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Yeah the fact that nimbus is only visible to people with Active Mage Sight on is pretty silly since it means you rarely see it. Also if I was making CofD3 I would have NPC-simplification and simple-NPC building rules. Even simpler than ephemeral entities - a beat cop doesn't have Firearms 3 and Athletics 2 and Strength 2 and whatever. They just have Being A Cop 4. The fact that in supplements, NPCs have full stat writeups is just absurd. In fact for preference I would turn it into an "only the players roll" kind of game (I already mostly did this when I ran Mage) but that might mess with some other systems.
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Oct 15, 2023 23:20
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bewilderment posted:Also if I was making CofD3 I would have NPC-simplification and simple-NPC building rules. Even simpler than ephemeral entities - a beat cop doesn't have Firearms 3 and Athletics 2 and Strength 2 and whatever. They just have Being A Cop 4.
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Oct 15, 2023 23:48
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bewilderment posted:Also if I was making CofD3 I would have NPC-simplification and simple-NPC building rules. Even simpler than ephemeral entities - a beat cop doesn't have Firearms 3 and Athletics 2 and Strength 2 and whatever. They just have Being A Cop 4. NPCs worked like this as of, like, the 1e blue book. There were some full-statline NPCs written out in case they had to participate in combat or something but many more that'd go "the Street Preacher has 6 dice to speechify and 4 dice to recall theology, good luck."
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Oct 16, 2023 00:01
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Storypath! Storypath! Okay, I'm intrigued. What is Storypath?
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Oct 16, 2023 07:54
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Ferrinus posted:What I mean is I want some level of magical effort/sloppiness that causes your immediate nimbus to be visible to all whether you want it to be or not. instead of "sleepers shouldn't watch me cast spells because they could dampen/paradox it" it becomes "sleepers should not see me cast a spell, because they could learn I'm a mage" give Ferrinus the million dollars
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Oct 16, 2023 08:17
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Okay, I'm intrigued. What is Storypath? Onyx Path's newer in-house system, used for Scion, the Aeonverse games, They Came From... et al.
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Oct 16, 2023 10:50
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With, among other things: - Simplified combat damage (when you take damage, you can choose between taking a Bruised, Injured, or Maimed condition based on what was hurting you, if you're out of choices you're knocked out) - Combat maneuver-type-stuff baked into attack/damage resolution (basically, you spend successes triggering stunts that might buy off or create complications on other people's rolls) - Slightly-simplified chargen where you pick 3 "paths" (origin, what you are now, and how you relate to your pantheon in the case of scion), assign skills to them, and then prioritize those, getting total skill dots based on how those interact. It's a little annoying the first time you do it but it ends up making it a lot easier (at least for me) to get into the head of the character and figure out what they're really about at a glance. The nice thing about this is if something doesn't fall cleanly into a skill you can always just say "oh roll based on the path you think makes sense for this" And a bunch of other stuff. It's neat.
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Oct 16, 2023 14:17
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Only real problem with Storypath is the item crafting rules are obnoxiously vague and hard to understand and OPP just jams their fingers in their ears when people bring it up. They keep having chances to rectify it with Trinity too but never did.
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Oct 16, 2023 14:49
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Dawgstar posted:Only real problem with Storypath is the item crafting rules are obnoxiously vague and hard to understand and OPP just jams their fingers in their ears when people bring it up. They keep having chances to rectify it with Trinity too but never did.
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Oct 16, 2023 14:58
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Yeah, for Scion specifically it's bizarre how vague (yet for relics, still a big table...? Changeling token creation rules spring to mind here) the design guidelines for birthright-creatures and relic creation are when you have, in the very same section between those entries, the pretty-good rules for designing Followers.  ) they might have estimated that an animal or a magic sword has less risk of Problems than supporting NPCs. Kind of like how Allies in WoD has the potential to be the most broken-rear end stat possible.
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Oct 16, 2023 15:15
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I think my ideal CoD 3rd edition would just strip the weird exp rules out in favor of gain an XP every session or so and then massively reduce conditions and how often they come into play. I think if you just ruthlessly cut away unnecessary rules it would be better. Oh also get rid of a lot of skills but have options for bringing them back in specific campaigns. If I'm running a Vampire Nomads game drive is a relevant skill but by default it doesn't belong.
