Wealth (Resources) and Mages

[Snakesandsuns]

Dearest Fellows,

How do you handle the resource merit in your mage games from both a player and game master? For when dealing with individuals that can simply conjure up what they need from thin air, foretell a future financial boon, or any number of tool/wealth creation tricks the merit itself seems lackluster except for roll playing reasons and back story. This mind you is a very good reason to have the merit! However, compared to other things to spend your experience on it seems lack luster compared to say having a magically bound spirit or knowing a magical martial art.

I plan personally to use it as a signifier of class and comfort. That those with actual earned wealth or that have invested their magical earnings into actual sustainable wealth production don’t need to fly be their pants and have significantly more comfort. Also that they can afford to leave town and not worry about payments and collectors and such if they are trapped in a time bubble in an ancient ruin. It still seems silly though to worry about at all. I had the same problem with Changeling (1e, having looked at 2e yet) when the book talked about poverty but the reality is you could just make a simple contract and be rolling in cash.

So going back to the first question, how is resources dealt with in your Mage game?

[mcgonigle]

So. Either drop the shit, so we can move on, or I don't know.. at least own up to it? Ask around. I can keep going at this for at least another 10 or 20 pages. If you actually care about a good discussion, I've said plenty of things we could be talking about instead of your desperate attempts to save face you can't possibly succeed at.

No, I quite believe it, and it's obviously clear that there is no way we are going to be able to have a substantive discussion, because the main thing your 'amazing' arguments have convinced me of that you are everything you have tried to portray me as and more (Liker half the issues on style you are objecting to me raising you introduced). I'm not prepared to wade through your vitriol, the constant personal attack for the quality of discourse you are capable of.

So Well Done! You have convinced me of one thing!

[Heavy Arms]

The origin of formating issues was trying to use your original wording like you asked, and often needing to paste in multiple other posts while writing to follow your arguments.

I do this all the time without any formatting issues, as do many other posters. I'd have to guess you're using a secondary place to copy things to, and then copying back, rather than just opening a new window to quote another post and copy and paste that into your current main post. Or just use a plain text secondary that doesn't impart formatting. Also, it doesn't explain that lack of line breaks between paragraphs.

So the general problem with this debate is that any time you misinterpret me, which you are doing constantly stripping all context to score cheap points, it's my fault but if I can't get a paragraph of meaning out of a sentence it's also my fault (and I am a lying asshole because of it). Yet you don't seem to be even able to acknowledge it when it clearly happens.

So, here's the thing?

I've shown, repeatedly, how you've misrepresented things, shift goal posts, and what not. Your response is simply to accuse me of the same thing, but you never actual back it up.

With the waiter thing? I quoted how you directly said one thing in the first post, and then when I followed the CONTEXT of what you said, you accuse me of bad posting because I didn't "follow" the [b]THING YOU'RE NOW SAYING YOU MEANT THAT WASN'T ACTUALLY THERE BEFORE[b],

In fact, you're doing it again with the "survival" thing. You're getting pissy at me, not because I have any issues with the context of the things in this conversation, but because I'm not following the shit going on in your own head that you're not saying. Look at your own phrasing here:

Yes it was that was utterly part of the conversation I was trying to have, I’m sorry you missed that.

I can't miss WHAT YOU NEVER FUCKING SAID Either show me where you said it, or stop this bullshit.

Seriously stop with the constant ad homimen attacks.

Stop trying this nonsense of, "I'm being a perfect posted no matter all the bad shit you're call me out on, stop being mean to me about it!"

But in that post I’m NOT complaining about summarising people as millionaires.

Yeah, you were. It was a minor tangent.

You really seem to be struggling with this idea that you can make side points that I object to, even if they're not the main point of a passage. So you're circling around trying to claim what you said wasn't what you said, rather than either defending what you said or moving on because it wasn't important and you might have been better off not bothering with the side tangent.

So if you followed the flow of the argument, I didn’t think millionaire 1 worked as a resources 1 character, and then I gave an example of the level of duality I would think might be closer. But that person doesn’t have net assets worth a million

And I've more than decently demonstrated that 1 works as a Resources 1 character. You have no substantive objections, you're just declaring it wrong so you can be right. Hence your example is meaningless to the CONTEXT of the conversation.

If you can prove what my Resources 1 millionaire examples (yes there are examples) are actually not valid, do it. Though I think you would have already if you could. Just saying, "They should be Resources 2 or 3 because I say so," means you're misrepresenting my examples, lying about the conversation, and in general being an ass about it all.

It's also a pretty stupid argument to say, "This is what I think a resources 1 millionaire should look like, but they aren't actually a millionaire like your examples."

You don’t respond to the argument,...

Make an actual argument to respond to.

(That I POINT out you have misinterpreted).

Pointing at words and shouting that they're being misinterpreted doesn't demonstrate that's the case. Esp. from someone that claims reading about making a bit of extra money off of cash tips as trying to make small bits of extra money add up is clearly misinterpreting the point that you meant was get one giant cash tip.

Then when I start talking about your real life example as if they were a character in a game, your counter point is they aren’t.

Because the other course is to let you assert negative things about a real person to make your weak claims about a game. As I stated, they're a real person I used to show how this can look, because it's a real example not something just made up for the debate. Turning him into a character so you can, effectively, claim he was being stupid with his money by not having Resources 2-3 on the spot according to your no-back-up-by-anything stance on the matter isn't something I was interesting in getting into... but here we are now.

And, of course, there's no way to translate this into issues like XP, because XP doesn't exist IRL.

This bit:

The additional options that gives them, that aren’t paid for in exp, which you clearly regard as a large issue.

Is exactly why it shouldn't go there.

I posted a good faith account of what I had understood from what you said...

I. Don't. Believe. You.

And you're doing nothing to convince me that I'm wrong to mistrust you in this. You're not reacting like someone that made a serious gaff in how they represented what someone else said, you're acting like someone that meant precisely to misrepresent it, and are trying to come off as not having done a bad thing.

See, you don't do the whole, "You: X, Me: Y" repeat thing, to get clarity. You ask if you want clarity. You say, "Hey, this is what I think you're saying, is that accurate?" If you're not sure, when I react rather pissed to what you said, you don't double down for a few posts, you stop and reset. Trying to reset way later down the line leaves a bunch of doubling down to make your reset look as disingenuous as I think it is.

If you haven’t communicated your thought process correctly, me posting what I understood from your argument isn’t lying.

Except, I did express my thought process in a fashion that communicates what I said the first time. You, as you continually bitch about me doing even though it's just handwaving and vague accusations, literally cut meaningful words out of my statement and now you're blaming me for your conscious decision to alter what I said in a fashion that changed its meaning.

[quote[(Also I would say there are three cases of that in that post if you had ACTUALLY followed it.)[/quote]

I followed it, there weren't. Again it's just, "You did it, but I can't say how!" Sou yeah, more lying and hypocrisy, try again.

It's really simple:

1) It's clear your points on this were shit.

2) It's clear your response to being called out on this is shit.

3) You're going to keep doubling down on being shitty.

4) I'm too stubborn to stop any time soon.

So. Either drop the shit, so we can move on, or I don't know.. at least own up to it? Ask around. I can keep going at this for at least another 10 or 20 pages. If you actually care about a good discussion, I've said plenty of things we could be talking about instead of your desperate attempts to save face you can't possibly succeed at.

Like those two sections, yes I was confused by the 1), because you hadn’t included anything which I could see that relates to the original context (The quoted text doesn’t even create the original context).

So, here's the rough part for me. You constantly accuse me of missing the flow of the conversation... but you're the one forgetting what we've said and you're throwing it at me for not quoting three posts worth of stuff on one tangent.

Yes, the lack of a joiner was confusing, I'll own up to that on my part, as I already did. That doesn't put you in the right though.

Yes it was that was utterly part of the conversation I was trying to have, I’m sorry you missed that.

So... tip? Say things you mean to say.

So actually my intention was not to dismiss your two people worth millions point, it was the starting point about talking about the false dichotomy you introduce of either "if you want to live as a hermit in the woods" or as "a person of means."

Except you did want to dismiss the two people worth a million point because as you've repeated in this post, you think one of them is not valid.

You're now conflating two different topics too. It wasn't a starting point, it was something you threw in that didn't ever relate to your at the time acknowledgement of it being two extremes.

As for the "false dichotomy," part? "A person of means," does connote wealthy, but not one specific value of wealthy. It's a bit of an excluded middle, but it's not a dichotomy. Presenting two options to illustrate a point isn't inherently claiming they're the only two options (esp. examples at different ends of a spectrum). As I've said, repeatedly and to your great avoidance no matter how much you claim to value my further posting having clarity, frequency is a big consideration here.

All points you utterly ignored in your next post, but that’s why I brought it up.

I didn't respond to it, because there wasn't anything I thought needed to be said about it. Do you need a pat on the back about it?

The Waitress example is meant to be somewhere in the middle.

I did focus in here, because it's a bad example. Also why is it a waitress now? I don't really care about that for anything more than consistency.

Like I missed the nuance of your original post, but you utterly failed to grasp what I was trying to say in that post.

