The "Rebecca Borgstrom is a Moron Law"

[Dominus Nox]

These sorts of descrptions make me glad I stick to fairly hard SF games...

[The Yann Waters]

I was tempted to use the word "genre" instead of "context", but I'm not sure that there's really a genre for this sort of thing.

"High-powered modern fantasy" comes close. But of course it doesn't have to take place in the modern day since various forms of time travel exist in the setting, not to mention that you could simply start the game in, say, Troy or the court of Charlemagne...

From the book: "Nobilis does not have a genre, in the classic literary sense. What it has is an approach to the genre of your choice -- an approach in which the characters and events are absolutes. Where they operate on the highest levels of reality. And where the whole world turns on a word in the right ear. Within those bounds, you may play in whatever genre you like." It's possible to have a fairly street-level, down-to-Earth sort of a character in the game (straight zeroes in all attributes, no Gifts apart from the likes of Unblemished Guise, a number of suitable Handicaps); but even that takes a bit of effort, and playing a common mortal simply isn't an option. Once you get your head around the power level, you can run anything from Westerns to detective stories to space opera, though.

[droog]

I've felt for a long time that there is a group of games including Nobilis, Nephilim, In Nomine and most of the WoD games that are for what my friends, in their untheoretical way, call 'powergamers'. Must be something about the 90s.

[The Yann Waters]

2) Whether merely pretentious or ironically pretentious.  Whether an unplayable mess, or a highly innovative game where you can jump around on missiles and kick jet fighter apart... it just doesn't sound like my idea of fun.  At all.

It should be noted that the Example of Play is meant to illustrate the kind of things that your characters can actually do during a session, and so it condenses diverse situations into a relatively small number of pages. The aerial battle is just one of those scenes.

The sheer scale of power involved isn't for everyone, naturally enough: with a modicum of creativity, a starting character could potentially wipe out the human species. The thing to remember is that the PCs are not above the law, and that there will always be consequences to everything they do. Eradicate humanity, and you couldn't expect to find a sanctuary anywhere in the universe, not against the wrath of Entropy and the Council of Four.

[The Yann Waters]

I've felt for a long time that there is a group of games including Nobilis, Nephilim, In Nomine and most of the WoD games that are for what my friends, in their untheoretical way, call 'powergamers'.

Ah, yes: the "Morpheus Was a Twink" school of thought. Still, in the end conventional power does precious little in Nob. You'll be better off investigating the love lives of Excrucian shards and using that knowledge against them than trying to cut them into ribbons with an economy-size sword.

[fonkaygarry]

Ah, yes: the "Morpheus Was a Twink" school of thought. Still, in the end conventional power does precious little in Nob. You'll be better off investigating the love lives of Excrucian shards and using that knowledge against them than trying to cut them into ribbons with an economy-size sword.

You've tried very, very hard to make Nobilis sound fun. You can stop now. It'll be okay. The war's over. You're not alone anymore.

We can work through this together.

[Blackleaf]

You've tried very, very hard to make Nobilis sound fun. You can stop now. It'll be okay. The war's over. You're not alone anymore.

If I were Rebecca Borgstrom, and GrimGent wasn't championing my game across the Int0rwebs, I'd maybe think about creating a second account from my "Rebecca Borgstrom" identity so that I could do exactly what GrimGent was doing.*  It's actually very clever Viral marketing, and something big companies and political parties do all the time.

I wonder if that sort of thing is very common with RPG designers and RPG related forums?  I know we've seen that sort of thing on some of the indie comic boards I've helped with.

* I'm not REALLY calling out GrimGent here -- I'm sure he's just a really keen fan.  But it does make me think about this sort of thing.

[The Yann Waters]

If I were Rebecca Borgstrom, and GrimGent wasn't championing my game across the Int0rwebs, I'd maybe think about creating a second account from my "Rebecca Borgstrom" identity so that I could do exactly what GrimGent was doing.

Eh, even her posting style tends to be highly idiosyncratic: BORGstrom jokes aside, I don't think there's any chance of confusing the two of us.

