At long last, another note on RPG design
One of the things I've been trying to find an elegant approach to is to highlight, game mechanically, the notion of personal consequences of magical actions. Some people have embraced Magic as madness, and Magic as disease, and Magic as drug.
But to my mind Magic is just a metaphor for all kinds of power. It's abstracting what money and politics, skill and rhetoric, persuasion and manipulation, invention and innovation can do. It moves changes at the speed of an individual soul rather than at the speed of social endeavor.
I like the idea that the moral or personal consequences of Magic touch the soul more directly than the work of hands and tools. So if you kill, or even hurt with Magic that it reflects into you more quickly than an act of indirect violence would. That using Magic for petty outcomes leads to an attenuation of the soul.
My first draft idea was inspired by the White Wolf Mage Paradox and Resonance systems (with a bit of Garou status thrown in). The idea would be that every magical act was either Static, Dynamic or Entropic at heart. When you accumulate paradox from magic that instead of being of a single flavor, the paradox would be colored by the act of magic itself. And you could be tainted worse if your actions were particularly inhuman (whether cruel, presumptuous or simply reckless). In turn if you accumulated too much of any one flavor of temporary paradox-resonance (pares for now), it could crystalize into a permanent dot in a resonance trait. And with that accumulation you would accumulate mental and magical defects based on the type of change.
Ultimately, it would mean that every mage would have to perform a balancing act or succumb to a different flavor of insanity. And then the three non-PC factions of the basic game become the groups that don't bother to perform the balancing act, or at least typically fall off one end of the three way balance.
So the Mauraders, due to their reckless disregard for social, mental and physics norms, would embrace Dynamic resonance until they lost their ability to see anything but the delusional constructs of their personal drama.
The Fallen, like the Euthanatoi who over indulge Jhor (or entropic resonance) would gradually lose their capacity for empathy, for valueing human existance at all. The pain that enmeshes their soul would either drive them to boundless cruelty and hate or to sociopathic numbness to the consequences of their actions.
And the Technocracy, or at least some of them, walking the path of Pattern without mitigation, would become control freaks on an epic level. Meglomania, fanaticism, obsessive compulsive urges that require subjugation of other peoples' lives and wills. They would lose the ability to interact without dominating or obeying a dominating force.
The key, as I imagined it, to the balancing act, was to mitigate early. If you have used magic too often to blast and destroy, perhaps you need to spend days of non-magical rest and recovery gardening, or tending the sick, or painting. Anything to provide perspective and ground out the damage done by accumulated magic. Similarly perhaps a technocrat might break out of their shell, drop X and spend all night at a dance club, embracing their own loss of control to keep perspective. Perhaps someone too enmeshed in the magic of transmutation and exceeding boundaries might observe a tai-chi regimen, or perform math puzzles to order their mind and spirit.
Unfortunately, there are problems with the idea. One, the idea of a temporary and permanent counter runs against the simplicity of the dots and pools in 5s and 10s system. Another problem is that it's not always particularly clear what is Pattern and what is Dynamic. Healing? (Ordering the body, or releasing the energies of growth?) Raising the Dead? (Entropic subject, Pattern verb) There's a lot of handwaving in the tripartate categories that are the resonance triat.
Additionally, this doesn't really respond to the idea of moral consequence. So using magic to animate a flying carpet to sail to Aruba vs using magic to create a shield against an attack have equal 'risk' in terms of consequences. Every time I try to figure out a criteria of moral resonance consequences, the triat becomes unfriendly. Is tricking someone by Glamour Pattern, because you're taking their free will, or Dynamic because you're creating sometimes that breaks the rules. What about stealing with Magic? Etc. Etc.
One option would be to integrate the nWoD wisdom system, with its' hierarchy of sins, and just have wisdom loss or even wisdom rolls affect resonance. But at some point you create a set of incentives where you have to be a Jedi or a saint to remain effective, and that's just not entirely interesting. I wouldn't want a game in which Mages couldn't cut loose at all. But I would like a game in which magic has serious, personal and magical consequences.
