Metaphysicians For a Better Tomorrow is a campaign site with character writeups and play transcripts. In his Statement of Purpose, the GM writes
Gaming is Fun has character writeups for three campaigns the group has played, plus a link to an allied quotes page.So, there are several purposes to running this game. The first, of course, is to keep myself entertained and enlived. But further, I'm proving a point: Nobilis is easy.
The Compass Rose looks like a genuine "pblog campaign."
In Thought-Records' continuing (well, fitful) effort to bring you news of everything Nobilis on the web, the following:
Nobilis - Locus Amo Enus - Looks to be a campaign site. As yet it is sparsely populated, but keep an eye out. I believe "amo" is the first-person singular conjugation of the latin verb "to love." And I think "enus" is a fairly common programming abbreviation for "English - US." So the chancel name seems to translate as "Locus I Love US English."
Or not.
Meanwhile, on the gaming blog Through a glass, darkly, a "Nobilis horror story." This item has a comment from Mike "Epoch" Sullivan that is useful in putting the post itself in perspective.
An idea for tabletop play: go all the way with the Dynamic rules success/failure tables and eliminate the distinction between Lesser and Major miracles. (See original item below.) The revised miracle difficulty list becomes:
0 - Divinations
1 - Ghost Miracles
2 - Preservations
3 - Creations
4 - Destructions
5 - Changes
A "Major Creation" becomes simply a Deep Success on a Creation miracle. A 0-level divination is still a passive alarm, your estate shouting "Ow!" when it stubs its toe. You get the equivalent of a Lesser Divination with a Hard Success (Vital Force 2 + any opposing auctoritas) on a deliberate Diviniation. To get your estate to give as much info as you can get from a GWB Major Divination, you need a Deep Success or better on a "revised dynamic" divination.
I think there's a definite gain in elegance going this route.
This switch makes most lesser miracles one point cheaper (for a simple success anyway). Major miracles end up retaining the same effective cost, because a Deep Success is 4 points over target, not 3. (Note: Except for divinations. Major divinations end up a point cheaper than they do in GWB.)
One might prefer an informal alternate naming scale for each miracle type, e.g.
Simple Preservations (Diff 2)
Normal Preservations (Diff 3)
Hard Preservations (Diff 4-5)
Deep Preservations (Diff 6-7)
Triumphant Preservations (Diff 8+)
Then again, one might not. Simply say, that's a Force 6 Preservation miracle, netting 3 shifts (for vitality, warding or protection).
Why I like this: Imagine that there were an "average starting Noble character." That fellow has attributes of about 2 across the board, with about one point in gifts. Under the revised dynamic system, this ASNC can do Preservations for free, meaning that it is a simple matter for ASNC to fortify and strengthen his/her estate in minor but meaningful ways.
That seems about right.
(Most likely, ASNC has more than one point in gifts, so his average attribute is less than 2.)
Wrinkle: There are two things at risk of being lost by "flattening the miracle table."
1) If major miracles exist as a separate category, you can get extra levels of success. That's because it's theoretically possible to get a Deep Success or Triumph on a major miracle if you spend enough points. If there are no major miracles, then the highest success on the revised table (Triumph) is the equivalent of a Hard Success on the existing major miracle table.
There are two ways to approach this issue:
a) Whatever. Who has that many points anyway?
b) Cap the success names at Triumph, but allow another shift for every two points above the base Triumph level of Diff+6.
2) If you have to declare a "major miracle" attempt in advance, there's a possibility you'll miscalculate the auctoritas and fail completely. Under the revised system, you'd probably still get some lesser level of success than you wanted.
This one seems to be a matter of taste. If it bothers player and GM, the GM could, perhaps, declare that, e.g. On this miracle, unless you succeed at a Hard Preservation your miracle will be considered to fail.
Gregor McKinney's Locus Omphalos has a new home on Niffelheim. net.
