AkatsukiL13
An Enlightened Mind
- Location
- New Copernicus Station
Just play Awakening. The Translation Guides are an utter waste and not worth the money.
White Wolf's World of Darkness
Just play Awakening. The Translation Guides are an utter waste and not worth the money.
Mechanically, all you need to do is remove the "No indefinite spells on living patterns" rule, say that the Hollow Ones get Death and the Euthanatoi have Fate, and then you're most of the way there already. Just use the oWoD Paradox system - it slots right in and it's rather imporant for the oWoD feel that Paradox is something that accumulates. Mechanically, there's really not much you need to do.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Doesn't that kinda change the whole metaphysical flavour of what Entropy means in WoD/Ascension? (I do realize that backporting WoD Entropy into the CoD ten-sphere system is a fussy task . . . )
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Entropy is actually mostly Fate already. Quite a lot of nWoD Death lives in oSpirit or weird permutations of spheres like oSpirit + oMatter to pull the 'ghosts' of objects into Twilight.
And, you know, Panopticon Quest uses Death as a variant sphere just fine without everything exploding.
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
How do I handle Watchtower/Splat-X, then?
... just cut out the Watchtowers? And give your splats the same favoured arcana that they had as spheres?
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
Hmm.
Alright.
Alright.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Eh, the big point about Entropy is that it isn't just Fate; seeing it as Fate seems to be a simplification, just like seeing Correspondence as 'Distance' (I've heard people try a reductionist approach of explaining Correspondence as Distance, and it . . . didn't grab the whole breadth of the Sphere). I mean, Entropy includes at least the following things that are not the same as fate: randomness, decay, flaws, corruption, truth-and-lies, vitality and disease, memetics, concepts, logical arguments. Some of those things lie on the edge with a different Sphere, while others don't seem too outside the box of the other eight. All of this always seemed to me to be an indication that Entropy is the most esoteric sphere, one that was very hard to wrap one's head around at first, but that many players found to be very, very interesting due to such esotericism (e.g. my Exalted GM named it as his favourite Sphere when we touched upon the release of M20).
Also, I am currently aware that Sphere-swapping is a thing, with examples such as Data, and that life goes on after such swaps, no worse than it did before. But personally, I think re-division of Spheres (as opposed to swapping for a more similar counterpart, such as Spirit/DimSci or Corr/Data) changes the implicit metaphysics of the setting. After all, the number and division of Spheres, and the fact that each Tradition or Convention primarily favours one of them (though apparently M20 allows characters to pick and choose instead) seemed to be one of the important, unifying common grounds between different paradigms. It seems almost indispensible for playing one of the most fun things of the game line: reconciling mages of different paradigms when they need to work on a single big spell together, such that different mages contribute different Spheres. Though of course there's not much of a problem with that if everyone replaces Entropy with Death and Fate and then shoves some of the remaining non-Fate, non-Death-related Entropic effects into a bunch of other Spheres.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
The interesting thing is, from what I can gather with the Technocracy it's the other way around. People like Agent Smith are the ones at the top setting broad policies, which are then enacted by the boots-on-the-ground idealists whose beliefs align more closely with Taggart and the Architect.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
That varies on interpretation and the work. Some groups like Iteration X made a habit of surgically removing empathy from their ground teams because the ability to understand other people clearly isn't important, so the people on the ground are inhuman monsters, but the people in charge see only a path to greater efficacy and don't understand the human cost. Other times the agents are pure idealists fighting for a cause their superiors don't really believe in, against institutional corruption and inertia that dragging them down.
The only convention that seems mostly immune to either fate is the Void Engineers, who are clearly intended to be the token good guy group in the Technocracy. Not that they don't fight against 'reality deviants,' but they're generally cleaner then everyone else on the side of the union.
dragonx99
Actually Satan
I thought Iteration X started cutting back on that removing empathy thing with the advent of the ADEI which unlike the normal DEI doesn't remove their capacity to feel emotion. Like I know that the older people from before 1999 grumble and complain about how that is a downside to the new models but I thought on the whole the group is stepping away from that. Like how they're starting to be more open to Dim.Sci now that friend Computer isn't running the show anymore.
