When I "play wizards" with my friends, my wang is typically involved. So are drugs, but that's besides the point.FrankTrollman wrote:If those questions have anything at all to do with parsing the action resolution in a fucking tabletop roleplaying game, those rules are bad and need to be changed. Your attempt to whip out your epistemic nerd wang only showed how wildly inappropriate that wang is for cooperative storytelling about wizards among your friends.Korgan0 wrote:Just out of curiosity, how have studied Aristotelian medieval metaphysics at a university level? Hell, how many of you have studied Aristotle at a university level for more than a week or so? Raise your hands if, without googling, you can tell me whether Ockham ran more towards realism or nominalism.
-Username17
Your argument is that the Forms and Techniques are incoherent. My argument is that while the book descriptions are incoherent, extant medieval metaphysics provides a firm foundation for them, perhaps even on par with Shadowrun's. You obviously disagree. I was curious as to your experience with exactly the body of work I am claiming provides a way out. I'm not defending ArM5; it requires a copious amount of spreadsheeting and mind-caulk to work well, and the setting is weirdly contradictory in all the ways you've pointed out, with a few exceptions, that I'll get to later. However, if you're talking about going forward, it's perfectly possible to adapt medieval metaphysics into a structure capable of supporting the classic ArM magical system. Remember, a realignment of metaphysics entails a realignment of physics. Galileo's experiment, if the players performed it, would necessarily have different results. Catapults would have differing ranges. Plastics couldn't exist. It would take work and reading and all that fun stuff, and some definition of physical laws, but it's still possible. You could probably dedicate 12 or so pages to a brief explication, prefacing it with "yes, it's weird, but this is how this world works deal with it" and going super in-depth in a splatbook.
In any case, while the assimilation of the Order into Medieval politics is weird, to not mention the Fae, the problem of an activist God is much less substantial than I think you're making it out to be, purely because the players don't interact with God except in very precise ways. Specifically, they can eat/drink or piss on the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ, or they can work miracles. That's literally it, and the Limit of the Divine means that magic can't affect anything directly emanating from God. The remainder of the interactions with the Divine occurs through angels, who are predominantly interested solely in making sure humans don't sin, and otherwise executing their narrowly defined jobs. As such, while it's weird that God supports both the Crusades and those fighting against the Crusades, if you abandon the notion of omnibenevolence (which doesn't appear to factor prominently in medieval theology; Aquinas' notion of goodness is very different, and I don't think a lack of omnibenevolence is a problem for perfect being theory) there would really be no reason for God to intervene directly, since God typically doesn't do that without mortals asking super nicely. Angels are different, but angels are (a) not limitlessly powerful (b) have their powers well-defined and (c) care more about the afterlife than who's killing whom. As I said, while it's certainly weird, you can say "God works in mysterious ways", and it's not inconsistent.