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Put another way, Mage is an idealist game (in a literal sense given the Neoplatonism) and the Abyss represents a nihilistic subversion or abandonment of the already damaged symbolic order reality runs on and which is currently ruled by tyrants who benefit from it being broken. One could further map political idealism onto the Diamond and ‘realism’ as the betrayal of that higher order onto the Seers, but that’s stretching to the breaking point.
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Oct 15, 2019 20:33
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OvermanXAN posted:So how do the Abyss and the Idigam from Werewolf connect, since those are also impossible entities that shouldn't and/or can't be? I'm not sure a canon answer to this exists (or, if it does, whether it's ever been explicitly stated in player-facing material instead of just hidden away in some internal setting bible) but Idigam are probably not Abyssal. There are (at least seemingly) only a finite number of Idigam in existence, all of whom were either imprisoned on the moon by Father Wolf or who hid themselves and went dormant for thousands of years until they were sure he was gone. If they were Abyssal, you would expect new ones to be leaking out all the time. They're much less interested than the average Abyssal entity in erasing reality and replacing it with a new version -- Idigam love reality as it exists and nearly every NPC Idigam statted up is motivated by some kind of curiosity about or desire for things that exist rather than by the urge to destroy them, and in particular, formless Idigam feel a nearly irresistible urge to coalesce around an existing concept or thing in order to anchor themselves. Abyssal entities also tend to be tied more to the Astral rather than to the Shadow (the spirit realm). This is not to say that cross-pollination is impossible or that a spirit couldn't be somehow corrupted by Abyssal influences, but it does make it unlikely that Idigam are directly spawned from the Abyss. Finally, existing lore about the Idigam hints (however inconclusively) that they're either alien spirits from outside the order established by Luna and Helios, or that they're somehow related to the mysterious absence of Humanity spirits and represent concepts and resonances that didn't yet exist or had no meaning at the time of their creation.
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Oct 15, 2019 20:37
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There’s an example Abyssal spirit-thing in Intruders, it’s an intruder pretending to be a spirit that started a religion for spirits that lets them disconnect from flesh entirely, it’s a fun tempter villain for spirit ecosystems.
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Oct 15, 2019 20:40
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By comparison one of my favorite personal theories about the nWoD is that True Fae are a branch of especially successful Abyssal infiltrators, given their tremendous narcissism, their tenuous hold on existence held together by bargains and theatrical performances that will literally kill them if they break a promise or fall out of character, their desire to transform human beings into playthings and reflections of their own reality, and their power over dreams. e: and also the fact that they're not really people at all, so much as collections of living stories, which is similar to how some Abyssal entities are portrayed (most notably The Prince of 100,000 Leaves, a living alternate history that wants to overwrite ours). Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 20:43
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:By comparison one of my favorite personal theories about the nWoD is that True Fae are a branch of especially successful Abyssal infiltrators, given their tremendous narcissism, their tenuous hold on existence held together by bargains and theatrical performances that will literally kill them if they break a promise or fall out of character, their desire to transform human beings into playthings and reflections of their own reality, and their power over dreams. So does the accumulation of new titles and need for Wyrd-fueled opposition, and the suggested need for reality to exist by their continuing creation of Changelings, represent a way in which the Abyssal nihilism has been perverted to being locked into the current reality wherein changelings can escape to?
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Oct 15, 2019 21:28
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Gerund posted:So does the accumulation of new titles and need for Wyrd-fueled opposition, and the suggested need for reality to exist by their continuing creation of Changelings, represent a way in which the Abyssal nihilism has been perverted to being locked into the current reality wherein changelings can escape to? It depends on whether the True Fae have an "endgame" beyond just continuing to exist, which for meta-game reasons is something it's unlikely for the game line to ever answer. If they do, then there isn't necessarily a perversion in the first place. If they don't, then there are a lot of interesting ways to potentially answer that question -- maybe they've already succeeded; there's nothing to say that successive generations of Abyssal Intruders all have the same goals, so maybe any of them that actually realize their desires become co-opted into the status quo and necessarily become more static and passive. Or maybe, given that a True Fae who is stripped of all their titles (but manages to avoid being outright erased from existence) usually leaves a person-like core behind means that they're not themselves the Intruders, but merely the hosts and/or beneficiaries of an Intruder whose actual self is something grander but even less tangible. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 21:40
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While the Fallen World is the glitchy, but functional code that composes our reality and the Supernal World is the operating system that lets it run, the Abyss is pure random, unaddressed data that produces weird and nonsensical results when ran as a code. Theoretically a functional alternate reality can be found there – just as random characters can sometimes produce working code – but the chance is incredibly small. There is another world completely inimical to life: the Lower Depths. It's not anti-reality like the Abyss, it's just a bunch of worlds that lack a crucial quality that we take for granted (i. e. space). What's worse, its denizens tend to consume that particular quality when they encounter it, which makes them as dangerous as denizens of the Abyss.
