|
Why I prefer UA as opposed to Mage: Mage has a bunch of mechanics to ensure that the players are never going to reveal magic to the general public or deal with the result of using blatant magic. UA just has you dealing with it.
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 10:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 2, 2024 01:55 |
|
|
I've been playing/running UA on and off for about a decade. During that time I've seen two major charges produced, both of which were lost without being spent. Yes the players have the capacity to put junk in your trunk with majors, but if you realistically deal with acquiring them, the party should be just about where it started, maybe a little worse. Magic is bad for you, don't you know. Now I'm not saying that you should stop them from doing what they want with the charge. I say let that big boy fly. But if for instance you start a humongous riot as is required to gain an irracomancy major charge, there will be repercussions that follow you for the rest of your life. Kemper: Not entirely true. UA has the "Claws of the Tiger" rule, which tells you just how much damage your character takes when a huge unstructured riot breaks out around them, as is the inevitable result of using most magic in public. counterspin fucked around with this message at 16:12 on May 26, 2010 |
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 16:09
|
|
|
DeclaredYuppie posted:Don't forget- earning a major charge is usually the effort of a number of story arcs or an entire campaign. Your players will usually be running off a number of minor/significant. Can you share a few examples of the hoops you put players through to get a major charge?
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 16:41
|
|
|
Squidster posted:Can you share a few examples of the hoops you put players through to get a major charge? Cliomancers, who use historical significance to fuel their magic, get a major charge for being the first cliomancer to visit an important historical site. Tranquility Base (on the moon) has a charge waiting to be harvested, as soon as some cliomancer figures out how to get there... Epideromancers, who power themselves with pain and self-mutilation, have to permanently remove a body part (hand, nose, eye, etc.) to generate a major charge. Entropomancers, who run on risk and luck, must risk their lives and the lives of at least 10 innocent bystanders on at least a 90/10 proposition. Are you getting the sense that in UA, the quest for magical power tends to ruin your life and the lives of the people around you?
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 16:54
|
|
|
Some more: Personamancers get their abilities by impersonating others. To generate a major charge, they have to fool an audience of at least ten million people by, for example, posing as the President on a TV broadcast. Narco-Alchemists get their abilities by creating magical drugs. The book flat out says that they don't know how to make a major charge yet, "but everyone's trying." Urbanomancers draw their energy from the urban environment. To generate a major charge, they must generate powerful, city-wide change. The book suggests the Great Fire of London as a baseline. Videomancers get their power by watching TV. No, I mean watching TV obsessively, and if they ever miss the show(s) they've chosen, they lose all their charges. What if those shows change to be scheduled opposite each other? Well, that's a bitch. The Videomancer gets a major charge by starring in his favorite program and appearing onscreen at least 50% of the time. These are just the ones from the corebook. I hope that it's obvious from reading these that getting a major charge is going to be a pain in the rear end and a plot point in itself. The best way to deal with the idea of there being major charges spent in the world is just to assume that the world is the way it is at least in part because magic made it that way. The brilliant thing about the setting is that the idea of people trying to get charges and magical power explains all kinds of absolutely aberrant behavior that really happens. On the grim side, a scenario was published in 1999 about a dude taking over an airliner and crashing it into Chicago in a massive suicidal explosion so he can ascend as the archetype of the Terrorist.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 18:35
|
|
|
FMguru posted:Entropomancers, who run on risk and luck, must risk their lives and the lives of at least 10 innocent bystanders on at least a 90/10 proposition.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 20:39
|
|
|
Squidster posted:What prevents an Entropomancer from putting on a blindfold, hijacking a bus, and driving it into highway incoming traffic? The other adept major charges seem like they would be a huge challenge and great story to obtain, but the chaos dudes seem to have it pretty easy. The relatively high chance that they will die? edit- like, if they do get that major charge, they'll probably want to use it on saving their own life or giving themselves the ability to walk and chew food again after being thrown through the front windshield of the bus and landing 100' away w/ 4 broken vertebrae. Fidel Cuckstro fucked around with this message at 20:59 on May 26, 2010 |
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 20:44
|
|
|
DeclaredYuppie posted:The relatively high chance that they will die? This, pretty much. Entropomancers are the adepts who die the most since getting charges involves deliberately risking their own lives for juice. Even a 99% of living means that you'll eventually hit that 1% of dying horribly. Think of a crazed adrenaline junkie who eventually goes so nuts that they skydive without a parachute or any means of slowing their fall, just banking on sheer complete dumb luck to save them. That's an entropomancer who's gone round the bend.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 20:56
|
|
|
DeclaredYuppie posted:The relatively high chance that they will die? Also, assuming you survive all that, you're still identified as "that guy who tasered a Greyhound driver and drove a bus full of screaming people into an abutment." Your mundane life is now a shambles. Hope you can magick up a good lawyer, 'cause you're going to need it.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 20:59
|
|
|
Squidster posted:What prevents an Entropomancer from putting on a blindfold, hijacking a bus, and driving it into highway incoming traffic? The other adept major charges seem like they would be a huge challenge and great story to obtain, but the chaos dudes seem to have it pretty easy. Yeah the charge economy is different for each class, I think for instance the Entropo and Epideromancers actually have a list of major charge powers that are souped up versions of their significant charge abilities, but the archaeologists and the narco-alchemists just get a bunch of really powerful suggestions. Sargeant Biffalot fucked around with this message at 23:25 on May 26, 2010 |
|
#
?