Obsessed as I'm becoming with the potential dangers of Lord Entropy and the Cammora, they nevertheless provide one possible - and viable - solution to a genuine problem. R. Sean Borgstrom enunciates the principle:
The principle makes perfect sense to me. An example from another cosmology: In Amber fandom (game and books) there are people - I am one - who argue that if the "Logrus" power introduced in Zelazny's second quintet of books really existed at the time of the first series, the events of the first series could not have taken place. That's because Logrus as described provides the forces of Chaos with greater mobility and power than they are plainly seen to possess in the chronicles of Prince Corwin. Working backward from the facts of the first series - Chaos did none of the things they could have done had they possessed Logrus - we dispense with Logrus rather than with the Corwin chronicles.There's a standard I've seen pretty often in RPGs for when the GM/HG should step in to prevent world changes: the "if it were that easy, wouldn't someone have done it already?" standard.
Returning to Nobilis, a pure intraworld rationale can lead to something very like the Council of Four:
1) There is a society of a couple of thousand Nobles who have an interest in maintaining stability during the Valde Bellum. Even if the Valde Bellum is not going on, a society of Nobles may, on balance, prefer the status quo to massive changes that benefit some at the expense of others.
2) Any rule in favor of preserving the status quo needs an enforcement mechanism.
3) An enforcement mechanism means something like a government. It needs to be run by someone tough.
4) Oh by the way, Noble institutions, like human ones, will act to preserve and extend their power. (This is Public Choice theory in the mythic world.)
5) Oh by the way, the most ruthless will tend to rise to the top. (This is Friedrich Hayek in the mythic world.)
It all follows logically. What I'm looking for, I suppose, is a kinder, gentler solution to the Rebecca's Razor problem. Possibilities:
a) Perhaps major world-changing miracles happen frequently and we just don't realize it because prosaic history rewrites itself to accomodate them. There is support for this view in the GWB.
Problem: It also disempowers the players, at least potentially, if, in the middle of the current story, everyone suddenly lives under the ocean and breathes through gills. (Stole this from Noblist.) Possible solution: But this kind of thing could, if handled discreetly, provide interesting opportunities between adventures. In Sandman, Morpheus doesn't appear as a cat creature in every issue, but he does in "A Dream of a Thousand Cats." Let time be fluid, let the PCs be recognizably themselves, but have the occasional adventure in Atlantis or Cloudcukooland or Dune-on-Earth.
b) Seriously downgrade the infectiousness of "dementia animus." People are great rationalizers. Let them rationalize away most miracles. There is support in the GWB for this too. We are told that if someone is so gauche as to shoot the sun out of the sky, and someone else puts a new sun in its place, prosaic reality will experience it as an eclipse, and even as a predicted one. The GWB actually goes so far as to note that the destruction wrought occasionally by the actions of Aaron's Serpents is one of the few miraculous happenings that prosaic reality can not explain. Restrict dementia animus to those instances where mortals have their noses rubbed in the mythic world, not simply where strange things happen.
Under this protocol, if the Power of Cold creates an ice floe in the middle of Denver, most people will be convinced it was some kind of major accident involving refrigerants, unless said Noble goes out of his way to make it impossible for the world to believe this - say, by going on TV and cackling "You fools! I am the Power of Cold, do you hear me! This is all MY doing!" Lord Entropy's salience shifts away from dementia animus and toward the Windflower Law, which anyway strikes me as his more interesting role.
c) The Acacia Rite. Some people like to come up with new flower rites. Invent one that cures dementia animus. It need not always be simple or practical to conduct...
d) Some cosmological principle that provides a disincentive to engage in world-changing miracles for PCs and NPCs alike. There's the "opposites dodge" familiar to us from Sandman, where Delirium defines Sanity, Destruction defines Creation, Dream defines Reality etc. So the Power of Cold doesn't cover the world with ice because his own estate simply doesn't exist apart from the concept of Heat. This works for a lot of estates, though it doesn't seem to explain as readily why the Power of Insects doesn't fill the world with cockroaches. Perhaps major miracles simply "don't count" toward strengthening one's estate somehow. (Invent your own reason.)
e) Let the Good Times Roll! Junk the whole Entropy/Council of Four apparatus. Perhaps there has been a period of stability that is now ending. See what happens.
I incline temperamentally toward b and d.