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Oct 15, 2019 22:54
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Gantolandon posted:While the Fallen World is the glitchy, but functional code that composes our reality and the Supernal World is the operating system that lets it run, the Abyss is pure random, unaddressed data that produces weird and nonsensical results when ran as a code. Theoretically a functional alternate reality can be found there – just as random characters can sometimes produce working code – but the chance is incredibly small. It should be noted that 'The Lower Depths' is extremely a catch-all term Mages use for 'places that are further from Supernal Truth than our own phenomenological reality.' Vice demons come from a Lower Depth, so do Strix, and I'm sure that a decent number of God-Machine projects access one of the Depths. Any place that's like our own but fundamentally lacking in some quality, any alternate reality horrorverse, are categorized under the Lower Depths in Awakened cosmology. So saying a thing is from 'the Lower Depths' is mostly a way of saying 'this is bad and bad things are going to happen' rather than an immediately useful piece of information. One nice thing is that Abyssal entities and things from the Lower Depths absolutely don't get along as a rule, because Abyss things are the antithesis of reality while Lower Depths things generally want MORE reality.
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Oct 15, 2019 23:00
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Joe Slowboat posted:One nice thing is that Abyssal entities and things from the Lower Depths absolutely don't get along as a rule, because Abyss things are the antithesis of reality while Lower Depths things generally want MORE reality. Which is itself a setting detail that evolved from the Mage office taking a frankly bizarre sidebar in WoD: Inferno that took pains to say that Inferno “demons” and Abyssal entities hated one another and running with it. In Canon ( much as we dislike the term) Duat from Mummy, the Strix’ Home dimension, and the Inferno are all Lower Depths, joining the handful of increasingly-bizarre ones we’ve made offhand mention of in actual Mage books. Changeling Arcadia isn’t.
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Oct 15, 2019 23:08
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Changeling Arcadia: also not Mage Arcadia. Changeling Arcadia is just weird, no matter who you are.
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Oct 15, 2019 23:12
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As for Abyssal beings, I like the Crossroads the most. It's a circular path, and every time you walk it, it sends you deeper into the Abyss. After the first full circle, people start to disappear and the ones that remain can barely interact with you. After the second one, they disappear completely and the path becomes pretty much a tunnel that unconvincingly mimics the real world. Then changes start – every time you return to the same spot, it looks weirder and more nonsensical. At first the difference is small (the STOP sign spells SPTO instead, the Coke machine distributes drinks that don't exist in the real world), but walk the Crossroads long enough and you'll eventually reach the point where the ground is flowing and the air is made of angry hornets.
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Oct 15, 2019 23:33
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Mors Rattus posted:Changeling Arcadia: also not Mage Arcadia. Has anyone run an adventure where a Mage gets high on his own farts and tries to make Changeling Arcadia and Mage Arcadia become the same thing?
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Oct 15, 2019 23:42
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wdarkk posted:Has anyone run an adventure where a Mage gets high on his own farts and tries to make Changeling Arcadia and Mage Arcadia become the same thing? I believe there was either a dev joke or an actual statement that Archmasters arguing over whether the two Arcadias were the same thing, and doing the magic to make their version true, was a thing. But I might be misremembering. In first edition only, mind.