May 26, 2010 23:22
|
|
|
The nice thing about UA is the way that skills work, and how magic is a skill like anything else, sure you could have a 40% skill in cutting yourself for magical energy, but a 40% in First Aid or similar is going to come in handy pretty often too. It allows relatively normal characters who are still interested in the occult underground to play with the big boys. Of course they should still probably learn some rituals or something just in case.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 00:25
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:The nice thing about UA is the way that skills work, and how magic is a skill like anything else, sure you could have a 40% skill in cutting yourself for magical energy, but a 40% in First Aid or similar is going to come in handy pretty often too. It allows relatively normal characters who are still interested in the occult underground to play with the big boys. This is true- and really it's easy to play as a normal person in the occult underground since you generally have skills like "worked in the corporate world 35%" or "credit check 40%", and a lot of time in UA (IMO) was spent dealing with how these small bits of the deranged occult world interfaced with the normal world all around them. Looking/being inconspicuous was a value all its own.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 01:58
|
|
|
And let's not forget the utility of obsession skills. Since Adepts have to take their school as their obsession skill, they're really good at magic but lose out in situations where its not time to seal shut someones mouth or hit them in the face with a levitated brick. Someone with an obsession skill in sweet talk or something is probably going to be a lot more useful in most situations, and an obsessed martial artist is going to be just as much of a combat beast as your average adept.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 02:32
|
|
|
Baby Babbeh posted:And let's not forget the utility of obsession skills. Since Adepts have to take their school as their obsession skill, they're really good at magic but lose out in situations where its not time to seal shut someones mouth or hit them in the face with a levitated brick. Someone with an obsession skill in sweet talk or something is probably going to be a lot more useful in most situations, and an obsessed martial artist is going to be just as much of a combat beast as your average adept. The most useful character is a character with Psychotherapy as their obsession skill, because the party WILL be completely apeshit insane given enough time without people to help stall the acquisition of failed and hardened notches.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 02:34
|
|
|
Daeren posted:The most useful character is a character with Psychotherapy as their obsession skill, because the party WILL be completely apeshit insane given enough time without people to help stall the acquisition of failed and hardened notches. Please tell me that a character with that as their obsession gets to help the party maintain their sanity at the cost of their own well being.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 03:17
|
|
|
Gr3y posted:Please tell me that a character with that as their obsession gets to help the party maintain their sanity at the cost of their own well being. Actually that would be an excellent basis for an adept school...
