Unknown Armies 3e ?

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Unknown Armies 3e ?

Post by silva »

So, according to this thread the kickstarter for the new edition will launch soon and the book will be available in 2016. The only info we have now is that its being written by Greg Stolze and Cam Banks (of Marvel Heroic fame), that it renamed the madness metters to "Shock Gauges" (and probrably reduced it from 5 to 3, if Nemesis is some indicative), that all character abilities are derived from these "Shock Gauges" (there will be no stats this time), and that the authors will try to make it more clear and playable.

Thoughts ? Expectations ? Wishes ?


P.S: Im lefting this here as a reminder of the awesome evocativeness of the game, and as a wish that the new edition be fulled of this kind of thing.. (thanks Longes)
Longes wrote:Let's talk about Avatars for a change of pace.

The Trickster, from "Stratosphere", p.76

Trickster is an all around great archetype. It's an actual archetype people can think about (unlike, say, Mystic Hermaphrodite), it has a good taboo and it has great powers. Really, the name speaks for itself, so I'm not going to go into details of what a Trickster is. Think Loky, Hermes, Smilin' Stan S. Stanman.

Taboo: Trickster can't choose straightforward way when it's possible to do a complicated con. Taking a loan - nay, making a pyramid scheme - yay.

This taboo is great. It's something that the avatar of Trickster would want to do anyway, and it, potentialy, leads to fun roleplaying experience.

Powers:*

1%-50%. Trickster is such a nice guy, that no one can stay mad at him. While in Trickster's presence, everyone with the Soul score less than the Trickster's avatar skill thinks that the Trickster is a great guy no matter what he does, or did in the past. It's possible to resist this with a Soul check, if the Trickster is asking you to do something harmful to you.

This power is great. This is an eternal "get out of jail" card. Guards bust into an oval office and see you drenched in blood, standing over the president's lifeless corpse? You smile, ask for a towel and leave. It was clearly an accident, you could do nothing wrong. Can this archetype possibly get any better?

51%-70%. Yes, yes it can. At this level you get the ability of the Perfect Lie. With a successful Avatar check you can convince any single person of the veracity of a single statement, no matter how outrageous it is. The person keeps believing that what you said is true until proven otherwise. The keyword is "proven". Memory doesn't help.

This ability... It's just so great! You can convince your enemy in combat that they need to reload. You can convince a shop clerk that you've already paid for whatever you took. You can tell someone that their name is Bobbin Threadbare, and they'll go by Bobbin Threadbare until they check their ID. The possibilities are endless.

71%-90%. You can flip-flop any check related to decieving - lying, disguise, forgery, magic tricks, etc.

Very useful, but not very interesting.

91%+. With a few props you can perfectly disguise yourself. Put on a bald wig and british accent, and you are Patrick Stewart. Paint your face black and wear a tie and you are Barak Obama. Use some lipstick and a pink ribbon and suddenly you are a gourgeous woman. The disguise is explicitly impossible to penetrate.

Conclusion. This Archetype is great in every way possible. The taboo is great, the powers are great. It's worth every skillpoint invested. As a cherry on top, it blends wonderfuly with most schools of magic. In fact, the only school of magic it doesn't blend with is Irascimancy (you need to get people angry with you to get charges, and first channel prevents that).

*Avatar is a skill you take, and you get new powers at the appropriate skill level.
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Post by silva »

Ok, from my part I would like to see 2 things:

A bigger Focus, both from a mechanical and from a "what to do in play" standpoint. Ditch the separate levels of play altogether (street, global and cosmic) and have just one: street. Make the game premise simpler to grok. "Its a game about mages in modern cities". Then reveal the twists and weirdness slowly. "But its not exactly like WoD Mage, you know".. "Really ? how so?".. "Well, for starters, here your character is some everyday lunatic living in his own bubble reality while fighting others for power, and the more power he gets the more ruined his life gets". tl;dr: think in a rpg of modern mages co-directed by Tarantino and Lynch. (I would ditch the avatarhood elements too, and only reveal it on a future supplement)

