[OSSR] Guide to the Technocracy

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Post by maglag »

What, you mean you don't simply apply tome economy to world of darkness? You allow normal money to buy useful things?? And the players aren't stealing everything that isn't nailed down??? What madness is this?

No, really, what's stopping mister mage from just mind-controlling Trump or teleporting inside a military arsenal to gear up or just take whatever goodies he wants or predicting the lottery numbers or faking them even if he didn't put any dots on the money discipline?
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Post by hyzmarca »

maglag wrote:What, you mean you don't simply apply tome economy to world of darkness? You allow normal money to buy useful things?? And the players aren't stealing everything that isn't nailed down??? What madness is this?

No, really, what's stopping mister mage from just mind-controlling Trump or teleporting inside a military arsenal to gear up
Paradox. Lots and lots of Paradox. Paradox that takes the form of the Secret Service beating you and tasering you repeatedly.
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Post by Chamomile »

If Trump didn't belong to a powerful supernatural before the election, he certainly does now. They won't like you messing with their property.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Ancient History wrote: When wealth can literally buy you the other things you need, for example, why do you spend XP on anything else?
Yeah, it's really a huge problem in any game that allows for it. It's such an issue that I've often seen game referees simply make "[TEXA$] Thalers!" impossible to affect the plotline, simply to prevent "The parties Plutocrats subdue the problem by throwing stacks of banded money at it" (yes, I have seen a party where more than one player decided to get lots of financial resources, that's literally what they claimed they would do to solve all problems; then the campaign begins in a Tzimisce dungeon-mansion).

The worst is that there's no middle ground for it once it gets to that point. The only solution I've seen is AS's "Rating no more than 3" for In Media Res narratives.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Tue May 09, 2017 5:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hyzmarca »

But if you're a member of the Syndicate, throwing stacks of banded money at it is your Paradigm.

"No, I think you're going to stop right now and let us walk out of here or I'll make you stop."

"You and what Army?"

"My army of Benjamins. I have more outside."

To the GM: I have resources 10 and 5 Dots of Mind. I'm using a banded stack of no-sequential 100 dollar bills as a tool for psychodynamic mind control effect. In Paradigm, I'm taking advantage of the natural instinct to acquire ever more resources, commonly known as greed, to convince him to do what I want him to do.
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Post by Ancient History »

The thing is, this isn't just an issue for Mage - but it becomes grossly more obvious with Mage, because there are so many different ways to play around with the same hacks without even getting into backgrounds.. You can use alchemy to create gold or cyberkinesis to make the ATM spit out dollar bills or Jedi Mind Trick (TM) to let the bartender start a tab for you that you conveniently never pay back. There's a reason why so much of legend, folklore, and good ol' occult tradition involves the generation of magical wealth. Quid pro quo is one of the greatest memes in human history, and while there's a couple branches of the Technocracy screaming that Economics Is Not A Science, moneymancy is not only a perfectly legitimate tactic for mages of all traditions, but a traditional pursuit of magic.

Long before MMOs realized the problem with digital economies, gamers in D&D were well aware of the problem of cash sinks - which is why magic items are so expensive in AD&D and d20 - but they then ran into the problem that anything producing portable, expensive, handmade goods would be attractive to players as well. It's why enchanting became such an issue in Shadowrun - if you can sit at home and make orichalcum and earn more money than shadowrunning, then why are you shadowrunning?
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Post by Mechalich »

Judging__Eagle wrote: Yeah, it's really a huge problem in any game that allows for it. It's such an issue that I've often seen game referees simply make "[TEXA$] Thalers!" impossible to affect the plotline, simply to prevent "The parties Plutocrats subdue the problem by throwing stacks of banded money at it" (yes, I have seen a party where more than one player decided to get lots of financial resources, that's literally what they claimed they would do to solve all problems; then the campaign begins in a Tzimisce dungeon-mansion).
Well here's the funny thing, for most factions in the oWoD the GM has an excuse to bring the hammer down on anyone who plays absurd games with money - especially money that is obtained from illegal sources or supernatural means (and if you're a vampire you are supernatural means). That excuse is the Technocracy. The point is made in several mage books that the Union watches the global financial system fairly closely and also monitors major deals. You can have a giant pile of cash, but like your average drug kingpin you probably won't even be able to leverage a fraction of it because the money is dirty and no one in the business world trusts you. If a Hermetic mage alchemically generates a ton of gold and deposits it at bank in Luxembourg a guy from the Syndicate zeros that account out in a week and now the mage is flagged to ever security service in the world. It's hard to spend millions when you're legally dead, have no credit rating, and your name pops up an Interpol hit whenever its run.

