Quote from: phydeaux on January 16, 2023, 04:06:38 PM
M20A is so woke that I'm a little disturbed they managed to publish it without cognitive dissonance sneaking in and triggering a "Are we the baddies?" moment. Don't they flat-out describe the Technocracy as "The White Menace" for some insane reason? It's so ludicrous that I have trouble believing I didn't hallucinate that part.

They're not even consistent. Another book said it was pro-vaccine and anti-fake news. Also, they're apparently not even the bad guys anymore?

Fuck it. I can't be bothered to keep up with this stupid shit.

Quote from: Zelen on January 16, 2023, 12:20:21 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on December 30, 2022, 07:39:13 AM
It was also more complicated than that because none of this stuff happened in a vacuum. 90s liberals were also reacting to the culture of the 80s and earlier where the Christian conservative Moral Majority tried to impose their values on everyone else, trying to ban everything, branding it as Satanic or whatnot. As well as the rampant homophobia that was going on, with gay teens committing suicide or ending up in the streets cuz their Christian parents wouldn't accept them, and a bunch of other stuff that was going on culturally at the time.

I don't want to derail the thread with politics too much but this type of comment is simply false and slanderous. The sociological data is in, and gay teens aren't any less suicidal today. In fact, rate of suicidality of these groups has actually increased over time. The issue is, and always was, that these people suffer from a variety of mental illnesses. Encouraging it has only made the problem worse.

The people pushing this false meme, (including WhiteWolf at the time) were never interested in truth or actually helping people who need help, they were only interested in bludgeoning "wrongthinkers" and blaming them for things that aren't in their control to begin with.

The fact that people still kill themselves today does not logically follow that therefore they did not face persecution in the past. A LOT of people from every demographic kill themselves today, not just gay people. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in some civilized nations. Suicide is a lot more complicated issue than "they killed themselves because they were gay, and therefore mentally defective", like only gay people kill themselves.

We live in a spiritually and morally bankrupt society, devoid of purpose, where people in power get away with everything and things appear to be getting worse every day. Of course people are gonna kill themselves!

None of this proves that anything I said isn't true.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 16, 2023, 05:16:59 PM
They're not even consistent. Another book said it was pro-vaccine and anti-fake news. Also, they're apparently not even the bad guys anymore?

Fuck it. I can't be bothered to keep up with this stupid shit.

For mage? I wasn't aware of that one. That doesn't even make any sense. At that point it's breaking its own setting rules so blatantly that it's no longer a RPG. It's some creepy, pushy leftoid politics primer that you're supposed to act out. The concept of 'fake news' doesn't even have any meaning in a game that's about consensual reality, and fuck no. Most mages are not going to be pro anything you inject into your body from a syringe. In proper MtA, that needle would probably be filled with stuff so vile that it would make the devil say, "Bro."

Quote from: King Tyranno on January 16, 2023, 02:08:02 PMIt's been my experience that a lot of nerds are very insecure and frankly have issues with arrested development. Wokeness allowed them to indulge their pettier sides with no consequences. But if I'm being honest, pre wokeness the nerds always wanted to bully people. Assert that they are mentally superior to all others. It's just nowadays the nerds can be condescending and bully people and actually get praise for it publicly. Things like being anti corporate, anti establishment, anarchist, hippy and whatever else was just a way to assert their superiority due to aforementioned insecurity. And they are eternal victims so they're never wrong and it's everyone else's fault.

This isn't untrue, but I'd argue it's more universal than any one subculture; we all tend to possess more insecurity than it is socially rewarding to admit to, we all have the drive to attain positions of ego-reinforcing visible superiority, we are all excessively sensitive to anyone who appears not to value the criteria by which we judge superiority, we all fight the temptation to gratify personal grudges through the exercise (sometimes licit, sometimes abusive) of whatever superiority we acquire, and we all share the incentive to disclaim responsibility for our own abuses by excusing them merely as justified responses to prior worse abuse (because any abuse that happened to us was always worse, ipso facto).

