oMage v. nMage

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Errr. 'quality posts'. I will try to make a review once I'm done with my thesis and finish the NWO OSSR, but for now just a magic change overview.

So, upsides:
* Compared to nMage 1 and especially oMage, nMage 2 is very strongly moving away from using multiple arcanas for a single spell in favor of making every arcana awesome. That's great. In oMage making a character who specializes in Correspondence, Time and Prime frequently meant making a character who can do absolutely nothing.
* Vulgar/coincidental distinction is completely gone. There is still Paradox (which comes as a result of there being an evil baby-eating realm between you and the magic realm), but no of the coincidental magic silliness. If you do any visible magic there is a small increase in spell's paradox, but that's it.
* No multiple action clusterfuck. This is a general change in nWoD 2 - everything that gives multiple actions went in the trash. Using Time magic gives increases in Speed and initiative fuckery instead.

Now, how did the magic system actually change? The core of the new system are "yantras", essentially casting tools. The spellcasting roll is Gnosis+Arcana+Yantras-Modifiers, with Yantras-Modifiers being limited to a maximum of +5. There are a bunch of yantras and they give +1 or +2 bonus, with a few merit-based yantras giving +3. The number of yantras you can use in a single spell is determined by your Gnosis - 2 yantras at Gnosis 1-2, 3 yantras at Gnosis 3 (maximum chargen Gnosis). +2 yantras generally take more than a turn to use, and you can only use one yantra per turn, so in combat mages will just use their best yantra for spells. You also have a "dedicated tool", a single +1 yantra item that also reduces the paradox dice. While this is important will be covered later. Example casting:

Mary Mastigos wants to cast a spell to read thoughts of a hot bartender. She has Mind 3 and Gnosis 2. Mary uses two yantras - a ring that was given to her by her father on the 16th birthday (her dedicated tool) and Concentration. Concentration is a +2 yantra that causes spells with long duration to stop working as soon as you take any action. Mary rolls Gnosis 2 + Mind 3 + Yantras 3 - Modifiers and gets or doesn't get a success. The yantra system may seem complicated at first, but it's actually isn't. Each player will have 3-4 yantras they use all the time and they all give very similar small bonuses, so it's easy to remember.

So what are these modifiers? Spells have factors: Potency, Duration and Scale. Scale is how many targets the spell affects. Duration is duration, but also affects spell penetration against magical defenses (Clash of Wills). Potency is the effect's strength and also has to account for spell penetration against people in general. Some spells don't care about Potency, some do. All spells have a Primary Factor (either potency or duration) which gets a bonus from your Arcana rating. To get more of a factor you have to buy it, 1 point for -2 to the casting roll. For Mary's example, Telepathy's primary factor is Potency so the spell will have Potency 3, Duration 1, Scale 1. To make the spell last for more than one turn Mary will have to take a -2 penalty to get it to Duration 2.
Spell factors are a bunch of math. They work perfectly fine in a PbP, but at a table I can imagine them being annoying.

There is one other aspect of the spellcasting, and that is Reach. Reach improves the effect of the spell in some way. For example, by default Telepathy just lets the mage read target's thoughts. By adding 1 Reach you can allow the target to selectively transmit the thoughts. By adding 1 Reach you can also make the telepathy go both ways. You can do both Reach options. You get a certain amount of free Reach and you can get more by increasing the number of Paradox dice you'll have to roll. That's where dedicated tools come handy - they are one of the few ways to decrease Paradox.
You can also spend Reach on other things. By default all spells are cast as rituals, and to cast them in a turn you have to spend Reach. All spells are also touch-only, and going to LOS costs Reach. Going to an Advanced Duration scale also costs Reach (normal Duration goes from 1 to 10 turns, Advanced goes from 1 scene to year).
Most spells printed in the book have Reach options written for them. How do you determine Reach options for spells not in the book? Go fuck yourself, that's how. The core spell list does actually cover most obvious uses of arcana, but still.

And that's my brief overview of the main bits of the magic system. I've probably poorly explained something, so if you have questions - ask away.
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Occluded Sun
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Stupid question: are there any remnants of Paradigm in nMage? (I grant you that most people didn't actually bother with it in oMage, but technically it was supposed to be there.)
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

No, but yes if you really want to. The yantras are semi-free form so if you want to roleplay magicbabble you can talk how jade wand is a yantra for spell X because it symbolizes whatever and how a laptop is a yantra for spell Y because it's a symbol of universal connectivity. But nothing like in oMage.
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Occluded Sun
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Post by Occluded Sun »

I vaguely remember people talking about that when nMage came out, and the developers said something about how it was the most problematic part of oMage, so they got rid of it.

Sadly, it was the reason for playing the game for some people... including me.

What we got was a lot closer to specific classes of mages, right?
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Kind of. At chargen you pick a Path which determines your two strongest arcanas:
* Mastigos - Space/Mind
* Obrimos - Forces/Prime
* Moros - Matter/Death
* Acanthus - Time/Fate
* Thyrsus - Life/Spirit

For spells from arcanas other than your two you have to spend an extra point of mana.
talozin
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Post by talozin »

While the lack of multiple actions is a close contender, I think maybe the best thing about the nMage 2 magic system is the complete absence of extended spellcasting rolls.

For those of you who didn't pay much attention to nMage 1, among the dumb things it allowed you to do was to roll your casting dice pool a number of times up to N, where N = the number of dice in your casting pool, in exchange for each individual roll taking longer. So you couldn't do this while you were actually in combat, but, as D&D taught us long ago, who cares if you can't do something in combat, as long as it affects you when you are in combat?

Some spells had built-in limiters to how many successes were useful, but many didn't. For instance, the one-dot Spirit spell that lets you add your casting successes to a roll of your choice when using a particular object. Well, if you were even moderately invested in Spirit as a starting character, you could routinely get 30 successes on an extended casting of this spell, meaning you could spend a few hours one weekend on doing so, and then walk around for the rest of the month with a +30 bonus on tap when shooting someone with your concealed handgun. A low-level Life spell allowed people to have month-long +25 bonuses to initiative, and that low only because they got bored with rolling huge handfuls of dice. If you focused your build on doing so, you could as a starting character wrangle enough dice on a Mind spellcasting roll to give yourself 5 dots in every single skill in the game. Not that you'd probably bother, because +5 on a roll is basically chump change under these circumstances.

nMage 2 has done away with this entirely. You can still get some pretty gross levels of effectiveness, but it's an order of magnitude less silly than it was with v1.
TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.
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