My Little Pony XIX: I Emptied Your Thread

[Thanqol]

I would be sad that a bunch of adorable ponies didn't show up.

Then, you know, the dying of happiness. That too.

Charger: Clearly this meeting must be held at a pony ranch.

I...I don't get it. And that scares me, because this means this will be spectacularly bad when it finally clicks. Half from the bad pun, and half because I don't see it now. Eeep.

Jayden: *Starts grinning*

Aaaaand there it is.

Ow. My pun organs. >.<

Jayden: *Finishes grinning* Our work here is done.

Uh, yes. Hypothetical. *shifty eyes*

Charger: We are having a hard time visualising a better use for our meagre savings than travelling intercontinental to attend this game.

As an aside, I've found the direct method to be terribly, utterly useful. All drama in life is avoided by direct confrontation. Everything out in the open. Potential fights are stopped by direct application of physical and mental force. Potential jobs are acquired by direct inquiry. So a creature who uses primarily distraction just doesn't jive with me.

Hay, all my current life problems are because I've gone slack on being direct. I've gotten soft :/

Jayden: IT'S SO TRUE! I keep telling people this! There's one quote that's stuck with me forever and was part of my signature for 4 years: "I talked to my GM and got it resolved".

I have to ask, who was Storyteller? And what would have happened had everyone failed?

Charger: The Storyteller was a RL friend of mine named Glenn. He's amazing.
Mask: Charger has the biggest crush on him.
Charger: D-do not!
Mask: Anyway, had everyone failed... it wouldn't have been the end of the world, or the end of the game. Something horrible would have happened. Something globally, utterly, fundamentally horrible. It was hinted that the Internet would have been retconned out of existence, with everything that implies. The game would have gone on but something beautiful would have been destroyed forever.

I always hear these world domination plots, but they are always thwarted. Is the game master prepared to see it play out? Would the world fall to wrongness, and every proceeding game has to be done in a new world because of it?

Jayden: Mage doesn't work like that. The enemy in Mage isn't the evil mages, or the brain spiders, or any of that. The enemy is the world. The status quo wants to hammer you down and crush everything positive about the human spirit, put every human being to sleep. Being a Mage is the ultimate double bind: You have the power to create beautiful things, make the world better, but you also have the ability to fail and be crushed by the world's backlash. Wisdom, the core of the game, is figuring out which is which.

I have this sick impulse to slog my way through 3/4ths of the plot, then switch sides just to see how far the story teller will take it. If I win, do I really get to command the world? Or is everything back to normal next game, like it was all a dream?

Jayden: You could try that in Mage. You can join the guys who already do command the world. You can have all the money and drugs and sex you want. Nothing else. Just lots and lots of money, drugs, and sex. Occasionally you gotta kill a guy to keep humanity down. Being on the winning side's great, right?

I'm surprised no one tried to convert or redirect the idea. All I requires is being stronger than the impulse. You can't stop the unstoppable force, but as part of it, with enough Will you can guide, direct, maybe even control it.

All: Ahahahahahahaha!
*Faces fall deathly grim. Even scared.*
Jayden: Someone suggested that in game. I nearly shot him.
Mask: We're also pretty sure that that's the plan of some evil mages.

You'd make one hay of a god-parent. The other two not so much, but all that rocketed optimism has got to be good for rearin' a sprat.

Jayden: I am enormously flattered

If there is anything I've learned from this thread, and especially all the Thanqol inspired mini-memes (), it's that crashing shouldn't happen because the brain isn't designed to compile anyway.

Jayden: AH AM A BIG GRIFFON!

Throughout his career, Charizard has been a King of Beasts. I don't know what diamond/pearl or black/white bring to our saurion master race, but I'm pretty sure the glorious Age of Charizard is still in full swing.

Jayden: Charizard is best pokemon. Dissenters will be eaten by Charizard.
Charger: Also Dragonaire.

you have intrigued me.

Tell me, what should it have played up, and what should it have not played up?

Charger: Well...

