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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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EarthScorpion said:
It would also mean the world would be in the shocking situation that the MA-40-U would be the safest suit of Iteration X power armour in the world - a sentence never before uttered in the history of mankind.
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It would also mean that Kessler has a fun time, because being a huge dude whose natural power is amplified by implanted god-machinery ,that he uses to solve his problems in tandem with cyborg kung fu is Exalted as fuck.

Meanwhile Serafina is crying over the fact that Cross and Piero get to do whatever the fuck they want due to being demigods.

EDIT: The Apocalypse Canceller is also pretty coincidental since it's really just a Hellstrider gize.
 
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EarthScorpion said:
Because roll-offs are what happens when two powers clash in Exalted, and CRP is not a defence. The mage is saying "Reality works this way", CRP is saying "no, reality works that way", and when they disagree, one of them loses.
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Which is, presumably, why a Mage gets a roll-off when they cast a spell that's vulgar and the Consensus says "no, reality works that way"?

There should be no roll-off because there is no direct clash. This isn't counter-magic, it follows the procedure for spell-casting perfectly. A mage casts a spell, and checks it against the list of things that are considered vulgar. This list is established by the local Consensus. CRP establishes a local Consensus. Therefore, the mage checks the spell against CRP's list.

If a Mage has a spell which calls down lightning to strike her foes, this is obviously coincidental when there are storm-clouds in the sky, and vulgar when there is clear weather. It becomes vulgar if another Mage already used their spirit allies to clear all the clouds from the sky, or if a Technocrat used a mass-broadcast to absolutely convince everyone that the oncoming storm is composed of very rare "de-ionized clouds" that cannot form lightning. In neither of these scenarios does it receive a roll-off to become coincidental.
 
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Revlid said:
Which is, presumably, why a Mage gets a roll-off when they cast a spell that's vulgar and the Consensus says "no, reality works that way"?
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When I explicitly say "Because roll-offs are what happens when two powers clash in Exalted", you can't dismiss it by bringing up how things work in canon Mage.

Revlid said:
There should be no roll-off because there is no direct clash. This isn't counter-magic, it follows the procedure for spell-casting perfectly. A mage casts a spell, and checks it against the list of things that are considered vulgar. This list is established by the local Consensus. CRP establishes a local Consensus. Therefore, the mage checks the spell against CRP's list.
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So under Exalted's rules, there is potentially a direct clash. The Exalt is using a power to say "reality works this way". The mage is using a power to say "reality works that way".

You have decided that CRP establishes a local Consensus, but my entire point was that that's not the only way of doing it. It can also be modelled as two competing effects, because the Exalt has an active ongoing power that's warping the local laws of physics so things don't fall down because of the curvature of local spacetime, but instead because of stuff about essence.

I don't disagree that yours is a valid way of doing it - hell, I said yours was the simplest way. I just was pointing out that there's also another way of doing it. Especially since, amusingly enough, if CRP is establishing a local Consensus, that means it's going up against the existing Consensus it's forcing itself onto - and the precedent of Marauders means that this Exalt is therefore on a counting down timer before the Consensus gets sick of their shit and kicks them out into space. People with an aura of "reality works this way around me" aren't unheard of in oMage. They get kicked out of the world into the Umbra.

Exalt: "Oh, hey, looks like the Wyld has redesigned itself to be much more interesting and cohesive a setting. Probably because they got rid of all the fucking Raksha. Can I take this place home with me? It's really just better."
 
EarthScorpion said:
So under Exalted's rules, there is potentially a direct clash. The Exalt is using a power to say "reality works this way". The mage is using a power to say "reality works that way".
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No, they're not.

There's still no direct clash here. You're conflating two different arenas of saying "reality works this way". The Mage is painting on a canvas, but the Exalt isn't shoving their brush out of the way, or diluting their paint – they're just choosing what kind of paper is set on the easel.

Under Mage rules, this is a perfectly fine tactic and requires no roll-off, as I just demonstrated through other examples of using powers to change the local Consensus to provoke vulgarity. Under Exalted rules, this is also fine and requires no roll-off, for the same reason that using Benediction of Archgenesis on a desert doesn't require a roll-off, even if there's an Infernal there who'd really prefer to still have access to their Desolation Charms.