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Oct 15, 2019 23:58
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 8: Baby you can drive my car, also you can do it on the computer and also you are literally a baby Ah, vehicle rules. The other side of gear in modern games that's not gun porn. Also, ones that have a strong tendency to disconnect from and/or screw up everything else, so of course Shadowrun Sixth Edition is bound to contain plenty. Actually, that's not quite true. For some reason, all of the vehicle rules are written in the context of rigging - that is, remote piloting a vehicle - to the extent that the rules on just driving are actually under the heading Vehicle Rigging. So. A vehicle has a whopping 9 stats. Handling is the difficulty of making piloting tests when driving the vehicle.. well, kind of. We'll see the issue with that below. Acceleration, Speed Interval and Top Speed all relate to how fast you can go. Acceleration is "the maximum meters per combat round the vehicle can safely accelerate or decelerate". That sounds fair enough.. until you then read the actual way acceleration works. If you're going 20 metres per round, you decide to accelerate by 10, so in your next round you go.. 25, because in the round you decide to accelerate your speed changes by only half what you actually accelerated by. Next round, you'll get to 30. And no, there is no option to accelerate or decelerate "unsafely" in order to increase these rates. (And yea, acceleration and deceleration rate are always the same, because you can't have better brakes than your engine.) Speed Interval is the number that your meters per round is divided by to determine your penalty to handling checks - and yes, you could technically munchkin it by going 1mpr less than the threshold - and Top Speed is the fastest your vehicle can go. There's a translation table for converting meters per round to KPH or MPH values, too - although it's in units of 10, and many of the actual vehicles use numbers that aren't. It makes the actual stats look a bit strange, too. For example, the fastest accelerating car in the game has an Acceleration stat of 24mpr. Suppose we want to accelerate to 60mph, which is 81 metres per round: First round: starting speed 0, accelerate 24, apply half acceleration now: 12mpr. Second round: starting speed 24, accelerate 24, apply half acceleration now: 36mpr. Third round: starting speed 48, accelerate 24, apply half acceleration now: 60mpr. Fourth round: starting speed 60, accelerate 21, apply half acceleration now: 70mpr. Fifth round: starting speed 81, target reached. Five rounds. 0-60 in 15 seconds! Yep, a car in the distant future which "pushes the limits of performance and the verge of street legality right to the edge" would only just lose to a 1983 Nissan Pulsar! The rest of the stats are Body and Armor which are used for damage checks, Pilot and Sensor which represent the effectiveness of the built-in driving software, and Seats for how many people they carry. So, just driving around doesn't incur any skill tests. If you want to "do something tricky with the car" - like make a hairpin turn, make a jump, or follow another another car without being spotted(?), you need to roll Piloting+Reaction against your vehicle's Handling score. If you're opposed by another driver, you just roll Piloting+Reaction against them. Example: Billy and Milly are drivers of equal skill who get into a stunt competition. Billy is driving the aformentioned Eurocar Westwind X80, a sports car with an on-road Handling of 2 (which is better, because remember, handling is what you roll against). Milly is driving an Ares Roadmaster, a heavily armored long-haul commercial truck with an on-road handling of 5. Since Billy and Milly are competing, they roll against each other, and their Handling stats are ignored. Even though Milly is driving a pantechnicon and is no better a driver than Billy, she still has a 50% chance of beating Billy in his sportscar. If you fail a handling test, you need have to roll to see if you crash. (Yes, you might crash if you failed to follow another car without being spotted.) That's another Handling test, but always against the standard threshold this time (so I guess Milly does have a higher chance of crashing than Billy, which might even it out a bit). If you crash, everyone in the vehicle takes damage equal to the mpr speed divided by 10. "A vehicle may have safety features such as airbags, rapid-expanding foam, or even simply seat belts, which can reduce this damage," says the section, but none of the vehicles actually list these nor the amount of damage they subtract. Curiously, crashing does not appear to do any damage to the vehicle. In fact, there are very few rules for doing damage to a vehicle at all. The Defense Rating of a vehicle is its Armor plus the driver's Piloting, so as usual, the Armor value of a car doesn't actually protect it against damage. It can presumably roll Body to resist damage, but there's no guaranteed level of resistance. Body also determines a vehicle's HP count in the same way that stats determine them for PCs - half the stat plus 8 - and some of the vehicle Body values are alarmingly low, which means that someone with a cyberjaw can just straight up eat a Proteus Lamprey submarine in 9 seconds. That said, he may have trouble hitting it, because there are no rules for what a vehicle rolls in defence against regular attacks. If you try to ram a vehicle with another vehicle, it's an opposed Piloting+Reaction test, but there's nothing about shooting a vehicle or anything similar. If you try to ram a person, you test against their Intuition+Reaction as usual, and you deal them damage equal to your vehicle's body halved plus one for each speed interval. "Soft targets inflict the target's Body/4 rounded up damage back on the vehicle", so ramming a troll with a sports car can leave the car off worse. To continue with the daftness, there is no actual statement of how much hard