All that changes between communities of differing times and places is the mode and scope of that process. Part of the difficulty with Wokism in its current form is that it is so wedded to the Marxist who, whom? paradigm that it cannot process the idea of moral criteria independent of one's position on the privilege ladder -- indeed, it actively refuses to admit to the possibility of such because it senses, not incorrectly, that any application of such a moral criterion could only hinder it in its objectives.

Quote from: phydeaux on January 16, 2023, 09:11:00 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 16, 2023, 05:16:59 PM
They're not even consistent. Another book said it was pro-vaccine and anti-fake news. Also, they're apparently not even the bad guys anymore?

Fuck it. I can't be bothered to keep up with this stupid shit.

For mage? I wasn't aware of that one. That doesn't even make any sense. At that point it's breaking its own setting rules so blatantly that it's no longer a RPG. It's some creepy, pushy leftoid politics primer that you're supposed to act out. The concept of 'fake news' doesn't even have any meaning in a game that's about consensual reality, and fuck no. Most mages are not going to be pro anything you inject into your body from a syringe. In proper MtA, that needle would probably be filled with stuff so vile that it would make the devil say, "Bro."

Found it!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354689/M20-Technocracy-Reloaded

QuoteWelcome to the Future

As the third decade of the 21st century dawns, the Technocratic Union stands on the cutting edge of a future imperiled. As science and technology draw humanity closer than ever before, certain factions within the Masses display gross negligence, undermining the Union's work and endangering the world for shortsighted gains. Despite global telecommunications, new frontiers in virtually every field of study, and an understanding of the universe only dreamed of by earlier generations, humanity faces threats on all sides.

Can You Save It?

Climate change threatens to destroy life as we know it. Religious fundamentalism breeds terror around the globe. Diseases, once eradicated in the developed world through vaccination, have returned due to antivaxxer movements. Totalitarian, nationalist governments rise as the Masses succumb to fear of the other. The world stands on the brink of destruction, and it is up to the agents and operatives of the Technocratic Union to save it...or be its ultimate destruction.

OMG, they're actually trying to make the factions morally gray now? That's just completely antithetical to the original themes of the game when it first started. The technos were originally supposed to be the villains. Sure, individual agents might be good people. Most of them might be good people. But they're misguided at best and don't know it.

It feels like they're trying to ape the moral grayness from Awakening, but here it's really obnoxious because they tie it into modern Western politics when it's clear they think the left is perfectly right.

I vastly prefer Pundit's take on it in Invisible College, not the least because he portrays the Enlightenment as a good thing rather than "science bad and wrong!" and I can use Assassin's Creed analogies to explain the cliffnotes. If I was writing a magic-themed rpg, then I'd depict the super scientists as good guys trying to protect magical creatures from big pharma, the new inquisition, and satanic warlocks.

Quote from: phydeaux on January 16, 2023, 04:06:38 PM
M20A is so woke that I'm a little disturbed they managed to publish it without cognitive dissonance sneaking in and triggering a "Are we the baddies?" moment.

MtAs was always the game of "marginalized people punching up and sticking it to The (White) Man". 

Problem (for WW/OP) was it was also a game that attracted a lot of smart people who knew the real world organizations the Traditions were based on were more sexist, homophobic, and generally as bad as the enemies they fought.  But the publishers wanted this to be a game of White Hats fighting Black Hats, no matter how much the fanbase appreciated things like medicine, computers, democratic laws, commerce, etc.

In an ideal world, the Trads vs. Technos should've been a battle of Gray Hat vs Gray Hat, with Nephandi as Black Hats and Marauders as those magi of the other factions who had broken their relationship between themselves and the Consensus (in whatever form that uniquely ended up being).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 17, 2023, 09:48:05 AM
Found it!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354689/M20-Technocracy-Reloaded

QuoteWelcome to the Future

As the third decade of the 21st century dawns, the Technocratic Union stands on the cutting edge of a future imperiled. As science and technology draw humanity closer than ever before, certain factions within the Masses display gross negligence, undermining the Union's work and endangering the world for shortsighted gains. Despite global telecommunications, new frontiers in virtually every field of study, and an understanding of the universe only dreamed of by earlier generations, humanity faces threats on all sides.

Can You Save It?

