Posts made by Killer Klown

I think there's also a bit of an ivory tower mentality there too. People haven't really had to deal with large scale outbreaks or widespread tragedies in any real sense; and as time passes and it fades from consciousness they start imagining that it can't be as bad as people say it was, or that it just won't happen - and forget the fact that the reason it's not happening is because of the measures previous generations took to prevent it from happening.

@flitcraft It really doesn't, though. Gnosis caps Arcana, but it's the only Power stat that does so for powers. A Primal Urge 1 Werewolf or Blood Purity 1 Vampire can still buy every level of Gift/Discipline they want; though the Power Stats do serve as requisites for some of the higher end merits. Conversely, both the max level of Arcana and the number of different Arcana you can have are limited by Gnosis on the low end.
On top of that, it also governs the pool you have to draw from and the maximum amount of pips you can draw per round - which has become fairly standardized in 2e. On that it's a level playing field.
Where it most counts is in terms of skills and stats; having a power stat higher than 5 means you can buy stats and skills at higher than 5, and allowing that for one group while categorically denying it to another is unfair. The argument that 'mages can boost their stats' doesn't hold anymore either, since
A> Physical disciplines now passively increase Strength or Stamina by their rating (And Dex, if you go for that obscure bloodline that has it) - that's without having to spend or activate anything.
B> Werewolves have gifts that also increase stats, on top of the stats that they get from shapeshifting.
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.

tl;dr Edit - Mages start off not being able to do a lot of things that other supers can do right off the bat; Gnosis helps them overcome that restriction before it starts giving them any real bonuses.

@coin Ugh. You're right, sorry. I was on the Wisdom line of thought without sufficient amounts of coffee.
Plus I haven't played anything WoD related in a while now.

@autumn Power stats are far less important in 2e than 1, since they don't really contribute to pools. That said, I've always felt that 5 was a reasonable stopping point for just about any given sphere (And I really do believe that you cannot single any one sphere out - if you limit Gnosis, you have to limit things like Blood Potency as well. Harmony... can't, because it doesn't work anywhere remotely the same anymore) The only reason I ever saw to allow higher was, again, Legacies in 1e - since you needed it to get to the third level attainments.

@tinuviel That's true. Hubris should be a thing and Magic, at least for most Orders, shouldn't be the go-to for answering everything (I could go on and on about how much of the Adamantine Arrow theme is ignored in favor of 'Combat-Mages-R-Us', but that's something else again). However, Wisdom in Mage is tantamount to useless - it's by far the most pointless of moralities, and you can pretty much afford to drop it to three before really having to worry about anything. Combined with Paradox being pretty soft-touch (better in 2e, but that's not saying much), while there might be rules there are no real consequences for breaking them.

Edit - this sort of caddycorners into what @GangOfDolls said above, as well. Most of what you listed as needing limitation can be solved by reduction of massive xp <I don't advocate having a cutoff, but I do advocate having people earn what they have rather than just let it trickle in> and actually enforcing rules as written
1 - Paths. I'm less inclined to see these limited because, frankly, it's one of those things that players don't really have a choice about in-character. It's based on personality and outlook, so restricting paths also means you're restricting how people play their concepts. A better idea in my mind would be to make the Orders as selective as they're supposed to be in the books. Guardians just don't take everyone, Arrows have some of the most stringent requirements to join of any group - Mage or otherwise - out there, and so forth.
2 - Arcana are naturally capped by your Gnosis, both in how many you have and how high they can go. This is further adjusted by your Path, as that will always dictate your highest Arcana. Limiting Xp limits your Gnosis; or if you're spending on Gnosis, you don't have as much to spend on Arcana. It's not a cutoff, but it does slow progression.
3 - Legacies in 2e are kind of ... odd. Then again, all tertiary qualities are kind of odd and unfinished-feeling. I've had a couple of CoD mages, and I've never had much inspiration towards a legacy (They also seem to do far less than they used to in 1e - in 1e you seriously hampered yourself if you didn't take one. In 2e, it doesn't seem to matter)
4 - I'll just say hella yes on this last one. That 'exceptions exist' clause they tried to push into things was one of the worst design ideas ever. It really mattered more in 1e Legacies; some favored a path or order, some favored one or the other - but there were reasons for it. If you wanted to play one of those Legacies, play something of that path or order. It's not as if you don't have the option. Then again, in 2e - as I mentioned above - Legacies are just weird so it might not even matter as far as that's concerned.

There's one huge change (among a large number of less-huge ones) between 1e and CoD Mage:
Successes don't automatically equate to power.
It's simple, but it has a massive effect. To put it in other terms, in 1e you would establish your spell factors like range, power (damage/armor/et cetera), duration and whatnot then make your roll with whatever dice you had. You could buff those dice with boosted stats, 8-agains, Rote actions, cooperative casting or what have you... and get some pretty impressive pool numbers. The way 1e Mechanics worked was that every success above what you needed, at least for a good number of spells, would be applied to the primary spell factor. If that factor was damage, rolling 4 succs meant 4 points of damage. Rolling 40 succs meant, yes, 40 points of damage.
In 2e, that doesn't happen. All your factors start at tier one except for the Primary, which starts at your Arcana rating <1-5>. Improving any given factor costs a Reach; you get a couple of these free based on a few things, but usually no more than one or two. Anything past the free ones docks 2 dice from your casting pool. Once you set the factors, they're set. Multiple successes only apply to how difficult it is to dispel or the flat 'Exceptional Success' bonus. This means things like 8-again or Rote Actions are far less impactful when casting.
Another fairly important change is you no longer need Mastery to be good at a level 1 or 2 spells. In 1e, the more levels in an Arcana you had the better you could improve your lower level spells. That's still the case in CoD, but if all you want is a Life 2 effect, you can buy Life 2 and then a Rote for the effect you want - which provides many of the same benefits of a higher Arcana for that specific effect. It cuts down on the need for people to push towards multi-mastery just to maximize their bread and butter powers.