EarthScorpion said:
this Exalt is therefore on a counting down timer before the Consensus gets sick of their shit and kicks them out into space. People with an aura of "reality works this way around me" aren't unheard of in oMage. They get kicked out of the world into the Umbra.
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Integrity-Protecting Prana.

(per Under the Rose, direct and hostile teleportation is considered a Shaping effect that can be shut down by Integrity-Protecting Prana)
(even without that precedent you'd have to convince me that fiating someone into space isn't a reality-warping attack with no obvious defence)

I appreciate what you're going for, but working on the home turf of world-sized threats composed of countless distinct entities and viewpoints cludged together into an all-powerful mass capable of warping reality to its whims is... y'know, exactly what the baseline Exalted kit is intended to facilitate.
 
Revlid said:
A very simple way of understanding how nMage treats its Sleepers is to consider the scene in the Matrix where Morpheus explains that everyone who does not know about the Matrix is fundamentally a slave to it, and so must be considered a hostile asset, even if they don't know it.


Why would the golden dudes need you to teach them?

They can just pop Chaos-Repelling Pattern, and watch as every spell not rooted in the paradigm of Creation instantly becomes vulgar.
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How fortunate that the character in question's paradigm works entirely according to Creation-OK methods! As entirely a coincidence, and not at all due to being a blatant expy. Which they are not.
Revlid said:
The elements are Fire, Earth, Air, Water, and Wood – Chinese spells predicted on Metal can go to hell
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Poor Auto-kun, nobody likes his Element ideas. :(
 
notanautomaton said:
And having Entropy instead of Fate is moronic. It's like having a variant of Matter that can only make things worse until high levels as core. So I changed it. Because it's moronic.
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Except the Euthanatos and other groups use Entropy to for death magic and necromancy as well as fate and probability based Magic.

notanautomaton said:
And it's harder to come up with a paradigm with just Tradition, which is the other option.
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Hence why I was talking about starting with the character concept for basis for developing their beliefs.

notanautomaton said:
I didn't say that? I said 'someone who's paradigm is 'I talk to spirits and get them to help me' is going to have spirit or else their character will be weird. Maybe work on your reading comprehension a bit?
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Admittedly I did phrase the start of that wrong and I blame that more the fact that I was literally writing that as I was going to bed after several long, long days and not in the best state of mind. What I was trying to point out is that your comment 'the spheres inform the paradigm' is backwards, the Paradigm informs the Spheres, not just what Spheres a mage would have but how they view and use them as well. I was holding up the Spirit Sphere as an example as not everyone sees it and what it encompasses in the same light.

notanautomaton said:
But that's not paradigm. That's what they do with magic, not how they do it.
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Actually it is tied to their beliefs as well. The Gambler while he does acknowledge the Euthanatos beliefs and spiritualism, he doesn't really engage in them and views Entropy more akin to probability, statistics and mathematics (like the Syndicate). Likewise the Assassin doesn't really engage in the Euthanatos spiritualism and flashier magic. He is an artist of murder, focusing inward in all things. Other concepts embrace the spiritual side of the Euthanatos while others still embrace the aspects of death and mortality.

But again they're all cases of the Paradigm informing the Spheres.

ChineseDrone said:
The vast majority of what the nMage Death sphere does (mostly relating to ghosts, zombies, raising the dead, etc.) is actually stuff that a Euthanatos member not only doesn't need to do, but would probably actively abhor.

A run of the mill Euthanatos doesn't need the Death sphere, he just needs a sphere that lets him kill people. Which is most of them.
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Actually the Euthanatos embrace death magic and necromancy, they just tend not abuse it like the Giovanni do. In fact the Euthanatos even have a term to encompass all death magic and necromancy that they practice, Kalananda. They Euthanatos do not abhor death magic and necromancy because it is a vital part of who they are, they abhor Jhor, the taint that comes with embracing casual death and destruction. You do not need to engage in death magic or necromancy to acquire Jhor. The regular act of killing the wicked can result in an Euthanatos succumbing to Jhor.

