Date: 2011-10-19 03:53 am (UTC)
Yeah, it sounds like we wound up seeing the same issues, just from different angles; my own critique began with the banality thing. Is it disbelief in magic and possibility? Is it mundane, boring life? Is it static and unchanging things? Is it negative emotion? (Ravaging somebody repeatedly can kill their creativity, after all.) Is it the antithesis of a given changeling's nature? If an accountant takes great pleasure in a nice, tidy column of numbers, is that banal or full of glamour? Is one changeling's glamour another one's banality, as in your pooka/troll example?

(The route I went with Memento, the game that gave rise to the Onyx Court books, was alchemically based: Banality was philosophic sulphur, the fixed principle, and Glamour was philosophic mercury, the volatile principle. The perfect melding of those two made the player-characters immortal at the end of the game.)

Some of it, honestly, is just an artifact of the whole World of Darkness shtick, where everything's supposed to be horrible and breaking down, and also where you have to account for lots of supernatural things co-existing, but not cooperating. The whole "Banality is static and unchanging" idea, for example, mostly comes about as an attempt to explain why vampires -- despite believing in all kinds of crazy-ass magical shit -- are banal and therefore bad for changelings to hang out with, and also to (somewhat retroactively) shove everything into the Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm framework. I think you're supposed to imagine that in the World of Darkness, ordinary people are so dead inside that "beautiful people may manipulate you, date you, dump you and steal your boyfriend" is dying out as a concept -- or at least the only response it produces is apathetic misery. But frankly, that's a scenario nobody really wants to spend much time imagining, so nobody ends up running a game that looks that way. (Changeling in particular fit very badly into that scenario in the first place, which is why it's the red-headed step-child of the WoD.)

I also had issues with the basic conflicts built into the line; the mechanics as written largely back up the idea that the sidhe are just More Awesome than everybody else (which is especially problematic in a LARP), and I frankly thought the way they approached the Shadow Court thing was stupid. Dauntain, to me, are just misery-inducing for the player -- they create a scenario in which you get punished for enjoying your character's powers -- so at that point you're down to Fomorians and such, which were never thought through as well as they should be.

And yet, somewhere in there was a flexible core that people could, as you say, interpret in all kinds of different ways. For all its flaws, Changeling is -- or perhaps I should say, can be made into -- an awesome game.
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