Unfortunately, no such measures are effective against Technocratic players. Sure the Union probably disciplines agents who use their abilities to go to Las Vegas or rig Soccer matches, and the base salary you have for seed money is small, but there's nothing to stop any agent from just playing the market and or launching their own front company. The syndicate's entire paradigm is about using money to control the world - that makes it really hard for a GM to justify a Syndicate play not solving problems with money.
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Post by Voss »

hyzmarca wrote:
maglag wrote:What, you mean you don't simply apply tome economy to world of darkness? You allow normal money to buy useful things?? And the players aren't stealing everything that isn't nailed down??? What madness is this?

No, really, what's stopping mister mage from just mind-controlling Trump or teleporting inside a military arsenal to gear up
Paradox. Lots and lots of Paradox. Paradox that takes the form of the Secret Service beating you and tasering you repeatedly.
A mind controlled Trump would be one of the most coincidental things in the WoD. I don't have the faintest idea how you'd distinguish it from actual Trump, unless you forget to make him tweet at fuck o clock in the morning, or not fire a random loyalist every month or so.
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Post by maglag »

So if there's already super magic police surveying every inch of the globe, secret services can catch up to you in no time, and every important muggle is under watch of some supernatural better than you, how exactly do you have Mage adventures?
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
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Post by MisterDee »

Since when are WoD games supposed to be about adventures or fun? Real Mages go to goth clubs on open mic night to make sure they have an audience for their poetry.
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Post by talozin »

maglag wrote:So if there's already super magic police surveying every inch of the globe, secret services can catch up to you in no time, and every important muggle is under watch of some supernatural better than you, how exactly do you have Mage adventures?
I'm assuming here that you mean Traditions Mage adventures, rather than Technocracy Mage adventures. Anyway, the only answer I can come up with is: Traditions Mage is about leveraging the shit the Technocracy doesn't care about into things that affect shit the Technocracy does care about.

See, the Technocracy has satellite surveillance and SWAT teams and orbital mind control lasers, but they still only have so many people (or AIs) to operate them. Grant Morrison once wrote something to the effect of "they can put up as many cameras as they want, but the guy getting paid $5 an hour to watch them is still going to go to the men's room to jerk off." They can't watch everybody at once, and they have a lot of very dangerous and hostile things to deal with. So your mission, as a Tradition Mage, is to do something useful while not getting on the Technocracy's "this is a threat we need to deal with right fucking now" list. Because as long as you stay off that list, laziness, personnel incompetence, and having more important things to do will probably keep them from doing more than harassing you if you have the bad luck to run into them.

It's probably not entirely unlike Shadowrun. The authorities in a typical Shadowrun city have enough firepower to kill you, and they have the ability to find you if you piss them off so much that finding you becomes a sufficiently high priority on their to-do list. So the game is not "how do I survive pissing off the cops so much that they are highly motivated to find and kill me", but rather "how do I accomplish my mission without pissing off the cops that badly." If your goal is to stop the Mayor from bulldozing the Peace Park to make a new parking lot, then step 1 in both games is to see if anyone suggests assassinating the Mayor in broad daylight with powered armor and a heavy machine gun. And then throw that guy down a well before you do anything else.
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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Post by Mechalich »

talozin wrote: I'm assuming here that you mean Traditions Mage adventures, rather than Technocracy Mage adventures. Anyway, the only answer I can come up with is: Traditions Mage is about leveraging the shit the Technocracy doesn't care about into things that affect shit the Technocracy does care about.

See, the Technocracy has satellite surveillance and SWAT teams and orbital mind control lasers, but they still only have so many people (or AIs) to operate them. Grant Morrison once wrote something to the effect of "they can put up as many cameras as they want, but the guy getting paid $5 an hour to watch them is still going to go to the men's room to jerk off." They can't watch everybody at once, and they have a lot of very dangerous and hostile things to deal with. So your mission, as a Tradition Mage, is to do something useful while not getting on the Technocracy's "this is a threat we need to deal with right fucking now" list. Because as long as you stay off that list, laziness, personnel incompetence, and having more important things to do will probably keep them from doing more than harassing you if you have the bad luck to run into them.
Pretty much this, and the Technocracy book actually makes this point fairly explicitly when it comes to resource limitations.

