My current thinking is driven by these post-Utrecht concerns:

On a need to make Teachers more effective as antagonists.

On a need to increase the frequency of Humanizing across the whole universe of formulae, and also to think about the mechanical effects of Traits.

On a need to consider ways of inter-weaving the storylines of the individual characters (particularly in the early game), but not in a way that shortens gameplay by making player characters too vulnerable to each other, and not by starting all the characters in the same time and place, because I think starting at the cosmic scale is one of the main things that makes the game compelling.

On a need to have some non-occultist NPCs stick around long enough to gain Traits and get interesting.non-occultist NPCs have a chance to emerge via play as characters of interest, protagonists to the relatively static antagonism of the player characters.

And related to that, on a need to skew the focus of play away from inter-player killing and toward the ambitions of the player characters.

Toward this, I'm considering the following package of rules modifications, some of which you've seen on the other threads, and some of which are new:

A character can cause a Teacher to take or send him to a specific location anywhere in time or space via a successful Resolution Against Teachers roll.

For Resolution Against Teachers, the GM will roll an opposing pool of d6's equal to the occultist character's Resistance plus Clarity, increased by one die for each prior Resolution Against Teachers roll by the player in the current scene, and reduced by one die for each point of Power the player elects to spend (and also possibly increased or reduced by other players spending Power). I'll rationalize this with the justification that Teachers are, by definition, mentally beyond the occultist character.

For Change a Teacher to a Rival, the GM will roll an opposing pool of d6's equal to the occultist character's Resistance plus Clarity minus the total number of Underlings he has, and reduced by one die for each point of Power the player elects to spend (and also possibly increased or reduced by other players spending Power). Same rationale as above.

A character who fails at a Resolution Against Teachers must Humanize a human NPC, and must pay a point of Power to reduce his Used Capacity by one point, if he has both Power and any accrued Used Capacity.  A character who fails a Teacher to Rival Status Change undergoes a forced location shift (i.e. the Teacher casts him away to some other time or extradimensional location), as well as the other consequences already detailed in the rules.

A character who fails a Rival to Underling Status Change must Humanize a human NPC, and must pay a point of Power to reduce his Used Capacity by one point, if he has both Power and any accrued Used Capacity.

A character's Used Capacity re-sets to zero at the beginning of any scene the player chooses to frame. (This probably needs some further thought. Capacity is hard to come by, especially now that Teachers are tougher. The goal of this modification is to incentivize the pursuit of Capacity, and to put readily spendable currency in the hands of players, out of desire that play feel a bit more dangerous and electric, and to incentivize players choosing to frame their own scenes. Though I have no idea how to rationalize this rule.)

Turn rotation is formalized such that the player with the highest Capacity goes first. If two characters have equal Capacity, the one with the lower Clarity goes first.

When roleplaying in a scene reaches the dice roll stage, the player's and GM's pools of dice are publicly assembled. Then, if Power spending is allowed by the formula, players spend Power and/or Capacity to increase or decrease the size of the GM's pool, and narrate details into the situation/setting as they add or remove dice from the pool. There is no correspondence of dice to facts. A player can spend one Power or many, and introduce a small detail or a large one. Players can spend again and again, until everyone decides they're done. And then the dice are rolled. And there is no necessary  connection between the character of the player spending Power and the scene; this use of Power is less a "spending" than it is an projection of the force of the character's subjectivity and will out into the wider occult reality.

The win condition for the game will be carefully defined. You have to successfully defeat Ephactha and then end the game by killing off whoever remains of the original group of player characters.

Death, as it applies to NPCs, would be carefully defined and clarified. For occultist NPCs, any success outcome against them across the Resolution and Status Change formulae could be played as physical death if that seems dramatically appropriate. But this death is only a state change. Barring creative block on the part of the players, the occultist NPC is never actually eliminated from potential use. So, possibly we see them again as undead or something. Nobodies would be immune to death, until they're made into Victims via a Status Change. For Victims there would be a new Status Change formula, just for killing them. And Resolution Against Victims would be non-fatal.

