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PJOmega posted:What school is made irrelevant by Netflix? Film school! Boom! Thanks, I'll be here all week. I couldn't ask for a better representation of the cheese dude mascot.
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# ? Feb 12, 2025 11:18 |
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Videomancers gets power by watching their favorite TV series when it airs and lose all their accumulated charges by missing the show. That includes reruns, but not recordings, so you can't trap a videomancer by turning on a DVD player. I wouldn't say Netflix makes it irrelevant since watching a recording doesn't count for gaining charges, and streaming a show on the internet is more or less the same as watching a taped recording. However, the way a lot of channels changes their programming methods when DVRs got popular probably hosed with them pretty hard. You were about to go mess with a rival cabal during their ritual under the full moon? Oh too bad your magic buddy can't miss an episode of NCIS because there's a marathon showing at the same time. Never expect reliable help from a videomancer attuned to police procedurals. Basic cable has those guys locked down.
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What happens when your favourite show is some sci-fi darling that runs for 2 seasons and gets canceled?
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Halloween Jack posted:What happens when your favourite show is some sci-fi darling that runs for 2 seasons and gets canceled? There's gotta be rules for choosing a new show, unless you want to have like Simpsons powers.
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Simian_Prime posted:I'm Numanoid (the guy who posted the SM Elric podcast link), and I was honestly surprised by how negative the response was. You're on to something about RPG.net being the community's conservative dad. Just as an aside, I love that liberals always complain that RPGNet is too conservative, but conservatives complain that RPGNet is too liberal. Gamers! ![]()
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You lose all your charges when your show gets cancelled, but you're allowed to attune to new shows more or less whenever. You can attune to new shows for free if you catch the world premiere, or spend a significant charge to attune to a show that's been going. Of course, if your show gets cancelled but another station starts playing reruns a few years later, your life just got more complicated. If you're attuned to two or more shows you could potentially build a lot of power quickly, but if the shows get scheduled at the same time you can't gain power from either one because you'll always miss the other.
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theironjef posted:There's gotta be rules for choosing a new show, unless you want to have like Simpsons powers. You can actually watch and gain power from as many shows as you want. However, if you're watching shows that wind up getting scheduled to air at the same time on different channels, you're basically hosed unless one of them gets canceled. To a videomancer though, that's like wishing for a loved one to die from a terminal disease or something similar.
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Lynx Winters posted:You lose all your charges when your show gets cancelled, but you're allowed to attune to new shows more or less whenever. You can attune to new shows for free if you catch the world premiere, or spend a significant charge to attune to a show that's been going. Of course, if your show gets cancelled but another station starts playing reruns a few years later, your life just got more complicated. If you're attuned to two or more shows you could potentially build a lot of power quickly, but if the shows get scheduled at the same time you can't gain power from either one because you'll always miss the other.
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Evil Mastermind posted:Just as an aside, I love that liberals always complain that RPGNet is too conservative, but conservatives complain that RPGNet is too liberal. Heh, I didn't mean to take it down that road with my initial analogy. My very limited understanding of RPGnet is that they tend towards being very defensive of old-guard stuff. Like they're the 3.5 guys in the edition wars and so on.
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theironjef posted:There's gotta be rules for choosing a new show, unless you want to have like Simpsons powers. Sort of; if your show gets cancelled, you lose all your charges and you're stuck getting minor charges off reruns forever. You can just dump a show but doing so also makes you lose all your charges, and you need a significant charge to attune to a new show. Watching reruns only gets you minors. So if your fetish show gets cancelled, you lose all your charges, cannot gain anything bigger than a minor charge because that's all you can get off a rerun, and therefore you're stuck watching reruns for the rest of your life (or until you can cash them up to significant ones if you know the right ritual).
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Halloween Jack posted:Two screens? You have to pay absolute attention to a show to gain power from it. Like, you can't even skip the commercials.
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theironjef posted:Heh, I didn't mean to take it down that road with my initial analogy. My very limited understanding of RPGnet is that they tend towards being very defensive of old-guard stuff. Like they're the 3.5 guys in the edition wars and so on. The thing is, they're really not; in fact a lot of people accused RPGNet of being utterly anti-3.x because they clamped down on people threadshitting 4e threads and making "4e is WoW" posts against the rules. RPGNet just has this weird confirmation bias thing with people's opinions of it. No idea why.