There were some interesting comments on the "Nobilis: The Case Against" post, especially on the "purity" of Lord Entropy and the Cammora's role in the default setting. That is, are Entropy and the Cammora just a world-element, or a metagame thumb pressing on the scales that weigh player-character power? The larger question is whether there are elements of the setting that tend to encourage GMs to disempower the PCs who are, supposedly, demigods.
Two data points to consider: Firstly, I saw someone write on the Nobilis list recently that he would never allow "mere Noble miracles" to have a particular effect. That strikes me as a telling formulation. As far as I can tell, he wasn't talking about mere minor miracles as opposed to major miracles. He meant any Noble miracles.
Secondly, in the scenario included with Game of Powers, a single Cammoran, named Honest John, appears, interested in acquiring the miraculous painting that is the scenario's MacGuffin. The scenario suggests that every single Noble will be rationally terrified of letting this one corrupt-if-immortal human discover that the painting has been stolen.
UPDATE: I should note that the Nobilis design team does not consciously desire to encourage hammering PCs, as this Bruce Baugh response to a Noblist message makes clear. At issue is whether elements of the official setting are working at cross-purposes with the design team's own wishes.
Sometimes you don't do something, but you feel better because you're not doing it for the right reason.
I've been wondering about the order of miracle types, running, as it does:
Alarms (Estate-Driven Divinations)
Ghost miracles
Divinations
Preservations
Creations
Destructions
Changes
and whether the order was right after Preservations. That is, should it be Creations/Destructions/Changes or should it be Destructions/Creations/Changes or should it be Changes/Destructions/Creations? If the Sovereign's Gift is common in most campaigns, doesn't that hint that the order is out of whack? Fellow campaigner Bill convinced me otherwise. Here's Bill:
I think Creation should absolutely be easier than Destruction. While this sounds counterintuitive (I would find it easier to break a chair than create one for example), it is important to the avatar concept in my opinion. The Power of Cold should absolutlely find it easier to lower the temperature (a creation of cold) than raise it (a destruction of cold).
Likewise I think it makes sense for it to be easier to do Creations than Changes. It should be easier for the Power of Cold to simply create a block of ice than it is for the same Power to change an existing snowbank into a block of ice. Powers are essentially the arms of Creation, it's easy for them to create things. [Editor's emphasis.] Easier than for them to exert their will ont hings that already exist. (Naturally, this would lead most Powers to create blocks of ice instead of changing things into blocks of ice, but I don't see that as a problem.) (Also note the examples under Preservations. It's not just keeping things from being destroyed, it also includes strengthening your estate in something and other things that seem change-y to me.)
The following is based on the text of an e-mail I sent around to the gaming group this morning that may be of general interest:
We'd been having some trouble getting a handle on the miraculous abilities of our Power of Evolution. The following is much influenced by Bill's point that we've been seriously underselling the value of miracles of preservation.
Evolution is:
1) A process of variation through reproduction and environmental selection.
2) The change in genetic expression over generations.
One view of the GWB rules would hold that Dave and I would have to pick one of those ways of looking at Evolution and stick to it, but let's play a little fast and loose for now, since we've yet to decide that Evelyn is overpowered...
Humanity has evolved juicy forebrains that enable people to, among other things, override the fight-or-flight mechanism in their stubby little hindbrains. With a lesser preservation miracle, Evelyn could strengthen this effect in someone fleeing Godzilla, enabling the target to overcome panic. The target may still choose to run - say, to avoid being stampeded by the rest of the crowd - but it would be a decision, not an instinct. With a major preservation miracle, Evelyn could calm the entire crowd. In either case, the targets would retain their free will - in fact, they'd be better able to express it.
Humans evolved opposable thumbs, enabling them to grab and hold things. A lesser preservation would enable a shortstop to have an error-free game, or a waitress to avoid dropping Evelyn's dessert. A major preservation would let a wide receiver have a hall of fame career.
My dog has no nose - but other dogs have evolved a keen sense of smell. With a lesser preservation, an ordinary dog could track like a bloodhound and a bloodhound could achieve prodigious feats of tracking. With a major preservation, said bloodhound could lead you to any target in the world for which it had the scent.
Humans have evolved to pair-bond. With a major preservation, Evelyn could cure a husband's propensity to stray. It wouldn't necessarily make the husband happy.
