Speaking of Princess and the One True Heir, I was thinking - for someone to be awesome enough to actually meet the prophecies in a sense other than the ironic "actually the true heir of the worst parts of the kingdom!" thing, wouldn't she need to be the kind of person who wouldn't actually invest in Mirrors charms in the first place?
White Wolf's World of Darkness
AkatsukiL13
An Enlightened Mind
- Location
- New Copernicus Station
For the same reason the Black Spiral Dancers haven't wiped out the Garou Nation in WtA, they may have the greater numbers but the Pure aren't anymore united than the Forsaken are.
Some part of me wants to try playing a full Princess game at some point.
Well.
That's a very generous reading which takes the mythology at face value - and it is mythology. The Uratha are remarkably similar to the Spider-Hosts and the Rat-Hosts. Suspiciously so.
No, even self-admitted by the Forsaken is that Luna is fucking crazy. She's an Incarna whose portfolio includes madness. That means she's certainly fickle - and worse.
Lunes, her choir of spirits, are also fucking crazy. And any werewolf which gets a Lune as a totem goes crazy.
Mythology.
By "loses the blessing" you of course mean that they have to cut the Renown markings out with a silver knife as part of a Pure ritual which involves so much Agg damage.
There is no known way to acquire an Aspect as a former member of the Pure.
Because "the Pure outnumber the Forsaken" is a particular set of circumstances at a certain point of time in a certain place - in the modern US, the Pure outnumber the Forsaken. That hasn't been true historically, and it isn't true globally - for example, in the UK, the Forsaken outnumber the Pure by a considerable amount.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
I prefer to think of the prophecy working in a post-hoc fashion, there's no one truly destined to be the heir or rather there are thousands of candidates and really the only way to tell which one is which is when they fufill the prophecy.
- Location
- Italy
Interesting.
I have to admit that, I while my exposure to the Old WoD is limited mostly to the corebooks of the big three and a few supplements (mosty Masquerade), I tend to prefer the new lines to the old, with the exception of Vampire, who are about equal in my mind.
Anyway, so from what I understand, a Forsaken chronicle tends towards a local, focusing on the pack of PCs and their efforts to police their territory, as well as defend it from Pure and other invasors, right? If so, I like the sound of it.
As for the tribes, you say that they lack focus, definition? What exactly do you mean by that?
I have to admit that, I while my exposure to the Old WoD is limited mostly to the corebooks of the big three and a few supplements (mosty Masquerade), I tend to prefer the new lines to the old, with the exception of Vampire, who are about equal in my mind.
Anyway, so from what I understand, a Forsaken chronicle tends towards a local, focusing on the pack of PCs and their efforts to police their territory, as well as defend it from Pure and other invasors, right? If so, I like the sound of it.
As for the tribes, you say that they lack focus, definition? What exactly do you mean by that?
Because the difference between them and the well , class, of the werwolfs is not as sharp as it could be and they are somewhat lacking in a distinct culture. The ones that have the most are the Iron Wovles, who mostly have it as examply of them acting unlike other wolves. In a way the tribes are more like a religion as you chose them and are not born into them so you need something more to show why one would chose exactly that tribe.
- Location
- Italy
Hmm, so if just by corebook alone, the Forsaken tribes lack enough distinction from each other and the werewolves' inborn tendecies (I assume that Auspices are like Mage Paths, or equivalent anyway), how would you present them, in a game, to give them a bit more of a character?
The "trick" about the Twilight Queens is that they're foils, and it's quite hard to pick out any specific wrong aspect of them, except in the extreme.
How many visual media examples of magical girls have shown the foresight and prophecy and the everything-centred-around-them of Mirrors, the unceasing determination and willingness to lay down their lives in the name of defeating evil of Storms, or the utmost devotion to protecting their people of Tears? Lots and lots and lots of classical magical girls have a dot or two in one of the Twilight Queens.
