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Rand Brittain posted:Well, I mean, it's not like the guy never did anything good. He was behind Guide to the Technocracy, and I don't think any of the complaints listed about M20 would apply to that. GttT did have Brucato as a writer, but it also had Brian "Mister Technocracy" Campbell as a writer, and Brian Campbell is the guy responsible for the Technocracy chapter in M20. Which is the one part of written text in M20 that I've actually liked.
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Mar 31, 2016 00:46
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Nessus posted:I suspect they did not produce a fancy hardbound book purely as an intellectual jape on their silly fans, though of course we are talking about White Wolf, so that's less implausible than usual. I don't mean that it was a joke on the fans; I mean that it was written in-character from the perspective that the Technocracy are the real heroes who protect us from the evil, light-bulb-fearing Traditions, but was not seriously putting that perspective forward as the true one out-of-character.
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Mar 31, 2016 00:55
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Rand Brittain posted:I don't mean that it was a joke on the fans; I mean that it was written in-character from the perspective that the Technocracy are the real heroes who protect us from the evil, light-bulb-fearing Traditions, but was not seriously putting that perspective forward as the true one out-of-character. I suspect the actual answer is "Internet fandom talks a lot," of course.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:16
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Nessus posted:This confuses me because why do you need to be advancing a "true" perspective out of character, even with a metaplot and such things? All the WOD lines seemed to have several groups who were various shades of justifiable, "I can see playing these guys," plus a couple of others who were in fact cartoon monsters. I... don't think what I'm describing is particularly uncommon? A lot of White Wolf books, and a lot of splatbooks from other companies, are written from the in-character perspective of the group they're about, and are about why that group is great and correct, but are written by authors who are writing with self-awareness of the ways in which the group in question is kind of full of poo poo. Guide to the Technocracy is just a little more cartoonish than average, with things like "we lose more cyborgs that way" and vague hints that the Void Engineers are all secret wizards who don't actually need to wear space helmets except to maintain kayfabe in front of the bosses.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:27
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Speaking of White Wolf/Onyx Path... I've been running in a campaign for a few months now of Exalted: Third Edition and while the book sticks to the standards set out by old White Wolf of "arranged by sorting chapters and topics into a list and having the Random Thing Picker arrange it for you" I actually really like a lot of the underlying systems here, specifically what they've done with combat to make it not as hilariously busted as Exalted 2e. This is gonna take me forever but I have a few weeks to months of downtime and I wanna really dig deep into this thing's guts. Particularly, as stated, the combat system and the new(?) and improved(!) charm trees.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:29
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Nessus posted:This confuses me because why do you need to be advancing a "true" perspective out of character, even with a metaplot and such things? All the WOD lines seemed to have several groups who were various shades of justifiable, "I can see playing these guys," plus a couple of others who were in fact cartoon monsters. It's useful for buyers if all books are compatible with each other. If one book presents the Technocracy as orphan-murdering fun-haters, and another presents them as beleaguered cops, people who want to run them as beleaguered cops can't use the supplements that have them as baby-killers, and vice versa. It's also very hard to discuss a large setting if every statement about the setting has to be prefaced with a list of every optional setting detail you are or aren't using. Imagine trying to discuss how the Technocracy might react to X if there are, I don't know, five different ways to portray the Technocracy? Having a single truth to the setting simplifies discussion between different players. Oh, and if someone says "I want to run a Mage game, want to join?" you don't have to ask them about every single setting option they're using to figure out whether you want to play it in or not. Also nerds are suckers for internal consistency.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:32
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"I'm going to write this book, ostensibly designed to be informative, but get this! It's going to be presented entirely in-character so that all of the information has to be parsed through my attempts to be clever and obfuscatory while falling back on the tired old excuse of it being the character talking and not me, the writer" is maybe not the most insufferable trend 90's RPGs have to answer for, but it's certainly top three.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:37
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Oh, I see what you mean now, Nessus. It's basically a good thing if you want your game to have consistent themes to not have different writers who all write about supposedly-identical-but-actually-widely-divergent versions of the setting based off their own views and biases. White Wolf failing to curate this stuff twenty years ago is pretty much why Mage fandom turned into a roiling pit of flames—they basically taught people to play several different mutually exclusion games that all had the same name, catered to all those groups at different times, and then started playing favorites, resulting in an explosion.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:38