Show me where I failed to grasp something instead of just saying it.

Also, maybe... just maybe, consider that you had three paragraphs with no central thesis, so there wasn't one specific point to focus in on. That I focused on what I wanted instead of what you wanted, when you're saying three different things without any connections built up between them. Not because I didn't grasp something, or ignored something, but because I picked up on what I felt was important to actually dig into.

Another example of this you then start talking about Resource 5 purchases when you in response to a paragraph that is talking entirely about resource 2 or 3 purchases (so you “introduced that issue yourself.”).

Bullshit. You asked an open ended question about living comfortably off of a single big windfall of money, which I address rather fully. Then I addressed your answer which lacks nuance because it asserts that, basically, everyone who gets a ton of money suddenly invests it properly to have a steady flow of income that would be easy to model with Resources 2-3. You weren't talking entirely about Resources 2 or 3, that was a parenthetical comment in one sentence. It was about you asserting a specific level of windfall that absolutely leads having a specific lifestyle (mixing narrative and mechanical representations), and now you're hypocritically getting in my face about a lack of nuance for ADDING NUANCE to your own absolute statement.

Also, seriously, you seem to have a very strong opinion about how $1 million translates into Resources 2-3 directly. Where, exactly does this come from because you're attached to the idea really hard.

Yes, you have increased the scale that changes the situation, and it’s even in the text you actually quoted.

No it's not.

You... really might need to proof read your posts more. You're asserting a lot of stuff as stuff you said despite... not saying it.

Depending on the odds it doesn't, like it doesn't matter if I play the lottery a every week my odds of winning a 6 figure sum aren't decent at any point.

No, that's not how statistics work.

First "running into complications in an RPG when you open the door wide open for the GM to let them loose," is a lot more of a common thing than winning the lottery. Trying to claim that getting spotted by other mages as you bilk sleepers for cash is something in the order of 1:100,000,000 or worse is nonsensical.

Second, you can't win the lottery that way because you're not doing it frequently enough. There's a whole mathematical formula for "beating" the lottery for how many tickets you need to buy between drawings, where you'll actually statistically make money as reliably as investing. The reason nobody does it, is because the starting capital to do so, and the logistical nightmare of trying, leave you with far less net gain than those equally reliable things like putting it into a good stock portfolio. A mathematician actually did it once in the US just to prove you can, and why nobody should bother trying.

Once you introduce shifting the odds, you can effectively declare it any time the party uses magic at all

NO YOU CAN'T

How are you still getting this spell wrong?

I'm honestly not sure exactly what angle you're going for here, but every interpretation of these words is both not how Shifting the Odds works (if you're talking about the ST using the players using the spell to introduce antagonists, then the "any time the party uses magic at all," clause makes no sense, if you're talking about an NPC using it, the PCs using magic is far too vague for NPCs to home in on anyone "Who's the nearest person who can use Shifting the Odds for me? Oh wait, me," and if the concern is just the ST wanting to introduce NPCs... you don't need Shifting the Odds to do that).

[mcgonigle]

The origin of formating issues was trying to use your original wording like you asked, and often needing to paste in multiple other posts while writing to follow your arguments. So if you stop sub quoting individual lines, like I asked, so you can attack a strawman, that won’t happen. Seriously your debating style is incredibly difficult to follow at points.

So the general problem with this debate is that any time you misinterpret me, which you are doing constantly stripping all context to score cheap points, it's my fault but if I can't get a paragraph of meaning out of a sentence it's also my fault (and I am a lying asshole because of it). Yet you don't seem to be even able to acknowledge it when it clearly happens.

Seriously stop with the constant ad homimen attacks.

Which doesn't add any context. A third owner doesn't impact my examples because the third owner doesn't contradict the validity of the others. Nor does it change that you complained about summarizing people as millionaires

when you introduced that issue yourself.

But in that post I’m NOT complaining about summarising people as millionaires. Not the meaning at all. THAT WASN’T THE POINT, at all. That’s not the issue, not the argument.

So if you followed the flow of the argument, I didn’t think millionaire 1 worked as a resources 1 character, and then I gave an example of the level of duality I would think might be closer. But that person doesn’t have net assets worth a million.

You don’t respond to the argument, you complain about summarising people as millionaires, which is words I introduce correct (But any attempt to reduce two people to a few lines is a summary which you have done by that point.) and complain again how I am misinterpreting you, because I’m not using your perfect wording, when I’m talking about a point I introduce. In a sentence you have stripped down to the words you want to complain about (That I POINT out you have misinterpreted).

Then when I start talking about your real life example as if they were a character in a game, your counter point is they aren’t. If that’s an example of what a resources 1 character with millions of assets could look like, I can talk about the impact of that example being a character in an RPG rather than just a person in real life.The additional options that gives them, that aren’t paid for in exp, which you clearly regard as a large issue.

Then ask for expansion instead of lying about what I said. ..Though it's still pretty telling when you say this, without actually showing where this is the case

.

I posted a good faith account of what I had understood from what you said, it’s actually more useful for a discussion because it allows you to directly clarify where my understanding and your meaning diverge. (Also your comment on clarification means I need to have worked out that’s not what you meant, which I hadn’t at that point, I had got the wrong meaning from your words.) If you haven’t communicated your thought process correctly, me posting what I understood from your argument isn’t lying.

So the original context would require quoting a huge swathe of text but if you were capable of reading sentences in context it wouldn’t be needed. (Also I would say there are three cases of that in that post if you had ACTUALLY followed it.)

But the Nimbus tilt and Wisdom example is shorter:

1) “The distinction Wisdom makes is if innocent bystanders are affected by your magic. Influencing someone that's going to give a big tip to your restaurant, and to your table, is certain affecting them.”

And

2)“Yes, I was including the Nimbus as part of this context, you had, after all, already brought up the idea of Nimbus Tilt helping affect people in a beneficial way to your goals. Enlightened Wisdom is more broadly worded than your musing acknowledged.

I think you're getting confused by two sentences, that is two complete thoughts, not having a direct joiner there. The point is that just as sleepers not being targets that are affected by a spell still qualifies for a Wisdom 8+ sin, Nimbus not being the spell itself still means you're affecting them if they get hit with the Tilt.”

Like those two sections, yes I was confused by the 1), because you hadn’t included anything which I could see that relates to the original context (The quoted text doesn’t even create the original context). 2) is actually a really good point, well expressed where I clearly get where you are coming from. 1) I had absolutely no idea that was what you were trying to say, because you are missing a number of key concepts.

Bullshit again. Whether or not you could survive on that income was not part of the conversation.

Yes it was that was utterly part of the conversation I was trying to have, I’m sorry you missed that. (Now think to yourself are you lying?)

So actually my intention was not to dismiss your two people worth millions point, it was the starting point about talking about the false dichotomy you introduce of either "if you want to live as a hermit in the woods" or as "a person of means."

How there are a range of interesting options between person of means and hermit, that could be using magic in that manner. That was what that section in post #15 was fundamentally about. All points you utterly ignored in your next post, but that’s why I brought it up.

Specifically you missed “I can see how it could result in that scenario, but it's far from certain, and with skilled use of subtle magic (and like mundane lying) it can be avoided. You have given two extremes and honestly most use of this is going to fall somewhere in the middle.” The Waitress example is meant to be somewhere in the middle.

Like I missed the nuance of your original post, but you utterly failed to grasp what I was trying to say in that post.

Another example of this you then start talking about Resource 5 purchases when you in response to a paragraph that is talking entirely about resource 2 or 3 purchases (so you “introduced that issue yourself.”). Yes, you have increased the scale that changes the situation, and it’s even in the text you actually quoted. There’s no nuance, you just clearly attacking a strawman.

It goes away with a poof after some way you determine the Duration of a non-spell?

It ceases when the duration of the contract ceases, okay there is no poof.

mages can get away from sleeper laws easily enough.

The interesting point about that was it was getting away from sleeper laws without using Magic that is a Wisdom sin. I could have made that more clear,

Since you skipped past this point: the issue is more how often you to it. The chances might be low (or high if Shifting the Odds points you at a mage without you knowing that), but low odds individually, and multiple instances, means decent odds of occurrence. And it only takes once for it to have consequences.

Depending on the odds it doesn't, like it doesn't matter if I play the lottery a every week my odds of winning a 6 figure sum aren't decent at any point.

Once you introduce shifting the odds, you can effectively declare it any time the party uses magic at all.

[Heavy Arms]

Also, maybe stop with the custom formatting or whatever is causing that in general? Like, quote one of your own posts to see what a mess it looks like to respond to. Your last post has been coded with two custom colors, black which is already default and so close to black most people can't see the difference in this context, two different fonts, and left justified text (also default). And that coding repeats itself every line break, including empty ones to separate paragraphs.

--------------------------

Interestingly that is quite different from YOUR first post, and you are referring to yourself there.

No, it really isn't.

(one of the reasons I stopped quoting you was to try to reduce the tangents on tangents)

If you want to stop creating tangents, stop creating tangents. Quotes or no quotes doesn't change that.

Fundamentally my argument is that the low Wisdom this leads to is 7, i.e not low Wisdom.

