gatz posted:TheMcD (which is a terrible forum handle, IMO) had a good post relating to who these emails could be sent from: Ha. Yeah, it's probably a quite terrible pick, but it stuck with me since I was like 11, and after a while I just figured "gently caress it, that'll just be my handle period, too much effort to introduce a new one to remember". Anyway, I've been running through the game myself lately, partly out of interest on a few side things, most notably the library level added by the Plus Patch (which is pretty interesting to run through, even if it's a bit barren), and I mean running in more ways than one, since I went with a Toreador this time around. I have to say, the Toreador's "HOLY poo poo I AM SO loving FAST RIGHT NOW" combat is a whole bundle of fun. I rushed Celerity 5 rather quickly and focused on melee so far (up to 8 after finishing up with those sewers, which were a lot less tedious now that I could repeatedly use Celerity and suck on rats to replenish blood points), and the ability to juggle enemies with my sword is pretty insane.
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Mar 16, 2014 14:04
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Question: If heather is like this becaue of our blood and Mercurio is drinking the Prince's blood why isn't he all head over heels about LaCroix (or whoever the blood source is) as Heather is about us? Does it come down to the amount of blood consumed (I can believe we gave Heather a p big dose given the extent of her injuries).
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Mar 16, 2014 17:13
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insanityv2 posted:Question: Because women are weak-willed fools who are slavishly devoted to the first person who gets their claws in them, of course.
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Mar 16, 2014 17:16
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Or because Mercurio is in his sixties right now and feels too old for that poo poo.
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Mar 16, 2014 17:22
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Added Space posted:Because women are weak-willed fools who are slavishly devoted to the first person who gets their claws in them, of course. Alternatively, Mercurio's had a few decades to figure out how on earth the blood messes with his head and can deal with it while Heather's had these feelings for all of two days.
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Mar 16, 2014 17:29
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I think it's more than just the blood here, Heather was literally dying alone in a lovely understaffed clinic and the PC showed up out of nowhere and saved them. Even if vampire blood wasn't way up there with heroin in the bliss-and-addiction department, obsession wouldn't be surprising. Mercurio's a long-term ghoul so he should be blood bound to whoever his blood source is by now, which would make him love that vampire 'as much as he is capable of loving anyone' - to those who aren't familiar, anyone that drinks the same vampire's blood three times is blood bound, but the effects begin after a single drink. So if he gets his blood directly from the Prince maybe he's a bit of a sociopath, or just habitually hides his affection. Otherwise, he could be getting 'paid' from a different vampire each month, either at Mercurio's insistence or Lacroix's preference (fully-bound ghouls can be a bit clingy), either by Lacroix telling a vampire to go feed him every month or delivering a bag of blood every month. At sufficiently high willpower (which Mercurio apparently has, given the amount of information he delivered while beaten near to death after dragging himself all the way home) a ghoul can resist the effects of a one-feeding blood bond. Or possibly Mercurio just cannot be blood bound, it's a Merit in the Ghoul splatbook. Alternately, in the Dark Ages, the effect of the blood bond was duty and obligation rather than love and adoration, so maybe Lacroix is older than he says and his blood's a holdout of old-school blood bonds, or there's a quirk to his vitae.
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Mar 16, 2014 17:32
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citybeatnik posted:Alternatively, Mercurio's had a few decades to figure out how on earth the blood messes with his head and can deal with it while Heather's had these feelings for all of two days. Also, we're not asking him to do anything that goes against LaCroix's interests and when we interacted with him we helped him out and did a job for the prince. If we went to him and said, "Hey man. I need to buy some guns from you because I'm going to kill that prick LaCroix" he'd run screaming to the prince in a heartbeat.
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Mar 16, 2014 18:13
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As I recall there is an option to make Heather forget all about you if you have the correct skill (Dementation?). What would that do to her long-term?
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Mar 16, 2014 18:43
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She'd have a bad few days as the blood wore off but without any knowledge of vampires she wouldn't know how to get another fix so she'd probably write it off as a bad flu or something.
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Mar 16, 2014 18:49
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Another thought is that Mercurio isn't in the presence of his domitor. You're standing right in front of Heather every time you interact, so of course she'll be fawning over you. If LaCroix was there in front of Mercurio, he might do the same thing.
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Mar 16, 2014 18:57
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Is it ever stated how much time passes from the beginning to the end of the game? I can't remember.
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Mar 16, 2014 20:11
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crime fighting hog posted:Is it ever stated how much time passes from the beginning to the end of the game? I can't remember. Nah. Hell, there's only one time anyone even comments on the time of night.