That's what makes them so seductive. You really can get away with using a dot or two of Tempesta as a secondary Invocation as a power-boost and something you fall back on when injured and as a way of casting from hitpoints, and you may well never 'answer' for it. It doesn't damn you. It doesn't steal your soul. The Queen of Storms won't possess you. You just have certain... incentives.
(That's what I designed the Invocation system to promote, at least, that very certain kind of Yozi Excellency-like system of incentives to act in a certain way)
Which makes them great antagonists in a way that the Pure Tribes don't seem to be. Maybe the Fire-Touched have a seductive worldview (though I don't know what it would be), but what do the Forsaken find tempting about the Ivory Talons? Or the... crap, I forget the third one's name.
I dunno. When did Usagi or Nanoha or Mai (of MaiHiME) or any central protagonist magical girl personally display prophetic powers, rather than merely being the subject of someone else's prophecy?
Further, when did any of those girls internalize and take for granted the idea that everything centered on them?
But this reminds me, I don't like the idea that the Court of Diamonds has managed the centralization and organization necessary for some of them to experiment with investing deep into Specchio to access the prophecy powers. As you said, the Court in the Dreamlands shouldn't be contributing much of anything beyond their Queen's Invocation and vague guidance, and the Court on Earth shouldn't have their shit nearly that well together.
Likewise nix the idea of organized and controlled dabbling in Lacrima for studying the dead.
Are these ideas that the other developers stuck in around your efforts?
But what IS an Invocation?
Is it merely a magical girl's experience in drawing upon the external power provided by a Queen, rather than anything internal and personal to the princess (like one of Exalted's Virtues)?
A magical girl could leave the Court of Swords and become a Club, forsaking the passion of a Sword, but her Fuoco rating remains unchanged. Which suggests that one's Invocation ratings have nothing to do with the current strength of your personal convictions, and everything to do with how much you've practiced borrowing someone else's power.
I don't have main characters popping into my head on that, but prophecy isn't that rare in supporting characters. Rei/Mars and Michiru/Neptune are just two examples of oracles in Usagi's group alone.
- Location
- The Pleroma
They're not that similar. There are even wolf-hosts in the enemies book for 1e. There are, however, mortals with strange powers over the Shadow that emerge from time to time. There are also the shapechangers in the back of War Against the Pure, which seem to be fusions of spirit and flesh.
AkatsukiL13
An Enlightened Mind
- Location
- New Copernicus Station
Yeah, there's several spirit-hosts beyond the rat and spider ones. I only remember the crow-hosts at the moment but I know there are a few others. Speaking of other NWoD shapeshifters, stick with the material in War Against the Pure. There is a Changing Breeds book for the NWoD but its mostly garbage and not worth picking up.
And just a heads up to OWoD for today only, DriveThruRPG has the PDFs of Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom, Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, Caine's Chosen: The Black Hand and Under the Black Cross are all 50% off while Changeling: the Dreaming 2nd Edition Rulebook is 80% off. Yes, right now a $25 PDF is is $5. Personally I've never touched CtD beyond DA:F but I have to admit at that price I think I might just pick it up.
Also all Scion books are 25% off until Monday.
Yeah, but the Wolf-Hosts were shit. They were nowhere near as good as the Azlu or Beshilu. And pretty much all the "new Hosts" were pretty bad too, without the clear, firm thematic statement of the existing ones. About the only idea of one which could have worked as well were the Locust Hosts.
And the WotP shapeshifters, much as I like them, really don't slot into Werewolf by default - they're a series of alt-antagonists.
- Location
- The Pleroma
Changing Breeds is trash for the Phil Brucato set.
There's only so much you can do when you've already shot off the "Mess with the Gauntlet" stuff.
- Location
- Italy
So having just bought Tribes of the Moon to get a better handle on them, I have to say it's opening fiction is perhaps among my favored pieces of literature in the World of Darkness.
It makes want to start a game in a similar way, with the funeral being an in medias res opening scene followed by the series of events that led the PC's there.