And my fundamental argument against that, is that relying on magic too much compounds itself to the point where you're going to have to start committing lower Acts of Hubris to start to cover up the consequences of all that earlier ones that seem innocent at the time.

Your only real counterargument to this on a game level has been, "nah, those consequences are too boring to come up so they don't matter," with your citation being... a mixed Mage/Demon came with some apparently big crazy shit to deal with. Which is hardly a representation of a default Mage game and what consequences are likely to come up.

It's also not terribly useful advice for someone that's thinking about how to make mundane Merits more worthwhile for mages to take when they have magic. If you want your players to invest in non-magic Merits to help represent both sides of their lives, enforcing these sorts of consequences is a greater priority.

I would say the Wisdom rules are a really sensible point to bring up when looking at this, they are key to my argument.

Which I addressed right away in the beginning of all this.

Or on the Mage rules you have now brought us into Nimbus and Mage Sight rules.

You can't avoid Nimbus and Mage Sight if you're going to be talking about characters using a lot of magic, and the potential consequences therein that are hidden if you just stop at "Wisdom doesn't drop below 7 if all you do it push fate around a bit." If you're using Shifting the Odds to get by in life, nothing prevents you from accidentally getting on an enemies radar. Shifting the Odds simply isn't specific enough. "The nearest corrupt cop," might be a Retainer of a Seer. "The nearest guy that can get me a gun on the down low," might just be a Banisher. The spell doesn't save you from this, it's a risk you take when you use it. It's just worse if you try to bring people to you (Shifting the Odds does not, alone, work for your waiter example as it tells you where what you're looking for is, not brings what you're looking for to you), because then you're making it that much more likely to get noticed.

If you want bigger stakes... well, there, bigger stakes than the IRS doing a thorough audit of you because you didn't think through what you were doing carefully enough,and you're going to have to use magic in a less Wise way to get out of it... or have some very pissed off people to deal with.

Yes, the argument has descended into a bunch of tangents, because you are nitpicking....

Bullshit.

(Also to the debate around Merits which is a separate starting point, and honestly I think we stuck better to that debate.)

I mean, if you consider actively lying about what I was saying "sticking to the debate," I guess.

Whether it leads to lower than Wisdom 7 really depends on how the player reacts to consequences if they come up in the game, but I have yet to see anything better than a it starts a slippery slope argument to support falling below Wisdom 7.

Slippery slope arguments are not inherently invalid. If there's a slope to slip down (which there is with Wisdom), it can't simply be dismissed at that. Hence my providing EXAMPLES of it; which isn't nitpicking, which is what you were left to doing.

I am not labelling ‘forum debates’ like that, I am constantly arguing utilising experience of what in my experience tends to work in games, because it’s useful.

You can be doing both you know.

You labelled forum debates like that and are arguing for the primacy of experience... even while citing an explicitly non-standard experience.

Forum debate examples can still be useful, or you wouldn't be using them too,

Because this started about someone asking about ST advice, and application to games feels central to that to me.

And you haven't cited why what I'm talking about doesn't apply to the game even if it hasn't been applied to your game.

Factors like how much of this is off-screen? how reasonable it’s going to seem based on the tip of the iceberg of these examples that will be seen by the players. Will this be seen as reasonable? will it ever get float to the top of the list of consequences that are likely to be relevant?

You have done nothing to argue any universal or even general nature of these things.

Also discussing this feels like it’s really confrontational (Which is one thing for a forum debate), and that to me suggests it’s possibly past a good line for maintaining a good player ST relationship.

It's the ST's job to create interesting consequences for the game and to run antagonists. It's only confrontational in a problematic fashion if the player feels like the consequences are out of step with the risks they're taking.

If the ST isn't enforcing the setting by having negative consequences happen to the players' actions, they're not being confrontational, they're just not running the setting as designed; which could be very frustrating or what the group agreed to.

Except what to me that suggests is that there are narrative elements, that fit into the area of mechanics that are covered by merits, that might not have been brought as merits.

Which is a meaningless concept to what I was saying.

Which to me feels like the entire point of the rule.

The point of the rule is to encourage players to buy Merits that might be lost in-game so they don't feel they get screwed over when those Merits are at risk. This was a problem with 1e, which didn't have SoM, because it became unfun for STs and players a like to juggle "these Merits should be something that you can risk losing," and, "I paid for that, I don't want to lose my points." It was a regular new ST question back in the day, "What do I do about my players using these Merits in risky ways? It feels like they should lose there Merits over this, but I don't want to piss them off by taking away their stuff."

SoM addresses this by saying if you lose Merits in play, you don't lose the meta-investment.

It’s the entire point of the Sanctity of Merits rule from my interpretation (Which is why it’s phrasing is needed outside of Mage, Demon and Changeling.) and these two interpretations drastically change everything else you build on those rules.

There is no "building" on SoM. You lose a Merit because of in-game actions, you get the points back to spend on new Merits later.

Not every exploitable area of the narrative is represented by a merit, even in areas clearly covered by X merit.

You're making up a consideration that doesn't exist int he game. What is "covered" by a Merit is tautological: you have the Merit. If you can do something that a Merit does without the Merit, you don't do something "covered" by the Merit, you're doing something parallel to the Merit. The game allows different paths to the same results, which have their own narrative and mechanical specifics.

(and they would still be at resources 2 or 3.)

Yes, the nitpicking is all my fault. You're not nitpicking (and wrong), you're just stating clear and obvious facts for the sake of being an asshole!

Yes, your friend chose to live at that level, but prior to when they were before the inheritance they have a lot of options that the character of them before the inheritance doesn’t.

And he's not a character in a game. He's a real person. What he does in life isn't subject to abstract rules meant to fulfill a narrative. He's just a real example of what "Resources 1, but net worth over $1 million" might look like in a non-absurd way.

It’s also a shame they stripped down Safehouse to in my opinion the boring bit, because that would have been another way of modelling I have a really expensive house.)

There's no reason you can't justify Safe Place on an expensive house that has above average security on it. Safe Place is also hard to consider watered down considering it's a new to 2e thing. Safehouse was the Hunter "location" Merit. 2e changed things so that everyone uses Safe Place, and it can be a base to build specialized physical places like Havens or Sanctums off of.

Like a friend is never going to be a equipment, service or condition, and if they end up providing a service it’s probably because you have exploited that relationship to do what RAW you would have needed to use resources to achieve (or higher resources potentially.)

Non-Merit NPCs, even friends, can be equipment as an abstraction of teamwork rolls for characters that don't have stats. Academics has an NPC listed as a potential equipment bonus.

Non-Merit NPCs, even friends, can provide services (in fact, it's generally assumed that the NPCs providing the service aren't your Merit NPCs, a Retainer that's specifically your chauffeur doesn't get hired as a service all the time). Keeping in mind that Resources is not the only way to get a service, there are just limits the game puts on how much they can do before mechanics need to come into play to keep things fair.

For both of these, if your friends are coming into the story enough that they're seriously replacing Merits or services without having to pay for them (again, there are lots of ways to get services besides paying money for them), you're not really following the RAW.

Non-Merit NPCs, even friends, can't be a Condition, but that's only because Conditions don't work like that. Conditions are great for representing temporary social bonds that deserve mechanical representation with NPCs that aren't Merit based for your character; there are even examples of this in the books. If you can slap Swooned on an NPC you want to get to do something for you (like get a secretary to give you their boss's login information), it's a significant bonus, and that NPC secretary doesn't need to be bought with Merits as a Retainer, or hired for her actions.

So resources can buy security cameras, it can buy door bars, it can hire a security guard, it can buy bulletproof glass. There is a point where it’s definitely simpler to just model this as the Safehouse Merit, or you have a network of equipment and services that ends up being more potent than Safehouse in some ways and less in others and really complicated. Either way using money to secure a place is RAW achievable.

So. Buy. The. Merit.

I feel like I'm back in '04 all the sudden, where people coming from the cWoD where Backgrounds were largely free save for RPing stuff being shocked at having to pay XP for things.

So it's back to, literally, a 15 year old example:

You can't RP your character going to the gym all the time, and then demand that, at a certain point, you should get a free increase in Strength.

RPing what your character is doing to justify spending XP on it is not a replacement for spending XP.

I'd also point out (again, something that's been pointed out for over a decade because this was true in a different way in 1e) that the Safe Place Merit, equipment bought with Resources, and the services of hiring security guards? They can stack. Safe Place hits people trying to invade your space with a dice-penalty, which can stack with even more mundane security increasing the number of successes needed to break into your Safe Place as an extended action, which can stack with the dice-bonus to spotting intruders your extra security guards provide.

These are not mutually exclusive. As I said before? They are parallel, and even more so with this? They are complimentary.

Now we get to the part which the rules aren’t clear on, and is more about philosophy and one the new core isn’t as clear on, I assume there is a point where if that was happening you would be expecting the player to spend exp on it, or buy it with their next exp.

The rules aren't unclear about this being the case, at all. You don't get Allies by defining background characters for your characters. You get Allies by buying Allies. "This gives those friends a direct effect in the game."

