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Lightning Lord posted:Really? drat. Well, I hope the years have mellowed him out. He's putting up snippets of the book here - he's still calling himself "Satyros Phil Brucato" but he seems alright.
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Feb 1, 2014 00:51
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The new By Night Masquerade books are doing a way better job of updating the setting than Anarchs Unbound. And they did indeed canonize Bloodlines. Even if you're not into LARPing, you should liberally steal from their setting update if you're running a Masquerade game not set in the 90s.
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Feb 1, 2014 01:35
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Bigup DJ posted:He's putting up snippets of the book here - he's still calling himself "Satyros Phil Brucato" but he seems alright. I'm concerned with how he's going to handle the Technocracy - has he accepted that most people find the more ambivalent Revised version to be more interesting or is he pushing for the technological monsters of earlier takes? All I can seem to find is him asking if HIT Marks should be in the M20 corebook. Exrandu posted:The new By Night Masquerade books are doing a way better job of updating the setting than Anarchs Unbound. And they did indeed canonize Bloodlines. Even if you're not into LARPing, you should liberally steal from their setting update if you're running a Masquerade game not set in the 90s. Where do I get these?
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Feb 1, 2014 01:44
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Lightning Lord posted:Where do I get these? Same place you get everything! Drive Thru RPG!
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Feb 1, 2014 01:49
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Lightning Lord posted:I'm concerned with how he's going to handle the Technocracy - has he accepted that most people find the more ambivalent Revised version to be more interesting or is he pushing for the technological monsters of earlier takes? Everything I can find about M20, including the gigantic page count, seems to suggest the answer to all of these edition-based questions is "yes, all of them"
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Feb 1, 2014 01:57
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Lightning Lord posted:I'm concerned with how he's going to handle the Technocracy - has he accepted that most people find the more ambivalent Revised version to be more interesting or is he pushing for the technological monsters of earlier takes? All I can seem to find is him asking if HIT Marks should be in the M20 corebook. Drive Thru RPG has the PDF. The physical books are coming soon. The PDFs came out early to get lots of eyes on them so they could get the first round of corrections and errata in the first printing of physical books. The biggest thing I've seen so far is that in the original text literally any violation of Elysium basically screws the entire domain (dumping the brutal Disgraced status on everybody), but they updated it a day or two ago to say that that only happens if the offender isn't punished, which is far more reasonable.
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Feb 1, 2014 02:57
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Exrandu posted:The new By Night Masquerade books are doing a way better job of updating the setting than Anarchs Unbound. And they did indeed canonize Bloodlines. Even if you're not into LARPing, you should liberally steal from their setting update if you're running a Masquerade game not set in the 90s. What new By Night books? Can I get a link? I seriously don't see new ones on Drive Thru. NutritiousSnack fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Feb 1, 2014 |
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Feb 1, 2014 02:59
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The new LARP rules are Mind's Eye Theatre: Vampire: the Masquerade by By Night Studios. I'm not sure what new books Onyx Path have put yet, though they've taken over as publisher for the OWOD and other WW game lines, and they've got a bunch of new stuff coming out fairly soon.
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Feb 1, 2014 03:04
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Pope Guilty posted:So, anybody have feelings about the new By Night Studios LARP rules? The Cam's all but announced that we're switching to it in March and the mailing lists are a flurry of arguments, though I suppose that's hardly new. They're pretty cool. We playtested them, and had a lot of fun. Overall they're a great improvement, but there were 2 issues that I had: 1: Combo disciplines are vastly underpowered compared to elder powers - most of the good combos have become clan specific merits or ability add-ons to the discipline levels, leaving the remaining lame ones as actual combos. This means the aspect where elders get (scary powerful) elder disciplines being balanced by neonates getting combos is not remotely balanced - I was playing an elder in the playtest and more or less stomped all over everything with True Love and instant pre-emptive Majesty, and combos were largely irrelevant. One solution might be houseruling allowing people to buy ability add-ons as combo disciplines - dunno. 2: Capped merit points. Merits are vastly more powerful than anything else - everyone will take 7 points in character creation. The problem comes in with long running games - many of the merits are related to character development. I think an almost necessary house rule would be slowly increasing the merit cap as you play the character, maybe one point per year or something. That way if someone after 4 years of play is being mentored by a creepy guy on a path, they can pick up the path over time. Or they can learn some of the powers that used to be combos, or a Setite who started out a warrior cultist type, but has slowly taken over after 3 or 4 years of play, can develop a cult around him. That sort of thing. The willpower recovery system is a little problematic - it works like "RP Nods", except that instead of happening at the end of game they happen at any time. So the usual circlejerk of "we had an awesome scene I can't tell people about" now gets you your retests back. This means after every fight, the scary combat guys will go chat with their friends in the car outside, have an "awesome scene", and head back in for more. But overall making retests more expensive and rare definitely speeds things up. It meant combat didn't really run more than 3 rounds - one side or the other started to run low on retests and ran away. Yessod fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Feb 1, 2014 |
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Feb 1, 2014 18:36
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Daeren posted:Last I checked, he was heading up the M20 rewrite. This is true. He has consulted with a number of people (including me) but this is his project.
