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[CaptOtter]

I think you and I definitely disagree about how weak Strength 2 is (owing to varying constructions of what the word "lift" means in this case). A 3-4 lbs.-sword, okay, i can see that. But twice that? I find that a little more hard to believe.

I could make the argument that the Strength and two-handed requirement, and the fact that it cannot be concealed, are there to balance out the fact that the weapon is high-damage, but low difficulty to use (Diff 5 for some bizarre reason).

If you don't care to dig through it, then you shouldn't expect anyone else to,...

[CaptOtter]

You made the claim and linked to that specific video. If there's another video that supports your position, you should cite it. Typically the burden is on the party making a claim to substantiate same; there are practical reasons for this, not the least of which is the ease of all involved.

Just because the distinction is not one that would have been made by the people who historically actually used the weapons, doesn't mean the distinctions aren't valid and useful. For instance, "Middle English" is a modern term—not at all a term that would have been used by anyone...

[CaptOtter]

Even assuming arguendo that the video you linked makes a defensible argument (it doesn't actually discuss physics, biomechanics, or kinesiology, so who knows), the argument the gentleman makes is for a weaker person using a long sword; the weapon that is subject of this entire discussion is a great sword (that it's a two-handed weapons, and has a minimum Strength requirement is a footnote).

If your rejoinder is that the distinction between "long swords" and "great swords" is often arbitrary and amorphous--that it's difficult in many cases to say that a particular...

[CaptOtter]

I considered how the feats of strength factor in, and I decided that the different levels of "Strength" described have to mean that that's the amount you can "lift" (whatever that means; more on that below) without a feat of strength. Otherwise the entire scale becomes meaningless, because there is literally no one with Strength 1 and Willpower 1 that cannot "lift" 100 lbs. With that in mind, it's clear that people who hold the world records for competitive athletic lifts are either using feats of strength, or roping in Athletics somehow (for the more technical lifts...

[CaptOtter]

Beyond the issues of power balance and pacing, are there any nuts-and-bolts differences (i.e., dramatic systems/underlying game engine) between the two games? I haven't done a literal side-by-side comparison with both books open in front of me, but the system looks very similar.

[CaptOtter]

What is this series? I searched for "great sword strength" on Youtube, and 99% of the videos I saw after scrolling for a while were about Dark Souls III. The handful of videos I saw that discussed great swords and/or "zweihanders" didn't speak to the level strength that would be required. Also, what is the actual claim being made in the video? Is the message that two-handed sword require a shockingly meager amount of strength to wield effectively, or is the claim moreso that using a two-handed sword requires less overall strength to use than is typically depicted in popular...

[CaptOtter]

Let me just get the mandatory caveat out the way, lest anyone feel that I’m attacking them personally or something: the bottom line is that the differences we’re discussing in how feeding and the beast operate are not small differences between the older editions and V5. I mention below that these are aesthetic choices, neither good nor bad; and what I mean by that is that because there is no one objectively correct or accurate way of depicting vampires a (hopefully) fictitious monster, they can be as high or low-powered as anyone desires. The vampires in The Vampire Diaries are no more or less...

[CaptOtter]

Sure vampires are responsible for what their beasts do—but I don’t think MyWifeIsScary is saying that vampires in V5 are totally and completely exculpated for the Bad Thing the beast makes them do by dint of being more difficult to control or manage. It is neither a hot take, nor extraordinary, to posit that moral failure exists on a spectrum: the less control one has over one’s actions and behavior, the less morally culpable one is for the negative or undesirable outcomes of those actions and behavior. Obviously you could never perfectly define the spectrum (because you would never be able...

[CaptOtter]

Per page 451,"Two-handed weapon; very heavy — requires min. Strength 3 to employ." Do you mean absurd from gamist standpoint? Cause it makes some kind of sense to me that a thing that does a lot damage in part because it's big and heavy would necessarily require more strength than typical to weild. And the +6 seems in line with 20th anniversary, revised, and revised dark ages stats for this sort of weapon (give or take 1 depending on the book).

What I find absurd is that space missiles, and is what is essentially a rail gun, would do less damage than a regular ol' machine...

[CaptOtter]

I said 9 based on M20 rules—great sword is Str+6 damage, and requires minimum Strength 3 to use....

[CaptOtter]

Well, that's sort of my point—why would I spend the effort to outfit a craft with special, Paradox-prone space weapons if it's 100% more effective to simply put hard points on the outside and mount the same hum drum shit that is used in regular naval surface warfare?...

[CaptOtter]

I thought the Aetherial Realm was just a Middle Umbral Realm (albeit a huge one with spiritual correspondents to the planets/what Mages call the Shade/Shard realms). I'm basing this mostly on a box in some book that explains that there's like four or five major umbral reflections of the moon, one of which is in the Aetherial Realm (i.e., Sohkta)....

[CaptOtter]

YOINK! I'm stealling allllllllllll of this!!...

[CaptOtter]

This makes a huge amount of sense given the typical engagement range for space combat in most hard sci fi settings....

[CaptOtter]

Right to the point: the Voidcraft armaments presented in the book look soft as hell. Unless I'm missing something (akin to the system of notation for weapons from Aeon first edition, where vehicle-sized-weapons worked on an entirely different scale from anti-personnel weapons,) there's a vast incongruity between the weapons as describes, and their actual damage output.

First off, the majority of these things are doing Lethal damage, which seems particularly inappropriate in the case of HEX missiles (because they are missiles--they explode), and particle beams (which fire focused plasma)....

[CaptOtter]

I echo the majority of what Aleph in response to your last comment (and I've responded directly regarding the minority of instances in which I have a different take or opinion.)

First off, the core book absolutely teaches you the game--but I don't think it's necessarily a failure of the book that it may require more than one or two or three readings to really "get it." Unlike other games, Mage requires active rule synthesis; learning Mage requires that you learn a new way of thinking about problems based on a set of fictional natural laws. You could just limit yourself...

[CaptOtter]

If you're looking for an actual Rote/Procedure that does this, the Void Engineers have one called "Deprocessing" that uses Mind 4, with optional Prime 2 (the Prime makes the procedure "safer" after a fashion). The full write-up is in Void Engineers (Rev.) on pgs. 85-86. The non-magical elements of the Procedure look about as important as having the necessary spheres.

I would go a step further and posit that it would be possible for others groups to develop their own Mind 4 effects/rotes for breaking Conditioning, albeit I think it would be a much longer, more difficult...

[CaptOtter]

The changeover all at once makes sense to me in light of the fact that, at least if you're using Revised canon, the top of all the hierarchies got cutoff and the leadership necessarily skewed younger and newer to the game--i.e., no attachments to old labels, less nostalgia for the way things were/have been, etc.

In addition to the fact that the writing was on the wall for the DS going back to earlier editions, I think the same thing can be said of the Sons of Ether, whose 2nd ed. and Revised Tradition books had scattered mentions of how individual members of the tradition weren't...

[CaptOtter]

I would buy this Storyteller's Vault supplement in a heartbeat....

[CaptOtter]

Did you expect to be able to read any Mage: The Ascension core book just once and "grok" it all immediately? If the first time you read M20 was the first time you ever read an entire Mage book (which is to say you had not previously read or learned any prior edition of the setting or rules), I don't think any experienced Mage player or ST would expect you (or any other similarly situated person) to have "gotten" the entire game--i.e., understood and internalized all the rules and minutiae, all the ways the spheres work and interact, all the metaphysics--after a single read...