[UA] Re: Adepts/Avatars (was Thoughts on Fan Based...)

[Chad Eagleton]

     In my earlier comments I never said it wasn’t
possible to be both an adept and an avatar. I was
speaking of rarity, not feasibility. Being both should
be rare and probably drive you crazy; not to mention,
make you really really lonely. Even in the main rules
it says this: “the three forms of magic are not
exclusionary”. And then it goes on to say that, yes
realistically, you’d be crazy.
     And if we look at the three examples from the
book, the ones that X mentioned, what do we see?
First, Gerlinde Unger. The write-up mentions that
she’s what—crazy. Juggling her roles of Sleeper,
Cryptomancer, Mystical Hermaphrodite avatar, and cabal
leader in Berlin has driven her totally insane. And
her avatar rating is constantly in flux.
     All the things she is grew out of her obsession
with power—magical power. Not because she sat down to
plan her life out and thought, you know I could follow
this avatar path, pretty easy and it’d help me be a
better Cryptomancer, because the
taboos
blah
blah
blah. That sort of thinking comes
from you the player setting down and thinking how you
could be a better badass.
     I don’t think any player should start out with
all those sorts of things. I think there’s enough
role-playing potential in just one. And if they want
to be both, that should be the thrust of the game.
Look at the Unger background again and you see it. She
started out knowing nothing, but wanting to piss her
parents off. Hence her association with the occult.
Once there she saw a way to power that didn’t care if
she was a “girl”. Then things began to snowball in her
quest for power as she picked up something new and
then something else and so on until her whole sense of
self eroded and now she’s nuts. Powerful, but nuts.
There’s a game. There’s a background. That’s
appealing. Not, I sat down and read through the book
and I think these things go together without too much
conflict, and, well, this avatar path will help me be
a better adept. That’s power gaming to me. And if that
works for you, that's fine. But it works for you
purely because you want a better badass.
     I could excuse it if you had a whole story behind
it and were capable of role-playing all those
conflicts in their complexity. Or if I were the GM,
and you came to me and said, I want to be this and
this—let’s do it in the course of the entire story.
     Then we have Vernon Henshaw. Pretty normal. No
raving insanity. But he’s a badass. Pure and simple—a
badass. Hell, he’s even nice to old people, helps them
cross the street. Probably calls his mother every
Sunday.  Honestly to me, not a particularly
interesting character. But is he supposed to be—I
don’t think so. He’s just a badass. He’s a Sleeper.
He’s the guy you don’t want on your trail.
     And again look at his background. One thing
slowly grew out of another. He didn’t come striding
into the occult underground a Hunter/Bibliomancer.
     Finally, there’s the Freak. What is the Freak?
S/he is a cosmic level lord. No stats given in the
book. It’s an enigmatic monster. A
plot device.
     So, of the three examples from the book—two are
from Hush, Hush
the book about the Sleepers, who are
feared by everybody. Of those two, one is insane and
the other is just a badass. While the third example is
a plot device. A Deus ex machina. Able to do whatever
you want him/her to do. All three are basically the
boogeymen for your players in the course of the game.
     Seems pretty rare and special to me.
     Without rarity, I think you lose the feel of the
game. The world isn’t chocked full of adepts or
avatars. For the most part, they don’t swim in the
same ponds. When one encounters the other, chances are
they look at each from their own standpoint. Oh, he’s
an adept who practices some weird magic with not a lot
of effects. Or, oh, he’s channeling an avatar, but
he’s putting all this needless crap in the way. Either
way, I don't see how that fits into a mindset of being
one and looking at the other as a means to be better
at what you do.
     And then to make a mixture of the two common?
Enter my White Wolf comment
to me you might as well
make every homeless man an Urbanomancer, every hot
chick a Pornomancer, stick a Dipso in every bar, make
sure the bike messenger beside you is channeling his
archetype, give every fast food restaurant its own
magic conspiracy, make sure all the villains are
Executioner/Thantomancers and bring on the demons.
    But beyond all that—hey, it’s whatever works for
you.


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