This has always been my point when I’ve brought up the whole Science & Social Progress vs. Religious Right/Climate-Change-Denialist/etc issue. I have no problem with the Technocracy as bad guys – or that said bad guys include a vast array of corrupt empiricists; it was just that it ignored the socially regressive tools of control, which effectively demonized progressivism specifically by exclusion.

Which all adds up to why I love the Seers of the Throne as effectively executed bad guys with very human motivations & philosophies that make sense while still being clearly “the bad guys”.

I guess I’m curious to see how that translates mechanics-wise and fluff-wise, in your head. I assume that has something to do with why Entropy and Time appear to have been tied together to make Destiny? (Or I assume that’s what happened.) Obviously, if you want to focus on a journey of personal growth and change, messing around with Time machines is pretty much a distraction…

The Dirty Version is as much a parallel creative response than something designed to supersede the original game.

I think people should be less confident that they know *all about* the interaction between science, politics, religion and culture. They should think of the game in the context of self-criticism. They should avoid excessive structure, because that makes the game look contrived.

As you can see, Jess and I were both pretty concerned with the intersection between beliefs about the world and morality. I think this is definitely not given enough chatter.

Also: why did you save the Sons of Ether? Why two paradigms loosely attached to science?

Because they’re fun and I like the metaphysics I designed for them in SoE Revised. Anomalies in organization also feel more authentic, like the Traditions have an organic history.

Also: why did you save the Sons of Ether? Why two paradigms loosely attached to science?

I was always baffled by the Mage edition wars. It seemed obvious that the flexibility of the game was far more dramatic than the exact spot in that continuum that one or another edition hit. All three editions were fundamentally the same game – and all three were very, very good games – and I can’t think of a campaign I could run with one that I couldn’t run with the other two.

I ran some games where I scrambled up Technocracy and Tradition factions in order to get across the no-good-guy-ness of the (really “my”) setting. The one where the Syndicate was everyone’s enemy, and winning, was my favorite.

As for the system being messed up, some of the problems you list I kinda…well, I didn’t identify them as problems. For example, the fact that coincidental magic is less powerful than vulgar magic, and you face very few immediate consequences for vulgar magic, I saw as a good thing. All the consequences for vulgar magic didn’t come the first or second or third times you used it in a day, they came later down the road. Vulgar magic is a “push your luck” mechanic, not a “Dark Side taint” mechanic, if you take my meaning. I absolutely agree re: the weird difficulties of higher-ranked Effects, but, by sheer chance, managed to dodge it by having players (and pushing players) who put Arete at a higher priority than lots of high level spheres. With extra dice to throw at the tougher stuff when we got there (not to mention the bonus from using unneeded foci), the effect of the weird probabilities was lessened. It wasn’t until after I ended my last Mage campaign that I figured that out.

I especially like your second to last point, about the moral status of the factions in the game. I wish it had been made clearer through the texts of the games and supplements. (There’s a lot of things I found in Mage that others didn’t, that I wished would be made clearer.)

Let me expand a little on your comment, about gamers not recognizing the taste of sadism in authority. I think this comes not from a tone-deafness about sadism, but a complete lack of understanding of authority. In other words, when you know more about how the Empire operates than you do about what happens at your local City Hall, political material goes right over your head. I know when I started to learn how things actually work in (say) a regular ole government office, my approach to politics in gaming changed dramatically and gained a new depth and reach. I didn’t need caricature anymore – the real absurdities were enough to get me where I wanted to go.

Someone should be able to say “Hey, instead of sitting on the mountain to defy suffering we can give you a materialistic Pure Land where you will drop a layer of base unhappiness and concentrate on meaningful relationships.” Unfortunately, if you do that without creating a social context where this can happen you repeat to OoR’s mistake, where the Guild, et al is all, “Say, as the guy with all the money in this project, why are we just giving this away?” So everybody has to get a job and buy XBoxes to fight terror.

But I also think there is a certain amount of sadism in the exercise of authority that gamers aren’t comfortable with, and will only admit in fictive form — Star Wars and such. That’s where you get someone using a comparison to the Nazis to claim a faction is ridiculous even though the Nazis existed.

For paradigm, I’ve often thought that the practical drawback was losing flavour as you liberated yourself. I toyed with the idea of paradigm expansion instead of abandonment, where you’d grab cabal-mate foci and learn to work with them more effectively by seeing things their way.