Mage Revised was utterly ruined by Metaplot. The Avatar Storm was not ignorable. The whole magic system was altered because of it to accommodate it.

So the good game that was Mage 2nd Edition was effectively ruined in Revised. Because of the developer not treating the metaplot as something that was optional.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130111Me: "Listen, jackass, I didn't come here for a cookbook. I came here for a meal."

Quoted for truth. No one buys a novel to read on the last page "just make up an ending that works you."

A) that's what fanfic (or house ruling) is for. B) 99% of the readers don't WANT to spend their free time writing their own ending.

There's a reason that, for all the derision it gets from the toolbox types, that 5e chose to make Forgotten Realms it's default setting. Not everyone wants to start their game from a blank slate; Hell, even those who'd rather do so don't always have the time to do so.

And it's not a lack of creativity that leads to a preference for well developed settings either. It's just where you choose to spend your creative energies.

What I like about settings like Mage or Vampire is that I can put all my creative energies into the specific NPCs and their agendas and not have to spend lots of time just figuring out what cosmology I want for the setting and how my spell casting and supernatural critters work each time I start up a game.

I was able to get my Vampire campaign started with about three hours prep even though, as a desire for a complete change of pace from my usual Mage campaign, I decided to set it in a completely different city.

That's because the Vampire setting gave a solid framework of how vampires (and other critters) work in it and how the vampires of a normal city are organized... so all I had to figure out were specific NPCs and the ways I wanted my city to deviate from those norms and my sandbox was ready to go.

Toolboxes have their place, but over time I've really come to appreciate the time savings of a finished product (or nearly finished in the case of RPGs).

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130125Mage Revised was utterly ruined by Metaplot. The Avatar Storm was not ignorable. The whole magic system was altered because of it to accommodate it.

So the good game that was Mage 2nd Edition was effectively ruined in Revised. Because of the developer not treating the metaplot as something that was optional.

I eventually warmed to Revised. Honestly, M20's refusal to canonize the Avatar Storm feels a bit silly to me.

Quote from: Chris24601;1130027The themes of Vampire would be lost if they're not suffering God's curse, but are actually thaumivores resulting from Caine's long ago botched Awakening.

That is genius! I might steal that as the big reveal for the next V:TM game I run.

I hear what you're saying about Christianity and V:TM. It's definitively baked into the premise, which I can appreciate and enjoy even though I'm not religious.

However, I'm thinking of a Vampire game which is not Christian in origin, where the origin of vampires is shrouded in mystery. Several competing origin stories over the millennia have evolved into mystery cults or sects. One of these might be Christian in nature, another might be a virus, another might be magical, etc.  The gist is to use the conflicts between the sects to replace the Camirilla vs. Sabbat conflict of V:TM. Each sect races to uncover historical and archaeological evidence to establish it's legitimacy, and some even create forgeries to mislead or sabotage their rivals. More of a cold war than an open conflict. As such, the main theme of the game switches from Guilt to Self-discovery. Or to Despair, when you discover everything you believed in is a lie. Or to Paranoia, when you discover that the lie was fabricated by very powerful people who use it to control you.

But I'm starting to get this terrible feeling that Requiem does something like that? Requiem came out right after I exited the WOD, so my knowledge of it is superficial.

Full circle

1992?

We loved V:TM back then. We tried a few games of Mage and Changeling when they came out, but we kept returning to Vampire. And we never did cross-over games, since it was clear to us that the different game lines were never supposed to work together, not only due to issues with the powers and systems, but the conflicting cosmologies as well.

1997?

I got disenchanted with the game, mostly because both the published product and our actual play at the table was becoming "The Sabbat War," which seemed cheap and cheesy. I much preferred the early theme of the game, which was the conflict was between the shadowy Methuselahs who were using everyone as pawns in their centuries-long vendettas. Or was that the theme of Jyhad, the card game? I can't recall. Looking back, I know now what I wanted, which was something more like Game of Thrones than World War V.  

1999?

We anxiously awaited each new installment of the metaplot, if only because it was interesting. Not that we used it. We just kept doing the same thing we had always done, but it was clear the magic was gone. The RPG options just kept increasing; half of the group wanted to try new games but the other half didn't. People moved on; the group broke up. Sold my books on Ebay.

2004?

Requiem came out, and we made a half-hearted attempt to get the band back together. After one game we realized why it was never going to work: the half that loved the OWOD disliked this new thing, and the half that walked earlier felt that there were better, newer things out there.

2012

I bought the V20 PDF because it was on sale. I don't think I've ever opened it.

