[OSSR]Masters of the Art
Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:45 am
Masters of the Art
High-level characters are difficult to handle, and become all the more so when you're running a game without discrete levels. Dragon Kings is a good example of how at higher levels the disparities between threats and classes becomes increasingly obvious and insulting; the Epic Level Handbook just doubles-down on the fact that linear advancement falls apart as the bonuses stack up.
But when you go classless and level-less, things get weird. Caps exist in games like Shadowrun and the various World of Darkness games primarily to act as some sort of control over potential munchkinism and power gaming run amok, and what that encourages is either hitting the caps early through specialization or bypassing them by stacking bonuses. Which is fine if that's your aesthetic. In Shadowrun, you can start out as a world-class sniper. That is a thing you can do in pretty much any edition of the game, as long as you devote enough points to it, and there is an entire character creation mini-game for which builds are most effective at doing that. You might not be able to build the best sniper from the get-go, but you can generally max out at least one skill and buy the best rifle you can at chargen and be an effective sniper.
This is generally not a thing you can do in World of Darkness games.
World of Darkness is a mix of systems, so it's difficult to generalize. But basically the more involved the game is, the harder the caps are, and the more room you have to play within limits. The best example is probably Vampire: the Masquerade, where Generation sets a hard cap on your powers. In that way, it acts as a sort of pseudo-level cap, replicating some of the effects of having levels in a game that technically doesn't have levels. The same basic concept underlies initiation, the most broken aspect of Shadowrun, which acts as a leveling-up minigame; Earthdawn tries to split the difference, and is more or less successful depending on whether they did the math right. But I digress.
The thing about World of Darkness games is that there are a lot of powers, but generally speaking individual characters do not get many of them. Vampires are lucky to start out with a handful of discipline powers, unless they really min-max. Werewolves don't begin with dozens of gifts. Wraiths have a set number of Arcanoi. And raising your stats in WoD is expensive. Stupidly expensive. Which is why, in large part, the upper-level abilities are so much bullshit NPC powers. Your PCs are probably never going to campaign long enough to get six dots in fucking anything, and even at five dots you're probably barely getting the powers you need to function effectively.
It's why Blood Sorcery took off so well that they devoted two and a half entire supplements to it, and had paths and rituals crammed into damn near every sourcebook. It's why Abyss Mysticism and combo disciplines became a thing. It's not that people needed more shit to spend their imaginary XP on, and it isn't because they were going to bust through the hard Generation cap - it's because they were looking for more variability within the level. The kind of thing Shadowrun does by default and Earthdawn manages by largely disassociating circle and talent ranks.
Mage: the Ascension was a different beast, however. The starting powers were already open-ended, both from a game mechanics and a roleplaying gamepoint. We like to joke about it devolving into "Mother May I?", but the ostensible goal of the setting was that you could fiddle with the cornerstones of creation, and were limited only by your imagination and how many dice you had to roll. You began the game with an infinite number of low-level effects at your fingertips. If you suck the gamemaster's cock hard enough.
There's no really hard levels, just your Arete and Sphere ratings, but there's also no distinguishable difference between have one dot in a Sphere and two dots. Figuring out how to do a two-dot rote with one dot instead is just a challenge, not a hard limit, even when the writers forget and try to write it that way. It's like Shadowrun if the numbers on your character sheet didn't actually matter.
Which is only part of where things fall apart. In Mage, the rubric is that technology is just a sufficiently advanced form of magic which has become such a default paradigm that anybody can use it. This is not how it actually functions, however. Frank and I talked about this a bit in the oMage vs. nMage OSSR. The thing about magic is that people can't do it. Building a big cannon isn't a magical act, and mechanically you don't need dots in any of the Spheres to do it. So call that Problem Number One.
Problem Number Two is stakes. Mage liked to talk big stakes, but it was ultimately about as effective as Cosmic Bumfights. PCs not only didn't have the capability to actually challenge the consensus of the setting in any way, but if they did it would make them horrible monsters, not heroes or saviors - explicitly because everybody can use science and only a few people can use magic. There is no fucking rote you can come up with which is as useful and effective at scale as penicillin. You can't teach child soldiers to throw fireballs, but you can train them to disassemble, clean, reassemble, and fire an AK-47.
So trying to scale up effects in Mage has always been both a pain in the ass and arbitrary. Mage doesn't go in for GURPS-style mechanics where you just pump more mana into whatever you're doing and the range/area of effect/damage/etc. scales proportionately. It has to create and impose arbitrary limits on what you can and can't do, and you don't really find out about them until you pick up a new book and see what they set the limits at for the rotes therein. You're honestly better off never buying a single damn splat for Mage, because their intended goal is to cockblock you from doing some effect that you could have talked the Storyteller into letting you do with the Spheres you have.
And beyond that, Mage doesn't want you to actually, y'know, play a powerful wizard.
Let that one sink in for a minute, because it's a major theme of this book. The designers of Mage do not want you to walk around throwing fireballs, turning bankers into sheep, summoning hookers and dragons, muttering arcane incantations, or waving magic swords and staffs about. Trying to act like a regular D&D wizard in Shadowrun will get you some odd looks, because this is the 21st century and all that Tolkien shit isn't necessary; trying to act like a regular D&D wizard in Mage will have Paradox prison-fuck you like you insulted someone's mother and commented on the suppleness of your colon in the same breath.
Which is about where this pre-review rant is going to be wound up...this is a book that the authors didn't want to write, and pretty much assumed would never be used. It deals with becoming an Archmage - getting those Sphere ratings into 6 dots or higher - and what you can do with that. But it is mainly about what you can't do, and why you shouldn't do it, and what a lot of shit it is to be an archmage in the first place. This book isn't just a celebration of mediocrity, it encourages it, because the designers figure that if you're actually trying to use this book then you're a powergaming shit that is playing their game wrong.
