2016

You'd think so, but in practice blood magic always seems to have near entirely only evil applications.

One point to consider is: how the fuck do you balance blood mages? They alone can store immense quantities of their power source, or maintain people to use as mana batteries.

Healomancer blood mages do sound pretty neat though.

What? No, blood is good. You need blood to live.

>blood magic
>dirty
It is the purest form of magic for it comes from ourselves. Anything else dillutes our humanity.

>anything else dillutes our humanity
I'd call Ki a hell of a lot more pure than blood magic. Much cleaner, too.

Pfft, no you don't. Blood is bad, it can contain diseases. You should get rid of all your blood.

I'm bored of the idea of blood as vital life force. Yeah, you'll die without it, but you'll also die without a liver or lungs or even an asshole.

Using your own life force to power spells, sure, that's cool.

Most blood magic just comes off as edgy tryhard shit.

Man blood magic s how you cure wounds

Hmm, yeah that makes sens- waaaaait a minute... you're not a skeleton, are you?

>his power doesn't come from the blood

i agree, butwhat about like subtle blood magic?

>city has fighting pits / human sacrifices
>using them to charge magical city defenses

I think it was Unknown Armies where blood magic was balanced by the fact that you had to do it to yourself if you wanted to get any kind of charge.

Like, performing unnecessary exploratory surgery on yourself was good for a major charge, Cutting yourself open and stitching the wound close good for a minor one.

Also, unknown armies doesn't tell you your hit points, just the game master keeps track and lets you know if you died or not after the fact... so it is entirely possible to accidentally kill yourself in a fight or even laying in bed at home practicing this art.

Really good story for first half of the game, the ending half just ruins it. Seriously, if it ended about halfway through it would be better in general.

Essentially the plotline for the big event seems just artificial and thrown in just to tie it to future games, while the first half was focused on a personal struggle showing the main character as someone who probably should just say "Fuck this noise" and leave

Ki is not earthly. Humans, as we are, aren't as aetherial as such forces. Blood may not always be truly pure, but it is as pure as we humans are. Some have diseases, two may share bad blood between each other, some folk are red blooded, others are bluebloods. Impure and unclean, that's who we are. Don't defy your nature with something "greater".

>human sacrifice
>subtle

At that level of abstraction, there's no notable difference between blood and souls.

The subtle was more the fighting pits angle lmao

We fought a blood mage once, scary as fuck.
He would stab himself and use his blood as magic blades, "something something iron in his blood."
Whenever he cut someone, he would sap their bloodstream and add it to his attack.
We fought him just after he had just slaughtered his way into a castle courtyard, so we were dodging literal greatswords of blood.

I think the idea is that blood is a conduit for life force as you can find it throughout the body, and you can move it around more easily than your nervous system. Plus it regenerates over time.
While in theory you could use an organ or flesh as a life force battery, it's a little awkward to source from the same person more than once.
Though using ritually prepared bones as single use Uberchargers on spells sounds fucking metal.

So in theory once you've cast the spell you've got a whole load of dead blood as you've drained it of life force.

Jiangshi pls go, you're not convincing anyone that impurity is normal.

Impurity is normal though.

But we should not be satisfied with such.

>impurity is normal though
Yeah, like kidney stones and cholesterol are normal. The human body acquires impurity as it lives because the world around it is full of it. Remove the impurity from the environment, and suddenly humans don't become impure.

>how the fuck do you balance blood mages?
A bunch of counter-balancing measures are possible, many of which relate to its basic mechanics
>The blood has to be user's own, or from a willing source
>Stored blood is not acceptable
>Using blood magic requires elaborate rituals that are near-impossible to achieve in battle
>Using blood magic still costs mana or whatever, but requires sacrifices in addition
>Blood magic is highly specialized and cannot do many things that other sorts of magic can do
>Blood magic has a high cost to achieve its effects
>It does bad things to users who use it too often. Corruption, paradox, life-drain, addiction, reducing ability to use magic, mutation, demons, etc
>Despite the name, the magic is not from blood itself, but the destruction and desecration of life. All uses of blood magic must be harmful to victims and users in significant ways
>The setting has forces that work strongly against practitioners of bloood-magic, so they must keep their activities concealed
>Blood magic is for whatever reason not available to player-characters, so its balance is not as great of a concern

One of the wonderful things about magic of any kind is that it works however the author wants it to. He can just write the rules so as to achieve the desired effect.