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Feb 2, 2014 00:26
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DG would work well with Hunter but I'm not sure that it would work well IN Hunter. Maybe one of the modern ones would, but we know gently caress all about them.
Big Hubris fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Feb 2, 2014 |
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Feb 2, 2014 07:03
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Lightning Lord posted:I'm working on an "After the End" WoD game where the various gameline ends happened and wrecked the world into a post-apocalyptic state. What exactly happened is unclear and up to the characters to discover, if they want. I realized when I was reading around that this would be a perfect way to combine the best aspects of Old and New WoD. For example, fragmenting the Camarilla and Sabbat into new, smaller sects, getting rid of Generation and introducing Blood Potency, probably because the Antediluvians were either destroyed or left the Earth, etc. I'm probably going to go with the NWoD system using the various translation guides. I've got a soft spot for House Fortunae, from the Order of Hermes Tradition book. If you're going to use the Traditions with nMage rules, you could do worse than elevating these guys to a full Tradition of Chaos-theory numerologists and giving them Fate and letting the Euthanatos keep Death. It talks about how their goal is to become a full Tradition in the book, and for some reason that idea has stuck with me for a long time.
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Feb 2, 2014 08:52
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I've decided that because I mostly want to focus on setting, in the end to use V20. Other than setting changes, I've decided to leave most things the same mechanically. However, there's one mechanic that needs to change for the setting I'm building. Generation. I've decided to replace it with Blood Potency. Caine and the Antediluvians have been mystically severed from their clans (Whether this means they've been destroyed or not is one of the mysteries of the post-Gehenna world) so the generation of a vampire is meaningless. Is it a smooth slot out, replace all mentions of Generation with BP and it'll work, or is there anything else to consider?Gilok posted:I've got a soft spot for House Fortunae, from the Order of Hermes Tradition book. If you're going to use the Traditions with nMage rules, you could do worse than elevating these guys to a full Tradition of Chaos-theory numerologists and giving them Fate and letting the Euthanatos keep Death. It talks about how their goal is to become a full Tradition in the book, and for some reason that idea has stuck with me for a long time. I'll keep this in mind. I'm not sure I will fully use nMage rules, but the idea of Mages who focus in one specialty of a Sphere over another is cool.
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Feb 3, 2014 02:36
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Everyone needs to watch the season 2 episode of Millennium 'Somehow Satan Got Behind Me'. It stands pretty much alone, and it's basically this: Four demons in a donut shop, quietly talking about how they're working to corrupt the world. It's hilarious.
Loomer fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 06:41
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Pretty much the whole of Millennium is good watching, even at its worst. I'm surprised they got a lot of that stuff on TV.
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Feb 3, 2014 12:30
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moths posted:Pretty much the whole of Millennium is good watching, even at its worst. Yeah, parts of season one especially seem like they shouldn't have made it past the censors. On one hand, I'd be curious to see what might have been if say, HBO, had done the show. On the other, I'm not actually sure it would have been much different at all, it's already so transgressive. Maybe more tits, but that'd be about it.
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Feb 3, 2014 13:02
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I think what made some of the ideas and images more horrific is that we didn't get to see them onscreen, or only had glimpses of them. HBO would have shown the guy in the pilot getting his eyes and mouth sewn closed, and it would have been reduced to "yet another gory visual." (Instead of something that still creeps me out all these years later.) You get the Psycho effect, where you remember it as the worst thing you literally imagined.