It's also important to consider geography. In the oWoD the Union's footprint varies immensely depending on where you are standing. If you're in the US or Western Europe then the surveillance state is quite strong and even in the World of Darkness getting up to any sort of trouble that would hit the serial killer or domestic terrorist levels is going to make your life really challenging. Heck it would even without the Technocracy - evading the completely mundane FBI and local police once you've been flagged takes plenty of work, which is it's own problem since in Mage you role 3-4 dice to do magic, the more magic you use the more often you botch and the more likely you take the inevitable paradox backlash that ends your character as a functional concern.

On the other hand, outside of the developed West and a few other places like Japan the reach of the Union is much less powerful, especially when you get outside of the major cities. A dreamspeaker shaman in the Bolivian cloud forest, a Hermetic in a hilltop fortress in Moldova, a Buddhist Choirister in inland Myanmar, all of those mages can do whatever the hell they want so long as it doesn't hit the level of 'visible from space.'

Now it is regrettably challenging to actually run a Mage game in some kind of remote area, but smart characters can occasionally travel somewhere off the beaten path if they need to do something high-powered and obvious and the GM won't feel obligated to send the in the black helicopters.
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Post by Mechalich »

Chapter Seven: Storytelling

Ah the obligatory storytelling chapter. Here's a fun line from the second paragraph: "Chronicles about the Technocracy build off strengths other chronicles don't have. Structure is the first big advantage."

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structure is important, lack of structure can take you to a very bad place

This is of course quite true. Structure is huge. The Technocracy pitch assumes all characters are members of a super-science intelligence conspiracy. Compared to pretty much every other oWoD this is starting on 3rd base.

The first part of the chapter is about assembling an amalgam and includes the advice that, since the Technocracy don't just slap people together, the GM should make sure the amalgam is a functional team. Such foundation principles like 'make sure the group can handle a variety of mission types' and 'minimize in-group rivalry' are actually put to paper here. None of this advice is even approaching world-shattering, but it is actually useful. Novice GMs aren't being steered in the wrong direction.

The next section mentions modeling the Technocracy chronicle on a television series. This is probably the single best and most insightful piece of GMing advice that I have ever seen from White Wolf. It actually works. The idea of an episodic structure with hints to greater plotlines in the background fits the way the game it setup to be played, and pretty much every established trope or function of the Technocracy can be matched to a TV series. Pick you piece of investigative science fiction or paranoid police procedural as inspiration and you're fucking done.

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The Truth is this shit Works

This chapter goes a bit further in providing advice as to how to detail this process and actually holds some hidden gems like 'maybe make it so people can occasionally miss a mission' and 'don't let unresolved plots get out of control' and 'have the supervisor debrief everyone after a mission.' None of this is high-end GMing guides, but where certain WW books have a tendency to steer the storyteller wildly wrong, the generic advice here is pretty okay.

There's some information about a bunch of big conspiracies-inside-the-conspiracy, which are mostly dumb, and a lot of verbose detail about the structure of the Union and how it can be useful. These include good advice like making sure to actually use unenlightened minions, but also don't let the PCs treat them like disposal robots and that the supervisor is damn important in this kind of game and that you shouldn't power trip like Hal 9000 just because you can.

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just because you can tell Dave 'I can't do that' doesn't mean you should

Several pages of mostly wasted space about thematic approach follows. Rare is the game that reaches a sufficient level of immersion where 'theme' is something meaningful, and these are largely self-explanatory and heavily overlapping anyway. A prospective GM already has their own plans and does not care about this crap. The set of sample agendas - basically broad campaign plot types - is also likely something the GM has already figured out and talked with the players about, but they aren't terrible prompts for a novice.

I shall not speak of the half-page of insanity that is the digression on Alternate Histories.

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this is already screwed up enough, no adding time travel!

