What Do You Love About WoD?
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Or maybe sometimes people just want to play a fucking tabletop roleplaying game, @The-Tree-of-Woe, not write a 32-page philosophical dissertation just so they can pretend that they can wave their hands and turn someone into a lawnchair.
I feel like I understand the reasoning behind simplifying and streamlining Ascension into Awakened better than any of the other books; I may not agree with where they wound up with it in 1e (Mage 2.0 is still looking pretty cool), but of all the oWoD games I feel like oMage took itself too seriously, had the most rules-bloat and self-contradiction, and took the most for granted, leaving potential new fans out in the cold to scratch their heads and shrug and go play something else, while a constantly-shrinking fanbase smirked their superior smirks and circle-jerked themselves into obscurity.
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I notice in all that you did not once actually counter my point about Awakening. Thanks!
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This is why I think D&D and its derivatives are on the whole superior systems to Storyteller/ing. As long as you are reasonable with focusing on a move or talent, you're probably fine.
Ahaha. >_>
Thenomain's bitching about the Order of Hermes aside
I think you mean me? Did Thenomain mention the Order of Hermes when I wasn't looking?
(if you want to know if something's good, check out the things he doesn't like)
Sorry to burst your fuckbubble, but I not only liked, I commonly played Order of Hermes.
I like pizza, too, but I don't want all food to become some flavor of pizza.
my problem with Awakening was that it specifically threw out something you really had to do to play Ascension -- pick up a book that wasn't a fucking game book and read it, whether that's The Emerald Tablet or the Qur'an or The Selfish Gene.
No, you really didn't, unless you actually wanted your character to specifically reflect elements within, or at least wanted them to be accurate when they talked shit, but that's true for everybody.
Or maybe sometimes people just want to play a fucking tabletop roleplaying game, @The-Tree-of-Woe, not write a 32-page philosophical dissertation just so they can pretend that they can wave their hands and turn someone into a lawnchair.
Paradigm was way simpler, and more personal, than the Imago / Atlantis stuff in Awakening. Anybody who ever made you write a 32-page philosophical dissertation just to do some magic was just an asshole.
It did mean that sometimes if you couldn't think your way through creating a particular effect within your paradigm, you might not be able to do it, but that was a feature, not a bug. There's probably not a good way to solve 'people with better imaginations tend to do better' as applies to mix and match systems. It's as applicable in Awakening as in Ascension, just in different ways.
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@HelloRaptor Actually no, I wasn't talking about you. Inquire before you swear at people. You colossal narcissist.
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn -
I still love my void engineer and her space van.
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@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
@HelloRaptor Actually no, I wasn't talking about you. Inquire before you swear at people. You colossal narcissist.
I was the only person in the thread to mention the Order of Hermes, on a forum where people semi-frequently (myself included) misattribute shit to other people, so I'm not sure it requires colossal levels of narcissism to have made the assumption.
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OMage also practically ignored the core idea that belief equals power. No guidelines for changing the Sleepers ideas of what is possible. Nothing about the abject confusion of seeing other Paradigms work.
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@Misadventure
There's not supposed to be any confusion over seeing other Paradigms work. It's like skin color: If your entire tribe has black skin, and all the tribes around you have black skin, and all the tribes around them have black skin, then people have black skin. The first time you encounter somebody with white skin it's probably pretty confusing, but a thousand years later maybe you should get over it.Now instead there's no confusion or surprise, just derision, entitlement, and largely unsubstantiated assumptions about the inferiority of people who don't share your
skin colorparadigm. -
Then what is the difference between a Paradigm in OWoD and the tools of nWoD? Seems pretty extraneous if belief never matters. Heck the whole Disbelief thing seems pretty stupid at that point.
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What are you even talking about? Nothing I said indicated that belief doesn't matter. Belief does matter. It is, more or less, all that matters. But despite what certain faith-based rhetoric might have us think, believing in your own shit doesn't mean you're incapable of parsing that there are other ways of doing things. A Technocracy mage doesn't see a Verbena wave a stick around and conjure lightning and think "OH MY GOD THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!", they just think it's sloppy, or inefficient, or a dangerous abomination.
