King of Old School said:
You've already mentioned that you think Atlantis is on an even plane with space bats. Do you really not understand that not everyone agrees with your personal opinion? I don't take issue with your opinion, I take issue with your insistence that everybody (or even a substantial portion of everybody) in the world agrees with it.
I believe, and in my experience general wider opinion is with me, that having Atlantis as the root cause simply has so many cheesy intermingled references - unsuited to the direction Awakening seemed to be trying to be pushing - that it has an overall negative effect on the game, making the other problems with it seem even more problematic than they actually are. In tracking the reaction and debate in several other places as well as round-table talk the Atlantean 'nature' of Atlantis does seem a sticking point and the reaction is as divided - if not more so - than it was to Revised.
It has been brought up elsewhere though that the culture is somewhat different in the US with greater and lesser credibility being given to certain things and less to others. I would think that the pop culture problems around Atlantis would be worse in that case, not better, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility. That just makes the accusations against the game that it is too 'eurocentric' even more amusing
King of Old School said:
No. Kult's "sliding indicator" is not meaningfully different from nWoD's Morality track, it just uses a different scale... bigger numbers and a zero average, rather than a straight 1-10 (or 10-1) progression. It still uses the same system of objective morality (i.e. the Judeo-Christian one) to determine movement along the scale. The only real difference is that Kult ascribes insanity to either end of the spectrum -- being too good is just as nutty as being too evil. That certainly isn't the same thing as saying Kult ascribes "equal validity" to classical notions of good and evil, since the horror element of Kult is derived in large part from the extremely evil behaviours of its actors (to a degree that some would consider gratuituous and juvenile in places).
Kult doesn't start delving into real in game effects (apart from the ability to use ritual magic effectively) until points that would be pretty much off WoD's scale in either direction.
I found it more broadly defined and less restrictive than the WoD morality system in play - perhaps you're looking at a different edition?
You have a _somewhat_ valid point in comparing the two games - but a limited one. If one does treat Awakening as existing in a complete vaccuum then Atlantis is still ridiculous but the game is slightly less disappointing overall since it would exist without the expectations that it currently does, but Mage does NOT exist in a vacuum especially given the reinterpretations of the other games. Mage is the only one that lost the core of what it was and what made it a stand-out game before.
King of Old School said:
Now who's being disingenuous in their comparisons? Not everyone thinks mages should be completely divorced from morality (in either iteration of Mage), nor that morality is as subjective as reality in Ascension -- indeed, I've read a compelling argument that morality was the one thing in Ascension that was not utterly subjective, and was thus the point of the whole exercise. Certainly, Jhor was not divorced from an objective standard of behaviour... you deal out too much death, you go nuts. Incorporating notions of morality in Awakening just isn't the kind of break with precedent that selling Wushu as D&D would represent.
Any bad guy Mages you now create, or any who don't subscribe to conventional Judeo-Christian morality, be they even something so closely related to that mindset as islamic, will now be penalised. Is not the bargain with darkness for power a far more universal magical theme than Atlantis? Whether Faust or Loa or 'the dark side of the force' stories of evil magicians abound. This cripples them.
King of Old School said:
The existence of the methodology doesn't prove the existence of the claimed source, nor does it prove anything about its true nature. This is such an obvious point that I find it hard to believe you honestly missed it.
Its true that its more important to have 'facts' in interlinked or drop in games, be they LARP or tabletop, so that everyone is working on the same page. However, the default game has atlantean artefacts, atlantean ruins, codes, methodologies and innumerable other things. With the default setting as written Atlantis is pretty central and all but proven, all that is missing is direct or time-sensed memories of the time.
This might be a bad comparison but its like having all the evidence for evolution laid out directly in front of you, going against that requires a massive amount of stubbornness or faith and, in the case of magic in the game, no amount of faith or stubbornness will let you work magic any better, just as refusing to acknowledge evolution or genes and trying to geneer on pure faith by invoking the bible won't get you very far IRL.
King of Old School said:
Despite the umpteen number of times WW have referred to the new World of Darkness as a "toolkit for horror?" Oh dear, your bias is showing.
If we restrict the discussion purely to the corebook that would be true - albeit a toolkit missing most of the tools you might need. If you include any fatsplats it is no longer true in the same way that GURPS is a Toolkit but Transhuman Space is not.