How strong would a Masquerade have to be to survive in the modern world?

[Q99]

That's actually the basis of the whole numbers argument--so long as there are not enough supernatural critters or beings gathered in one place to create a statistical distortion, you can hide, and most of humanity will do the work for you.

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Oh, I'm saying the opposite:

You have enough supernaturals to make a statistical distortion, but that distortion is everywhere and appears in past records as well, so does not register as an anomaly by analysis. The missing persons amount being 10% higher is how it's always been, and so on, thus the numbers themselves do not lead one to suspecting something is off.

You still need other forms of cover to prevent eye witness accounts or such, but there's no "wow, something is unusual here because so many people go missing," and indeed, there's a shade of "if there really was something supernatural going on here, shouldn't it stand out in the numbers instead of being totally normal? (not realizing that the totally normal is supernaturals doing stuff)".

Almost everyone knows someone who was involved, but as long as that something is 'mysterious blackouts' or even 'deaths,' or something akin to that as long as there's nothing specific pointing to the truth, it's viewed as the status quo because there's nothing that looking at longer term statistics will peg as unusual.

 

[Arcus]

Another note about the WoD masquerade: It's incompatible with scientific theory overhaul. Newtonian physics would be correct and absolute under its rules, without the holes that led to the overhaul of physics we got IRL.

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Not really? Consensus reality is not absolute; people's beliefs aren't uniform and unchanging. Besides, the whole point of Mages is that they get to break Consensus.

And from my understanding a lot of the scientific community are Technocratic sympathisers or actual Technocrats. Yes, they do go to the effort of manipulating the scientific community into doing what they want. They're trying to push their updates out to the masses. Yes, that they decided to throw out Newtonian physics was all politics.

 

[Partizan]

Oh, I'm saying the opposite:

You have enough supernaturals to make a statistical distortion, but that distortion is everywhere and appears in past records as well, so does not register as an anomaly by analysis. The missing persons amount being 10% higher is how it's always been, and so on, thus the numbers themselves do not lead one to suspecting something is off.

You still need other forms of cover to prevent eye witness accounts or such, but there's no "wow, something is unusual here because so many people go missing," and indeed, there's a shade of "if there really was something supernatural going on here, shouldn't it stand out in the numbers instead of being totally normal? (not realizing that the totally normal is supernaturals doing stuff)".

Almost everyone knows someone who was involved, but as long as that something is 'mysterious blackouts' or even 'deaths,' or something akin to that as long as there's nothing specific pointing to the truth, it's viewed as the status quo because there's nothing that looking at longer term statistics will peg as unusual.

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Ah. I see the confusion, here. You have missed a vital part of the argument.

Your logic is absolutely sound, by the way. As things get more and more common, they become more and more accepted. And there is always a strong tendency by most humans to deny evidence of something that they don't want to be true--hence the Waldo Butters syndrome, where somebody can literally see zombies rip his office apart, and be arguing that zombies are impossible not five minutes later. And you are absolutely correct--once the numbers reach something like one in 10,000, the anomalies begin to disappear again. As you said, at that point the abnormal becomes the normal.

Here's what you missed: these statistical distortions (or not) cost money. All the problems a vampire can cause, all the damage done by an enraged werewolf, all houses destroyed by a mage who's fighting for his life, all that has to be replaced. A single person isn't going to be able to realize that the fire shouldn't have happened, or care, or be able to really investigate even if they do notice that something isn't right. But a multi-million dollar corporation has a bit more in the way of resources at its disposal. They can investigate, and they will do so.

Let's take the mages, for instance. Say one in 10,000 people is part of the supernatural, 10% of whom are mages. That comes out to about 3,000 mages in the country. As long as those are all spread out, the magical conflicts are kept to a minimum, which means the destroyed houses are kept to a minimum. But when two mages move next door to each other, and start fighting, one of them will come out the worse off--his car gets destroyed, then his plumbing explodes, than a sinkhole eats his garage, and so forth and so on, finally culminating in his whole freaking house getting burned down in a freak accident. Now, Mage B, who is coming out the loser in this conflict, is fully insured. He's not stupid. But...his insurance company is now out a fair bit of money, and they're going to want an explanation. Especially since it's going to look an awful lot like one of two things is true: either he's just really spectacularly unlucky, or he's defrauding the insurance company. One of the two would be expected to be true, and the insurance company would be pushing hard for the latter, since that means that they don't have to pay out a half-million dollars, or whatever. So now Mage B has a dilemma: does he go to prison for insurance fraud, which is enemy/next door neighbor would just love to see, or does he try to prove that he's just that unlucky? And, come to that...how does Mage B prove that he's unlucky?