2020, April

Lockdown, so like everyone else, I decide to do some spring cleaning. I discover an old box with thousands of Jyhad cards. Looks like I forgot to sell this junk back in 99. But as I start looking through the box... some of the cards are amazing. Consanguinous Condemnation? Sounds cool, but I can't recall what the hell that was. Treaty of Tyre Revoked. Oh yeah, that's the deal the Assamites were forced to make back in the Middle Ages. That would be a cool thing to actually have happen in a game. The Curse of Nitocris. The Fear of Mekhet. I have no idea what these things were. Were they in books I never owned, or did they exist only in  the card game? And what the hell are they? I think I will just make something up.

Now

I'm looking at all of these cards, their images and quotes. It's like the entire game has been chopped up into atoms and randomized. Divorced from any semblance of structure (or metpalot, if you will) these elements are mine to arrange as I please. I could do anything with this. But there is no nostalgia; this is not a longing for the past, but a look to the future, a big What If... and for the first time in 20 years, I'm seeing the World of Darkness the same way I did when I cracked open that first book all those years ago.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130129I eventually warmed to Revised. Honestly, M20's refusal to canonize the Avatar Storm feels a bit silly to me.

Here we most definitely disagree.

I believe the Avatar Storm brought nothing good to Mage. And that it actually damaged the property near irreparably.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130125Mage Revised was utterly ruined by Metaplot. The Avatar Storm was not ignorable. The whole magic system was altered because of it to accommodate it.

So the good game that was Mage 2nd Edition was effectively ruined in Revised. Because of the developer not treating the metaplot as something that was optional.

Mage Revised was basically the same thing as 4E D&D... a fine game if it weren't supposed to be Mage the Ascension. It was only because it ran so counter to previous editions on a "feel" level that made it be so negatively regarded.

That said, M20 (and also many of the later Revised-era books that backtracked hard) was also a return to form with options to ignore, continue or say Revised happened but was a temporary thing.

Also, since I was running ongoing Mage campaigns throughout 2nd and Revised (and right up to the present), I'm going to have to disagree with you on how ignorable the metaplot was because I ignored it so easily that I'm having difficulty seeing just what you found so difficult to ignore?

The Missing Masters was pure fluff text; just keep them around. Done.

Avatar Storm? Don't roll damage for crossing the Gauntlet. Done.

Disembodiment rules in Infinite Tapestry? Ignore the chart and let people stay in the Umbra as long as they want. Done.

As to the magic system changes, since I was on the GM side of the screen, I found it MUCH easier to adjudicate effects with the Revised mechanics (i.e. spending successes on specific elements). It wasn't like basic combat magic wasn't possible, two successes still let you deal damage to any target you could see and you even got a reflexive attack roll using a paradigm appropriate dice pool (ex. Per+Occult for a Hermetic, Dex+Firearms for a Technocrat) to add damage to the attack.

As to the increased difficulty for using a non-rote; ignore the difficulty penalty, done.

Don't like the Resonance mechanics? Don't use them (or apply them only to magic effects where I found them awesome for players to better reflect their styles... not as good as M20s approach to Paradigm, Practices and Instruments, but good for its time). Done.

I also felt that immediate paradox backlash unless you spent effort to hold it off just felt a lot more like how Paradox should have been to me (why would the backlash for violating the natural order be delayed and then bleed off without consequence?) and the default of soakable bashing damage (the limit if you took your lumps as they came) and difficulty increases to actions were both easier to apply and to come up with meaningful descriptions of on the fly because I like poetic backlashes and those are much easier to come up with when the effect that produced the backlash just occurred.

In practical terms, anything up to about rank 3 vulgar without witnesses effort meant you took a +1 difficulty penalty to your next action at most (3 dice of bashing damage at difficulty 6, resisted by Stamina at difficulty 6... people who wanted to use more vulgar effects went 3-4 stamina and then bought it up to 5 to represent their becoming paradox inured; and if you can take a fundamental force of the universe punching you in the gut you can certainly take an ordinary punch too).

But if you really liked 2e's magic and backlash rules; use them instead because it's not like Revised went 4E on the basic mechanics... Attributes, Abilities, Backgrounds, Willpower, Health Levels, Arete, Spheres and Quintessence were all unchanged in terms of stat values.

If your Metaplot mechanics are as ignorable as AD&D's damage vs. armor type mechanics, I hardly consider them to be "unignorable."

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130155Here we most definitely disagree.

I believe the Avatar Storm brought nothing good to Mage. And that it actually damaged the property near irreparably.