(Warning: Enormous)

Spoiler

Show

Charger: The Mage book and system is beautiful. It's beautiful! It's a system that requires, rewards, demands and inspires spur-of-the-moment creative genius. It's inspired. Laying out the base principles, there are 10 Arcanum - Death, Matter, Fate, Time, Forces, Prime, Life, Spirit, Mind and Space. These are ranked 1-5. One rank in any of these gives you all the investigation and knowledge gathering spells related to that discipline. One dot in Forces lets you hear radio waves, see infrared, perceive electrical currents running through buildings, everything. One dot in Death lets you determine exactly how someone died, or if they're going to die soon so on and so forth. This makes a Mage an investigative genius with an almost trivial expenditure of effort.

Rank two gives you all the shielding and concealing abilities related to that discipline. Rank three allows you to command it directly (Lightning jumps from wall sockets). Rank four lets you do anything you want to the subject which doesn't change it's fundamental nature (Electricity becomes sound - a lot of electricity will become a lot of sound because it's fundamental nature - LOTS - is unchanged). Five dots lets you Make and Unmake. You're given a phenomenally broad toolset to work with and moment-to-moment genius is what the game is all about.

However, if you read the book in the wrong way, what you'll see is a D&D 3.5 style list of spells - hard, self-contained discrete effects. It's an immensely boring read and can turn you off the entire thing or put binders on your creativity. Some of the spells in that spell list, furthermore, defy uselessness and that list makes some arcanum, notably Prime (the magic of magic) seem ridiculously worthless. What you've got to realise is that this is essentially an enormous errata block. They took all the rules arguments and weird loopholes from Old Mage and clarified them with concrete mechanical effects and consequences, so when a Time mage decides to speed himself up in combat there'll be a frame of reference other than the Storyteller throwing up his hands and saying "I don't know" in a Scooby Doo accent.

So that's my first piece of advice. Look at the spell list through that lens. It's a bunch of examples and an attempt to pre-empt as many rules arguments as it possibly can. The actual magic system in play works like a dream.

The second piece of advice is that a lot of people's brains shut down when they see the word "Atlantis" smeared all over the Mage creation myth. This is the worst creation myth ever. It's presented as utter, true, incontrovertible fact and reads like "Long ago things WERE GREAT until some guy SCREWED UP and now THINGS SUCK". It's absolutely rubbish as a history and misses the point of Mage so badly.

And yet, in a cosmic irony, various sourcebooks take this horrible fail of a creation myth and just by changing the tone slightly make it work, and work spectacularly. Magical Traditions is particularly noteworthy here. It actually spends it's entire first chapter discussing why Atlantis is part of the Mage cosmology, what it can offer your games in actual play, and how to go about removing or re-working it or filtering it through thousands of different mystical lenses and occult traditions and what that will mean. The corebook presents the Atlantis myth as hard fact, and that taints not just the myth but also the Magical Orders descended from that myth.

See, one of the biggest things about Mage is the search for the Truth. The world was broken by the Hubris of Awakened Man, and they separated the Supernal and the Truth and kept it for themselves. They then blinded the eyes of every human being and trapped them in a prison-world. Accepting reality's existence is to buy into the Lie made to keep you down. Giving a single, verifiable, canon meta-myth completely slaps that theme in the face.

If you read Mage wrong, you'll get the idea that it's about fairies and goblins. It's not, it's an incredibly humanocentric cosmos. If you read Mage wrong you'll get the idea the spell system works like D&D 3.5. It doesn't; it's a beautiful system that turns every encounter into a puzzle. If you read Mage wrong, you'll get the idea it's about a war against evil mages. It's not - one of the strangest and most compelling aspects of the setting is how small a role the antagonist factions actually play. The Seers of the Throne, Mages who serve the Lie and bad guys, are outnumbered 2:1 by Pentacle Mages and are rather afraid of all-out war. They much prefer conversation and conversion than gunfights and disappearances.

It's very easy to read Mage: The Awakened wrong. Everypony who has read the book in absence of other context, myself included, was left feeling uninspired and generally rather dreary. But if you have somepony on hand who *gets it* and can explain what it's actually about to you then it'll make so much more sense so much faster. It's absolutely worth looking into. Just remember to look at what it is rather than what it looks like.

What, really? Boy, hope Hubris isn't a bad thing... <<"
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Jayden: Hubris can't possibly be a bad thing! If it was I'd be in trouble!
Charger: Brain spiders.
Jayden: Ha ha ha ha!

Mask: And something pony related to keep this on topic: