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bekeleven
2013-08-24, 01:20 AM
Intro (you can skip this)

Nobilis is probably my favorite role-playing system, but nobody plays it for some reason. The book is massive and slips frequently into rambling descriptions of the nature of the soul or short prose passages in the middle of mechanics sections. It’s a complicated game, but it’s the kind of complicated where you’re continually finding more things you can do, not things you can’t.

In this writeup I’m describing 2nd edition with Persona backported. I’ll make that point later, when I describe it. This primer was loosely adapted from a 3-page briefing I once made to pitch a weekly online nobilis game.

Nobilis in a nutshell


A game about massive power levels (compared often to Rifts/Exalted)

Diceless (All conflicts are based on character stats and resource management)

Not combat-centric (You have health, and you can be killed, but there’s a whole lot of politics)

Free-form, and based on creativity. It might be good if you had some experience creative writing.


Basic Setting

Here’s the idea. One day you were just walking along (or maybe not, maybe you were a dolphin or a teddy bear or something) and you meet this guy probably. He explains that he’s not actually a guy, but an Imperator: one of the most powerful of beings, like perhaps an angel descended from heaven. He’s recently procured the shard of reality representing “discourse”, and it’s mandated that his kind watch over the concepts in their possession. The only problem is, he tends to spend his days in the spirit realm killing horrible beings from beyond reality, so instead, since you have a mouth that some might consider capable of communication, he’s deputizing you to watch over it. Being the bulwark of your high school debate team, you challenge: “Prove it.”

So he plants the shard into your soul, and suddenly, you can see things as they truly are. The earth isn’t round, it’s flat. Gravity, air, wit – these aren’t forces or ideas, they’re spirits, and everything has one down to each blade of grass under your feet. And for the first time you realize how big the universe is: Earth is just one fruit on Yggdrasil, the World Tree. You have the dim sense that, had you seen this as a mortal, you would’ve been driven mad.

And thus you are ennobled: You are now the concept of Discourse (although you’re still yourself, more or less). One by one you are introduced to the other nobles underneath your Imperator, although you sort of already knew them, since you all contain parts of the same being’s soul. Together you scheme against other nobles or families of nobles, tend to your Sanctum (which is also a part of your imperator’s soul, it’s a long story), deal with mortals or not-so-mortals on earth or other fruits of the world ash, or imperator-forbid encounter the occasional excrucian from beyond reality that gets past the imperators and breaks through the weirding wall.

Mechanics

In a round, a player may make a mundane action (an action performed with the mortal part of their bodies and souls) and a miraculous action, which uses one of their attributes. Nobilis has a few attributes (4-5) and a few ways in which they work. For instance:

Aspect, the single stat that controls all physical and mental abilities, so that we can get those out of the way to make room for the magic. An aspect 2 character can expect to beat nearly all humans at any given task. An aspect four character can throw a baseball into the sun or track a person by scent. An aspect 5 character can catch bullets. It’s an aspect 6 miracle to memorize everything ever written. Things kind of get crazier from there.

Domain, the primary attribute for messing with your estate. You’re not just a noble, you’re The Viscount of Hats or The Domina of Discourse, and that difference emphasizes the importance of domain. It’s a level 3 domain miracle for the noble of hats to preserve a hat so that it never gets worn; one more level and he can create a beard hat that gives the wearer a real beard. A level 4 domain miracle for the noble of discourse can convince a person to drown himself. This makes discourse sound more powerful than hats, but it’s a bit more complicated.

Realm is power over the “chancel”, the home-sweet-home for the party, which usually exists just a hair out of time and space. Basically, realm is the ability to do what somebody with domain can do, only instead of being limited by concept, you’re limited to a certain space. Still, it’s an important space, and high Realm equals respect among other nobles.

Spirit is the fire in your soul. Increasing it allows a noble to better resist the miraculous powers of others, as well as split their soul and plant drops into more mortals, turning them into “_Anchors_”: Love them or hate them, and they become your eyes, your ears, or your minions, allowing you to participate in scenes where you aren’t physically present or advance various goals in absentia. High spirit also empowers specific magical rites, some of which have devastating effects.

Persona is power over the properties of your estate, and it’s the primary (only?) thing I think 3rd edition did right over 2nd. What are properties? Well, maybe discourse is a battle of the minds, and a force that proves truth. With persona 3, the Dame of Discourse can force the power of truth to her words; with persona 5, she makes a person stupid, forever. But maybe, she instead defined discourse’s properties as a method of communication, which is used to unify, and creates understanding. Now, with persona 1, she can bring peace on a man of two minds; or with persona 4, she can make a room full of CEOs to donate their wealth to charity. Once again, if you play 2nd ed (which you should), I recommend you look into the 3rd edition books to check this mechanic out. Including it is painless.

Character Creation

I’ll go into this more in-depth with anybody that would like help creating a character, but here are the high level basics:


Decide on your character concept: Who you are, and what you want to be able to do.

Decide on your estate properties. These are touched on above, in the Persona explanation. Although a straight 2nd edition game wouldn’t include the stat of persona, the description could still help clarify and define your estate.

List your bonds, things that matter to your noble. Winning, the color green, various anchors and friends, a good BLT, whatever you want. These have mechanical meaning but also serve to flesh out a concept.

Decide on a code, three principles that you uphold as sacred. The common ones are defined in the book, or you can make one yourself.
Now the number crunching. Each character starts with 25 character points. It's common for GMs to award 1 CP at the end of every session, or a few after every arc.


A level in an attribute costs 3 points; an attribute can go up to 5, allowing a noble to trivially do miracles up to that level. And yes, level 0 miracles do have meaning. (You do miracles above your attribute by spending miracle points – You start with five for each attribute.)

You can take or create gifts, and there are ways to create gifts that do almost anything. To give an idea of what gifts can do: flight or fire-breathing are 1 point; the ability to inspire lasting devotion in all who see you is two points; perfect timing taken at the 5-point level can cause accidental (but damn convenient!) time travel; immortality is 6 points (that should tell you the importance of combat).

Taking handicaps is strongly encouraged. These are things that inhibit you or dog you in some way, but due to the principle of “power from adversity”, you get extra miracle points from them. For instance, if you are dead and can only act through anchors, you get 3 MP right off the bat. If you are unable to cross running water, you get a miracle point every time an enemy dastardly flees over a bridge.

Bond your Anchors. Sidekicks and minions all rolled up into one. Sure, they’re not as cool as you or the other nobles… but at least they’re better than the normal riff-raff we call humanity.

After the party members are done creating their characters, you all get together to…


Create the Chancel. Maybe it’s a small temple and anybody can reach it by praying. Maybe it’s a sprawling underwater city with anti-sub turret defenses and wizards. Players begin with chancel points (the things that make it awesome!) equal to the sum of the party’s realm, but can add to it by taking disadvantages as well, like “common excrucian target” or “always smells like feet”.

Create the Imperator. He’s your dispatch, he’s your boss, and technically speaking you’re all just parts of his soul. Give him disadvantages (e.g. he gets angry at failure) to earn advantages (like giving you miracle points, just because he’s awesome).


Read those last two bullet points again, think about a campaign full of characters that can shoot down the sun, and imagine how fun it is to try and “plan” a nobilis campaign in advance. I have done this. It was... arguably a success.

Here is someone else’s longer, far better writeup of stock 2nd edition: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~cms/gaming/ry_synopsis.html

2e vs e3 (Because no game is complete without an edition war)
I'll try to be as impartial as possible when I describe the differences between editions, although the above passages make my allegiance clear.

In 3e:


The lore is dumbed down. This is not always a bad thing. The Big White Book of 2e had a ton going on and I don't claim to know all of it off the top of my head. The book will be in the middle of a mechanics section then just decide to tell a story about a baker in 1440 for a couple of paragraphs. It's a great book to read but terrible to reference. That said, it did get rid of a few things I enjoyed.