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Oct 16, 2023 16:46
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Okay, I'm intrigued. What is Storypath? Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:With, among other things:
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Oct 16, 2023 18:12
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Goa Tse-tung posted:instead of "sleepers shouldn't watch me cast spells because they could dampen/paradox it" it becomes "sleepers should not see me cast a spell, because they could learn I'm a mage" There's two main things I actually want to accomplish here: - Tactically, there's some level at which antagonistic or potentially-antagonist NPCs can learn that you're the source of their immediate problems when bad things start mysteriously happening to them, at the same time as they might suffer Integrity loss or add paradox dice or whatever. Mortals will blank on or misremember the details post-scene but at least in the moment they'll be more inclined to look into and confront the caster. - Narratively, I want other supernaturals in mixed games, or even just mortal onlookers/enemies in high-tension situations, experience the demonic cackling or crackling aura of power or whatever that secretly accompanies all of a mage's spells, so that I can add it to general descriptions without some sort of "...only X and Y see the..." qualifier. Obviously, it's entirely appropriate for only other mages to see that stuff a lot of the time (although I separately kind of wish they could see it with peripheral and not just active Sight) but it'd be nice if it broke through at some point without requiring the spellcaster to be deliberately showboating at their own expense. There's one detail that needs to be handled well here, of course, and that's for invisibility spells or infiltration-enabling shapeshifting or other magic for which bespoke SFX would defeat the point. If I use Life 4 to turn into a rat and thereby sneak into your warehouse, it'd kind of defeat the point if the rat had glowing silver runes across its body. But I think you could clarify that an immediate nimbus takes its sharpest effect at the same time the spell does, and then takes on a more subtle aspect so long as the spell does (either as an "I know it when I see it" judgment call or an explicit question of, like, did you add more Reach than your Arcanum rating can safely admit, did you spend Mana to push any values to 6+, etc).
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Oct 16, 2023 18:19
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Ferrinus posted:Something I'd like in Awakening is rules for a mage's immediate nimbus becoming visible to onlookers. Obviously, other mages can always see that your mage is surrounded by glowing runes or laughing skulls or whenever when they cast magic, but I'm pretty sure that by the book that's totally inaccessible to sleepwalker onlookers (including even other supernatural creatures), and it seems like some combination of reach or mana spent should cause your nimbus to bleed through and limn spell effects so that they're obviously workings of your own supernatural power rather than spontaneous poltergeist activity that can only be connected to you by inference. Yeah, I was pretty disappointed when I discovered that out of the five characters in our cabal, only the other mage would actually see any spellcasting special effects I did and even then only if they had their Wizard Eyes on. I love casting spells!
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Oct 16, 2023 21:21
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Ferrinus posted:There's two main things I actually want to accomplish here: oh sure, the silver runs appear on your body as it twists down into a rat shape and then fade away, but they're not giving away the game when you're scurrying about.
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Oct 17, 2023 19:45
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Soonmot posted:oh sure, the silver runs appear on your body as it twists down into a rat shape and then fade away, but they're not giving away the game when you're scurrying about. Well, yeah, but on the other hand maybe if I levitate a boulder maybe the boulder should be surrounded by twinkling motes of light for so long as it's suspended, so how do we square the circle? A simple solution is to only make the immediate nimbus manifest in the moment of casting no matter how vulgar, to use old terminology, the ongoing effects are, but you could also make it more variable.
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Oct 18, 2023 06:46
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Maybe letting the nimbus effects become visible grants an extra reach? In the boulder example, I wouldn't have the boulder looking creepy, only the mage. So if the character was hidden, it wouldn't matter that their eyes were glowing and whorls of wind were circling their arms or whatever.
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Oct 18, 2023 14:24
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In Storypath, you could achieve this by making nimbus effects a complication you have to buy off during spellcasting, maybe with a rating that scales with the caster's Gnosis. Just sayin
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Oct 18, 2023 15:07
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Hello, welcome back to Mage Chat.Signs of Sorcery posted:A handful of Isn't it, though? That which is considered 'natural' is what is reflected by the Supernal. If ol' Hegemony (The Exarch of...Life or Spirit, I don't remember) says Racism is Cool then challenging that should be a mystic act, yes?
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Oct 24, 2023 15:58
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Also just at a basic level, the whole thing with the Exarchs are...they're the status quo, right? And being a mage, challenging the acts of the Exarchs, is a mystic act, even if you aren't saying "I'm doing this because these specifically guys set this up and I hate them."
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Oct 24, 2023 16:06
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The Supernal contains multiple perspectives, in fact is multiple perspectives, so Exarchal opinions are not a priori correct.
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Oct 24, 2023 16:14
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Rand Brittain posted:The Supernal contains multiple perspectives, in fact is multiple perspectives, so Exarchal opinions are not a priori correct. No, but it feels like correct and 'natural' have very different meanings in this context. My understanding is that it's called The Lie for that reason; that what is Good and what is Normal have diverged, largely because of the Exarchs.