So, non-murderous resolution against Victims would be:

For Resolution Against Victims, the player rolls a pool of dice equal to Rage plus Flesh/Voice/Imagination/Memory.
The GM rolls an opposing pool of d6's equal to the occultist character's Resistance plus Used Capacity, increased by one die for each prior Resolution Against Victims roll by the player in the current scene.
If the player rolls more primes than the GM, his occultist's Power is increased by one point.
If the player rolls fewer primes than the GM, or the same number of primes, increase his character's Rage by one point.

And Murders of Victims would be:

For Killing of Victims, the player rolls a pool of dice equal to Rage plus Flesh/Voice/Imagination/Memory.
The GM rolls an opposing pool of d6's equal to the occultist character's Resistance plus Used Capacity plus one d6 for each of the Victim's Traits.
If the player rolls more primes than the GM against an NPC who was originally Status Changed to a Victim by some other player, the Victim is killed and his occultist's power is increased by three points, plus one for each of the Victim's Traits. If the NPC being killed is one this occultist character made into a Victim, the Victim is killed and this occultist's Power is increased by one point for each of the Victim's traits.
If the player rolls fewer primes than the GM, or the same number of primes, increase his character's Rage by one point.

A character who fails to destroy Ephactha, and who chooses outcome #1, can spend a point of his dwindling pool of Power on his turn to either give a Trait or Traits to a Nobody, or to elevate a Victim to Nobody.

A character whose Clarity hits zero washes out of the tradition. The player makes up a new character.

The rules for how and when a player can kill another player character stay unchanged from the current playtest rules. But players now keep track of how many other occultist player characters they've killed, and this number is a factor in the outcomes of certain dice rolls. For Resolution Against Nobodies, Change a Nobody to an Underling, and Change a Nobody to a Victim, the player rolls his dice and then discards a number of rolled Primes equal to how many other player characters his character has killed. (Characters embroiled in the bloody conflicts of occultists are more visibly deranged; so Nobodies avoid them, and are less likely to be taken in. I spent a lot of time thinking about the Tragedy of the Commons, and about privatizing the power of characters killing each other, and ultimately decided that privatizing it would just draw play attention to it. This rule instead aims to problematize it. So, it's still necessary if your godhood ambitions are to win out, but I'm hoping it's no longer the most obviously rational choice when the opportunity presents itself. I want players to spend Power and Capacity into each other's scenes to disadvantage each other's scores by provoking failures, not just with deadly intent. I'm hoping this rule for discarding Primes, along with the player's ability to readily reset his Used Capacity will slow the killing and put energy into characters grinding their ambitions against each other.)

Thoughts?

Paul

I remain unconvinced that the overall problems can be solved purely through mechanical changes. Adding rules adds friction from mechanics but does not per se strengthen the fictional motivations and concerns of the characters, which I perceive as the weakest part right now. Playtest will tell. Playtest? I have no fucking idea when, my local playgroup insists on playing TSOY. I can't blame them, I guess ;)

I suggest that you spend some time opening the mechanics in writing; pretend you're an occultist who's writing a letter to an underling, detailing the various effects of the mechanics. That kind of material should help clarify the rules for you, for us and for post-publication audience. Right now I'm having difficulty grasping the rules and your hoped-for effects on the level you're discussing. Those changes might make a difference, but what I'm seeing is mostly just more mechanics. I dig the Teacher-sends-character-through-time mechanic, obviously, because it concerns itself with the fiction.

Just a thought.

Hey Eero,

I suggest that you spend some time opening the mechanics in writing; pretend you're an occultist who's writing a letter to an underling, detailing the various effects of the mechanics.

This is good advice. I've been working on it. And what I'm realizing is that the occultist is unreliable. The vision of reality he's imparting is not borne out by the game mechanics. He believes the real power game is the pursuit of arcane objects and the conflicts among occultists over status. So the game text and mechanics will contradict him.

Paul