Some mechanics are cleaned up. The breakdown of "Domain" into two categories rids the system of one of its more glaring ambiguities. In 2e, the strictest interpretation of the rules penalized players with abstract estates ("Discourse", "Blue", "Anger") because nobles of physical domains could use their domains to interact directly with related concepts - so why bother being the noble of anger when you can be the noble of the WWF and get anger as a side benefit? The popular reading of the rules forbade this, which in turn limited the effectiveness of physical estates. I backport this rule into 2e when I run it.

Some mechanics were unneeded. They introduced a system where you stat your mortal body and gain mortal skills. It's not necessary at all. In addition, The Spirit stat was turned into "Treasure", which is just a grab-bag of mechanics with little narrative cohesion (even worse than Spirit in 2e).

The most glaring change was that of powers belonging to estates. The reason that Nobilis works so well as an abstract politics and subterfuge game isn't because you can't build brawlers; you absolutely can. The reason it works is because nobles belong to no estate. For instance, it's trivially easy to build the noble of memory as a man capable of altering the memories of others to suit his agenda. However, even if he can penetrate the defenses of another noble, it would do him no good as the noble's memories don't belong to his shard - the concept of reality doesn't recognize noble memories as part of "memories". 3e got rid of that, meaning that conflicts between nobles become far more direct, and whoever can hit the other can dominate confrontations.


Nobilis isn't a game about characters being balanced. It's a game about everyone breaking the game in different ways. Sure, one guy can run around the world a few times a second and lift battleships, but the other guy can bend mortals to his will and the third one can steal miracle points from enemy nobles. The point is that each character has an area of expertise (A typical party being "Spirit Guy", "Aspect Guy", "Realm Guy" and a few domains to fill out the familia), and the player is creative enough to utilize his strengths in any situations where he finds himself.

In 3e, when nobles directly battle each other, well... the game becomes D&D. You can have strength in any area you want, but one of the areas is "bending every noble to your will".

The biggest surprise about nobilis 3e is that, I've read forum posts from players that preferred this change. I like dungeons and dragons. I'm in an ongoing game now. I've built homebrew (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=15807014)for it. But Nobilis is special because it's not about beatsticking and CharOp, and I think 3e did away with a ton of that.

If you really like the mortal skills system, and you like treasure (which, I admit, cleared up Alchemy mechanics), and you like the changed lore, and you like the big-eyed anime drawings, and you are committed to running 3e... then I still recommend you think long and hard about whether nobles belong to estates. The Auctoritas, boundary of the soul, isn't just what separates the noble from the elements. It's what separates Nobilis from Rifts.

Sample Session (the fun part)

In order to figure out why Okinawa had gone missing, the reason behind the hacking of youtube and the connection of both to the mystery cult's clockwork ritual and the man on fire, one player's character decides the best place for answers is The Infinite Library of Alexandria, a place on the other side of the world-tree. He's Schrodinger's Cat, the noble of Superpositions, so he can move pretty quickly: Once he knows where he's going, he can hide from prying eyes and then use a minor miracle for somebody at his destination to observe him. So he's able to get to the library while the rest of the party is trying to prevent the bouts of mass-insanity they accidentally caused.

Anyway, once there the librarian bars his entrance until he completes a task. It's customary for the task to be a book collection, but at that moment the library had at least one copy of every book that has existed, currently exists, will exist or can exist so instead he wanted a curiosity. He asked the cat to bring him mercy from the green lady.

The cat travels back to the group and they do some research. Luckily one member is SkyNet, a Mythical being whose projection in reality mostly lays over the internet. It does some research on The Green Lady and finds that she's an Imperator (Imperator Type: True God) living in her Chancel, an infinite forest known as "The Grove." She spends her time moving about it caring for the plants and the animals, but as she's a force of nature more than something mortals would be able to comprehend, she kills and saves in equal measure. The familia (party) gathers there, as getting into the grove isn't hard, and ponders how to gain her mercy.

The way that they chose is 100% not what I predicted. First, SkyNet sent a drone to attack Schrodinger's Cat, while another party member, the Noble of Hunting, made sure all other activity of note in the area had ceased. Soon enough, The Green Lady realized what was about to happen. She vaporizes the drone as only an Imperator can, and once it happens a small flash of short-lived mercy spirits fly off of the Cat's body. The noble of Discourse orders two of them into a box, which she then closes, and the cat casts a preservation of superposition on the box so that, even though mercy spirits are sparks at best, it's unclear if they're still inside. Then the Noble of Delivery throws the box into his bag of preservation and the group heads off to the Infinite Library.

Once there, they take the box out and quickly present it to the librarian. He opens it to find nothing there. About to bar them entrance, the noble of Memory shows him what the box used to contain, while the noble of discourse argues that since it contained both 2 and 0 spirits, they completed their side of the deal, and he was the one that destroyed the spirits by collapsing the waveform.

Each noble chose a book before we ended the session, and I wrote up 500-word summaries and excerpts of them by the next one - which was HUGE fun, since I got to make it so that they could figure out the next arc beforehand if they all pooled their knowledge.

AuraTwilight
2013-08-24, 01:45 AM
Thanks for writing this. A common complaint I've heard is that while Jenna Moran is a great, whimsical writer, her strengths are also total weaknesses in actually explaining how her damn games work.

erikun
2013-08-24, 02:09 AM
Well, thank you for the introduction to a new system that I wasn't familiar with. It is quite a good explanation! The sample at the end is a good read, as well. :smallsmile:

Just a few observations/concerns of note.

One is the mention of two different editions of Nobilis. Now, I'm familiar with several different systems and so having two systems with different positive qualities, or hacking together two editions for a better whole, isn't a surprise to me. However, it does still mean learning two new systems, and two while are 90% similar and remembering the distinction between the two, to figure out how to do so correctly. Also, this doesn't seem like the kind of system you could just leave to the GM to know the rules and dictate them to the player - it seems like the players want to have a firm grasp of how the rules work in order to know what they can do.

Second, I'm not sure I'm really seeing a resolution anywhere in there. It seems like the system is mainly finding a way to apply your character's strengths and domains in a logical way to solving problems? Very freeform indeed.

And finally, it seems like Nobilis won't be that practical for playing anything but Nobilis. And perhaps something similar, like running a fey court game. This isn't really bad, as you generally only play Shadowrun to play Shadowrun and generally only play Vampire to play Vampire. However, it would mean that the appeal to the system might be a bit limited. Unless you want to play a game where you are a godlike power of an aspect solving problems in a world of such, it doesn't seem like you'd want to use the system.

Grinner
2013-08-24, 04:40 AM
That is extremely well-written.

I have but one question; Realm is still an attribute? I had been under the impression it was no longer attribute as of 3e.

bekeleven
2013-08-24, 06:42 AM
That is extremely well-written.

I have but one question; Realm is still an attribute? I had been under the impression it was no longer attribute as of 3e.

I was describing 2e.

3e refluffs it as basically Secondary Domain:Chancel, which is more or less what it already was. It's mostly a neutral change, with the exception that people with realm 0 no longer have the line on their character sheets.


One is the mention of two different editions of Nobilis. Now, I'm familiar with several different systems and so having two systems with different positive qualities, or hacking together two editions for a better whole, isn't a surprise to me. However, it does still mean learning two new systems, and two while are 90% similar and remembering the distinction between the two, to figure out how to do so correctly. Also, this doesn't seem like the kind of system you could just leave to the GM to know the rules and dictate them to the player - it seems like the players want to have a firm grasp of how the rules work in order to know what they can do.

