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

[George Guy]

Yes.  I agree.  Therefore, there shouldn't be adept/avatar comboes that are
difficult to avoid archetypes that easy to stumble upon while following a
certain school.

On 5/3/06, Chad Eagleton <ceagleto at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>      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.
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> UA mailing list
> UA at lists.unknown-armies.com
> http://lists.unknown-armies.com/mailman/listinfo/ua
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.unknown-armies.com/pipermail/ua-unknown-armies.com/attachments/20060503/99772cbc/attachment-0002.htm>