So, its' still a work in progress.
Feedback embraced.
But to my mind Magic is just a metaphor for all kinds of power. It's abstracting what money and politics, skill and rhetoric, persuasion and manipulation, invention and innovation can do. It moves changes at the speed of an individual soul rather than at the speed of social endeavor.
I like the idea that the moral or personal consequences of Magic touch the soul more directly than the work of hands and tools. So if you kill, or even hurt with Magic that it reflects into you more quickly than an act of indirect violence would. That using Magic for petty outcomes leads to an attenuation of the soul.
My first draft idea was inspired by the White Wolf Mage Paradox and Resonance systems (with a bit of Garou status thrown in). The idea would be that every magical act was either Static, Dynamic or Entropic at heart. When you accumulate paradox from magic that instead of being of a single flavor, the paradox would be colored by the act of magic itself. And you could be tainted worse if your actions were particularly inhuman (whether cruel, presumptuous or simply reckless). In turn if you accumulated too much of any one flavor of temporary paradox-resonance (pares for now), it could crystalize into a permanent dot in a resonance trait. And with that accumulation you would accumulate mental and magical defects based on the type of change.
Ultimately, it would mean that every mage would have to perform a balancing act or succumb to a different flavor of insanity. And then the three non-PC factions of the basic game become the groups that don't bother to perform the balancing act, or at least typically fall off one end of the three way balance.
So the Mauraders, due to their reckless disregard for social, mental and physics norms, would embrace Dynamic resonance until they lost their ability to see anything but the delusional constructs of their personal drama.
The Fallen, like the Euthanatoi who over indulge Jhor (or entropic resonance) would gradually lose their capacity for empathy, for valueing human existance at all. The pain that enmeshes their soul would either drive them to boundless cruelty and hate or to sociopathic numbness to the consequences of their actions.
And the Technocracy, or at least some of them, walking the path of Pattern without mitigation, would become control freaks on an epic level. Meglomania, fanaticism, obsessive compulsive urges that require subjugation of other peoples' lives and wills. They would lose the ability to interact without dominating or obeying a dominating force.
The key, as I imagined it, to the balancing act, was to mitigate early. If you have used magic too often to blast and destroy, perhaps you need to spend days of non-magical rest and recovery gardening, or tending the sick, or painting. Anything to provide perspective and ground out the damage done by accumulated magic. Similarly perhaps a technocrat might break out of their shell, drop X and spend all night at a dance club, embracing their own loss of control to keep perspective. Perhaps someone too enmeshed in the magic of transmutation and exceeding boundaries might observe a tai-chi regimen, or perform math puzzles to order their mind and spirit.
Unfortunately, there are problems with the idea. One, the idea of a temporary and permanent counter runs against the simplicity of the dots and pools in 5s and 10s system. Another problem is that it's not always particularly clear what is Pattern and what is Dynamic. Healing? (Ordering the body, or releasing the energies of growth?) Raising the Dead? (Entropic subject, Pattern verb) There's a lot of handwaving in the tripartate categories that are the resonance triat.
Additionally, this doesn't really respond to the idea of moral consequence. So using magic to animate a flying carpet to sail to Aruba vs using magic to create a shield against an attack have equal 'risk' in terms of consequences. Every time I try to figure out a criteria of moral resonance consequences, the triat becomes unfriendly. Is tricking someone by Glamour Pattern, because you're taking their free will, or Dynamic because you're creating sometimes that breaks the rules. What about stealing with Magic? Etc. Etc.
One option would be to integrate the nWoD wisdom system, with its' hierarchy of sins, and just have wisdom loss or even wisdom rolls affect resonance. But at some point you create a set of incentives where you have to be a Jedi or a saint to remain effective, and that's just not entirely interesting. I wouldn't want a game in which Mages couldn't cut loose at all. But I would like a game in which magic has serious, personal and magical consequences.
So, its' still a work in progress.
Feedback embraced.