Whereas I’d actually treat it like I would something created by a spell.

It goes away with a poof after some way you determine the Duration of a non-spell?

I trade 3 dots of Resources this month to give our HQ Safehouse 3 for the month, is a simplification but it’s completely neutral in terms of player power, and it’s not outside the clear design philosophy that comes out in the Mage Status Merits (although that is outside the corebook.)

If you want to run with this as a house rule, go for it. It makes Merits a bit more valuable (by making them much more flexible) but it's not a big deal. It's just not the RAW.

So you got the point I was trying to make across when I summarised what I thought you said, (and I as result understand what you were trying to say better than I did from your original words.)

If you need to actively misrepresent what I say until I get pissed off enough to text-shout at you and quote my original words back at you, in order to understand what I said clearly the first time... not I really don't get what you're after besides trying to piss me off.

Listen. You have zero credibility with me right now, because you're being dishonest as fuck.

You can do this little face-saving dance of, "Oh I didn't understand you the first time, but I do now" thing. But that's for you. For me, it's just you ducking your own bad posts as being such.

(I will demonstrate this as I go through because you keep doing this)

You keep saying things like this, but you don't seem to really get there.

So going back to the tips example where you go back to the game of economic simulation, when the entire point is this is pretty much just how I’m slipping in the mechanical spell that gives me resources 2 in an hour into the fabric of the Fallen World.

Well, the problem here is that I was assuming you were actually using the magic rules as written. You don't just magic yourself Resources 2 into the fabric of the Fallen World. That's not how the spell works.

Yes, you hit the jackpot, like it feels like you have written multiple sections of responding to individual lines, get to the end and only then actually seem to start to grasp the overall point I was trying to make.

See, the problem was actually that your example was really unclear:

"As an example say I play a waiter, resources 0, due to fate magic I make slightly more than I should in tips, some of which because it's cash in hand doesn't get declared and no one is likely to be suspicious because I am declaring my full salary plus I am getting tipped reasonably well (and declaring tips probably makes you less likely to create suspicion.) But anytime my secret mage persona needs a bit of capital, it has came from magic."

Emphais mine. You start the example with "making slightly more than I should in tips." Do you see how this does not translate into, "I make normal tips, except for Fate providing me one big cash tip I can pocket without people noticing."

All your going on about context... but it seems like either you missed your own damned context, or you don't really care about context and you're trying to slam me to hide not owning up to your own mistakes (I favor the second interpretation at this point, if you really meant the one big score in the first place, it would have been clear I didn't understand that from your first posting about tips from my response to it).

Shifting the odds is absurd,...

Stop using this word already! You even recognize you're using it in a poor fashion!

$150 dollars on the table in cash isn’t even absurd for it (Also I’ve seen the UK version of that tip happen a number of times, for various sets of co-incidences.)

Well, it's absurd because it's not how the spell actually works. As noted, Shifting the Odds doesn't bring the nearest person that's going to give a big tip to you, you have to go to where Shifting the Odds tells you to go. The absurdity is that you could, at all, reliably be working a job and Shifting the Odds gets you money without you having to do anything but your normal work. Even a taxi driver using Shifting the Odds (which is easier as an example) would have to be actively passing up passengers to hunt for who the spell reveals is going to tip big (or drop their wallet in your cab). If you just do normal taxi work and pick up passengers as they come (or as you get calls) there's no assurance you can benefit from Shifting the Odds because there's no assurance you'll get that passenger that way.

Also tipping culture in the UK is decidedly different from the US. I.. really have my doubts about "co-incidences" considering that UK tipping is less common and lower value that US tipping (which is good, because the UK doesn't let employers consider tips part of your salary for minimum wage purposes so tipping is actually extra for good service).

You spend a lot of time talking about economic simulation, when what my central point is about is fate conspiring to achieve that.

Fate doesn't conspire to do anything. You cast a spell that has an effect. This is an example of what I mean about you giving Fate more power than it has RAW. The mage twists the fate of the Fallen World towards their benefit, fate isn't just happily helping out.

So what I have done here is included the start of my sentence in brackets, which actually shows I was talking about property owner 3, in that sentence which I introduced in that sentence not either of your two examples.

Which doesn't add any context. A third owner doesn't impact my examples because the third owner doesn't contradict the validity of the others. Nor does it change that you complained about summarizing people as millionaires when you introduced that issue yourself.

But I don’t need to constantly use exactly the same phrasing as you to have a discussion.
...So I am losing no accuracy by being slightly more concise.

The problem with what you've been posting in all this is not just not aping phrasing directly, but changing wording to the point where it changes meaning, or adding words that serve no purpose but to negatively impact the conversation.

When you do things like rephrase what I said inaccurately, or introduce an additional example to complain about language, to attack my examples by proxy? That's damaging to having a productive discussion.

Actually quoting the words doesn’t seem to help you grasp the flow of the argument, and you can misrepresent me just fine by replying to a phrase out of the sentence and misapplying where it is referring to.

Saying that doesn't actually show me doing it like you said you were going to.

I have however noticed what you say works better when you expand upon it later.

Then ask for expansion instead of lying about what I said.

Though it's still pretty telling when you say this, without actually showing where this is the case.

Also weirdly the entire millionaire argument is a tangent from essentially this issue. It was about you can’t survive on that income, where you narrowed in on the word absurd (which I will admit was poorly chosen when what I was trying to convey was edge case) and that splintered into a whole conversation.

Bullshit again. Whether or not you could survive on that income was not part of the conversation.

I focused on the word "absurd," because you said my example was absurd to dismiss it, so I demonstrated how it wasn't absurd. But it's great that after calling you out on how bad of a word choice that was you... didn't even stop for this post.

It was about the idea that you could maintain a high luxury lifestyle without high Resources, because I actually give a shit about context as demonstrated by what I actually say, not by complaining about it when I need some fall back generic way to bash someone's arguments.

How long does a million dollar lottery win sustain a comfortable background life of comfort?

Depends on a lot of factors like, in the US, there's a ~20% prize tax off the top in most places (gambling is illegal in most of the US, the lottery is just a fancy game fund-raiser for state governments), and the remaining ~$800K is still taxed as income for the year, which means you need to set aside a decent chunk of it for that or earning tax deductions to offset it. Then it's a matter of how responsibly you spend it/invest it, keeping in mind that any financially productive investments (like stocks) means getting into capital gains taxes.

Of course "comfortable background life," in terms of value also depends where you live. For example, my parents and I have very similar houses in terms of value, and land. However, their real estate taxes are ~$5,000 more a year than mine. If I moved to where they are, without changing any other part of my financial situation, I would go from "comfortable" to "struggling," just like that.

And there's things like, do you already have a stable financial situation and the winnings are all extra? Or are you already struggling and you're trying to establish a stable situation with them?

Because it’s not once a year (and once you have a sum of capital the luck in investments needed to maintain resources 2 or 3 isn’t as incredulous - mechanically you need something like this to maintain the non SoM magic resources, it might not be needed in the narrative as much). Playing a character who mostly lives of a single moment of incredible luck they had supplemented by avoiding bad luck. Fits the living off magic while not being a hermit.

Well, if it's "background life," than Resources dots don't really matter. Resources isn't your background life, it's your active in-game life. If you're actively making Availability 5 purchases as often as Resources 5 would let you, winning $1 million isn't really going to go far, and is going to take using magic for this more often. But that's why you just spend XP on it to have Resources permanently so you don't have to keep doing this (it's almost like Shifting the Odds actually specifically mentions doing this...). Living comfortably off of the winnings from the lottery means putting all that money into investments, not spending it.

So that was referring specifically to the Nimbus effect, if you took the quote in context, it’s entirely talking about whether the Nimbus tilt can be an act of Hubris in itself. It’s a strange musing aside which was why I left it as an asterix.

Yes, I was including the Nimbus as part of this context, you had, after all, already brought up the idea of Nimbus Tilt helping affect people in a beneficial way to your goals. Enlightened Wisdom is more broadly worded than your musing acknowledged.

I think you're getting confused by two sentences, that is two complete thoughts, not having a direct joiner there. The point is that just as sleepers not being targets that are affected by a spell still qualifies for a Wisdom 8+ sin, Nimbus not being the spell itself still means you're affecting them if they get hit with the Tilt.

It's correct, and actually matters to the sentence being responded to.

So a Mage could be close enough to you when you are using magic, it’s a universal potential issue with casting magic in Mage, and what are the chances?

Since you skipped past this point: the issue is more how often you to it. The chances might be low (or high if Shifting the Odds points you at a mage without you knowing that), but low odds individually, and multiple instances, means decent odds of occurrence. And it only takes once for it to have consequences.

Like you could theoretically as a ST introduce that complication at any point the player uses magic, and unless that NPC is grounded in what the players are specifically doing it’s going to feel cheap, poorly grounded.

Or your players keep using magic irresponsibly and it bites them in the ass. Time for interesting plot and fun to happen in a game about the consequences of abusing magic.

Then again, it's kind of weird how much you're like, "fate conspires to make things happen" and then, "only for the PC's benefit! Bad shit never happens to PCs if the odds of it happening aren't high!"

