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> > I never used the "fire is agg to everything" rule in straight Mage. Why
> > should fire be damaging to an idea's platonic concept, as opposed to
it's
> > physical form?
> >
> > CB
> >
>
> I use agg to mean "The pattern is _gone_". Ie, you need to recreate it
> from scratch, not encorage it to recover/remember itself. So, fire
> reduces material to powder and gas. The pattern or part of the pattern
> consumed is completely gone. That's why it is agg.
Powder and gas is still in existence. The only thing which can utterly
reduce a pattern to nil is a Prime 4 or 5 effect. In that case, the raw
Quintessence which makes up the Pattern is unwoven and becomes one with the
great pool of raw freestanding Quint.
So, in your games, acid also does agg damage, right?
> Slicing and dicing is not agg because, though the pattern is sundered,
> most of it remains, making it easier to magically restore. On the other
> hand, acid is agg because it dissolves the pattern into liquid.
>
> This is also useful because it allows you extend the concept of
> aggravated damage to things besides living bodies. So, fi, aggravated
> mental damage (the pattern of the mind has ceased to exist), structural
> damage, or spiritual damage. To put it is metaphysical terms, anything
> reduced to primordialism has suffered agg.
I don't treat dust as "primordial", it's dust. Wood, when subjected to
fire, merely becomes ash. The pattern changes, but the philosophical
concept of the item is still intact - it transforms, the same way it would
if dissolved by acid or chopped up into wood chips. In terms of Mage,
Aggravated Damage attacks are attacks which not only harm the object
physically, but also on the spiritual and ideal levels. While this has no
meaningful effect for Sleepers (a burned hunk of wood is still a burned hunk
of wood, or a chopped off hand is still an amputated appendage), for those
who deal in Magick, it makes it difficult or impossible to or restore the
items platonic ideal (it's Quintessential Pattern, using those Mage caps
words) without reweaving in compacted, hi-concentration Prime (using Life
and Free Quint to heal health levels.)
White Wolf's notion of using Aggravated Damage to represent high degrees of
mundane physical damage is a hold over from Werewolf and Vampire, wherein
the writers wanted to have a mechanism to have Kindred who are pitched from
the top of the Empire State to meet Final Death. This goes against Mage
metaphysics, and is unneccessary in Mage, as loads of Lethal damage are more
than capable of killing humans. A human who suffers 50 health levels of
damage isn't suffering Aggravated damage - he's simply dead from horrendous
amounts of non-supernatural damage.
In pure Mage, Aggravated damage is IMO best represented by purely magickal
attacks - Rotes back with Quintessence and Prime 3, or pure Prime attacks.
Fire is dangerous enough as it is.
CB
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