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Kai Tave posted:"I'm going to write this book, ostensibly designed to be informative, but get this! It's going to be presented entirely in-character so that all of the information has to be parsed through my attempts to be clever and obfuscatory while falling back on the tired old excuse of it being the character talking and not me, the writer" is maybe not the most insufferable trend 90's RPGs have to answer for, but it's certainly top three. It's number one when you combine it with "oh, and the in-character narrator will be the most intolerable smuglord I can conjure forth from the page." I mean, it's a good technique when you do it well*, but when you do it badly the result is much, much worse than just being boring.** * books that used this technique successfully: Followers of Set Revised, Devil-Tigers, Euthanatos Revised ** Virtual Adepts Revised probably wins the prize for being worst
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Mar 31, 2016 01:40
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I don't even think it's a good idea when done well, assuming it ever has been done well which I don't have any personal recollections of. Just as I'm not interested in playing an RPG so the GM can have us all be the audience for the adventures of his amazing GMPC, I'm not interested in an RPG sourcebook when it's some writer's attempts to live out his frustrated ambitions as a novelist.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:44
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Tom Olam from Castle Falkenstein, much as I love the game, may win some sort of special prize in that category. I'm just not sure whether it's a good or bad one. Because a lot of folks took him as an authorial self-insert, but per Mike, he was based on a friend who was self-aware enough to go "Oh, poo poo, that's -me-, do I really sound like that."
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Mar 31, 2016 01:47
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Rand Brittain posted:Oh, I see what you mean now, Nessus. Like I don't think this issue came up for Werewolf or Vampire.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:50
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Nessus posted:To me it doesn't feel like some immensely complex thing, and I don't get why it seems to be uniquely nasty to Mage. Maybe it's because Mage clearly casts the PCs as being most likely in an oppressed group, but the other guys are a. disproportionately powerful and b. arguably not the worst ever compared to the alternatives? Mage maps to real-world political arguments way more easily. Nobody's going to get really invested in the idea that the Sabbat is better than the Camarilla (I hope), but there are a lot of people who get mad at the idea of playing a heroic faith healer fighting the forces of scientific oppression.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:52
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Rand Brittain posted:White Wolf failing to curate this stuff twenty years ago is pretty much why Mage fandom turned into a roiling pit of flames—they basically taught people to play several different mutually exclusion games that all had the same name, catered to all those groups at different times, and then started playing favorites, resulting in an explosion. Kind of like... The Ascension War! oh shiiiiiit
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Mar 31, 2016 01:53
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Nessus posted:To me it doesn't feel like some immensely complex thing, and I don't get why it seems to be uniquely nasty to Mage. Maybe it's because Mage clearly casts the PCs as being most likely in an oppressed group, but the other guys are a. disproportionately powerful and b. arguably not the worst ever compared to the alternatives? Nerds love wizards and ray guns above all other things, so asking them to choose leads to massive fights. Also, Kai Tave is absolutely right. The whole 'Oh, it was just in character and thus incompatible with the rest of the line I swear' thing always rubs me the wrong way.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:54
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It's also an extremely half-hearted and lazy way of writing anything to do so in a way that always allows you to turn around and go "no wait you see, it was the character who said it and not me the author." Like, all I have to go on that Guide to the Technocracy was actually intended to be X instead of Y are third-hand accounts from someone on the internet. You can't even try to cut to the heart of the matter by saying "well clearly it's parody because look at how ridiculous it is" because plenty of White Wolf books were both incredibly ridiculous and entirely sincere about it. Are you really expected to be able to tell that this one book out of dozens is obviously meant to be a parody, meanwhile you have Rabid Furry Ecoterrorist Adventures over there next to Otherkin: the gently caress You I'm a Dragon? And that's not even counting poo poo like Gypsies or Freak Legion. But no, this book is clearly not meant to be taken at face value because e; disingenuous, the word I'm looking for is disingenuous Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 01:55
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It's basically the same kind of crap people pull on the internet to go 'Whoa man, I got some really negative reactions to the things I just said about that minority, so haha can't you take a joke I was joking I swear.'
