Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

The game system I have the most books for I've never used is probably GURPS. Mainly because GURPS takes so damn long to make characters, I always lose patience, so I've never tried to run anything with any of my groups. But I have them more because a lot of the books are good reference for other things, and I've used them for that. And I used to work at a hobby shop, so I could get RPG books at a good discount.

No, my favorite RPG I've never played has to be Mage: The Ascension, by White Wolf. I've barely skimmed through the new WoD Mage book, I got kinda turned off by all the talk at the beginning about Atlantis. So I haven't really given it a fair shot, but I don't have $50 to blow on RPG books these days.

If I'm being honest, probably one of the biggest reasons I like Mage is it's as if Cyberpunk, Magic, and Superheroes had a kid, and it shared some of the awesomest parts from each. (1) It was the Matrix before the Matrix. It hits all kinds of fanboy buttons. I am nothing if not a nerd. Plus two of the Traditions are steampunky mad scientists and nerd mages who work their magic through computers. How could I resist?

But aside from my fanboy-isms, part of it was the timing. I started picking Mage books up shortly after I actually read the Principia Discordia through and my mind was Aflame With Possibilities. And Mage has plenty of possibilities. And a dozen or so different ways of looking at the universe, too. Most of the game that wasn't about flipping out and doing crazy stuff was philosophy. An RPG might seem a weird place to learn philosophy from, which it might be. But they also had a really cool section of bibliography showing books they'd gotten ideas from. Some of them were gobbledygook and bullshit, and some were interesting, like Finite and Infinite Games, which I actually found at the library a while before I picked one of the Mage books that referenced it.

The two things from Mage that've stuck with me the most are these. The first is part of the Virtual Adepts, the computer nerd mages. Who I always identified with, naturally enough, since they were made of writers, computer programmers, and so on. Their specialty in magic is/was Correspondence, which is looking at the connections between things. And for the longest time, I thought "lame," because it wasn't as flashy or obviously powerful as the other schools, even if it did have cool things like teleportation. It wasn't as obviously powerful or flashy or neat as the other schools got. But since I never played it, it never really came up.

Then, a couple of years ago, I was driving to work, and thinking about utterly random stuff. I don't remember the train of thought, but I realized, basically, things only exist because they interact. If they don't interact with anything else, they might as well not exist. How do we know what color something is? By how light interacts with it and our eyes. How do we know how hard something is? By how it interacts with our hands. How do we know what properties oxygen has. By how it interacts with other chemicals. If something doesn't interact with anything, it doesn't exist. And that's when I realized that's what they were getting at with Correspondence, and I felt dumb for not realizing it all that long ago.

The other is in Mage, one of the signs of advancement for your character was they'd stop needing to use a focus or special preparations to do things. Partly I just think it's a really cool effect, since as you get better, you don't really need the tools, though they may make things easier. And it also works the same kind of way as the witches in Discworld, where Granny Weatherwax could use a dented kitchen spoon as the Sacred Steel Knife, as long as she convinced the universe it was. And parts of life work that way too, as you get better, you don't need the tools and tricks nearly as much. They might make it easier, sometimes, but you can learn more by doing it without them, and sometimes they hold you back. A good artist can do as much or more with just a pencil as a newbie or a decent artist, even with all the best computer tricks.

And philosophically, it appeals, because it leaves open all sorts of different ways to end up the same general place. The tricks and tools are there to help you, and make you feel like you know what you're doing, the universe doesn't care.

My Mage books are still sitting up on the shelf, I haven't really looked through them in months. Writing this made me want to again. I wonder now if they'll live up to the awesomeness I remember and have projected on them, or not. And I wonder if I'll ever actually get the chance to run (or play in) a cool Mage campaign, and if it'd live up to the awesomeness I'd expect. Probably not, but letting things sit around as abstract ideals that never get implemented is way too Platonic and stupid. An idea of something isn't nearly as awesome as that actual something doing things. Even if it is more perfect.

So what're you people's favorite RPGs you've never played? And maybe I should look for a group for Mage.



1: There's a theory out there that all of White Wolf's games are about superheroes, really. When characters in most of them can shrug off bullets or just dodge them, and throw cars, I tend to agree.

Playing D&D last night, the other mage in our party got hit by a specifically targeted version of the Silence spell. Which I then dubbed "Power Word: STFU."

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, gas prices? Now, I know the almost $4 prices right after Katrina were just price gouging (whatever happened to government investigations into that sort of thing?) but gas was down to $2.199 (repeating) today. Of course, US gas prices have always been below the actual cost, once you include all the environmental effects from burning gasoline. But the oil companies have been extremely successful at shifting those onto the public.

Why is it so bloody hard to get 8 people who're willing to pay $3 to play in a Magic tournament? Haven't had one in the past two weeks. Part of it I'm sure is the poor scheduling at the store, and how things have gone downhill since I quit, but still. I'd be tempted to so somewhere else, but anywhere else would require a lot more driving and screw with scheduling for D&D. At least I got to trade for stuff for my decks, now if only I had more chance to, y'know, play them. But trading in Magic gives a perfect example of economics, including supply and demand, different relative values, marginal values, and so on. Well, at least if you're nerdy enough to think about it that way, which I definitely am.

If there's one thing I'm sort of learning it's that I'm never a representative sample of anything except me. And not always even then.

Also, by being out of the house from Thursday till today, I spoiled my unbroken streak of posting something, no matter how random, to LJ every day. Ohnoes!

