The Gaming Den

This should be interesting.

I've gotten a lot of value from this thread. But I do wish to point out that it's inaccurate in at least one way: in oMage, humans have a material essence, a spiritual essence, and a mental essence, but no 'prime' essence. Prime is what the other three are made out of.

I have no clear idea of how Mage was intended to represent paradigms where 'minds' arose from the behavior of matter instead of being an overlay. I suppose the different Spheres could represent different techniques: medical physicians and chemists are ultimately dealing with the material world, but involve themselves only with certain aspects that can be usefully handled with different methods.

There is actually a precedent for Life affecting mind. Virtual Adepts have Life 4 rote, where they influence emotions by fiddling with the subject's goo.

We did talk about how in both games there were a lot of metaphysical bits you could call a "soul" - nMage is just a bit more fucking complicated on it than oMage.

With regards to medicine, it's strictly in Mister Cavern-woo territory. Most of it is ostensibly covered under Life, but there's nothing to stop you from using Spirit to dispel demons of plague if that's your paradigm, or Time to speed up healing or wind it back to before someone is injured, or Matter and Forces to alter someone's biochemistry directly, or Mind to try and heal a mental illness, or Entropy to shrink a cancer, or even Correspondence to do a diagnosis/symbolic healing using little dolls. Because in oMage, basing your magical methods on the four humours or whatever is supposed to be just as valid as basing it on Science! as far as efficacy, which is another point not-in-favor of oMage paradigms - because while fiddling around with mercury, herbs, and crystals might sound like a blast, generally speaking homeopathic medicines fairly sucked at telling you what was actually wrong with you.

Well, you could get a relatively crude set of effects by messing with a target's body chemistry and physiological reactions. A lot of our 'emotional responses' involve our awareness of body reactions. People who are paralyzed from the neck down often report that their emotions are less intense or more 'intellectual' than they were before.

And, of course, turning someone's 5-HT into LSD is going to have noticeable effects.

With creativity and knowledge of science, you can get certain mind effects through use of Forces. Subsonics are probably the most obvious example.

Even in paradigm where minds are a direct result of matter and energy, I could see a separate Mind sphere as a higher-level interface.

In VA terms, using Mind to make someone ignore your presence is like a single line of script, making a call into an existing library. Using Matter/Energy to do that is trying to write the same thing from scratch in assembly language. It's possible, but a lot harder, and unless you know what you're doing you're likely to just fuck things up. Using Life would be somewhat between those; writing it in C with some but not all of the libraries, perhaps.

Edit: Also, you already have to say something like "Matter/Energy can't modify things inside people's bodies, at least until very high dots." Otherwise all the existing lethal spells become pointless compared to "make a small amount of electricity/heat/poison inside the target's brain/heart."

If we try to imagine what various Traditions' paradigms would actually look like (as opposed to being rough stereotypes) it's not all that clear that VAs would have much ability to affect the physical world at all. Their worldview is centered around computation - most of the obvious implementations will involve the more abstract aspects of the world rather than the concrete ones. Letting 'Reality Hacks' turn lead into gold is, well, absurd.

But then we run into problems like Correspondence referring both to concepts of space and 'Law of Contagion' associations. I could see cellphones establishing the latter kind of correspondence link, sure, but in the scientific paradigm they're built out of Forces and Matter effects.

Ice9 wrote:Edit: Also, you already have to say something like "Matter/Energy can't modify things inside people's bodies, at least until very high dots." Otherwise all the existing lethal spells become pointless compared to "make a small amount of electricity/heat/poison inside the target's brain/heart."

I can easily see the complexity of living organisms screwing up the processes that are intended to permit Matter effects. But that doesn't mean that the effect should mysteriously fail - the organism would probably die.

As killing things is an intended goal of many players, however, the game creators didn't want to make it that easy to go about killing things. So they declared that Matter doesn't affect living things at all, which is again, absurd.

There's even a Void Engineer rote that detects living organisms by sensing the matter surrounding the scanner and looking for 'empty spots' within the substance that must contain living things.

That's just not compatible with current science - it doesn't make sense from that perspective. And that means it shouldn't be even remotely compatible with the worldview the Technocracy was supposed to believe in (at the low levels) and impose on everyone (at the high levels).