It makes want to start a game in a similar way, with the funeral being an in medias res opening scene followed by the series of events that led the PC's there.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Eh, I like the Crow hosts. Despite their spiritual origin, they have a fundamentally material flavor to them as what's basically a race of bodyjacking uploads. Of course with there tendency to be behind the seen manipulators, lack of physical power, and long term focus they fit better against vampires, changelings, and mages as 'outsiders' rather then against ware-wolfs as native villains.
Well, they also do a great 'mirror darkly' for skin-thieves, with the same themes of transgression and consumption but in reverse, but minor splats be minor yo.
...All right, time to remove gloves. Partially this is because I desperately needed the 2E books to begin to actually have fun playing nWoD, the other because I'm tired of these particular points.
And? Balance is a myth. You tune things enough so everyone has fun and there's a credible threat, then you leave the thing alone. Inter-game balance is not a priority, because it leads to garbage like the Arcadia/Not-Arcadia paragraph in every damn Changeling book that mentions mages. Oh yeah, and the fact that literally everyone on RPGnet seems to have liked both those "bad example" books, so by popular opinion, I'd dare say you need better examples. Blood Sorcery, I'll admit, is a slightly better example than Summoners. Slightly.
Also the "thematic" you were talking about is, well, poisonous, if you speak of Atlantis. It encourages people to ignore the Fallen World, which was never the Lie. That was the Exarchs' collective effect on it. Imperial Mysteries was all about this. The Supernal needs the Fallen to define itself, the Fallen needs the Supernal to give it meaning. More importantly, the whole Atlantis cycle gives people no reason to do things. Not nearly enough things to justify its existence as more than the eternal Mystery it should be.
Which is so much worse than the old way of "Winging It." As opposed to "Here's a reminder card for what penalties and bonuses you're under, as well as some optional objectives for XP."
Less sarcastically, I am going to stomp on one particular PRATT before it arises; FATE did it first. My response: Well, I guess we should jettison everything from Chainmail onward, after all those games did the idea of RPGs first. Conditions work, end of story. More than I can say for arguments about dice penalties and constantly forgetting who had what.
Oh hi there, I'm the person with an entirely rational reason to loathe the imposition of Christian Morality on me; THE VIRTUES AND VICES SUCK!
Of the Seven Vices, one is literally "Not do things" (Sloth), two only have applications that disrupt play in my experience (Wrath and Envy), and one is just plain creepy (Lust). The Virtues are worse; Two are literally "Not do things" (Temperance and Prudence), one is so broad it loses any sense of evocative behavior (Fortitude), one is essentially a straight copy of another in practice and doesn't actually involve any work (Faith), and one is also a copy of another, it's just that following it makes it worthy of being called a Virtue (Hope). Of all of the 14 qualities, I only had character ideas that I would actually like playing with Charity, Hope, Greed, and Gluttony, which brings me to the next point: Straightjackets, especially ones with only 49 possible combinations, are not fun. They are not roleplaying aides. They are boring.
Which brings me to the part about Morality. Besides the incredibly stupid idea of scaling XP which generally leaves everyone variations on the same generalist character applying to Morality too, there's also the fact that human psychology Does Not Work That Way. I have my doubts about Integrity being how human psychology works too, but a PTSD meter does a damn sight better than People Are Born With An Idea Of The Moral Nature Of The Universe And There Is No Unfortunate, Probably Imperialist Victorian Social Ideas In This Statement At All. Yes, murder is sanity shredding, but why is shoplifting sanity shredding too, especially if you genuinely believe it's the only way you and people close to you survive? There was also the problem of the NPC Morality Meter vs PC Morality Meter, but I'll get to that if I'm asked.
Suffice to say, I am very skeptical of the complaint of "has no core moral system", when there's a literal questionnaire to built a personal set of Integrity breaking points right there. With PCs encouraged to take risks in dinging it.
