The Technocratic Union are the primary antagonists to the 9 Traditions. No so much purely evil for the sake of evil but a well funded highly authoritarian secret society ideologically opposed to the Traditions. The Technocracy brought us modern plumbing, vaccination and modern medicine, toilet paper, and nuclear weapons, advanced bioweapons, capitalism, and the prison industrial complex.

The Nephandi are the evil for evil sake mages. They are seeking to spread as much pain and misery and bring in the descent of humanity into destruction.

And then there’s the marauders, mages who’s magickal hubris gets the better of them and they succumb to a reality warping madness.

Imo WoD I feel gets the right balance of RP and streamlined combat with optional additional rules if they are needed. I’m also generally a firm believer in combat means all other forms of diplomacy has failed. I also love that no matter how strong you are, everyone has 7 points of health they can take (but there are ways of getting around that especially for mages)

And for all the good and bad that the 5e splats that Paradox is putting out, the “3 rounds and call it” philosophy of combat is something I enjoy immensely.

At its core DnD is a wargame where we spend most of the game time fighting against monsters and bad guys. Having robust combat systems is the big draw of the game and fighting monsters in interesting ways without being too unfair either way. People want rules that are robust enough to make interesting combat but don’t completely break down under a bit of the box thinking, like the peasant rail gun, or the moon box lich, or the create water in someone’s lungs to cause drowning, or the coffeelock to get infinite spell slots.

All of these mechanical oversights are frustrating to play with because we have to stop the game and debate over whether this cheesy game breaking bullshit should be allowed at the table and it takes time away from the reason we’re all here, to get together play a game, and let everyone have fun, DM included. And sitting around debating whether the moon counts as a container for a lich’s soul reliquary or lining up 500 peasants and each of them readying and handing off an object at a bazillion mph for an hour and a half breaks the rules is not fun.

You want a system for magic that encourages being busted even at high levels? Play some Mage the Ascension, you can do some absurdly wacky shit even at fairly low power levels.

Because certain systems have different focuses.

The core game focus of DnD is pretty heavily directed toward combat. Most of the spells and skills your character has are for combat or for getting into combat or for between combat encounters. It’s a combat centric game, with some RP rules added on top for in-between combat encounters.

Compare that to World of Darkness’s Storyteller system, which is much more heavily focused on the social interactiom and narrative drama. Combat in that game is quick and usually quite lethal, and even in the 5th Edition games Paradox is releasing, calls for combat to be 3 turns before resolving the interaction.

It takes a lot of time and effort to add on your own rules to make these systems handle what they weren’t really designed for.

I wouldn’t really want to run a game of complex political intrigue in DnD just as I wouldn’t want to run a monster slaying dungeon crawl in World of Darkness.

Yeah, gender being a social construct doesn’t mean everyone everywhere just suddenly becomes genderless androgynous blobs, we still express our gender in the ways we want to express them.

For example High heels, sheer leggings, long curly hair, and a flowy skirt and poofy blouse adorned with shiny bits. Am I describing the style dress of women today or the style of dress of 17th century French kings?

Certainly coffee houses do have historic basis in our own reality but the highly commercialized omnipresent franchises with extensive supply chains like IRL Starbucks would definitely be a bit more anachronistic, especially in an adveture friendly world where monsters and bandits are waiting outside the walls of the city waiting to ambush cargo shipments.

Something like that probably wouldn’t have been even remotely possible until the age of Mercantilism well after the medieval period gave way to the Renaissance and eventually the age of exploration.

As a DM dice are there to make noise behind the screen and raise tension. They’re a psychological tool as much as they are a randomizer.

Personally I play a lot of World of Darkness games, which runs on dice pools, so if I can just keep obviously adding more and more dice to a pool, recount once or twice and roll to really sell the illusion that they may be in for something a lot bigger and scarier than they are. Or just roll a handful of dice as moments are going on, give a facial reaction and let that simmer under the surface for a while.

This sounds a lot like Star Lord’s situation with Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy 2.

Do my eyes decieve me? An honest to god Mage the Ascension meme???

Point taken, but they also still had the resources and people to make that many charts.

Well Rollmaster has multiple authors/designers and the benefit of 43 years of accumulated writing and knowledge.

It goes you, the dirt, the worms inside the dirt, popo’s stool, kami, and popo. Any questions maggots?

He laughed when I said 5.

We save our carcasses and use them for a stock that goes into the gravy for the next time we do a turkey dinner. We’ll usually do a big turkey dinner 2 or 3 times each year including Thanksgiving.

Odd, everything I’m coming across is saying broths are made from meat where stocks are primarily made from bones. Both use vegetables as part of the aromatics.