targets inflict back - I guess maybe you're supposed to use the same ram damage on both sides, but it doesn't say it, so technically you can crash into tanks all day as long as you don't hit any trolls. Oh, and if a vehicle loses all its HP, it "breaks down". Doesn't crash. Doesn't do anything to the passengers. Just breaks down. If you want to fire from a vehicle, that's Logic+Engineering for a mounted weapon, or a regular ranged attack if you're just firing out of the window or something; although in both cases the penalty for the vehicle's speed is applied to the attack roll. There are, however, no rules for shooting a person in a vehicle as opposed to the vehicle itself. This means that it's even easier than it was in Fourth Edition for your group to pull off the dumb poo poo my murderhoboes did of crashing armored cars into gunfights and blasting everyone at no danger. Now, how about drones? Drones can't be piloted manually (you'd look pretty drat silly trying to sit on one) so you have two options: rig them or remote control them. They use their Piloting stat to maneuver, and fire weapons with their Sensor rating plus the rating of their software driver for that weapon. If they're fired at, they use their Evasion software.. assuming they have it, and if they don't we have no idea what they use. Oh, and as we mentioned last time, Drones can.. hack. They have an Electronic Warfare program available which "is used as the Cracking skill for purposes of jamming and overcoming ECM." There are no ECM devices in the book which are overcome by using the Cracking skill. Ig. Do we think that maybe the rules for actually rigging vehicles - that is, controlling them through VR - could be any better? Well, we kick off by saying that to do this, first of all you need a Vehicle Control Rig, "or the appropriate technomancer complex form", because the author didn't actually bother to read the section on Technomancers and didn't realise that Machine Mind is an echo, not a complex form. So, if you "jump in" to a vehicle and take control of it in VR, you use your Willpower, Charisma, Logic, and Intuition values to replace your Body, Strength, Agility, and Reaction. I am not sure what your Body and Strength would ever be used for while rigging a vehicle, since none of the vehicle skills relate to them, but hey. The alternative is to use a Rigger Command Console, which only lets you issue commands to drones, but does let you control multiple drones and can share software between them. The bad news is that your Command Console can be hacked, and the really bad news is that since you probably don't have a cyberdeck you don't have any way to fight back. The recommendation is to "use the Full Matrix Defense action". Which defends only your own person (not the device you're in) and we don't know if you can use it while rigging a vehicle or not.. Ok. Let's stop it. The section on rigging and vehicles, not including the vehicle stats, is 6 pages long. There are 21 suggested errata for the section on Reddit. Not all of them are justified, but still, that's 3 and a half errors per page, which has to be some kind of record. It's a shame that trains are not listed as vehicles, because if they were, they'd be wrecked. (But wouldn't take any damage) Next time, we'll make everything else irrelevant by learning about magic. hyphz fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 01:00
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So a thing to remember is that the nWoD/ChronD lines never really abandoned the annihilation/change/stasis aspect found in oWoD. It's precedence various from game line to game. For werewolves, Maeljin/things crawling out of Wounds are linked to the Abyss (or at least most of the details point towards it). The Bale Hounds are similarly linked to the Abyss.
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Oct 16, 2019 04:40
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Tasoth posted:So a thing to remember is that the nWoD/ChronD lines never really abandoned the annihilation/change/stasis aspect found in oWoD. It's precedence various from game line to game. For werewolves, Maeljin/things crawling out of Wounds are linked to the Abyss (or at least most of the details point towards it). The Bale Hounds are similarly linked to the Abyss. Nnnnno? Both no to the Triat concept being particularly manifest in the nWoD, and specifically to the Maeljin and their Wounds and Bale Hounds being associated with the Abyss. A sidebar in Demon explicitly asserts that the Maeljin and the Wounds are associated with the realm described in the (somewhat hackneyed) World of Darkness: Inferno, which is not the Abyss. The dichotomy between Mage's Lower Depths and Abyss defies categorization by the static/dynamic/entropic model. Both represent different forms of annihilation, with contact with the Lower Depths threatening to reduce the Fallen World to a vacuum, destruction as emptiness, while the Abyss threatens to destroy and drown all reason and meaning from the world, destruction as breakdown. They represent aspects of stasis and dynamism too, with ancient scelesti associating the Abyss with the primordial chaos. It's just not a useful lens to look through here.
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Oct 16, 2019 05:07
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Tasoth posted:So a thing to remember is that the nWoD/ChronD lines never really abandoned the annihilation/change/stasis aspect found in oWoD. It's precedence various from game line to game. For werewolves, Maeljin/things crawling out of Wounds are linked to the Abyss (or at least most of the details point towards it). The Bale Hounds are similarly linked to the Abyss. No, they really aren’t. they were linked to the Lower Depths (the Maeljin were literally Inferno demons) until the very latest NWerewolf book, where the writers retconned the Bale Hounds. The list of things in other games that are Abyssal is really tiny, and mostly in Hunter.
