MalcolmSheppard posted:

Now the Skill, for +5 dice with any melee weapon, is 45 XP. The price difference is worth 7 dots of the above Merits, which equates to boosting a secondary weapon to +5 dice. Given that combat focused characters will typically use 1 primary and one backup weapon, this makes it functionally similar in value.

Ferrinus posted:

That's why I'm saying you could replace Medicine with a simpler, cheaper merit, not add a simpler, cheaper Merit that's mandatory for anyone with Medicine to buy.

Gerund posted:

...so why have skills, then? This seems like a "kill skills" rule-concept.

Augure posted:

Ideally we want to kill skills that could be better represented as a training merit plus an attribute test. Don't we?

Like, we probably - assuming we don't revamp the whole system like Malcolm proposes - want to keep Brawl and Weaponry and Driving and Investigation and Persuasion and so forth as skills, because we can coherently imagine a case where someone with less specialization but more ability could be desirable. Would a nerd who's studied how to make friends and influence people be more or less likely to succeed in a social situation than a shy good-looking farmboy? I dunno, but I could see it going either way. By contrast I could not see going either way on "Do I want the doctor or the really, really smart med student to patch me up"

Gerund posted:

This seems like a "kill skills" rule-concept.

Ferrinus posted:

Well...yes? That's what I said. The hypothetical result is a situation where you mostly roll combinations of attributes when you're trying to outdo other characters, and "skills" are non-standardized traits which describe which fields your character can or can't compete in at all, or what kind of results your character can expect from certain kinds of activity.

Vaguido posted:

Ferrinus posted:

That'd also be cool. It'd leave you groping for what the difference between Politics 3 and Politics 4 is, of course, and might lead logically to a system where you just cut out the Attributes instead of cutting out the Skills, but I don't mind in the abstract. Actually, that sort of situation suggests Skills cannibalizing Merits - higher levels of Politics could directly grant allies and contacts, for instance.

Gerund posted:

On that note, why isn't there a requirement of Streetwise or Politics for certain types of social merits? I don't imagine that Ally (The Mayor) goes to many that couldn't ever give him a call.

Baby Babbeh posted:

I just... I guess I don't have the verisimilitude problem you guys have with how skills currently work, and it seems like skillmerits would quickly get unwieldy as you tried to map every type of specialized knowledge explicitly, unless you made them more freeform, like FATE aspects or one roll skills.

Loomer posted:

So I did one of the Mage tradition books today. Akashic Brotherhood.

oMage is dead. Long live nMage. Jesus christ it's worse than I remembered. It's just... It's just really bad. It saps the goodwill I had because of my rose coloured glasses and my irrational fondness for the Technocracy and replaces it with seething bile.

Loomer posted:

1994, so 1st edition Mage.

ZearothK posted:

I'll non-ironically fight with anyone who doesn't love Sons of Ether Revised.

quote:

There’s an invisible prison, with invisible walls
Invisible cells and invisible bars.
On Wednesdays you’re allowed to exercise
Under invisible guards’ watchful eyes.

It’s not just a metaphor for mental illness, you see. Like most metaphors, it’s borne from something quite real. Unlike most metaphors, it’s not used in a way unconnected to the original use. The Invisible Prison is a very real thing: it captures one or two mages, sorcerers and wizards every year. Nobody knows who invented the bit of not-very-well-written doggerel that later became a skipping-rhyme (where, one figures, some smart kid grew up, became an expert on mental illness, and coined the phrase to better describe a very real societal problem with no connection to the rhyme’s origin). Nobody knows why it happens or how it happens. But they know it happens, and they know what happens to the people it captures. You see them on street corners, talking to themselves and begging for change. (Not all of them, of course. But a very few.)

Of course, lots of cut-rate supervillains have used the gambit since, because “make your enemy think he is crazy” is something every garden-variety sadist can come up with. But all of those supervillains miss the point. It doesn’t matter if you try to make Wolverine crazy because sooner or later he’ll pop his claws or realize his healing factor still works. It doesn’t matter if you try to make Captain America crazy because sooner or later reflex memory will kick in and he’ll do something he wouldn’t be able to do. You can’t convince a superhero that they’re delusional – at least, not enough for it to matter.

The invisible library has magazines
Which you read and you dream your invisible dreams
Of when you won’t sleep on your invisible cot
And will not get lost in invisible thoughts.

But you can convince a sorcerer of it. Because magic depends on will and belief – and if you doubt your ability to do magic, you won’t be able to do it. And if you take away their ability to do magic, then the underpinning of their world falls apart because you’ve destroyed the defining tenet by which they’ve organized their lives. It’s very effective and it hardly ever fails, which is why there are more than a few wandering, unstable homeless people who still, very occasionally, do magic by accident wandering the streets of New York City (where they are inevitably deposited by the Invisible Prison these days; it has done for centuries now, although before that it dropped people in London, Paris, Rome and Ur).

And, because we’re talking about magic, the Invisible Prison has advantages your standard villain-lair-designed-to-convince-the-hero-that-they-are-in-an-asylum does not. Because it’s not a physical place (although it can be). In many ways it’s more a state of mind. The Invisible Prison is wherever you are, and it takes a different form each time. It’s when you wake up in a hotel feeling the end of a three-day bender on which you never went. It’s going outside and feeling eyes on you from above, but when you look up they’re not there. It’s when you look in the mirror when you brush your teeth in the morning (because any mage worth their salt knows that dental hygiene is important) and you see bars in front of you – but only in the mirror. And sometimes, yes, it’s a dank cell in a dark pit, in the middle of a complex whose geography is odd and non-linear.