Since the two editions use largely the same stats (drop one, add one, refluff one), resolution mechanics (generally, finding the simplest position in which two miracles don't conflict) and dice (none), adding a stat from 3e to 2e is literally just drag and drop. Since I own the 3e pdf, I photocopied pages 173-176 (description of estate properties; 3e is incredibly large print, so it's literally what I said up there, plus "you get 7 points, spend more than one on the integral ones") and 196-205 (which presents what you can do at each level of persona; since the system is abstract, this doesn't require mechanical descriptions so much as "at this level, you can incarnate yourself into an instance of your estate").

Resolution mechanics are either (1) finding lack of conflict between miracles, or (2) if that's not feasible, obeying the larger miracle, which is just a numbers comparison.

Death and combat works thusly: A player has a number of "wounds" equal to aspect + 4. They come in 3 levels: Surface (paper cut), serious (sword through arm) and deadly (losing arm, sword through gut). If you have enough concrete essence to keep yourself together, you can instantly heal from a paper cut. In fact, you never take damage unless it's damage of your highest available wound level. This means that if your attacks don't deal deadly wounds, it's impossible to damage someone unless they're already hurt. The book provides guides on the "size" of miracles that can deal each level. Penetrating enemy Auctoritas is often an issue, and depending on how your powers work, extremely challenging.

Combat has a number of wrinkles, so here's a few: Durant is an aspect minor preservation of self. As a 1 point gift, it makes it so that all miracles have to be a bit larger to hurt you. Your surface wounds take the power of serious wounds to remove, serious to deadly, and deadly to deadly+1. It's a 1 point gift. Immortality, a major preservation of self with stronger flexibility, is a 6 point gift that also protects against aging, dying or being hurt at all, any physical aliment, or "being trapped forever". Rite of the Holy Fire is a rite any noble can periodically preform that protects against attacks from non-miraculous beings (i.e. humans) depending on your spirit level. But since the rite has the hardest time defending against the most personal of attacks, someone with spirit 0 will protect themselves from things like atomic bombs, and as your spirit goes up you gain additional protections from things like tank shells, automatic then manual gunfire, stabbing, punching, insults, and then disrespect and gossip.

Play, in my experience, essentially comes in 3 level of abstractness. The first is your basic physical level, where you're doing things that all have concrete meanings on "prosaic earth" (the one humans see). A good example of this is combat with an excrucian. Players that play D&D may or may not like this. I had sparse combats when I ran, because not all players could contribute. For instance, SkyNet had a Gundam Anchor that could step on his enemies, and Discourse could tell enemies to stop existing (thereby dealing 1 deadly wound due to how he statted his estate), but Verschränkung (the cat) couldn't do much besides coordinate people, grab supplies, etc.

The second level is the level in my session summary, where sometimes things get rather abstract, but all effects are easy to describe and understand. Basic uses of estate and aspect, generally, to do basic things.

The third level, which is best described from examples in the books, especially "The Game of Powers" (since my groups never got close), is super abstract. I think the more you play with a group, the more comfortable they feel approaching that level (which is not to say that it's the natural goal of all play; I think all playstyles are legit). An example of this abstract play is this passage, describing an example concept of a character with Domain 0:

Mikhail was the foremost Power of Russia, before he lost his love. She perished in the winter winds he himself brought upon St. Petersburg. His resulting (entirely inappropriate) nervous breakdown nearly severed the connection between his Estate and himself . He split into the shadowy remnant of a human soul, bound into a Power's body, and a cold impersonal force (played by the HG) that has taken up his former duties. In exchange for certain concessions, the Imperator he belonged to traded that human self to another. Servants who have tasted power are always useful, and Mikhail's Aspect remains strong. The HG will doubtless explore the connection between Mikhail and the inhuman Power that carries out his old job in the course of the game.
Or consider this short passage from "A Game of Powers":

The stone was as heavy as my sins. That's not a metaphor, not precisely - that's how heavy my lady the Manchessa made it.

"You will remain in this room until you can move it aside," she said.

I waited until she was gone, then pushed upon the stone.

My sins, it seems, were great.

Here (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvDPPQoXw7vOdGNhZ2NESUZqNzhGTnBhNVgwckktb Xc#gid=0) is a freely editable character sheet that my group used in our games, especially online games over skype. If you want to create something persistent, I recommend cloning it (file -> make a copy).

Geostationary
2013-08-26, 02:23 AM
Persona is power over the properties of your estate, and it’s the primary (only?) thing I think 3rd edition did right over 2nd. What are properties? Well, maybe discourse is a battle of the minds, and a force that proves truth. With persona 3, the Dame of Discourse can force the power of truth to her words; with persona 5, she makes a person stupid, forever. But maybe, she instead defined discourse’s properties as a method of communication, which is used to unify, and creates understanding. Now, with persona 1, she can bring peace on a man of two minds; or with persona 4, she can make a room full of CEOs to donate their wealth to charity. Once again, if you play 2nd ed (which you should), I recommend you look into the 3rd edition books to check this mechanic out. Including it is painless.


Two things: first, Persona doesn't quite work the way you think it does, but that's less important. More importantly, how the hell do you actually use it with 2E mechanics as Persona partially relies on Afflictions, which you appear to disregard. Persona 3 & 6 miracles don't even do anything without them.


2e vs e3 (Because no game is complete without an edition war)
I'll try to be as impartial as possible when I describe the differences between editions, although the above passages make my allegiance clear.


Hi! I'm the other side.


In 3e:


The lore is dumbed down. This is not always a bad thing. The Big White Book of 2e had a ton going on and I don't claim to know all of it off the top of my head. The book will be in the middle of a mechanics section then just decide to tell a story about a baker in 1440 for a couple of paragraphs. It's a great book to read but terrible to reference. That said, it did get rid of a few things I enjoyed.

I wouldn't say dumbed down so much as simplified in some areas; there's less in-depth bits and there aren't examples for every single level of a thing. It does still go over all the important setting bits, and some of those bits are improved (in my opinion), such as the factions, i.e. shift of hell from Corruption to unconditional universal love, the Dark being more 'exceed limits [to the point of suicide] rather than just ultimate freedom by killing yourself, etc.


Some mechanics are cleaned up. The breakdown of "Domain" into two categories rids the system of one of its more glaring ambiguities. In 2e, the strictest interpretation of the rules penalized players with abstract estates ("Discourse", "Blue", "Anger") because nobles of physical domains could use their domains to interact directly with related concepts - so why bother being the noble of anger when you can be the noble of the WWF and get anger as a side benefit? The popular reading of the rules forbade this, which in turn limited the effectiveness of physical estates. I backport this rule into 2e when I run it.

I have no idea what you're referring to here unless you mean Persona, which doesn't actually do this. The Persona/Domain divide is between the substance of a thing and the meaning, not abstract v. concrete. They may favor certain Estates, but one doesn't uniformly favor one over the other, especially if people get clever.


Some mechanics were unneeded. They introduced a system where you stat your mortal body and gain mortal skills. It's not necessary at all. In addition, The Spirit stat was turned into "Treasure", which is just a grab-bag of mechanics with little narrative cohesion (even worse than Spirit in 2e).

Mortal skills- These were actually partially introduced in a 2e peculiar book, as otherwise there's no way to resolve challenges of a non-miraculous nature. Additionally, mortal actions interface with the Treasure, Aspect, and Auctoritas rules, amongst other things. This helps eliminate some of the ambiguities of 2E Aspect and gives increased options in how to do things in conflict with Aspect and the other things listed.

Treasure- Part of this is that Spirit, as a stat, doesn't really do anything actively, and is less useful with the new mechanics of 3E. Spirit also morphed into elements of Persona, not Treasure (the Auctoritas Magister is based on Persona), so I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. Treasure is also hard to understand at first glance, hence why there's now a minibook going into detail on it (available for free). It also greatly expands the utility of Anchors and what they are, as they've gone from 'people you care strongly about' to 'my panoply/people I care about/mystic icons/etc'. I disagree that it lacks cohesion, but can't say more without knowing why you think this.