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Oct 24, 2023 16:25
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Yeah I don't know if it's poorly-phrased or what but that passage definitely reads like fart-huffing "but like...think about it, man" -level cultural critique, like you're giving some power to the stuff in charge by opposing it (, because you don't want it to be in charge, because it is bad). Which seems circular in a way that makes me hope I'm misreading it or else wow that's loving stupid
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Oct 24, 2023 17:09
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it was written in character by a Hollow One during their shift at Hot Topic.
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Oct 24, 2023 17:25
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Everything is secretly its opposite. An oppressive status quo is certainly "natural", but all "natural" things are in fact temporary, historically-contingent, and de facto artificial products of specific circumstances and pre-existing historical forces. It was just as natural not to live under that status quo however many decades or centuries ago, and it's just as natural for that status quo to be destroyed at whatever point in the future. The Exarchs are a great illustration of this, because they're immutable cosmic laws... but only because they cheated themselves into their positions and then repeat that they are to everyone who'll listen as loudly as they can. Is defying them a mystic act, because you're contravening the laws of reality itself, or is defying them as mundane as brushing your teeth, because they themselves have set the precedent for doing that? I say the actual mystic act is asking this question.
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Oct 24, 2023 17:39
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Very few of Mages authors have read their Kelsen and it shows.
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Oct 25, 2023 00:40
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I thought it might be a riff on settings including Mage itself that run on consensus reality rules and/or present the status quo as supernaturally ordained.
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Oct 25, 2023 06:58
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF9FIPSLMeM I think folks might dig this, its a brief look at historical vampirism belief.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:17
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Schwarzwald posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF9FIPSLMeM https://youtu.be/6rHOEWFBDg0 Not quite as good as this one.
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Oct 27, 2023 21:32
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Fuzz posted:Christ HtV2 hosed it up so badly by going the opposite direction from where you wanted HtV to go. TFV ruled. I'm curious now, how did HtV2 gently caress up things?
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Oct 28, 2023 21:58
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Traveller posted:I'm curious now, how did HtV2 gently caress up things? Generally, by not being very good. Task Force Valkyrie specifically, they basically merged all the government organizations together into one organization, which hurts all of them. TFV is less mysterious, VASCU loses all their cool "actually trying to solve mysteries and arrest people" flavor, all the lower tier groups get a completely different feel when they're in the same group as the guys with anti-vampire laser guns. It's just a bad creative decision.
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Oct 28, 2023 22:07
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They also made the Cheiron Group into a Paranoia-like comedy conspiracy, which was really weird.
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Oct 28, 2023 22:24
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I've always wondered what the reasons were behind a lot of changes from HtV 1e to 2e. It had that open development phase for a bit but then things went dark and then the book came out a while after. Some changes I get even if don't care for them, like VASCU (if I recall correctly) privatizing, which theoretically opens the organization up to wider concepts, but others like TFV leave me scratching my head. The new compacts and conspiracies seem fun though, at least from a quick read.
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Oct 28, 2023 22:44
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We've talked a lot about how Onyx Path/CofD is in a downward spiral as they lose more experienced writers and don't have a good way to keep institutional knowledge due to their cheap pile-of-contractors structure. An inexperienced group of writers trying too hard to justify making a new edition honestly explains all of HtV 2e's problems.
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Oct 28, 2023 22:47
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Checking out with nWoD 1E still seems to have been the right call
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Oct 29, 2023 00:01
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Traveller posted:Checking out with nWoD 1E still seems to have been the right call Nah, Awakening 2e is an enormous improvement on the original corebook. Both lorewise and with a functional magic system!
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Oct 29, 2023 00:58
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Traveller posted:Checking out with nWoD 1E still seems to have been the right call Vampire the Requiem 2e gave us the strix though, one of the few times the 'honest, these are the really evilest evil dudes' actually worked without being super edge about it.
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Oct 29, 2023 04:19
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Quote is not edit.
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Oct 29, 2023 04:19
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Pakxos posted:Vampire the Requiem 2e gave us the strix though, one of the few times the 'honest, these are the really evilest evil dudes' actually worked without being super edge about it. Well, it put them in the core book, but they originally showed up in Fall of the Camarilla and I think maybe a Night Horrors book for 1e.
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Oct 29, 2023 04:40
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A lot of the 2E books are worth your time. Vampire, Werewolf and Mage are all good. Demon is basically a 2E book and it's definitely worth it. Heard very good things about Defiant as well.
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Oct 29, 2023 04:51
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