That's all I have for tonight, join me next time for "Why The God-Machine Is Not Metaplot, Why You Don't Actually Have To Care About It, And Why I Despise Old Werewolf But Absolutely Love The New One And Descent More Than Fallen (Because Of The Metaplot In The CWoD)"
And? Balance is a myth. You tune things enough so everyone has fun and there's a credible threat, then you leave the thing alone. Inter-game balance is not a priority, because it leads to garbage like the Arcadia/Not-Arcadia paragraph in every damn Changeling book that mentions mages. Oh yeah, and the fact that literally everyone on RPGnet seems to have liked both those "bad example" books, so by popular opinion, I'd dare say you need better examples. Blood Sorcery, I'll admit, is a slightly better example than Summoners. Slightly.
Also the "thematic" you were talking about is, well, poisonous, if you speak of Atlantis. It encourages people to ignore the Fallen World, which was never the Lie. That was the Exarchs' collective effect on it. Imperial Mysteries was all about this. The Supernal needs the Fallen to define itself, the Fallen needs the Supernal to give it meaning. More importantly, the whole Atlantis cycle gives people no reason to do things. Not nearly enough things to justify its existence as more than the eternal Mystery it should be.
Which is so much worse than the old way of "Winging It." As opposed to "Here's a reminder card for what penalties and bonuses you're under, as well as some optional objectives for XP."
Less sarcastically, I am going to stomp on one particular PRATT before it arises; FATE did it first. My response: Well, I guess we should jettison everything from Chainmail onward, after all those games did the idea of RPGs first. Conditions work, end of story. More than I can say for arguments about dice penalties and constantly forgetting who had what.
Oh hi there, I'm the person with an entirely rational reason to loathe the imposition of Christian Morality on me; THE VIRTUES AND VICES SUCK!
Of the Seven Vices, one is literally "Not do things" (Sloth), two only have applications that disrupt play in my experience (Wrath and Envy), and one is just plain creepy (Lust). The Virtues are worse; Two are literally "Not do things" (Temperance and Prudence), one is so broad it loses any sense of evocative behavior (Fortitude), one is essentially a straight copy of another in practice and doesn't actually involve any work (Faith), and one is also a copy of another, it's just that following it makes it worthy of being called a Virtue (Hope). Of all of the 14 qualities, I only had character ideas that I would actually like playing with Charity, Hope, Greed, and Gluttony, which brings me to the next point: Straightjackets, especially ones with only 49 possible combinations, are not fun. They are not roleplaying aides. They are boring.
Which brings me to the part about Morality. Besides the incredibly stupid idea of scaling XP which generally leaves everyone variations on the same generalist character applying to Morality too, there's also the fact that human psychology Does Not Work That Way. I have my doubts about Integrity being how human psychology works too, but a PTSD meter does a damn sight better than People Are Born With An Idea Of The Moral Nature Of The Universe And There Is No Unfortunate, Probably Imperialist Victorian Social Ideas In This Statement At All. Yes, murder is sanity shredding, but why is shoplifting sanity shredding too, especially if you genuinely believe it's the only way you and people close to you survive? There was also the problem of the NPC Morality Meter vs PC Morality Meter, but I'll get to that if I'm asked.
Suffice to say, I am very skeptical of the complaint of "has no core moral system", when there's a literal questionnaire to built a personal set of Integrity breaking points right there. With PCs encouraged to take risks in dinging it.