It is as subtle or as blunt as it needs to be, because the Warden (and there is a Warden) provides a tailored experience, whatever will destroy your mind most effectively, be it brutal, terrifying horror or creeping, steady paranoia. And there’s a relevant side-effect: once you’re in the Prison, you go “off the grid” for the purposes of divination magic. In the Prison, it is as if you never existed – until you leave it, a shell of what you once were. Nobody knows why it does what it does. Some think it’s a leftover tool of vengeance by a master mage who wanted to destroy a rival, and that that tool gained a sort of self-driving awareness. Others think it’s a conspiracy that tries to reduce the number of magic users in the world (and there are plenty of people who would like that to happen). But given its success rate, it really doesn’t matter.

One day you might stride out the invisible gate
After a lengthy invisible wait
But the invisible prison will not leave you whole
It tears at your mind and your heart and your soul.

Now, Dr. Strange isn’t going to get trapped in the Invisible Prison. Dr. Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme, after all, and you don’t get to that level without being able to deal with psychological warfare – even magically-assisted psychological warfare. The reason anybody knows the Invisible Prison exists in the first place is because a Sorcerer Supreme was the first (and only) person to break out of it in the mid-1400s. The Prison doesn’t go after Sorcerers Supreme. Maybe it’s because it only wants to grab people it knows it can break. Maybe it’s because it was scared off that one time. But in any event, Stephen Strange is quite safe from it.

But if a Sorcerer Supreme were to not live in isolation (as most do), and were to take apprentices (as most do not)… well, then the Prison might find itself a target that would allow it to strike back at the Sorcerer Supreme, albeit indirectly…

Reene posted:

My players will be going to the Underworld in a few sessions to dig up and enslave the soul of an Archmage. I have a pretty good idea for what I want to happen to them there but I need some ideas for funny, horrifying, and/or useful poo poo I can have the waters of each Underworld river they'll be crossing do, because I just know one of them is going to go "hey can I bottle/drink that?" and I want to punish them for their curiosity reward them for their situational awareness in an amusing manner.

So far my only okay idea is liquid that makes you completely forget any name or nickname or alias you have ever had, and only that, for some period of time. Someone could remind you your name is Bob and you go "oh poo poo, okay" but ten seconds later they're screaming "BOB JESUS THE ZOMBIE IS RIGHT BEHIND YOU" and you have no idea who the gently caress Bob is.

Error 404 posted:

So are you thinking of having some do a good thing, a good thing with a drawback, or gently caress YOU PLAYERS?

Because going by mythology, you already basically have the river Lethe, so:

The river Styx could maybe buff all your physical stats by 2 for a day, but cause a couple aggro boxes, or reduce your Willpower.

Maybe one river doesn't massively gently caress you up, but now you can see and hear and talk to ghosts as per Death 1, but you can't ever touch anything in twilight.

Likewise, maybe there's a river that does something similar with Time?

Error 404 posted:

The river Styx could maybe buff all your physical stats by 2 for a day, but cause a couple aggro boxes, or reduce your Willpower.

Project1 posted:

Couple of questions: I'm reading through the Clan Novel Saga 1, which is Fall of Atlanta I think. It's pretty dull so far, with only a couple of interesting characters. I'm up to some consultant who got ghouled by Swedish Camarilla Toreador. Does it get any more interesting? It's readable, but only just.

What's the NWoD fiction like? I read through the vampire story of Three Shades of Night, and that was ok for RPG fiction. I heard it goes downhill after that.

And I'm thinking up a character at the moment, who is a Lasombra. Any tricks to get around the mirror thing? Are cameras a problem?

Reene posted:

My players will be going to the Underworld in a few sessions to dig up and enslave the soul of an Archmage. I have a pretty good idea for what I want to happen to them there but I need some ideas for funny, horrifying, and/or useful poo poo I can have the waters of each Underworld river they'll be crossing do, because I just know one of them is going to go "hey can I bottle/drink that?" and I want to punish them for their curiosity reward them for their situational awareness in an amusing manner.

So far my only okay idea is liquid that makes you completely forget any name or nickname or alias you have ever had, and only that, for some period of time. Someone could remind you your name is Bob and you go "oh poo poo, okay" but ten seconds later they're screaming "BOB JESUS THE ZOMBIE IS RIGHT BEHIND YOU" and you have no idea who the gently caress Bob is.

Suda posted:

A certain place in the middle of everything; in it occurs a drawing-up and swallowing of waters, until complete inundation; [it is] a dim and dark place. Yet Acheron is like a place of healing, not a place of punishment, cleansing and purging the sins of humans.

Project1 posted:

Couple of questions: I'm reading through the Clan Novel Saga 1, which is Fall of Atlanta I think. It's pretty dull so far, with only a couple of interesting characters. I'm up to some consultant who got ghouled by Swedish Camarilla Toreador. Does it get any more interesting? It's readable, but only just.

What's the NWoD fiction like? I read through the vampire story of Three Shades of Night, and that was ok for RPG fiction. I heard it goes downhill after that.

And I'm thinking up a character at the moment, who is a Lasombra. Any tricks to get around the mirror thing? Are cameras a problem?

Volume posted:

I wouldn't have anything happen right away, as the story progresses I'd give increasing penalties to life magic and increasing bonuses to death magic while they are down there.

When they finally come back, the ones that drank from the river would start having dreams and visions of the Underworld again and little by little they seem to wan to fade from existence (like you see in those time travel movies where they accidentally erase their own existence) as their soul is called back to the underworld.

And there you have your next story.

Fuzz posted:

The ONLY oMage book worth reading is Guide to the Technocracy. That's it. The core isn't even worth bothering with, and GttT is really only good because it's chock full of awesome poo poo.