Sometimes memes get stronger in a new package. Plato’s cave is old news only philosophers care about, but then they made the Matrix movie, and suddenly everyone was like “dude, what if we actually live in a matrix???”
I guess Mage: The Ascension (which I never played, so I have no idea about the details) similarly happens to repackage something in a way that appeals strongly to the kind of people who play RPGs? I am just guessing here, but maybe nerds generally perceive mental manipulation as one of those spooky social skills that are forever out of their reach… but once you make a game where mental manipulation is just a number that you can increase, suddenly the idea of increasing the number sounds appealing.
Also, it makes you conceptualize the skill as a general number, as opposed to a more distributed “different techniques work on different people, there is no such thing as being universally persuasive, e.g. the rationalist will laugh at a homeopath, and the normies will laugh at x-risk” thing, which may be useful for people like Vassar who can then claim that their number is high. (Which is a hyperstition: If you convince people that you have mental powers, that will make them pay more attention to you, and that gives you actual power over them.) But I repeat, just blindly guessing here.
Sometimes memes get stronger in a new package. Plato’s cave is old news only philosophers care about, but then they made the Matrix movie, and suddenly everyone was like “dude, what if we actually live in a matrix???”
I guess Mage: The Ascension (which I never played, so I have no idea about the details) similarly happens to repackage something in a way that appeals strongly to the kind of people who play RPGs? I am just guessing here, but maybe nerds generally perceive mental manipulation as one of those spooky social skills that are forever out of their reach… but once you make a game where mental manipulation is just a number that you can increase, suddenly the idea of increasing the number sounds appealing.
Also, it makes you conceptualize the skill as a general number, as opposed to a more distributed “different techniques work on different people, there is no such thing as being universally persuasive, e.g. the rationalist will laugh at a homeopath, and the normies will laugh at x-risk” thing, which may be useful for people like Vassar who can then claim that their number is high. (Which is a hyperstition: If you convince people that you have mental powers, that will make them pay more attention to you, and that gives you actual power over them.) But I repeat, just blindly guessing here.