Winged Knight
Still just a crazy man with a wolf on his head
- Location
- Texas
On the subject of counterpart Spheres, are there any noticeable differences between Spirit and Dimensional Science at each dot ranking? I've looked over them both, but as I'm a total newbie I must admit I'm probably missing something. I'd heard that the two had distinctions between them, and if someone could lay them out for me I'd really appreciate it.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
As I said, depends on the work. Revised is a lot friendly to the Technocracy then 2nd, but that's a double edged sword because while revised had great bits, on the whole it sucked and was rejected. People largely didn't LIKE revised, so trying to go with the revised interpretation of anything is... questionable.
This is of course why there were flamewars between Revised and 2E fans, rather than the former being this tiny minority which didn't exist and couldn't influence opinions? And of course why everyone agrees with you and there weren't all these differing interpretations.
Also, the "everyone in Iteration X has their emotions cut out" thing isn't even 2E, it's a 1Eism (strike one) coming from a disgruntled defector (strike two), who despite having his 'emotions cut out' was perfectly capable of being emotional in the text (strike three).
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Um, no. It's from the freaken Iteration X handbook, 2nd, page 51. The DEI, one of the most popular Iteration X cybernetics, including all Cyphers, which is the main entrance for recruitment, which means MOST OF THEM. They cut out the parts of the brain dealing with "Emotional Control, Expression, Long Term Plans, and Moral Judgements."
So that not strike anything, you just fouled and damaged your credibility.
Likewise saying that flamewars started over this is true, but in no way suggests that the two sides are equally supported. The Avatar Storm is a bad word in a lot more places then it's a good one, which I'm pretty sure you know. Do I need to go and dig up all the old RPG.net reviews panning Revised and revised books here? That's time-consuming and tedious, so if so I'm going to expect some concessions at the end of it.
- Location
- Italy
I have no horse in this race, but looking at the publishing dates of both books, Technocracy: It X was published in 1993. Mage The Ascension 2e in 1995. Unless there's another Convention book for them outside of that one and the Revised version?
Mage: the Ascension: 1st Edition-published 1993
Mage: the Ascension: 2nd Edition-published 1995
Convention Book: Iteration X-published 1993
How interesting.
Oh, and let's not forget that the book was a report from a Iteration X defector (like I said) who somehow had the emotions to whine about Iteration X despite, according to him, having all his emotions removed by a DEI. Oh yeah, and he doesn't have Life magic. Or Mind magic. Just Forces and Matter.
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NonSequtur
a body
It's not questionable here, though, because SV is pretty down with Revised.
Meanwhile, any argument that tries to correlate popularity and quality gets the side-eye right off the bat, so you'll probably have to back a general condemnation of a line with more than 'a bunch of people online vocally disliked it'.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Hmm, ok, it was tail end of first edition, though it was the Iteration X book until Iteration X revised came out. Which incidentally also says THE EXACT SAME THING. Only, sometime after the avatar storm they magically all switched to the Advanced Digital Enhancement Implant which doesn't have the same downside, without mentioning how they all switched gears and regrow everyone's brain. Because they're all nicer now without adequate explanation for why.
And no, getting cut off from the eldar technocrats isn't adequate explanation when part of your backstory is that you're all brainwashed, emotionally and morally crippled fanatics. That isn't a group that can naturally switch gears effortlessly. And they did keep that as their backstory. They didn't recon it, it was still true up till post Avatar Storm. Even if you go with revised, it remains true.
Oh and don't worry, I helped dig them up.
https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_2688.phtml
What's that? A positive review of the game? Oh don't worry, there's a negative one too.
https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_2870.phtml
Which comes down to whining about Hunter: the Reckoning and how White Wolf has ~ruined his game~ because of D&Ders being incapable of policing their own games or something. I don't think you're going to convince anyone that the 2E interpretation was the better one when your reviews are going to be basically "this guy was salty about the Avatar Storm."