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 03:39
|
|
|
It's worth noting that the published scenarios for UA run the gamut from highly experimental game to nothing-supernatural-here fakeout and include, notably, an adventure that no one is going to run anywhere for at least the next five years (mentioned above, "Fly to Heaven" is, no poo poo, 9/11 the RPG, published in '99), a grail quest, and the single most depressing adventure I have seen for any game ever (I considered running "Garden Full of Weeds", but I realized that not only are my GMing skills not up to it, I don't think my roleplaying skills are up to it). One-Shots and Weep are both usable in ongoing campaigns, and while I haven't played To-Go, I have it and it both looks good and is well-reviewed.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 03:40
|
|
|
Gr3y posted:Please tell me that a character with that as their obsession gets to help the party maintain their sanity at the cost of their own well being. Not really, but considering that you can't use Psychotherapy to cure yourself, if that party member was the only source of therapy and never went to a therapist himself, he'd slowly go crazy while the party was just fine, and eventually people would be learning how to stay sane from someone who is more than a bit nuts. However, blowing a gauge would still make you pretty much unplayable, and getting too many hardened notches and becoming sociopathic would probably disqualify you as a viable therapist.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 03:43
|
|
|
If you want to introduce people to UA run Jailbreak from the One-Shots book. Best adventure I've ever played in, run, or read. A masterpiece. There I said it, and I got gushy.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 05:46
|
|
|
counterspin posted:If you want to introduce people to UA run Jailbreak from the One-Shots book. Best adventure I've ever played in, run, or read. A masterpiece. There I said it, and I got gushy. Jailbreak features a small fortune-cookie sized slip of paper you're supposed to copy and cut out as the GM. During the session you hand it to players. It reads: Bored? Do Something! Jailbreak owns. fake edit- Icepick made an appearance in virtually every UA game my friends ran.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 05:50
|
|
|
I really wasn't interested in any of this at all but I kept reading the thread anyway, and then this page has really made me go "hot drat this sounds like good poo poo." Specifically,FMguru posted:Plutomancers, who use (other peoples') money to work magic, need to acquire $100 million in one lump sum. That is just loving awesome, therefore UA must be awesome. gently caress you guys I didn't want to learn another system.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 06:34
|
|
|
Yeah, I'm a little put out that Amazon.ca wants $80 for the core book.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 07:49
|
|
|
Kerison posted:That is just loving awesome, therefore UA must be awesome. gently caress you guys I didn't want to learn another system. There's not that much to learn rules-wise and the rest is a thoroughly enjoyable read. UA is amazing.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 07:50
|
|
|
If you're wondering about the mechanics and the general feel of the book before you take the plunge, Atlas has this preview up on their site. It's the entire first and part of the second chapters, actually enough for character creation for a street level game. You don't get to see any of the cool poo poo like adepts and avatars, but it should be enough to convince you that UA is pretty much the best thing ever. Seriously. Buy it. You will not regret it.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 09:15
|
|
|
counterspin posted:Kemper: Not entirely true. UA has the "Claws of the Tiger" rule, which tells you just how much damage your character takes when a huge unstructured riot breaks out around them, as is the inevitable result of using most magic in public. Yeah, but there's a fine difference with having rules that ensure that most of the time you won't even think of doing it, and rules that make you deal with the consequences. The Paradox mechanism in Mage is so drat punishing that I've actually never seen anyone do something blatantly vulgar magic poo poo in a game.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 18:47
|
|
|
I'm a little fuzzy here, but isn't vulgar paradox backlash in Mage basically "your character is dead/removed from play, don't do that?" Because that's a pretty stupid system.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 19:19
|
|
|
Paradox amounted to some dice of bashing damage in both Ascenscion and Awakening (the latest versions, anyway). It got progressively worse as you used more vulgar magic in the same scene, though.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 19:25
|
|
|
Always thought that was really poor game design. I mean it was logical, but still: ''Here's all this cool poo poo you can do. But if you do any of it, you will be penalized for it''.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 19:28
|
|
|
Unknown Armies is one of the few games where non-magical characters are never on the sidelines. Hell, I ran a whole campaign based on the premise where an Occult Underground semi-gangster hired young, educated and open-minded people to do investigations for him, simply because they weren't hosed in the head or obsessed by magic. And the scariest opponent they had was a mob hitman who was off his rocker and had no magical powers or knowhow whatsoever.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 19:37
|
|
|
northerain posted:Always thought that was really poor game design. I mean it was logical, but still: It was better to deal your enemy several levels of agg. and take several levels of bashing than to do nothing. I do have a few complaints about the way Awakening's paradox system is set up, though, that's why I changed it in the game I don't run.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 19:39
|
|
|
I just started reading the Unknown Armies core book, and I really like what I've seen so far, with one exception: why do they have to spell magic with a k 
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 19:51
