Mage rules
Aug. 31st, 2019 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI don't remember how but I seem to have spent some hours on the wiki for Werewolf, Vampire, Mage the Ascension et al.
The most interesting and confusing part of all those games is they all take place in the same universe with the same beings in, can fight each other, yet have such wildly divergent points of view on the universe they can't all be true at once and yet they all do work for the people who believe them. And there's in u iverse mechanisms and ezplanations as to why.
It is brain breaky.
The least interesting part is how everything got worse until it all went splat. Everyone fails and everyone is wrong, very boring. At least that's what it looked like when I stopped reading, obviously there are gigantic amounts of lore going on and all things could happen in there somewhere.
If there's anything all the strands of storytelling have in common it's the response of the characters to their inevitable failure.
Like yes there's a theoretical chance of winning a future so bright it changes all the possibilities, but there's a lot more mechanisms for watching your character lose themselves in a wide variety of grim ways. And then the world ends.
Somewhere in there it loses me.
But the approach to the characters is kind of inspiring? And confusing. But every tradition, every clan, every tribe, they all have opinions on all the rest and they're internally consistent but do not agree with each other at all.
And my usual impulse as a writer is to figure out The System and to tell story about How People Are, but here's game rule books presenting multiple systems and so many points of view you wonder if Real is.
... actually I don't think it is in these games. Real is highly contested.
I have no idea how they would be to play. Mostly there seems to be Hitting People? Which seems like the least interesting part.
But it is interesting to have so many rules that the concept of rules falls apart.
The most interesting and confusing part of all those games is they all take place in the same universe with the same beings in, can fight each other, yet have such wildly divergent points of view on the universe they can't all be true at once and yet they all do work for the people who believe them. And there's in u iverse mechanisms and ezplanations as to why.
It is brain breaky.
The least interesting part is how everything got worse until it all went splat. Everyone fails and everyone is wrong, very boring. At least that's what it looked like when I stopped reading, obviously there are gigantic amounts of lore going on and all things could happen in there somewhere.
If there's anything all the strands of storytelling have in common it's the response of the characters to their inevitable failure.
Like yes there's a theoretical chance of winning a future so bright it changes all the possibilities, but there's a lot more mechanisms for watching your character lose themselves in a wide variety of grim ways. And then the world ends.
Somewhere in there it loses me.
But the approach to the characters is kind of inspiring? And confusing. But every tradition, every clan, every tribe, they all have opinions on all the rest and they're internally consistent but do not agree with each other at all.
And my usual impulse as a writer is to figure out The System and to tell story about How People Are, but here's game rule books presenting multiple systems and so many points of view you wonder if Real is.
... actually I don't think it is in these games. Real is highly contested.
I have no idea how they would be to play. Mostly there seems to be Hitting People? Which seems like the least interesting part.
But it is interesting to have so many rules that the concept of rules falls apart.