The most glaring change was that of powers belonging to estates. The reason that Nobilis works so well as an abstract politics and subterfuge game isn't because you can't build brawlers; you absolutely can. The reason it works is because nobles belong to no estate. For instance, it's trivially easy to build the noble of memory as a man capable of altering the memories of others to suit his agenda. However, even if he can penetrate the defenses of another noble, it would do him no good as the noble's memories don't belong to his shard - the concept of reality doesn't recognize noble memories as part of "memories". 3e got rid of that, meaning that conflicts between nobles become far more direct, and whoever can hit the other can dominate confrontations.


Nobilis isn't a game about characters being balanced. It's a game about everyone breaking the game in different ways. Sure, one guy can run around the world a few times a second and lift battleships, but the other guy can bend mortals to his will and the third one can steal miracle points from enemy nobles. The point is that each character has an area of expertise (A typical party being "Spirit Guy", "Aspect Guy", "Realm Guy" and a few domains to fill out the familia), and the player is creative enough to utilize his strengths in any situations where he finds himself.

In 3e, when nobles directly battle each other, well... the game becomes D&D. You can have strength in any area you want, but one of the areas is "bending every noble to your will".

I'm not trying to offend, but I think part of this is that you didn't see/understand the new aspects of 3e's system.

So, a major reason why dropping exemption from Estates is fine is that the wound system is totally revamped, and the existence of Bonds (these are different from 2e Bonds) and Afflictions replacing Bonds/Virtues/Limits/Affiliations/etc.
First, Wounds in 2e were just hit points by another name; you could only lose them via physical violence. There's also no real way to deal with weird attacks like "lost all memories of the color blue" or "turned into a frog, ignoring the ambiguous rules legality of such an action".
Wounds in 3e don't measure health. They instead measure player agency- thus you can counter even the strangest metaphysical attacks by taking a wound; the wounds you take can even ward you against future attacks! You can also choose to just go with whatever they did to you and take one retroactively if your condition becomes inconvenient. They model this with the new Bonds and Afflictions.

There are a lot of things that go into this, but having run 3e it works just fine (if not better, as is my opinion). I'm honestly not sure how you came to this conclusion/opinion of 3e. Out of curiosity, have you actually played in a 3e game?



The biggest surprise about nobilis 3e is that, I've read forum posts from players that preferred this change. I like dungeons and dragons. I'm in an ongoing game now. I've built homebrew (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=15807014)for it. But Nobilis is special because it's not about beatsticking and CharOp, and I think 3e did away with a ton of that.

If you really like the mortal skills system, and you like treasure (which, I admit, cleared up Alchemy mechanics), and you like the changed lore, and you like the big-eyed anime drawings, and you are committed to running 3e... then I still recommend you think long and hard about whether nobles belong to estates. The Auctoritas, boundary of the soul, isn't just what separates the noble from the elements. It's what separates Nobilis from Rifts.

You really care about the whole 'Nobles are not part of an Estate' thing, don't you? I totally get the preference for most of 2e's fluff; hell, I'm a committed 3e person and I still consult the second edition books every so often because they have some cool stuff and elaborations. But I think that overall, the new system is mechanically superior.

*********************

Second, I'm not sure I'm really seeing a resolution anywhere in there. It seems like the system is mainly finding a way to apply your character's strengths and domains in a logical way to solving problems? Very freeform indeed.
Resolution is blind bidding of a limited resource (MP) to modify set Attributes for larger effect if desired. There are also a variety of resources to modify the final number for the purposes of resolution, or to outright stop the Miracle from being able to do something. Indirect opposition is important.

The system is actually surprisingly deep (I peg it as rules-medium), but applying strengths in clever ways is definitely a strong element.


And finally, it seems like Nobilis won't be that practical for playing anything but Nobilis.
This is pretty true, though you can use it to model certain things surprisingly well. If you want a related but lower-powered and more generic system, check out Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, which was made with this in mind.

Aolbain
2013-08-26, 03:17 AM
Nobilis is one of those games I always wanted to play but properly would be really damn bad at.

bekeleven
2013-08-26, 04:24 AM
Two things: first, Persona doesn't quite work the way you think it does, but that's less important. More importantly, how the hell do you actually use it with 2E mechanics as Persona partially relies on Afflictions, which you appear to disregard. Persona 3 & 6 miracles don't even do anything without them.
Persona 3 Miracles:


With this level of difficulty, you can use Persona to apply one of
your Estate’s Properties to yourself as an Affliction. Books can change
lives: so can the Power of Books. Hope springs eternal: the Power of
Hope can’t, therefore, die. Treachery can be anywhere: ergo, so can its
Power. The HG interprets the Property in such a fashion as to give a
meaningful effect on the situation you are currently in on a time scale
ranging from one round to one scene. Other than that it’s up to the
HG to determine how the effect actually manifests — does the Power
of Hope die and then come back to life, or avoid being killed, or simply
vanish temporarily under a veil of mystery?
Given that resolution is about applying strengths cleverly and indirect opposition, I don't see why I would need codified affliction rules to say "this is a miraculous effect. If something directly contradicts it, we can assign it a miracle level of 3."


I wouldn't say dumbed down so much as simplified in some areas; there's less in-depth bits and there aren't examples for every single level of a thing. It does still go over all the important setting bits, and some of those bits are improved (in my opinion), such as the factions, i.e. shift of hell from Corruption to unconditional universal love, the Dark being more 'exceed limits [to the point of suicide] rather than just ultimate freedom by killing yourself, etc.
I won't dispute this. My language may have be unnecessarily disparaging when describing the book.

One friend described nobilis 3e as "proof anime can make a person stupid." Now, I like anime. I develop homebrew for it (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=299771) (heh). But jeez, how did lord entropy turn from the dread imperator to an angry huge-eyed kid stealing cookies from the cookie jar?



I have no idea what you're referring to here unless you mean Persona, which doesn't actually do this. The Persona/Domain divide is between the substance of a thing and the meaning, not abstract v. concrete. They may favor certain Estates, but one doesn't uniformly favor one over the other, especially if people get clever.
I know that the persona/domain divide is not abstract vs. concrete. I'll pull out my 2nd ed rulebook to explain:

Domain miracles can do almost anything to the mortal world, although the Domain Attribute of any specific Sovereign is more limited. These miracles give the Nobilis broad and effective control over the things of their Estate. Most Sovereigns also have some control over the things associated with their Estate.
For instance, a domain 4 miracle is "Lesser creation". If I were the noble of elephants, I could create an elephant. By the rules mentioned occasionally in the book, such as in the passage above, I could also make something heavier - or I could use a destruction to make something lighter. After all, it's clearly an associated concept.

Let me offer a second example. Say I am the noble of weight. My Domain 4 miracle is lesser creation (still). I can use domain 4 to create weight (probably not too much, since it's lesser). So if I want to make something heavier, that's domain 4. Can I also use a lesser creation to make an elephant? By the rules in the book, this is a ton more ambiguous.

Now, the thing is, I've never played with a group that allowed free manipulation of weight for the noble of elephants using domain miracles, even if it was mentioned (in passing, usually) in the rules. I've also never played with a group that let the noble of weight spam elephants. These are grey areas that make constraining and defining noble powers tricky. Given the summary I just wrote above, why would a person play the noble of weight?

Including persona in 2nd ed solves these problems. Now, the noble of elephants has the estate property "Elephants are heavy." He can create an elephant with a domain miracle, or use a Persona 1 (bless/curse with the nature of estate) miracle to make something's weight closer to an elephant's, or use a persona 4 (lesser enchantment) miracle to make something fundamentally heavier (Quote: "These miracles add the dharma and/or Properties of your Estate — the way of being your Estate has — to a thing"). Isn't that system much easier to understand?