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Oct 16, 2019 07:52
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Besides, they don't even fit. The Bale Hounds are your typical "kill puppies for Satan" faction who wants to spread as much suffering and misery as possible. The Abyssal entities don't really want you to suffer, they may even try to help you in their own way. More likely, they are completely indifferent. The Anumerus doesn't really want to kill people by making them accidentally overdose or get them fired by bankrupting the company where they work – it just happens that wherever it appears, you're completely unable to use numbers in a predictable way.
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Oct 16, 2019 10:04
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Shadowrun: Have they fixed the vehicle speed issue from 5th edition? The speed stat was based on a linear scale but whoever did the table you needed to read in order to find out what a given speed value was in meters per round (in a completely different part of the book of course and you still had to manually convert it to km/h) was using an exponential curve for speed values so each rating was much faster than the previous. For some reason it also had walking and running rates for each speed. Is a car's speed value walking or running? Who knows. The totally average and common Ford Americar couldn't even manage 30km/h. Meanwhile you could use a spirit to boost the speed value until you quite easily broke the speed of light.
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Oct 16, 2019 10:46
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The Abyss: It's good to see so many people Getting It in this thread. The Abyss is one of the most commonly hosed-up things in nWoD books where freelancers on other lines assume it must be a certain way (usually some factor of sapient cackling evil or "demons") without any knowledge. People dropping offhand references to Traditions or coincidental magic can be swiftly corrected if caught, but proposing your thing that acts nothing like the Abyss is from it has proven harderbto stomp out. And then there's stuff like the Contagion, which acts exactly like the Abyss but isn't, for reasons that escape me.
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Oct 16, 2019 11:04
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All this discussion about things named the same thing but are different and also related to a bunch of similar things that are the same but also not I think is a very strong indication that an editor needs to take a chainsaw to the setting and just tear most of it up. It just doesn't work.
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Oct 16, 2019 12:51
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At this point it's not a soluble problem in nWoD, to the degree that the books have actively started to acknowledge and lean into the confusion in some cases. There are six or so different things called demons, and while they're all quite different, most people that aren't demons of some type can't tell them apart casually. Especially hunters. e: that said the real thing is that the game lines aren't designed with crossover in mind, and shouldn't be, in nearly all cases, because doing so weakens the individual game lines in basic design. Crossover weirds things, and that can be fun, but it can't be the core concern when making a new WoD game.
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Oct 16, 2019 12:54
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If they're writing for another line, maybe their abyss isn't this Abyss anyway, just like those five other kinds of demons aren't Demons. Particularly if it serves the goals of the line they're writing for better.
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Oct 16, 2019 13:12
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no, it was meant to be the Mage Abyss. And that's the real problem - it's not that there's some things that share names. That ship sailed with Changeling. The problem's a vast ip with noone really looking out for mistakes and a freelancer pool who are 99% of the time brilliant and 1% beset by the Dunning-Krugers. No one *means* to put references to oWoD setting and mechanics into nWoD books, or getting core setting of linrs wrong in crossover bits, but it keeps happening. (And lest it seem I'm whining about kids on my goddamn lawn, who's got two thumbs and wrote a section in his very first freelancing job referencing Wraith the Oblivion mechanics in a Requiem book? That got published, so you can go read it now? THIS guy. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 13:31
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Yeah, but it's not intended to be a cohesive single setting, so maybe the Abyss is sapient and hates you in other lines if it would fit them better. I'm saying that element of the setting's writing means it's hard to say something is definitively how something works across all lines and works, even when intentionally writing crossover stuff.
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Oct 16, 2019 13:44
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Er...no. If it is intended to be the same thing, what it is and how it works doesn't differ across lines. It's just, there's a lot of things that share names and aren't the same thing. If you're intending to use the Abyss from Mage, it should work like the Abyss. If you're making a new Abyss, it should be something specifically different.
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Oct 16, 2019 13:55
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, but it's not intended to be a cohesive single setting, so maybe the Abyss is sapient and hates you in other lines if it would fit them better. I'm saying that element of the setting's writing means it's hard to say something is definitively how something works across all lines and works, even when intentionally writing crossover stuff. True, but good crossover material is either aware it’s modifying the themes and style of one game, and explains how, or doesn’t do that. The toolbox approach doesn’t mean ignoring that the individual lines have specific investments; if anything it means those investments are even more important because each line has to justify its own setting thematically. The Abyss has the qualities or antiqualities it has because they serve the larger Mage story; if it can serve a different purpose in another book that’s cool but needs to be done consciously and ideally with signposts for the reader that it’s not the same in that case. E: an unpublished example of this is that one of the devs posted a cool Werewolf monster that’s a weird eye infestation and a giant eye on the other side of a portal, and suggested that in a Woof game, maybe that’s what the Seers worship as The Eye, while making it clear that this is not how most mage material assumes Exarchs work and would not be compatible. That’s a good approach if you want to mess around with established ideas radically. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 13:58
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I'm actually curious, what is it like freelancing for OPP? Do you get something of a setting bible or direct guidance on any of these things?