Dragon Kings giving 3 hp when the Fighter hit 21st level is an insult. But they never tried to sell it as the Fighter being a bad person who should have dual-classed for a bit to round out their character instead.
Next: Actual review begins!
High-level characters are difficult to handle, and become all the more so when you're running a game without discrete levels. Dragon Kings is a good example of how at higher levels the disparities between threats and classes becomes increasingly obvious and insulting; the Epic Level Handbook just doubles-down on the fact that linear advancement falls apart as the bonuses stack up.
But when you go classless and level-less, things get weird. Caps exist in games like Shadowrun and the various World of Darkness games primarily to act as some sort of control over potential munchkinism and power gaming run amok, and what that encourages is either hitting the caps early through specialization or bypassing them by stacking bonuses. Which is fine if that's your aesthetic. In Shadowrun, you can start out as a world-class sniper. That is a thing you can do in pretty much any edition of the game, as long as you devote enough points to it, and there is an entire character creation mini-game for which builds are most effective at doing that. You might not be able to build the best sniper from the get-go, but you can generally max out at least one skill and buy the best rifle you can at chargen and be an effective sniper.
This is generally not a thing you can do in World of Darkness games.
World of Darkness is a mix of systems, so it's difficult to generalize. But basically the more involved the game is, the harder the caps are, and the more room you have to play within limits. The best example is probably Vampire: the Masquerade, where Generation sets a hard cap on your powers. In that way, it acts as a sort of pseudo-level cap, replicating some of the effects of having levels in a game that technically doesn't have levels. The same basic concept underlies initiation, the most broken aspect of Shadowrun, which acts as a leveling-up minigame; Earthdawn tries to split the difference, and is more or less successful depending on whether they did the math right. But I digress.
The thing about World of Darkness games is that there are a lot of powers, but generally speaking individual characters do not get many of them. Vampires are lucky to start out with a handful of discipline powers, unless they really min-max. Werewolves don't begin with dozens of gifts. Wraiths have a set number of Arcanoi. And raising your stats in WoD is expensive. Stupidly expensive. Which is why, in large part, the upper-level abilities are so much bullshit NPC powers. Your PCs are probably never going to campaign long enough to get six dots in fucking anything, and even at five dots you're probably barely getting the powers you need to function effectively.
It's why Blood Sorcery took off so well that they devoted two and a half entire supplements to it, and had paths and rituals crammed into damn near every sourcebook. It's why Abyss Mysticism and combo disciplines became a thing. It's not that people needed more shit to spend their imaginary XP on, and it isn't because they were going to bust through the hard Generation cap - it's because they were looking for more variability within the level. The kind of thing Shadowrun does by default and Earthdawn manages by largely disassociating circle and talent ranks.
Mage: the Ascension was a different beast, however. The starting powers were already open-ended, both from a game mechanics and a roleplaying gamepoint. We like to joke about it devolving into "Mother May I?", but the ostensible goal of the setting was that you could fiddle with the cornerstones of creation, and were limited only by your imagination and how many dice you had to roll. You began the game with an infinite number of low-level effects at your fingertips. If you suck the gamemaster's cock hard enough.
There's no really hard levels, just your Arete and Sphere ratings, but there's also no distinguishable difference between have one dot in a Sphere and two dots. Figuring out how to do a two-dot rote with one dot instead is just a challenge, not a hard limit, even when the writers forget and try to write it that way. It's like Shadowrun if the numbers on your character sheet didn't actually matter.
Which is only part of where things fall apart. In Mage, the rubric is that technology is just a sufficiently advanced form of magic which has become such a default paradigm that anybody can use it. This is not how it actually functions, however. Frank and I talked about this a bit in the oMage vs. nMage OSSR. The thing about magic is that people can't do it. Building a big cannon isn't a magical act, and mechanically you don't need dots in any of the Spheres to do it. So call that Problem Number One.
Problem Number Two is stakes. Mage liked to talk big stakes, but it was ultimately about as effective as Cosmic Bumfights. PCs not only didn't have the capability to actually challenge the consensus of the setting in any way, but if they did it would make them horrible monsters, not heroes or saviors - explicitly because everybody can use science and only a few people can use magic. There is no fucking rote you can come up with which is as useful and effective at scale as penicillin. You can't teach child soldiers to throw fireballs, but you can train them to disassemble, clean, reassemble, and fire an AK-47.
And beyond that, Mage doesn't want you to actually, y'know, play a powerful wizard.
Let that one sink in for a minute, because it's a major theme of this book. The designers of Mage do not want you to walk around throwing fireballs, turning bankers into sheep, summoning hookers and dragons, muttering arcane incantations, or waving magic swords and staffs about. Trying to act like a regular D&D wizard in Shadowrun will get you some odd looks, because this is the 21st century and all that Tolkien shit isn't necessary; trying to act like a regular D&D wizard in Mage will have Paradox prison-fuck you like you insulted someone's mother and commented on the suppleness of your colon in the same breath.
Which is about where this pre-review rant is going to be wound up...this is a book that the authors didn't want to write, and pretty much assumed would never be used. It deals with becoming an Archmage - getting those Sphere ratings into 6 dots or higher - and what you can do with that. But it is mainly about what you can't do, and why you shouldn't do it, and what a lot of shit it is to be an archmage in the first place. This book isn't just a celebration of mediocrity, it encourages it, because the designers figure that if you're actually trying to use this book then you're a powergaming shit that is playing their game wrong.
Dragon Kings giving 3 hp when the Fighter hit 21st level is an insult. But they never tried to sell it as the Fighter being a bad person who should have dual-classed for a bit to round out their character instead.
Next: Actual review begins!