|
|
|
Attorney at Funk posted:I just started reading the Unknown Armies core book, and I really like what I've seen so far, with one exception: why do they have to spell magic with a k I like to think it's because people who know about magic in Unknown Armies are pretentious and so would pretentiously call it "magick." If it's self-aware then it's okay to me.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 20:10
|
|
|
Kemper Boyd posted:Yeah, but there's a fine difference with having rules that ensure that most of the time you won't even think of doing it, and rules that make you deal with the consequences. The Paradox mechanism in Mage is so drat punishing that I've actually never seen anyone do something blatantly vulgar magic poo poo in a game. I'm confused as to which of these two things apply to UA in your opinion. In mine both apply. I've never seen someone use "vulgar" magic in UA except at the end of a storyarc, and the rules very clearly state what the consequences of using magic are, namely that you will be immediately surrounded by a violent riot after which everyone will remember you started the riot, though no one will remember exactly what you did. A presumption that you will be hunted down like a dog in a multi-state manhunt(which is what happens to people who start gigantic riots resulting in fatalities) and then put in jail for the rest of your natural seems like making you deal with the consequences to me.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 21:24
|
|
|
counterspin posted:I'm confused as to which of these two things apply to UA in your opinion. In mine both apply. I've never seen someone use "vulgar" magic in UA except at the end of a storyarc, and the rules very clearly state what the consequences of using magic are, namely that you will be immediately surrounded by a violent riot after which everyone will remember you started the riot, though no one will remember exactly what you did. A presumption that you will be hunted down like a dog in a multi-state manhunt(which is what happens to people who start gigantic riots resulting in fatalities) and then put in jail for the rest of your natural seems like making you deal with the consequences to me. I think it's more of a paradigm difference than a clear rules difference, actually. Thanks to the fucker who stole my books, I don't have the books on hand right now, apart from the 1st edition corebook, but the way I see it, is pretty much like this: Mage makes a presumption that no one will ever perform flat out impossible stuff in front of mundanes. UA assumes that occasionally, this happens, like in the story about the dude who pulls off another dude's nose in a barfight. Mage is here about character-crippling rules, UA is about Power and Consequences. There is nothing to stop you from doing a miracle, but there are always consequences, and performing magic in front of mundanes isn't even harder to do.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 21:43
|
|
|
But one of UA's largest factions does nothing but shoot people stupid enough to do magic in front of normals in the head. I was running a Sleepers campaign where things got out of hand, "vulgar magic" wise and another group of Sleepers came and killed several of the players(Sleepers function in cells, so they don't have an easy way to determine who is a Sleeper and who isn't). So the difference is between having the system punish you or the setting punish you? counterspin fucked around with this message at 22:12 on May 27, 2010 |
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 22:05
|
|
|
counterspin posted:So the difference is between having the system punish you or the setting punish you? Yeah pretty much so. Thanks. Other thing I like: not even the Sleepers are all-knowing or all-powerful which is one of the great design elements in UA. WOD made me hate all-powerful conspiracies, and it's cute how the Sleepers (powerful, but to a significant part just lies and hot air) and The New Inquisition (have lawyers, guns and money but don't know poo poo) are handled. In the words of Stolze: that's pretty motherfucking elegant.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2010 22:59
|
|
|
Kemper Boyd posted:Yeah pretty much so. Thanks. It's really a pity that the splatbooks are so hard to get. We have Hush Hush and Break Today, but I would love to get my hands on the other three softcovers (LGM, Stratosphere, and Postmodern Magick). Note that Amazon.com has the corebook at list.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2010 02:31
|
|
|
Unknown Armies just got a new printing, so if you're thinking about getting a copy now's when you should probably do it.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2010 03:11
|
|
|
Greg Stolze is indeed awesome. I love ORE because Wild Talents and Monsters and Other Childish Things both use it and Monsters is one of my favorite games ever, which is why I write books for it. I need to do a MAOCT thread soon. Anyway, if you go to Gencon you can meet Greg. He hangs out at the Arc Dream booth usually. He's very easy to approach and talk to. Also, I've gotten to play with Greg during Gencon a few times and even ran a Call of Cthulhu game for him once. He was a great player because he made decisions based on FAILED occult checks. Call of Cthulhu: Well of Sacrifices - Greg plays the native who encouraged the other players to go back into the cave with horrible giant bloodsucking bats after losing a PC. U-Boote Herasus: CoC WW1 game run by Scott Glancy (Delta Green co-author). Greg was a player. Part 1 and Part 2 Dig to Victory: Another WW1 CoC game run by Scott Glancy. British tunnelers who find something nasty under the trenches. And now some UA material: Is Space Jam based on Mayan sacred text? More UA Fodder: Unknown Armies Plots in a line on rpg.net quote:You know what humor is? It's magic. Dangerous magic. Laughter is used to banish evil from the world. But it's also addictive.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2010 06:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 2, 2024 01:55 |
|
|
oh and BTW - Reign is 10 bux so buy it you mugs http://www.arcdream.com/store/product.php?id=75404
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2010 06:18
|
|