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Mar 31, 2016 02:01
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Kai Tave posted:It's also an extremely half-hearted and lazy way of writing anything to do so in a way that always allows you to turn around and go "no wait you see, it was the character who said it and not me the author." Like, all I have to go on that Guide to the Technocracy was actually intended to be X instead of Y are third-hand accounts from someone on the internet. You can't even try to cut to the heart of the matter by saying "well clearly it's parody because look at how ridiculous it is" because plenty of White Wolf books were both incredibly ridiculous and entirely sincere about it. Are you really expected to be able to tell that this one book out of dozens is obviously meant to be a parody, meanwhile you have Rabid Furry Ecoterrorist Adventures over there next to Otherkin: the gently caress You I'm a Dragon? And that's not even counting poo poo like Gypsies or Freak Legion. But no, this book is clearly not meant to be taken at face value because I feel like if you read it you would probably see what I'm talking about.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:03
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Rand Brittain posted:I feel like if you read it you would probably see what I'm talking about. I feel like the fact that plenty of people apparently came away from GttT thinking "oh poo poo, these guys are right!" is enough evidence of a failure on the writer's part that I don't actually need to do empirical research of my own to reach that conclusion. Now I guess you can just handwave that away with "well maybe all those people are just huge loving morons," but even if they are it's still the writer's (and editor's I suppose but we're talking about White Wolf here so let's not go too crazy) responsibility to get their intended point across.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:09
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And as I recall the oWoD books weren't usually explicitly presented as being in-word/in-character information. They were presented in the same "Hello player/GM here is the information on the world" manner as most other RPG supplements. EDIT: Also this meant that if they were supposed to be like in-character poo poo about how the group saw themselves, you never actually got objective information about what they were really like.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:09
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I just figured the Technocratic stuff that wasn't all that bad was, you know, the in house poo poo, the stuff Trads never saw unless they infiltrated a base or whatever. Like how the Norse were mostly a peaceful farming/trading civilization but boy you would not get that impression if you were a monk in Ireland or a king in Byzantium.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:38
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Nessus posted:I think that your criticism is valid irrespective of the insults to Crowley, because Mage is actually based upon people who were inspired by derivations from Crowley, and indeed in turn off the pop versions of those aspects of things. The clearest example is probably the Verbena who seem obviously intended to be Wiccans or like, the ancient Real Wiccans, We Mean It, or perhaps generalized neopagans only they didn't have to be neo- about it, etc. Yeah, I was kicking myself a bit after I wrote it (and was out and about doing things) because it's less Crowley himself and more the telephone game version of Crowley through things like "chaos magick". And chaos magick is what you do in the '90s rather than follow Crowley's actual rituals, because vanishingly few people considered fraternal orders still exciting, and even less exciting when you have tight leather pants and round sunglasses on. I'm not sure where you'd get "action-packed" out of Crowley but I figure folks could find a way. I think Ken Hite's proposed game of occult one-upsmanship set in in London or Paris amongst figures like Crowley and St. Germain and Cagliostro is probably the idea I find most amusing, but it probably has less general appeal than two-fisted do as thou wilt.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:33
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Whatever the presentation of the Technocracy, a lot of the fandom hatred of the traditions comes down to the massive and blatantly unsubtle detest of both modern society and modern technology. I admit I have a particularly person bias here due to the experience of literally only living due to modern medical technology, hearing that all this stuff is evil and horrible and I should go back to herbs and crystals or whatever is absolutely laughable. There were some vague attempts to imply that a Tradition-focused consensus would be better, but it never really says how and the in-setting examples of both history and the modern day shows that this is never even really given much in the way of thought by the authors. It was ableist as gently caress to assume that players could set concerns like that aside, and that's not really a term I use often. Also it's fun to shoot vampires with laser guns, even if you're playing the nominal bad guys. 