That's all I have for tonight, join me next time for "Why The God-Machine Is Not Metaplot, Why You Don't Actually Have To Care About It, And Why I Despise Old Werewolf But Absolutely Love The New One And Descent More Than Fallen (Because Of The Metaplot In The CWoD)"
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Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
So quick you were to leap on this and claim that I am somehow wrong for believing in the concept of "balance" when, in fact, what I did was call someone "mechanically inept". Mechanical ineptitude can manifest in many ways, some of them completely tangential to the concept of balance. For example, the following example of mechanical ineptitude Revlid presented has little if anything to do with balance:
Now, let's imagine two scenarios. In the first, I am out on the streets of Venice, on holiday, and am attacked by a man with a knife. He jabbers at me in his pagan tongue, and I take a desperate swing at him, bloodying his nose. His knife scrapes across my arm, and I jerk back in terror. With every subsequent punch or kick I make to ward him off, I can feel my mental energies and resolve draining, until finally I throw my hands in the air and piss myself, begging for mercy in the universal tongue of "loud English". He clearly doesn't believe my attempt to surrender is sincere, and makes a few further swipes at me with his knife, but each strike visibly drains him of energy, and eventually he just snatches my wallet from the pocket of my shorts and sprints off down some winding sidestreet. I am filled with a minor burst of determination, and feel I've learned something.
In the second scenario, I am out on the streets of Venice, on holiday, and am attacked by a man with a knife. He jabbers at me in his pagan tongue, and I take a desperate swing at him, bloodying his nose. His knife scrapes across my arm, and I jerk back in terror. The fight continues without pause, the two of us trading cautious blows. Eventually, I decide I can't safely beat him, and no help is on its way, so I backpedal, raise my hands palm-up, and produce my wallet from my pockets, offering it to him. Despite my surrender, he feels no compulsion to spare my life, having wanted nothing more than to turn my ballsack into a medicine pouch from the start. Even if I prevail over his redoubled assault, I will regain none of my determination, and will not immediately feel as though I've learned anything.
The only difference between the two scenarios was what the other party wanted, something my character couldn't have possibly known. The drain on the attacker's Willpower – whether an attacker who's been wounded, or an attacker going after someone who has "surrendered" – functions regardless of their in-character knowledge. It's a cludgy disassociated mechanic.
I am not only speaking of balance when I say the writers seem mechanically inept; I am also talking about mechanics that are clunky, counter-intuitive, pointless, confusing (like the fact that Conditions are used to represent three or four entirely different mechanics by changing the way a Condition works) and similar descriptors of lacking good design. Stripping all character generation away, the game still suffers from mechanical flaws that seem to stem from a single source; the writers.
But then, to address your unproven assertion that balance is a myth and that inter-party balance is not a priority (which is it, by the way? Does balance exist without being a priority, or does balance not exist?); you are wrong. You say that the ST should tune things so everyone has fun and there's a credible threat... but that's just balance; a balance between the capacity of the players to succeed, and the capacity of the adversaries to harm the players. With your requirement that the ST should arrange things to be fun and threatening, you're just shifted the burden of balancing things onto the ST. You've not removed the concept of balance, since it needs to exist to evaluate the capacity of Player Characters and NPCs to inflict harm. Nor have you made it insignificant, since you require that enemies present a credible (presumably not overwhelming) threat. You've simply made it the duty of the ST, rather than the game-designer, to provide that balance.
Notably, the need for inter-party balance actually arises from this; to have credible threats, they must present the players with a challenge (at the most banal, the challenge of "can I be lucky enough with the dice to not run out of HP before the monster does"). When player characters have different competency levels, this means that you need to create a threat that is credibly threatening to all those different levels of competency. This is not easy; the kind of threat that challenges a Mage will probably be insurmountable to a mortal (which is for obvious reasons not fun for the mortal's player), but the kind of threat that challenges a mortal will probably be trivial for a Mage (which, again, is not fun for the mortal's player, since their ability to contribute becomes minimal).
To stop this from becoming a problem, games tend to impose restrictions on competency-levels to ensure that the ST doesn't have to drink themselves senseless trying to find inspiration for a threat that can challenge both a slug, a taxi driver, Superman, and God himself without squishing the slug (and games where a slug, a taxi driver, Superman and God himself are considered a valid party tend to be successfully designed around conflicts where the slug and God himself are equally competent, not universe-creation).