Once or twice, eh. You can write this off as a weird coincidence. Insurance fraud happens, after all, and there are even some people who manage to beat the system. It happens. That's why people keep trying it. But if the mages group with the rest of the American population, and follow other very human tendencies, that means you are looking at whomever insures the apartments in, say, New York City, facing the loss of considerable money every year from this. Hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, certainly. Potentially millions. Now, they can just eat the cost of all this, sure. It's one of the known hazards of doing business, after all, especially in something like insurance. But...their competitor, who is based out of, say, Richmond, VA, is going to be looking for an edge. New York City is a big market, after all, and the nature of the insurance business is such that controlling that kind of market is going to give you a major advantage in selling insurance in other parts of the country. So the competitor is looking of any edge they can find, any way they can insert a prybar into the enormous insurance market that is NYC, so they can force the first company out of the city, and take it for their own fiefdom. There's money in this, you see. Lots of money. Just the healthcare insurance alone is a multi-billion dollar industry, and that's by far not the only type of insurance on the market. So any competitor, whether they come from Richmond, or California, is going to need all the advantage they can get. And a million dollar per year cost advantage is a really big advantage. Possibly even big enough to counter the advantage that controlling a 20,000,000+ person market segment would grant.
If one company figures this out, however they manage to stumble onto the truth--and if there are that many supernatural beings on the planet, that means that stumbling on the truth becomes highly likely--than no insurance company that doesn't stumble upon the truth, and that cannot predict that there is an increased chance of supernatural events when you're writing a policy to a mage, can possibly survive. For one in 10,000 people, we're likely talking billions of dollars every year, and that's going to be a very noticeable chunk of change.

For proof of this analogy, by the way, all you have to do is look at the car insurance market in the United States. The 4th-largest company in the country, Allstate, basically survives and prospers entirely because it has the best actuarial tables. That lets Allstate give the best dollar-for-dollar policies on the market, policies that no other company on the market can match in terms of cost or value. So far, the bigger companies have held Allstate off because there's an inherent cost advantage in having a larger customer pool...but if the smaller companies start to get squeezed out, or Allstate expands its market abroad, that could change. So everybody has to spend a lot of money continually improving their actuarial tables, even though the factors behind the accidents are pretty well-known, by now, and aren't really changing all that much. Adding the supernatural just adds in one more readily identifiable element. Sure, the numbers are just part of the background scenery, but so's the mountain covering up all that lovely, lovely coal--and a mere mountain is nowhere near enough to stop a mining company from extracting the coal it's looking for.

 

[Q99]

If one company figures this out, however they manage to stumble onto the truth--and if there are that many supernatural beings on the planet, that means that stumbling on the truth becomes highly likely--than no insurance company that doesn't stumble upon the truth, and that cannot predict that there is an increased chance of supernatural events when you're writing a policy to a mage, can possibly survive.

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You still need to be able to pin it down from investigating a mage. Because investigating a mage, well, if they've got mind cover up spells? They can guarantee your conclusion is "it's old random explosion syndrome. When will those dumb scientists figure that out anyway?" or "It's in the realm of bad luck." And if the mages can cover up their identities or change ones, maybe it won't even revolve around individual people. Statistical spread.

Because at that point the equation becomes less about statistics, and more about 'what's the defense when people look at the area?'. The problem is statistically normal, so you can't really show it to others from a distance, you need a smoking gun. The insurance people will look... and they won't be expecting anything odd, and they'll be interviewing the mage themselves and thus giving an opportunity to quelch it. No individual case becomes a 'let's focus all our efforts on figuring this out,' and cases of that type consistently produce similar results.

And that's assuming a spell slinger masquerade where stuff gets blown up and relatively high destructive power involved. A vampire masquerade (with, say, some degree of hypnosis) is largely going to be memory blanks and the occasional missing people, so insurance companies don't get involved so much as they do with a property damage thing. Or mages have less destructive omph, more repair spells, and 'spontaneous human combustion' is much more widely accepted...

This absolutely requires very good on-point defenses, but it means that unlike a masquerade with good on-point defenses but small clustered number, you can't statistically point and say 'there's something going on' from a safe distance, you have to get close to, and generally talk to- and thus come in contact with- the supernatural and fall in range of front line masquerade covering.

 

[Partizan]

The problem with any masquerade is that it has to balance two competing factors: the degree to which those who it covers stand out, versus the money that is being invested (knowingly or not) in doing so. The more people who have to be covered by the masquerade, the more money there is to be had in breaching it--so even though more stuff gets rolled into the "nothing weird here" syndrome, eventually, there gets to be enough money involved that you start to have to provide alternate explanations, so that people don't dig up the truth by accident. Worse, they have to be alternate explanations that hold up under some very intense scrutiny, because, again, whomever can use those explanations to predict the future, wins. If there's not very much money involved, because there aren't very many people covered by the masquerade, there's no real money in investigating. Then you get something like the Hunters--people who might know about the masquerade, but really don't have the resources to do anything about it, except for individually hunting the "monsters" down, one by one.