The Order of Hermes doesn't think the Technocracy's science-based magic doesn't work, or even that it shouldn't work, they just think it's wrong.
You need a framework of belief within which to work your magic. Nothing in that requires that you believe other people's magic won't work, even if you can't do what they do in exactly the way they do it.
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So what is the Technocracy manipulating in the Sleeper populace to get technology etc to work, and to pressure non-Technocracy stuff to work less well?
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They took advantage of the Renaissance and advances in technology (the printing press, for example) to push an agenda of Science and Reason over mysticism. They started pushing the idea that Faith is for your afterlife, and that God's will is beyond your control or comprehension, so your faith can't make things happen in the here and now.
Science and technology in owod worked without the technology. They rarely created brand new inventions for the masses. Instead they used their own private advances to push refinement and expansion of existing science and technology, which further opened doors for the fairly explosive growth of both in the modern world.
Magical traditions had a pretty shitty PR policy, too. The secrets of the ancients are only for the chosen ones, or require years of dedication and study, or dangerous pacts or self-sacrifice, blah blah blah. That shit doesn't hold up to gunpowder and a boomstick in your hand that can shoot the monsters that lurk in the dark right in the face. Something the monsters in the dark learned all too well, and pretty early, so had their own campaigns to push the idea that monsters (and by extension magic) were just fairy tales.
As to your earlier comment about influencing sleepers, you're right that there's no good mechanic for it in the books, because it's generally left up to the Storyteller. Influencing a local community towards a belief system that supports your magic is actually supposed to make your magic easier/more coincidental/etc in the areas that community holds as their own. On a MU* you'd want something to help codify that a bit. EmmahSue has some plans for that, should her eventual oMage game with Mage 2.0 mechanics get off the ground.
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Did Thenomain mention the Order of Hermes when I wasn't looking?
It's implied. I was touched in bad ways from people who bragged how OoH were experts in every other Tradition's area. This didn't happen occasionally. This happened with one out of every one OoH fanboi.
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@Thenomain
That's not really surprising. The Order of Hermes' paradigm was basically designed around figuring out and incorporating magic of any kind. My last OoH mage had a Mage Lore specialization in Cross-Paradigm Interpretation.I mean, the Order of Hermes itself was basically a microcosm of the entire rest of the Nine Traditions, with subfactions of almost everybody else having joined them over the centuries. I'm not sure why someone would brag about that, or why anybody else would feel like it was a bad touch.
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@silentsophia said:
I still love my void engineer and her space van.
That was an entertaining character.
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I would have loved to see the space van but I was a filthy Traddie IC so likely not allowed to.
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@2mspris
Awww. Thanks. I'm glad you think so. I enjoy(ed) playing her. -
@HelloRaptor said:
I'm not sure why someone would brag about that, or why anybody else would feel like it was a bad touch.
Because when your thing is your thing, and someone else comes by and says, "Ha ha, I can do your thing," then why bother? As it was said earlier, people do like the powers. This is my incarnation of it.
Kind of like people who play D&D et al. and complain that 'Fighter' is no fun because it's not unique enough. I never felt that way, but I did see it a lot on forums. Or people who flip out at the thought that a Werewolf of a different Auspice using their Auspice Gifts. We got a lot of Werewolf players in Changeling who didn't understand how everyone could use everyone else's powers. I have some empathy toward it, but if XP didn't run like water then it wouldn't be a big problem.
OoH Fantards (not just players, but the people who gush over it) didn't play OoH as people interested in integrating all magic, but dominating it. Kind of like Techno players who took the 'Reality Police' thing way, way too far. You know the people I'm talking about. A lot of oMage players took the 'Paradigm War' thing too far OOC.
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@Thenomain
Fair enough. That's certainly true. People who OOCly revel in the more antagonistic aspects of their IC factions are always a teeth grinding affair. -
@HelloRaptor said:
Fair enough. That's certainly true. People who OOCly revel in the more antagonistic aspects of their IC factions are always a teeth grinding affair.
And this is why it is sometimes difficult to be a Sanctified PC. You sort of get lumped in with the Sabbat-wannabes.