Also, I wish the game structure were more on the Sandbox side. Ditch the CoC roots where the GM brings his mystery of the week for the players to follow through breadcrumbs, and take cues from sandbox products with clear presented structures like Griffin Mountain, the By Night city series from WoD, Apocalypse World and its fronts, etc. Provide tools and clear advice for that to happen. Make gameplay revolve around this fight and maneuvering for power against the local underworld. Have the setting be as evocative as ever, but make it explicitly optional, for the players to use bits of it if they want to, or not. Provide support for the players create their own local factions and entities if they want. Gimme a list with 100 named local weirdos. Gimme a list with 100 weird artifacts. Gimme a list with 100 local gangs & cabals. Gimme a list with 100 local weird phenomena. Gimme a list with 100 paranormal beings. Teach me how to use these together to create interesting conflicts, perhaps with the help of the players.
Last edited by silva on Wed Jul 22, 2015 9:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

I liked the old system, and don't see the purpose of tying everything to levels of insanity.
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Post by Neurosis »

What I've learned from this thread is that if I ever try UA, it won't be this new edition.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

I highly recommend the second edition. The first edition is almost, but not quite, identical to it, so give that a look if you get the chance.
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Post by silva »

Occluded Sun, according to Cam Banks there is still some places for playtesters. I'd you are interested or know who are just drop him a PM at RPGnet.

About the rules, besides my previous points, Id like to see the madness letters cleaned. The couple times we played we felt Isolation, Helplesness and Self almost never got triggered, while Violance and Unnatural were activated everytime. So I think merging those three or something would be a good idea.
Last edited by silva on Fri Jul 24, 2015 10:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by rasmuswagner »

"Imagine if Mage had been based on Constantine (Hellblazer) instead of Dr. Strange". This 3rd edition sounds like Kult, a swedish horror RPG about....gnosticism, and schizophrenia being a superpower.
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Post by Username17 »

Unknown Armies of both 1st and 2nd edition are naked obscurantism masquerading as a game. We did a review some time back. Even within the generous standards of "some guy's Call of Cthulhu house rules from the 90s" it doesn't look very good. You have to have serious nostalgia glasses on to give that piece of shit even 2 stars. Moving away from the clunky Call of Cthulhu house rules shell is a good thing, but the fact is that the core of Unknown Armies is still just Greg Stolze trolling you with deepisms and making fun of you for not guessing the number he was thinking of. Nothing goes anywhere. Literally all of the big mysteries have no answers or meaning and nothing the players do or don't do has any effect on anything. There are no goals to have, and whether you succeed or fail at any of the tasks in the game is basically MC asspulls all the way down and it doesn't matter anyway because there's no reason or reward to work towards anywhere for anything. The shitty core rule engine is really a pretty minor portion of why that game is a flaming dog turd on the side of the road of RPG design. Unknown Armies would need to overhaul it's "everything" before it was even worthy of consideration.

Unknown Armies will be old enough to vote in American elections next year and can already go to R rated movies without an accompanying adult. During that time not one game has stolen or adapted anything from Unknown Armies. Because the game is so damn empty that there's nothing to steal. You could wipe your ass with a printing sheet of fortune cookie fortunes and call that a new edition of Unknown Armies and I don't think anyone would be able to tell the difference.

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Post by silva »

Soap-opera like drama and exaggeration aside, I kind of agree.

Though I think the reason its rules were not influential was due to it 1) being the tweak of a concept that was dying by itself (the d100), and 2) being one of the last representatives of the 90's school which was coming to an end itself. So unless there is some 90s revival similar to what OSR did, I don't see the game being copied in any way or form. And honestly, I wouldn't like to see a revival of that age rules and concepts, as I regard it as one of the worst ever (see: Shadowrun). The only "salvageable" thing, I think, was the obsession concept which allowed the player to perform better based on what aspect of the fiction hr defined as important. Even the madness letters, while kind of neat, ended up forgotten and not finding fitting vessels after the game.