You still need to be able to pin it down from investigating a mage. Because investigating a mage, well, if they've got mind cover up spells? They can guarantee your conclusion is "it's old random explosion syndrome. When will those dumb scientists figure that out anyway?" or "It's in the realm of bad luck." And if the mages can cover up their identities or change ones, maybe it won't even revolve around individual people. Statistical spread.

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But the mages can only guarantee the results if they know the investigation is happening--which they won't necessarily know. The existence of mages, because they get into all kinds of crazy stuff, is going to be one of those things that could be proven by people investigating along any one of several different avenues. Plus, this assumes that the mage in question can alter somebody's mind or memories, which may not be guaranteed.

Plus, you've got to remember something important: mages (or other supernatural critters) are going to concentrate where the people are. And the the greater the concentration of mages, vampires, etc, the more potential for conflict there is...and the more potential that somebody will do something stupid. Worse, the more potential for either there is, the greater the potential for both to happen at the same time...and that's probably going to be the source of the vast majority of the weirdness that would end up costing money.

Because at that point the equation becomes less about statistics, and more about 'what's the defense when people look at the area?'. The problem is statistically normal, so you can't really show it to others from a distance, you need a smoking gun. The insurance people will look... and they won't be expecting anything odd, and they'll be interviewing the mage themselves and thus giving an opportunity to quelch it. No individual case becomes a 'let's focus all our efforts on figuring this out,' and cases of that type consistently produce similar results.

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The thing is, there's something called an 80-20 rule, that states that if you can solve the 20% of the problems that occur most frequently, you remove 80% of all reported problems. As long as the numbers stay low, the insurance people look, don't see anything odd, they run a few quick interviews, the issue gets squashed, and they go on. If the numbers rise above a certain point, the problem starts to tip into the top 20%...at which point, the mage doesn't get interviewed. Instead, the remains of his house get forensically examined, and the examiner's bosses aren't going to take "nothing weird" as an acceptable answer. This isn't just about claims payout any more--this is about rates adjustment, and that's where the real money lies. Now we're talking serious money, most of which the mage won't have any warning is being expended, to get to the bottom of things. And if the claims adjustor comes back in the middle of all this with "nothing strange happening here," that data point gets added into the mix. So no amount of on-point defenses will help, until and unless you somehow get lucky, and find out about the investigation before it is too late.

And that's assuming a spell slinger masquerade where stuff gets blown up and relatively high destructive power involved. A vampire masquerade (with, say, some degree of hypnosis) is largely going to be memory blanks and the occasional missing people, so insurance companies don't get involved so much as they do with a property damage thing. Or mages have less destructive omph, more repair spells, and 'spontaneous human combustion' is much more widely accepted...

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A vampire masquerade will generate its own issues--spontaneous transmission of blood-borne diseases, for instance, or the presence of bite marks on the victim. The same thing goes for werewolves (would be a distinct shortage of cats, lots of howling at night), dragons (gold shortages, and the random disappearance of maidens) and so on an so forth. I just picked mages because they were the most spectacular, not because they were the only ones.

 

[Jace911]

I'm reminded of Monte Cook's World of Darkness spinoff where Chicago has a mage population of 60,000 and the Dakotas are consumed by a perpetually burning sphere of fire, yet nobody notices or cares.

I want to see a tv show about normal humans trying to go about their daily lives in this world where every single rooftop in the city is host to nightly reality warping mage fights a la Doctor Strange, every nightclub is owned by thinly-disguised vampires who were never told the 90s ended, and political canvassers have a 1/50 chance of knocking on the door of a supernatural monster who will eat them.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

The thing is, there's something called an 80-20 rule, that states that if you can solve the 20% of the problems that occur most frequently, you remove 80% of all reported problems. As long as the numbers stay low, the insurance people look, don't see anything odd, they run a few quick interviews, the issue gets squashed, and they go on. If the numbers rise above a certain point, the problem starts to tip into the top 20%...at which point, the mage doesn't get interviewed. Instead, the remains of his house get forensically examined, and the examiner's bosses aren't going to take "nothing weird" as an acceptable answer. This isn't just about claims payout any more--this is about rates adjustment, and that's where the real money lies. Now we're talking serious money, most of which the mage won't have any warning is being expended, to get to the bottom of things. And if the claims adjustor comes back in the middle of all this with "nothing strange happening here," that data point gets added into the mix. So no amount of on-point defenses will help, until and unless you somehow get lucky, and find out about the investigation before it is too late.

