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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

So what do heir gun mGes do if they can’t use guns
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Post by erik »

OgreBattle wrote:So what do their gun mages do if they can’t use guns?
Fulminaturgs is the name of the gun adepts for those looking. It took me a bit to even track that down. Surprising since I'd imagine gun mage is a concept that should have some fucking legs.
https://fictionsuit.org/2017/09/14/unknown-armies-16-adepts/ wrote:For example Fulminaturgs are obsessed by guns, but their magick only works if they never actually shoot anybody. That said the way they collect charges – openly carrying guns in public – might make it too difficult to play a Fulminaturg in a UK set game.
That website is the only place I found them even referenced. And nothing on what they actually *can* do.

edit: this is reminding me of when I made an adept magick up for one of our UA campaigns. I wrote up a Junkomancer whose taboo was that he couldn't throw away stuff. I think his significant power was being able to have or find something useful. Don't recall much else mechanically since it was forever ago. I do recall my motivation behind writing it was that I was infuriated by how stupid the presented options were.
Last edited by erik on Sat Feb 03, 2018 11:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hyzmarca »

OgreBattle wrote:So what do heir gun mGes do if they can’t use guns
They're magic is based around manipulating social perceptions and relationships.

So, they can make people think "This dude has a gun, so he must be an authority" or "This dude has a gun, so he'll protect me" or "this dude has a gun, so I shouldn't mess with him" or "Holy fuck! He has a gun! Run!" or "That guy has a really sexy gun. I'm not gay but you know, but I'd make ane exception." or "That guy has a gun and is telling us to fuck the man! We \were just going to break shit anyway, but he seems to know which man we should be fucking, lets follow him."


It also includes the ability to make your opponents' guns stop working, to make every shot miss you, and to mind read people who have shot you. And to relieve stress by fondling your gun.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

hyzmarca wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:So what do heir gun mGes do if they can’t use guns
They're magic is based around manipulating social perceptions and relationships.

So, they can make people think "This dude has a gun, so he must be an authority" or "This dude has a gun, so he'll protect me" or "this dude has a gun, so I shouldn't mess with him" or "Holy fuck! He has a gun! Run!" or "That guy has a really sexy gun. I'm not gay but you know, but I'd make ane exception." or "That guy has a gun and is telling us to fuck the man! We \were just going to break shit anyway, but he seems to know which man we should be fucking, lets follow him."


It also includes the ability to make your opponents' guns stop working, to make every shot miss you, and to mind read people who have shot you. And to relieve stress by fondling your gun.
This, mind, is in a game that also has trolling mages who manipulate social perceptions and power dynamics. And reprinted the sex mages, who manipulate social perceptions and power dynamics (and still have the charge method Frank said was worse than FATAL, but also an option to charge by filming yourself fucking).

Gun whispering, Stormtrooper Marksmanship, and jacking off your surrogate metal dick to feel good again are all things a gun mage that didn't start off with Stolze's stupid first taboo could conceivably do and still be able to fire their fucking gun! The goddamned car mages can only do stuff with/in their car; they didn't get the taboo of "can't actually drive a fucking car".

It's a damn good thing UA3 opens with how to roll your own Adept school, then provides spells to do so because fuck.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Back when I was obsessed with Unknown Armies I just assumed that mages would routinely violate their taboos and just accept it meant their mana bar empties. So you can totally fire your gun once you've shot your magical wad.

Unless UA3 added some sort of price tag to violating taboo that's even bigger than "set number of charges to 0"?
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Sun Feb 04, 2018 8:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Longes »

Omegonthesane wrote:Back when I was obsessed with Unknown Armies I just assumed that mages would routinely violate their taboos and just accept it meant their mana bar empties. So you can totally fire your gun once you've shot your magical wad.

Unless UA3 added some sort of price tag to violating taboo that's even bigger than "set number of charges to 0"?
There is no extra price tag, but the game stresses that an adept would never willingly break their taboo and stops very short of describing your behavior as "rollplaying not roleplaying".