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Mar 16, 2014 20:40
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So if we did let Heather go, would she still be alright, or would her old wounds open up when the vampire blood wore off?
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Mar 16, 2014 22:17
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Glazius posted:So if we did let Heather go, would she still be alright, or would her old wounds open up when the vampire blood wore off? She'd be fine, the healing isn't undone as she has not aged more than a few days.
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Mar 16, 2014 22:27
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The wounds are healed so she wouldn't die, however she would suffer from a sever case of withdrawal.
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Mar 16, 2014 22:28
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Yeah she'd feel like poo poo for a while and not know why if we mindwiped her and sent her on her way. Ghouls don't get slammed with every injury they ever healed with the blood, just any aging they avoided.
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Mar 16, 2014 23:23
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Gideon020 posted:Nicely done with the title drop in the update gatz. Thanks. I named this update after the thread title since, on the one hand, we're caught between two opposing factions, but also because of the reasons that Tehan points out: "As the plot thickens, the limitations of the video game format become more and more apparent . . . here we're forced to tell LaCroix even if we can agonize about it at the Last Round for a bit." Pickled Tink posted:Gatz, for some amusement you should listen to the stuff Chunk says in the lobby. Just make sure you listen carefully because he only cycles through those lines of dialogue once (or at least I couldn't get him to go through them again). Noted. I'll get that up in a few updates.
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Mar 16, 2014 23:50
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citybeatnik posted:Alternatively, Mercurio's had a few decades to figure out how on earth the blood messes with his head and can deal with it while Heather's had these feelings for all of two days.
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Mar 17, 2014 05:52
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There's one thing that always bugged me about the whole Nines did it/he was framed thing that's come up in the plot now. The third dot of obfuscate gives you an ability called Mask of a Thousand Faces. And it's explicitly for faking poo poo just like this. It lets you copy someone's looks, voice, even mannerisms if you're very skilled with it. Absolutely perfect for having a quick conversation with a witness or two for a frame job. I understand that the limits of the game make obfuscate nothing but an increasingly powerful invisibility spell, but if this was a tabletop session the first theory going around the table would be 'Someone's using MoaTF to frame him.' Especially when we find out that the Malkavian primogen is dead without actually finding a body. Most people associate obfuscate with Nosferatu and rightly so. But it's a Malkavian discipline as well and they tend to be fonder of the really tricksy uses of it than the sewer rats.
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Mar 17, 2014 08:09
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OTOH, if Lacroix is framing Nines, not ratting him out means you're not to be trusted.
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Mar 18, 2014 01:33
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Rockopolis posted:OTOH, if Lacroix is framing Nines, not ratting him out means you're not to be trusted. Yeah, the decidedly not-Nines Nines we meet at Grout's is pretty much obvious, but we're pretty much stuck into this thing. Unless we really want to give Lacroix a reason to kill us, that is. Jack was pretty much spot-on, "you do what you gotta do". We're pretty much stuck between a Sheriff and a hard place right now, so we gotta rat out Nines. vvv: Yeah sure. Shugojin fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 02:03
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Shugojin, could you edit that last sentence at my request? It's too wink-wink-nudge-nudge.
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Mar 18, 2014 02:06
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This doesn't exactly come up until a good bit later in the game, but it's quite inconsequential and I just have to ask because I just saw this myself. Spoilers for a future side-quest: What the hell is up with that last poster you get from Gary's quest? Did that ever come up before? It seems to come right the gently caress outta nowhere to me, and I just can't figure out where the connection is.
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Mar 18, 2014 03:24
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TheMcD posted:This doesn't exactly come up until a good bit later in the game, but it's quite inconsequential and I just have to ask because I just saw this myself. Spoilers for a future side-quest: What the hell is up with that last poster you get from Gary's quest? Did that ever come up before? It seems to come right the gently caress outta nowhere to me, and I just can't figure out where the connection is. In the baseline game, for this future and inconsequential side quest, all the posters are just pinups of various female Kindred/Kuei-Jin so none of them really come out of nowhere - is your question coming out of a plus patch change?
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Mar 18, 2014 04:47
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ulmont posted:In the baseline game, for this future and inconsequential side quest, all the posters are just pinups of various female Kindred/Kuei-Jin so none of them really come out of nowhere - is your question coming out of a plus patch change? Just looked it up, yeah, it's a Plus patch change. It adds three new posters - the one with Imalia, the one with Tawni, and then the one I was asking about, which looks like this: http://vpforums.org/imghost/77/vampireposter.jpg Is this just :wesp: in action?