Exactly! We must work towards and aspire to become pure! But only by accepting our current impure state and recognising it as something to remake can it be done!

Down with the blood mages! Embrace our potential! Wield the Odic Force! Hold Mana in your hand! Surge Ki within you!

Ah, so water, earth, and druidic magics must be disgusting for you, for the rivers carry silt and fish excrement, the ground beneath your feet is sediment and enriched with nutrients from manure, and the nature of the wild is best left unsaid.

>The city has a slaughterhouse district.
>The gutters from the slaughterhouse district drain into a separate sewers
>The blood from the hundreds of slaughtered animals flow into a complex network of hidden pipes that surround the city.
>These pipes form a ritualistic circle.
>As long as the slaughterhouse is running, the city is protected from, of all things, a semi-dormant volcano just outside of town.

Yes. That is why you should only deal in magic using locally-grown artisanal homunculus souls.

>Disaster strikes
>the city is surrounded by fire and death
>only the blood circle protects the city
>but you're running out of animals
>there are still plenty of citizens left of course..
>but you could hardly order such a thing
>right?

Well, if disaster has already struck, then the ward has very obviously failed. No reason to keep wearing a broken condom, right?

Oddly enough I seem to recall a minecraft mod that handled blood magic really well.
It required an altar to even collect the blood for your blood magic, the altar needing to be bigger and more elaborate the more powerful of blood mage you were, for any powerful effects it required building huge elaborate ritual circles, and even then the effect was bound to an area near the circle, and was destroyed if the circle was damaged.
While if you wanted to craft spells or magic you needed machines made to channel magic in a very specific way so you could channel that magic from your blood pool, into the machine, then back into you to cast for a shitty effect that isn't as good as just making a fucking ritual you nitwit.

The real benefits to it were making armor out of crystallized blood mixed with demon blood, that made you more or less invulnerable, sigils that could activate minor personal effects on the go, and being able to conjure weapons out of specially prepared blood and return them to blood form afterward.

Are we really hating on Blood Angels?

Or Bloodborne?

Or Vampire magic-users using the magic of their people?

Oh, Blood Magic: Alchemical Wizardry? Yeah that mod is pretty cool. I'm more of a Thaumcraft man myself, but yeah it's pretty good.
I can recommend it as a magic based mod, though I'd suggest tech mods over it for those new to modded gameplay.

Of course, being Minecraft you could set up villager farms that continuously feed innocents into your blood altar for infinite energy that is streamed real time into your player bound blood network.
But hey, worse things have happened in dorf fort.

You play as Ethan Hawke, a refugee from Ferelden in an era where everything is oddly low-poly.

You go and live in Kirkwall where you have an uncle, and soon you get super wealthy from a successful deep roads expedition where your baby sister/brother dies. Your mother later dies by a crazed serial killer who you meet on multiple occasions during the serial killer investigation and can even see obvious hints he's the killer... But you don't pick up on it until mommy dies.

There is a big undercurrent of unrest in the city because mages insist they are oppressed by the Templar who accuse them of blood magic. They prove just how oppressed they are by practicing blood magic. The head Mage and leader of the Mage Faction later tells you the mages should not be oppressed for committing blood magic, and then commits blood magic and turns into a demon.

You meet Justice from DA: Awakening, who is now an edgy try hard called Vengeance and is possessing Anders, the cute horndog from Awakening who suddenly starts whining about his dead gay lover even though he was explicitly heterosexual in Awakening.

Anyway, things reach a head in the game when the Templars accuse the Mages of being evil blood mages, and in response to this Justice/Anders proves the Mage's innocence by literally bombing the Church full of innocent worshippers.

Anders is portrayed as a sympathetic character, your other party members include a pirate whore, anime character and old farm girl with a dead husband. The end of the game has you fight the High Templar Meredith who is suddenly evil due to red lyrium (it's red because it's evil) and she turns into an anime character while animating steel golems to fight you.