Click to shrink...

This assumes that the insurance companies are not actually owned by the supernaturals in question, which, given that this heavily focuses on the old World of Darkness, is unlikely to an extreme.

In the new World of Darkness, a lot of the supernatural is explicitly self-censoring. The Uratha have Lunacy, I'm pretty sure there's something which makes all but strong-willed people want to rationalize away the existence of vampires, and any attempt by Sleepers to seek to understand magic inherently destroys the magic, leaving only mundane explanations, because the Abyss exists. Oh yeah and you have the Exarchs who are willing to help enforce the Lie. Your actuarial tables won't make sense, because you are literally incapable of comprehending the mystic factor.

The ones which don't have such a censorship field-well, Prometheans are super rare and avoid humanity, Mummies are only active for brief and unpredictable moments in time, Sin-Eaters deal almost exclusively with the dead and the underworld, and if you were to try to break the cover of a Demon by doing so, you will probably either find one of them convincing you that everything you found out was wrong, or find yourself strapped to a chair, being tortured by a bunch of hardened cyborg terrorists until you signed away your soul, and the next day, why, it turns out you made a basic mistake in all your calculations and there is definitely no such thing as the supernatural! In fact, it seems that I'm a complete lunatic! Or says the demon puppeting your very identity because they just erased you from all existence and now they've taken your place. And even an institutionalized crazy is a useful Cover because if nothing else, you can Burn it.

 

[Evil Plan]

The problem with any masquerade is that it has to balance two competing factors: the degree to which those who it covers stand out, versus the money that is being invested (knowingly or not) in doing so. The more people who have to be covered by the masquerade, the more money there is to be had in breaching it--so even though more stuff gets rolled into the "nothing weird here" syndrome, eventually, there gets to be enough money involved that you start to have to provide alternate explanations, so that people don't dig up the truth by accident. Worse, they have to be alternate explanations that hold up under some very intense scrutiny, because, again, whomever can use those explanations to predict the future, wins. If there's not very much money involved, because there aren't very many people covered by the masquerade, there's no real money in investigating. Then you get something like the Hunters--people who might know about the masquerade, but really don't have the resources to do anything about it, except for individually hunting the "monsters" down, one by one.

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In other words, the most effective form of masquerade is the one where you discard the masquerade in favor of "oh, vampires are as normal as cars or gay people".

(Incidentally, this is the sort of thing science does all the time. This is, for example, how we discovered the atom.)

I've probably been reading too much Worm stuff, but I'm reminded of the "masquerade" about the existance of supers in that setting. There is no maquerade about whether or not supers exist; they're common knowledge, they have dedicated branches of law enforcement, and several are even well-known public figures. On the other hand, there's plenty of "masquerade" to be had on the level of "this particular person is or is not a super".

This assumes that the insurance companies are not actually owned by the supernaturals in question, which, given that this heavily focuses on the old World of Darkness, is unlikely to an extreme.

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As far as I can tell, the thread is not focused on WoD, either oWoD or nWoD. I can't say regarding the conversation you're commenting on.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

As far as I can tell, the thread is not focused on WoD, either oWoD or nWoD. I can't say regarding the conversation you're commenting on.

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Here's the thing, though. A lot of times, supernatural creatures have sufficient power that they can do something similar-have very heavy influence over mundane society. Like, stereotypically you have these powerful councils of wizards or vampires with tons of money and power, it's not a stretch to imagine that they are going around kindly suggesting to the right people that there's no such thing as wizards/vampires/etc.

In a lot of urban fantasy with sexy vampires, the vampires are less predatory than oWoD ones, even, and thus would leave even less evidence save a trail of broken hearts most of the time.

 

[Partizan]

In other words, the most effective form of masquerade is the one where you discard the masquerade in favor of "oh, vampires are as normal as cars or gay people".

(Incidentally, this is the sort of thing science does all the time. This is, for example, how we discovered the atom.)

I've probably been reading too much Worm stuff, but I'm reminded of the "masquerade" about the existance of supers in that setting. There is no maquerade about whether or not supers exist; they're common knowledge, they have dedicated branches of law enforcement, and several are even well-known public figures. On the other hand, there's plenty of "masquerade" to be had on the level of "this particular person is or is not a super".


As far as I can tell, the thread is not focused on WoD, either oWoD or nWoD. I can't say regarding the conversation you're commenting on.

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While the discussion itself is not based around either nWoD, or oWoD, those are the two settings that are the most famous for their use of the masquerade. For that simple reason, most of the examples will be pulled from those settings, meaning that they're going to dominate the discussion.