That's why I think having Cam Banks (of Smallvile and Marvel Heroic fame) at the helm (well, one of the helms) is a good thing. The guy knows how to design innovative and theme-heavy rules.
Last edited by silva on Sat Jul 25, 2015 5:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by silva »

One thing is certain though: 3rd edition will have more of the delicious writing by Stolze (is there a better writer in the hobby ?) and the crazy psychedelic ideas from Tynes updated to the new age (I foresee social networks, selfies and reality shows being a thing :mrgreen: )
Last edited by silva on Sat Jul 25, 2015 6:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

But Frank, you should know by now that's not gonna happen. Cosmic Bumfights is like punk: it doesn't have to be good, it just has to be cool. :biggrin:
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Post by silva »

Mask_De_H wrote:Cosmic Bumfights is like punk: it doesn't have to be good, it just has to be cool. :biggrin:
YEEAAAAHHH!!!!!!! :cool:
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Post by erik »

But unknown armies isnt even cool. There is literally nothing I would wish to emulate or steal from UA. Nothing. The closest it comes is the very general idea of having very specific magic arts, but not a single one they created is compelling enough to steal either. The setting is just as shit as the rules. Maybe more so! I tried to get some friends of mine to justify their love of stolzecock and all one could do was huff and puff about dark and edgy with no examples to speak of and no explanation of how its rules were at all positive.

Even Lamentations of the flame princess, a retro joke emulation of odnd, has rules I can riff off of (and will add similar encumbrance rules to my rifts thread when I get my Lappy to wifi).
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Post by silva »

Erik: Unkonwn Armies is the bastard lovechild of Tim Powers and Neil Gaiman, raised up by the homo couple of Tarantino and Lynch. If you dont find that the epythome of cool, the glands of coolness located in your brain have died out or were surgically removed, man.
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Post by Username17 »

Unknown Armies is just broad parody of Call of Cthulhu with an incomplete and incoherent retread of Mage: the Awakening's reality war thingy stuck in sideways. And I don't mean that it's broad parody of the Mythos, I mean it's literally broad parody of Call of Cthulhu. It is the tropes of that game from the early 80s that are being introduced and then shat upon, not so much any real literature references to the original source material.

So you got the whole slide into insanity while you investigate and the magic coming from madness and driving you insane, and it's all played for laughs at the expense of the players. A player signs up to play a pornomancer, but they aren't allowed to go around seducing NPCs or whatever, they have to have sexual experiences that the MC designs and if they do anything the player wants to do they lose all their powers. The game offers you the ability to play an insane sex magician, but the fine print is that you don't get to do any of the sex or the magic you want to do, you're just supposed to get trolled by the MC as hard as he wants. Unknown Armies is really mean spirited and has absolutely nothing to say.

What's really weird about all of this is how fucking unnecessary it all is. Idiosyncrasies of early 80s RPGs are not really something that needs having the piss taken out. That shit is obscure and also superseded. It would be like if you wrote a hate rant about people who like those egg-shaped chairs, or put together a scathing retort to pet rocks.

But while you could make fun of things that nobody likes and which have mostly been forgotten and get some smiles and chuckles by reminding people that shit was dumb back in the day, Unknown Armies doesn't even do that. Unknown Armies is fundamentally dishonest, presenting to the players a chapter about how we're going to sit down and play madness mages investigating big mysteries and then walks it all back in the secret MC-only sections to explain that actually we're just trolling the players and none of that shit goes anywhere.

Unknown Armies is actually offensive. And there's nothing cool about it. No one describes their game as "like Unknown Armies but with X" because Unknown Armies doesn't have anything to like. It's an anti-game. A bizarre and insulting spectacle of performance art where you tell people that you're going to have a game based on X-Files or Sandman or something and then the MC just yells "Fooled You Bitches!" as soon as you all sit down. It has no place in the evolution of the RPG, because it's actually just a protest against cooperative storytelling as a medium.

