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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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So @EarthScorpion and I are watching Supergirl at the moment, and we were talking about how Kara is an absurdly powerful Bygone but only an intern-level caster (which is why her high-ranking Technocrat Mentor hasn't noticed who she is yet), and I commented jokingly that the job of "Cat's assistant" is basically a Primer. And ES considered this comment, and went "... it totally is an ordeal that hammers your soul". And thus...

CatCo Executive Assistant (PA role to Cat Grant)
A Chair of Syndicate Media Control, the so-called Queen of All Media is legendary for chewing through assistants in weeks or days - sometimes mere hours. Her caustic criticism, unrelentingly high standards and constant demand for excellence are an intimidating prospect for prospective employees. A hopeful secretary needs to bring an incredibly strong drive (Willpower 7) simply to survive her expectations. Should they pay attention to the gems of knowledge she casually drops and learn enough from her (8 Ability dots minimum), the job acts as a Primer which can teach them Enlightenment 1, Mind 1 and Primal Utility 1 through a paradigm focused on mass media control and personal excellence.
 
I must admit, the Syndicate using entry-level finance/business jobs as primers makes the hell that is being a new Goldman analyst make a lot more sense
 
Aleph said:
A hopeful secretary needs to bring an incredibly strong drive (Willpower 7) simply to survive her expectations. Should they pay attention to the gems of knowledge she casually drops and learn enough from her (8 Ability dots minimum), the job acts as a Primer which can teach them Enlightenment 1, Mind 1 and Primal Utility 1 through a paradigm focused on mass media control and personal excellence.
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Interestingly enough, these mechanical requirements are identical to those displayed by multiple Hermetic masters in history with a high rate of Awakening students over the years. Someone from House Thig said it was because each of the masters in turn has been the avatar of the Platonic godform of the Queen Bitch, but House Thig people say that sort of thing a lot so no one really pays them much attention.
 
Aaron Peori said:
Or destroy them in various hilarious ways.

Either or.
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This is actually untrue, Primers don't force Awakening and don't have the risks that Forced Awakening has. If you have a person who already buys into the paradigm it sets up, who has the other prerequisites to become a mage (general excellence and talent, high willpower, etc), it has a fairly reasonable chance to get you a new mage. Those who fail just... fail. They might even still Awaken later, or be responsive to other Primers.

Generalissimo said:
Or accidentally make a Hedge Wizard :p
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Primers don't actually do this FYI. Unless they have an entirely separate function of teaching hedge wizardry what they do is give you a dot in Arete/Enlightenment and a dot in a sphere or two if you successfully assimilate their knowledge.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
This is actually untrue, Primers don't force Awakening and don't have the risks that Forced Awakening has. If you have a person who already buys into the paradigm it sets up, who has the other prerequisites to become a mage (general excellence and talent, high willpower, etc), it has a fairly reasonable chance to get you a new mage. Those who fail just... fail. They might even still Awaken later, or be responsive to other Primers.



Primers don't actually do this FYI. Unless they have an entirely separate function of teaching hedge wizardry what they do is give you a dot in Arete/Enlightenment and a dot in a sphere or two if you successfully assimilate their knowledge.
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Huh, that's interesting.

Honestly, though, I kinda like the nMage way of it where getting any Awakenings at all is really, really difficult and often fraught with, "I think this caused them to Awaken but maybe not and it's just confirmation bias, lol."
 
The Laurent said:
Huh, that's interesting.

Honestly, though, I kinda like the nMage way of it where getting any Awakenings at all is really, really difficult and often fraught with, "I think this caused them to Awaken but maybe not and it's just confirmation bias, lol."
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Well nMage has different metaphysics. I could totally buy Morpheus giving a speech that lets a small number of people, who are already convinced that reality isn't quite real, to understand the code behind the physical facade and go "yeah the Matrix isn't real, I can totally jump 20 feet straight up into the air while firing two machine-guns with perfect accuracy." Also, as I understand it, nMage Awakenings don't have the same prerequisites as oMage ones, where your average mage is a literal Great Man, simply because of their stat spread.

