thread: 2005-11-14 : Dangerousness
On 2005-11-18, Charles wrote:
Hmm, I was blocking in defense of Barry's stated preference that the Monkey not be easily vanquished. The "not good at dream magic" was a reflexive defense of Somnex's importance.
As an aside to the audience, Somnex is a character who has been in the back of my head for 13 years, since I created the Manu Tenere mages while Sarah and I were in Swansea, Wales, and Sarah was creating the Order history. I recently handed over control of the Manu Tenereans to my fellow players, as it didn't make sense for me to play the entire neighboring covenant. Or rather, since the entire point for me of this game being co-GMed is so I don't have to GM, me running the Manu Tenereans would be exactly what I don't want. Anyway, Somnex is a savant of Dream Magic, and the one dream sequence we've done previously has been under his guidance. While Kip had never previously established that Perdyx was bad at Dream Magic, he had never established that he was good at it. My feeling is that Dream magic in the Order is very rare, so anyone not established as good at it is bad at it.
Also, once you are in dream under somone else's control, I think you are at a huge disadvantage magically. The actions you try to take are already under their influence, so they can easily drain off your power as you try to collect it, or poison it with their own dream power. If you want to work dream magic, and you aren't hugely proficient in it, you need to have prep'd yourself beforehand, ensorcelling yourself to be able to work effective dream magic. Or anyway, that's how I think of it. It also allows an out. Perdyx had warded the box against dream attack, and so almost certainly was otherwise unprepared.
What happens when Perdyx is well prepared is still up in the air.
Mostly though, the Monkey needed to be established as powerful, and appearing in a dream only to be immediately banished didn't sound like it would accomplish that. Probably I shouldn't have blocked, and should simply have let Barry play out the Monkey's response to being banished, but I wanted to see where Barry's Monkey was going to take the dream exchange. Probably there was a selfish component to that as well. For Sonata's Monkey plotline to go interesting places, we need to see what it is the Monkey's are doing, and this seemed like a scene that could get us some steps in that direction.
Would stats and dice have gotten us somewhere better? Possibly, but magic stats for Perdyx wouldn't have helped much. I have Sonata's magic fully stat'ed out in AM terms, but I don't think it gives me much more guidance. For your stats to matter, you'd need for the Monkey to be stat'd out as well, and to have a mechanic for comparisons. We don't have that.
On the Perdyx-Ilba relationship, I think the current scenario set needs to reach a major resolve on the Monkey issues (not a final resolve, but a big one). Sonata is pushing the Monkey question hard, and there is pretty much no way for that to not spill over onto Ilba and Perdyx that I can see (unless, I suppose, it turns into primarily a confrontation between Sonata and the Monkey, drawing the tension off of Perdyx and Ilba by temporarily resolving Ilba's monkey issues).
Also, the Monkey issue is definitely Ilba's first hurdle to entering the order. For her to truly become an apprentice, she needs to get past it. If it just gets pushed down, it will blow up badly at some future point.
Not there is anything wrong with that.
This makes NK go "You guys have a cool game."