Quantumboost said:
Poor Auto-kun, nobody likes his Element ideas. :(
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Yeah he always gets screwed over.
 
@Revlid, @EarthScorpion: This is not a resolvable debate. Neither setting was designed to cross over with the other in any way that makes sense. The closet you will get to a Solar popping CRP is a Hunter using some kind of crappy Edge.

You either decide that oMage cosmology trumps Exalted cosmology or vice versa. Whichever you decide on wins. Potentially you go a third option and craft an entirely new meta-cosmology, but that seems like a hell of a lot of work for a theoretical exercise based off a joke post.
 
Revlid said:
The former is what I'm going for, yes. Chaos-Repelling Pattern imposes a veto vote over the local Consensus – the world around them accepts the paradigm of Creation, regardless of what anyone/everyone thinks. That means Magic Kung Fu spells are a-okay, Christian sacraments and quantum entanglement are not. The elements are Fire, Earth, Air, Water, and Wood – Chinese spells predicted on Metal can go to hell, and Technocratic atomic theory can follow on its heels.

I don't really see a justification for a roll-off, to be honest. Even on a non-gameability level.
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That's not quite how Consensus works though unless you're going strict-PDD/HOP. Otherwise, the Traditions would be super-boned. The focus doesn't matter to consensus, just the results. And basically nothing is vulgar in Exalted. Kung-fu? Okay. Cyborgs? That's cool. Esoteric cosmic bullshit? Isidoros is a black hole, sounds legit. Killer robots made out of invulnerable shapeshifting metal? Aren't there like, 200 of these fuckers in Autochthon? Basically the only vulgar things in Creation!Consensus would be shit like actual time travel and resurrection. Also, probably fae-related magic because fuck that shit that's what Creation was made to shaft. Isn't it sad Verbena-kun?

"But MJ?" You might ask. "What about Constructs and Chantries which specifically make other people's things vulgar or coincidental?"

Why, I'm glad you asked. You see, those are places metaphysically designed to prevent other people's effects, rather than merely following a certain set of internal rules. You can format 'open' paradigm spaces under any paradigm, which basically means "things in this space look and act like however you want but mages there don't need to follow those rules." A chantry or construct is closer to a "Restricted" sector in the Digital Web, where the paradigm is "everything the authorized users can do is coincidental, but everyone else, fuck those guys specifically, we're saying they can't do shit."

The general default assumption is that chantries are loose-paradigm IIRC-you can freely cast in them but they don't prevent other people's magic.
 
Well, making math not work in a Technodigm-based construct would be a pretty terrible idea...
 
EarthScorpion said:
@ManusDomine, @Omicron, @GardenerBriareus and everyone else who expressed interest in a Promethean Quest.

Long to Reign Over Us (Promethean: the Created Quest) is now up!

I am... unsure as to how this very character-centric chargen (and completely non-mechanical) will go. Oh well! That's what experimentation is for! If you know the setting, feel free to answer some of these questions together rather than on their own.
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I like it. It gives me ideas. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to sit down and come up with some proper write-ins for a couple days.
 
EarthScorpion said:
@ManusDomine, @Omicron, @GardenerBriareus and everyone else who expressed interest in a Promethean Quest.

Long to Reign Over Us (Promethean: the Created Quest) is now up!

I am... unsure as to how this very character-centric chargen (and completely non-mechanical) will go. Oh well! That's what experimentation is for! If you know the setting, feel free to answer some of these questions together rather than on their own.
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/me starts digging another place in @Aleph's grave full of EarthScorpion quests.

But seriously, good luck!
 
EarthScorpion said:
I am... unsure as to how this very character-centric chargen (and completely non-mechanical) will go. Oh well! That's what experimentation is for! If you know the setting, feel free to answer some of these questions together rather than on their own.
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Honestly ES, i think you have overdone this.

Trying to brute force a character whole personality/backstory in a single shot doesn't seems a good idea to me. It's better to start with a outline (A good outline, of course) and slowly and organically develop the personality/fill the backstory. (Like, you know, Jamelia in Panopticon).