A character in nMage is intended to be a neophyte, with experienced characters like SWAT officers and special forces types and veteran doctors/barristers/etc. often quite a bit of XP away from starting. A oMage initiate is generally already going to outclass them, and a starting Mage Mage can easily be elite in one area of expertise and still be a high-professional in another without any real glaring weaknesses.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Well nMage has different metaphysics. I could totally buy Morpheus giving a speech that lets a small number of people, who are already convinced that reality isn't quite real, to understand the code behind the physical facade and go "yeah the Matrix isn't real, I can totally jump 20 feet straight up into the air while firing two machine-guns with perfect accuracy." Also, as I understand it, nMage Awakenings don't have the same prerequisites as oMage ones, where your average mage is a literal Great Man, simply because of their stat spread.

A character in nMage is intended to be a neophyte, with experienced characters like SWAT officers and special forces types and veteran doctors/barristers/etc. often quite a bit of XP away from starting. A oMage initiate is generally already going to outclass them, and a starting Mage Mage can easily be elite in one area of expertise and still be a high-professional in another without any real glaring weaknesses.
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Honestly, I'm just going to say that in my opinion, for the types of games and the like that I prefer, that isn't really a good thing?

And yes, nMage Awakenings have no prerequisite and every prerequisite. It's something that happens when a person is pushed the right way at the right time and realizes something. Becomes something, sees something, and is so changed by it that they'll spend the rest of their life utterly transformed...at least in theory.

Outside of the mechanics, though, you totally could have someone with absolutely amazing Attributes and etc. It's merely that they have to sorta have a game, so they limit people to the starting XP/stats.

In theory, however, you could run a 'Hunter' game that later turned out, several months of playing and getting XP and buffing your character up into a very talented individual, to actually be a Mage game when everyone Awakens and suddenly the Seers are after them and it turns out that the dreadful enemies that they spent a dozen adventures fighting were just, like, relatively low-level spirits by Mage standards.
 
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MJ12 Commando said:
This is actually untrue, Primers don't force Awakening and don't have the risks that Forced Awakening has. If you have a person who already buys into the paradigm it sets up, who has the other prerequisites to become a mage (general excellence and talent, high willpower, etc), it has a fairly reasonable chance to get you a new mage. Those who fail just... fail. They might even still Awaken later, or be responsive to other Primers.
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Well, you might end up destroying them, but that has less to do with it being a Primer and more to do with something like "you just subjected someone to X-Com on Ironman mode with maximum handicaps and now they're a sobbing, broken wreck of a former person".
 
Carrnage said:
Well that won't backfire at all when a rival mage unleashes your furniture on you.
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So what you should do is turn the vampire into a table, the werewolf into a rug etc and then gift the furniture to rival. Make sure you hide the impact of this. Make sure to include a limited duration so the vampire will arise from his chair-hood and be rather pissed off at the guy who has been sitting on him for the last couple weeks.

...also it might be time to leave the country so nobody can catch up to you in case their are survivors.
 
One thing I'm grateful to Mage 2e for is the fact that literally everything related to any of the other realms (Ghost, Astral Beings, etc) doesn't also have, "Oh, and it also takes a few dots of Spirit on top of it because for reasons."
 
ManusDomine said:
Okay, @The Laurent how much did you pay him? :V
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The most important thing a person can do is make friends so that they can be your unpaid shills without you ever asking them to do it. :V

Currently, as it stands, the main character if the votes hold is going to be visiting the Shadow for the first time.

"Hey, I'll teach you about spirits and the like. We could view spirits in twilight at all sorts of places, or I might have a few fetishes in my magical carpet...bag to show you--"[1]

"Shadow. Now."

"Well...okay."

[1] He uses his magical carpet bag as one of his tools, specifically using it for Space spells involving distances...like, yes, teleporting.
 
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I think you're mistaking the alleged spirit of an age for some fairly straightforward game design. WW planned to make a game that was a modern successor of Ars Magica (because, among other things, Vampire continuity connected to it) and after a few iterations hit on this way to get there. (And according to conversations I've had, some Ars fans were actually pretty pissed off they didn't get "Ars Moderna," which they felt they were promised, and there was for a time a fork based on playtests called that.)