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Post by Omegonthesane »

I feel I should say that I liked the concepts of self-harming fleshcrafters, the probability mages who had to take stupid risks to recharge, the clockwork people from Postmodern Magick, the death mages from Postmodern Magick, the Personamancers, the idea that the Sleepers were literally the result of in-universe trolling, and some of the implications of the various NPCs with Steve magic skills.

I feel I should say this mostly as confessing to having once liked Unknown Armies - I can only assume I glossed over the GM advice and thought "eh, I can totally make some shit up that meets the thing that was promised in the first two sections" - and partly because it makes it that much worse that the overall game was so bad. (And partly because I really should have worked out FAR more quickly why e.g. everyone else had an issue with the whole "d100 that you then interpret as either d100 or 2d10" dice mechanic.)
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Sun Jul 26, 2015 4:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Orion »

Unknown armies is basically a bunch of evocative half-finished ideas you can raid when making an actual game. Many of the magic systems are interesting, and they feel more like "real" magic, if you care about that, than most RPGs. A number of them work in sufficiently unusual ways for an RPG that they'd really need entire subsystems dedicated to them, so you'd have to pick and choose. The skill system is irredeemable garbage, but the idea of different psychological stress tracks is good. Basically you would want to start with a functional base mechanic, write a version of stress tracks that worked, and then either write a magic system with its own content and selectively port in a few classes and spells from UA, or pick a couple UA paradigms and write a system for them.
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Post by Longes »

Once you get past all the high abstraction problems Frank mentioned, you encounter smaller, but no less annoying problems.

The magic schools are inconsistent and dickish. Being a Dipsomancer means winning at life, because you get all the power, all the "drunk wizard" hijinks, all the power because "cheating" is not a real focus for the magic school, and none of the penalties (dying from health problems 10 years down the line is a minor nuisance for a PC). But if you are playing a Western Cryptomancer, then you are stuck always telling the truth, get arbitrary 10% penalty to your magic skill, and have "invisibility" half of the illusion magic.

The avatars are just weak, and should always be a power up option for the real mages, rather than a full secondary path. They also need to be massively reworked as a concept, because really, Mystic Hermaphrodite?

The setting and its magic are nailed to the America of the 90s, and can't be moved anywhere else without massive changes.

Unknown Armies is a heap of cool evocative ideas. But zero thought was put to making it all work together, so the end result is just a mess.
Last edited by Longes on Sun Jul 26, 2015 9:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Longes wrote:The magic schools are inconsistent and dickish. Being a Dipsomancer means winning at life, because you get all the power, all the "drunk wizard" hijinks, all the power because "cheating" is not a real focus for the magic school, and none of the penalties (dying from health problems 10 years down the line is a minor nuisance for a PC).
Not to mention how the charging mechanism means your power is multiplied tenfold by a GM pity item before you even get into actually having access to significant-tier spells.

Dipsomancy was meant to have a somewhat defensible short-term drawback, in that you had to have an action penalty from alcohol to keep any of your magic points. But that's only defensible on the drawing board, you probably aren't *taking* non-casting actions if you can help it given there's literally a spell whose effect is "roll Dipsomancy, including the flip-flop bonus, instead of an actual skill and ignore drunk penalties".
Longes wrote:But if you are playing a Western Cryptomancer, then you are stuck always telling the truth, get arbitrary 10% penalty to your magic skill, and have "invisibility" half of the illusion magic.
Yeah, that shit was just bad and they should be ashamed for publishing it. If the whole thing was meant to be that successful magical paths are related to the zeitgeist of when you became a mage, that could've been enforced with a fluff note about how there aren't a whole lot of Cryptomancers these days instead of blanket making the school weaker.
Longes wrote:The avatars are just weak, and should always be a power up option for the real mages, rather than a full secondary path.
I'm not really convinced they ever were a full secondary path. Half the intended appeal of Avatars was that you didn't have the same degree of meaningful restrictions as an Adept. (This was the sales pitch, anyway. The reality fucked this up, and there was something about a synergy abuse meaning that fleshcrafter cowboys are the most dangerous PCs by getting a bunch of temporary hitpoints that they then turn into permanent bonuses.)