Evolution works by sexual selection. With a lesser creation of evolution, Evelyn could make a woman decide to bear a man's child. He could make her choose to marry one of two suitors. But he couldn't make her love the one she chose.
With a lesser creation of evolution, he could make the woman conceive a genius . Or a child who sees in the ultraviolet spectrum. With a greater creation of evolution, she could bear a child who hears color.
Evolution works by passing on mutations. With an appropriate creation or destruction, Evelyn could bless or curse a man's sperm glands. With an appropriate major creation or destruction, he could bless or curse the sperm glands of an entire city. Evelyn could make the impotent fertile and the fertile impotent with creation and destruction miracles, respectively.
Cetaceans crawled back into the sea, swapping their arms and legs for flippers and flukes as they went. Evelyn could rescue beached whales with a lesser destruction of evolution, wiping out that which prevents them from crawling back into the water. He could do this in a showy fashion, by devolving their flukes temporarily back into limbs, or more elegantly, by destroying just that quality which makes the flukes unable to maneuver the whales across land. With a major destruction of evolution, he could make a whale permanently able to walk on its fins and tail AND also a poor swimmer. With a major change, he could make the whale truly amphibious - now its flippers and flukes are useful land and sea.
There is some evidence that cetaceans beach themselve as an act of volition. So Evelyn may need to do a lesser preservation on the original evolutionary impulse to return to the sea so that the beached whales want to crawl back into the ocean. Or he could to a major preservation, curing a particular pod of their desire to crawl onto shore for the rest of their lives.
Humans evolved a genetic capacity for language. A lesser preservation of evolution would enable someone to get the gist of a different tongue. A greater preservation would make them a polyglot.
o A preservation of evolution is anything that makes the target more like what its species has been becoming.
o A creation miracle is anything that fosters a new instance of an estate. In the case of evolution: new variation by sexual selection (or new sexual selection), a new change in genetic expression across generations, a new environmental selection for or against characteristics.
o A destruction of evolution is as likely to be the opposite of a preservation as it is the opposite of a creation. Just as Evelyn could calm a crowd in the presence of Godzilla, he could use destruction miracles to wipe out the forebrain's power to override the fight-or-flight mechanism. (Note that he couldn't make the crowd panic - that's Godzilla's job.)
I'm inclined to reclass the miracles of Evelyn's that we've jokingly referred to as "shapeshift other" as change miracles rather than creation miracles. Evolution is bound up with time. Humankind has evolved to have two human legs. Evelyn is not the Power of Legs, so he's not performing a miracle of the Leg estate. For Evelyn to give a man two goat legs instead is not an operation on the man's legs, but an operation on the process that led to human legs. That process manifestly exists at the time Evelyn decides the man should have goat legs. Evelyn is changing that process to result in goat legs rather than human legs.
Corollary: Man is a primate and his ancestors lived in trees. Evelyn could give a man something like ape legs with a destruction miracle - cheaper than the change miracle required to give him goat legs.
Hopefully, these examples and principles would make it easier to think of "Evelyn approaches" to in-game problems. For instance, it seems to me Evelyn could solve a lot of investigative problems by finding an appropriate animal and doing preservations on it. Evelyn can also bargain with particular mortals - offering them gifts of his estate if they help him, or blackmail mortals, offering them different gifts of his estate if they obstruct him.
Added some long-overdue links to the right-hand column, including the weblogs of some of my favorite folks in the hobby. (Industry, in Bruce Baugh's case.) I also removed the link to Locus Omphalos for now. This terrific site has been down for something like a week that I know of. I'll restore the link when it comes back up...wherever.
James Wallis of Hogshead has announced that Nobilis is going back for a second printing. What you need to know: "The second printing will have a crimson ribbon instead of a gold one."
(Link via the Nobilis Mailing List archives.)
I picked up The Game of Powers Friday. This is the first supplement, devoted to Nobilis LARP. I'm not a LARPer, so I was mostly interested in the section on mechanics changes for the LARP, called "dynamic Nobilis" in the supplement. As a low-mech guy, sometimes I like the LARP mechanics better than those in the corresponding tabletop version.