Mortal skills- These were actually partially introduced in a 2e peculiar book, as otherwise there's no way to resolve challenges of a non-miraculous nature. Additionally, mortal actions interface with the Treasure, Aspect, and Auctoritas rules, amongst other things. This helps eliminate some of the ambiguities of 2E Aspect and gives increased options in how to do things in conflict with Aspect and the other things listed.
In games I was in, the non-miraculous actions taken tended to be things like walking around, opening doors, and speaking with people. If you fired a machine gun at someone, you probably used aspect to do it, since even aspect 0 is stronger than mortal fire.

Basically, in any situation in which your success was in doubt, you used a miracle. The mortal skills system is just cruft designed to adjudicate things you didn't even care enough about to do right.


Treasure- Part of this is that Spirit, as a stat, doesn't really do anything actively,
Domain in 2e lets a person create, destroy, change, divine, etc. instances of their estate. Treasure let a person become immune to miracles, become immune to nonmagical harm, bind more anchors, divine who used what magic when, suck miracle points from enemies, etc. Both had plenty of applications, even if becoming immune to miracles - the very base - was a passive.


Spirit also morphed into elements of Persona, not Treasure (the Auctoritas Magister is based on Persona), so I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion.
Spirit is generally known for doing a few things: Auctoritas (folded into persona, as you said); anchors (literally treasure), and rites (which unless I'm forgetting something, are no longer even based off of any stat, except the servant's rite which is obviously associated with treasure).

Treasure is also hard to understand at first glance, hence why there's now a minibook going into detail on it (available for free). It also greatly expands the utility of Anchors and what they are, as they've gone from 'people you care strongly about' to 'my panoply/people I care about/mystic icons/etc'. I disagree that it lacks cohesion, but can't say more without knowing why you think this.

That said, my group houseruled anchor buffs, which is vaguely similar to how 3e uses treasure, although we started it before we'd seen the 3e rulebook. If you're curious, it was something like: A player can voluntarily ditch 1 anchor slot to give all anchors a 1-point gift, or ditch half his anchor slots to give all anchors character points equal to his spirit (it may have been minus 1 or 2, I forget). The balance rules were a bit more complicated, stuff like an anchor with no points in an ability didn't have a 0 in that ability (thus, an anchor without aspect 1 was considered a mortal and suffered mortal damage instead of wound levels; one with spirit 0 was affected normally by miracles, and did not have a level-0 auctoritas, etc). We also let players spend character points directly on anchors instead of their own characters, which fit some of the more dead character concepts amazingly.

So yeah, anchors in 2e are chumps, and sometimes I forget that because we didn't play using those rules.


I'm not trying to offend, but I think part of this is that you didn't see/understand the new aspects of 3e's system.

So, a major reason why dropping exemption from Estates is fine is that the wound system is totally revamped, and the existence of Bonds (these are different from 2e Bonds) and Afflictions replacing Bonds/Virtues/Limits/Affiliations/etc.
First, Wounds in 2e were just hit points by another name; you could only lose them via physical violence. There's also no real way to deal with weird attacks like "lost all memories of the color blue" or "turned into a frog, ignoring the ambiguous rules legality of such an action".
Wounds in 3e don't measure health. They instead measure player agency- thus you can counter even the strangest metaphysical attacks by taking a wound; the wounds you take can even ward you against future attacks! You can also choose to just go with whatever they did to you and take one retroactively if your condition becomes inconvenient. They model this with the new Bonds and Afflictions.
To some degree, this reminds me of the Game of Powers supplement, but I'd have to reread it to figure out whether I'm imagining things.

Back on topic, in my last game, the noble of discourse told an excrucian shard to die (very convincingly!), dealing the shard 1 deadly wound. If the noble of memory wanted to make him lose all memory of the color blue, well, that wouldn't work because his memory aren't in the domain of any estate. If they were in the domain of an estate, then he could just do a major change, build a mind-rape trap, and start the tippyverse.

You say that wounds in 2e were only from physical violence, but 3e is the system all about direct confrontation. You can use miracles and bully another noble into losing memories of colors or what have you. The primary means of noble attack in 2e was draining powers from your enemies using the nettle rite. If you want to know how hard they shut down indirect attacks in 3e, the nettle rite now gives the target as many miracle points as you. It's still something explicitly done to your enemies... just now it helps them. Because if you're not face to face, how could they be harmed?


Out of curiosity, have you actually played in a 3e game?
No. I've never run one, and all my friends ran 2e. If you're recruiting for a PbP or skype, I promise not to complain about treasure too much :P


You really care about the whole 'Nobles are not part of an Estate' thing, don't you? I totally get the preference for most of 2e's fluff; hell, I'm a committed 3e person and I still consult the second edition books every so often because they have some cool stuff and elaborations. But I think that overall, the new system is mechanically superior.
Nobles being part of estate is great for a game like exalted, where person A has powers, and person B has powers, and they powers each other until one has no powers. Nobilis 2e, intentionally or not, is a game of indirect politicking and subterfuge, and it's excellent at it.

It seems like you prefer 3e because it's more mechanically inclined, codifying exactly what afflictions can do, and using wounds to represent whatever it is they represent. It reminds me a lot of D&D 3.5 Vs. 4th ed. In 3.5, there's this vast, entirely unbalanced, somewhat complicated cornucopia of character options and you can make anything you want. In 4th ed, they simplified a lot of things, but disregarded fluff for smoother mechanics - A paladin can "mark" an enemy to encourage it to attack him, by using special holy powers to hurt it when it attacks others. A fighter can "mark" an enemy by getting free attacks if it attacks others. These abilities override each other why? Does the fighter slice through the paladin's deific power source with his sword to get the monster's attention? It's a mechanics thing, and 4th ed is very mechanically robust. But fluff wise, it makes about as much sense as a person with a bullet wound being mechanically equivalent to a person that forgot blue.

There's nothing wrong with a system like that. If you're in combat a lot, it can certainly be preferable.

Geostationary
2013-08-27, 02:38 PM
Given that resolution is about applying strengths cleverly and indirect opposition, I don't see why I would need codified affliction rules to say "this is a miraculous effect. If something directly contradicts it, we can assign it a miracle level of 3."

Because that's not what emulations do. So, Iolithae Septimian does a lesser emulation of the "Are sacred" property of her pseudoEstate, 'The Lies of Iolithae Septimian'. First off, there is a level three miracle protecting the fact that there's an emulation- and nothing else. This is understandably hard to directly counter. What the miracle actually does is give her Affliction: Is sacred (2 or 3, according to HG). This means that any miracle that would profane, pervert, or otherwise remover her sacredness would have to 1) contend with an Auctoritas rated equal to the Affliction and 2) the miracle the affliction generates to enforce her sacredness (typically rated at Affliction+2, HG's discretion).


I won't dispute this. My language may have be unnecessarily disparaging when describing the book.

One friend described nobilis 3e as "proof anime can make a person stupid." Now, I like anime. I develop homebrew for it (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=299771) (heh). But jeez, how did lord entropy turn from the dread imperator to an angry huge-eyed kid stealing cookies from the cookie jar?

There are a few things that went into this. Between the later found to be inaccurate assurances that she could get lots of high-quality locally sourced art for cheap (in China) and the art crisis where replacement art had to be found fast after an artist had been found plagiarizing other artist's work, the art took some hits.


I know that the persona/domain divide is not abstract vs. concrete. I'll pull out my 2nd ed rulebook to explain:

For instance, a domain 4 miracle is "Lesser creation". If I were the noble of elephants, I could create an elephant. [I]By the rules mentioned occasionally in the book, such as in the passage above, I could also make something heavier - or I could use a destruction to make something lighter. After all, it's clearly an associated concept.