@skew It is awesome and hella fun; and in 2e they do emphasize focusing on Rotes rather than having spontaneous magic being the be-all/end-all. Still, despite that and not being able to knock out the 15-power rolls like you used to there's still a lot of scope creep.
I remember getting into a discussion back in the days of oWoD where we basically came to the conclusion that, as the splats progressed, they moved further and further away from 'real world' concerns. Like, Vampire was very grounded in what happened in the mortal world both in a proactive and reactive sense. Werewolf was more reactive in terms of the real world and tended to focus more on internal/spirit matters. Mage started to get more and more removed as the power grew. Changeling and Wraith were flat out gonzo - to the point that Wraith could have almost zero interaction with the real world beyond events when your Fetters came into play. That's sort of how I'd see a nMage game going, too - dealing with reality is just too easy to the point of falling to handwavium <which is probably why so many things like that are potential Hubris sins>; the real meat of it should be dealing with Mage foo - which would provide it's own challenge due to the fact that the opposition has the same tricks up their sleeves as you do.

@arkandel At least Mage 2e did a lot to cut down on the 'best of everything' mechanics; but still, the amount of work necessary to implement and run a Mage sphere would probably equal all the other supers they've got going combined, so I can understand why folks don't want to push into it.

@ganymede I still have Bunnies and Burrows somewhere (old, like 70's era, tabletop RPG based loosely on the Watership Down world - surprisingly complex mechanics for the time... and for the fact that you were playing freaking rabbits)

@runescryer Sentinels also has the advantage that it's not all scripted out. The original Robotech triumvirate pretty much stuck to Earth and was pretty jam packed in terms of timeline. Sentinels, they were out in the middle of nowhere space with a bunch of weird aliens.
They did cover a lot of it in the novels, but not everyone read those (They were good, though - I remember one of the coolest things being them explaining what happened to the SDF-1's fold generators), and there's still more than enough room for flexibility.
That said, though, if we're on the subject of anime I actually loved the Votoms world better than most of the other mecha-anime. One, it's small mech/power armor scale; and two, unlike the other settings where the mecha pilots were some elite class of warrior in the highest tech equipment available, Votoms soldiers were just regular grunts in mass produced suits that constantly broke down or had a better than average chance of exploding if you used particularly harsh language against them.

@chet Don't get me wrong, I like mecha - but I far more like the smaller power-armor style suits (Back in the day, for example, all my friends liked Alphas or Betas; and I loved me my Cylones)
That said, Heavy Gear was always a great setting for the smaller suits and the world was actually really compelling - basically something between Dune and Mortal Engines.

Filling in for Fillory.

@pandora said in Creative/Clean insults?:

Cry me a river... then build yourself a bridge and get over it.

Make like Elsa and let it go.

'Here's a straw, so you can suck it up.'

Of course, this generation has decided to try and ban straws... which probably explains a few things in that light.

@too-old-for-this Oh yes, but in my case that more translates to 'this email is sent from a shared box with no direct tracking, so here's hoping that someone else picks your crybaby, illiterate-ass problem next time because I'm sure as hell you didn't bother noting my name when I gave it to you'

@ganymede I speak this language well; also have another that I tend to use with a great deal of frequency <in certain variations>

'If I may ...' --> Listen up you primitive screwheads,

'Er. What were you trying to accomplish?' is always my favorite; especially after an epic display of indescribable .... whatever that was.

Also, 'Kid's got almost as much brains as the south end of a northbound Holstein'

Does it count if you just end up descing all your MU characters with outfits that you own/wear RL?
Or is that more the character cosplaying as me?

I remember BESM (Big Eyes, Small Mouth) worked pretty well when it came to cartoony powers (What with the system being based on 'generic' anime creations). It had a three-stat mechanic that was oddly similar to the way WoD does spirit stats - three main stats, and a few derived from averages or sums of various combinations of those main stats.

It was fairly simplistic but tended to flow pretty well - which is probably better for a game based on cartoon fantasy than something overly complex.

Old School Giovanni style seems to check a lot of boxes there. People tell me the Sangiovanni were the nwod replacement, but it just seemed to lack some of the ... flavor, I suppose.
You know, the kind of flavor that came from having a ritual that involved beating someone to death with a human femur coated in lead and inscribed with arcane glyphs while reciting a droning Greek chant <directly from the book, that>.

@arkandel said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

@thenomain said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

Yet I almost never saw anyone use them.

I don't know if this is because there's a tacit "no social rolls against PCs", there's a more obvious "if I do this people will drag this into a headache that I can avoid", or what.

Yeah, a hundred per cent that.

I'd be willing to bet big internet bucks the major reason social powers are so rarely even attempted on PCs is the potential for headaches following it.

I think the other option is 'if I make a roll I'd prove that I don't have the stats I'm trying to play off'