@trogdor Everything mom does is vet-approved, no worries.
@nitsua60 Yup. Mom had bought a little cat platform recently, and she's using it. I got in trouble again for moving the folded up comforter away from her cat cube, though.
I like our cats, they seem to mostly have their own distinct personalities and they are charming and fluffy,... but if they were huge I would be scared
They like things that they can fit their bodies into just perfectly, things that they can semi-hide in, and also things that are different from their surroundings because they're curious and they're like "oh what is that."
@Tritium21 Because d20 roll forever and ever, thus inevitably ending under the couch. I've heard of one d20 that did the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs once.
@Pixie well, mage is like electroswing if it was made into an RPG
Heh. I have in the past not been very fond of White Wolf systems. The ideas are very cool; I just struggle a lot with the execution. Not ruling out trying it someday, though.
because Mage has an incredibly rewarding backstory and universe, which is perfect for the kind of a mystery and discovery games, where players explore the setting by playing from knowledge level zero
Revised was better, but it had a major tone change, which disrupted a bit what people think of when they say Mage
I have Mage 20. I've only started reading, but after 100 pages (out of 700) most core concepts are laid out clear
@Piixie what Tradition?
@trogdor actually White Wolf is having a resurgence. Onyx Path is a company that continued its legacy on a license, formed mostly by former employees of WW, while the WW itself has been very recently bought by Paradox Interactive, the very same that brought us video games Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis
Also, they intend to create some video games in the universe, but details are scarce. So far Onyx Path doesn't seem affected as they happily released another M20 splatbook
@trogdor just don't confuse Ascension with Awakening. Ascension - good. Awakening - well, good, but not Mage anymore.
@trogdor my problem with Fate Core in particular is that there are so many narratively-related moving parts its hard to get started for someone who is a worldbuilder not a relater
@trogdor it's not that I don't like RP -- it's that I take such a strong worldbuilding-simulationist view of it that it causes problems when you try to force narrative structure on me.
@trogdor it's about how the technology rules the world and oppresses people. The game to work has to have a certain limiting feeling, especially since you play a magical dude with godlike power that can do anything in a number of ways
A good mage character is narratively God Tier, limited only by mechanics.
Well, a starting Mage character is about as powerful and versatile as lvl20 Sorcerer in DnD, if played with creativity
So the power to derail plots and solve mysteries is great
however, it's bloody difficult to use that power in combat, because it's hard to use on the spot, without preparation and consequences of doing so outweigh potential gains
so, to put things clearly, you can make the Big Bad rethink his life choices and join you to reverse his actions, but you can't fireball him with impunity
Actually, fireball is the poster boy of poor imagination in Mage.
@Pixie sounds like Verbena or Cultist of Ecstasy
@Pixie it might be anything else though, if he said things like "computer" or "spirits" or "death"
Well, he didn't say death, but this is a preexisting character that I know well. I would not be even remotely surprised if he went with something deathy for this guy, since he's a necromancer in other RPs.
@eimyr yeah...although I'm not sure what the reaction of the table to mages messing around with the innards of what mortals know as "science" would be. creating an infinite fount of energy simply by performing an unreproducable act?
Oh, right, now I know why I can't find these things... we talked about it the most in a voice chat. :P He mentioned something about a spell/power that lets you touch ghosts or vice versa.
@eimyr yeah. that's problematic for me because that'd cause irreconcilable problems for basically all experimental science. you wouldn't have tech in such a world, just magic -- because modern science couldn't develop properly.
a Paradigm is a set of coherent beliefs that each mage has - it might be paradoxical and nothing like the "science" one. It is explicitly stated that "science" is just one of these paradigms, that has made great success with people who are not mages
@Pixie I had a play-by-post character (well... this one) who had a platonic relationship with his own gun. Treated her like a fine lady she was. I could link, but the game is in Polish.
@Shalvenay okay, this is actually established in-universe. At the beginning there was no such thing as a unified, global paradigm. every tribe had differing set of beliefs - some said thunder is god's wrath, some claimed it's discharge of ancestral energy etc.
They were all right in their own unique ways.
A certain group of mages, called the Order of Reason decided to enable common man by promoting a set of beliefs that's so easy to understand it's reproducible with little effort
They created science. At the forefront of the science it was indistinguishable from magic - but they introduced it veeeeery slowly, so that common poeple would believe a new invention when they saw it
and this is the greatest success and the greatest failure of mages, because with the advent of scientific thought, a global paradigm was established and all others were diminished
so it's not that world is scientific and reproducible because it is - but because we were conditioned to see it this way, according to mage's lore
Now, if they decided to say, go with system of chakras of distinguishable entities, we would measure energy in chakras per hour and levitate by concentrating, because it would be considered normal.