The thing about that was they started rolling back the Avatar Storm almost immediately after they introduced it with the Stormwardens and the Rogue Council. They also did the Revised Convention books that, aside from being blatant Technocracy propaganda, were still very popular with their more heroic depiction of the Union. A lot of people who hated the Avatar Storm softened on it as the primary result of it in the Union books was, "The Union is now 90% less psychotic and evil than it was while they were being controlled by Autocthonia, Control, and possibly the Nephandi."

M20 has also managed to do a lot with it.

Take note, I used to HATE the Avatar Storm with a furious passion but "rebuilding the Traditions and/or Union like the Rebellion rebuilding the Galactic Republic" turned out to be a lot of fun.

Quote from: Aglondir;1130131That is genius! I might steal that as the big reveal for the next V:TM game I run.

I hear what you're saying about Christianity and V:TM. It's definitively baked into the premise, which I can appreciate and enjoy even though I'm not religious.

However, I'm thinking of a Vampire game which is not Christian in origin, where the origin of vampires is shrouded in mystery. Several competing origin stories over the millennia have evolved into mystery cults or sects. One of these might be Christian in nature, another might be a virus, another might be magical, etc.  The gist is to use the conflicts between the sects to replace the Camirilla vs. Sabbat conflict of V:TM. Each sect races to uncover historical and archaeological evidence to establish it's legitimacy, and some even create forgeries to mislead or sabotage their rivals. More of a cold war than an open conflict. As such, the main theme of the game switches from Guilt to Self-discovery. Or to Despair, when you discover everything you believed in is a lie. Or to Paranoia, when you discover that the lie was fabricated by very powerful people who use it to control you.

But I'm starting to get this terrible feeling that Requiem does something like that? Requiem came out right after I exited the WOD, so my knowledge of it is superficial.

It had the opportunity to do that, but it never actually did. It touched on it a tiny bit with torpor reducing blood-potency and inconsistently affecting memories (so you could create a noob PC who is centuries old and adjusting to modern life, or create false records of events to use for personal gain centuries in the future, etc), but ultimately discarded all those ideas because fans apparently wanted the same eternal unchanging elder vampires as in VTM.

VTR is basically just V5 but the discipline mechanic sucks.

Your ideas are a breath of fresh air in this stagnant rotting fandom.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130125Mage Revised was utterly ruined by Metaplot. The Avatar Storm was not ignorable. The whole magic system was altered because of it to accommodate it.

So the good game that was Mage 2nd Edition was effectively ruined in Revised. Because of the developer not treating the metaplot as something that was optional.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130129I eventually warmed to Revised. Honestly, M20's refusal to canonize the Avatar Storm feels a bit silly to me.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130155Here we most definitely disagree.

I believe the Avatar Storm brought nothing good to Mage. And that it actually damaged the property near irreparably.

Quote from: Chris24601;1130158Mage Revised was basically the same thing as 4E D&D... a fine game if it weren't supposed to be Mage the Ascension. It was only because it ran so counter to previous editions on a "feel" level that made it be so negatively regarded.

That said, M20 (and also many of the later Revised-era books that backtracked hard) was also a return to form with options to ignore, continue or say Revised happened but was a temporary thing.

Also, since I was running ongoing Mage campaigns throughout 2nd and Revised (and right up to the present), I'm going to have to disagree with you on how ignorable the metaplot was because I ignored it so easily that I'm having difficulty seeing just what you found so difficult to ignore?

The Missing Masters was pure fluff text; just keep them around. Done.

Avatar Storm? Don't roll damage for crossing the Gauntlet. Done.

Disembodiment rules in Infinite Tapestry? Ignore the chart and let people stay in the Umbra as long as they want. Done.

As to the magic system changes, since I was on the GM side of the screen, I found it MUCH easier to adjudicate effects with the Revised mechanics (i.e. spending successes on specific elements). It wasn't like basic combat magic wasn't possible, two successes still let you deal damage to any target you could see and you even got a reflexive attack roll using a paradigm appropriate dice pool (ex. Per+Occult for a Hermetic, Dex+Firearms for a Technocrat) to add damage to the attack.

As to the increased difficulty for using a non-rote; ignore the difficulty penalty, done.

Don't like the Resonance mechanics? Don't use them (or apply them only to magic effects where I found them awesome for players to better reflect their styles... not as good as M20s approach to Paradigm, Practices and Instruments, but good for its time). Done.

I also felt that immediate paradox backlash unless you spent effort to hold it off just felt a lot more like how Paradox should have been to me (why would the backlash for violating the natural order be delayed and then bleed off without consequence?) and the default of soakable bashing damage (the limit if you took your lumps as they came) and difficulty increases to actions were both easier to apply and to come up with meaningful descriptions of on the fly because I like poetic backlashes and those are much easier to come up with when the effect that produced the backlash just occurred.