Climate change threatens to destroy life as we know it. Religious fundamentalism breeds terror around the globe. Diseases, once eradicated in the developed world through vaccination, have returned due to antivaxxer movements. Totalitarian, nationalist governments rise as the Masses succumb to fear of the other. The world stands on the brink of destruction, and it is up to the agents and operatives of the Technocratic Union to save it...or be its ultimate destruction.

OMG, they're actually trying to make the factions morally gray now? That's just completely antithetical to the original themes of the game when it first started. The technos were originally supposed to be the villains. Sure, individual agents might be good people. Most of them might be good people. But they're misguided at best and don't know it.

It feels like they're trying to ape the moral grayness from Awakening, but here it's really obnoxious because they tie it into modern Western politics when it's clear they think the left is perfectly right.

Mage was my JAM back in the day. It hit me at just the right age, gave me a lot to think about, and left a lasting impression in how I view things. I probably spent more time considering the ideas and implications of MtA when I was a kid than was strictly healthy. Between tabletop and the MUSH/MUX scene, I was probably tuned in to Mage about 7 days a week. Ridiculous looking back, but hey.

I'm actually alright with them trying to present each faction from a, "Everyone thinks they're the hero." perspective. That's fine and I prefer that to having one dimensional moustache-twirlers in a game about subjectivity. The irony is their description of the Technocracy is virtually indistinguishable from a typical lefty NPC talking point. At least in some part, this is due to the impossible task of trying to write an MtA game in an era where they "Fucking Love Science!" and are treating it like a religion. It's actually interesting to think about, because it boils down to the new left trying to update a game written by the old left, and they've changed so much in the last 30 years that their views are both completely incompatible and rigid.

The modern leftist's viewpoint is entirely too rigid to competently operate in an environment like Mage, where literally everything is subjective. Mages seek truth, but there is no truth save for the truth they invent. That was always the core message I took from Mage, and while that matched up well enough with a 90s liberal mindset, it's completely incompatible with the new breed of left-leaning thought which engages in fucking purity purges.

I find it a little distressing that no one involved seems to have the self-awareness to realize something is wrong when their modern viewpoints absolutely align with the villains of their own game. Then again, this is the same crowd who thinks Orcs are good, so siding with the bad guys is nothing new.

I don't agree with the whole "the truth is whatever you want it to be." That kind of denial of reality has led to the current lunacy in leftist circles. The game was always designed to reflect leftist attitudes about reality being whatever they want it to be, and we've seen where that led.

I prefer something more along the lines of "if you could change reality, then how far should you go?" Power corrupts and all that.

I've been tinkering with an urban fantasy setting where the temptation and corruption of reality warping power is an omnipresent danger for all magical people. You would think that there'd be a secret cabal of magical people controlling world affairs, but here that isn't the case. The reason why is because eventually magical people lose interest in Earth and decide to fuck off to their own personal isekai fantasies where they don't have to worry about dealing with real challenges. Real people have free will and opinions, they don't want to be your mindlessly devoted catgirl fuck slaves on your secret rape ranch, and it's just too damn hard to spend time imposing your totalitarian dictatorship when you can just make a fake reality that caters to your delusions. Very few people are able to resist the allure of becoming wireheads when given the chance.

In other words, the ultimate fate of mages isn't archmastery: it's becoming the gentry. Hopefully you'll get that reference, but if you don't that's fine too.

And yes, this is deliberately misanthropic social commentary.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 17, 2023, 11:22:32 AMYou would think that there'd be a secret cabal of magical people controlling world affairs, but here that isn't the case. The reason why is ...it's just too damn hard to spend time imposing your totalitarian dictatorship when you can just make a fake reality that caters to your delusions. Very few people are able to resist the allure of becoming wireheads when given the chance.

The interesting element of this approach is that it suggests the really dangerous mages would actually be the ones with the persistence, dedication to a greater ideal, patience, and perspective necessary to stay the course on manifesting their visions. In other words, the ones who are legitimately in it for a cause they truly believe in rather than, at bottom, mere self-gratification of power -- the people we would normally want to think of as the "good" guys.

