[UA] Bad Reactions to UA?

[Joshua Knorr]

> 2. Make settings/tone/rule changes to make UA more positive to
> these folks.

Setting:
I'd suggest either reworking one of the major factions in the OU, or making
the PCs part of a new group that doesn't have the unpleasent ethical/moral
baggage of canon UA.  The New Inquisition is a pretty good choice - without
too much effort Alex Abel can become a more-or-less good guy who went
through a profound life-changing event and now is trying to keep the Occult
Underground from eating itself alive or dragging mundane society into the
abyss with it.  Tone down the fanatacism of the Order of St. Cecil and
you've got Demon Hunters'R'Us.  Same for the Sleepers.

You'll need to rejigger the magick schools to be less horribly-dysfunctional
(or come up with some new ones that don't lead to utter degeneracy amongst
the practicioners).  Plutomancy can be fiddled with, entropomancy almost
works as is, and if the GM is fairly lenient personamancy, iconomancy, and
bibliomancy can be made practical-but-not-mindwarping.

Thinking bigger, the game would have to be less about "What will you give up
for power?" and more about "What will you do with the power you've got?"
Instead of a world in which the pursuit of magick power is inevitably
destructive, look at it as a place where a new breed of adepts are coming
into power and running amuck.  The choice is between the fast and
destructive new schools or the old schools of slower but more balanced
enlightenment.  Play down the adepts and play up the avatars.  In short,
make UA less like CoC or Kult and more like Mage.

Rules:
Double the amount of skill points allotted to starting characters.  Keep the
allocation of stat points the same, but give people double their stats in
skill points for each category.  This makes rolling your obsession/stimulus
skill less of a priority and makes the characters significantly more
competent. This makes A) things feel less futile, and B) encourages
characters to be multifaceted without a single destructive obsession.  Hand
out more XP, inversely proporitional to how many more starting skill points
they got.  With the above-mentioned double-your-stat level, 7-10 XP per
session means that characters will have gotten significantly more competent
in something (+10%) in about 4 sessions worth of play.

The one thing I wouldn't recommend fiddling with a whole lot is the madness
meters - they emphasize the moral consequences of one's actions.

Josh Knorr
WWBBD?




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