In any case, it's becoming increasingly clear that UA3 is just as, if not more, bolted to the specifically american culture of about 2012*
I mean, I didn't realize that gun magic is an NRA joke until hyzmarca said it, because I live in Germany and I know next to nothing about NRA. But evidently the apocryphal playtest guy also didn't realize that, and he probably was an american. So it's not like the joke is all that great to begin with.

I've mentioned the book's angry adversarial tone before, but for posterity I'll quote the part where Stolze shuts down the gun magic arguments. This tone is very, very typical for the book:
A GUN MAGE DOESN’T SHOOT ANYBODY?!? wrote:This popped up loudly in playtesting, where a player wanted to be a badass magickal triggerman and shoot all the bad guys. Or somebody. He was sorely disappointed that this was not encouraged.

Look, if you want to be the awe-inspiring John Woo-ish gunslinger, you don’t need a school of magick. Put many points in Gunslinger, make it your obsession, give it features that provide initiative and firearm attacks. But magick in Unknown Armies is about people who go against expectations. They see things in a way that is violently different from ordinary folks, and need that opposition to fuel their will. From what I’ve seen, in RPGs especially, “I have a gun to shoot people” is the exact opposite of unexpected. Or run it through Google. “Gun, hunting” gets about 83 million hits. “Guns kill people” gets 140 million, even though one would expect a three-term search to be narrower. It’s not conclusive, but it certainly suggests where the mind-share’s at.

That’s without considering the alternate taboo, embraced by paranoid loner adepts, that forbids them to leave their home or vehicle without a firearm. They can shoot as many people as they like, they just surrender their charges as soon as the SWAT team disarms them.
*The school of magic based around photos doesn't even mention Instagram, so it's as far removed from the actual pop culture of taking pictures as you can get. Instead you are locked into exclusively using film cameras, so every cameraturge is an annoying hipster like Max from Life is Strange.
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Post by Cervantes »

erik wrote:edit: this is reminding me of when I made an adept magick up for one of our UA campaigns. I wrote up a Junkomancer whose taboo was that he couldn't throw away stuff. I think his significant power was being able to have or find something useful. Don't recall much else mechanically since it was forever ago. I do recall my motivation behind writing it was that I was infuriated by how stupid the presented options were.
this is a literal school of magic in UA3e now. the taboo is basically the same
Longes wrote:I've mentioned the book's angry adversarial tone before, but for posterity I'll quote the part where Stolze shuts down the gun magic arguments.
Stolze's whole idea of "magic works because it goes against expectations" is fucking stupid. "crazy obsessed person who bends reality through stubbornness" is at odds with "here's literal schools of magic". as noted in the OSSR: it makes for an interesting story but not a good collaborative story.

Stolze's thing is not even what's actually happening with adepts. they're pretty clearly tapping into what people believe implicitly and amping that up to 11

and, of course, you simply can't play as a badass trigger mage because of the system is awful and you're encouraged to avoid combat at all costs because that's awful too
Last edited by Cervantes on Sun Feb 04, 2018 9:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Longes wrote:
Omegonthesane wrote:Back when I was obsessed with Unknown Armies I just assumed that mages would routinely violate their taboos and just accept it meant their mana bar empties. So you can totally fire your gun once you've shot your magical wad.

Unless UA3 added some sort of price tag to violating taboo that's even bigger than "set number of charges to 0"?
There is no extra price tag, but the game stresses that an adept would never willingly break their taboo and stops very short of describing your behavior as "rollplaying not roleplaying".
That's still an edition change - to quote Epideromancers from 2a:
Most Epideromancers schedule their beauty salon appointments for when they plan to be "empty". Or they just do it themselves.
That and I swear the description of "break taboo, lose charges" had the exact words "that's the price of freedom" used to describe it rather than "this is a terrible awful horrible thing you would never do" in the 1e/2e books, but I don't even remotely care enough about this to search especially as it clearly isn't Greg Stolze's position now.
Longes wrote:In any case, it's becoming increasingly clear that UA3 is just as, if not more, bolted to the specifically american culture of about 2012*
Lemme guess, they don't even update Videomancers for Netflix / Youtube. Given I was just expecting people would demand an updated Youtube Videomancer and even worked out a charge structure for it back in 2010, something about minors requiring hours staring at a screen and a sig for every time the views on your videos go up an order of magnitude starting at... whatever number I fucking picked, probably 100 or 1000 but I don't give a fuck today.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:02 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Longes »

They don't update videomancers at all because they didn't update any of the old schools.