Ratings for - RPGnet RPG Game Index
And the M:Rev reviews too! Those are great. There are more 4s and 5s (very good and excellent) than there are 2s (poor.) The average is 3.6/3.3, which is not a bad game by any means. This is discounting the fact that there are some reviews which, far from being objective, are basically based on nothing more than salt.
EDIT: The one bad review which isn't salt and addresses the Avatar Storm and why it's a bad idea to put it in the corebook doesn't actually go "bluh bluh but my Avatar Storm but my Umbra" but rather "they should have actually put shit in to allow STs to adjust their game to the metaplot, you know, rather than nothing" and points out that if you're new to Mage this is probably better than 2E (WW would later provide some of that in the Storyteller's Guide, but it should have been in the corebook).
There was an edition war, which implies that plenty of people liked one of the editions and not the other. Let me remind you that Revised got products after the official end of the oWoD, not 2E. Revised. And these products have been very well-received.
The really funny thing is that the reason Revised had the Avatar Storm is demonstrated perfectly well by your attitude-they weren't willing to just quietly say that the old stuff was weird and deprecated canon, they had to ~remove the masters and make changes to the Umbra~ to give the players some more power and influence and emphasize the focus of the game on Earth rather than dimensional hopping. Criticizing the Avatar Storm for basically doing IC what should have been done OOC and then go "but look at this weird bit of 1E canon that people kept referencing!" is silly because it's the attitude that led to the Avatar Storm.
FYI: "released in the same year as the 1E book is not the 'tail end of first edition.'"
Or maybe the DEI wasn't actually nearly as emotionally inhibitive as you claim it was? There's no actual statistics on DEI-derived mental illness, and it clearly wasn't universal. Note that in 1E, of the 4 mages given, 3 of them are not emotionally dead (Tecson, Zimmermann, and Smith), and the one who is apparently emotionally dead may not in fact be a DEI implantee. Note that the DEI wasn't said to have the inherent 'no emotions' flaw or something, simply replace parts of the human brain which dealt with emotions-the implication is obviously imperfectly, but there's no explicit 'emotionless' situation created by it.
If you read between the lines, the actual conclusion is simple. Smith overegged the DEI's impacts upon his defection and oversold the idea that Iterators with these DEIs were all emotionless psychopaths, given that he has a DEI and he is very much capable of normal human emotional ranges. So when a DEI came out that didn't have the same level of flaws because they didn't want the 2% or whatever chance of mental illness... people decided to use the new and improved model. Like, this isn't really hard to understand.
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Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
The lower levels (1-2) of Dimensional Science allows communication with other DSci users, but don't let you send meaningful communications to spirits.
Spirit 3 manipulates spirits as with Life and awakens objects, while DSci 3 manipulates ephemeral energy/matter and lets you permakill spirits.
Spirit 4 can be used to bind and control spirits, which DSci doesn't at any level. DSci 4 lets you create 'tunnels' that speed travel through the Umbra.
The fifth rank is baaaaasically the same thing, except DSci doesn't let you see Avatars as such.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Annoyingly, I think RPG.net has been deleting some of their old reviews, because there was a great one for The Infinite Tapestry and The Bitter Road that basically broke down everything wrong with revised, and neither of them still seem to be up. I'll concede here.
There aren't even any reviews of The Bitter Road left at this point, only a stub of a review.
You can do that, but then you're just rewriting the game to throw out the clearly intended interpretation. Like, not WoG or anything abstract like that. We have the actual write up for the DEI, not an in character write up either - and we're flat out told what's involved. And that bit of backstory is preserved through all editions. It isn't early installment weirdness, it remains the description of Iteration X for the entire line. We see it talked about in the description of Interaction X throughout the line.