Let me offer a second example. Say I am the noble of weight. My Domain 4 miracle is lesser creation (still). I can use domain 4 to create weight (probably not too much, since it's lesser). So if I want to make something heavier, that's domain 4. Can I also use a lesser creation to make an elephant? By the rules in the book, this is a ton more ambiguous.

Now, the thing is, I've never played with a group that allowed free manipulation of weight for the noble of elephants using domain miracles, even if it was mentioned (in passing, usually) in the rules. I've also never played with a group that let the noble of weight spam elephants. These are grey areas that make constraining and defining noble powers tricky. Given the summary I just wrote above, why would a person play the noble of weight?

Including persona in 2nd ed solves these problems. Now, the noble of elephants has the estate property "Elephants are heavy." He can create an elephant with a domain miracle, or use a Persona 1 (bless/curse with the nature of estate) miracle to make something's weight closer to an elephant's, or use a persona 4 (lesser enchantment) miracle to make something fundamentally heavier (Quote: "These miracles add the dharma and/or Properties of your Estate — the way of being your Estate has — to a thing"). Isn't that system much easier to understand?

I'm still not clear on what you're getting at. This looks kind of like the classic question of "How can I use my Estate to make a catgirl?/ Stop a missile?/etc.", from which we learned that any Estate, given sufficient twisting and bizarre logic, can do really strange things. Also, having considered a Domain weight Noble, you can do ridiculous things with that. Like shoot down arguments, or make the things he says sound really important, regardless of actual value. He carries a lot of weight in social situations.


In games I was in, the non-miraculous actions taken tended to be things like walking around, opening doors, and speaking with people. If you fired a machine gun at someone, you probably used aspect to do it, since even aspect 0 is stronger than mortal fire.

Basically, in any situation in which your success was in doubt, you used a miracle. The mortal skills system is just cruft designed to adjudicate things you didn't even care enough about to do right.

First off, it's debatable how much low-level Aspect can actually automatically win things like that. Second, even ignoring that, you don't seem to understand what mortal actions actually do; of the 5 or so things, only one can be reproduced with Aspect.
What do they do?
1) The do mortal things, which can be done with Aspect. Hunting, fishing, etc.
2) Magical skills. You want to be a curseworker, scryer, alchemist, or something? Magical skills can do it. Aspect explicitly can't.
3) Superior skills. These model things like "I'm not [entirely] human in the first place." Wanna be a bird? Superior Bird lets you fly and do birdy things. Aspect doesn't [to the limit that people are not birds]. I think you can use these in conjunction with Aspect, but it's not entirely clear.
4) There's this fundamental divide behind what miracles and mortal actions do. Miracles declare something to be so, and it is so, with no guarantee that your action will be productive or beneficial to you. Mortal actions are not certain, but they guarantee that your actions will be productive according to the level of your Intention, something miracles cannot do.
5) Mortal actions ignore the Auctoritas Magister outright, something Aspect 0 miracles can't do without Strike/penetration. This can be taken advantage of.
6) Unlike with miracles, the Auctoritas Magister protects your mortal actions from any miracle that would interfere with it, not just ones directly opposed to it.


Domain in 2e lets a person create, destroy, change, divine, etc. instances of their estate. Treasure let a person become immune to miracles, become immune to nonmagical harm, bind more anchors, divine who used what magic when, suck miracle points from enemies, etc. Both had plenty of applications, even if becoming immune to miracles - the very base - was a passive.


Spirit is generally known for doing a few things: Auctoritas (folded into persona, as you said); anchors (literally treasure), and rites (which unless I'm forgetting something, are no longer even based off of any stat, except the servant's rite which is obviously associated with treasure).


Here' the thing- Spirit, at it's base, is entirely about making you passively better at things everyone else can already do. There's no such thing as a 'miracle of Spirit'. While I agree that it's conceptually cool, with the creation of Treasure and Persona and the divorce of the Simple Rites from attributes, it's not really useful in the new system. It would be interesting to see a 3e-style Spirit attribute, but with the additions and shift in philosophies in the system, Spirit as-is isn't all that useful, and I think its replacements are more interesting in play.


To some degree, this reminds me of the Game of Powers supplement, but I'd have to reread it to figure out whether I'm imagining things.

Back on topic, in my last game, the noble of discourse told an excrucian shard to die (very convincingly!), dealing the shard 1 deadly wound. If the noble of memory wanted to make him lose all memory of the color blue, well, that wouldn't work because his memory aren't in the domain of any estate. If they were in the domain of an estate, then he could just do a major change, build a mind-rape trap, and start the tippyverse.

First, Changes aren't a thing in 3e. There are Motions, which are similar, but they're not 2e Changes. Next, there are so many ways to get around a mind-rape trap it's kind of hilarious, and that's not including 'take a wound that makes you functionally immune to mind-rape for the duration' or the fact that such a trap would likely be a mundane thing, unless the Noble wanted to sustain an action for all time.


You say that wounds in 2e were only from physical violence, but 3e is the system all about direct confrontation. You can use miracles and bully another noble into losing memories of colors or what have you. The primary means of noble attack in 2e was draining powers from your enemies using the nettle rite. If you want to know how hard they shut down indirect attacks in 3e, the nettle rite now gives the target as many miracle points as you. It's still something explicitly done to your enemies... just now it helps them. Because if you're not face to face, how could they be harmed?

Not really. For one, you can do that in theory, but taking a wound allows them to assert narrative control over the attack and what it does to them. You may try to erase their memories, but that's not necessarily what will happen.
So, 3e Nettle Rites do two things: They break Bonds/Afflictions, and give you [the person performing the rite] MP. Let's talk about breaking Bondflictions- when you break a Bond or Affliction, either by yourself or by Nettle Rite, two things happen. First, you gain MP because that's a thing those do when they cause you trouble. Next you take a wound; this is one of two ways you can even inflict more than one wound at once, as breaking a Bond/Affliction (5) inflicts two Deadly Wounds. Since everyone has 2 Divine, 1 Tough, and 2 Normal Wound levels, it's technically feasible to defeat someone solely with Nettle Rites, or at least to weaken them or otherwise screw them over.




It seems like you prefer 3e because it's more mechanically inclined, codifying exactly what afflictions can do, and using wounds to represent whatever it is they represent.

I like 3e because it defines things better than 2e, and the new stats and mechanics are superior to the old ones, in my opinion. For example, what's the difference between an 'improbable feat' and a 'very improbable feat'? In 3e, each level of Aspect does a distinct thing (in this case, Aspect 3 straight beats mortal actions and gives you miraculously good timing, and Aspect 4 makes you roughly twice as strong/smart/etc.). Also, Afflictions weren't things in 2e, so that argument is like saying 'you like it because it explains what the rules for a thing are'.


It reminds me a lot of D&D 3.5 Vs. 4th ed. In 3.5, there's this vast, entirely unbalanced, somewhat complicated cornucopia of character options and you can make anything you want. In 4th ed, they simplified a lot of things, but disregarded fluff for smoother mechanics

No, not really. Both systems give you "vast, entirely unbalanced, somewhat complicated cornucopia of character options and you can make anything you want"- 3e Nobilis is arguably better at this. The fluff is still there, it's just the mechanics have been cleaned up, removing a lot of ambiguities and replacing some systems with better, more flexible ones- for example, Bonds and Afflictions can cover everything Bonds, Handicaps, Limits, Affiliations, etc. in 2e did, and they provide the basis for the new damage system.


It's a mechanics thing, and 4th ed is very mechanically robust. But fluff wise, it makes about as much sense as a person with a bullet wound being mechanically equivalent to a person that forgot blue.