But videomancers were kinda stupid anyway, and there's a new school based around participating in a community that takes their place. It's stupid (watching Game of Thrones episode counts as participation in the Game of Thrones community), but it does basically replace the videomancy concept from UA2.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Longes wrote: I mean, I didn't realize that gun magic is an NRA joke until hyzmarca said it, because I live in Germany and I know next to nothing about NRA.
I'm pretty sure that the guy who wrote it also knows next to nothing about the NRA. While the school itself is obviously making fun of American gun culture, it seems to be quite clueless on the subject beyond the broad strokes. If I were to create a magic school around hyper-obsessed gun nuts who were prohibited from shooting people, I'd go about it quite differently.

There's like zero attempt to actually understand the culture that they're basing the magic school on.
They can shoot as many people as they like, they just surrender their charges as soon as the SWAT team disarms them.
The wording here is really telling. "As soon as the SWAT team disarms them." As if it were such a foregone conclusion that it has already been decided.
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Post by Longes »

hyzmarca wrote:The wording here is really telling. "As soon as the SWAT team disarms them." As if it were such a foregone conclusion that it has already been decided.
It's Unknown Armies. GM decides when you need to roll and when you don't, so against a disarming SWAT team you get -50% penalties and SWAT team automatically succeeds because their Master Disarmer identities are very high.
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Post by Stahlseele »

But . . . would being disarmed not be what the "can't shoot people gun mages" want? *confused*
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Stahlseele wrote:But . . . would being disarmed not be what the "can't shoot people gun mages" want? *confused*
That bit's referring to the alternate taboo where you're a gun nut who never goes anywhere without a gun.
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Post by Longes »

That bit is relevant for both kinds of gun mages because neither can use their magic without their totem gun. So really the "alternate taboo" is actually just "has one taboo instead of two".
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Post by hyzmarca »

It would be really annoying to lose a major charge beause you lost your totem gun. Since the most practical way to get a major charge is to design a gun that is at least as commonplace and influential as the AK-47.

I mean, no Fulmiturgist is ever going to get a major charge, because that's just absurdly difficult and completely dependent on GM goodwill, but if they did then losing it would be a right bitch.

Losing all of your significant charges is also potentially problematic, since it takes 9 hours of concealed carry in public to build one up. That's a major time sink.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Why would you hold on to a major charge knowing it's so much easier to taboo than ti get another one? I always thought the idea was that you'd only even seek a major charge if you already had a specific thing in mind to power with it.

"Make a gun as commonplace and influential as the AK" is of course ridiculous even by that standard.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Depends on your definition of Design.
The AK is wonderfully customizeable.
Solder a sling-hook to the front end of the barrel and call it a day.
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Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Longes »

Stahlseele wrote:Depends on your definition of Design.
The AK is wonderfully customizeable.
Solder a sling-hook to the front end of the barrel and call it a day.
The retarded part in "design a gun important to history" is "important to history". I'm pretty sure that the importance of role AK-47 played in history was decided many decades after AK-47 was created. You can not get a major charge as a fulminaturge unless you are playing some kind of bizarro game that spans generations.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Why?
When is it set?
The AK is already important to history.
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TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Stahlseele wrote:Why?
When is it set?
The AK is already important to history.
Right. And if I develop and release a new gun today and it sells 4 million units in 2018 and goes on to be the single most ubiquitous gun of the 21st century, when will I recognize that it is historically important?

Certainly not in 2018.

Probably not in 2028.

Maybe in 2038? Kinda?

In order to judge the historical importance of events, you must have historical perspective, and that takes time. Even 'obviously significant' events rely on consequential events to determine their import. The death of a major historical figure is significant, but it'll matter whether a new leader emerges that advances their cause; a struggle for power fractures their alliance; a new leader fails to accomplish as much. So even if you recognize that the new gun 'changes history', in what manner will require time. Comparing it to the AK-47 would also likely require at least 50 years; much of the contribution of the AK-47 was proven in the early 2000s when the gun continues to be ubiquitous.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

deaddmwalking wrote:Right. And if I develop and release a new gun today and it sells 4 million units in 2018 and goes on to be the single most ubiquitous gun of the 21st century, when will I recognize that it is historically important?