Reproducibility and non-paradoxicalism is just part of that belief system that we embraced
In fact, Technocracy (new name for Order of Reason) has labs where currently impossible science happens - FTL transport, neural interfaces, dark matter operation - but it's not reproducible yet, because it's not part of the belief of common man
Foci lend plausibility to a thing happening by offering a justification. If it's a justification that the dominant world belief system accepts, the thing happening is considered commonplace.
If you go back far enough in history, you find bubbles of belief so that, for example, a healer using four-humours-based cures would be successful in Greece, but would be utterly incompetent in China.
His cures would simply stop working because the dominant belief system said they're quackery--unless he had a strong enough will and belief himself to temporarily overpower the Chinese healing system.
But if he does that, he gets paradox for having something that 'everyone knows' doesn't work... work.
So heres the thing with paradox ... you hold out your hand in front of everyone and make a cigarette lighter appear out of thin air, you get blasted with mega amounts of paradox. Do the same thing in your pocket, and just pull the lighter out? No paradox.
like the description of the effects of a Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blaster: wrap a lemon around a gold brick and hit yourself repeatedly in the head with it. (IIRC)
@nitsua60 If you were Penn and Teller, no paradox. If you are david blane you get paradox. And this has more to do with how they approach magic as an art.
@nitsua60 It suffices to say he believes his job as a magician is to warp the audiences view of reality - to make them think he actually has magical abilities.
he wanted the car blown up? nah! let's make that cargo helicopter change route and the freight cable be worn and the freight is a propane tank due ot a mistake
We feel no need to test our belief that garlic has no effect on magnets, just as Plutarch felt no need to test his belief that garlic had an effect on magnets--and we feel this way for exactly the same reasons that he did.
if, by example of that you mean practical philosophy
I prefer, if philosophy is used, that it either have a practical use or be hilarious
XD
even if they only person who it amuses is me
to be fair, I took one or two philosophy courses, but I don't remember too much about what specific thing is the product of which philosophers ideas and such
I do remember that many of them still built/build on each other like with anything
and most of the ones I know anything about are Greek, Indian, or Chinese
possibly some stuff from Japan, but they didn't deal so much in philosophy as straight up religious beliefs
and I mean, most people probably have heard of Aristotle, Plato, and Confucius, so I don't see knowing those names and maybe very little about them too much of an accomplishment on my part XD
As a DM I always try my best to include unique characters in my adventures. I wanted to use a lunatic character who has completely lost his mind as a sort of minor plot hook to introduce the players to a new part of the world. How do you think I could make the NPC believable, without revealing mu...
@tophandour @besw I think this is something you can test fire on meta to see if it is a good fit or not? Or if you are daring with a thick skin go right to main and see if it gets a vtc
but basically, I want the party to discover that a certain mage who was trapped in a dungeon went mad over the course of many years. The first thing that sticks out to me is the trick where the party finds journal pages as they explore and the journal pages happen to be in an order that shows the progression of his madness
I've done that one before, though, so I was trying to come up with other ideas
In my experience, the best examples for "Heeeey, this guy who we aren't meeting has influenced the environment we're exploring in ways that indicate he's going totally cuckoo" is the Myst franchise.
You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool th...
this is how you show a decent into madness, by the way
If he's been living in a dungeon for a long time, he's made changes to it more than just leaving behind journals. He's made devices, repaired things and broken things and decorated things.
But yeah, I'm stuck on: 1: journal scraps 2: "memory shadows" like the brief flashes you might see in the Fallout games 3: The party just sees the aftermath and for all they know, he was always crazy, except for maybe one or two sane older writings
So use that: all his work shows an obsession with the number five; all his decorations are of the same scene, but it changes in disturbing ways; he's learnt how to catch and distill frogs to smoke...
But yeah, I'm stealing an idea from someone else because I like it: mage went nuts and decided to make himself immortal by putting his soul in an enchanted item
The dungeon was created by a god of order. Everything was extremely clean and orderly and sterile and the tick tick tick ticking never slowed or stopped
Solitude is not a guaranteed to drive someone to madness. There are records of people being underground for 6 months to a year with very little psychological effect
Traditional reasons for folks to go mad include Meeting A Powerful Being, Getting Laughed At By Those Fools At The Academy, Losing A Loved One, Forced To Do Something Against His Nature...
@Tophandour that sounds like a lich to me. I'd recommend reading some good lich stories. Tends to be the same in most stories, that as the body decays you start to see memory loss and alzheimer-like symptoms. Names being forgotten, confusion, repetition of tasks...
The dungeon isn't just a big clean clockwork sealed series of rooms, though. It's strongly tied to the concept of Order. It tries to slowly creep in. He just chose to violently reject it
anyway, this guy was a researcher, treasure hunter, and enchanter. The dungeon contains plans to create a certain axiomatic weapon and he was hoping to get the plans and learn from them
How I see this man loosing touch with sanity is indulgence. He spent so much time believing his own hype without any reality checks that it went to his head.
To the point where events he has no control over appear to him as playing into his plans.