G0P's mechanics really are plausible replacements for the ones in Nobilis 2nd Ed. It adds a scale called "Triumph and Misery," which is basically degrees of success and failure. Every miracle has a score called Vital Force, which is just the character's attribute score plus any miracle points behind it. If Evelyn puts 2 DMPs into a domain miracle, the Vital Force is his Domain score of 5 plus the 2 DMPs = 7. You then compare that to the difficulty of the miracle. The difference between the Vital Force and the Difficulty is the degree of success or failure:
| Criterion | Result |
|---|---|
| Vital Force <= Diff.-6 | Misery |
| Vital Force <= Diff.-4 | Deep Failure |
| Vital Force <= Diff.-2 | Hard Failure |
| Vital Force <= Diff.-1 | Normal Failure |
| Vital Force = Diff. | Simple Success |
| Vital Force >= Diff.+1 | Normal Success |
| Vital Force >= Diff.+2 | Hard Success |
| Vital Force >= Diff.+4 | Deep Success |
| Vital Force >= Diff.+6 | Triumph |
The book lays out, with as much specificity as a game like this will bear, what the varying degrees of success mean.
Back to Evelyn and his Force 7 miracle. If his miracle were a Lesser Change, he'd achieve a Normal Success - Lesser Changes are level 6 miracles and he's putting 7 points into it. If his miracle were a Major Divination (Level 5), he'd have a Hard Success (7-5=2), and so on.
GoP also provides for shifts up and down for time spent or environmental factors, and gives you ways to apply your degrees of success - completeness, economy, beauty, duration etc. depending on the kind of miracle. I like it. Of course, the system bears a certain affinity with my Magic Formula for Everway, so I'm predisposed to like it. (The time scale in GoP looks an awful lot like what Amber Mailing List denizens refer to as the Gulick Scale, after Pattern theorist Jack C. Gulick.)
If anything, I think GoP could have taken the "Dynamic Nobilis" system one step further, by eliminating the distinction between "Minor" and "Major" miracles altogether. Nobilis users have already noticed that every Major miracle is exactly 3 levels higher than the Minor miracle. The things you can do with levels of success seem to provide for seamlessly turning a miracle of minor effect into a major one.
For instance, under the Dynamic rules, a Preservation miracle lets you "shift down" the time scale to find the new, "preserved" span of an object's days. The time scale runs
Seconds
Minutes
Hours
Days
Weeks
Months
Years
Centuries
Say you're the Power of Flyfishing and you want to keep a great mayfly hatch going. You can do a Lesser Preservation (Difficulty 3) on the hatch. A simple or normal success will shift the normal duration of a mayfly hatch - hours - one level "down." Now it will last days. A hard success or better (my emphasis) earns two shifts. Now it will last weeks. That's the best you can do with a Lesser Preservation.
So you can try a Greater Preservation (Difficulty 6). A simple or normal success earns you three shifts (to months), a hard success, four shifts, five for a deep success and six for a triumph.
The thing is, a normal success on a Greater Preservation (Force 7) looks an awful lot like a deep success on a Lesser Preservation (Force 7). Under the rules, a deep success Lesser doesn't get you anything more than a hard success lesser would, but I can't see any reason for that to be the case. And the pattern appears to hold for Creation, Destruction and Change miracles too. Arguably, a Major miracle is essentially a deep success on a minor miracle. It seems that, with a little jiggering of the Triumph and Misery scale, you could redo Miracles as follows:
| Difficulty | Miracle Type |
|---|---|
| 0 | Alarms (aka Estate-Driven Divinations |
| 1 | IGhost Miracles |
| 2 | Divinations |
| 3 | Preservations |
| 4 | Creations |
| 5 | Destructions |
| 6 | Changes |
Handle everything else with degrees of success. (Note: As written, a deep success is 4 points above simple success, while a major miracle is only 3 above a minor one, so treating major miracles as deep successes of minor ones would cost characters an extra force point. But the success tables could have been written so that that wasn't the case - or could be revised by Hollyhock Gods still...)
One important aspects of tabletop-rules Nobilis contests seems to be discarded in the dynamic rules. In the sidebar, Strategy in Miraculous Conflict (p. 163), Nobilis 2nd ed. advises
Whenever two miracles cancel out, one combatant gains a distinct advantage...For this reason, directly opposed miracles is never the preferred strategy for all parties in a miraculous conflict...Most miraculous combat, therefore, has one or both parties struggling to come up with clever indirect effects that thwart their assailant.
