@goldfish said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

As for my opinion: Straight up, I really think that if you want to criticize the game being advertised, open up a thread in the Hog Pit and do it there.
...
And locking also blocks out positive feedback. I know I go on HorrorMU's ad thread to evangelize when there is an update and positivity is NOT a bad thing. It's an awesome thing and we all could use more of it.

Allowing 'positive feedback' in public and walling off criticism behind an opt-in forum that lots of people don't read (because it's mean) or don't know about is bad policy. It defeats half the purpose of the community.

It's been a long time since I played one of these, but here are the ones I remember.

Currently:
Nowhere.

Formerly:

Eddie @ Darkwater, Winter Changeling
Jimmy @ Darkwater, Summer Changeling
Jonah @ Darkwater, Skin Thief
Theophile @ Penny Dreadful, Moon Court Changeling
Murphy @ The Reach, Cheiron Group Hunter

I don't think having special stats for Lucerne hammers is a core facet of any stories I've ever seen in the nWoD.

Had a real shitty week last week and still waiting to get out from under the boil water notice, but I made it through okay. A lot of other people lost power for a lot longer than I did, so I consider myself lucky.

Thanks to the wonderful @EmmahSue, this past weekend we got to:

• Knock out a dog!
• Steal snowmobiles!
• Finally got to use a bunch of those Contracts you never get to use!
• Go up a mountain to die, maybe! We'll see!

She even managed to schedule it around some of our UK timezone players, which we have now. Good news for early birds and those trapped on some bleak island. It's good stuff, y'all, check it out.

The finale of our first big plot is scheduled for this upcoming Tuesday! If you've drifted off and would like come help put the kibosh on the Big Bad, we'd love to have you back. If you'd like to get in on the ground floor of the next one, it's a great time to do it.

Bummed as I am at how things turned out, you've got nothing to apologize for.

Darkwater came back during what is, for me, the darkest part of the year. It gave me something pleasant and creative and social to do when I would have just been stewing. It put me back in touch with some wonderful people (you're one of them, for the record) and introduced me to some new ones. I'll be grateful for that forever.

I'm sad to see it go, but I understand, and I'm sorry I poofed off the way I did tonight.

I can't say I see the point of a wiki, here. It'd just add another layer of complication and maintenance and make it a little harder to see when a new game opens.

That said, anything beats a policy of "advertisements and testimonials on the public forum, warnings and criticism get shuffled to the Hog Pit."

Throw away your bibles, people, this is the real Good News.

There's equipment in the core book. The system isn't so granular that you really need a new statline for Bowie Knife, Combat Knife, Keris, Kriss, Kukri, and Rondel Dagger. I find it kind of refreshing to play a game where I can just buy a knife and not worry about picking the best one.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway is one of my favorites, I listen to it every couple of years.

Had a real shitty week last week and still waiting to get out from under the boil water notice, but I made it through okay. A lot of other people lost power for a lot longer than I did, so I consider myself lucky.

This one comes to mind a lot these days.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

The day I turned my back on all you people...

The whole album is great, too.

I caught an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was about five years old and that was pretty much all she wrote. If that wasn't enough, the 2E Monster Manuals I used to comb through at B. Dalton's would have been. I've got a real keen memory of an illustration of some kind of mummy cat monster, in particular, but I can't find it for love or money.

@killer-klown said in Mage for Multi-Sphere WoDv2 Games:

@flitcraft There's a difference between 'weaker' and 'artificial limitation'.

I don't see how. It's all artificial. These are game rules, not natural laws. If they're having an effect contrary to what you want for your game, you change the rules.

On the one hand, M+'s are weaker by design - because they're basically just mortals with a few bells and whistles; and people know what they're getting into when they opt to play one.

Just like everyone would know what they're getting into playing any splat that's been house ruled on a particular game. I'm not advocating for doing this in secret, so I'm not sure what your point is here.

On the other hand, cutting parts out of a sphere because someone deems them too powerful is, at best, arbitrary - and stands to upset the overall balance of the game.

It would certainly change the balance of the game, but that's kind of the idea.

@killer-klown said in Mage for Multi-Sphere WoDv2 Games:

@flitcraft It really doesn't, though. Gnosis caps Arcana, but it's the only Power stat that does so for powers.

Which is why it strikes me as such a different creature from the others, and why it might be warranted to cap it at a lower level than the others. I'm not a big fan of power stats above 5 for player characters in general, though.

Further, Gnosis still limits the amount of spells a mage can have active at any given time. The symmetry would be limiting a vampire to only a certain number of Disciplines active <both passively and used directly against someone> or the number of Gifts they can have up at any given time - neither of which is a rule that exists. If anything, Mages depend on their Gnosis far more than the other supers depend on their respective power stats, so if you hobble it while not doing the same for the rest you might as well just not have Mage there to begin with.

I'm not really arguing from a perspective of fairness or symmetry. If one sphere being weaker than another were a reason not to have it, we wouldn't have M+, or anything but Mage, really.

I think there's enough appeal in the theme of Mage and the breadth of what they can do even at low levels to be fun, even if the scope of what they can do is less than what folks have got used to. There's plenty of stories you can tell better with Constantine than you can with Doctor Strange. Whether or not there's a big enough audience for that to carry a sphere, I don't know, but I think it's worth a shot.

I always saw Power Stat 5 as a kind of soft cap for what player characters are meant to obtain, and going over that as kind of NPC/Antagonist territory. It was genuinely weird to me to encounter so many characters in that range on the Reach and the games that have followed in its footsteps.

That said, I can't think of any reason beyond purely cosmetic fairness to cap them all at the same place on a multisphere game. They represent different things, and for all their mechanical similarities they do different things. Gnosis 5 is going to change the landscape of your game a lot more than, say, Wyrd 5, just because of what it unlocks in terms of Arcana.

That's not to say you can't make things work with Gnosis 5 and Masters running around, I just think it's better to make that decision one way or the other after looking at the actual effect it's going to have, rather than on the basis of symmetry.

XP bloat is bad for everybody, no question, though I think the way Mage characters progress makes it worse when they're around.

I'd also argue that "requires exponentially more staff support and attention than any other sphere" is a problem with running the system as-is on a MU*. Most games demonstrably can't provide that kind of support, and it seems like one that did would pretty much become a Mage game, because that's where staff would be invested.

As far as fixing it, I don't know. I actually like Mage theme, especially the 2E and late 1E stuff, so it'd be nice if it could be done. I've always thought you could still have fun with Mage if you capped Arcana at three dots, but I doubt most folks who want to play Mage would get behind that.

@goldfish said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

As for my opinion: Straight up, I really think that if you want to criticize the game being advertised, open up a thread in the Hog Pit and do it there.
...
And locking also blocks out positive feedback. I know I go on HorrorMU's ad thread to evangelize when there is an update and positivity is NOT a bad thing. It's an awesome thing and we all could use more of it.

Allowing 'positive feedback' in public and walling off criticism behind an opt-in forum that lots of people don't read (because it's mean) or don't know about is bad policy. It defeats half the purpose of the community.