I wouldn't describe it as shooting electricity. If it were an aimed spell, which is a projectile, then I don't see anything wrong with a Fraying spell working as I describe being projected as arcing lightning, rather than like... a spark bullet or something?
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Apr 9, 2020 01:26
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Joe Slowboat posted:If a spell were point-and-click I wouldn't describe it as shooting electricity. If it were an aimed spell, which is a projectile, then I don't see anything wrong with a Fraying spell working as I describe being projected as arcing lightning, rather than like... a spark bullet or something? Well, for instance, if you're causing lightning to arc from your hands into my body I might try to raise a sheet of glass or rubber between the two of us in order to block the lightning, but then you'd be laughing because it turns out the lightning is just a representation of the fact that my cells are all finding themselves unable to maintain proton gradients.
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Apr 9, 2020 01:28
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Ferrinus posted:Well, for instance, if you're causing lightning to arc from your hands into my body I might try to raise a sheet of glass or rubber between the two of us in order to block the lightning, but then you'd be laughing because it turns out the lightning is just a representation of the fact that my cells are all finding themselves unable to maintain proton gradients. ...not in the mechanics of the Chronicles of Darkness? Like, the hypothetical aimed Fraying spell could be blocked as a projectile by that shield (though you'd need some way of applying your defense to projectiles) but once the spell lands, it's going to play out however it was going to play out, regardless of whether I'm using a direct attack with Patterning or Unraveling. Either are a direct attack spell with four dots of Forces, and both mechanically function the same way. I suppose they might produce different Tilts, but that's not a pure damage spell.
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Apr 9, 2020 01:44
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ElNarez posted:so Hunters dropped their first big writers announcement for Werewolf V5; I don't know if it's a good sign but no one's talked about "the lure of heroic fascism" so that's something Oh poo poo gentlemen gamer on a country road and my man b Dave Walters??? https://twitter.com/BDaveWalters/status/1247948583304704000 With this, the success of Chicago V5/Folios, and the sick nasty blood gods manuscript this is a big time 5th edition world we're in and maybe the weird edition war stuff will stop Falll of London is extremely good too
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Apr 9, 2020 02:48
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Joe Slowboat posted:...not in the mechanics of the Chronicles of Darkness? Like, the hypothetical aimed Fraying spell could be blocked as a projectile by that shield (though you'd need some way of applying your defense to projectiles) but once the spell lands, it's going to play out however it was going to play out, regardless of whether I'm using a direct attack with Patterning or Unraveling. Either are a direct attack spell with four dots of Forces, and both mechanically function the same way. I suppose they might produce different Tilts, but that's not a pure damage spell. This is a non-aimed Fraying that happens to look like an arc of physical, damaging substance connecting you to me. If I want to cut it off by interrupting that arc (say to stop you from hitting me with the the same tricked-out Rote or Praxis next round, or with a same-turn defense on my part that I'm risking some Reach to cast reflexively), I will be deeply disappointed.
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Apr 9, 2020 03:53
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Who wrote that really neat alternative to applying paradox from a month or two back?
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Apr 9, 2020 03:57
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ElNarez posted:so Hunters dropped their first big writers announcement for Werewolf V5; I don't know if it's a good sign but no one's talked about "the lure of heroic fascism" so that's something I may or may not have squealed a little. The team on the game has me going from "Cautiously optimistic" to "Actually hyped." W:tA was my first tabletop game, since D&D was of the devil and it's got a special place in my heart
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Apr 9, 2020 04:01
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Ferrinus posted:If I recall correctly, the first available .pdf version of the 2E Mage book still did the dumb 1E thing where dealing targeted bashing damage was always a *** Fraying effect completely regardless of the fiction, but quickly rectified itself such that what Practices a particular attack spell took were based on actual in-game logic rather than an arbitrary damage-scaling-by-dot system. Nope, not quite. All the Arcana can deal direct bashing damage at three dots, lethal at four dots, aggravated at four dots + 1 Reach and 1 Mana, using purview appropriate Effects. That is one of the inherent abilities of the Fraying practice, in addition to damaging or making less perfect something under the Arcanum purview. That is your basic, "I don't have time for anything fancy, I just need this rear end in a top hat to stop moving" attack spell. However, if you inflict indirect damage as the result of a spell, that does damage based on whatever other mechanics you're interacting with. So, if you manage to collapse a building on someone's head with a Matter spell, that does whatever damage having a building dropped on you inflicts, and engages whatever systems might allow you to try to get the hell out of the way of a falling building before it hits you in the head. TL DR, wizard lightning is absolutely a Forces 3 direct damage attack spell. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is exactly the specific example Fraying direct damage spell in The Awakening 2E core book.
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Apr 9, 2020 08:31
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Yeah, so your choices with Forces 3 are "a direct Fraying spell to gently caress up the forces in their Pattern" which will do Bashing, or "I make the electricity in the power line arc to them", which will do... Whatever the damage for the electricity is. You might find it easier to use Forces to just set a motherfucker on fire and let the fire rules sort out the rest than skin your Forces 4 Lethal attack as a D&D spell. The only problem is that setting people up for environmental damage is inherently less controllable than a direct assault on their Pattern - fire spreads, electricity sparks, and those are just the two common ones. You could use Forces to irradiate the house they're in, but that is decidedly Unwise.