So having a job is somewhat outside the mechanical abstraction layer of the game, but every effect of presently having a job (as opposed to being qualified for one) is a merit (Resources/ Status/ Contacts) are all ones that can be created by that spell, and if you have a merit representing your old job as that decays you can SoM it to secure the new job merit.

1) Shifting the Odds doesn't create things. It helps you find things. It also has a Duration, and within that duration limited uses based on Potency anyway. That's not a job you get hired for regardless of the overlap with how those Merits are normally used. You might find someone that's willing to offer you a job... in the "criminal offering you something under the table," sort of job, but you find money lying around, or just the right person to ask about something, not a stable relationship with them.

2) SoM doesn't let you pick the same Merit you just lost instantly as per your example of just walking down the street to a new job. You have to spend at least a Chapter rebuilding.

Also do you mean Serendipity?

SoM is the spell that basically lets you declare in a feasible situation that there is someone who fits the criteria, exists and if not feasible then Fate leads you to them in 1/24hrs.

Again, not how Shifting the Odds works.

The idea manipulating fate within a notice period can get you a job, doesn’t feel a stretch compared to what else that spell can do. It’s probably even more trivial in the modern world with temporary working practices. (Ending up drifting around between jobs that Fate provides feels really Arcanthus.)

Fate can certainly help you find work. But this is not, "You hand in your notice, and the next place you are walking past is really short staffed, and you happen to be there just at the right time."

You're shifting goal posts.

Machine Invisibility

You were talking Forces part to explain how you're getting money out of a machine without it recording the transaction at Forces 2. Machine Invisibility just makes questions as the ATM knows cash was removed, and when, and then nobody shows up on camera. Worse since anyone that sees you is still around to ask about what they saw and how you manage to evade cameras.

Not blanking the cameras is... a pretty suspicious thing at that point.

Again you quote tiny sections and miss a large part of the argument, at the point you hit this you need the investigator to be a sleepwalker (at least) to not just explain away the obviously impossible thing.

Sleepers seeing impossible things has consequences beyond the Lie pressing them to forget that part of it. Rationalizing your not appearing on camera magic as some special privacy tech instead of magic doesn't mean the cops don't keep investigating an ATM spitting out cash oddly. So, no I'm not missing the point, I'm disagreeing with the point that is, basically, "if I say a potential consequence should be ignored, everyone is bound to listen to me."

And you're ignoring the point that the issue isn't getting caught; mages can get away from sleeper laws easily enough. The point is the hassle of getting investigated.

Character Gen only is a pretty clear factor that’s a point we both clearly agree on, but if you had 5 merit dots in Vampire, using Masquerade style Generation costed at 1 merit dot each, would Striking Looks also being character gen detract from that effect. (Or it might make the builds Gen 5 or Gen3/SL2)

Is there an actual place you're going with this?

This isn't speculation. The original nWoD authors talked about these changes and why they were made. Generation wasn't broken for just one reason, sure, but the incentives it created (as well as examples in other WoD games) influenced how the nWoD was first constructed.

It was a terrible design, but they then keep coming back to pieces of game design that grant non SoM merits after character creation...

This is apples and oranges. Powers that replicated Merits (which and also be ended, frequently with consequences), and so on aren't Generation or the flaws with it and the old Background system.

[Satchel]

mcgonigle: Please fix your formatting, because being half-again the default text size and barely using line breaks makes reading it an excessively onerous task.

[mcgonigle]

This whole thing started because I asserted that Wisdom was a reason to avoid using magic to solve your problems. Nothing you're saying is actually arguing against that. You started with a mechanical argument about the level of hubris involved, and when I pointed out that it's more complicated than that, you've just decided that trying to nitpick examples is some beneficial thing, and have tossed out extremely lazy examples in your clear contempt for engaging in a fruitful discussion of this.

Interestingly that is quite different from YOUR first post, and you are referring to yourself there. Let alone the summary of my arguments. You have just done what you later complain at me for doing, but actually even with those mistakes I think its a useful. Because it helps to look at the big picture from time to time (one of the reasons I stopped quoting you was to try to reduce the tangents on tangents), but in this case I will go back to your words in your original post.

Wisdom.

Mages that opt to solve all their creature comforts with magic are on the fast track to low Wisdom, and all the complications therein.

Fundamentally my argument is that the low Wisdom this leads to is 7, i.e not low Wisdom. I would say the Wisdom rules are a really sensible point to bring up when looking at this, they are key to my argument. (But of course develing into issues of the real world like Tax Returns, percentage of tips by credit card, the basis of a Credit rating when typically missing the main argument isn’t nitpicking. Or on the Mage rules you have now brought us into Nimbus and Mage Sight rules.)

But aside from your first short example where you didn’t show any working and assumed that the response to X is Y, NOTHING you have argued since then actually applies to this except for saying this doesn’t apply to Wisdom. You miss the main thrust of the response to your post in my third post in your desire to nitpick with sentences, often stripping them of meaning (Which I will actually demonstrate with the last post, later.)

Yes, the argument has descended into a bunch of tangents, because you are nitpicking at my posts apart attacking lines completely devoid of context rather than responding to the body of the argument. (Also to the debate around Merits which is a separate starting point, and honestly I think we stuck better to that debate.)

Whether it leads to lower than Wisdom 7 really depends on how the player reacts to consequences if they come up in the game, but I have yet to see anything better than a it starts a slippery slope argument to support falling below Wisdom 7.

Right, you're just looking for a reason to dismiss arguments without actually addressing if they're valuable by just labeling forum debates like this. Of course, that means all of your arguments are just as meaningless if you're being serious about it.

I am not labelling ‘forum debates’ like that, I am constantly arguing utilising experience of what in my experience tends to work in games, because it’s useful. Because this started about someone asking about ST advice, and application to games feels central to that to me.

Factors like how much of this is off-screen? how reasonable it’s going to seem based on the tip of the iceberg of these examples that will be seen by the players. Will this be seen as reasonable? will it ever get float to the top of the list of consequences that are likely to be relevant?

Also discussing this feels like it’s really confrontational (Which is one thing for a forum debate), and that to me suggests it’s possibly past a good line for maintaining a good player ST relationship.

BECAUSE THE TWO CATEGORIES ONLY APPLY TO MERITS.

Of course they don't fall in, because they're not suppose to fall in. Non-Merit friends DO NOT MATTERto the idea of using Resources to buy MERITS.

....And? We have equipment, services, and Conditions for these (esp. that favor example) if they need a mechanical representation.

Except what to me that suggests is that there are narrative elements, that fit into the area of mechanics that are covered by merits, that might not have been brought as merits. Which to me feels like the entire point of the rule. It’s the entire point of the Sanctity of Merits rule from my interpretation (Which is why it’s phrasing is needed outside of Mage, Demon and Changeling.) and these two interpretations drastically change everything else you build on those rules.

Not every exploitable area of the narrative is represented by a merit, even in areas clearly covered by X merit. The resources 1 millionaire character that you are talking about is a great example of this, (and they would still be at resources 2 or 3.) Yes, your friend chose to live at that level, but prior to when they were before the inheritance they have a lot of options that the character of them before the inheritance doesn’t. These options might become relevant as the plot escalates, like your friend is living the life of a background character might not use it. Would a Player character use it as the plot escalates? (If they didn’t have a character acting as a group credit card.) (It’s also a shame they stripped down Safehouse to in my opinion the boring bit, because that would have been another way of modelling I have a really expensive house.)

Like a friend is never going to be a equipment, service or condition, and if they end up providing a service it’s probably because you have exploited that relationship to do what RAW you would have needed to use resources to achieve (or higher resources potentially.)

What nuance in, "you can't use Resources to buy Merits that aren't protected by SoM" does my perspective lack, exactly? That Resources can buy non-Merits? Because that doesn't actually apply.

So resources can buy security cameras, it can buy door bars, it can hire a security guard, it can buy bulletproof glass. There is a point where it’s definitely simpler to just model this as the Safehouse Merit, or you have a network of equipment and services that ends up being more potent than Safehouse in some ways and less in others and really complicated. Either way using money to secure a place is RAW achievable.

Now we get to the part which the rules aren’t clear on, and is more about philosophy and one the new core isn’t as clear on, I assume there is a point where if that was happening you would be expecting the player to spend exp on it, or buy it with their next exp. (Or you end up with an argument, about keeping that safehouse as complicated seperate purchases and acquisitions to save exp.) Whereas I’d actually treat it like I would something created by a spell.

I trade 3 dots of Resources this month to give our HQ Safehouse 3 for the month, is a simplification but it’s completely neutral in terms of player power, and it’s not outside the clear design philosophy that comes out in the Mage Status Merits (although that is outside the corebook.) You can definitely RAW spend money to secure a place, this is simplifying that. (You can RAW do it by self destructing your own merits say by spending what I saved up on new security systems and cutting back on overtime etc, and then invoking SoM to get the new Safehouse.)

Have you noticed that what I say works better when you use my actual wording?.