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Mar 31, 2016 03:49
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: White Wolf draws from 90s anti-corporate, anti-science beliefs which exalt nature and imagined, nature-worshiping ancient cultures; to modern day readers, it will be seen, on the whole, as laughable bordering on abhorrent.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:55
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I remember finding it weird even at the time.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:59
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It was the best RPG of its era. Your characters inhabited a wondrous universe, with philosophers warring with one another about how the universe worked, could work, and SHOULD work, and making it so by sheer collective force of will. There were mysterious, infinite, far-flung realms to explore, and implacable enemies seeking to dominate or destroy everyone and everything in the multiverse. Sorry for interrupting to gush about Planescape, keep discussing Ascension.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:05
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Kavak posted:Sorry for interrupting to gush about Planescape, keep discussing Ascension. No, no, go on.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:15
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Alien Rope Burn posted:No, no, go on. That joke is basically all I had to say. Everything that Ascension claims to offer is there in Planescape, minus the magic system and the modern day setting, but you shed a ton of baggage with both of those.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:28
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Kavak posted:That joke is basically all I had to say. Everything that Ascension claims to offer is there in Planescape, minus the magic system and the modern day setting, but you shed a ton of baggage with both of those. You can certainly have a much more entertaining and less acrimonious argument about fantasy Randianism versus fantasy goth Buddhism.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:29
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Kavak posted:That joke is basically all I had to say. Everything that Ascension claims to offer is there in Planescape, minus the magic system and the modern day setting, but you shed a ton of baggage with both of those. If anything, the lack of a modern setting and the magic system "exalting" some people to power over others makes the setting better for the discussions Ascension wants to make. It lets it come off as less anti-science (though, arguably, they want that) and remove a lot of baggage. Zereth posted:I remember finding it weird even at the time. I think that's because it mostly appealed to new agers in the 90s.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:35
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I remember there being a small group of young peers in my area trying their hand at being a Mage-based cult for a week or two. Presumably they were shut down by the Technocracy or just common sense at how silly the thing was.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, I was kicking myself a bit after I wrote it (and was out and about doing things) because it's less Crowley himself and more the telephone game version of Crowley through things like "chaos magick". And chaos magick is what you do in the '90s rather than follow Crowley's actual rituals, because vanishingly few people considered fraternal orders still exciting, and even less exciting when you have tight leather pants and round sunglasses on. You could probably also roll up a cool adventure setting drawing off his various cosmological settings, but I think GURPS Cabal kind of already does this. It'd probably be LIKE GURPS Cabal, anyway. Probably there would be rules for mountainclimbing.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:55
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The perfect encapsulation of Planescape is that town in Torment where the fallen angel ruins everyone's lives and makes the town slide into one of the hell planes, and you have to go around fixing their problems in order to make them happy enough that it will slide back to the outlands.
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Mar 31, 2016 05:24
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Fans of a game where reality is subjective not liking books with a subjective POV is hilarious, As I've said a zillion times, I'm pro-science but it's still fun to play a game where all my crazy hippie friends are right, and the awesome bullshit that is Chaos/Pop Magick actually works. I'd love to live in a world where symbolism could change the world. There's nothing wrong with that, and Mage is great at scratching that itch. White Wolf appealed to people who weren't traditional roleplayers but were still counter-cultural and geeky. Technocracy fanboys seem like the revenge of traditional STEMlord gamers, though Guide to the Technocracy and Void Engineers were fun (my phone keeps trying to write 'avoid engineers', which is probably good Mage advice). Read The Invisibles to see MAGE done best. Nobody accused hardcore D&D and Pathfinder fans of wishing for a return to feudalism. Planescape is cool, tho. What system lets me play the magickal war between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore? Unknown Armies or MAGE? Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 05:39
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Relevant to this thread that the Unknown Armies kickstarter is now up.
