Okay, this got kind of long-winded, sorry! Apparently so much so this requires two comments. You were right about never actually making it home if we started talking about this in person....
The way I see them as different games does have a lot to do with the nature of glamour/banality, and, by extension, the nature of what a changeling was. It seems to me that there were several ideas in there that were overlapping but not really quite the same thing:
* Changelings are descended from, or reincarnations of, actual extremely-powerful ancient beings that existed independently of humanity, and who were called 'gods' and 'faeries' and so on semi-interchangeably. If there is or was a sidhe called Nuada or a troll called Athena, that's because there actually was a Nuada or an Athena stomping around at some point in the past. * Changelings are physical/spiritual embodiments of powerful concepts, such as "beautiful manipulative people" or "honorable warriors." If there is or was a sidhe called Nuada or a troll called Athena, that's because those are the shapes that ancient people gave to those ideas. * Changelings are physical/spiritual embodiments of creativity and joie de vivre; essentially, the game might as well have been called Muse: The Dreaming. If there is or was a sidhe called Nuada or a troll called Athena, that's because those shapes were particularly useful in coaxing a particularly useful-to-changelings set of feelings from mortals at some point in the past.
The ideas aren't totally incompatible: you could say—and I think the game was trying to say—that a changeling was all three: a reflection of an ancient being called Athena and a reflection of the abstract concept of 'honorable warrior' and a reflection of the creative dreamstuff that makes humans feel a certain important way. But the three ideas sort of bumped uncomfortably along with each other. If they're abstract concepts, why were they in so much danger? It's not as if "beautiful people may manipulate you, date you, dump you and steal your boyfriend" is a concept that's dying out, so why are sidhe always having to scramble for Glamour? If they're really purely muselike and based on modern dreams/emotions, why the ancient folkloric motifs? (A friend of mine, on that theory, ran a game in which he dumped terms like 'satyr' and 'sidhe' entirely; all the characters were modern urban legend-y creatures, on the principle that if you're trying to get an emotional response from modern people, that makes a lot more sense.) Etc., etc.
It does show up the most in banality. Banality rules used to make my head hurt. You'd get the acknowledgement that the sidhe returned due to the moon landing, but the books still mostly assumed that science = banal. Sometimes glamour seemed to be tied to creativity and banality to uncreativity, sometimes glamour to strong emotion and banality to doldrums (but then again, sometimes it was implied that strong negative emotions were banal, too...), sometimes glamour seemed to simply be 'clap your hands if you believe in faeries!' literal faith and banality simply disbelief, or, relatedly, glamour was old/archaic stuff and banality was current/modern stuff. And each of those makes sense depending on a different sort of concept of what a changeling is, but cramming them all together into a single game caused a lot of confusion.
(As a side note, I think part of the problem is that, even more than most WoD systems, 'glamour' tended to get simplified as 'good' and 'banality' as 'bad;' people with a lot of glamour were, if not morally good, then at least awesome and interesting to be around. So you got weird things where inspiring strong emotions in people was glamorous, and in theory the strong emotions that a redcap or a sluagh inspired could be something like 'terror' or 'dread' or 'agony'... and yet you'd get text that made it sound like, say, partner abuse was inherently banal. Which makes no sense if inducing a human to provide glamour is done by inducing strong feeling, but does make sense if you've gotten stuck in a context where glamour=good, because of course nobody wants to say that partner abuse is good. It confused things.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-10-18 03:54 pm (UTC)The way I see them as different games does have a lot to do with the nature of glamour/banality, and, by extension, the nature of what a changeling was. It seems to me that there were several ideas in there that were overlapping but not really quite the same thing:
* Changelings are descended from, or reincarnations of, actual extremely-powerful ancient beings that existed independently of humanity, and who were called 'gods' and 'faeries' and so on semi-interchangeably. If there is or was a sidhe called Nuada or a troll called Athena, that's because there actually was a Nuada or an Athena stomping around at some point in the past.
* Changelings are physical/spiritual embodiments of powerful concepts, such as "beautiful manipulative people" or "honorable warriors." If there is or was a sidhe called Nuada or a troll called Athena, that's because those are the shapes that ancient people gave to those ideas.
* Changelings are physical/spiritual embodiments of creativity and joie de vivre; essentially, the game might as well have been called Muse: The Dreaming. If there is or was a sidhe called Nuada or a troll called Athena, that's because those shapes were particularly useful in coaxing a particularly useful-to-changelings set of feelings from mortals at some point in the past.
The ideas aren't totally incompatible: you could say—and I think the game was trying to say—that a changeling was all three: a reflection of an ancient being called Athena and a reflection of the abstract concept of 'honorable warrior' and a reflection of the creative dreamstuff that makes humans feel a certain important way. But the three ideas sort of bumped uncomfortably along with each other. If they're abstract concepts, why were they in so much danger? It's not as if "beautiful people may manipulate you, date you, dump you and steal your boyfriend" is a concept that's dying out, so why are sidhe always having to scramble for Glamour? If they're really purely muselike and based on modern dreams/emotions, why the ancient folkloric motifs? (A friend of mine, on that theory, ran a game in which he dumped terms like 'satyr' and 'sidhe' entirely; all the characters were modern urban legend-y creatures, on the principle that if you're trying to get an emotional response from modern people, that makes a lot more sense.) Etc., etc.
It does show up the most in banality. Banality rules used to make my head hurt. You'd get the acknowledgement that the sidhe returned due to the moon landing, but the books still mostly assumed that science = banal. Sometimes glamour seemed to be tied to creativity and banality to uncreativity, sometimes glamour to strong emotion and banality to doldrums (but then again, sometimes it was implied that strong negative emotions were banal, too...), sometimes glamour seemed to simply be 'clap your hands if you believe in faeries!' literal faith and banality simply disbelief, or, relatedly, glamour was old/archaic stuff and banality was current/modern stuff. And each of those makes sense depending on a different sort of concept of what a changeling is, but cramming them all together into a single game caused a lot of confusion.
(As a side note, I think part of the problem is that, even more than most WoD systems, 'glamour' tended to get simplified as 'good' and 'banality' as 'bad;' people with a lot of glamour were, if not morally good, then at least awesome and interesting to be around. So you got weird things where inspiring strong emotions in people was glamorous, and in theory the strong emotions that a redcap or a sluagh inspired could be something like 'terror' or 'dread' or 'agony'... and yet you'd get text that made it sound like, say, partner abuse was inherently banal. Which makes no sense if inducing a human to provide glamour is done by inducing strong feeling, but does make sense if you've gotten stuck in a context where glamour=good, because of course nobody wants to say that partner abuse is good. It confused things.)