There is a line in one of the Mage books in the third edition before White Wolf blew up their world that I got reminded of today. It was about the Virtual Adepts, and it was about the change in attitude between the second and third editions. I couldn't find it leafing through the main book or the VA clanbook, but I remember the gist of it.

It was something like this. In the old version, the ethos was the hacker slogan "Information wants to be free!" so thematically, they grabbed whatever they could and threw it out there. But in the newer edition, the focus changed, because it wasn't working. Information might want to be free, but throwing everything out there was just dumping out a mess, with nothing to separate the important from the unimportant. Too much information doesn't mean more stuff happens, it slows stuff down since people have to go through all the information to find what they need.

And this seemed relevant today, since I was catching up on what had happened on the Internet since I hadn't been on much for a couple days, and because of the linkdump post I made with several things I had wanted to write more about but hadn't gotten to. A couple of them I still plan to write something about, really. But there were so many things I was finding that I wanted to say something about, I just kept finding new ones and throwing the old ones on a pile of bookmarks. It's the same kind of thing as the story bit above. And I'm hardly the first person to have that happen, there's plenty of wonks and self-help gurus who are trying to turn "information overload" into one of those breathless reports on the local evening news. "And coming up, after sports, ARE you stressed by TOO MUCH INFORMATION? Dick Steele has the surprising facts!"

This is where filters come in. That's part of what newspapers and TV news and stuff does in theory, they go through all the news and information and filter it to what's important. Of course, most of their job is supposed to be going out and finding that news, but in this day and age their real job is to make the advertisers happy, since the advertising is what pays their salary, so the advertisers are the real customers. The explosion of the 'net has made all sorts of information more available, and has made a lot of other filters available. From the obvious, like slashdot or Metafilter or Google News, to tiny little things like this right here. There's also automatic filters, like RSS feeds and automated news sites and so on. Though none of that is nearly as good yet as a good secretary or personal assistant, which is still the preferred choice of the rich.

The problem with any kind of filter like that though is it's somebody else's decisions about what's important, and they can always miss something YOU think is important. On the other hand, there's a lot of problems with people being easily able to ignore large chunks of news and information too. But I've drifted quite a bit from my original point. One last diversion, though. When you have a mass of unorganized information, the human brain is great at finding patterns. That's one of the main things it seems like our brains have evolved to do. We do it so well we can find patterns in the completely random. A bewildering array of patterns, depending on which bits we choose to pay attention and mark as important.

Back on to my original point. I need to learn to filter better, just so I spend less time reading over every bloody thing, and actually post about things and get things done and so on.

But there's another point here too. As a nerd and a sort-of writer, I probably worry too much about the importance of ideas in and of themselves. Alone, ideas don't really mean much. They're important in what they can get people to actually do. That was the last part of the little story about the Virtual Adepts, they had changed so instead of just tossing information out there, they tried to get specific information where it would matter. The ideas just there where nobody sees them or does anything because of them might as well not be there. Now it's true, using ideas to get people to do things is awfully close to the Dark Arts of Spin and Marketing, it's really exactly the same. But really, persuasion is like any other tool, it can be used for good or evil. And yes, even putting information out there specifically so people can use it to make up their own minds about something is trying to persuade them. You're trying to persuade them to think, and that's hard.

I'm decent at Magic. I'm not great, but I'm pretty good, and I know I can be better. But today I was defeated in part thanks to my Inner Ferrett. Or maybe a combination of Inner Bruce. (Both articles are about Magic, but dudes, you should read them anyway, because while they're ABOUT Magic, Magic's just the medium. Especially for Rizzo's. The rest of this is going to be about Magic, until the last little bit, so you could scroll to that if Magic bores you.)