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Feb 3, 2014 14:57
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Anybody got advice for running Masquerade LARPs? I've just taken over the local one and it's been a ton of work and preparation since the former ST was about as useful as a Zippo in Hell.
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Feb 4, 2014 16:07
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Pope Guilty posted:Anybody got advice for running Masquerade LARPs? I've just taken over the local one and it's been a ton of work and preparation since the former ST was about as useful as a Zippo in Hell. "Don't"
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Feb 4, 2014 16:39
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Pope Guilty posted:Anybody got advice for running Masquerade LARPs? I've just taken over the local one and it's been a ton of work and preparation since the former ST was about as useful as a Zippo in Hell. Get a couple of reliable level headed assistant storytellers. I would say one for every 5-10 people there are in the game but not too many. Brainstorm and share the load together. Get a good idea of what you want for the game and the setting but don't be too concrete on the setting. Restrict rare stuff and independents. If the game is already hosed, don't be afraid to reboot the game while allowing the players to start with whatever xp they already had. Avoid crossover and don't get too big. Keep things small and localized.
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Feb 4, 2014 17:00
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Get a couple of reliable level headed assistant storytellers. I would say one for every 5-10 people there are in the game but not too many. Brainstorm and share the load together. Get a good idea of what you want for the game and the setting but don't be too concrete on the setting. Restrict rare stuff and independents. If the game is already hosed, don't be afraid to reboot the game while allowing the players to start with whatever xp they already had. Avoid crossover and don't get too big. Keep things small and localized. This is tremendously good advice. Masquerade games have a tendency to bloat worse than a Marvel plot arch and become completely incomprehensible in much the same way. Think like a TV show, with multiple competing plot arches evolving over the course of a season and then resolving. Don't think of everything in terms of how easy or hard it is to resolve; resist the temptation to constantly throw 'boss' NPCs at the players just because all of them can gloss over a social or physical obstacle in a single afternoon. This is especially true in Masquerade because for some reason every game seems to have 5+ elders more powerful than all the PCs combined, and that's totally not necessary or fun for the game to work. Look to the players for ideas on new plots but never ever pin an important plot to one player. LARPs are infamous for flakeouts and besides players are competing for your (the ST's) attention. Constantly battling the impression of favoritism is a real thing.
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Feb 4, 2014 17:18
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I just spent a solid 7 hours putting together enough content for a single session in what will end up being a Mage Chronicle, and i'm not sure how to reconcile that fact with the feeling that 90% of all that will be tossed out the window within moments of the PCs smashing against it. This is my first time DMing, and it's going to be a hell of a time. 
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Feb 5, 2014 17:29
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klapman posted:I just spent a solid 7 hours putting together enough content for a single session in what will end up being a Mage Chronicle, and i'm not sure how to reconcile that fact with the feeling that 90% of all that will be tossed out the window within moments of the PCs smashing against it. This is my first time DMing, and it's going to be a hell of a time. Welcome to mage! Roll with the punches, and be reassured that once you get the hang of your players' characters, you'll end up throwing out less and less plot.
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Feb 5, 2014 20:03
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Any encounters that your players avoid can always be reworked for later, and your players can be a pretty good source of inspiration.
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Feb 5, 2014 20:24
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Remember, any plot point that was so utterly skipped that the players never caught wind of it can easily be tweaked and placed back into the story later on, if it's still worth using. In addition, if your players are that magical kind of player that freely goes "Oh man, I hope this isn't [x]" or "You know what? I bet this is [x]," you can steal their good ideas with wild abandon and make them feel smart for "calling it."
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Feb 5, 2014 20:44
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Also, it's genuinely fun to creatively use your magic powers to trump or bypass things that looked like they'd be serious problems. Snapping your fingers and ordering the corpse to tell you where that stab wound came from is part of the fantasy of being a mage.
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Feb 5, 2014 20:58
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Using Space and Death to make the knife an anchor of the victim's ghost and then ordering said ghost to lead you to the knife is even more so.
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Feb 5, 2014 21:07
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Error 404 posted:Using Space and Death to make the knife an anchor of the victim's ghost and then ordering said ghost to lead you to the knife is even more so. I hope when that happened, you went "Is this a dagger I see before me?"