If the ST fails to create credible threats for all the disparate player characters, it's often a recipe for discontent among players, who feel that they're being unfairly treated. When some players get a sense of accomplishment because they can accomplish while others can't, that's no fun for the players who don't get a sense of accomplishment. And it's the kind of thing that - because humans are imperfect monkey-people - leads to envy, malcontent, anger, or at the risk of repeating myself simply not having fun. So it's best to avoid this state of affairs.
And the best way to avoid this state of affairs is to not make an game that it's easy to imbalance in the first place. The ST could be required to perform this task, but why would you? It's ultimately a game design task best done by game designers who can be expected to have detailed knowledge of the workings of their system, statistics, basic principles of game design, and access to playtesters. When you put majority of the workload in creating credible threats on the ST, you're requiring the ST to perform game design. To put it simply, that is not their task. If only because some are 13-year-olds DMing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time and can't be expected to be trained in game design, let alone basic statistics.
That same 13-year-old and their friends, I should add, are also hormonal teens, and not well versed at handling the social issues that arise when fun-impacting balance-issues do arise.
To put it bluntly, balance is necessary to ensure everyone's fun, and it should not be necessary for STs to design around balance issues to create that balance. Good games are ones where the ST can focus on bringing the world to life rather than fighting the natural inclinations of the system to leave Mr Slug insignificant in conflicts that challenge Superman.
Then figuratively literally everyone on RPGnet like a thing that had major problems. This is not a new concept. Lots of people may have liked Blood Sorcery, but that doesn't change the fact that it decides that spells that would turn Mages green with envy suddenly become available to only 2 of the 5 Vampire convenants.
Who are you talking to? It appears to not actually be me, since you're going off on a tangent I didn't even know existed.
In what way do Conditions "work, end of story."? They work in the sense that they're mechanically workable, but that doesn't actually make them a good idea, or better than what they replaced. As a system they're messy, counter-intuitive ("awed" is not a condition but "Charmed" is), describe several different mechanical niches (status effects, having a mentally bonded animal, not knowing where you are, mental trauma, several magical powers in Demon, combat effects), incomplete (several Conditions in Vampire require checking the rules for the Discipline that impose the Condition to learn the full details of how the Condition works, but you also need to check the Condition to see how the Discipline works), exception-riddled (several VTM 2E Discipline-imposed Conditions need to specify how they're exceptions from the norm, as do some Conditions in GMC), occasionally require the use of a flow-chart, turn things into an organizational nightmare (several Vampire Disciplines require reading both the Discipline text and the Condition text some 200 pages later in the book)...
It's not that they're FATE-like Aspects, it's that they're not even Aspects. Aspects, at least, are a unified well-defined mechanic the entire game is built around. Conditions are superficially similar, but offer none of the benefits and are a mechanical mess that has been used to represent everything from a persistent, activatable power to not knowing where you are to being on fire... while simultaneously not representing being affected by vampire magic.
What aspect of this do you find works better than the old model where, for example, Vampire Disciplines plainly stated what they did in on block of text, and there was a chapter with a subheading that said what happened if you are a on fire? If the problem was keeping track of all those modifiers, how are you keeping track of all the Conditions and Tilts?
I don't have a horse in this race and I am a Christian, but I agree that the Virtue/Vice business was lackluster at best.
I think I like the basic idea of the Morality system, but rolling each time you transgress to see whether or not it actually mattered to you doesn't seem the least bit lifelike.
I think I like the basic idea of the Morality system, but rolling each time you transgress to see whether or not it actually mattered to you doesn't seem the least bit lifelike.
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Blood Sorcery was mechanically trash. It was complete and utter shit. That the mechanics got written which gave members of the Lancea Sanctum and the Circle incredibly powerful freeform magic when no one else got jack shit speaks incredibly badly of the sense of internal balance for the Vampire Lines and mechanical aptitude of both the line leads and the person who wrote those powers. It should have been caught and lol-noped by any competent line developer, and shouldn't have been written in the first place. It is even more fucking OP than oVampire Thaumaturgy, and that's saying something considering how infamous that made the Tremere for munchkins. Especially since the Blood Sorcery powers are clearly and obviously bad if you put any thought at all into little things like "how much bang do you get for your XP buck" or "hey, Mage is balanced around the fact that anyone can get access to the counters to the Arcana. Maybe we should consider that giving approximately these capabilities to only two Covenants isn't a great idea?".