There's nothing wrong with a system like that. If you're in combat a lot, it can certainly be preferable.
See, here's the thing- it does jibe with the fluff that they can be equivalent. Miraculous duels have always been about asserting narrative control over the world. The reason that both a gunshot wound and lost memories can be mechanically equivalent is that both are concessions of a Noble's agency, unless they're fine with it- you can choose to just go "Alas, I have been shot!" and continue playing as though you've been shot. They're both undesirable things that you don't want happening to you, and as a creature of spiritus dei, you can reject the truth of these things, proclaiming to the world the actual truth of how it effects you.

elliott20
2013-08-27, 03:36 PM
Thanks for writing this. A common complaint I've heard is that while Jenna Moran is a great, whimsical writer, her strengths are also total weaknesses in actually explaining how her damn games work.

good god this so damn much. She spends so much time coming up with cool metaphysical concepts to test out that half of her games can end up devolving into a giant stew of schizophrenic semantic wrapping if you're not careful.

i.e. in an older Nobilis game (I think it was 2e), one of the players decided he wanted to be the god of triviality. The rest of the game was basically him trying to be trivialize everything so he could get as much influence as possible. But when this crossed with the god of failure (another player), it started producing some really really strange results.

bekeleven
2013-08-29, 09:28 AM
Because that's not what emulations do. So, Iolithae Septimian does a lesser emulation of the "Are sacred" property of her pseudoEstate, 'The Lies of Iolithae Septimian'. First off, there is a level three miracle protecting the fact that there's an emulation- and nothing else. This is understandably hard to directly counter.
I'm sure it's at least as hard to counter somebody changing their level of sacredness when other nobles find that their sacredness isn't part of the sacred domain.

So turns out that thing you hate about 2e actually works this time.


There are a few things that went into this. Between the later found to be inaccurate assurances that she could get lots of high-quality locally sourced art for cheap (in China) and the art crisis where replacement art had to be found fast after an artist had been found plagiarizing other artist's work, the art took some hits.

I think this interpretation is hurt by the "Male Noble" and "Female Noble" art pages. Also, this (http://i.imgur.com/1ZUO7OO.png).


I'm still not clear on what you're getting at.Depending on how you interpret the limitations of domain, certain types of estates allow more options in gameplay. Estate Properties and Persona help mitigate this issue. I literally don't know how to make this clearer.


any Estate, given sufficient twisting and bizarre logic, can do really strange things. Also, having considered a Domain weight Noble, you can do ridiculous things with that. Like shoot down arguments, or make the things he says sound really important, regardless of actual value. He carries a lot of weight in social situations.
Unless, you know, his estate properties lock him out of doing so. "Weight is a function of mass." "Weight makes things fall." By forcing the noble of weight to have estate properties, that stops being an issue. Are you now arguing that 2e's lack of estate properties is better?


First off, it's debatable how much low-level Aspect can actually automatically win things like that.
Aspect 0 (at least in 2e) is defined as "Peak Performance": Literally the best you can do in your normal mortal body. Aspect 1, meanwhile, is defined as being able to compete globally in any mortal activity or competition (the "Olympic bronze medal at anything" level). Aspect 2 is beating humans at everything - the "Olympic gold medal" level.


Second, even ignoring that, you don't seem to understand what mortal actions actually do; of the 5 or so things, only one can be reproduced with Aspect.


Each describes a skill set or way of life that you spent a long time practicing. The better you are with that Skill, the more points you should assign it.

The example skills offered are "Writer" and "Dancer". Examples of mortal actions in the book (p151) are as follows: Complete homework, fix leaks, play piano, be a lawyer. There's also Cool and Shine. Cool explicity works against "Mundane Actions", and Shine is "leadership, glory, and influence." The example given is the ability to convince mortals to do things they shouldn't want to do. This is explicitly in the domain of aspect bruisers, at least in 2e. Also, if performed with aspect, they circumvent rite of the holy fire.

As you point out, the other classes of skills - presented not under the "skills" header, but under subsequent headers like "trouble", which damages my claim about this book being well-organized - almost have useful applications, in that you need to spend a 1 point gift or be aspect 5 to fly in nobilis (planes can fly, and aspect 5 allows you to perform tasks that a machine constructed specifically for a task can perform; my group ruled it as closer to "jumping from cloud to cloud"). However, at least half of the system serves literally no mechanical purpose, and the other half allows you to do maybe 1 miraculous thing that loses any contested action against another miracle, even someone else's low-level aspect miracle. So, go team, I suppose.

Also, yes, in the effort of making the system as different from everything else as possible, skills (although only at certain levels) have the property of never backfiring, one of the more irksome parts. I can just see Varsuuvius asking, "Even when the fighter's sword misses his target, it is guaranteed to strike something beneficial to him. Why is it that when I alter reality with a thought I do not have these same assurances?"


Unlike with miracles, the Auctoritas Magister protects your mortal actions from any miracle that would interfere with it, not just ones directly opposed to it.
This may be one of the wrinkles I missed. Where can I read it?


Here' the thing- Spirit, at it's base, is entirely about making you passively better at things everyone else can already do. There's no such thing as a 'miracle of Spirit'.
I mean... in the way that high aspect lets you do things that mortals can do, yeah.

THE MOUNTAIN LAUREL LAW: If a human can do something, Aspect can do it... a thousand times better.
Humans can jump; Aspect covers jumping over a wall.
Humans can compose; Aspect covers composing great songs.
Humans can swim... etc.

So, yes, spirit lets you bind an anchor... high spirit lets you bind many anchors. Spirit lets you detect magic... high spirit lets you detect very minor magic used months ago. Spirit armors you from mortal attacks... high spirit armors you from gossip. Spirit lets you adapt your miraculous energy... high spirit lets you use any miracle points however you like. Spirit lets you nettle miracle points from your enemies... up to your spirit rating. Etc.

And yes, the traditional ways of spending SMPs are either to use miracles through anchors (where they can be subbed for any other miracle point type) or to spend on gifts. My group also houseruled that they could be used to buff spirit for a single rite, in the same way that other MPs are used for 1 action.


First, Changes aren't a thing in 3e. There are Motions, which are similar, but they're not 2e Changes.Which is why I was describing 2e, or did the "nobles not belonging to estates" not tip you off.


So, 3e Nettle Rites do two things: They break Bonds/Afflictions, and give you [the person performing the rite] MP. Let's talk about breaking Bondflictions- when you break a Bond or Affliction, either by yourself or by Nettle Rite, two things happen. First, you gain MP because that's a thing those do when they cause you trouble. Next you take a wound; this is one of two ways you can even inflict more than one wound at once, as breaking a Bond/Affliction (5) inflicts two Deadly Wounds. Since everyone has 2 Divine, 1 Tough, and 2 Normal Wound levels, it's technically feasible to defeat someone solely with Nettle Rites, or at least to weaken them or otherwise screw them over.
OK, this does have nontrivial interaction with the "taking wounds lets me do random ****" system that I didn't realize.

That said, you could build a farming engine simply by giving a character a ****-ton of 1-3 point bonds and durant or immortal traits. Just pick a bond that you (or others) can break once a minute, and you get miracle points at the same rate. Oh, and wounds can be healed using those stockpiled miracle points if you ever run into an issue. Also, you get far, far fewer bond/affliction points than you could in 2e (although it varies based on how you create your character, I'd say that due to lower base bond points and having to spend those points to get previously free things like limits, it ends up half or less) 1 point bonds are a lot more appealing.


I like 3e because it defines things better than 2e, and the new stats and mechanics are superior to the old ones, in my opinion. For example, what's the difference between an 'improbable feat' and a 'very improbable feat'? In 3e, each level of Aspect does a distinct thing (in this case, Aspect 3 straight beats mortal actions and gives you miraculously good timing, and Aspect 4 makes you roughly twice as strong/smart/etc.).