[The Yann Waters]

You've tried very, very hard to make Nobilis sound fun.

Actually, I don't care whether anyone else around here finds Nob fun: there's no arguing about taste and it's none of my concern what others play, after all. Also, not everyone likes the style of the book, and that's completely understandable. What annoys me are the occasional arguments that the rules are utterly incomprehensible and that no one could possibly have any fun with the setting, and that these claims are generally presented as some sort of facts by people who apparently have next to no idea what they are talking about.

[Andy K]

* Nevermind that this belief is often accompanied by the claim that such games are so incredibly inconsequential that they're little more than vanity projects of their creator, that they have no influence on the RPG industry/hobby as a whole, &c.  Not to be picky, but I don't think it can be both things at once.  

No, be picky. For you spotted the argument of hypocrites and morons.

(and no, not a fan of Nobilis. It sat on my shelf for a year until I sold it, unplayed and for the most part unread)

[dar]

Ah, yes: the "Morpheus Was a Twink" school of thought. Still, in the end conventional power does precious little in Nob. You'll be better off investigating the love lives of Excrucian shards and using that knowledge against them than trying to cut them into ribbons with an economy-size sword.

GrimGent, this is the problem I have with many of your posts here. You seem disingenuous. I thought that the post your commenting on to mean 'power games' in a general sense. Like high stakes poker, board meetings, or politics. You've distorted that meaning in order to counter that post.

It seems like your playing a game of Nobilis and just arbitrarily changing facts and meanings to your own ends.

Am I alone in sensing this?

[The Yann Waters]

I thought that the post your commenting on to mean 'power games' in a general sense. Like high stakes poker, board meetings, or politics. You've distorted that meaning in order to counter that post.

When did you ever hear someone use "powergamer" as a positive term, or even neutral? In general, it's not exactly something associated with political power.

[dar]

When did you ever hear someone use "powergamer" as a positive term, or even neutral? In general, it's not exactly something associated with political power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powergaming

is a good start. The primary definition is closer to what I originally thought. The secondary is closer to what you thought. But that's really my point. Before you even begin to argue you take the point of the other poster in the worse possible light or even slightly distorted and argue against that.

I guess only droog can really say what he meant. And that it would be simple for anyone to take the meaning you took from his post, a meaning that just so happens to bolster your argument and seems tangential even just a bit to what I thought he meant, but gosh darn, you do seem to do a lot of that.

[The Yann Waters]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powergaming

is a good start. The primary definition is closer to what I originally thought. The secondary is closer to what you thought.

That first definition doesn't really even apply to tabletop games: it covers the "I growl and you run away screaming" kind of behaviour in online RPing. The other one presents the powergamer as commonly seen in RPGs: maxed-out stats, the biggest guns money can buy, and no character concept beyond "badass".

[RPGPundit]

There seems to exist this notion, among gamers, that the range of possibilities within RPGs amounts to some sort of zero-sum game.  If games of one stripe were to be successful, it would only be at the expense of games that were of a different type.

Amusing. You choose to make this place, this game, your "stand" after a gang of Nobilis fanboys tried very very hard to push Guardians of Order to remake the 2nd edition of Amber as a Nobilis-based game.

In other words, they did exactly what you describe, and what I warn about; they tried to subvert a good traditional game and wipe it out of existence by being an overly-vocal minority manipulating the gaming market to push their crappy shithole of a product and wipe out their more interesting, more playable, more popular competitor.

They tried to destroy Amber.  So you will forgive me if, yes, I DO fucking see it as a zero-sum game. If I do, though, its because those fuckers made it that. They made it a situation where they tried to destroy the other game by treachery, because they knew they couldn't beat it in sales, and knew that a 2nd edition of Amber was a threat to Nobilis because Amber is a diceless game that actually works.

So fuck them all. And fuck you for trying to promote the lie that the Swine "just want to get along". They say this while they hold a knife behind their backs like a gang of fucking cowards.  They don't even deserve to be spit upon.

I will fight them at every turn.

RPGPundit