Certainly not in 2018.

Probably not in 2028.

Maybe in 2038? Kinda?

In order to judge the historical importance of events, you must have historical perspective, and that takes time. Even 'obviously significant' events rely on consequential events to determine their import. The death of a major historical figure is significant, but it'll matter whether a new leader emerges that advances their cause; a struggle for power fractures their alliance; a new leader fails to accomplish as much. So even if you recognize that the new gun 'changes history', in what manner will require time.
Might work if it was something like the Sten gun (or maybe StG44). If your weapon is introduced as standard issue by a major power in the biggest war ever, then very rapidly it'd be of great significance, if nowhere near that of the AK (though more for a similar span of time). Anything developed since WW2 (or before, for that matter) would take much longer to become important, yeah.

Also, do you get credit for knock-offs and variants if you only designed the basic platform? Cause that'd change the numbers a lot.
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Post by hyzmarca »

The M-16 is specifically called an "edge case" that could be interpreted either way. So basically, that's the minimum you can get away with if you're having sex with the GM, by RAW.

It's still less insane than "build a gun from scratch" which only sounds easier when you put it like that without explaining that when they say "from scratch" they mean "go out into the wilderness with only your bare hands and come back with a fully functional modern firearm that you made."

In other words, the journey to built a gun "from scratch" starts with finding a large piece of flint and banging it against another piece of flint until you have an hand axe that can be used to make a shaft for a pick. And then you make a flint pick and use it to mine copper and tin, smelt them in a fire, and use the bronze to make bronze tools, with which you can mine iron ore. Go through several cycles of smelting and refining and building better quality tools until you have a modern machine shop. You'd also need steam engines to drive everything, because refining gasoline would be beyond your ability, and electricity would be inefficient. And when all that is done, and you have a fully functional modern firearm, which will become your new totem gun, you also get a major charge.

Comparatively, building a gun that's important to history is slower, but easier, as it doesn't require you to Robinson Crusoe up the complete infrastructure of civilization.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Tue Feb 06, 2018 1:15 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Longes »

hyzmarca wrote:The M-16 is specifically called an "edge case" that could be interpreted either way. So basically, that's the minimum you can get away with if you're having sex with the GM, by RAW.

It's still less insane than "build a gun from scratch" which only sounds easier when you put it like that without explaining that when they say "from scratch" they mean "go out into the wilderness with only your bare hands and come back with a fully functional modern firearm that you made."

In other words, the journey to built a gun "from scratch" starts with finding a large piece of flint and banging it against another piece of flint until you have an had axe that can be used to make a shaft for a pick. And then you make a flint pick and use it to mine copper and tin, smelt them in a fire, and use the bronze to make bronze tools, with which you can mine iron ore. Go through several cycles of smelting and refining and building better quality tools until you have a modern machine shop. You'd also need steam engines to drive everything, because refining gasoline would be beyond your ability, and electricity would be inefficient. And when all that is done, and you have a fully functional modern firearm, which will become your new totem gun, you also get a major charge.

Comparatively, building a gun that's important to history is slower, but easier, as it doesn't require you to Robinson Crusoe up the complete infrastructure of civilization.
Of course they didn't define what a gun is, beyond "no bows", so what you actually do is become a master crossbowman and just make tiny decorative crossbows out of a tree you grow in your garden. You still need to make some tools from scratch, but it's easier than minecrafting your way to smelting.
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Post by Cervantes »

guys come on... the almight and wise DM will decide what that means... its all abt the joruney Not the rules
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Post by Chamomile »

hyzmarca wrote:It's still less insane than "build a gun from scratch" which only sounds easier when you put it like that without explaining that when they say "from scratch" they mean "go out into the wilderness with only your bare hands and come back with a fully functional modern firearm that you made."
It only takes a few days in Minecraft, how hard can it possibly be in the real world?
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