When I was thinking about what would be required to make a Mage-type magic system without arbitrary restrictions for game balance, one of the things I came up with was:

Magic has been there for a long time, sometimes with a higher level of random activity. So all living organisms are inherently resistant to it, because the ones that aren't didn't survive past the single-celled phase. In practical terms, you can't target a spell anywhere within the body of a living creature. Even spells that appear to affect creatures directly (polymorph, mind control) are actually setting up a wave of morphic / mental pattern energy from outside and directing it at them.

Even with that, it's pretty easy to kill someone with magic, it just makes it not completely trivial.

It's surprisingly easy to kill humans, period.

In a game where the players are humans, making it trivial to kill humans sounds like a fairly terrible idea.

Well, it's not necessarily a problem. I mean, a gun kills humans pretty well, and yet the existence of them doesn't make modern-setting RPGs disfunctional.

So once you have magic that can easily kill people, but you don't want everyone to be easily killed, you just need to apply whatever rules you're using that prevent guns from easily killing everyone.

Ice9 wrote:Well, it's not necessarily a problem. I mean, a gun kills humans pretty well, and yet the existence of them doesn't make modern-setting RPGs disfunctional.

Hm, name one modern-setting RPG (need not apply: Super-Hero, Urban Fantasy), thats not dysfunctional please.

Korwin wrote:Hm, name one modern-setting RPG (need not apply: Super-Hero, Urban Fantasy), thats not dysfunctional please.

* Looks at thread title *

Ice9 wrote:

Korwin wrote:Hm, name one modern-setting RPG (need not apply: Super-Hero, Urban Fantasy), thats not dysfunctional please.

* Looks at thread title *

I wrote that, because with magic you can insert reason why guns arent that deadly.

Was'nt aware what the thread title is, to be honest

Very interesting. I hope you make similar threads for oWOD Vampire and Werewolf. Although I don't know if anybody can make a more entertaining summary of the last days of oWOD Vampire than Gehenna: The Musical did.

Red_Rob wrote:In a game where the players are humans, making it trivial to kill humans sounds like a fairly terrible idea.

Mages aren't humans any more than vampires are.

hyzmarca wrote:Mages aren't humans any more than vampires are.

Mages are explicitly human. Even average humans have the 'reality'-warping power that characterizes Mages - they just don't have it strongly enough to break away from the collective warping of the great masses. Mages are just people who are especially talented at a particular human function.

I've been thinking through my reaction to an assertion, the assertion that oMage was incoherent in its treatment of paradigm and how it worked. Most specifically, to the idea that Mage said that televisions worked because people had faith in electronics.

I don't think that's what Mage says, although I don't think it stated its position particularly clearly. To use the same example: I think that, in-game, people believe television works for the same reason that most people IRL believe it works: because they regularly see it working. They accept the facts in front of them, like the color of the sky or the pull of gravity. They don't know much if anything about the theories of why the universe operates that way, but they know that it does.

In Mage, the acceptance of the fact that televisions work and work in a particular way reinforces the belief of a relative few in the theories of electronics. Televisions couldn't exist for long if the people who understand and can build and repair them ceased to be - and that's true in a mundane sense as much or more than any mystic one.

Mages explicitly have an Avatar grafted onto them, which makes them transhuman at best. But most oWoD splats were transhuman.

I'd argue that becoming undead changes you less than getting an avatar does.

hyzmarca wrote:Mages explicitly have an Avatar grafted onto them

Pretty much all humans in Mage have Avatars. I say "pretty much" because 1) there are cases where the Avatars were supposedly irreversibly destroyed, or at least thrown out of consensus reality, and 2) there may have been people somewhere who naturally lacked them. But realistically speaking, everybody has one.

Not everyone has one that lets them do magic, because... reasons.

What I find most annoying is that the metaphor that runs through the game, that of "Sleepers" and "Awakened", is wrong. Mages haven't awakened from the giant shared dream that is 'reality'. If they had come fully awake, they'd have Ascended and left. Mages are lucid dreamers, still asleep but able to direct the dream they're in.

This analysis is really entertaining and insightful. Is there any chance Frank or AncientHistory (or some other learned person) could write up the overall history of WotC, White Wolf, or other major gaming company?