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Oct 16, 2019 14:00
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Night10194 posted:I'm actually curious, what is it like freelancing for OPP? Do you get something of a setting bible or direct guidance on any of these things? In an ideal world, yes! And it's a lot more likely these days, with dedicated line devs and actual communication. The outline of a book should have most of what you need in it, but I understand that for specific, complex settings the devs prepare actual setting bibles for the writers. (I only have direct experience with Scion; we have a Slack and each pantheon gets its own mini-setting bible built into the book outlines of the main-line Scion books they originate in to help unify their themes and religious ideas.)
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Oct 16, 2019 14:03
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Night10194 posted:I'm actually curious, what is it like freelancing for OPP? Do you get something of a setting bible or direct guidance on any of these things? There's a style guide. Requiem, Awakening, Sin-Eaters, Descent, Primordial and Renegades have setting bibles. Don't know about others or oWoD games. Mage's setting bible is huge. It's longer than some of the game's actual sourcebooks. EDIT: Rose chopped Vampire's bible in half and sells the halves on the Storyteller's Vault, if you're curious. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 14:10
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Nobilis 2E How Play Game quote:You can think of Nobilis as a paperless writer’s workshop. You and the other players work together to tell a fun, engaging, and even meaningful story within constraints provided by the rules and setting. As much as I like a lot of the actual play and GM'ing advice in Nobilis, the second line here bugged me a bit. Everyone should get screentime when you're running or playing a game, and especially in a game with few-to-no mechanical constraints, people running roughshod over each others' ideas isn't necessarily a "contribution." It can just as easily dishearten someone, considering how hard it is to encourage some people to step up to bat, it feels like this should have been paired with advice about asking or engaging others before you add a potentially disruptive element or story direction. Everyone's got a different storytelling style, and someone who's a less confident storyteller could easily be scared back into the shadows rather than just "rolling with the punches". The rules are also established as "can't conjure story elements out of thin air, have to be consistent from one scene to the next, can't magically make anyone fall in love with someone else." And the last one feels kind of out of place and like a result of some playtester decided to get Romance Weird or something. "Look, Jeff, it's in the book. You can't just write that she wants to marry you now." As someone who's usually the GM, though, I appreciate that it's enshrined in the rules that people must fete me with drinks, snacks and free dinners. Does need a line saying that pizza with pineapple on it doesn't count, though, before some fucker poisons me with that poo poo. We get exactly two columns of "how to play" before it, in the "how to play"-chapter, segues into setting details that should perhaps have been in the previous chapter, that being the actual setting chapter, then it gets back on track with telling us what a character is made out of besides a name and a description. We have our Aspect(basically how good we are at human stuff, like running, shooting, punching, thinking and smiling, ranging from "just human" to "superman"), Domain(how good we are with our specific superpower), Realm(how good we are at using our magical spirit clubhouse or protecting it) and Spirit(a catch-all for whatever other magical things we want to do). The book then makes the brave and wonderful decision of putting the rest of chargen 40 pages down the road after giving us this and some general rules for conflict resolution(whoever has the highest stat wins, always) and a general idea of how difficult it is to blow supernaturals up with magic powers. The difficulty descriptions of how to do things with magic powers, i.e. how high a stat you need or how many miracle points you need to spend to do it, are also exceptionally vague, defining difficulty levels with stuff like "make big things." Like, I think I'd almost prefer no rules at all than rules this vague. Wait, So What's The Point Again? Also known as "what do Nobilis actually, like, do?" Firstly, you might be tasked with maintaining your Imperator's Chancel, his magic pocket dimension or whatever. Mostly you beat the locals around the head until they obey and generally try to run the place like an actual government but with wizards. Now you can nerve staple the drones with magic wands rather than machines. You can attend to the overall mood as a distant dictatorial council handing down decrees or you can run around at street level snooping into everyone's business and kicking over their trash cans and doing all the work yourself. Supposedly the main challenge here is deciding when the needs of the many override the freedoms of the individual. In all seriousness I could see the appeal of this, but I feel like the book kind of sabotages itself by giving you such a wide swathe of different things to do. Like, the Chancels are so incredibly varied because the Imperators are, so it feels like it's just missing some sort of guiding thread to give it some flavour. Most