So you got the point I was trying to make across when I summarised what I thought you said, (and I as result understand what you were trying to say better than I did from your original words.) Whereas later you can quote me and by somehow miss that I dealt with the very point you are raising later in that paragraph. Beside it’s just as easy to misrepresent a position by responding to individual lines out of context, as trying to summarise a debate (I will demonstrate this as I go through because you keep doing this)

So going back to the tips example where you go back to the game of economic simulation, when the entire point is this is pretty much just how I’m slipping in the mechanical spell that gives me resources 2 in an hour into the fabric of the Fallen World.

Wait, you mean you're trying to score one big tip? Like someone's going to drop $150 on the table in cash?

Yes, you hit the jackpot, like it feels like you have written multiple sections of responding to individual lines, get to the end and only then actually seem to start to grasp the overall point I was trying to make.

Shifting the odds is absurd, $150 dollars on the table in cash isn’t even absurd for it (Also I’ve seen the UK version of that tip happen a number of times, for various sets of co-incidences.)

You spend a lot of time talking about economic simulation, when what my central point is about is fate conspiring to achieve that.

Also you start talking about Credit Cards not quoting the section when I respond to that exact issue. So to use your own words:

Does the word "context" just not compute for you?

.(I could see heir struggling with built up debts due to financial mismanagement in a home worth a million, but most of which is owed to the bank could create that weird duality )but I wouldn’t summarise that as a millionaire

….

Have you noticed that what I say works better when you use my actual wording?

"Two characters could both be worth millions of dollars in what they own..."

"Property owner 1 has millions in real estate..."

So what I have done here is included the start of my sentence in brackets, which actually shows I was talking about property owner 3, in that sentence which I introduced in that sentence not either of your two examples. If it makes you feel better I also wouldn’t summarise that person 3 as being ‘worth millions of dollars’ either. But I don’t need to constantly use exactly the same phrasing as you to have a discussion. (Particularly when millionaire is “a person whose assets are worth one million pounds or dollars or more.” So I am losing no accuracy by being slightly more concise.)

Actually quoting the words doesn’t seem to help you grasp the flow of the argument, and you can misrepresent me just fine by replying to a phrase out of the sentence and misapplying where it is referring to.

I have however noticed what you say works better when you expand upon it later. The later post adds a lot of nuance, which makes the sentence less objectionable.

Winning the lottery once or twice might go under the radar, winning a $1 million scratch off once a year? That'll have them up in all of your business trying to figure out how you're gaming the system.

Also weirdly the entire millionaire argument is a tangent from essentially this issue. It was about you can’t survive on that income, where you narrowed in on the word absurd (which I will admit was poorly chosen when what I was trying to convey was edge case) and that splintered into a whole conversation.

How long does a million dollar lottery win sustain a comfortable background life of comfort? Because it’s not once a year (and once you have a sum of capital the luck in investments needed to maintain resources 2 or 3 isn’t as incredulous - mechanically you need something like this to maintain the non SoM magic resources, it might not be needed in the narrative as much). Playing a character who mostly lives of a single moment of incredible luck they had supplemented by avoiding bad luck. Fits the living off magic while not being a hermit.

The distinction Wisdom makes is if innocent bystanders are affected by your magic. Influencing someone that's going to give a big tip to your restaurant, and to your table, is certain affecting them.

So that was referring specifically to the Nimbus effect, if you took the quote in context, it’s entirely talking about whether the Nimbus tilt can be an act of Hubris in itself. It’s a strange musing aside which was why I left it as an asterix.

The section that refers to includes that the spell is clearly already an act of Hubris against enlightened Wisdom, if the Mage was Wisdom 8 they are rolling for degradation regardless. So this is correct but utterly divorced from the meaning of the sentence it’s responding to. (Like going back to by first not a problem if you are Wisdom 7.)

As for noticing it by antagonists? You're dinging their Peripheral Mage Sight, so if they go in with Active Mage Sight (or turn it on reflexively) they'll see your Nimbus, and can then use Focused Mage Sight to see your Signature Nimbus too. Though, again, this is under the presumption that you're doing this a lot, not just once.

So a Mage could be close enough to you when you are using magic, it’s a universal potential issue with casting magic in Mage, and what are the chances? without them also manipulating chance. Like you could theoretically as a ST introduce that complication at any point the player uses magic, and unless that NPC is grounded in what the players are specifically doing it’s going to feel cheap, poorly grounded. It’s easy to stack things against the player as the ST.

Now there might be situations where the players action will feed in with the plot, if there is a Silver Ladder Restaurant critic you want to introduce. But this is where my focus is less actions must always have consequences and more building in elements of the story I am trying to tell.

What spell, exactly, is creating a new job for you, that you're qualified for, and is going to hire you on the spot, whenever you need one?

It sounds like you're being way more generous with Fate than the rules actually allow.

So Shifting the Odds, possible with Simplicity support are the spells I am thinking of

So having a job is somewhat outside the mechanical abstraction layer of the game, but every effect of presently having a job (as opposed to being qualified for one) is a merit (Resources/ Status/ Contacts) are all ones that can be created by that spell, and if you have a merit representing your old job as that decays you can SoM it to secure the new job merit.

SoM is the spell that basically lets you declare in a feasible situation that there is someone who fits the criteria, exists and if not feasible then Fate leads you to them in 1/24hrs. (You also have simplicity where the next steps to getting a job can all involve survival if you really want - or probably socialise.)

The idea manipulating fate within a notice period can get you a job, doesn’t feel a stretch compared to what else that spell can do. It’s probably even more trivial in the modern world with temporary working practices. (Ending up drifting around between jobs that Fate provides feels really Arcanthus.)

Yeah, no, that's not going unnoticed, and unless your blanking every camera in a radius (and screwing with the minds of everyone that sees you).

Machine Invisibility, for the duration of the spells machines don’t record YOU it’s not blanking security cameras, and the combination of those two spells will screw with any attempt to get an accurate time window of when it happened.

Again you quote tiny sections and miss a large part of the argument, at the point you hit this you need the investigator to be a sleepwalker (at least) to not just explain away the obviously impossible thing. Not to mention you go higher than sleepwalker and you suddenly start getting other incentives and priorities. Anytime you investigate, all the initial leads are going to be red herrings, and even if they ever painstakingly track a swathe of the money back to you it gives you a chance to further fiddle with their electronic records and they still don’t have any actual evidence, that you were the origin point.
(Also give me an encounter with a vaguely suspicious sleepwalker in the police, and I’m making lemonade.)

None of which gets away from the additional factor of none of the other Backgrounds being hard to acquire in game, be up for loss, and those a waste of your starting points.

Character Gen only is a pretty clear factor that’s a point we both clearly agree on, but if you had 5 merit dots in Vampire, using Masquerade style Generation costed at 1 merit dot each, would Striking Looks also being character gen detract from that effect. (Or it might make the builds Gen 5 or Gen3/SL2)

It was a terrible design, but they then keep coming back to pieces of game design that grant non SoM merits after character creation (Deals, Pledges, Pacts, Status, Spells, Exploits.) Whereas to my knowledge they haven’t decreased the cost of the core Resistance traits in any game (Ignoring the Hurt Locker option which if it was Char Gen only (and well known) would be over that line in my opinion.)

[Heavy Arms]

No, my point is that most of these arguments aren’t going to translate well to an actual game.

Right, you're just looking for a reason to dismiss arguments without actually addressing if they're valuable by just labeling forum debates like this. Of course, that means all of your arguments are just as meaningless if you're being serious about it.

[quote]You can come up with examples where this could backfire[quote]

Right, because my position is only based on the possibility of backfire to encourage people taking a safer route.

I could do the same for paying for things using resources.

If you're trying to say that you can come up with examples of using the Resources Merit in a stupid way that could have mechanical consequences? OK, cool. I agree. Using Resources in that way should have those consequences, just like using magic should have consequences.

The point wasn’t has anyone in a game you played in ever done this, but have you seriously played in a game where the interesting consequences to tell the story about is how that Camera you needed was paid for? Or how you paid for that train fare?

Individually? No. It's when it becomes a pattern in a mage's behavior that it becomes a problem. That's why Understanding level Wisdom is the most common level range. You end up doing some Acts of Hubris, but not so many, or so callous, that you're unstably spiraling down.

So, yes, things like your magical waiter example have come up in my games, where it's something a character is constantly doing, even if individual isolated acts don't lead to the same situation.

But we have at least 5 more pressing fires to put out from grander mistakes.

Good thing I never said this "must" be used, or that there is some mechanical time frame in question.

This whole thing started because I asserted that Wisdom was a reason to avoid using magic to solve your problems. Nothing you're saying is actually arguing against that. You started with a mechanical argument about the level of hubris involved, and when I pointed out that it's more complicated than that, you've just decided that trying to nitpick examples is some beneficial thing, and have tossed out extremely lazy examples in your clear contempt for engaging in a fruitful discussion of this.

You: Mystery Cult or Created by Magic

Nope. What I said is easily found, because this is a forum. Lying about what I said is sad.

"Only things like Mystery Cult Initiation's bonus Merits, or Merits generated by magic, are supposed to not be covered by SoM."