If you want to criticize how the in character voice bits make everything subjective and unclear, and many of them are badly written, I'll agree with you. Many White Wolf authors couldn't write in character fiction worth a damn, and presenting important setting information that way makes things unclear. On the flip side, my argument is completely independent of that. We get told all Cyphers get the DEI installed, we get impartial fluff and stats for the DEI not in any characters voice, and we get told that Iteration X cuts out empathy through the rest of the series, culminating in Iteration X revised where they mention both in character and out that they've just switched to a new system.
Trying to put it down to early installment weirdness doesn't help you when it's not just early installment, and instead the major interpretation of the faction for the majority of the games shelf life.
Dude, explicit roleplaying hints for three of the four 1E ItX mages:
One of them is angry about the Progenitors for his birth defects and revels in his sweet exoskeleton.
Another one is hyper-enthusiastic and excited about her job, and a 'benevolent streak shows through' in her activities.
Yet another is incredibly frustrated and takes it out on other people.
In 2E, you get a brief snippet of an Iterator cyborg-a frontline killing machine, the most heavily monitored and indoctrinated sort of Iterator, and he is not emotionally dead-he's rather enthusiastic about getting into a gudfite with a Reality Deviant if you look at his responses to his DEI. It is early installment weirdness-the interpretation of the DEI in the same book and throughout the lines is more "these guys may not be the most stable" rather than "everyone is an emotionless drone."
In fact, I'll go farther and say that the idea that they are all emotionless cyborgs is actually fanon, and was never canon.
EDIT: Beyond the Barriers has a report of Autocthonia.
Autochthonia has Iterators doing things like reading, playing MMOs, watching movies and listening to music, and painting. The most popular way of spending free time on Autochthonia is holodecks. These are the most exemplary Iterators to ever Iterate. They are not emotionless droids.
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vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Regarding the word 'emotionless':
White Wolf cannot into science, so I would take any statements by them about a character lacking emotions with a truckload of salt. Because if they so much as skimmed through a textbook on emotions, they would realize that a mind deprived of emotions lacks a mechanism for redirection attention, and without attention perception is kinda useless, and a mind without any useable ability to perceive will not process stimuli in a meaningful way, i.e. will be effectively incapable of interacting with the outside world at all. In fact, even skimming the infallible font of knowledge* should give one the idea of just what sorts of effects an across-the-board chopping of emotions can do.
But of course the authors didn't study the psychology of emotions, so it's quite likely that by 'lacks emotions' they mean something other than a mind that actually lacks emotions. I haven't read Iteration X, so I'm very leery of even trying to figure out exactly what they could mean. A wild guess is that they could mean having a reduction of the more positive emotions, or maybe they meant what some psychology schools call 'higher feelings'**.
So . . . what are the actual game-mechanical effects of old-model DEI anyway?
* == Just in case somebody takes that phrasing seriously, this was sarcasm.
** == Personally, I highly dislike that term, because it carries a chunk of ideological baggage that has no place in proper science.
White Wolf cannot into science, so I would take any statements by them about a character lacking emotions with a truckload of salt. Because if they so much as skimmed through a textbook on emotions, they would realize that a mind deprived of emotions lacks a mechanism for redirection attention, and without attention perception is kinda useless, and a mind without any useable ability to perceive will not process stimuli in a meaningful way, i.e. will be effectively incapable of interacting with the outside world at all. In fact, even skimming the infallible font of knowledge* should give one the idea of just what sorts of effects an across-the-board chopping of emotions can do.
But of course the authors didn't study the psychology of emotions, so it's quite likely that by 'lacks emotions' they mean something other than a mind that actually lacks emotions. I haven't read Iteration X, so I'm very leery of even trying to figure out exactly what they could mean. A wild guess is that they could mean having a reduction of the more positive emotions, or maybe they meant what some psychology schools call 'higher feelings'**.
So . . . what are the actual game-mechanical effects of old-model DEI anyway?
* == Just in case somebody takes that phrasing seriously, this was sarcasm.
** == Personally, I highly dislike that term, because it carries a chunk of ideological baggage that has no place in proper science.
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You get the equivalent of Dream 3 and a few basic Mind 1 effects. Notice the lack of any explicitly mentioned flaws.