>He doesn't praise the good blood

>not using Blood magic

How long has the semi-dormant volcano been, er, active?

>Anders is portrayed as a sympathetic character,
What?
Anders was portrayed as a man possessed by an inhuman spirit of wrath literally called VENGEANCE in a setting where spirits are literally incompatible with mortal values because they can only perceive the universe through the concept that comprises them.
Anders in DA2 was meant to be pitiful, perhaps well-meaning at his core but horrendously distorted in action and absolutely becoming worse and worse as the story goes on. Decidedly not sympathetic.

I mean I get what you're saying but even in Dungeon Meshi blood magic is still a dark art that best elf keeps quiet about her knowledge of and instead walks the path of explosions.

>ywn go back in time and prevent DA2 from being made

I know right?

>he wouldn't kill a squirrel for a casting of lightning
>he wouldn't snuff a pupper for a shine spark
>he wouldn't RKO a giraffe to rewind time
>he wouldn't duct tape a turtle inside its own shell to gain water walking

BM's problem is how goddamn grindy is, even at the higher tiers where you've got high-efficiency altars with regeneration rites. It's also a bitch to automate and doesn't interact that well with other stuff.

>dirty blood magic
>dirty blood
So what, is this some sort of gay rights campaign where only fags who have had their pos hole negged can wield magic?

>even when crazy, she was still right

Except the game bends over backwards to claim it was justified, since the mages are good boys who dindu nuffin' while being constantly oppressed by Templars, who bully mages due to it being the only way they can get an erection.

The fact that they make all mages be psychopaths was one of the most bizarre cases of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was writing.

It was extremely rushed, which causes the whole thing to fall apart when you get near the end. The beginning is pretty decent, focusing on your character going from a random penniless refugee into a wealthy and respected hero, but the mages vs templars conflict in the latter half of the game feels very half-assed and shoehorned in mostly because it ties to stuff in the 3rd game. In the final dungeon it's very obvious they originally intented to have different events depending on whether you sided with the mages or templars, but ran out of time or money and decided to just make one dungeons for everybody. So regardless of who you side with, the mage leader goes crazy and turns himself into a demon who you kill, and then the templar leader goes crazy and you kill her too (it's especially dumb if you side with the mages, as the mage leader suddenly decides that it's hopeless and they can't beat the templars, despite you having been able to fight them off just fine so far, and that the only solution is to sacrifice his fellow mages and turn into a demon, which you then have to kill. And then you go and kill the rest of the damn templars by yourself).

Apparently Bioware wasn't originally planning on making the game (DA3 was supposed to be the next game in the series), but EA insisted they'd make a sequel for next year. They obviously couldn't get the game they wanted to make ready in such a short notice, so they just knocked together something in a hurry to give them more time to work on the proper sequel.

>grindy
Welcome to literally any magic mod. Or most mods.
I'll grant you the rest though. Some mod makers don't realise how important mod compatibility is or what people actually want to get out of their mod.

Also fuck Vazkii, botania was fine with dayblooms. It was always fine. Passive decay is shit, will always be shit and overgrowth seeds are just insulting.

IIRC, it was originally supposed to be a DA:O expansion.

I don't know, Witchery wasn't that grindy, and thaumcraft's shitty little minigame was the only annoying part. Botania is a reskinned tech mod, but it gets up and running fairly quickly too, with the boss being the grindfest.

Passive decay is dumb, but at it steered me away from wasting time setting up passive flowers, since active flowers are over one thousand times better.

>using ritually prepared bones as single use Uberchargers on spells sounds fucking metal.

Stealing this. Blood magic is going to be the most common NPC magic in my setting, particularly in the area of summoning and binding daemons (I basically lumped angels, demons/devils, and elementals together. It all depends on who/what they serve).
And non-adventuring uses, like increasing the harvest and growing herbs that curse people.

I bet these fuckers wouldn't even sell out humanity to the aliens for a jetpack.

Good thing it never came to that. Now at least we have one decent DA game.