Like, seriously. The Blood Sorcery powers are legitimately mechanically worse than Changing Breeds. Yes. You heard me. It's worse than "Beast Magic", because at least that only let them buy specific rotes as powers. It's worse than the number inflated warforms, because while the number inflated warforms might be stupid, the Blood Sorcery powers wreck the entire internal dynamics of Vampire society.
That there are people on rpg.net who like it doesn't mean shit, because there were a lot of people on rpg.net who liked Scroll of the Monk for Exalted even when people were explaining how broken it is.
Like, seriously. The Blood Sorcery powers are legitimately mechanically worse than Changing Breeds. Yes. You heard me. It's worse than "Beast Magic", because at least that only let them buy specific rotes as powers. It's worse than the number inflated warforms, because while the number inflated warforms might be stupid, the Blood Sorcery powers wreck the entire internal dynamics of Vampire society.
That there are people on rpg.net who like it doesn't mean shit, because there were a lot of people on rpg.net who liked Scroll of the Monk for Exalted even when people were explaining how broken it is.
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I'd think it would be because you should never take Rock's glee at becoming effectively immune to Paper to mean that the latest buff to Rock was a sound mechanical decision.
In other words, white room combat.
This is understandable as it is completely wrongheaded. White room combat works for things like D&D, where combat is the focus of the game. In a horror game, the thing is meant to create a feeling of helplessness and viciousness.
Quite simply, all the writers have bluntly stated what they were going for is real-world violence. In real-world violence, the winner is usually the one who came prepared. Or more likely, cheated. This...was not clear in the GMC, so that's a point in your favor. The Hurt Locker will go into this, and hopefully when the official 2E book comes out.
(Also, I remain very skeptical of Revlid's claim here. I see absolutely no opportunity for a "learning experience" at all here, so the second scenario is the more realistic one. In fact, I wonder exactly who is the crazier person here, Mr. French Ball-Thief or the guy who apparently believes that discovering you are fighting a serial killer instead of a mugger is a "learning experience." And the fact that "trying all your might" isn't a good in-game representation of spending Willpower kind of makes me think that Revlid's rant, as it was the first time I saw it, was not well thought out).
The very fact that Ghouls are playable puts the lie to this. A mage has a massive weakness his mortal allies don't; Paradox. It's less of a weakness than, say, Death Rage, but a mage who pushes his luck ends up with tentacles eating his face, and the fact that his powers are dangerous to use and abuse means that in, say, an Abyssal-infused area, the mortal is simply safer. So there's always a handicap a mortal simply, and cheerfully, lacks . With Supernatural Merits, he even gets to have some safer powers too.
Also, there's a lot of quote, and not enough time for me to type up a response-I literally only have an hour or so before school. So I'm going to have to get to the next point. Suffice to say I was tired, and realized I should have said "inter gameline balance", because crossover is not a focus, nor should it be. Party balance is not, but I still have yet to see major party balance issues in 2E.
First, we are arguing over something subjective about entertainment. Popularity is generally a metric in something's favor, because that's what it's meant to attain. I know it's a fallacy, but the thing is, sometimes fallacies are the only logical arguments.
Second, Blood Sorcery had the distinction of also making blood sorcerers actually fun to tinker around with, which is the key here. Balance generally results from how long casting a ritual actually is (all the fingerbones in the world won't save you if your enemy has already found you and is kicking your face in), which is something of a weak counterweight, I will admit. Here's what I've found though; it's better to make something rather overpowered than underpowered. You can fix overpowered pretty easily, in the gameline or the table, and the thing is, overpowered is still Fun. Underpowered is usually a lot more endemic to fix (just look at fighters from 3.5 and how they never caught up with every other class of higher tiers, not even swordsages), and not only is it boring to the guy playing the underpowered character, it ruins balance among the party and forces them into an escort mission for their incompetent buddy.