Today, you see, was the state championship events for the Two-Headed Giant format in Magic, down in Richmond. It's a fun format, and not all that much pressure, really. Two players, build two decks from the cards you get, and then beat the stuffing out of other people. Me and the Zac(k/h)s went, and my friend Nik. We opened up cards that were okay but not really that good to register, and were glad to see the back of them when we were done. Then they came back. After looking and thinking and agonizing and bitching, we managed to assemble a pair of relatively not-bad decks. But not really that good, either. And so the tournament commenced. The first round, we got paired against Bennie Smith and a friend of his. It set things off on a poor note, because I drew all of five non-land cards, and Nik never got one of his lands, we got smashed. We didn't really expect otherwise. So winning the next two rounds was a bonus. Even if I was a bad player for part of the second match and didn't realize I could have been swinging to the face with my big dude, but we still won. And the third match, well, our decks just loved us and gave us exactly what we needed.

It was the fourth match where things came down to it. One of the opposing team was wearing a Pro Tour Hawaii competitor shirt, but I didn't worry about that. Even the pros can be beaten. Even better decks can be beaten. What beat us, really, was us. They had a Ghost Council, which is a pain in the ass. But we had a chance to get rid of it, but neither of us noticed it until after we'd already blown it. Poor communication, and playing too quickly without thinking things through. Nik had a Graven Dominator, which turns all dudes into 1/1 dudes when it comes into play, and the opponent had only the council and a flying dude. I had a Trophy Hunter, who can shoot flying dudes down, and Nik had a Viashino Fangtail, who can shoot any dude for 1. But the Trophy Hunter costs mana to use, and I'd jumped ahead and used all my mana to summon my big Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi. I could have shot the flying dude, then without the creature to sac to save the Council, Nik could have shot the Council, and we would have had a good chance of winning. Instead, we died. To the Ghost Council.

And then since we were all x-2, we dropped and drove home. Which concludes the Magic portion of this post.

The most frustrating part of the loss in round 4 was I saw the move we should have done just after we were done. If I'd spent the time to stop and think things out, instead of just going "Yay! I can play my dude!" like I'd decided to do beforehand, since I knew the dude was coming up, we probably could have won. And if I'd talked with Nik about the play and we'd taken our time, we probably would have seen it. But I wanted to go "YAY! I PLAY MY D00D!" and my mind was running behind the game. It's one of my weaknesses in other areas of life too, I always think of what I should have said or done, anywhere between ten minutes and a day after I've already screwed it up. I need to learn to think faster, and ahead. But not into the future, think ahead enough that my brain's keeping up with Now, and can guess where Now is going.

I'm not quite sure how to do that. Oh, I have ideas for Magic. For example, JamieW used to have a rule, play the game with a D4, and every time you make a mistake, crank it up 1. If you get to 4, count it as a loss, even if you win. Because you screwed up, and in a good game, any mistake can cost you the game. Practice is all there is to it. But most of life isn't as easy to practice as Magic, and if you screw it up, you don't just reshuffle and get ready for Game 2.

The game system I have the most books for I've never used is probably GURPS. Mainly because GURPS takes so damn long to make characters, I always lose patience, so I've never tried to run anything with any of my groups. But I have them more because a lot of the books are good reference for other things, and I've used them for that. And I used to work at a hobby shop, so I could get RPG books at a good discount.

No, my favorite RPG I've never played has to be Mage: The Ascension, by White Wolf. I've barely skimmed through the new WoD Mage book, I got kinda turned off by all the talk at the beginning about Atlantis. So I haven't really given it a fair shot, but I don't have $50 to blow on RPG books these days.

If I'm being honest, probably one of the biggest reasons I like Mage is it's as if Cyberpunk, Magic, and Superheroes had a kid, and it shared some of the awesomest parts from each. (1) It was the Matrix before the Matrix. It hits all kinds of fanboy buttons. I am nothing if not a nerd. Plus two of the Traditions are steampunky mad scientists and nerd mages who work their magic through computers. How could I resist?