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Apr 9, 2020 08:43
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Personally I’m not a huge fan of single spells being able to trigger cascade effects - mostly because it leads directly to ‘my Fate attack is causing a car to swerve onto the sidewalk due to sheer bad luck. How much damage does getting trucked do?’ Now, the GM can balance these things on the fly enough to have there actually be some degree of challenge or need to adapt to different circumstances, but I’d rather have a functional game than high fidelity Fallen physics interactions. Especially since it rubs me wrong to treat immediate, clear causality as not part of the spell: if I’m casting ‘car swerves, killing that guy I hate’ treating the spell as fundamentally the same as it would be to make the car swerve without violent results is reducing the action to purely the material. If I cast that spell, in every way that counts I’m casting a direct damage spell with extra steps. Maybe this is solely my issue, but it feels off to frame things in a Neoplatonic way for magic then immediately go ‘but the magic system is strongest when you mostly think about Fallen physics tricks to use one practice to replace another.’
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Apr 9, 2020 09:25
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I misremember how coincidence is playing in in Awakening vs. Ascension but it seems like using Fate to get a car-kill on someone would have a precondition that you be by a busy road. I don't think that's a common or traditional place for a wizarding duel. Besides, magic in general seems to be much more about understanding, shaping, creating and destroying aspects of the various spheres rather than maximizing your DPS.
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Apr 9, 2020 09:35
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Nessus posted:I misremember how coincidence is playing in in Awakening vs. Ascension but it seems like using Fate to get a car-kill on someone would have a precondition that you be by a busy road. I don't think that's a common or traditional place for a wizarding duel. Yes, I just want wizard DPS to be relatively hard-capped by potency so that if you are going to have a wizard fight, it’s going to be more interesting curses and spells than just ‘what in this environment could potentially be lethal.’
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Apr 9, 2020 09:43
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Joe Slowboat posted:Awakening's mechanical strength is precisely in that being a chemical engineer OOC isn't the optimal path to magical combat power. Unless of course you're part of the Celestial Masters legacy.
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Apr 9, 2020 15:11
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Joe Slowboat posted:Personally I’m not a huge fan of single spells being able to trigger cascade effects - mostly because it leads directly to ‘my Fate attack is causing a car to swerve onto the sidewalk due to sheer bad luck. How much damage does getting trucklefucked do?’
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Apr 9, 2020 15:31
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DantetheK9 posted:I may or may not have squealed a little. The team on the game has me going from "Cautiously optimistic" to "Actually hyped." W:tA was my first tabletop game, since D&D was of the devil and it's got a special place in my heart Love the irony of a game where you have to go out of your way not to become warriors of goodness who literally descend hell and kill evil gods being thrown out in favor of a game where you play animist neopagan spirits of rage who smash the system on behalf of the primordial gods of the planet. I very clearly remember being sent to the principle's office in hebrew school for reading W:tA instead of paying attention to the inane classes. One of the Rabbis saw me reading it and asked about it and occasionally offered a halfhearted "well in one interpretation, Judaism is in agreement with that" about the eco-poo poo and otherwise didn't condemn anything, which was real cool of her.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:19
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Looking at VtR 2e I'm impressed it uses 8 and 9 again all over the place and never explains them anywhere. Classic WoD editing strikes again.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:29
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Arivia posted:Looking at VtR 2e I'm impressed it uses 8 and 9 again all over the place and never explains them anywhere. Classic WoD editing strikes again. there's a glossary in the introduction, I think?
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Apr 9, 2020 16:32
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Digital Osmosis posted:Love the irony of a game where you have to go out of your way not to become warriors of goodness who literally descend hell and kill evil gods being thrown out in favor of a game where you play animist neopagan spirits of rage who smash the system on behalf of the primordial gods of the planet. I have trouble imagining a rabbi in a denomination that accepts ladies as rabbis giving half a poo poo about kids playing rpgs, yeah. (Reading them in class, on the other hand...)
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Apr 9, 2020 16:34
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:there's a glossary in the introduction, I think? Nope. There's a lexicon of vampire language at the end of chapter 2; the CoD core rules have the x-again definitions in their lexicon in the introduction though.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:41
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Joe Slowboat posted:Personally I’m not a huge fan of single spells being able to trigger cascade effects - mostly because it leads directly to ‘my Fate attack is causing a car to swerve onto the sidewalk due to sheer bad luck. How much damage does getting trucked do?’ It feels off maybe, but using fallen physics to mess with the Lie is kind of the purview of Forces. It's much more on the nose than the other arcana, but it's not really any different than a Matter mage rearranging the particles in a coffee tin to be gold for a while. And in practice, needing the extra reach to make it target a pattern, make it a ranged effect, and instant casting, all to avoid defense is usually enough to keep combat honest enough for me. Also, have you been talking to my players, because they definitely attempted the miracle of car drives through building and into a person trick. I mean, it didn't kill the guy because also an Acathus, but it sure caused quite the distraction and they definitely did some crazy things that were UNWISE that night. That was a really fun set of sessions (they had some issues that caused them to have to really mess with time and we had to run a take 2 second session on it and it got even crazier). Once I stopped worrying about balancing things in a combat paradigm and just worried about how badly they're messing with reality it really started to change our sessions into something much more fun and I got to start doing really crazy things with magic too. That was definitely the evolution between dots 3 and 5.
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Apr 9, 2020 17:10
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On the other hand, I feel like "use Fate to get someone run over instead of blasting their skin off with magic rays" is extremely one of the things you play Mage for.
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Apr 9, 2020 17:22
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Jhet posted:Once I stopped worrying about balancing things in a combat paradigm and just worried about how badly they're messing with reality it really started to change our sessions into something much more fun and I got to start doing really crazy things with magic too. That was definitely the evolution between dots 3 and 5. Oh yeah, I already know my players are going to just go bananas! That's one reason I want to find those alternate paradox rules someone posted, it seemed to encourage using multiple reaches and such.
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Apr 9, 2020 17:34
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