Frank & AH repeatedly allude to the conditions of working at WW/CCP that contributed to these games' existence, but I wish there was some kind of well-informed and devastatingly cynical overview of the whole company I could consult for greater context.

Frank and I both freelanced in the industry, straddling that fine line between devoted fan and devoted freelancer and back again; so we have a bit of insight into the industry, we like to keep tabs on the scuttlebutt and official news that comes out, and we both have a large amount of general knowledge of RPGs, including some weird and obscure ones. Which is what makes our reviews fun; knowledge plus rage.

That said, we've never tried an exhaustive history of the game companies, though Frank's posted some in-depth threads.

Certainly, a big problem with going into extreme detail is that no one knows all the extreme details. It doesn't really matter how much of an insider you are or were, these things are written independently by people who aren't talking to each other to specifications handed down to them by different people with different visions who may not have even attempted to communicate those visions to each other.

We can follow the arc from Ars Magica to Vampire. Rein*Hagen was in the process of writing Ars Magica 1999 when he went to GenCon carpooling with one of the guys making Shadowrun and saw the unveiling of Ravenloft. He got home, and Ars Magica 1999 had the serial numbers filed off so that the "secret wizard conspiracy" was now a "secret vampire conspiracy," and the mechanics were clumsily hacked from "roll a d10" to "roll a dicepool of d10s." That's known history, primarily because the "why did you write Vampire?" question has been asked enough that some straight answers have been provided.

But consider the next major splat: Mummy. Not that one, the other one. No, not that Mummy either, the first one. The one that came before Werewolf was a thing. It's packaged as a Vampire expansion which happens to be about the Mummies. It also bombed horribly and you may have never seen a copy. We can certainly speculate as to why they might try to repeat the success of Masquerade by putting out a line of expansion books for Masquerade that detail other monsters. That seems like a pretty good idea, but I don't think anyone has ever copped to what was going through their minds. Certainly, I think they learned all the wrong lessons from that fiasco - the next major splat (Werewolf) was stand alone and nominally incompatible. It was even supposedly a different genre ("Savage Horror" rather than "Gothic Horror").

But again, I don't know that anyone has a firm grasp of what ended up actually pulling the trigger to make Mummy be as terrible a book as it was.

-Username17

Well, Mummy was obviously following Anne Rice's Ramses the Damned. If A.R. had written The Wolfkin, Werewolf probably would have come first.

Ancient History wrote:That said, we've never tried an exhaustive history of the game companies, though Frank's posted some in-depth threads.

I've been going through the items listed on the Den Review index thread, but if you can direct me to any of the in-depth threads you're referring to that aren't included there, I'd be much obliged. "Official" histories are always so sanitized; it's like trusting Stan Lee to tell the full story of Marvel.

FrankTrollman wrote:But consider the next major splat: Mummy. Not that one, the other one. No, not that Mummy either, the first one. The one that came before Werewolf was a thing. It's packaged as a Vampire expansion which happens to be about the Mummies. It also bombed horribly and you may have never seen a copy. We can certainly speculate as to why they might try to repeat the success of Masquerade by putting out a line of expansion books for Masquerade that detail other monsters. That seems like a pretty good idea, but I don't think anyone has ever copped to what was going through their minds. Certainly, I think they learned all the wrong lessons from that fiasco - the next major splat (Werewolf) was stand alone and nominally incompatible. It was even supposedly a different genre ("Savage Horror" rather than "Gothic Horror").

But again, I don't know that anyone has a firm grasp of what ended up actually pulling the trigger to make Mummy be as terrible a book as it was.

-Username17

You mean this one?

Yeah, it's a dog.

I don't think that they learned anything from Mummy for the development of Werewolf - and not just because of learning disabilities. On the credits page for Mummy, someone on the editorial staff mentions that WTA is in the "last stages of development" and is due out that summer. Sounds to me like WTA was already pretty much in the bag at that point.

It would be nice to know exactly what directive Greenberg and Wieck were trying to fulfill. I'd hazard a guess that Mummy was something they threw together just for the sake of A) making a few bucks and B) seeing if it would stick, while their major resources went into creating their second full game line.

It's funny you should bring up Mummy, though, since several times you've mentioned that nWoD Mummy was Frankensteined together out of fan material... is that for real?