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Halloween Jack posted:Two screens? You have to be fully-focused on the entire broadcast, including commercials. That means no flipping channels, no getting up to pee, no joking with your buddy about bad writing or delivery, nothing. UA magic stems from obsession and paradox, and is in no way meant to make anyone's lives easier. The cost of great power is irrational and self-destructive behavior. Even the process of being able to be an adept requires you to completely lose your mind and reconstruct your entire worldview around whatever your focus is.
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Evil Mastermind posted:The thing is, they're really not; in fact a lot of people accused RPGNet of being utterly anti-3.x because they clamped down on people threadshitting 4e threads and making "4e is WoW" posts against the rules. I don't do a lot of forum visitation outside of SA and the AVclub, so all my knowledge about RPGnet and The Forge and whatnot comes from grognards.txt. Clearly the most unbiased source of all. I found the original thread where we were mentioned on RPGnet because I have stats info on the systemmastery site and I noticed a spike from there. Same a few months ago when someone mentioned us on Reddit. I think the negative reaction we got in there is similar to some twitter beef we've seen which is that people go in thinking "oh boy, a rationally presented critical analysis of the games of yesteryear, I can't wait for their measured thoughtful opinions!"
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It actually baffled me when you brought that up in one of them podcasts, that apparently some people don't understand why you're negative about the game? I mean, it's the format. It's obvious why from the title of the darn podcast, even.
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Evil Mastermind posted:Sort of; if your show gets cancelled, you lose all your charges and you're stuck getting minor charges off reruns forever. You can just dump a show but doing so also makes you lose all your charges, and you need a significant charge to attune to a new show. Watching reruns only gets you minors. Well, or you can get your poo poo together and stop being obsessed with a show that's been cancelled for five years. You won't be a videomancer any more, but at least you can act like more of a human. Anyway, Netflix and Tivo and video streaming didn't ruin the videomancer mechanically, but they did ruin the thematics behind it. One of the big things about the school is that you're having a shared experience with millions of people across the country by sitting in your room alone and staring at a little metal box for half an hour. These days that can technically still happen, but unless it's something crazy like Game of Thrones there just isn't the sense that the next episode of something is an event.
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:It actually baffled me when you brought that up in one of them podcasts, that apparently some people don't understand why you're negative about the game? I mean, it's the format. It's obvious why from the title of the darn podcast, even. We had this hilarious thing where a guy tweeted that he was super excited to start listening to the show (after being recommended on another podcast) and then over the course of two days slowly shift from excited to cautious to angry to straight up campaigning against us. We got a tweet like "I couldn't disagree more with their review of Stormbringer." then "Do you guys like ANY games?" then finally "Hey followers, is there a GOOD podcast that reviews the GOOD things about old roleplaying games because the NEGATIVITY of systemmastery is something I don't need in my life." Whole time I was just thinking maybe, but that show is probably pretty boring. Lurks With Wolves posted:Well, or you can get your poo poo together and stop being obsessed with a show that's been cancelled for five years. You won't be a videomancer any more, but at least you can act like more of a human. Now that'd be the Twittermancer. You can get all the powers of Kanye by repeatedly updating his twitter as fast as f5 can be pressed.
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RPGnet is mostly full of older nerds, and they're often very very provincial about their particular nerd tastes. And any game out there, no matter how mediocre or stupid or downright bad, is somebody's favorite game, and they are going to defend it to the death against all criticism. I mean, there was one poster there who battled everyone for the honor of Gary Gygax's otherwise unloved DANGEROUS JOURNEYS: MYTHUS until he was run off the forums for reasons unrelated to his Gygaxophilia. Culturally, the forum tilts left-of-center, and the moderation takes positive steps to weed out the worst neanderthal impulses of fans (casual homophobia, lecturing transpeople about what their gender really is, and denying the experience of rape and harassment victims are all bannable offenses). But fan tastes are fan tastes and most nerds never lose their attachment to the things they loved in their late teen years.
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Well, or you can get your poo poo together and stop being obsessed with a show that's been cancelled for five years. You won't be a videomancer any more, but at least you can act like more of a human.