>mages go demon every time they so much as stub a toe so templars aren't the clear bad guys because muh shades of grey

Anders was anything but sympathetic. Everyone in the city hates his guts for ruining the peace that had just been achieved (potentially).

>go back and play dao and the dlc
>bond with loghain (who wasnt right, but also want completely wrong)
>have lots of dangling plot threads
>remember that bioware now tries to force a well meaning jerkass vision into every game
>remember that all of the plot threads are either abandoned or completely fucked up in later games
Dragon age may be the one series where the sequels actually make the original game worse retroactively

Mages have what I like to call the X-Men Problem.

They're stand-ins for the oppressed, but they're also incredible superhumans with amazing power and intellect. This is hard to reconcile with the idea of oppression, or at least the idea of said overpowered group not DOING the oppressing themselves. So, predictably, they had to be given an enemy that represents oppression in all the ways the target audience vaguely understands: religious zealots, McCarthyists, and the occasional Nazi. Something over the top and evil enough that it makes the incredible superpowered fucks into the underdogs.

You see it a lot in things that invite self-inserts, are political allegories, or are poorly written.

That's completely accurate. There were supposed to be two distinct stories with two last bosses, and the side you were on was the right side. Bioware insisted on another boss fight though.

The most ubiquitous LG deity in my setting has blood under her purview. It is from blood that life flows and is maintained, and it is from blood that healing is done.

She was fucking garbage at her job. The city was infested with apostates and blood mages and her Templar spent more time attacking random people and teleporting into the same 3 caves over and over rather then keeping the peace.

Botania's one of the mods that I just cheat on because the grind is so boring. I'd rather not farm the bosses for materials.

I hate getting to the end of a complete DA:O playthrough only to realize I have to play DAII next and then grind through freaking DA:I after that. If DAII had never been released (Or had been an optional add on to DA:O, as mentioned above) and DA:I didn't have the stupid MMO mechanics and combat, then maybe I'd enjoy playing through the Dragon Age series. As it stands, I'd rather play something else these days.

It's not that Inquisition's story bits weren't enjoyable. It's that I hate the grindy ass-fetching quests and the floaty, impactless, mindless combat. If they had a version of Inquisition with the fat trimmed, I'd probably love it. Sure there was a load of SJW wank, but I could instead hang out with Cullen or Solas. Hell, the gayest character in the game, my man Dorian, was actually less insufferable than other more "oppression narrative" characters. And Cassandra was quite enjoyable, too.

The whole "blud majiz wur oppressed" thing just made me want to bash my face in, though.

I take it you never played Mass Effect past 1

At least the shooting mechanics were better in the second one.

Mass Effect actually improves its gameplay as the games progress though, even if the narrative coherence goes down the shitter. Good gameplay with a shit story is still a decent game; shit gameplay with a good story is a shitty game.

>shit gameplay with a good story is a shitty game
Planescape: Torment, unless you count dialogue choices as gameplay, is a great game with the shittiest Infinity Engine gameplay ever made.

Not Veeky Forums but one of the things I loved the most in Guild Wars 1 was that you could spec a necromancer to be a blood mage, it was their coolest aspect.
Fuck GW2.

It's why we generally avoid using it in comparisons. It's a horrible game, but if you actually say that you automatically lose the argument due to blaspheming against 'the classics'.

Mages have what I like to call 'shit writers' problem. Here you have fairly average men and women who have been taken from their homes as kids and herded into a prison because their dreams contain a literal gate to the demon realm, and each and every one of them is one mental slip away from turning into a bloodbending abomination, yet the best Bioware could come up with to generate drama is some new-age mewling about oppression. Even in the first game you have poor persecuted apostates as one of your sources of filler quests, and you don't even have an option to tell Irving or Greagor about it, or to wring the information out of the selfish irresponsible bastards if you're a mage yourself.

This is one aspect that always wriggled with annoyance at the back of my brain. There's no way to turn in apostate mages, or do things a powerful person who is a believer in the Chantry would do. You're supposed to be a modern western person and have modern day values, not an actual person in Thedas, at least according to the options allowed you by Bioware. It's one thing tabletop will have above vidya until we have emergent AIs running our games.