And the other side of this, of course, is that you are asking for eleven different write-ins right of the bat (Or, in practice, probably a single long write-in that some talented soul will have to put out in his/her own, because i doubt answering the questions one by one would produce a coherent character).

At the very least, i think you should had post the questions after the question's vote to the main background is already decided.

(Mind, i don't usually bother to offer critique, and if i do, is because i actually want one of your Quests to live).
 
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Broken25 said:
Trying to brute force a character whole personality/backstory in a single shot doesn't seems a good idea to me. It's better to start with a outline (A good outline, of course) and slowly and organically develop the personality/fill the backstory. (Like, you know, Jamelia in Panopticon).
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Yes, but I want to consider why we think that. Why, in a character centric medium, is it more acceptable to ask the players to vote for mechanical things than character based things when setting off? After all, entire sweeping fields of literature don't start with the character as a blank template. And, indeed, the over-reliance on 'umble farm boys or bland spiky-haired teenage boys is frequently mocked.

Characters like Jamelia are, at the moment and with the prevalent style of character generation, effectively totally reliant on players putting in an unguided effortpost to create them whole-cloth. Why shouldn't quest writers - especially ones who are also writer-writers - lay out the kinds of guide ropes that they use all the time to build characters, so players who aren't used to doing that kind of thing can actually colour within the lines to build a character, rather than being handed a blank piece of paper being being told "draw something"?

Why not, instead, have character generation being actual, literary-style character generation? Why not generate a character, rather than a collection of mechanics - and then leave it up to the quest-runner to build the mechanics around the character the players have built?
 
EarthScorpion said:
Yes, but I want to consider why we think that. Why, in a character centric medium, is it more acceptable to ask the players to vote for mechanical things than character based things when setting off? After all, entire sweeping fields of literature don't start with the character as a blank template. And, indeed, the over-reliance on 'umble farm boys or bland spiky-haired teenage boys is frequently mocked.

Characters like Jamelia are, at the moment and with the prevalent style of character generation, effectively totally reliant on players putting in an unguided effortpost to create them whole-cloth. Why shouldn't quest writers - especially ones who are also writer-writers - lay out the kinds of guide ropes that they use all the time to build characters, so players who aren't used to doing that kind of thing can actually colour within the lines to build a character, rather than being handed a blank piece of paper being being told "draw something"?

Why not, instead, have character generation being actual, literary-style character generation? Why not generate a character, rather than a collection of mechanics - and then leave it up to the quest-runner to build the mechanics around the character the players have built?
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I think in many cases, the answer will amount to "because it's a lot less effort." Piles of mechanics are easier to put together than compelling characters.
 
So, out of some curiosity-

If you all had the power to rewrite oMage's spheres, how would you do so? I've been banging around ideas for a nuAscension for a while now in my head and come to the conclusion that something like this basically has to be done.
 
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ChineseDrone said:
If you all had the power to rewrite oMage's spheres, how would you do so? I've been banging around ideas for a nuAscension for a while now in my head and come to the conclusion that something like this basically has to be done.
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I've played around with the idea of getting rid of them entirely, and tying them instead to abilities - so a NWO agent literally casts magic by rolling arete + terrorism or arete + red tape, while a Hermetic might roll arete + binding demons. If you're including Arete 6 paradigm breaking, then you get to buy much broader skills, like the original spheres.

Balancing this, of course, would be a massive pain, but on a conceptual level it appeals to me.
 
NonSequtur said:
I've played around with the idea of getting rid of them entirely, and tying them instead to abilities - so a NWO agent literally casts magic by rolling arete + terrorism or arete + red tape, while a Hermetic might roll arete + binding demons. If you're including Arete 6 paradigm breaking, then you get to buy much broader skills, like the original spheres.
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Rising skills is trivial compared with rising spheres.

But more importantly, Mages aren't Solars. They shouldn't require skills to cast magic.* Having a paradigm that says "I am just lucky and good things happen to me just because" it's perfectly kosher.

*(Having them helps, of course).
 
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