In practical terms, anything up to about rank 3 vulgar without witnesses effort meant you took a +1 difficulty penalty to your next action at most (3 dice of bashing damage at difficulty 6, resisted by Stamina at difficulty 6... people who wanted to use more vulgar effects went 3-4 stamina and then bought it up to 5 to represent their becoming paradox inured; and if you can take a fundamental force of the universe punching you in the gut you can certainly take an ordinary punch too).

But if you really liked 2e's magic and backlash rules; use them instead because it's not like Revised went 4E on the basic mechanics... Attributes, Abilities, Backgrounds, Willpower, Health Levels, Arete, Spheres and Quintessence were all unchanged in terms of stat values.

If your Metaplot mechanics are as ignorable as AD&D's damage vs. armor type mechanics, I hardly consider them to be "unignorable."

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130165The thing about that was they started rolling back the Avatar Storm almost immediately after they introduced it with the Stormwardens and the Rogue Council. They also did the Revised Convention books that, aside from being blatant Technocracy propaganda, were still very popular with their more heroic depiction of the Union. A lot of people who hated the Avatar Storm softened on it as the primary result of it in the Union books was, "The Union is now 90% less psychotic and evil than it was while they were being controlled by Autocthonia, Control, and possibly the Nephandi."

M20 has also managed to do a lot with it.

Take note, I used to HATE the Avatar Storm with a furious passion but "rebuilding the Traditions and/or Union like the Rebellion rebuilding the Galactic Republic" turned out to be a lot of fun.

I always thought Mage tried to do too many things at once and ended up doing none of them particularly well. On the one hand it seems to want to be a bit like Dresden Files or Harry Potter or other urban fantasy where the paranormal lives hidden in plain sight... on the other hand it wants to be Rifts and Shadowrun and Chronicles of Amber and Ready Player One all thrown in a blender.

I always thought the metaphysics were poorly constructed, as evidenced by the countless pointless debates over consensus reality, the purple paradigm, results- versus process-based determinism, obnoxious anti-science attitudes, etc. I've seen people argue that the Technocracy invented waterborne illnesses like cholera, which sounds incredibly stupid. I studied the hard sciences in college and I understand the scientific method, so I'm pretty much the last person who would enjoy Mage.

The recent Mage books also suffer an extreme case "hey there fellow kids" and an obnoxious bitterness towards all technological progress made since the 90s. The Technocracy and Virtual Adepts have degenerated into retrofuturist technophobes who are bitter that social media didn't let them take over the world and constantly complain about the horrors of fake news and anti-vaxxers and whatever is currently trending on twitter.

If you guys enjoy it then that's great, but it really doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm sorry, but I have to make my own game because I really don't want to interact with the sorts of people attracted to Mage.

Box, you do you.

I didn't notice a hatred towards modern technology at all. One of my favorite Hermetic rotes takes advantage of our electronic enconomy... by inscribing arcsne sigils on seven credit cards and placing them in a circle around your bills, a spirit of forces, entropy and correspondence siphons fractional rounding of currency from electronic transactions and applies them towards the balance of the bills in the circle. If the Syndicate didn't intend this, so say the Hermetics, they shouldn't have been so shoddy with their currency systems rounding to only two decimal places.

In terms of how magic works though, there's a very good discussion on results vs. process based determinism and hypothetical omniscient vs. average observers on page 534 of M20... and M20 operates from the assumptions of;

A) Process-Based Determinism (i.e. if you want a taxi to ferry you quickly across town you better have life, mind, matter and prime and a paradigm that lets you conjure organic constructs and complex mechanical devices out of thin air... or you could use mind to convince an actual nearby taxi-driver to turn your way, notice you and stop).

-and-

B) Hypothetical Average Bystander (if someone sees you walk into a dark alley and when they go to look they don't find you and on the other side of town an instant later you walk out of a dark ally... it is coincidental, because unless both hypothetical average bystanders were in contact with each other to relay that you traveled 50 blocks in an instant, neither would presume anything magical had just happened).

That framework plus the refinements to Paradigm and retaining Revised's effect building via spending successes makes magic a LOT easier to manage (so much so that I dumped all my pages of house rules when M20 came out).

The fact that you can essentially quantify every other critter type in the game within the subjective reality of Mage generally makes it my default for any crossover campaigns.

Also, for those wondering; the notion that Caine might not have actually been a vampire at all, but suffered a botched Awakening is pretty strongly implied by the text in the Book of Nod.

