[Anathema] Ronnies feedback
Ron Edwards:
Hey,
I'm glad you like the diagram!
Aw crap, about my character. I actually had a really good one worked up, also Kindly, but lost the sheet and whipped up this one on the fly - missing rules I'd actually accorded with the first time, like the Will 7. Oh well.
I'm liking the idea of Anathema being a point-spend-bid for Initiative, not so much the idea about Perception, which I still think oughta simply be expunged and the point-totals adjusted to account for that. But whichever way you go, count me in on the playtesting.
Regarding angels, I supppose I'm being as precedent-centric as you mentioned you tended to be. There are a few sorts of angels and related notions I merely write off in, or from, my head entirely - Hallmark angels, of course; Milton's literary notions which are fine as literature but have nothing to do with religion; most medieval notions and imagery; and the mishmash of these things found in DC titles like Sandman and Lucifer. When one goes back and looks at the origins of the Abrahamic religions, a lot of conventional narrative simply gets tossed out the window, and the whole notion that there are these guys with wings with allegiances to heaven and hell ... well, screw it. Instead there's this gnostic soup of ideas, some of which involve supernatural beings and some of which involve God and some of which involve the Hebrew tribes and some of which involve local politics, and so on.
Plus the notions of Heaven and Hell as they appear in the references that I said I tend to write off, well, those post-date the time-period and texts I'm talking about by centuries. I figure you know this already, but for the record and for clarity, the Heaven/Hell stuff is grossly troweled onto the original (messy) compilations of documents. It's always interesting to me when someone with a strong Roman Catholic background, among others, sits down and reads the Bible one day - 'cause there's essentially nothing in there resembling anything he or she was taught. But I digress.
What's weird to me is the curious power, presence, and outright danger of the beings, cherubim and seraphim and whatnot. I mean, they're straight-up bad-asses on their own, with what appears to be no moral content or direct association with God-stuff, in the sense of a "heavenly host" or much like that. They're vaguely-described, unstoppably powerful, apparently highly opinionated, and all over the damn place.
So to me, Anathema(e) look very much like angels, much more so than any character in Paradise Lost, much more so than any image we see in religious art from the Renaissance, and much more so than any of the modern stuff like Touched By An Angel (and the host of similar), or the Vertigo comics.
I hope that was interesting at least.
Best, Ron
charlesperez:
One seeming hole I notice about the game is that, for a beginning Shroud, killing by any means other than attacking in combat is not efficient for gaining Anathema, because such indirect means costs one point of Anathema, the very point the killing was supposed to yield, and is not a sure kill. Even when killing a preferred victim for an extra point, the prospect of gaining net Anathema from the deed is uncertain. Am I reading the game wrong? Or is it the intention for every Shroud to be particularly good in combat, and to start its career by striking down its victims directly?
Charles
Devon Oratz:
Basically, you have to kill a medium sized number of people up-close-and-personal to build up "seed money" in terms of Anathema points to start using your fancier powers to set up creative "kill chains" to start getting a good yield of Anathema gained to Anathema spent. It's decidedly gamist, in a fucked up way.
Fortunately, many of your human victims are pathetically weak, so I don't think this design forces everyone to dump a bunch of points in Combat/War.
Ron (having actually played the game!) can probably answer better than I can at this point, though.
Phil K.:
I was holding off on posting about this until Ron got the actual play posted, but this is an issue we spotted during the session. We were all dying to use our powers but 1) none of us had a powerful enough ability for it to be worthwhile and 2) it seemed like a zero sum game.
1) We're angels of death but it's seriously that hard to kill a man with a touch? Come on! Beef up the effectiveness of the powers, give us something to play with! Our rank 3 powers were actually worse than traditional (read: mortal) means of dealing death! This was a bit frustrating and really kept us from building lots of anathema.
2) It was immediately apparent to all of the players that it just wasn't worth using our powers aside from the cool factor in most cases. Spending anathema to gain anathema isn't a problem if the ROI is sufficient. The 1:1 exchange rate (which is really less than that, given that there is a chance you will fail to kill someone with a given power) feels restrictive. The players all seemed to feel that the powers should be a conduit for gaining anathema rather than a method for dumping it. To be fair, players did use their powers when they had an opportunity. One evaporated the water source of a refugee camp and another caused a fatal accident at an artillery encampment.
-Phil
Ron Edwards:
Computer problems have delayed my playtest post, which is very frustrating.
I thought I'd make sure two issues are kept separate.
1. Getting your hands bloody at the start, in order to bank up enough Anathema to start using Dominions - this is great. It works really well, and ensures that the players (and characters) do not start killing safely from a distance. There's no anesthesia for what they are doing. I think what Charles wrote above is a strong feature of the game.
2. The Dominions as currently written - probably need a fairly intensive overhaul. Part of it concerns what Phil is talking about, the tendency toward spending as much or more Anathema to kill fewer people, i.e., a net loss of Anathema. This doesn't apply to every Dominion at every level, but it is a tendency across them. Another part concerns differences among Dominions in terms of effectiveness, particularly Atrophy.
I think the latter point is very easy to see once you play, and Devon, for you as the designer, will be very easy to revise, in whatever way you think is strongest. I don't see much point in belaboring it or dissecting it on-line - for one thing, we haven't played long-term, and for another, again, I don't think the design question should be subjected to committee-type dynamics.
Best, Ron
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