I think that while you may delete the author from a work as far as his intentions, you can not delete the author’s circumstances. This is especially true in science fiction. All good science fiction are stories written about the time they were written in, set in another time as a metaphor. Look at two major works of …
Why Enlightening Masses of Mortals is a Bad Idea
Mass Enlightenment should sound like a good idea… until you begin to realize how terrible an idea it is. For example, the difficulty to weave Fate for a section of Creation is based on the Magnitude of the people that live in that area. So an area with a Magnitude of 10 had difficulty 10 to weave …
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On Extras versus Heroic, And Problems With 2e Rules Regarding Them
Extras were not below enlightened mortals. It was, in fact, possible to be both at the same time. Merely having access to Essence channeling was not enough to make you a Not Extra. A pack of Blood Apes attacking your party were as much Extras as a pack of brigands, just with higher base stats. …
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On How Martials Arts Should Work
What makes Martial Arts useful is that they are prepackaged combat styles which require little to no thought for players and STs to invest in. Instead of having to buy a cloud of Charms from three to five different abilities, you invest in a single Charm tree with a predefined path that, when complete, gives …
On Wish Fulfillment in Fiction
I think people have a very… shallow understanding of wish fulfillment. See, being able to effortlessly win and never be challenged may be seen as wish fulfillment – and to some people it is – but to many it would not be. Human beings want to be challenged. Even if a human has all their needs …
On The Problems With Summoning Elementals, and Solutions
The main problems with Summon Elemental were that a) it wasn’t broken into circles, and b) it was presented as a fact of the nature of all elementals. Thus meaning summoning the Kukla was a valid summon (granted, one likely to get the entire Aerial Legion siced on you before you finished the dozens of …
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On the size of Malfeas
I find that having Malfeas be nice and huge has two very good effects: 1: It allows me to ignore most of it. I mean, there are a lot of Yozi and demons and so on. Not even getting into first circles, we have 23 Yozi, at least an order of magnitude more Third Circle …
On naming things in Exalted
Here is the trick to making cool names and things in Exalted. Start with something cliché, or ridiculous or lame and then disguise it. As my reaction upthread shows, I didn’t realize for years that Death of Obsidian Butterflies was literally a spell for glass cannon wizards, because the spell was disguised. Infallible Messenger was an IM (ie, Instant …
Here’s the thing. I’m atheist. I don’t care what you are. You could be Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist or Laveyan Satanist. No skin off my nose. What I’m interested in is what you believe and how that impacts your actions. If being a good Catholic means you support social equality, economic justice and otherwise being a good person: good for you! …
GMing when characters are smarter than players
I guess my question is, how do you take into account “my character is smarter and better prepared than I ever could be, so she would have thought to take measures against this even though I, the player, did not” without having retcon mechanics like DMG and so-on? tzar1990 By letting the PCs win. No, …
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