Posts made by Flitcraft

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.

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

if a game is a toilet people deserve to be able to find out before they get shit on themselves without, like, say, having to go to the length of making an account and clicking to view one particular sub forum where it's ok to say "hi this place is run by someone gross"

is my unpopular opinion

but then i p much came here to say that, so

++++++

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."

No real preference as far as length, but I find I'm usually the one who calls 'cut', or one of the first to leave if there's a big group. I've always got an eye out for the organic or dramatic ending to a scene, because I find that a lot more satisfying than letting things ramble on and peter out.

I wasn't actually going to look at this place until a friend convinced me to make a bit this morning. Then the place closed like an hour before she got home from work, so she didn't get to make one.

(

Usually not a fan of Mage on a multisphere game, but Demon is fucking dope, and the games have some interesting thematic overlaps it might be interesting to zero in on. For that pairing I think Houston or DC would be a better fit, and Beast can go choke forever under all circumstances, but no game is perfect.

@cupcake said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:

history of domestic violence?"

@bad-at-lurking said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:

people who turn into wolves, vampires (other than Peter Thiel, who apparently believes he can become immortal off the blood of twinks), Mages and baristas or coders who all like movie stars and models,

@wretched said in Respecs.:

@surreality said in Respecs.:

A single success is a success. A skill at 3 is 'you are a professional in this skill' an attribute at 3 is you are /good/ in that area. Dex 3 int 3 medicine 3 is a damned good doctor, add bonuses for tools and operating rooms and whatever, you are almost guaranteed a success MOST of the time.

Agreed, here. My longest running character had about 5-7 dice in a bunch of different things, and with the occasional willpower spend or equipment bonus he always got along fine except with STs who forget how the system works and start calling for you to hit a certain number of successes to actually succeed at anything.

Outside combat and contested rolls against similarly overbuilt characters there's not much need for 60 dice in anything.

They remind me a lot of the 'Feature Character' thing I used to read about oWoD games having, just more widely available. Which is, I guess, a step up from restricting them to whoever's the favorite of the day, but still a step down from not having them at all.

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

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.