You didn't really bother to read what the "Borges vs. Gaiman" thing was about, did you?

ETA: And don't mess with Harry Potter!!!

Quote from: GrimGent;323020That would depend on who announces their actions first. Lesser Creations are always level 4 miracles by default, although the miracle-worker can crank up the level deliberately in order to counter a more powerful effect.

Yeah, but would you, in seeing the attack coming at you, know whether or not more "juice" has been pumped into it? Because, if I understood correctly so far, higher number wins, right? So, if you were trying to trump (no pun intended) a LC of fire with a LC of water, but the fire one has 4 extra MPs on it you would lose unless you pump your own up, right? So, do you know it beforehand or not? Can your character "see" or "sense" just how powerful an attack is, in terms of how much extra effort has been put into it? And what about Penetration? Are you aware of the potential of any specific attack to hurt you or not? Sorry if the questions weren't clear.

QuoteOn a somewhat different note: You know, people, that's what I find most amusing about all this. For what I can understand so far, the game is pretty simple when the rules are extricated from the prose. It would make it pretty simple to explain ("you get to play god/immortals/powers that be"), and pretty quick to start when properly guided in chargen. So, WHAT THE FUCK IS SO HORRIBLY COMPLICATED ABOUT IT ALL?!? I really don't get it.

But that's the thing.  The entire thing, rules and all, is tied up in prose as twisted and impenetrable as a granite octopus, and drips with pretentious and obtuse terminology like "hollyhock god".

The only thing I learned from Nobilis, or any of Borgstrom's writing, is that she/he/it is terribly impressed with her own cleverness.  In the words of xkcd, communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness.

Quote from: SunBoy;323093So, if you were trying to trump (no pun intended) a LC of fire with a LC of water, but the fire one has 4 extra MPs on it you would lose unless you pump your own up, right? So, do you know it beforehand or not? Can your character "see" or "sense" just how powerful an attack is, in terms of how much extra effort has been put into it? And what about Penetration? Are you aware of the potential of any specific attack to hurt you or not?

Well, you have no way of telling how many MPs the attacker has invested into the fireball, and you presumably don't want to wait until it gets within five feet to see how effective its Penetration is, and you might not know its exact increased level (unless you have for some reason switched on the Sight which probably would let you analyze the miracle in detail); but typically recognizing the more high-powered effects comes easily to Nobles and they can calculate precisely how effective a particular counter-strategy would be. The game is diceless because it deals with beings who operate on absolute terms and have no doubts about what they are capable of at any given time. If you notice some threat hurtling into your general direction, you can always ask the GM about, say, the necessary Aspect required to dodge it. Besides, the higher levels tend to be blatantly obvious: add a few more levels to that fireball, and it can nuke cities into ashes. The characters know how that all works out in practice. ("Well, I heard that bastard is the Duke of Fire, so he can keep blasting out those flamebursts all day long... We need to take him out now before wasting any more of our strength.")

One further thing to remember is that damage tracking in the game is in a sense reversed. Each empowered character has a number of Wound Levels divided as equally as possible into three categories (Surface, Serious, Deadly), and the most severe injuries must be suffered first before lesser scrapes become anything other than cosmetic. That is, you must first lose all your Deadly Wound Levels before you can lose the Serious ones, and then all Serious ones before the Surface ones, and finally all Surface ones before you die. In other words, you can't for instance be nibbled to death by rats as long as you haven't already suffered all the Serious and Deadly Wounds that you can take (maybe your enemies tortured you nearly to death before shoving you into a rat-infested dungeon), because what would otherwise cause Surface Wounds will have no mechanical effects until then. What exactly qualifies for each injury category depends on the character's defensive Gifts, according to a simple damage assessment chart: as mentioned before, a level 4 fireball can only hurt a healthy Noble if he has none of them at all. As a rule of thumb, anything that probably would kill a common mortal will instead inflict a single Deadly Wound on a defenceless Noble. And if you have the Immortal Gift, you can mostly just ignore damage altogether, since nothing in the universe can kill you anyway.

You can still find the example of play from the book here as a PDF download, along with the intro chapter and Mytholder's newbie pamphlet.

Quote from: J Arcane;323116The only thing I learned from Nobilis, or any of Borgstrom's writing, is that she/he/it is terribly impressed with her own cleverness.  In the words of xkcd, communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness.

She's never been anything other than honest about occasionally having trouble conveying the reasoning behind her rules, though. Her thinking just seems to follow slightly unorthodox patterns, from time to time, so that she doesn't always easily recognize how unintuitive her writing might feel to the casual reader. But she's never struck me as "smug" about it.