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Lynx Winters posted:You have to be fully-focused on the entire broadcast, including commercials. That means no flipping channels, no getting up to pee, no joking with your buddy about bad writing or delivery, nothing. UA magic stems from obsession and paradox, and is in no way meant to make anyone's lives easier. The cost of great power is irrational and self-destructive behavior. Even the process of being able to be an adept requires you to completely lose your mind and reconstruct your entire worldview around whatever your focus is. So it's like a very, very specialized Otakumancer? Now how about a mage that needs to constantly churn out fanfiction of his favorite franchise, with the amount of charges based on the amount of Mary Sues and nonsensical pairings? Or fanart with totally original characters (do not steal)? theironjef posted:We had this hilarious thing where a guy tweeted that he was super excited to start listening to the show (after being recommended on another podcast) and then over the course of two days slowly shift from excited to cautious to angry to straight up campaigning against us. We got a tweet like "I couldn't disagree more with their review of Stormbringer." then "Do you guys like ANY games?" then finally "Hey followers, is there a GOOD podcast that reviews the GOOD things about old roleplaying games because the NEGATIVITY of systemmastery is something I don't need in my life." Twitter does some weird stuff to people. Doresh fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Mar 26, 2015 |
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I can just imagine being a Law and Ordomancer, Somewhere inbetween ion, TNT, and USA you might be able to fit in about 30 minutes to eat, poo poo, and sleep.
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Zereth posted:I feel like the sort of person who would become a videomancer would not be capable of doing that. Which is pretty much the point of all the adept disciplines.
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Kurieg posted:I can just imagine being a Law and Ordomancer, Somewhere inbetween ion, TNT, and USA you might be able to fit in about 30 minutes to eat, poo poo, and sleep. The Rerun part never seemed to make sense in the philosophy of the Videomancer. The whole point is, as someone pointed out upthread, that people who are hundreds if not thousands of miles apart are sharing an experience broadcast from a place that could be thousands of miles away from them both. Reruns are reruns. Then again, as is with all adept schools of thought and getting your head around them, the difference is I am not legitimately bugfuck crazy.
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Doodmons posted:oWoD's position is "all these games take part in the same universe, but the rules and fluff doesn't let that happen" I never got the impression the nWoD wasn't one setting. It's just that unlike the old one, with Metaplot and revelations and big cosmologies, the new world has been pretty consistent about nothing ever making sense for it's inhabitants. Every answers only leading to mroe questions and things like that. So every gameline is about how that group views the nWoD and is colored by their understanding of it, but every time there's a crossover it becomes clear everyone knows a lot less than they think they do. So despite being less consistent in how things work, it's actually been a lot more consistent in tone, making it feel more like different corners of one world. IMHO.
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FMguru posted:Culturally, the forum tilts left-of-center, and the moderation takes positive steps to weed out the worst neanderthal impulses of fans (casual homophobia, lecturing transpeople about what their gender really is, and denying the experience of rape and harassment victims are all bannable offenses). But fan tastes are fan tastes and most nerds never lose their attachment to the things they loved in their late teen years. I love how man of the big bans seem to follow this pattern: Mods: "Don't do <thing> or you'll get banned." Person: (does <thing>) Mods: "Okay, you're banned." Person: "OH WHAT THE gently caress YOU GODDAMN FASCISTS THIS IS A WITCH HUNT" There was one guy I saw who was so pissed that he got banned because, by his own admission, he socked around a previous ban, which he new was a bannable offence.
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theironjef posted:Now that'd be the Twittermancer. You can get all the powers of Kanye by repeatedly updating his twitter as fast as f5 can be pressed. The other piece of the Videomancer is that their powers weren't derived from their fetish show, the fetish show was just their source of power. If your Videomancer's fetish show was The Simpsons, you didn't have a different power set from a guy who fetishized the local news. It actually worked that way for all of the -mancers, and prevented them from being as vulnerable to min-maxing and power creep that spell casters in other games encounter. A boozehound doesn't get different powers depending on whether he drinks scotch or light beer (being drunk is what matters) and pornomancers, for example, can only get power from ritualistically mimicing the sexual exploits of one very specific pornstar - they actually lose all their power if they ever have sex outside of the ritual context. UA is a fairly rules-light system, so not having to worry about how a Videomancer who fetishized Loony Tunes was better or worse than a Videomancer who fetishized Dexter was intentional.
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My fav solution to the Videomancer issue was "Just invent your own in-universe TV show." It also lets the players get creative. "Find out what happens on the next episode of "Invitation to Love!"