I suspect that you are correct, however--the single most effective form of masquerade may well be that there is no masquerade, and supernatural creatures such as vampires and other critters are just an accepted fact of life. In such circumstances, small-scale masquerades, that cover a village or a neighborhood, are probably the best that could be accomplished--just convincing people that there aren't any vampires here would be enough to keep a vampire safe, I would think.

This assumes that the insurance companies are not actually owned by the supernaturals in question, which, given that this heavily focuses on the old World of Darkness, is unlikely to an extreme.

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I feel like we've been over this before...the actors change, but the concepts remain the same...or maybe it's the other way around. My memory never was what it used to be, and as time has gone by, it has gotten worse.

However....

In this case, you're assuming a total dominance of all aspects of human society and economic activity. Anything less will, sooner or later, cause critical industries to come out from under the masquerade's control. The reason for this is simple: those insurance companies that are owned by vampires (for example) are primarily being used to maintain the masquerade--not to make money. Companies that do exist to make money will always have a cost advantage over those that are formed for another reason. The only reason why companies are ever able to survive existing for a reason other than making a profit is when there is either no competition (which will not last in a global economy unless there is a very good reason), or they are being externally funded. And it's no use saying that the vampires or whomever are maintaining control--new companies are formed all the time, and whomever opposes the masquerade (and there will always be somebody who opposes it, for one reason or another) will start to take steps to protect those who are in a position to independently discover whatever the masquerade protects. This is leaving aside whatever measures the people who own these up-and-coming companies take to protect themselves, which will be substantial. At the end of the day, any masquerade that has the kind of influence you describe would be in a constant state of shadow war, as much with itself, as with any other. This is one of the aspects that WoD, both old and new, managed to capture very well--and that success, I believe, is one of the reasons why WoD has become the gold standard for all masquerades.

Yet even in WoD, the masquerade does sometimes slip, even without outside help, and the consequences for those affected by a slipping masquerade are universally catastrophic--witness the vampire casualties in the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, for instance. Effectively, what contains the damage when the masquerade slips even slightly isn't so much the actual masquerade, or even the self-maintaining mechanisms that keep most people from seeing that which is hidden by the masquerade. What contains the damage is that the casualties among those shielded by the masquerade are so total that there is nothing left to use to track those protected by the masquerade outside of the immediate vicinity.

In the new World of Darkness, a lot of the supernatural is explicitly self-censoring. The Uratha have Lunacy, I'm pretty sure there's something which makes all but strong-willed people want to rationalize away the existence of vampires, and any attempt by Sleepers to seek to understand magic inherently destroys the magic, leaving only mundane explanations, because the Abyss exists. Oh yeah and you have the Exarchs who are willing to help enforce the Lie. Your actuarial tables won't make sense, because you are literally incapable of comprehending the mystic factor.

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I understand this. You will notice that nowhere in this discussion did I say anything about eyewitness accounts, or Youtube, or cell phone cameras, or videos, or any kind of visible, easily accepted evidence. That can be countered, sequestered, marginalized, discredited, and, ultimately, removed. It would take a hell of a lot of influence, but it can be done.

But science is a lot more than just YouTube and the nightly news. Science is about looking at something that you don't understand--something that you cannot understand, or explain, or prove--and finding a way to explain things to such an extent that you can reliably predict what will happen in the future. That's what actuarial tables are. They don't require a belief, or even an understanding. They're just raw numbers, calculating probability, and the only thing that is required of them is that they work. And the problem is that numbers don't lie, or Lie, or indicate understanding, or anything else. Nobody has to understand magic, or thaumaturgy, or anything of that nature, to prove that it exists. They wouldn't even be examining the possibility that magic exists. All they'd be trying to do is understand why a Kenmore boiler explodes in one house, and not in another, despite both boilers being put into the exact same situation, under the exact same circumstances. That's not understanding magic. That's just trying to figure something out--something that isn't possible under current, mundane laws of physics. If anything, the self-censoring nature of the masquerade will only amplify the fact that this doesn't make sense, because it actively removes the only logical explanation: that somebody actively tried to blow up the first boiler, and make it look like an accident. So what you get is a boiler that explodes when it should not have. If that only happens a few times, ever, no big deal. But if it happens more than once in a century, than it starts to cost money, and Kenmore starts looking into it seriously, to try to figure out what the hey is happening. And because sabotage is out, and our engineers are telling us that this is impossible, and our test engineers are duplicating the conditions exactly, and they're not getting that result...well, at that point, you've eliminated all the mundane, reasonable, logical, possible answers. You can't write it off as a fluke, because it's costing money, lives, and you're getting court orders to fix it. You can't figure it out according to conventional knowledge, because the primary factor that's making them explode no longer exists. So what do you do? You assume an unknown factor, and you move to isolate it, and when it turns out that any and all mundane explanations don't work, you're left with only the non-mundane.