"Like" is a very important modifier to this (as in, other things besides those fall into this consideration). As is the context of discussing Merits, not characters, making the whole friends thing a meaningless bit of nonsense on your part.

And it still doesn’t mean non-merit friends fall into your two categories

BECAUSE THE TWO CATEGORIES ONLY APPLY TO MERITS.

Of course they don't fall in, because they're not suppose to fall in. Non-Merit friends DO NOT MATTER to the idea of using Resources to buy MERITS.

Does the word "context" just not compute for you?

Yes, there is nuance (well SoM basically you never loose merit exp through misfortune), your black or white absurd RAW perspective you were trying to convey, lacked nuance.

What nuance in, "you can't use Resources to buy Merits that aren't protected by SoM" does my perspective lack, exactly? That Resources can buy non-Merits? Because that doesn't actually apply.

You also might want to stop using the word "absurd," here, since you're clearly just projecting.

It’s all those little things that build up over the course of the story that have never had a merit dot assigned to them but potentially have use and value and importance to the story. I cache in the favour I have with Merlin rather than using allies.

And? We have equipment, services, and Conditions for these (esp. that favor example) if they need a mechanical representation.

If these things aren't Merits... this doesn't add nuance or contradict my actual point.

It’s absurd because that character 1 is going to have far more options than a more sensible resources 1 concept. They are going to be able to able to access far more capital should they need it.

That's not what absurd means.

And... yes, the system RAW is kinda messy around the idea of leveraging wealth for capital (esp. with no conversion rate of Cash Equipment into different ratings). Hence I suggested updating the 1e Luxury Merit to have more space for addressing this sort of thing if it ever comes up.

Millionaire who would struggle to get a normal car repaired, get a hotel room or afford a lawyer feels absurd.

Feels absurd? That's nice. That doesn't make it absurd. A former house-mate of mine's grandmother was killed in an accident with a company held liable, and my friend, being her sole living heir, after probate, taxes, and so on, was technically a millionaire, with the vast majority of his wealth tied up in her house. He got some fairly sound help with financial planning since he decided to keep the house despite not really having the income at the time to justify it, tying up most of the settlement into a fund for paying for the property until his career advanced enough that he could afford it on his own; which took him the better part of a decade. Or, in simple terms, he was a millionaire that was living Resources 1-2 for quite some time... mostly because he was already living Resources 1 before that, and didn't want to engage too much in taking on debt for capital now. Though this was choice not forced by a bad credit score.

It's super easy to come up with examples from my life, because I know they actually hold up because they actually happened.

What’s their credit rating?

While no millionaire, I came from an upper middle class family and didn't have personal debts until I starting taking them on on purpose. My credit rating was N/A for the longest time because you don't get a credit rating if you don't take on debts, which is actually worse than a low credit rating. I got denied a credit card multiple times when I dropped out of college because of that and not finding long term employment yet.... even though I had a rather decent amount of capital in my college fund that I hadn't used yet as collateral.

I'm not on the mortgage for my house because my credit rating was still being built from that starting point, where my wife had a great credit score from having... student loan debt and practically no savings.

They might not have the resources 5 of the other millionaire but that isn’t described by resources 1. (Unless something like high Mentor for a rich spouse or other way of representing it.)

The problem though, as I alluded to above, is that the game doesn't really model debt and deficit spending well. While you can hand-wave low Resources as having significant debt and paying it down even if you have significant assets as well, it really doesn't work well if you want to use those assets as collateral and so on; which isn't absurd, just not something the game designers felt like modeling.

..but I wouldn’t summarise that as a millionaire.

Have you noticed that what I say works better when you use my actual wording?

"Two characters could both be worth millions of dollars in what they own..."
"Property owner 1 has millions in real estate..."

It's almost like I avoided any issues with "summarizing" people as millionaires in the first place.

Personally I wouldn’t even stat that character as low as resources 1, because playing them higher being up front about the narrative I want to play and then reclaiming the merit dots when their story progresses is more interesting.)

That's nice. You're you. You're not the rules, or who everyone else has to please.

1) Using Magic to get things is suspicious to the authorities

Using magic, regularly to get things is suspicious to the authorities because they look for patterns (that is you need to be doing this often enough for it to ping them by it becoming a pattern). But you know, accuse me more of not having nuance by just removing it from my points.

Like the obvious example would be using magic to win the lottery, or making money on the financial markets neither of which is going to look suspicious to the authorities. Like the well worn path for this is Fate 2, much of which is going to appear like good luck.

Winning the lottery once or twice might go under the radar, winning a $1 million scratch off once a year? That'll have them up in all of your business trying to figure out how you're gaming the system.

Making money on the markets, besides just actually being good at it which doesn't take magic, by "getting lucky" a lot is also something that gets attention, because it makes it look like you're, again, cheating the system. When you're on the money making side of investments that the majority of traders were betting the other way on repeatedly? You're an insider trading suspect.

And the problem with these isn't ending up in jail, it's these people looking at your life in incredible detail while you're trying to be a mage at the same time.

2) You are leaving a paper trail

Well, not leaving one is more suspicious...

Other route is Forces to trick machines, computer says I did pay for that, how easy this is to notice depends on exactly the spell intent used but it’s not going to have your name on it. And it’s going to require a lot of effort to track back even if noticed, and the lie probably helps there. Also machine invisibility is the same level, pulling £200 pounds out of that cashpoint late at night and the camera catches nothing gives no obvious leads and anyone looking into it probably ends up explaining it away due to the lie.

And we're back to the frequency thing. Once? Sure. Using this as your paycheck? Yeah, no, that's not going unnoticed, and unless your blanking every camera in a radius (and screwing with the minds of everyone that sees you).

It's also pretty easy (if tedious) to find you even if you sabotage the electronic record. They know which bills go into ATMs, so they just go looking for where the cash you're taking is getting spent to triangulate.

I don’t want to make real money of tips, I want to make real money off manipulating Fate to hand me improbable tips.

It still takes a lot of work to make real money off of "improbable," tips off of small values. Getting a $5 tip on a $10 bill is extremely improbable. Doing it thirty times for a $150 book isn't subtly skimming off the top unless you're doing this over decently long period of time. Getting 50% tips from every table for a shift is exceedingly suspicious.

You missed the point about the waitress example, it was you pocket the majority of the Fate increased tip, and I declare a slightly bigger tip. Someone looking at the tax return isn’t going to have any hint that happened and wasn’t declared.

Well, again, credit cards destroy this tactic. You can't just pocket credit card tips and manipulate the reporting.

What’s more there are no weird spending patterns on my actual accounts because my awakened life needed to spend that $150 dollars on an occult grimoire.

Who's taking cash for grimoires like that? Awakened society deals in cash, sure, but because the Orders and Consilia need money too, but nothing in the setting generally implies this sort of scenario.

You get cash primarily for buying normal stuff, not magic stuff. Mages have much better things to ask for from you.

...the big one is cash.

Wait, you mean you're trying to score one big tip? Like someone's going to drop $150 on the table in cash?

Going beyond immediate Nimbus technically the spell targets you, so that’s where the main lasting effects are it might leave traces on the customers or the money maybe, but again you are choosing to have an NPC antagonist arrive through that weak trail of improbable bread crumbs rather than something that concerns core game or character plots, and probably has a stronger trail.

Nimbus doesn't care what the target of the spell is.

As for noticing it by antagonists? You're dinging their Peripheral Mage Sight, so if they go in with Active Mage Sight (or turn it on reflexively) they'll see your Nimbus, and can then use Focused Mage Sight to see your Signature Nimbus too. Though, again, this is under the presumption that you're doing this a lot, not just once.

[quote](The Restaurant likely has some Nimbus influence on it but you probably have enough sympathetic connection to your place of work that this is happening anyway.)[quote]

The whole point of Shadow Names and keeping up your double life is that keeping your magic to your Shadow Name means your Nimbus's Long-Term effects don't do this.

If people start noticing and getting a bit suspicious about the luck, but this is something that will slowly build up, to some degree lying and being on the ball with picking up tips will help. The lie might also help, but eventually that same spell also great for getting you a new job. You hand in your notice, and the next place you are walking past is really short staffed, and you happen to be there just at the right time.

What spell, exactly, is creating a new job for you, that you're qualified for, and is going to hire you on the spot, whenever you need one?

It sounds like you're being way more generous with Fate than the rules actually allow.

*This feels like an interpretation, but also it means even casting entirely imperceptible spells around sleepers is an act of Hubris, which pushes Wisdom 8+ even more unachievable to maintain.

The distinction Wisdom makes is if innocent bystanders are affected by your magic. Influencing someone that's going to give a big tip to your restaurant, and to your table, is certain affecting them.

There are a lot of variables there and personally I'm looking at the key combo being:

None of which gets away from the additional factor of none of the other Backgrounds being hard to acquire in game, be up for loss, and those a waste of your starting points.

[nofather]

They still have a dot rating:

Activation is penalized by dot rating and acquisition with other merits (such as Status) is gated by rating.