In other words, try to come up with ways to stop your opponent that use lower-level miracles and fewer MPs than he is using.
If I interpret the GoP correctly, Dynamic Nobilis makes this impossible:
When a character seeks to interfere with or oppose another character's action, this begins a contest. The miracles square off against one another. Accordingly, the newer miracle has difficulty equal to the higher of its natural difficulty and the old miracle's vital force.
(GoP p. 46.) That seems to mean you can never get away with using a lower-force miracle than your opponent, if you hope to stop your opponent, which strikes me as a measurable loss over the tabletop rules. Still, that has to be set against some measurable gains in clarity and usability.
The book itself, by the way, is quite attractive. It's paperback, 8.5" x 11", with a bronze sculpture of Ophelia straddling the spine. The full-page interior illustrations are no worse than the ones in the Great White Book, and probably, on balance, a little better. But not good enough to sway me from my conviction that Hogshead should use only photographs of sculpture for interior art as well as the covers.
Note to locals: There were copies at Game Parlor Friday. It costs $16.95 (80 pp.).
Based on some e-mail discussion, the following criticisms of the game have surfaced:
I disagree with 1 completely. Our own campaign has had, so far, but a single Excrucian breakthrough in a half-dozen stories. While the cosmology makes much of the Valde Bellum, it offers a lot of ideas for adventures unrelated or only tangentially related to the War.1) Not only does Nobilis require a specific world, it requires a specific PLOT. There is one and only one Nobilis campaign: In fact, not only is there only one Nobilis campaign, there's really only one Nobilis adventure: This week the Excrucians will try to destroy something. Your assignment will be to stop them.
2) The game supposedly involves powerful characters, but the background vitiates that power with the inhibiting effect of Lord Entropy and the Cammora. PCs internalize the prohibition on showy miracles and the apparent omnipresence of a secret society connected directly to the ruler of the earth. Result: PCs may be powerful, but they don't feel powerful.
3) It's just another dark myth magic realism game, a la World of Darkness/In Nomine etc, where the PCs fight an overwhelming force for the soul of all creation, fated to lose and able, at best, to delay the inevitable.
On point 3, I'm at a disadvantage. I've never played the World of Darkness games nor been inclined to. But I don't see anything in the rules that suggests that the Excrucians are fated to destroy Creation, nor even that they are more powerful than Creation's defenders.
Point 2 I'm inclined to accept. I've written previously of my increasing unease with the Entropy and Cammora parts of the background. (See Scottish Play.) In one of the first reviews of first-edition Nobilis on RPG.net, Kevin Maginn wrote
Having now played more than a half-dozen sessions of the game, I'm more convinced than ever that Maginn was right - in both directions: Entropy is obtrusive; and yet, the Windflower Law specifically is full of story-potential.Where would I be without a complaint? I have really only one: Lord Entropy. Entropy is the Big Bad Imperator in charge of our Earth. He makes the laws, he enforces the laws, and he's mean and tough and has a serious attitude problem. He's also a game mechanic. He's a deus ex machina for gamemasters who need a crutch to keep unruly players in line. Much like the various arbitrary and annoying rules of Immortal, Vampire's "Masquerade", and the Quaesitoris in Ars Magica, Lord Entropy is arbitrary authority to check the vast powers of the players; a beat-em-up stick for GMs who need to say to their players "Don't disrupt my plot by killing off NPCs or 'll sic Lord Entropy on you!" Admittedly, this is tempered by the author's keen sense of the legendary and beautiful and tragic; Entropy's first rule is "Thou shalt not love another," which all by itself suggests a thousand stories and plots to me.
How Nobilis users might deal with the problem - and how our group specifically might address it - will be something I hope to post about this week.
Amtrak found previously undetected cracks in a shock absorber bracket on two Acela Express locomotives and withdrew all the high-speed trains from service again yesterday.
does this mean that Tim's domain, vehicular accidents, is being nettled?
Time to break out the flowers, men, there's work to be done!