(C.S. Lewis points out this paradox in The Screwtape Letters when his devil Screwtape observes, somewhat exasperatedly, that to be truly and effectively wicked a man needs at least some virtue as well ("What would Attila have been without his courage...?"), and since the devils cannot really produce or control virtue they are always forced to work with tools prone to turning in their hands.)

There's also the fact that humans who exist for too long without experiencing significant, personally meaningful challenges tend to get bored. So unless it's a condition of these personal otherworlds that mages who disappear into them can't come back, another group of the really dangerous mages would be the ones who finally outgrow them and return to Earth ready to deal with stuff that will actually resist their will.

Mages were assholes, every last one of them.  The Traditions couldn't give a shit about the rest of humanity, they were just clawing at the power they'd lost and trying to get back on top.  The Technocracy didn't give a shit about the rest of humanity either, they were fighting to stay on top.  In each case it was a big case of "fuck you got mine", just couched in trappings of how their side was the side who wanted the best for people.  If the Traditions won the war, a week later they'd be off in their golden towers and floating castles and the unawakened humans would all be enslaved just as bad or worse than they fared with the Technocracy ascendant.  Both groups were better than the Nephandi solely by merit of not wanting the world to be devoured by the Wyrm, but none of them would be your friend if you bumped into them in the street.

Quote from: Valatar on January 17, 2023, 03:32:57 PMThe Traditions couldn't give a shit about the rest of humanity, they were just clawing at the power they'd lost and trying to get back on top.  The Technocracy didn't give a shit about the rest of humanity either, they were fighting to stay on top.

Well, that was the tragedy of both factions, in that you really could see the classic arc play out even in their own self-interested reporting of their histories: They started as movements which became businesses, and then eventually degenerated into rackets, the first of which was overthrown by a more successful movement and is now trying to move against the successor racket.

Both also had the advantage that they were speaking to real needs of the people supporting them: the Traditions for spiritual meaning and purpose ("I want to matter to the universe, to make a difference"), the Technocracy for material comfort and prosperity ("I want the universe to be a better place to live in"). The Marauders and the Nephandi were both attempts to bail out of this paradigm: the Marauders by saying, "Purpose is meaningless, so embrace randomness", the Nephandi by saying, "Comfort and suffering are both meaningless, so embrace oblivion".

I would have been interested to see Mage written as a game about the idea of resolving lesser conflicts as alliances against greater dangers, where the goal is ultimately for the Traditions and the Technocracy to unite and produce something better than either, but picking any one "story arc" for that setting might reasonably have been criticized as too limiting.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 17, 2023, 02:42:39 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 17, 2023, 11:22:32 AMYou would think that there'd be a secret cabal of magical people controlling world affairs, but here that isn't the case. The reason why is ...it's just too damn hard to spend time imposing your totalitarian dictatorship when you can just make a fake reality that caters to your delusions. Very few people are able to resist the allure of becoming wireheads when given the chance.

The interesting element of this approach is that it suggests the really dangerous mages would actually be the ones with the persistence, dedication to a greater ideal, patience, and perspective necessary to stay the course on manifesting their visions. In other words, the ones who are legitimately in it for a cause they truly believe in rather than, at bottom, mere self-gratification of power -- the people we would normally want to think of as the "good" guys.

(C.S. Lewis points out this paradox in The Screwtape Letters when his devil Screwtape observes, somewhat exasperatedly, that to be truly and effectively wicked a man needs at least some virtue as well ("What would Attila have been without his courage...?"), and since the devils cannot really produce or control virtue they are always forced to work with tools prone to turning in their hands.)

There's also the fact that humans who exist for too long without experiencing significant, personally meaningful challenges tend to get bored. So unless it's a condition of these personal otherworlds that mages who disappear into them can't come back, another group of the really dangerous mages would be the ones who finally outgrow them and return to Earth ready to deal with stuff that will actually resist their will.

I imagine the otherworlds operate like video game/porn addiction except they're no longer bound by the laws of physics in their pursuit of pleasure. Including time, so they have an eternity to mutate physically and mentally. Whatever they've become now is a Warhammer chaos daemon, not something recognizable as having once been human. Or a corpse universe from Midnight World rpg. Imagine the most horrifying analogy you can think of because I'm not sure whether you'll understand the pop culture references I make.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 17, 2023, 04:16:49 PMWhatever they've become now is a Warhammer chaos daemon, not something recognizable as having once been human.