Overall this chapter actually has a bunch of good advice for a fairly new GM. This matches up well with the Technocracy as a game - it is much friendlier to newbies than standard Mage or really any other oWoD game except Hunter. Even in 1999, and especially in 2017, prospective players understand how Technocrats are supposed to be played and what you are supposed to do in such a game very easily. The pitch of 'you're a secret agent' isn't as cool as 'you're a vampire' but it is so much more functional that it makes up a lot of difference.
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Post by Voss »

The pitch of 'you're a secret agent' isn't as cool as 'you're a vampire'
Debatable. Vampires had been eaten by funpires a long time ago. (I blame Anne Rice)

But the big thing is the sudden self-awareness in this book... that completely disappears as they utterly shit the bed immediately afterwards. Had nWoD been built on these principles (and fucked the system less), it could have actually worked.
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Post by Mechalich »

Chapter Eight: The Arsenal

Half of this chapter is spells, half of it is stuff.

Spells first. Technocrats call their it's-science-not-magic magical tricks Procedures. Technically you can use sphere magic to make up anything you want, but you get a slight bonus for using established (meaning that you found it in a book) procedures. However most people don't care about that, what the listing of procedures is actually useful for is to give both players and GMs and idea of the kinds of things you can do and how many dots you might need to do them.

As a list of examples goes this is woefully short, but it includes some decent examples - how to use Forces to get more damage out of your gun, and how to neuralize people are both on the helpful list. Helpfully this doesn't include any of the ludicrously high-dot examples that made it into many mage books and you would never ever get the chance to use. None of these require more than three dots in any particular spheres, though many require two or more spheres. So starting characters can actually use these things.

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try not to use this one too much

Now they actually need a lot more examples, like dozens more but these ones mostly don't suck and are mostly in a reasonable point on the power scale.

And then we have devices. Obviously these are important. The only archetype that wants magic items more than wizards are artificers. Tony Stark is a character you can totally play as a Technocrat. Devices have to be in the game. The list in this book is quite short, but that's kind of justified in that Technomancer's Toybox (which is one of the most gloriously ridiculous books in the entire oWoD catalog since it's the one with stats for military hardware in the appendix) had come out the year before and it had a lot of Technocratic stuff in it.

Anyway, these devices range from cheeky Bond gadgets to hulking power armor. It also includes several energy weapons. Here's the thing though, the rues for how you use artifact weapons in Mage have never been made clear. These weapons have their own arete rating - meaning they do their own magic - but it's not clear precisely what you role that for, and how it interacts with things like extra successes from ordinary attack roles. This matters because it you invested 10 points in backgrounds to have your own NSN Plasma Caster, you want to know just how fine the particular ash you're going to leave behind from all dead vampires will be.

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this thing clearly does a lot of damage, but it would be nice to know just how much

Of course the weapons have nothing in the overpowered department compared to the enhancements. Would you like to be Wolverine? Because that is a thing that you can do with enough background points. You could also be Aquaman if you wanted, and pretty much anything in between.

Oh, and just because they could, they threw in some vehicle stats for things like deadly attack helicopters and supersonic military fighters. This is like stating out archdevils -it's so not necessary. If you're using them, you're already so far off the RNG stats are irrelevant.


Appendix

The book concludes with a list of sources, a mixture of books, film, and TV. It's an interesting list and at this point is a fun bit of nostalgia about where this sort of thing was at in the late 90s. Looking back, it's also interesting to see how Guide to the Technocracy in some ways mirrors VtM in being slightly ahead of trend.

Worth noting: CSI premiered in Oct 2000 and launched 15 years of Technocrats roaming all over CBS and spawned about ten thousand imitators. This book was referencing The X-Files and the still ongoing La Femme Nikita. An explosion of spy thrillers, cop shows about weird technological trickery, and even fighting the paranormal were all coming. The stuff in this book matches the tropes in a lot of them.

One particular example is worth noting:

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This particular piece of 2002 anime is so Technocracy it hurts. The mysterious enforcement agency that hunts witches, the agents having trouble trusting their superiors, the Virtual Adept hacker they caught reprocessed and are making work for them. Witch Hunter Robin hit the theme, the mood, the aesthetics, everything. It even hit the all-important 'Goth Gamer Girls dig it' criterion. That's important when it comes to trying to convince the female gamers who found vampire, but not D&D, appealing to play something else. Anecdotally, every Technocracy game I've run had more female players than male.