Oh, did I mention - Epideromancers had a few spells that gave permanent bonuses. I even did a spreadsheet of how many weeks a closet fleshworker would need to reach 250 HP assuming they cut for a Sig every time they reach full HP, and found that it was something you could do in a year's downtime (aka "backstory").
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Post by silva »

I can't disagree with the overall sentiment that the game is unbalanced, both between levels of play (mundanes, adepts, avatars) and even within the same level of play ( adept schools), but with Cam Banks at the helm I suspect some of those issues have a fair chance to see some ironing out. For example, by keeping only the most balanced adept schools and ditching (or tweaking) the rest.

In fact this was one of the rants that came up more frequently when Stolze asked opinions on what to keep and what to go away over at the RPGnet thread.
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Post by Longes »

Omegonthesane wrote:
Longes wrote:The avatars are just weak, and should always be a power up option for the real mages, rather than a full secondary path.
I'm not really convinced they ever were a full secondary path. Half the intended appeal of Avatars was that you didn't have the same degree of meaningful restrictions as an Adept. (This was the sales pitch, anyway. The reality fucked this up, and there was something about a synergy abuse meaning that fleshcrafter cowboys are the most dangerous PCs by getting a bunch of temporary hitpoints that they then turn into permanent bonuses.)
Well, literally every person who played UA in the past just stared at me in disgust and said the GM would never allowed my Plutomancer-Merchant or Cryptomancer-Trickster.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Longes wrote:
Omegonthesane wrote:
Longes wrote:The avatars are just weak, and should always be a power up option for the real mages, rather than a full secondary path.
I'm not really convinced they ever were a full secondary path. Half the intended appeal of Avatars was that you didn't have the same degree of meaningful restrictions as an Adept. (This was the sales pitch, anyway. The reality fucked this up, and there was something about a synergy abuse meaning that fleshcrafter cowboys are the most dangerous PCs by getting a bunch of temporary hitpoints that they then turn into permanent bonuses.)
Well, literally every person who played UA in the past just stared at me in disgust and said the GM would never allowed my Plutomancer-Merchant or Cryptomancer-Trickster.
The fluff text wanked to how it was meant to be somehow really hard on your brain to be both avatar and adept - one of the example NPCs is a tramp with a fully blown Violence gauge and no explanation for that except that he's an Entropomancer-Pilgrim. There's also The Freak, the intentional DM-penis-extension NPC, who was not only a Fleshcrafter-Mystic Hermaphrodite but the Godwalker of the latter, who may have got people assuming that Avatar-Adepts were something only a munchkin would do.

But yes, Avatar-ing was meant to be the thing that a mostly-mundane relatively sane PC did to dabble in magic rather than their primary mechanical shtick the way I saw it. If it's so hardcore that Avatar-Adepts are some kind of game breaking munchkinnery then that's a design fuckup.
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Post by silva »

I always saw avatarhood as something kind of common in society. You know when we say a friend is a natural-born seller, or a gifted athlete, etc ? That's avatarhood you're talking about. A 15% avatar skill should be commonplace among the polulace. What differentiate the "true" avatar is going above that.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

I homeruled a Dipsomancy variant that involved drinking vintages you'd never previously encountered to gain sig. charges. Having so much power come from an item was a bad idea, not least because it meant Dipsomancers were either crippled or power monsters.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

While I ultimately decided that UA was unsalvageable before I ever had an opportunity to run it again, I considered going with a houserule that every drink that took you over 25% drunk penalty would give you a sig, to encourage binge drinking because I felt that was the most IC destructive behaviour (and also because it meant you really weren't passing any non-Dipsomancy rolls).
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Mon Jul 27, 2015 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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