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Spirit Tongue with a Death 1 option? Gnosis (2) + Spirit (2) + High Speech (2) = 6 dice, 2 successes As Thorn ascended the staircase, everything took on a deeper, more significant edge. Peering into the Twilight, she saw two realms at once, and her mind reeled a few seconds before she could...

Firmly agreed on the first point. As to the second, I may have missed my mark here, because I don't want to argue for any one interpretation of the word "roleplaying." It's many things to many people, and defining it narrowly shrinks the community, rather than strengthening it. I described my...

Of course I can have narrative balance in a game. I do it every Wednesday. That's my job as a GM, to finesse the game so that everyone has an equal share of the story, so that everyone feels like a main character. I don't force the players to do anything; I give everyone an equal opportunity...

Wow, you've managed to completely miss the point of what I was saying. I don't give a flying flumph about the kind of game balance that inspired 4th Edition. I'm talking about narrative balance. The way I play roleplaying games, the most important thing is to make sure everyone shares the...

You're looking at it from a game-mechanic perspective; "blocking" in improv is a narrative term. In improv, "blocking" doesn't mean "stopping someone from succeeding." It means shutting down their idea ("offer") for how a scene progresses, which usually results in stagnant scenes. In a...

The description for Spirit Tongue says it has an option to add in Death 1 to see ghosts better, so yes. As a general principle, if the spell has a written additional component a mage can use conjunctionally, that's always going to be an option. I'd be a jerk otherwise! :) I just want to avoid...

My favorite kind! Your explanation of how the spells affect supernatural templates makes sense, though.

Wait, I don't see where Life factors into it, if the spell affects a spirit. Not that it matters much, since no one is casting it right now :p

Since you have gnosis 3, you can combine two spells at a given time by increasing the dot requirement of both spells by one. Hence, if you want to combine Supernal Vision with Aura Perception or Third Eye, you could do it with Prime 2/Mind 2. You would use the lower of the two dice pools and...

I like the way the game Prey handled death, and I think it could be adapted to pen-and-paper, after a fashion. In Prey, the main character, Thomas, has the power to see and move through the spirit world. When he dies, he goes into a dreamy mini-game, in which he must shoot flying spirits with...

Following this advice is mandatory.

I found the relevant section on pages 128-129 of the core book. A mage that wishes to combine spells together must have 1 additional dot in each of the Arcana used, takes a -2 to the casting pool per spell over 1, and rolls the lowest pool out of all of the spells being combined. Additionally...

Wits (2) + Investigation (2) = 4 dice, Extended action (4 rolls), 5 successes The floorboards creaked as Gabriel stepped into the quiet, drafty sitting room that served as the first gallery of Cormant House's museum. There was an old upright piano with handwritten sheet music laid out in...

She's taking a -1 "unskilled" penalty, since she has no ranks in Empathy. One of the fiddlier rules in WoD, in my opinion, but it does tend to make skill ranks more valuable, which I think is a positive result. I'm thinking that when the Cormant House scene is over, everyone will have a...

Paranoia XP has a nice section on conditioning players, and their philosophy is similar. I think GMing techniques have evolved (which is not the same as improved) and branched off over the years, and there are now many methods employed to condition players to play the game well. Killing their...

Yeah, unfortunately. Cubicle 7 makes one of my favorite games, Victoriana, which I'm using right now. If it's anything like Victoriana, the Doctor Who RPG from them will probably be neat and full of good story ideas, but a little complex rules-wise. Man, if I keep promoting Cubicle 7 games...

Not to direct you guys too much, but those of you with Spirit 2 or greater can cast Spirit Tongue on those without ranks in Spirit, if you like. In most cases, you can upgrade a "self" spell to touch with 1 more dot in the Arcanum. You can also take a dice pool penalty to increase the range...

Jeremiah walked discreetly out of the dining room, past the staircase, and into the antechamber. Outside, he saw Arathnos having a cigarette, shivering in the cold New England November. Lucky break. He ducked into the gift shop, and pulled a cherry wood cylinder out of his jacket pocket. 4...

Merry Christmas!