The bottom line is that the storyteller system is generally bad and the Mage sphere magic system is particularly bad, but everything else about the Technocracy is better than it's fellow storyteller system games, and you can still goth hard if you want to. Any oWoD game requires you to get past the mechanics, but if you do that the Technocracy actually leaves you with a halfway decent game to play via the fluff and the structure and that's more than can be said for pretty much all the others. The ultimate evidence is that between 1999 and 2017 there have been several other games - perhaps most obviously the Laundry RPG - that have basically made another Technocracy game. It's a pretty worthy well, shame about the sphere magic though.

Hilarious Coda: even as Technocratic type storytelling was all over the airwaves in the 2000s with shows like 24 and Alias and Bond came roaring back in 2006 with Casino Royale, the Technocracy was completely eliminated when it came to producing the nWoD.
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Post by Heaven's Thunder Hammer »

Great summary of the book. This book was very popular with many of the M:tA fans back in the day too.
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Post by Nath »

Mechalich wrote:The next bit includes the first quote from La Femme Nikita (the TV series with Peta Wilson, not the movie or the reboot with Maggie Q) to appear in the book. It will not be the last. Guide to the Technocracy has a massive hard-on for this show, which was popular at the time (it was the number one drama on USA Network when this book was being developed) but is now fairly obscure. In fairness to the authors, they do get around to admitting their rampant fapping to the show eventually.
Mechalich wrote:This particular piece of 2002 anime [Witch Hunter Robin] is so Technocracy it hurts. The mysterious enforcement agency that hunts witches, the agents having trouble trusting their superiors, the Virtual Adept hacker they caught reprocessed and are making work for them. Witch Hunter Robin hit the theme, the mood, the aesthetics, everything.
I guess it makes sense. Witch Hunter Robin itself drew a lot of inspiration from La Femme Nikita. Small secret agency, blonde lead dressing in black, mentored by a dry, humorless guy, supervised by an administrator that will ultimately turn against them. And a support hacker that would like to leave the agency...

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You'd wonder why they bothered changing the name
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Post by Prak »

hyzmarca wrote:But if you're a member of the Syndicate, throwing stacks of banded money at it is your Paradigm.

"No, I think you're going to stop right now and let us walk out of here or I'll make you stop."

"You and what Army?"

"My army of Benjamins. I have more outside."

To the GM: I have resources 10 and 5 Dots of Mind. I'm using a banded stack of no-sequential 100 dollar bills as a tool for psychodynamic mind control effect. In Paradigm, I'm taking advantage of the natural instinct to acquire ever more resources, commonly known as greed, to convince him to do what I want him to do.
Honestly, I'd rather have an army of clones of Benjamin Franklin armed with laser rifles...
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Post by Zaranthan »

It's WoD, I'll settle for an army of Benjamin Franklins armed with fist-sized rocks and sturdy tree branches.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Prak wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:But if you're a member of the Syndicate, throwing stacks of banded money at it is your Paradigm.

"No, I think you're going to stop right now and let us walk out of here or I'll make you stop."

"You and what Army?"

"My army of Benjamins. I have more outside."

To the GM: I have resources 10 and 5 Dots of Mind. I'm using a banded stack of no-sequential 100 dollar bills as a tool for psychodynamic mind control effect. In Paradigm, I'm taking advantage of the natural instinct to acquire ever more resources, commonly known as greed, to convince him to do what I want him to do.
Honestly, I'd rather have an army of clones of Benjamin Franklin armed with laser rifles...
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Zaranthan wrote:It's WoD, I'll settle for an army of Benjamin Franklins armed with fist-sized rocks and sturdy tree branches.
Let's be honest. It's WoD, I think just paying some street kids to throw rocks & bottles a handful of Benjamin Franklins would be about as effective, and much more cost (and masquerade maintainingly) effective.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

While just throwing actual money at a person can work in some circumstances, it'd tend to be grossly vulgar. The Syndicate is much smoother than that, using psychology to appeal to motivations and emotions.

The nice bit about playing low-level Tech operatives is that you don't have to worry so much about the biggest weakness of the Mage game: Paradigm and Paradox. You already have most of your paradigm intuitively understood and established by the players, and any exceptions are relatively easy to isolate mechanically and explain. You don't go around doing high-powered Vulgar effects, and you're strongly motivated to avoid doing so even if you can, so paradox isn't so much of an issue.

And there's the important point that an awful lot of Mage players are, in their personal opinions and worldviews, much much closer to the Technocracy than the Traditions.
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