Which makes total sense as a possible effect of becoming god of your own reality -- which, I have to admit, I always found horrifying as an idea too, especially on finding out that the "End Times" MAGE book Ascension explicitly describes this as one of the possible resolutions for the World of Darkness: every single living human being Ascends to become god of their own reality.

But even the Chaos gods of Warhammer eventually wanted back into the mortal plane. The problem, of course, was that if they ever actually succeeded that was basically the end of the game, so the people the PCs had to fight were the servants, cultists and summoners rather than the actual greater-scope villain.

It sounds like in your world, ironically, magic would only be part of covert power structures insofar as the people using it still valued magic itself more as a means than an end, and if the nature of magic is itself to be a fundamentally addictive power that eventually becomes its own end, the paradox is that the people really in charge of the Conspiracy pyramids would be the Muggles who knew how to manipulate wizards through purely non-magical means, and how to eliminate them when they were becoming uncontrollable.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 17, 2023, 03:48:57 PM

Quote from: Valatar on January 17, 2023, 03:32:57 PMThe Traditions couldn't give a shit about the rest of humanity, they were just clawing at the power they'd lost and trying to get back on top.  The Technocracy didn't give a shit about the rest of humanity either, they were fighting to stay on top.

Well, that was the tragedy of both factions, in that you really could see the classic arc play out even in their own self-interested reporting of their histories: They started as movements which became businesses, and then eventually degenerated into rackets, the first of which was overthrown by a more successful movement and is now trying to move against the successor racket.

Both also had the advantage that they were speaking to real needs of the people supporting them: the Traditions for spiritual meaning and purpose ("I want to matter to the universe, to make a difference"), the Technocracy for material comfort and prosperity ("I want the universe to be a better place to live in").

But it seems to me that much as Valatar says, neither the Traditions or Technocracy actually cared about the mass of humanity. That was very much my impression of the original Mage: the Ascension. The Traditions wanted *themselves* to matter to the universe, but they weren't interested in empowering or enlightening others. The Technocracy likewise only wanted power for themselves, and weren't really trying to protect or care for the masses.

In general, the whole cosmology of M:tA is baselessly anti-science, where scientists in there are trying to suppress the truth rather than reveal it - which is the opposite of science in the real world.

I was much more partial to the split of C. J. Carella's GURPS Voodoo, which I thought had a much more interesting handling of real-world magical traditions - where different traditions had their flaws, but those flaws were connected to more real-world history.

Quote from: jhkim on January 17, 2023, 05:10:01 PMThe Traditions wanted *themselves* to matter to the universe, but they weren't interested in empowering or enlightening others. The Technocracy likewise only wanted power for themselves, and weren't really trying to protect or care for the masses.

I think we were certainly meant to take away, as an ongoing realization, that neither faction was as altruistic as it presented itself, true. But that doesn't mean either group's altruism was entirely a lie, either. The Order of Reason's declaration of war at Mistridge was never presented as anything other than a conscious and sincere intent to improve the lot of humanity in general, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are usually depicted as having been wildly successful in at least one dimension of that goal. Similarly, however real the self-interest the Traditions have in not being exterminated and regaining their power from the "old days", there is a real and valid case for their fundamental claim: that the technological and material comfort of the Technocracy's world, and its rigid, organizational complexity, have left many humans feeling purposeless, impotent and irrelevant, and that Awakened enlightenment and magick is a birthright which was forcefully and unjustly denied them. However corrupt and venal people in authority on either side might be, the expectation is that the PCs are always among the "good ones", the ones who sincerely mean better and want to help others (however they understand those terms).

It occurs to me now that both sides in that conflict, due to the very nature of magick in the game, exemplify a particular feature of Woke critical discourse, which is: There is no point trying to engage with a system so definitionally rigged against you that it will not even admit your desired goals are valid. So that is one way in which Mage was very definitely a precursor of Woke attitudes; Mage magic is the ultimate form of "when you aren't allowed to win the game, flip the table" protest.