Yes, 2e's Aspect 2 miracles of "a tiny bit above the ability of the greatest mundane humans" is so much less clear than 3e's "like the best humans in the world, plus a little extra." And aspect 4 doesn't double your power - Instead, it makes you twice as strong as aspect 3... in most cases. Really, the only difference is that 2e's aspect 2 conforms with 3-3, whereas 2-7 is closer to 3-6 (running at the speed of light, lifting a city block). So there's a slightly smaller midrange spread, which could be good, I guess?


Also, Afflictions weren't things in 2e, so that argument is like saying 'you like it because it explains what the rules for a thing are'.Bonds, limits, restrictions, and virtues (and codes) were all things in 2e. Saying that they aren't the equivalent of bonds and afflictions in 3e is inaccurate. See, this guy agrees with me:


for example, Bonds and Afflictions can cover everything Bonds, Handicaps, Limits, Affiliations, etc. in 2e did

So yes, they standardized the rules for those mechanics, which were disparate in 2e. Even you are saying this to me. I'm not sure why you are arguing against it.


No, not really. Both systems give you "vast, entirely unbalanced, somewhat complicated cornucopia of character options and you can make anything you want"- 3e Nobilis is arguably better at this. The fluff is still there, it's just the mechanics have been cleaned up, removing a lot of ambiguities and replacing some systems with better, more flexible ones- for example, Bonds and Afflictions can cover everything Bonds, Handicaps, Limits, Affiliations, etc. in 2e did, and they provide the basis for the new damage system.

See, here's the thing- it does jibe with the fluff that they can be equivalent. Miraculous duels have always been about asserting narrative control over the world. The reason that both a gunshot wound and lost memories can be mechanically equivalent is that both are concessions of a Noble's agency, unless they're fine with it- you can choose to just go "Alas, I have been shot!" and continue playing as though you've been shot. They're both undesirable things that you don't want happening to you, and as a creature of spiritus dei, you can reject the truth of these things, proclaiming to the world the actual truth of how it effects you.
I respect that you like the new mechanics more than the older ones, but I don't see us seeing eye to eye on it. I prefer a system in which you can't just use a miracle to make your relative narrative control meter go up because it forces the players to act indirectly and leads to great politics and subterfuge in my eyes. You like a system where different types of miracles have similar mechanical power, because it jives with the idea that noble agency all comes from the same miraculous power. I think we should agree to disagree.

Terraoblivion
2013-08-29, 10:04 AM
I respect that you like the new mechanics more than the older ones, but I don't see us seeing eye to eye on it. I prefer a system in which you can't just use a miracle to make your relative narrative control meter go up because it forces the players to act indirectly and leads to great politics and subterfuge in my eyes. You like a system where different types of miracles have similar mechanical power, because it jives with the idea that noble agency all comes from the same miraculous power. I think we should agree to disagree.

You do realize that wounds in 3e only apply to you and, I think, anchors, though I might be projecting Chuubo rules there. If somebody turns Cleveland and everything in it into a forest of crystals, then the narrative is that now Cleveland and everything in it is a forest of crystals. Wounds simply allow you to say "not me" if you were in it. It's narrative control over you yourself and what is closely tied to you, not over everything. This incidentally means that politics and subterfuge aren't touched, unless people are doing it by directly trying to brainwash you, as opposed to turning your friends against you or even just successfully lying to you.

bekeleven
2013-08-29, 10:47 AM
You do realize that wounds in 3e only apply to you and, I think, anchors, though I might be projecting Chuubo rules there. If somebody turns Cleveland and everything in it into a forest of crystals, then the narrative is that now Cleveland and everything in it is a forest of crystals. Wounds simply allow you to say "not me" if you were in it. It's narrative control over you yourself and what is closely tied to you, not over everything. This incidentally means that politics and subterfuge aren't touched, unless people are doing it by directly trying to brainwash you, as opposed to turning your friends against you or even just successfully lying to you.

My point is that you have the ability to exert much broader narrative changes on other powers using miracles, due to the changes in noble estate. So two nobles in a fight would throw narrative changes on each other, then each could block the other by taking wounds. If it were 2V1, you could bring action economy into it. Eventually the lone noble would be out of narrative control and the team of 2 would be able to narratively control him, whether that be to shoot him or make him forget blue.

I was referring to wound levels as "narrative control meters" because that is exactly what they are.


taking a wound allows them to assert narrative control over the attack

Terraoblivion
2013-08-29, 10:50 AM
My point is that you have the ability to exert much broader narrative changes on other powers using miracles, due to the changes in noble estate. So two nobles in a fight would throw narrative changes on each other, then each could block the other by taking wounds. If it were 2V1, you could bring action economy into it. Eventually the lone noble would be out of narrative control and the team of 2 would be able to narratively control him, whether that be to shoot him or make him forget blue.

I was referring to wound levels as "narrative control meters" because that is exactly what they are.

Yes, and my point was that it's narrative control over you. Clever nobles can get around that by either attacking the goals of their enemies or attacking in ways that indirectly limit their opponent. You're the one focusing purely on people slugging it out and then declare creativity impossible. Also, I'm not sure there are a whole lot of creative ways to directly attack your opponent given the nature of estates. Most direct attacks will be pretty blunt and unremarkable compared to what you could potentially do.

bekeleven
2013-08-29, 10:58 AM
Yes, and my point was that it's narrative control over you. Clever nobles can get around that by either attacking the goals of their enemies or attacking in ways that indirectly limit their opponent. You're the one focusing purely on people slugging it out and then declare creativity impossible. Also, I'm not sure there are a whole lot of creative ways to directly attack your opponent given the nature of estates. Most direct attacks will be pretty blunt and unremarkable compared to what you could potentially do.

I'm not declaring creativity impossible. I'm declaring direct combat feasible, and I'm declaring overwhelming force a legitimate means of bending nobles to your will (given the correct build, and possibly an ally). The first one of these is generally untrue in 2e; the second one is directly impossible.

Geostationary
2013-08-29, 04:26 PM
My point is that you have the ability to exert much broader narrative changes on other powers using miracles, due to the changes in noble estate. So two nobles in a fight would throw narrative changes on each other, then each could block the other by taking wounds. If it were 2V1, you could bring action economy into it. Eventually the lone noble would be out of narrative control and the team of 2 would be able to narratively control him, whether that be to shoot him or make him forget blue.

I was referring to wound levels as "narrative control meters" because that is exactly what they are.

I agree that we can't really see eye-to-eye on this, so I'll just shift to this bit here.

Yes, 3e lets you exert more power over other Nobles. This fits into the changes in philosophy of 3e's system, like the greater commonality of the Auctoritas, the greater abundance of MP, and the wound system now dictating player agency rather than traditional health levels.


I'm not declaring creativity impossible. I'm declaring direct combat feasible, and I'm declaring overwhelming force a legitimate means of bending nobles to your will (given the correct build, and possibly an ally). The first one of these is generally untrue in 2e; the second one is directly impossible.

Direct combat has always been feasible. It's also always been ill-advised. In 2e, this is because Nobles aren't part of any Estate. In 3e, it's because they can render damage into something that both can protect them from further damage, and lets them dictate the nature of the damage. In 3e, the Estate limitation is gone, which allows you more options on things to do to Nobles and the miraculous in general. In both editions, direct miraculous combat tends to be a large drain on resources that tends to go nowhere unless one side is grossly outnumbered- incidentally, this is more pronounced in 2e as the action economy is stricter and functions differently than in 3e.

Similarly, overwhelming force has also always been an option; it's just the nature of applicable forces has changed, giving both sides greater flexibility. It also tends to be less effective than clever maneuvering and general bastardry.

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Can we find some topic that isn't an edition war over our own preferences and perceptions? Yes, we agree the two editions are different and that we disagree over how they're different and the moral nature of that, but could we move on?