if you were to try to break the cover of a Demon by doing so, you will probably either find one of them convincing you that everything you found out was wrong, or find yourself strapped to a chair, being tortured by a bunch of hardened cyborg terrorists until you signed away your soul, and the next day, why, it turns out you made a basic mistake in all your calculations and there is definitely no such thing as the supernatural! In fact, it seems that I'm a complete lunatic! Or says the demon puppeting your very identity because they just erased you from all existence and now they've taken your place. And even an institutionalized crazy is a useful Cover because if nothing else, you can Burn it.

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How does the demon know you're investigating him (or her, or it)? Remember, nobody's asking any questions of the average passer-by on the street. They're asking questions of men in white coats, who have labs full of explody things, and who everybody tends to really notice if they go insane.

 

[Mannan]

For the masquerade you also have to take into account just how attention getting the creatures are.

It is very hard to hide it if all magical beings regularly duke it out in building destroying grudge matches, but if they live relativley peaceful lives then it would be much easier to hide them.

If a Vampire can subsist on blood bags and their is an organization of Vampires and their underlings that regularly take blood and distribute it then that would be fine and in fact would make vampire attacks even rarer than the past.

For various magical creatures they could have been hunted into extinction, which has been done to a lot of mundane species, or kept in reserves that keep people away.

For magical types the mages could just not resort to attention getting acts. After all all you need is a culture that espouses subdued displays of magic and it becomes so much easier to hide them.

Sure their would be some who buck this trend and would jeapordize the masquerade, but they would be the equivalent of criminals, and thus be a very small group that would be much easier to cover up.

 

[Q99]

One of the key things in a coverup is, thus, to give a convenient excuse for those actuary tables.

 

[Arcus]

Now, Mage B, who is coming out the loser in this conflict, is fully insured. He's not stupid.

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Or maybe, Mage B just doesn't press the insurance claim. Or he leans on his supernatural support network. Or he gets insurance with a company that is controlled by mage sympathisers. Because he's not stupid and presumably has a vested interest in preserving the masquerade.

Maybe you should check that you aren't working from flawed assumptions before making gigantic wall of text posts.

 

[mothematics]

I want to see a tv show about normal humans trying to go about their daily lives in this world where every single rooftop in the city is host to nightly reality warping mage fights a la Doctor Strange, every nightclub is owned by thinly-disguised vampires who were never told the 90s ended, and political canvassers have a 1/50 chance of knocking on the door of a supernatural monster who will eat them.

Click to shrink...

We have a podcast that's kind of like that, if you don't already know about Welcome To Night Vale

 

[windall]

To me it seems that pretty much any masquerade that is effective comes down to having some reality warping effect that makes the supernatural not or less noticeable to mundanes. The words reality warping effect make it pretty clear that there is no way for the masquerade to be broken except on the supernatural side.

 

[Briefvoice]

The biggest problem I have with Masquerades in works of fiction is that so many of them start with the premise that people don't want the supernatural to be true and are therefore predisposed to ignore it.

Here in the real world, everything I know about human nature says the opposite. Many, many people are desperate to believe in the supernatural and investigate it seriously. The only reason we have a general societal consensus that "there's no such thing as magic" is a few hundred years of rigorous investigation has been unable to turn anything up. To cite one particularly famous example, it's not that Harry Houdini didn't want to believe in spiritualists and mediums. He was desperate to believe and spent a lot of his life looking for someone genuinely able to contact the spirits of the dead. The problem is that being a skilled illusionist, he kept seeing through the fakes.

Aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, curses, witchcraft, angels... the general population is thirsty as hell for them.

 

[Partizan]

One of the key things in a coverup is, thus, to give a convenient excuse for those actuary tables.

Click to shrink...

Exactly. But it must be an excuse that will hold water under repeated investigations by a wide variety of organizations, because more than one group is going to be investigating this kind of thing.

Now, Mage B, who is coming out the loser in this conflict, is fully insured. He's not stupid.​

Or maybe, Mage B just doesn't press the insurance claim. Or he leans on his supernatural support network. Or he gets insurance with a company that is controlled by mage sympathisers. Because he's not stupid and presumably has a vested interest in preserving the masquerade.

Maybe you should check that you aren't working from flawed assumptions before making gigantic wall of text posts.