Lilith performs a cerimony to try and Awaken him and he goes into a vision of being tormented and cursed by angels. Angelic visitors is actually a pretty common form for Avatars to manifest as and such manifestations are common during the Seekings that accompany Awakening and the raising of Arete.

If you really want to run with it though, consider that Creation story isn't about the literal First Man and First Woman, but the first humans to ever Awaken. Adam and Lilith part ways and Eve is "born from Adam's side" in that she was Adam's apprentice who Awakened. Abel too was Awakened, but Caine was not and he murdered his brother out of jealousy then fled into the wilds to find the only other Awakened at that point; Lilith.

Caine though gets so overwhelmed by his guilt and self-loathing during the forced Awakening Lilith put him through that Caine becomes the First Marauder (trapped in his personal reality where he is forever accurded by God). This is why Caine was reputed to be able to create vampiric disciplines at will... because he was actually a true mage (albeit an insane one).

Some Marauders are known to be infectious, their madness can be spread to others who are Awakened; I give you the second and third generations who inherited Caine's god-like power to create disciplines.

Because of how early this entered into human consciousness (prior to the Toba population bottleneck that reduced the total human population to maybe 10k) Caine's particular condition became engrained as a potent mythic thread that needs only minor expenditures of quintessence (a point per day, stolen from mortal blood) to maintain. It is potent enough that passing on Caine's infectious paradigm doesn't even require the victims of it to be Awakened themselves... though it does warp the victim's nascent avatar into a Beast; which is why Awakened magic is impossible for vampires outside of Caine and possibly the other Antediluvians... and also why true magick has such a bitch of a time trying to undo the Curse (you can't undo Marauder-hood with magick).

Now, to be fair, I ONLY use that version when I'm running a Mage campaign because any Mage who wants to do a deep dive on the metaphysics of the vampire condition deserves a truly Mage-centric answer.

When I run Vampire I un-ironically use the Biblical God leveling an actual curse upon the actual Cain because Vampire is a game that explores holding onto yourself and your morality in the face of an all-comsuming temptation towards evil and that isn't well served by "you're actually suffering from the mother of all Paradox backlashes due to the hubris of one of the first mages in history."

I don't think it makes sense to use the Hindu word "avatar," for that matter. An avatar is an earthly manifestation of a deity. The Vedic traditions might use it and believe themselves to be avatars (like Avatar: The Last Airbender), but that doesn't make sense for everyone else. Whenever I hear "avatar storm" I imagine armies of hindu deities fighting.

Consensus reality is inherently nonsensical, especially when it comes to explaining history. (E.g. how did smallpox wipe out the native americans if they didn't believe it existed?) I find it much easier to say "magic just works." You can still have your loonies trying to destroy Western civilization, but you don't have to explain why anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers haven't changed the laws of physics, or how consensus reality interacts with things like civil rights and dehumanization.

Oddly it actually makes sense the more you understand about Hindu cosmology as the Avatar is the inner fragment of the Pure Ones and divine beings that predate the cosmos that is located inside a mage. Consensual Reality is nonsensical but it's part of the settings conceit. Sometimes I think it's fine just not to overthink these things when creating a game.

Mind you, I've also felt that "Consensual Reality changes to what MAGES do" but "Sleepers, by definition, do not affect Consensus save for generating paradox since they're not Awakened."

Which is to say all of the rules are the same but reality is reality.

So, I'm going to say I roughly agree with you.

Compare this with the game Nephilim. Rather than consensus reality, it posits that physics are different and allow magic. The Major Arcana book states that the nephilim have numerous traditions beyond the western, like Taoist, Haitian, Aztec, etc but sadly the game was cancelled before this was explored. The French version didn't do much with those either.

I liked nephilim's magic system because it was called occult science and used the scientific method to study magic. There were also at least three different kinds including sorcery, summoning, and alchemy. The Enlighted Magic system Chaosium released in ~2014 used a generic new age fluff, but the rules are flexible enough that you can switch it out for other kinds of rituals. In fact, IMO all of Chaosium's magic systems handle paradigm better than MTAs because they built different magic systems for different paradigms rather than try forcing everything into the same Ars Magica-derived system.

In fact, I'd really like to explore the Nephilim setting further but unfortunately the game was cancelled decades ago and isn't coming back. There's nobody to talk to about it.

The thing is Consensual Reality is pretty much central to the gameline. If you remove it, there's no reason for the Technocracy and Traditions to be engaged in a dominionist war to the last man for literally centuries. I'd argue that the major reason that Revised did the Avatar Storm was in order to try to get away from the Ascension War as the primary and only plot that could be explored while they were battling over whether humanity believed in fairies or not.