books, when you read them, they make stuff pop into your head about what you want to do and where you'd take it, but this part just leaves my brain a blank gray slate for the most part. Alternately can focus on personal projects, which are basically hobbies but with divine hubris. Rather than breeding a nice rose you breed a nice rose that's also sapient and can do your taxes. You were also a mortal once, so you can go back and turn all your bullies or the guy who trolled you on twitter into pillars of salt. It kind of runs the gamut from "extremely petty poo poo that most mortals would do if they were suddenly demigods" through "become a shadow dictator" or "find a loophole to get into Heaven" and "actually use your powers for good and stop reality from melting." There's also a suggestion that you could attempt ethnic genocide and WHY THE gently caress IS THIS EVEN A SUGGESTION IN THE BOOK? quote:Arranging or preventing the genocide of some ethnic subgroup without violating the Code Fidelitatis. Yes, I'm aware it also says you could be trying to prevent it instead. But what the gently caress, Nobilis. I also want to point out that the book keeps hammering on the "romantic" options. Like how the Chancel management can lead to romances. How your personal goals can be to romance someone or gently caress literally everyone in existence. More like Nobilis, the Game of Sovereign Boners, amirite? Though honestly I feel like I'd rather deal with that than some player attempting to genocide the Kurdish people. So aside from impregnating half the human species and murdering the other half, you can go socialize with other Nobilis and ask them how turning Billy Jenkins into a pillar of salt full of spiders is going and how many minorities they've gunned down in back alleys today. Okay, I'll stop it. I just loving can't get over the genocide thing. How am I supposed to skip from that to a paragraph about how you can arrange a cool fairie rave or whatever? You can also meet up to arrange a lynching or to have military maneuvers at the bottom of the sea or a cave where mortals can't see but where you can prepare to fight some bads with your armies of stuff. You've also got your Anchors to attend to, they've been mostly mentioned in passing so far but as far as I can tell are mortals that you can use as relays for your divine powers so you don't actually have to be around to torture the guy who called you a "fuckbird whoremonger" on Twitter, you can just use his boss as an anchor and fill his desk with ants through that every day. But this means you A) need to keep your anchors cooperative and B) keep them alive since a bunch of unfortunate things tend to happen to them often, and enemy supernaturals might well try to gently caress with them to gently caress with you by proxy. This is, so far, probably the part that sounds like it has the most potential for fun and also the most... evocative suggested scenarios. It feels like it has a sense of whimsy about it that works well with Nobilis and... it generally feels like the game works better with the smaller scales, despite what it seems to want to do. Like... the whole war for all of reality is so abstract and is apparently occurring in five different ways and also there are internal wars among the Nobilis and etc. that it feels like a muddle. Like it doesn't feel like the game needs LIGHT NOBILIS vs DARK NOBILIS. Just make us oppose the Excrucians and those Nobilis who are selfish dicks, boom. Clear concept, no splat bloat. Then there's Serving Your Estate, which is basically the idea that if, say, you're the Power of Rivers, you need to protect and further your core concept. This is a decent idea, and thankfully free of roleplayed sex or genocide. You spread your Estate and make it pervade more things(for instance, the Power of Rivers might try to encourage more hydro-electric power usage so she could use her control over rivers to, one step removed, affect mortal infrastructure). It's actually a pretty nice idea but kind of clashes with the bit where nothing seems to really compel the Nobilis to give a gently caress about mortals unless their existence is directly tied to them(like, say, if you're the Power of Video Game Consoles, probably cave olms won't give much of a gently caress about the Playstation 4, so you need to keep humanity alive and thriving or you're out of power and influence). Next there's Serving Your Code, which is kind of what I mean with too many criss-crossing lines. Just being a Power and having a theme/realm that you needed to defend and empower, a Chancel to manage, Anchors to protect, old mortal grudges to settle, a reality to defend, etc. is already enough but then you also have responsibilities towards: Heaven, Hell, Light, Dark or Wild. It doesn't help that Hell and Dark are basically the same, except Dark prefers self-destruction to lakes of sulphur, and Light and Heaven are also identical outside of Light being more concerned with structural inequalities and Heaven is more concerned with personal failings. Wild, meanwhile, just breaks down walls and kicks in doors while getting drunk. Lastly there's something that feels like it should have fit under the Chancel Management which is the category of "taking orders from your Imperator and doing what he drat well tells you to do." Mostly bullying other chancels, protecting your own, or burning down thousands of human homes. Because we just needed yet more war crimes in there for the PC's to commit because why the gently caress not. Next: A loving 20-page "example of play," what the hell, that's a small campaign.