But aside from my fanboy-isms, part of it was the timing. I started picking Mage books up shortly after I actually read the Principia Discordia through and my mind was Aflame With Possibilities. And Mage has plenty of possibilities. And a dozen or so different ways of looking at the universe, too. Most of the game that wasn't about flipping out and doing crazy stuff was philosophy. An RPG might seem a weird place to learn philosophy from, which it might be. But they also had a really cool section of bibliography showing books they'd gotten ideas from. Some of them were gobbledygook and bullshit, and some were interesting, like Finite and Infinite Games, which I actually found at the library a while before I picked one of the Mage books that referenced it.

The two things from Mage that've stuck with me the most are these. The first is part of the Virtual Adepts, the computer nerd mages. Who I always identified with, naturally enough, since they were made of writers, computer programmers, and so on. Their specialty in magic is/was Correspondence, which is looking at the connections between things. And for the longest time, I thought "lame," because it wasn't as flashy or obviously powerful as the other schools, even if it did have cool things like teleportation. It wasn't as obviously powerful or flashy or neat as the other schools got. But since I never played it, it never really came up.

Then, a couple of years ago, I was driving to work, and thinking about utterly random stuff. I don't remember the train of thought, but I realized, basically, things only exist because they interact. If they don't interact with anything else, they might as well not exist. How do we know what color something is? By how light interacts with it and our eyes. How do we know how hard something is? By how it interacts with our hands. How do we know what properties oxygen has. By how it interacts with other chemicals. If something doesn't interact with anything, it doesn't exist. And that's when I realized that's what they were getting at with Correspondence, and I felt dumb for not realizing it all that long ago.

The other is in Mage, one of the signs of advancement for your character was they'd stop needing to use a focus or special preparations to do things. Partly I just think it's a really cool effect, since as you get better, you don't really need the tools, though they may make things easier. And it also works the same kind of way as the witches in Discworld, where Granny Weatherwax could use a dented kitchen spoon as the Sacred Steel Knife, as long as she convinced the universe it was. And parts of life work that way too, as you get better, you don't need the tools and tricks nearly as much. They might make it easier, sometimes, but you can learn more by doing it without them, and sometimes they hold you back. A good artist can do as much or more with just a pencil as a newbie or a decent artist, even with all the best computer tricks.

And philosophically, it appeals, because it leaves open all sorts of different ways to end up the same general place. The tricks and tools are there to help you, and make you feel like you know what you're doing, the universe doesn't care.

My Mage books are still sitting up on the shelf, I haven't really looked through them in months. Writing this made me want to again. I wonder now if they'll live up to the awesomeness I remember and have projected on them, or not. And I wonder if I'll ever actually get the chance to run (or play in) a cool Mage campaign, and if it'd live up to the awesomeness I'd expect. Probably not, but letting things sit around as abstract ideals that never get implemented is way too Platonic and stupid. An idea of something isn't nearly as awesome as that actual something doing things. Even if it is more perfect.

So what're you people's favorite RPGs you've never played? And maybe I should look for a group for Mage.



1: There's a theory out there that all of White Wolf's games are about superheroes, really. When characters in most of them can shrug off bullets or just dodge them, and throw cars, I tend to agree.

Video games teach you things. This may be surprising to some people, but those people don't read my LJ, I bet.

And one of the things I've learned from legions of strategy games is simple. The upgrades that help the most are the ones that upgrade your basic dudes. Not because your basic dudes work for everything, but because you almost inevitably have the most of them, so making them slightly better has as big an effect as upgrading your badasses to be even MORE badass. And your basic dudes are almost always the most versatile (and if they're not, then the most versatile dudes usually end up being the most common).

Like in X-Com, the best investments are for weapons and armor for your basic infantry guys. Sure, you could make a force of all tanks, but that puts too many eggs in one basket and they're not as flexible as the four guys you're giving up. And trying to make a single squad of super-soldiers can work, but even in the best armor, people can die easily, you're better off having a bunch of decent guys, with the ubers mixed in. The other thing is to make sure your guys are trained and equipped for the right things. Some things are good for frontal assaults on alien battleships, but no good for when the aliens are attacking a city. And if you don't know what you're doing, lots of people are going to die for no good reason.