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Feb 5, 2014 21:13
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klapman posted:I just spent a solid 7 hours putting together enough content for a single session in what will end up being a Mage Chronicle, and i'm not sure how to reconcile that fact with the feeling that 90% of all that will be tossed out the window within moments of the PCs smashing against it. This is my first time DMing, and it's going to be a hell of a time. That's a reasonable fear. Mage (Awakening and Ascension both) are essentially "Obstacle Bypass: the Game." As an ST I found the most essential preparation bits were:
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Feb 5, 2014 21:19
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Dave B posted this on the whit-wolf forums, and I thought some of you might be interestedDave B on the white wolf forums posted:Awakening has three thematic principles to bear in mind when thinking about the magic system
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Feb 5, 2014 22:37
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That all sounds pretty cool. I'm looking forward to this book.  Also, I realize this is old news, but what is this I don't even
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Feb 5, 2014 23:46
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That Mage stuff sounds very cool. Two misgivings: -Mage Sight should be cheap and spells expensive, not vice versa. Expanded awareness is the core of being a mage - in my game, you actually have to spend WP to turn your Mage Sight off for a scene, and e.g. the cabal's Moros can no longer stomach hot dogs since he can't help but see (and smell and potentially taste; Mage "Sight" hits all senses) what's really in them. -Casting preemptive rather than reactive magic, especially when that preemptive magic takes the form of hours-long rituals performed in your basement, is super boring. The fun of an improvised magic ststem is in coming up with neat spells on the spot. There's definitely a place for "okay let's cast the ritual of poison immunity before descending into the spider dungeon" but you want to be real careful about making that stuff really strong or omnipresent.
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Feb 6, 2014 00:01
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Gilok posted:Also, I realize this is old news, but what is this I don't even It's exactly what it says it is: a Werewolf: The Apocalypse themed cookbook. During the W20 kickstarter, we were batting ideas back and forth for stretch goals. I'd been joking with some mates about what recipes would match each Werewolf tribe, since I love to cook, and I joked to Rich that we could include a W20 Cookbook as a stretch goal. He only went and put it up as an option, so here it is. All the recipes are suitable-for-humans — as in, I've cooked them all for friends and family. They've got notes for vegetarian/vegan/gluten/nut-safe modifications, because I kinda want people to cook them. I have a tiny kitchen and not much equipment, so that's also true of the recipes in the book. It's just, y'know, Werewolf-y.
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Feb 6, 2014 00:10
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The Mage20 Delux kickstarter better have a stretch-goal for a book full of occult-themed brainteasers and crossword puzzles and poo poo 
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Feb 6, 2014 01:19
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Oh, yeah, here's a third misgiving: if spellcasting itself is potentially a Wisdom sin, there needs to be an obvious underlying logic that allows improvised magic of any Arcanum to be fairly classed as harmful to Wisdom or safe to cast, and there needs to be thought put into whether Wisdom also, separately, gets dinged if you act conventionally evil.
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Feb 6, 2014 01:27
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I like that they're cracking open Rotes & Magical Tools to make mages more differentiated than a Gnosis blergh with Arcanum vlagh that only gets altered by their legacy choice, if that. edit: also giving a more important mechanical weight to the X-Men codename is very welcome. Gerund fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Feb 6, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 02:17
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Does this cookbook include anything of value for the Project?
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Feb 6, 2014 03:37
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Loomer posted:Does this cookbook include anything of value for the Project? Do you even sleep?
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Feb 6, 2014 04:27
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Ferrinus posted:That Mage stuff sounds very cool. Two misgivings: I'm just glad they're putting an impetus to use mana in. All of it sounds really interesting and I can't wait to get ahold of this book. Loomer posted:Does this cookbook include anything of value for the Project? 'Things Your Sons of Ether Friends Ask' for $500, Alex. Cabbit fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Feb 6, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 04:41
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Loomer posted:Does this cookbook include anything of value for the Project? It's meant to be an in-universe document, so unfortunately yes. There's a POV character named Pete Quire, who mentions various septs and characters he visits around the world to learn about Garou cuisine. My favorite part is the Red Talon chapter where he talks about the serious political implications of hyper-intelligent wolves learning to cook meat.
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