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Oct 16, 2019 14:58
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quote:Next: A loving 20-page "example of play," what the hell, that's a small campaign. The Example of Play for Glitch is even bigger! But seriously, the Example of Play was probably the most popular part of the book, and people complained vociferously when the third edition turned out not to have one. I think it's honestly way more useful to do it this way, where you play out an entire sample session, than to block out a single exchange of actions like most smaller samples wind up doing. Some of the older White Wolf books did multiple-page comic book sections but I don't think they tended to be very helpful. quote:Spirit(a catch-all for whatever other magical things we want to do). It's also an insanely powerful defensive stat, so powerful that it almost, sort of, makes up for the fact that it's completely passive. 3e, in recognition of the blandness of this, would eventually replace Spirit with Persona, so that "control over your Estate" wound up split into two powers, one that lets you control your Estate itself, and one that lets you manipulate the properties of the Estate, so that Domain (Fire) commands fire and Persona (Fire) lets you make things more or less fiery. quote:It doesn't help that Hell and Dark are basically the same, except Dark prefers self-destruction to lakes of sulphur, and Light and Heaven are also identical outside of Light being more concerned with structural inequalities and Heaven is more concerned with personal failings. Wild, meanwhile, just breaks down walls and kicks in doors while getting drunk. It would be interesting if you wanted to do 3e after this one and compare some of the differences, since 3e did a lot to make these factions more distinct. In fact, 3e's version of Hell is some of the best bits Jenna's ever done: quote:Hell is always with you. Rand Brittain fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 15:31
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Those sure are a bunch of war crimes. I suppose the point was probably more like 'Nobilises can fulfill their various purposes and goals in a horrible way that is not contrary to the underlying principles of reality.' Nevertheless, dang!
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Oct 16, 2019 15:33
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Rand Brittain posted:But seriously, the Example of Play was probably the most popular part of the book, and people complained vociferously when the third edition turned out not to have one. I think it's honestly way more useful to do it this way, where you play out an entire sample session, than to block out a single exchange of actions like most smaller samples wind up doing. Some of the older White Wolf books did multiple-page comic book sections but I don't think they tended to be very helpful. I like examples of play, because they help to pinpoint what kind of sessions does the system support best.
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Oct 16, 2019 15:33
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Rand Brittain posted:3e, in recognition of the blandness of this, would eventually replace Spirit with Persona, so that "control over your Estate" wound up split into two powers, one that lets you control your Estate itself, and one that lets you manipulate the properties of the Estate, so that Domain (Fire) commands fire and Persona (Fire) lets you make things more or less fiery.
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Oct 16, 2019 15:40
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Nessus posted:What does this mean? The latter seems completely and thoroughly covered by the former. Domain lets you set someone on fire; Persona lets you give them a fiery temper.
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Oct 16, 2019 15:41
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Essentially you make a list of properties for your Estate, like "fire is all-consuming" and "fire warms the heart", and Persona lets you imbue things with those properties (or make things less like them) rather than just conjuring fire out of thin air and throwing it at someone with Domain.
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Oct 16, 2019 15:54
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Rand Brittain posted:Domain lets you set someone on fire; Persona lets you give them a fiery temper. 
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Oct 16, 2019 15:55
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Rand Brittain posted:It would be interesting if you wanted to do 3e after this one and compare some of the differences, since 3e did a lot to make these factions more distinct. In fact, 3e's version of Hell is some of the best bits Jenna's ever done: I would be eager to review this, and not only because it would probably mean some people would burn me in effigy on their lawn, but because Nobilis has some good ideas that seem to get buried under the setting being a bit too... kitchen sinky.
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Oct 16, 2019 15:59
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hyphz posted:"Soft targets inflict the target's Body/4 rounded up damage back on the vehicle", so ramming a troll with a sports car can leave the car off worse. This is the way it should be, hitting a troll with a lovely little hatchback should annihilate the hatchback. The troll should get jacked up too, but the car should be a wreck. PurpleXVI posted:Next: A loving 20-page "example of play," what the hell, that's a small campaign. One of the biggest criticisms of Moran's games is that it's really hard to figure out how to actually play them, so having a thing that covers a whole session is super useful. The individual systems aren't usually very complicated, but figuring out how to put them together and get a session out of it, especially with the wild narrative power that players have in her games, can be difficult. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
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Oct 16, 2019 16:49
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