In Werewolf, the dot rating just indicates the Rank of the spirit inside. While it can affect the activation, there's no acquisition gating, you don't pay any beats to obtain fetishes (beyond arguably those spent on the Fetish Rite, which lets you make as many as you want). This is clear in the book, made more clear by the developers and writers on this forum.

As for how I did things on mage it seems to be like most people do. Some PCs had Resources justified by magic usage, others by 'jobs' gained through Order connections, one was Resources 0 but sort of living a penitent lifestyle. Even without Resources mages are generally going to be better off than your average human in the same position, with opportunities open to them the average person could never hope for.

I don't recall much about her appearances before the Fallen World anthology (she popped up in the Mekhet clanbook) but Lucy Sulfate was a mage who faced a pretty big issue that an abundance of money probably could have solved. While she didn't seem to have the moral bent of bilking money out of mortals it was pointed out in the story that she could have had the problem solved if she was willing to prostrate herself to whatever mage power/money lenders were nearby. I think the one mentioned was one from that other race legacy.

[mcgonigle]

VtM created a really bad mechanical incentive around the Generation Background, because it was the only one that didn't increase because the ST felt you did enough to increase it, and increasing it in play was an epic pain in the ass (not easy mechanically, huge in-universe social consequences). So players would sink as many starting dots into Generation as possible, because decent social traits (and VtM is a game that encourages thus) plus vampire powers meant you could easily start collecting Backgrounds like Allies, Contacts, Influence, and so on without "wasting" any points; even if nothing stopped the ST from taking them away too.

There are a lot of variables there and personally I'm looking at the key combo being:
It was really under-priced:
Character Generation only: (Except Diablerie) Like this tag will generally increase the chance of people investing in it at character gen, before making it a central trait.

You make Gnosis, 1 rather than 5 merit dots and for some reason only can be increased after character gen by performing mage-diablerie. The effect will be back regardless of whether or not you need exp to buy merits acquired in game.

[proindrakenzol]

Was more of a 1e complaint. Werewolf fetishes don't have Merit dots at all now, but like mage things, did in 1e, all saddled with the annoying rule you could easily throw out.

They still have a dot rating:

Werewolf: the Forsaken Second Edition [/I]page 146-147]Fetishes have a dot rating from one
to five that indicates the Rank of the spirit bound into the item and just how powerful the fetish is.

Activation is penalized by dot rating and acquisition with other merits (such as Status) is gated by rating.

[mcgonigle]

So... you're saying that you know you're arguing in bad faith, but instead of just owning up to it, you're going to obliquely accuse others of it first. Gotcha.

No, my point is that most of these arguments aren’t going to translate well to an actual game. The reason why we are having these discussions. You can come up with examples where this could backfire it’s easy to create an example to show something when you control every variable (or jump straight to the conclusion without showing reasoning), I could do the same for paying for things using resources.

The point wasn’t has anyone in a game you played in ever done this, but have you seriously played in a game where the interesting consequences to tell the story about is how that Camera you needed was paid for? Or how you paid for that train fare? Because I definitely haven’t seen that in Mage. Even the street level Aegis Kai Doru game (or basically that) where the players spend hours sometimes debating how to do things within the law, morally and with minimal risk. Even in that game I regularly sideline possible consequences or repercussions because there are other more interesting ones that are less of a stretch to impose.

Like I am playing in a game doing just this (Because my character is from a splinter timeline of Bletchley park, and wasn’t even born in the real timeline. It’s Demon/Mage.) Despite this Noah generally has less actions that are calling out for consequences than most of the party. (and I suspect if the ST wants to run something about the consequences of his magic it will be about the really overt public use of magic to save an old man Noah was really attached to from a fire, rather than how Noah catch the underground or paid for that suit.) But we have at least 5 more pressing fires to put out from grander mistakes.

Seriously all this is really digging for consequences, and I have never seen a game where that was needed, to create that theme. If you are going to have an NPC offscreen following a trail the players have set, this it quite a weak and unimportant trail.

Sanctity of Merits

You: Mystery Cult or Created by Magic are the categories of Merits not covered by sanctity of Merits,
Me: The listed example of Friends doesn’t fall into either Mystery Cult or Created by Magic, despite being the listed example
You: Unless you have brought it as a Merit
Yes At which point its covered by sanctity of merits, so not an example of something not covered by SoM. And it still doesn’t mean non-merit friends fall into your two categories.

Yes, there is nuance (well SoM basically you never loose merit exp through misfortune), your black or white absurd RAW perspective you were trying to convey, lacked nuance. It’s all those little things that build up over the course of the story that have never had a merit dot assigned to them but potentially have use and value and importance to the story. I cache in the favour I have with Merlin rather than using allies.

Millionaire

It’s absurd because that character 1 is going to have far more options than a more sensible resources 1 concept. They are going to be able to able to access far more capital should they need it. Millionaire who would struggle to get a normal car repaired, get a hotel room or afford a lawyer feels absurd. What’s their credit rating? what are the limits on their credit card going to be like? They might not have the resources 5 of the other millionaire but that isn’t described by resources 1. (Unless something like high Mentor for a rich spouse or other way of representing it.)
(I could see heir struggling with built up debts due to financial mismanagement in a home worth a million, but most of which is owed to the bank could create that weird duality but I wouldn’t summarise that as a millionaire. Personally I wouldn’t even stat that character as low as resources 1, because playing them higher being up front about the narrative I want to play and then reclaiming the merit dots when their story progresses is more interesting.)

Which doesn't get into the Wisdom issue. If you're using magic to get things instead of having wealth/assets/money and leaving an appropriate paper trail, you tend to get noticed by the people that watch these things (since it's an obvious sign of criminal activity, even if just tax evasion) and then you have to deal with that.

So a number of presumptions:
1) Using Magic to get things is suspicious to the authorities
Like the obvious example would be using magic to win the lottery, or making money on the financial markets neither of which is going to look suspicious to the authorities. Like the well worn path for this is Fate 2, much of which is going to appear like good luck.
2) You are leaving a paper trail
Other route is Forces to trick machines, computer says I did pay for that, how easy this is to notice depends on exactly the spell intent used but it’s not going to have your name on it. And it’s going to require a lot of effort to track back even if noticed, and the lie probably helps there. Also machine invisibility is the same level, pulling £200 pounds out of that cashpoint late at night and the camera catches nothing gives no obvious leads and anyone looking into it probably ends up explaining it away due to the lie.

The Tip example
Let’s start with Awakened Magic is absurd that was my entry into this conversation, like completely so.
I don’t want to make real money of tips, I want to make real money off manipulating Fate to hand me improbable tips.
You missed the point about the waitress example, it was you pocket the majority of the Fate increased tip, and I declare a slightly bigger tip. Someone looking at the tax return isn’t going to have any hint that happened and wasn’t declared. What’s more there are no weird spending patterns on my actual accounts because my awakened life needed to spend that $150 dollars on an occult grimoire.
All your points about realistic hours worked to get such, I don’t care because 1 reach on the spell gives me the results in the hour. This could be the day job, this could be one shift a week I do to supplement my English degree. (It has to be cash because you wouldn’t get the credit card one through the company in time, and you can possibly specify it in the spell.) It doesn’t matter if 90% of the tips in the place are credit card, the big one is cash.
Working hours are a really interesting piece of verisimilitude, but if you get into that it’s going to bite everyone to an extent, not just the one using magic to enhance their salary.
So Nimbus, firstly Immediate is not necessarily negative, for the next minute everyone is going to be slightly better at socialising. Also even when it is, it’s not forcing a sapient will to act against their interests, like at best it’s a sin against enlightened Wisdom which it already was*. Going beyond immediate Nimbus technically the spell targets you, so that’s where the main lasting effects are it might leave traces on the customers or the money maybe, but again you are choosing to have an NPC antagonist arrive through that weak trail of improbable bread crumbs rather than something that concerns core game or character plots, and probably has a stronger trail.
(The Restaurant likely has some Nimbus influence on it but you probably have enough sympathetic connection to your place of work that this is happening anyway.)


If people start noticing and getting a bit suspicious about the luck, but this is something that will slowly build up, to some degree lying and being on the ball with picking up tips will help. The lie might also help, but eventually that same spell also great for getting you a new job. You hand in your notice, and the next place you are walking past is really short staffed, and you happen to be there just at the right time.

*This feels like an interpretation, but also it means even casting entirely imperceptible spells around sleepers is an act of Hubris, which pushes Wisdom 8+ even more unachievable to maintain.

[2ptTakrill]

As ST you can always 'gift' your players with the merit points for the things they acquire in game, if you feel that is necessary. Has long as you do it equally I doubt your players will complain.
SoM just takes some of the sting out of losing things, but merits really aren't needed to represent one time acquisitions won in game.

[branford]

will help you invest Wisely.

Thanks to Fate and Time, no effort necessary!

[nofather]

You don't, it's just if they lose it it's not covered by Sanctity of Merits. Merits like Imbued Item, Enhanced Item, and Artifact are there for starting characters and for calculating requisition cost using merits like Order Status.

Was more of a 1e complaint. Werewolf fetishes don't have Merit dots at all now, but like mage things, did in 1e, all saddled with the annoying rule you could easily throw out.