Um, yeah. Wizards of the Coast says they found the lost third set of the Ice Age block. In all the time I've played Magic, I've never heard of this before. But they're going to print it, and make it T2 legal. Um.

It's not April 1st, so I imagine it's true, it's just BIZARRE. I don't know if I think it's a good thing or a bad thing or what yet. It's just a thing. A strange one.

Though watching the mix of whining and "OMG KEWLZORZ!" on the WotC fora is amusing.

So I've been playing FF7 a bit. And I haven't bothered to rename the characters when they show up, even though they give me the option. There's not really much point. Naming the character something different doesn't change what happens, their personality, or their interactions. That's all pre-scripted. I might as well just leave their names alone too, that way I know which character everybody is talking about when they talk about stuff. If I name Cloud "Smith", he's still spiky-haired, has an impossibly huge sword, and does exactly the same things. There's very little room for identification with the characters, as a consequence of the more developed plot.

As opposed to FF1, where the characters had... well, no development. And their names were 4 characters long. But because of that, their name was much more important. My most common party member names were Rune, Xana (White Mage), Lore (Black Mage), Myst (also Black Mage), and... I forget. I could go boot up the cartridge to check my last save. But since the characters had no pre-scripted development, they were pretty much blank slates for you to project onto. Their names and your actions and imagination told you who they were, not cutscenes. Which gives the freedom to produce things like 8-Bit Theater. Something like that would NEVER work with FF7 characters.

Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. But the experience in something like FF7 is much more movie-like because there's fewer options. With more options and customization, the game becomes much more personal.

And I am WAY overthinking this when it's 1am and I haven't finished my homework or studied for my quiz for Arabic tomorrow.

Today was the Ravnica release event at the local hobby store.

( Details inside, so as not to bore the non-Magic people )

And I went on IRC for Magic because I was geeking, and heard the best use for the Pro Tour Player cards. Nobody wanted them at the store, so I ended up with a bunch. Use them for tokens. I should snagged them all. "I attack with Kai, Dave, and Terry." Heh.

A series of random short things about today, to keep from posting 80 one sentence posts.

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There was a guy on the sidewalk as I was driving in to work today. He was carrying a sign, and had several more propped up against telephone poles and things. A one man anti-war protest, on some random street corner out here. The sign he was carrying said "Do unto others..." on one side, and "Thou shalt not kill." on the other. Couple of the other signs said things like "War and Greed are un-Christian."

I dunno how much difference he made, or if anybody else ever stopped and helped him carry signs, but good on him. I'm not quite sure what I think on the war in Iraq right now, but that's mainly because it's been so incredibly fucked up I don't know if there's any good solutions at this point.

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US Copyright law is largely bullshit right now. Why are movies and music and books like 50 years old still copyrighted? The publishers have long since made their money back on them. Most of the creators are dead, and the ones that aren't, honestly, I don't think it makes THAT much difference. Why should we let immortal corporations charge us rent for our culture? They're not contributing, in fact, they're stifling new creation. If there's any moral or economic reason why, I'd like to hear it. Aside from "The companies make lots of money and give lots of it to Congress and most people don't notice enough to pay attention to the issue."

I could go on about this for hours. And probably will later.

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I have several pieces of surfer Buddha things I need to write up, but haven't gotten to. So I expect when I do, it'll ramble, and I'll probably miss half of what I was planning to say, as conversations veer off. Also, they involve a lightsaber, and why Luke Skywalker kicks ass.

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I am sure my abilities at wiping down tables and flipping chairs from constantly helping the cafe people close will look excellent on my resume.

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I wish I had a scanner. Then I could do a very badly drawn journal comic. Or I wish the cool mac app that Eric Burns is using for the Adventures of John Stark was for PC, not just Mac. Or I had a Mac. But me am poor, no wasting money on anything computer-ey right now. I have more interesting things to blow money on.

In some ways, I hate all the little extras in games like FF7. (Which I'm playing because a friend loaned it to me with his Playstation, because he figured I should play it, since we're playing a quasi-FF7 Exalted game.) The problem with all the little extras is they turn on my nerdish collecting instincts, and I don't want to miss any of the options, even when the options require you to pick one over the other. So I end up using the vast powers of the interweb to find all the secrets to make sure I don't miss them, which means I really don't get the joy of finding them. Though sometimes, the "joy" of spending hours poking at almost identical pixels is overrated.

Or maybe I'm just indecisive.

"For a lot of Western otaku, Japan fills the same function as Middle-Earth or Starfleet or twelfth-century England does for other flavors of geek: it's a fantasy world where everything is attuned to their desires and, if they could magically get there, they wouldn't feel like outsiders anymore." - Shaneon Garrity

A Neil Gaiman quote, ganked from the Girl Genius Mailing List...

"Last time I was at Comicom, there were like 5,000 people there, and the audience was going to try and cut me off with stuff to sign. They had to figure out how to get me off the stage. All of a sudden, I'm getting to the end of the conversation. Dave McKean and I were doing a Mirrormask thing and we're ready to leave the stage. I look up and they have a bodyguard line of 30 Klingons. They're six-foot six and four-feet wide and they have the foreheads and they had linked arms. We were being lead off behind a human wall —a Klingon wall—of Klingon warriors. And I thought, how good does it get?"

Just go read this old article from the Duelist. Mind Over Magic It's got a lot of ideas in it that are similar to ones I've been poking at. A good chunk of everything is decided by the "inner game" like if you bother to even try in the first place. Which I must admit I'm not the best at, but it's another of those life lessons I've picked up from that silly game.

And I think I have that issue of the Duelist around somewhere still.