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PJOmega posted:The Rerun part never seemed to make sense in the philosophy of the Videomancer. The whole point is, as someone pointed out upthread, that people who are hundreds if not thousands of miles apart are sharing an experience broadcast from a place that could be thousands of miles away from them both. Reruns still count because you are still performing the act of watching a TV show on a schedule set by someone else at the same time as a lot of other people. You're still symbolically connected to all the other people watching Ross yell "PIVAT!" at the same time. It's just a minor charge because, well, you've seen it before. You could still go to work the next day and talk about the episode with your cubicle neighbor, but it's not as "important" as a new episode. On the other hand, if you popped a Futurama DVD in at the same time as Adult Swim showed an episode, that's not exactly the same thing because you didn't catch that commercial, or that new promo, or see the technical difficulties because an intern at the station messed up.
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homeless poster posted:UA is a fairly rules-light system, so not having to worry about how a Videomancer who fetishized Loony Tunes was better or worse than a Videomancer who fetishized Dexter was intentional.
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FMguru posted:You see this in other parts of the design, too, like the way each school of magic has a single blast spell that are all pretty much equivalent to one another (if different in the way those effects look). Point your finger at someone, burn a minor charge, they take X damage. Point your finger at someone, burn a significant charge, they take Y damage - whether you're an Urbanomancer or a Bibliomancer or a Personamancer, it's all the same. Bibliomancers and Personamancers don't get blasts ![]()
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FMguru posted:You see this in other parts of the design, too, like the way each school of magic has a single blast spell that are all pretty much equivalent to one another (if different in the way those effects look). Point your finger at someone, burn a minor charge, they take X damage. Point your finger at someone, burn a significant charge, they take Y damage - whether you're an Urbanomancer or a Bibliomancer or a Personamancer, it's all the same. Yeah, I really enjoyed that every flavor of wizard got an evocation spell (or equivalent ability) and then that was that and the rest of their spells were thematically cool and weird things that were still useful, without having to make one wizard the damage school, or worry that the damage wizard would be stronger/weaker than all the other wizards.
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Omnicrom posted:Bibliomancers and Personamancers don't get blasts Bibliomancers get everyone else's blasts via Book Burn, IIRC.
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Evil Mastermind posted:The thing is, they're really not; in fact a lot of people accused RPGNet of being utterly anti-3.x because they clamped down on people threadshitting 4e threads and making "4e is WoW" posts against the rules. Isn't it just that there are enough people on RPGnet that it doesn't have any one single consensus; that there are "vocal minorities" for multiple views? I see the same thing in reddit's /r/rpg or /r/dnd where you have Pathfinder partisans, 3.5 partisans, 4e partisans and of course 5e partisans. I think I've pretty much sworn off the place though after I dipped my toe into a Zak S discussion.
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gradenko_2000 posted:Isn't it just that there are enough people on RPGnet that it doesn't have any one single consensus; that there are "vocal minorities" for multiple views? I see the same thing in reddit's /r/rpg or /r/dnd where you have Pathfinder partisans, 3.5 partisans, 4e partisans and of course 5e partisans. It's kind of weird for me to see people saying RPG.net is the grumpy old man of gaming forums when ENWorld. the official WOTC boards, and Dragonsfoot exist. Seriously, on the grumpy old man scale, compared to those forums RPG.net is a college freshman with green hair, tattoos, and a septum ring.
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Omnicrom posted:Bibliomancers and Personamancers don't get blasts Unless they get tonk enough to make up their own blasts. Then things get interesting. This is your weekly reminder that Unknown Armies owns.
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BRP is a dull old clunker of a system. It gets the job done and plays quickly most of the time, but so do plenty of other systems. I can't figure out why some people are passionate about it.
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theironjef posted:Now that'd be the Twittermancer. You can get all the powers of Kanye by repeatedly updating his twitter as fast as f5 can be pressed. No one man should have all that power.
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Halloween Jack posted:BRP is a boring old clunky system. It gets the job done, but I'm bewildered at the idea of anyone being passionate about it. Ken Hite is super passionate about it where Call of Cthulhu is concerned. He likes to use the word "perfect" in regards to it. I try not to hold it against him because he writes so many nice things, though!
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ken Hite is super passionate about it where Call of Cthulhu is concerned. He likes to use the word "perfect" in regards to it. I try not to hold it against him because he writes so many nice things, though!
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# ? Feb 12, 2025 11:18 |
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ken Hite is super passionate about it where Call of Cthulhu is concerned. He likes to use the word "perfect" in regards to it. I try not to hold it against him because he writes so many nice things, though! Which reminds me... I have a Qelong write-up to finish! Sorry for the delay, I'll try to get it wrapped up for the end of the weekend.
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