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I'm sorry, I must be missing something. Obviously, every isolated asshole mage on the planet has immense wealth, and has no need to scramble to replace any amount of property they might have lost because they, just for example, picked a fight with the wrong group of PCs. Who are obviously always evil and vicious madmen who are running around randomly harassing mages just because they happen to be casting potentially world-ending spells, or some other such nonsense.

And remember what I said earlier--a company that is dedicated to maintaining the masquerade is always going to be at a disadvantage when it comes to competing against companies that are just trying to turn a profit, if for no other reason than that they are vulnerable to a price war.

 

[Mannan]

An issue I see is if the supernatural are actually predisposed to flashy displays of their inhuman nature.

Do wizards actually have to go settle fights with flinging fireballs and the like? Do Vampires have to drain blood and do the various monsters have to kill people in cities and the like.

Sure their could be fights breaking out, but unless they are at war then major displays of violence would probably really restricted. Its not like people expect to get into a shoot out regularly, not even police expect that.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

I'm sorry, I must be missing something. Obviously, every isolated asshole mage on the planet has immense wealth, and has no need to scramble to replace any amount of property they might have lost because they, just for example, picked a fight with the wrong group of PCs. Who are obviously always evil and vicious madmen who are running around randomly harassing mages just because they happen to be casting potentially world-ending spells, or some other such nonsense.

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Because obviously mages who regularly get into fights with other mages are going to be the types who live as normal people in mundane society. I am pretty sure this is not actually how most urban fantasy works. It is definitely not how either nMage or oMage work, because if you're a mage, you have some very good reasons to avoid staying around normal people unless you absolutely have to, and in both cases the people who 'absolutely have to' tend to be people with wealth and influence and therefore not 'normal people' whose homes inexplicably burn down.

And remember what I said earlier--a company that is dedicated to maintaining the masquerade is always going to be at a disadvantage when it comes to competing against companies that are just trying to turn a profit, if for no other reason than that they are vulnerable to a price war.

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I run Aspari Insurance, a multinational insurance corporation dedicated to maintaining the masquerade.

You run BankruptCorp, a multinational insurance corporation which is not dedicated to maintaining the masquerade.

I therefore have access to a literally superhuman talent pool. Because my insurance adjusters could literally see the future, I can always win. On the other hand, I don't even need to work anywhere near that hard. I have my associates help me cast a ritual which ensures you go bankrupt because your actuarial predictions will be incredibly wrong. Because you have no mages on your side, that is exactly what happens. Your claims are discredited and I win.

 

[Q99]

The biggest problem I have with Masquerades in works of fiction is that so many of them start with the premise that people don't want the supernatural to be true and are therefore predisposed to ignore it.

Here in the real world, everything I know about human nature says the opposite. Many, many people are desperate to believe in the supernatural and investigate it seriously. The only reason we have a general societal consensus that "there's no such thing as magic" is a few hundred years of rigorous investigation has been unable to turn anything up. To cite one particularly famous example, it's not that Harry Houdini didn't want to believe in spiritualists and mediums. He was desperate to believe and spent a lot of his life looking for someone genuinely able to contact the spirits of the dead. The problem is that being a skilled illusionist, he kept seeing through the fakes.

Aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, curses, witchcraft, angels... the general population is thirsty as hell for them.

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Yea, if there's something down in the dark alley, we're going to go "Let's check it out!" a statistically significant amount of the time.

A masquerade cannot rely on that factor. It needs stuff like hypnosis, illusions, or that sort of thing.


Hm, interesting the comics Narbonic/Skin Horse has a 'weirdness filter' thing where people just don't see a lot of things past a certain level... but only some people have it, and for others the masquerade is already effectively down. The machine intelligence union rep (who is a human) appeared on TV. Mad scientist robot attacks occasionally happen. A New Orleans voodoo priest is pleasantly surprised to meet a real intelligent science-made zombie. And one 'fun' thing? A mad scientist learns how to artificially induce this weirdness filter to make those once in on it oblivious. And no, this advancement isn't used to maintain any masquerade, a *mad* scientist made it.

 

[BossFight]

If anyone has read Gargoyles, I thought they handled it pretty well. Gargoyles are unmovung stone statues during the day, so they can only be encounter in the dark. Furthermore when they die they turn to stone so you cant present their corpse as evidence.

 

[Q99]

If anyone has read Gargoyles, I thought they handled it pretty well. Gargoyles are unmovung stone statues during the day, so they can only be encounter in the dark. Furthermore when they die they turn to stone so you cant present their corpse as evidence.

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Also there's, like, a half dozen of them in a city, and this is pre-cellphone cameras.

 

[Q99]

Oh hey, idea!

If you were a Gargoyle type monster (physically distinct but few in number. This works with Ninja Turtles too)-

One, get a friend who's big into cosplay.