So the solution isn't to break Blood Sorcery. It's to buff everything else. Something the writers have succeeded at; the new Nightmare Discipline, previously one of the weak ones, is now the lord of illusions, and its about on even ground with everyone else. Obsfucate was a bit overpowered, leading to the LOA problem as I liked to call it, but that was caught in the pdf release and fixed before printing. This is one place where I can also say Onyx Path is better than White Wolf; it knows how to fix things post-publication.
Primarily because it can, but that doesn't change the fact it does.
The "man who doesn't understand Mage's thematic" bit. Atlantis was what came to mind when people say things about "not thematic", and generally the whole mythos bloated in the core book too large and became a focus it shouldn't have been. If you were talking about something else, I apologize.
Because there's cards you don't have to rewrite and erase all the goddamned time, that's why!
You may have a point with Vampire (Curse of the Early Gameline, both nWoDs), but from what I can tell, that's it. "Awed" is not a Condition, because generally, being awed by someone doesn't effect the way you react and interact with the world. "Charmed" is, because if I remember right, that's either a sign of you thinking with your gonads or having been mind-whammied. And the bolded part is outright wrong, because what do you think the entire Condition chapter in Vampire was? Also, Demon seems to have picked up that the Condition cross-reference was a problem; the power-specific Conditions are generally in the same writeup or directly afterwards, so that problem's already been addressed.
Listen, I've played the GMC, and I can tell you, right now, that Conditions and changes thereof are not nearly frequent enough to be a problem. I was actually looking for ways to take them on for the XP. The real problem would occur if they were flying left and right, but in my experience, they don't. So they're just a fancy name for what we've been doing all along; modifiers. With bonuses for playing along.
The flowchart also is a problem because it exists when it has no need to. Not every ephemeral being has every Manifestation, and Manifestations they have follow the path that's been there ever since Werewolf, at the latest. Manifest-Urge-Claim/Possess. The only change is the addition of entities who Manifest in a physical form (which was already present), and the Open Condition (which is code for "an entity of a particular type can live here", aka an anchor, just more varied). So it looks far, far more complex than how I've actually found it to work.
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I was all set on running a Princess the Hopeful game for my group on January using the GMC rules, after our planned Christmas gaming spree, but reading this thread gave me pause. I'll probably do a trial run of then ask my players if they're willing to continue. Better try out the GMC rules before actually passing judgement on it.
Before I forget... @EarthScorpion, do the Enlightened need to be transformed to use their charms? There's no outright statement saying either yes, no or depends, which confuses me, and you being someone who did work on this, you're probably the only person I can think of to answer.
Also, for everyone else, I need some advice on Mage Ascension. I gave my group a choice between Traditions and Technocrats, and they chose to be Technocrats. One of my players decided on being a Syndic, and asked what is the difference between Prime and Primal Utility, both mechanically and fluffwise. It's something that I can't give a proper answer since this will be my first time doing a Technocrat game so some help is appreciated.
For that matter, any convenient rules hacks for Mage Ascension, like the ones from Panopticon Quest, would also be appreciated.
Before I forget... @EarthScorpion, do the Enlightened need to be transformed to use their charms? There's no outright statement saying either yes, no or depends, which confuses me, and you being someone who did work on this, you're probably the only person I can think of to answer.
Also, for everyone else, I need some advice on Mage Ascension. I gave my group a choice between Traditions and Technocrats, and they chose to be Technocrats. One of my players decided on being a Syndic, and asked what is the difference between Prime and Primal Utility, both mechanically and fluffwise. It's something that I can't give a proper answer since this will be my first time doing a Technocrat game so some help is appreciated.
For that matter, any convenient rules hacks for Mage Ascension, like the ones from Panopticon Quest, would also be appreciated.