I like how whenever dragon age gets mentioned on this board we all dust off the same complaints and collectively agree that 2's story and gameplay were trash, Inq was dull and sjw/diverse for the sake of it, and Origins was a fucking classic that didnt deserve it's sequels.

There are some mods at least that try to make it a bit more bearable.
Not gameplay changes, that will still be bad, but general fixes to an unfinished old-ass game that doesn't transition well to modern systems.
It's still a chore to play until you manage to get really invested in the story.

>Asshole magic
Actually, I think the fey already use that.

You don't have to be a believer. You simply have to be able to see a bigger picture, or have firsthand experience, like the mage warden. Mages are dangerous, Fade is dangerous, demons are dangerous, blood magic is dangerous, and the number of mages who can be trusted with power is so tiny the Circles are entirely organized around limiting power and secretly weeding out deviants. And even then you have things go wrong so frequently there's been seven Annulments in the last 200 years. There are no circumstances under which an apostate is not a horrible threat to himself and everyone else. Even if he's a warden. Dryden had her blood mage mind control nobles to ensure support for her little civil war, then she had him summon so many demons it tore the Veil and spawned an excuse for a faggot to stand in your base camp and shill DLC. This is not an issue of authoritarianism versus libertarianism, this is an issue of having all your nuclear missiles accounted for and safely locked away.

That's not magic. Elves are just that good.

It's because the opinions have become ubiquitous. It's generally accepted fact that DAII was pretty shit, and Inquisition, while much better, was too full of the consequences of 2 and was not good on the sidequests and MMO combat.

If it was a little less dark fantasy style, what with the ravenous demons and whatnot, I'd be all for the tearing down of the circles. But this is a fucked up world where people are just trying to stay safe and relatively alive. It seems that to make that omlet there needs to be a few human rights violations. It's definitely better than murdering every magic-endowed child or cutting their tongues out and sewing their mouths shut.

I will say the Templars could make their Circles comfier.
If you've got living nuclear missiles, you put them in a nice silo. Don't fucking antagonise the nuclear missiles so that they want to launch themselves at you for locking them away.

I don't seem to recall anyone ever saying that the Circles are a sad necessity. It's either "Circles are bad" or "Andraste said to do this so I'm doing it".
Yes, locking Mages away isn't great. In an ideal world everyone can get along and it isn't needed. But things are fucked up, so they are.

It's just.. well, don't piss the mages off. Give them visiting hours, some yard time. Maybe make your circle more like a gated academic institution than a prison. Just anything other than what they're currently doing. You dont have to bend over backwards for them, just don't be shits to them either.

Oh and the Kirkwall Circle was just stupid. They literally put them inside a scary building where the blood ran thickest in dark blood rituals and the veil is torn, and then acted like assholes to them on top of that.
Just... fucking put the Circle outside Kirkwall. Somewhere where the veil is strong, and you're not surrounded by civilians. Ferelden had the right idea. They're in a tower away from anyone else, in the middle of a lake. Even when the Circle literally went worst case scenario, the closest non-mages didn't even notice beyond "weird lights... fucking mages."
If mages are nukes, Kirkwall put theirs in the middle of the city and regularly kicked the shit out the warhead.

What were the templars who founded the Kirkwall circle thinking?
>You know that place where there was a bunch of blood sacrifice?
>Yeah, the spooky building
>Let's put the mages there
>I'm sure they'll love the ocean view
>Say, did you know that mages get stronger in places where the veil is thin?
>Yeah, in fact doing a bunch of blood sacrifice does make the veil thinner for centuries in the future

>I don't seem to recall anyone ever saying that the Circles are a sad necessity.
Circles were organized by mages after they were permitted to step out of direct Chantry supervision, and they are built form top to bottom to facilitate self-policing. Irving writes about leaving suspicious texts lying around in order to see which apprentices show dangerous proclivities early, and Uldred got into his confidence by giving him useful pointers. And in DA:O Circle templars answer to the First Enchanter. Greagor wouldn't be arguing with Irving so much if he had the authority to order him around, or order the Circle to the Chantry's liking. It's not some religious concentration camp for deviants, it's the best system MAGES came up with to protect their own interests. Lock the door, watch for bloodstains, and have a contingent of elite soldiers at hand to purge the place is walls start sprouting tentacles.