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Mar 31, 2016 05:45
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Covok posted:I've said it before and I'll say it again: White Wolf draws from 90s anti-corporate, anti-science beliefs which exalt nature and imagined, nature-worshiping ancient cultures; to modern day readers, it will be seen, on the whole, as laughable bordering on abhorrent. There's a reason Werewolf Revised's message changed to "Even if stopping the Impergium was a bad idea. Even if the War of Rage was a massive mistake. Even if we should have paid more attention to Pentex and the like. That's not a bell we can unring, and blowing up oil derreks isn't going to fix it. Nor is living in hippie communes pining over better days. We need to work within the system as well as without to win the war." It needed to swerve hard to get away from "Magical Natives Could Fix Everything If We Could Just Stop Killing Them".
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Mar 31, 2016 06:08
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Covok posted:I've said it before and I'll say it again: White Wolf draws from 90s anti-corporate, anti-science beliefs which exalt nature and imagined, nature-worshiping ancient cultures; to modern day readers, it will be seen, on the whole, as laughable bordering on abhorrent. Which modern-day readers? Because the anti-corporate side of it is super-mainstream now, and while I wish the anti-science stuff was gone, it's stronger than ever in many circles. I think there's a balance to be struck between NaturalNews: The RPG and Sell Out Now: Screw You Hippies, though the former, if promoted right, could make a ton of money. And hey, nothing wrong with playing a game where you fight The Man and imagine a better world. You could just include people profiting off anti-scientific fears as part of The Man. Unless you really identify with the Technocracy.... Or don't! Most traditional D&D style RPGs have encoded beliefs that are either abhorrent to the modern world (feudalism, species racism) or alienating to people (knowing lots of math makes you more powerful). While Mage and Werewolf has beliefs I usually hate (especially Werewolf), it's okay to indulge them in fantasy. Or steer away from some of it and still enjoy a world where music or poetry or naming is literal magick.
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Mar 31, 2016 07:15
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1990's White Wolf: The scientists have lied to you! Wake up sheeple! The year 2016: Hey look, another measles outbreak because Facebook moms think vaccines cause the autism. Also most modern anti-corporate sentiment these days takes the form of people wanting higher wages, better job protections, and greater access to affordable healthcare instead of people who unironically believe that Tyler Durden was right.
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Mar 31, 2016 07:23
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I actually thought Werewolf at least made it clear that, at least in the like... macro view of things, science was at worst neutral, at best very good. (Hell, in the Rokea book they even say radioactive materials were a gift from some sea-spirit creature to let the land dwellers have clean energy.) It was rampant technology and industro-capitalist hell that was the bad thing (or the neutral thing if you're a Glass Walker or Bone Gnawer). Like, for the most part scientific progress was not a Garou "thing," because their "thing" involved communion with animistic spirits in the shadow world, but "knowing things" was not evil. Vampire was pretty neutral on it. Mage at least had some 'good' scientists, even if it seemed like the main complaint a lot of Traditionalists had about the Technocratic system wasn't so much "this hurts people" as "this causes me problems and I'm not in charge of it." The two had blurry lines, of course.
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Mar 31, 2016 07:37
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Ah yes, the "good" scientists of mage, namely people who cling fervently to concepts such as phlogiston and orgone and 133t h4cker$, a truly balanced viewpoint there. I mean if I wanted to be really unsporting I could just bring up Changeling: the Dreaming.
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Mar 31, 2016 07:41
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