@Fortune
Cool, thanks for checking. It probably seems like a ridiculous thing to think might still be going on this long after Revised, but my experience with MU*ers suggests that when people are stuck on doing something wrong they'll cling to it like mad. See: TR, Spider, Troy, etc.
Did I just misuse a comma? It's like you're omitting words.
Here:
Roll like 10 dice at difficulty 10, see if any rolls that include 10s but also have more 1s than 10s, list as a botch.
As in roll some dice and see if any rolls turn up botches under those conditions.
Roll like 10 dice at difficulty 10, see if any rolls that include 10s but also have more 1s than 10s, list as a botch. If 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 10 is a botch, the game is doing it wrong.
Emphasis mine. Either your example is wrong or your description of the botch rule is wrong. (More of a derp than a duh.)
Not sure what you're on about. I read that a few times and I'm not seeing what I derp'd. Is Misadventure correct that you are the derp? Would it help if I'd put quote marks up such as:
If "1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 10" is a botch, the game is doing it wrong.
@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
In Revised and 20th Anniversary Edition, a botch is a roll where you get at least one '1' and no successes. Otherwise it is merely a failed check. So spending a willpower (automatic success) has the additional effect of ensuring that at worst you fail the die roll.
Yeah. Botching was supposed to be infrequent, but because of the way their dice pools interacted with a scaling difficulty, your odds of botching would increase at higher pools with higher difficulties compared to lower pools at higher difficulties. It was pretty amazingly stupid.
Even after games switched to Revised, it still took a ridiculously long time for a lot of staff to admit that they were still doing botches wrong.
Don't know about botches specifically, but the dice code has not been touched much, so I think botches are still done the old way.
Easy enough to test. Roll like 10 dice at difficulty 10, see if any rolls that include 10s but also have more 1s than 10s, list as a botch. If 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 10 is a botch, the game is doing it wrong. >_<
@Tennyson said:
@Tennyson said:
Is it potentially a reserved port on Windows?
Sigh. I just checked my antivirus and yep. McAfee was saying NO YOU CAN'T DO THAT!
So I've been pounding on the knowledge base. They suggest that you add telnet/simplemu to the exceptions under the mail spam prevention.. only that didn't work. So if anyone has suggestions, I'm open to answers!
Right, so here's the fix. Go to the virus scan console. Select access protection. Select anti-virus standard protection. Select prevent irc communication. Add Simplemu.exe (or whatever program) to the exceptions list. Apply. Voila! Connecting.
Alternately, stop using McAfee, because goddamn.
Hmmmm. Interesting. Will give it a look either way.
Shit, so they're not adapting the modified wod system again? Daaaaamnit.
We'll see. As has been noted elsewhere, too many people are not interested in learning a new system wholecloth. I'm one of them, more or less.
I too enjoyed Aberrant and Aeon both. I didn't really get into Adventure, but it fizzling like it did also stole our interest in trying to do more with it.
I like flashy powers, what can I say?
@Thenomain
I dunno, I liked owod Paradox. Paradox flaws, weird shit happening, etc. It wasn't some abyssal nightmare come to devour your soul blah blah blah so fucking serious. It was "So you think you're better than everybody else? HAW HAW SUCKER!", writ small or large, the very ideal of being punished for hubris.
Plus I got to do stuff like pushing a ritual to try and create a theoretical artificial Node construct to the point where if I'd fucked up on the final roll I'd have generated like 50 points of Paradox or something. Enough to obliterate me, my house, probably most of my block, and create a Paradox Storm over most of the city.
I didn't fuck up the last roll (barely), but I sat there staring at my screen with my finger hovering over Enter for probably five minutes or so because of the tension. And even so, pulling it off punished me something fierce, and only through a loophole did I avoid like 5 levels of permanent damage. Crazy, fun times.
@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.
@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.
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.
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.
@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 color paradigm.
@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.
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.
I also loved the Traditions. Each had a rather broad framework that you could fit so many things into. In nWoD I absolutely hate the 'choose 1 from column A and 1 from column B' framework they instituted for every game. I find it boring and, maybe it's a lack of imagination on my part, terribly restrictive. Sure, you can fit a religous oriented Mage into any of the 5 but the result won't feel at all like the Celestial Chorus.
Tecnnically oMage had the same thing. You picked an Essence and a Tradition (or no Tradition). Now you pick a Path and an Order (or no Order). There were just more Traditions than Orders, and fewer Essences than Paths, but it was still functionally the same deal. Same with Changeling, you had Kith and Seeming, and Werewolves had Pack and Order. Really Vampire was the only game without a built in Column A, Column B, unless I'm misremembering. I don't think there's really anything wrong with the game wanting you to define What You Are vs What You Do, or making that homogenous across the systems.
The major difference is that the Orders are mostly just watered down, Hermeticized variations. Akashic Brotherhood > Adamantine Arrows, Celestial Chorus > Obrimos of any Order, etc. The Order of Hermes was cool as a Tradition. I even liked that it sort of encapsulated all the other shit people did in its Orders, but I liked it because it presented an organized contrast. Turning the whole set of things into Orders full of bureaucratic nonsense was just...bleh.
and I loves most of the new Hunter Groups and old hunter always annoyed me.
oWoD Hunter was pretty bad, in a lot of ways. Hunters as a specific type of supernatural creature was ennnh.
If I have to be super careful about how I build the character, eh, that's not the game I want to play.
Conversely, if a system is so simplistic that there's really no wrong answer, it's probably not the game I want to play. Not that I really want people to build shitty characters, mind, but a lot of this shit really isn't that hard. Especially in wod where it's not super difficult to figure out what Attr+Skill stuff is going to make you good at, or what combination of those you'll need for powers you want.
@TNP said:
I liked oWoD a lot more than nWoD. The latter seems very bland.
It is. Very, very bland. I mean, Mage basically dumped consensual reality and '6 billion people believe this, you believe that, see who's right.' for a bunch of bullies thousands of years ago kicked sand in the face of everybody else and...meh?
There's a lot of shit that's obvious in hindsight, so playing historical games always involves too much in my head of "Come on, what the fuck, figure this shit out." whether it's technology, social issues, etc. Except at the time, most of it wasn't obvious, except to the people who to whom it was, and if those people aren't doing those things yet... you're shit out of luck mostly.
What I don't like about CWoD was the continued emphasis on futility. The problem with horror is that viewed in a broad sense, the protagonists are not supposed to succeed. And while that's fine every now and then, that shit gets real old real fast. I don't necessarily WANT to play in a game where the Nephandi/Baali/Technocracy/Wyrm/Whoever have it all locked down.
That wasn't really the case with oWoD, though. I mean, it was the party line, sure. The Antidiluvians will eventually wake up and devour us all and whatnot. Except a couple of them have woken up over time, and shit has got done. They either get put back to sleep, or murdered themselves, or some other crazy bullshit that usually leads to more crazy shit.
The Traditions were surely losing the Ascension War, but they hadn't really lost. At least not until the Revised shit, which was more or less a loss for everyone, and admittedly I didn't really like the futility of that very much. The ultimate ending of the series, though, was essentially everyone Awakening and collectively recognizing and excising the Nephandi from the world. So maybe not all that futile.
Werewolf is probably the closest that you come to it, in that theoretically the Wyrm will ultimately corrupt and devour everything, even itself.