All magic is blood magic. Unless your setting has inanimate objects that are also magic casters.

This. Oh so much this.

They knew the veil around Kirkwall was piss weak due to centuries of magical Tvinter pollution. They knew that mages suffered constant nightmares every night because of this. Even normal people hardly got a decent nights sleep.

They could see on any street map that the original city street layout was in an enormous ritual configuration.

So they housed the mages in the old slave pens where centuries of misery had leaked across the veil, where old Vint mages had conducted human sacrifices no less.

Then they treated them as badly as they could get away for generations.

Then they wonder why everything goes to shit.

The mages should have been housed some distance from the city. Preferably in another city.

Of course it doesn't help that the mages went full fucking retard.

They were knowingly harbouring blood mages and deranged psychopaths and ones who were both.

Also
>Hawke is their defender and protector
>Carving through Templars like they were so much wheat before scythe
>All is going well
>Just need to kill Mad Bitch and we can win this.
>Just one small push to victory
Nope.jpg Gonna turn into amalgamated corpse monster for teh lulz
>mfw

That's the theory.
It doesn't seem to work like that in practice.

Ferelden did it largely right. Still room for improvement, but they had a good track record up until the events of Origins.
But unfortunately it doesn't seem to be the average for Thedas Circles. Ferelden was comparatively delightful.

You know what might have been good for DA:I?

Being able to plays as a Tranquil. You were there at the Conclave to take note on the proceedings and sweet fuck all else. It would never be mentioned or remembered if you were there with the Mages or the Templars because who would notice? Tranquil are basically furniture.

Then you get the mark, Inquisition forms around you and because they elect you as Inquisitor because you are demon proof, temperate, diligent, insanely patient and completely impartial you interpret the Divines door stop of a writ as orders to make the world safe.

And, with no conflicting orders, this is exactly what you do in an overly mechanical unimaginative way. You build up the Inquisition, punch Corpy until his heads completely flat, fix holes in reality and threaten to join the other side of any nation that declares war on another within the area of your jurisdiction.

You don't care about matters of faith, nationality, ideology, magic, past historical grudges, ethnic prejudice or matters of the heart and passion. You just want every one to calm dawn and talk and you will beat down anybody who stands against that.

Also there would be no romance quest. Except maybe a hidden Easter Egg one with Cullen for female inquisitors due to the fact that he sees you as completely safe, but it would be at his instigation and reciprocated only for his mental wellbeing. There would be no love there.

There is nothing wrong with blood magic.

Well the problem with arguing about DA canon is that Bioware took a huge dump on everything from the first game. In Origins, the Circles were there because they worked. In DA2, the Circles were there because I don't fucking know, to make everything worse than necessary I guess.

Or, they just think you're a Tranquil.

My problem with DA:I was that the character creator was shit. Bioware's been given over to the tumblurina's and SJW's.

How does this make you feel?

Wow, all my questions about why bioware games are so shit are now answered with a single image.

Is this fucking real?

I'm guessing that this is a parody or something.

No, the only part that is touched up on this is her name.
It's actually Hepler.

Very real indeed.
I remember all this well because I still frequented /v/ by then.
The board was both having a field day and being absolutely livid at Bioware.

This explains far too much.

That said the stuff in the top right is a little over the top.

I mean, she HAD to be bad at her job or there would have been not plot.

Imagine if that shithole had been run by competent people.

"Oh hey Hawke, how're you doing? Yeah that Anders guy planted a bomb under the city, but our extensive municipal cleaning service found it and we dealt with it."

"Oh hey Hawke, the Qunari were here for like six months, but eventually we sent them back to their shithole country. Had to do something before AfK won a majority of seats. Anyway tell that pirate hooker you hang out with to lawyer up, there's a civil suit from hell coming for her."

"Oh hey Hawke, how's it going? What? Mages? Oh no it's fine, the zoning commission moved the tower six miles outside of town, something about an ancient curse, I dunno."

"Oh hey Hawke. The guards have unionized, think you could talk to the rep for us?"