Anyway, Mage 1st drags a lot from Robert Pirsig: the theme of reconciling the romantic and technological worlds, the term Arete as the game, and the Sons of Ether, who were originally called Parmenideans (it's on old promo material, even). Prisig's focus is pre-Socratic and not really friendly toward Gnosticism at all, since Prisig interprets pre-Socratics as not really thinking in terms of truth value, but a sense of functional harmony (a la Heraclitus) and wholeness (a la Parmenides). There was a conscious attempt to avoid any real occult traditions not just for the personal reasons of certain staff, but because the sense was that the game wasn't really about "real" magic. This notion went all the way back to the original Ars, which was aggressively not based on real medieval traditions. It's only later editions that really went for it once it was understood that the biggest fans was hardcore medievalists.

It is true the "science wars" were a thing in academia at the time, but Mage doesn't refer to any of those things. As far as I know, the only person with an education in any of that who worked on Mage was . . . me. And it was 5-6 years before I got involved.
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Huh, this is interesting.

It's from Malcolm Sheppard btw.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Pfft. "The D&D thing". That has never not also been an White Wolf thing too. Look at system complexity. You might act sneeringly to D&D, but when you compare the relative system complexity and time invested into basic elements of the game you find that the Storytelling/Storyteller system thinks the really important thing is combat.

And that's even more true in Exalted. Just compare the amount of Charmtech development between the aspects of the game. By the end of 2e, the number of Solar Hero Style charms was comparable to a MoEP.

The social system is already pre-devalued. All it is right now is an XP trap punishing people who don't have the system mastery to realise that a Manipulation 5, Charisma 5 character is not meaningfully much better at social things than the Manipulation 5, Charisma 2 character. And that's bad design.

If you want social things to be put on an equal footing with combat, then go write a better system where there is a meaningfully different mechanical role for two social Attributes - or simplify the combat system down as well and use the chance to resolve the Dex issue that's existed since, again, 1991. Don't stick your fingers in your ears and pretend that the system as it is puts equal effort into combat and social things.
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Oh, I know it puts too much focus on combat. I merely am not interested in making it worse. I'm not even acting sneeringly at D&D? It states clearly and wholeheartedly what it wants to be, and then it tries to design the best mechanics to do that. I mean, obviously they don't always do the best at that and D&D has plenty of problems, but it knows what it wants to be, mostly, and it's just a matter of actually being able to do it successfully. It says, "I want to be a fantasy tactical combat simulator, and I guess there will be social bits but those aren't that important."

You then evaluate it on those merits (or criticize it on them) rather than trying to figure out whether it has the best social-interaction-dice-mechanics in the world.

White Wolf still places an emphasis on combat, but the social interaction stuff does seem like they're trying to reach for something less combat-centered. At the same time, yes, there's still a lot of focus on combat.

As far as it goes, yeah, the solution (that works best for me) is to just fix the three attributes thing. In theory it shouldn't be that hard, in practice no doubt it'll take a lot of work. But social interactions are already reasonably complex, so finding a way to divide it into three is more a matter of making sure that you have a niche for each and a way to make it work than some attempt to do the impossible that's doomed to failure.

As far as it goes, even the way they've done it in nWoD isn't the worst thing ever, though maybe I'm just too accepting of a person? Like frankly here, for random game abstractions, Presence and Manipulation are something where it seems like it can be worked with, because there are people who can approach things in a sly way, and people who just have a force of personality, and so on. You'd need to find a way to widen the gap between the two, or find new names and identities for it that don't blur together at the edges, but the general idea of a "Social Power" and "Social Finesse" set of Attributes isn't the worst thing ever, and it's something I think you could work with in making a patch (admittedly not a total overhaul) of the system. And yes, I know that now means you'll mock me for saying that or something?

I probably should put time into fixing it one day, but part of it is I guess I'm not dissatisfied enough with it not to just work around it and use it? It's sorta like, "Well, I guess I can see that you have a point" but it doesn't rise to the point where it's enough of a make or break where I have to either fix it or just not play White Wolf, and so I might have less incentive than other people to try to open the system up and remake it from the start.

TLDR: I wasn't criticizing D&D, it has its design philosophy that it should be judged by either way, I think White Wolf was trying for something else, I don't think Presence+Manipulation are evil, and some elements of the divide might be salvaged for a rewrite, which I think should be three-attribute if you do it. However, I am not so dissatisfied with the system that I'm driven to try to fix that part, so I might not be the best person to count on with that.
 
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