Quote from: J Arcane;323116But that's the thing.  The entire thing, rules and all, is tied up in prose as twisted and impenetrable as a granite octopus, and drips with pretentious and obtuse terminology like "hollyhock god".

The only thing I learned from Nobilis, or any of Borgstrom's writing, is that she/he/it is terribly impressed with her own cleverness.  In the words of xkcd, communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness.

OK, right. But, as I was trying to communicate (maybe badly ) before, and someone (I think Chuck) said in another thread, I prefer to judge a game for it's system and setting (or one of the two) when deciding whether to play it or not. Opinions about how the material is presented are valid, of course, but I think they're just different questions. A vapid asshole presenting his game in a moronic way as the next best thing since swiss cheese could still theoretically have written a nice, playable game. That would affect my opinion on the bloke, but not on the game itself. I'm not trying to disparage Borgstrom here (I think it's a she, Rebecca isn't it?), since I haven't actually read the book yet, but you get the point.

Quote from: GrimGentWell, (...)

OK. So you could actually get hurt if caught unprepared. You're a badass, but not an untouchable badass. That is nice. Right, I think I'll give the game a spin if I can get it. Thank you, really.

Nobilis is pretentious crap.  One of the guys in our group brought up trying to run it; we made fun of him until he dropped the idea.  I suspect him of harboring symapthies for Vampire LARPers.

Quote from: SunBoy;323172So you could actually get hurt if caught unprepared. You're a badass, but not an untouchable badass. That is nice.

There are exotic and rare ways of circumventing the Immortal Gift too, by using methods that come from outside the universe and don't respect the natural laws. You can't kill an immortal. It's futile even to try. But with the right weapon or by bargaining with entities from the Beyond you can temporarily cut away his immortality itself and then murder him while he remains mortal.

Still, all Nobles and their peers are ridiculously resilient. Their total number of Wound Levels equals four plus the Aspect attribute, and they can speed up the healing process by spending miracle points. One of their most common magical rituals is the Rite of Holy Fire which renders them immune to mundane damage, and although its effectiveness depends heavily on the Spirit attribute, this allows any Noble to shrug off overwhelmingly lethal situations like nuclear explosions and erupting volcanoes.

Out of the three basic defensive Gifts, Durant is by far the most commonplace, and it only renders the character a little more durable, with no other special effects. Sacrosanct is the second one, and it typically combines a more efficient protection with some reflexive counterattack which might, for example, strike down any attacker with lightning or summon hellhounds to chase down the offenders. And that third one is Immortal, which under normal circumstances makes the character impossible to kill or even capture indefinitely.

Quote from: GrimGent;323183There are exotic and rare ways of circumventing the Immortal Gift too, by using methods that come from outside the universe and don't respect the natural laws. You can't kill an immortal. It's futile even to try. But with the right weapon or by bargaining with entities from the Beyond you can temporarily cut away his immortality itself and then murder him while he remains mortal.

Still, all Nobles and their peers are ridiculously resilient. Their total number of Wound Levels equals four plus the Aspect attribute, and they can speed up the healing process by spending miracle points. One of their most common magical rituals is the Rite of Holy Fire which renders them immune to mundane damage, and although its effectiveness depends heavily on the Spirit attribute, this allows any Noble to shrug off overwhelmingly lethal situations like nuclear explosions and erupting volcanoes.

Out of the three basic defensive Gifts, Durant is by far the most commonplace, and it only renders the character a little more durable, with no other special effects. Sacrosanct is the second one, and it typically combines a more efficient protection with some reflexive counterattack which might, for example, strike down any attacker with lightning or summon hellhounds to chase down the offenders. And that third one is Immortal, which under normal circumstances makes the character impossible to kill or even capture indefinitely.

Wow, that whole post reinforced the very underpinnings of my comment.

Quote from: Angry_Douchebag;323185Wow, that whole post reinforced the very underpinnings of my comment.

Emp. mine.

Uh... yeah. That was a really complex reasoning you presented there. That crap. Me Tarzan. What's cool is, I can call you a douchebag and it will be alright.

With a name like angry douchebag, i believe the fellow hath defeated all our protests!  Here is a good Nobilis example for why Lord Entropy is not openly rebelled against as a horrible tyrant.  His very aspects in creation that give him form are, one of them, corruption.  He cannot be any more than this, because he embodies it.

Therefore Angry Douchebag is simply living out his nature, and should simply be ignored for dumping in a thread about what we like about Nobilis


And I realize the book is a tough read if you are looking to glean actual rulesets out of it, so I know it may be bothersome, but any examples of obvious smugness and pretentiousness other than a lofty setting on the part of the writer would help me understand the logic of those who don't like the game beyond 'I'm using hard words to say its just not my thing'.