Two, have them make a high-quality costume resembling you.

Three, have them go to a lot of big cons, take pictures with people, share them on the internet. Including a how-to guide on how to make costumes like it and in partially completed form too.

Congratulations, next time you're caught on camera, "Waaait, that's Sam! I saw them at Dragon-Con and Comic-con, they're a regular! Here's a link to their gallery! Oh, or maybe it's someone just copying their design..."

 

[PhDEevee]

The insurance companies thought is amusing, though it's not exactly guaranteed to pick up magic. It might cause some interesting culture shifts, though. Suppose that mages (for some reason) all buy classical robes, for whatever reason. These same mages often get their houses burned down, for some reason. Scrutinising and investigating them very carefully, the insurance company ends up noticing the various robe purchases and adds them to its actuarial tables, causing insurance costs for mages who wear robes to abruptly rise without ever getting near the masquerade. This provokes some shift in the mages' behaviour, whether it's no longer wearing robes or doing something to the insurance companies who decide to add robes to their actuarial tables.

 

[Partizan]

Because obviously mages who regularly get into fights with other mages are going to be the types who live as normal people in mundane society. I am pretty sure this is not actually how most urban fantasy works. It is definitely not how either nMage or oMage work, because if you're a mage, you have some very good reasons to avoid staying around normal people unless you absolutely have to, and in both cases the people who 'absolutely have to' tend to be people with wealth and influence and therefore not 'normal people' whose homes inexplicably burn down.



I run Aspari Insurance, a multinational insurance corporation dedicated to maintaining the masquerade.

You run BankruptCorp, a multinational insurance corporation which is not dedicated to maintaining the masquerade.

I therefore have access to a literally superhuman talent pool. Because my insurance adjusters could literally see the future, I can always win. On the other hand, I don't even need to work anywhere near that hard. I have my associates help me cast a ritual which ensures you go bankrupt because your actuarial predictions will be incredibly wrong. Because you have no mages on your side, that is exactly what happens. Your claims are discredited and I win.

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So...let me get this straight.

You have Aspari insurance. It has access to superhuman talent pools, etc, etc, etc. And of course, there is absolutely no problem with mundane people making use of these superhuman predictions, or divinations of the future, or anything like that. You can pick the stocks, you can pick the policies, you can basically print money at will, and nobody has any choice but to use your company. Correct?

How many of your employees are mages, and/or superhuman?

Cause I don't know about you, but I seem to remember this thing called Paradox, that causes some sort of...backlash, wasn't it? When the spell is seen, observed, and known to be impossible? I mean, isn't that why mages have to be...you know...quiet about things? Instead of ruling openly, and all that? Because the magic literally does not work when people start looking at it closely. Right?

And I don't know if you paid huge amounts of attention, back in Bush's presidency, but there was this dude, called Bernie Maddox, who was supposedly doing things that were impossible...and people noticed. Not many, but a bunch of those who did were just average Joe Plumber types who did a lot of day trading. My own parents noticed. I don't know what twigged them to the problem. I've never asked, and I doubt they still remember (plus one of them is dead). But it was my understanding that it wouldn't take many people saying "this is impossible" to trigger Paradox. Which, as I recall, makes the magic wildly unpredictable, and massively dangerous, at best.

So, basically, you just took down Bankrupt Corp...and the entire global economy along with it. Plus, all your resources, plus all the banks, plus, plus, plus. All because you tried to use magic in a glaringly obvious fashion to manipulate the stock market, and make money go poof when that wasn't going to happen normally.

So...now, just like other corporate heads who tried to majorly fuck with the global economy, you're in jail. All the evidence that you haven't committed massive fraud, to the tune of billions of dollars, is all gone. I didn't have to lift a finger. I didn't have to pay a cent. All I had to do was laugh. The SEC, the hedge fund managers, the day traders, the...well, there's something like several million people who pay attention to this kind of thing. And you just saw a cash shortfall of about two-thirds your entire income, because all your magic-derived revenue went up in smoke. You're still rich--gotta love those Swiss bank accounts--but you're in jail. Me? I'm free to start again. And now there are all these investors looking for somebody to invest in...and a pretty big market that's suddenly lost its primary provider.

Maybe, if I feel really nice, I'll send you flowers in jail. Hell, maybe I'll hire some of your guys. There won't be any of this nonsense about maintaining any masquerade, though. We're here to make money, not cover for a bunch of guys wearing funny robes and trying to twiddle their fingers a lot.

Mind you, Bankrupt Corp isn't really a name to trust, these days, so I'll probably have to come up with a new name. How about Enron? I hear that's got some positive vibes associated with it. Well...more positive than Aspari Insurance Group, anyway.