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Mar 18, 2014 05:03
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Rockopolis posted:OTOH, if Lacroix is framing Nines, not ratting him out means you're not to be trusted.
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Mar 18, 2014 05:13
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TheMcD posted:the one I was asking about, which looks like this: http://vpforums.org/imghost/77/vampireposter.jpg What the actual gently caress. Maybe it was just a placeholder that Wesp forgot about?
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Mar 18, 2014 05:14
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   Here we are, fresh out of the roof access to the Museum of Natural History. How Melissa knew about this entrance is left up to our imagination. Not to say that roof accesses are uncommon, just that Melissa knew exactly how to exploit this one.  Down the stairs and to the left, there's a dinosaur statue leaning against the wall. This made me jump the first time I played bloodlines. I was crouched down, trying to sneak my way through here, and then I turn to my left and there's a loving dinosaur with its mouth open waiting to greet me. Next to the statue, there's a note attached to the wall.  OF particular interest to us is the fact that this maintence guy is leaving his keys around. We could continue further into the museum, but let's explore these side hallways a little first, in search of these keys.  Sure enough...  There's the key to some office here in the museum.  Now let's get down to exploring this museum. To state the obvious, we're here to find the Ankaran Sarcophagus, which is being held here. That means that there's a pretty heavy security presence inside the museum, since it's a rare and valuable artifact. There's also the fact that the sarcophagus is probably being held somewhere way back into the museum, behind several layers of security. LaCroix wants us to pull this heist off with complete stealth. That's not an option here, at least for me. I would be a lot easier with dots in obfuscate, but we're not playing as a Malkavian or Nosferatu.  What this means is that if we're detected by security...  That's what'll happen.  Up here, there's supposedly $100 sitting on a pterodactyl's head. Good luck trying to jump on it. Killing that guard was noisy, and it set others nearby on alert.  So they have to be taken care of. It's a good thing their bodies disappear right after they die -- LaCroix would be furious if any bodies remained on the scene.  Attempting to go down these nearby stairs sets off that giant dinosaur head, a loud roar that puts the nearby guard on alert...  ...resulting in his death.  Here on the ground floor, there's a giant dinosaur skeleton on display. I don't remember seeing anything as grand as this in any museum I ever visited.  There's also a cop who is suspicious that a door might be up to some illegal activity. The world is arguably better off without him.  The door he was guarding is the Museum Office.  Which is just life an office. Four cubicles, four computers we can't interact with. I'm sorry for all you cubicle workers reading this. What a boring life you must have.  I imagine you all leave your prescription bottles lying around your desks, too, popping pills at a moments notice to get you through the day. There's a door that leads further into the museum, but it's locked behind a pretty decent skillcheck.  So let's explore the ground floor a little more. This is the lost and found. Poor little kids that get lost in museums -- that would have terrified me as a child.  Three things are of note here. The first is the clock. It's one of the few times we can tell what time of night it is.  The second is the computer terminal. We'll hack into the email first. The password is iluvgabe.  1 posted:<Subject> Reminder We first learned about Johansen on the Elizabeth Dane, where he was menioned in an email as 'Professor Johansen'. He's probably not here right now, with it being night, but he'd probably be a valuable asset to LaCroix. 2 posted:<Subject> Fetish This sounds close to that occult item from a museum that Pisha wanted us to retrieve. Come to think of it, didn't LaCroix mention a small box that was shipped with the Dane? He might have been referring to this. We should try to find it. 3 posted:<Subject> VIRUS ALERT: read me! 4 posted:<Subject> thanks Keys are always good. We should take them, if they're still here. Now we'll go into the sales directory. The password is griff.  No sales figures. It figures.  The third thing of interest is this newspaper clipping, but it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know.  Museum Security? That ought to be good.  I guess it serves me right, not being as careful as I should. There's actually a way to drop in here from a ventilation shaft overhead, but that requires we find the entrance to it in a bathroom. This was a little faster.  After killing that guard, we find the basement key, just what we need. There's a server room that we can go into, but there's nothing to find in there.  Downstairs we go. If we're going to find the sarcophagus anywhere in here, it's probably going to be as far down as we can go.   Whoops.  The guards were already on alert.  You can see that there are cameras on the wall. If they spot us, an alarm goes off, and if there are more security guards in the area, they'll make their way to our position. If you're trying to do this mission with stealth, these cameras will be the bane of your existence. We can turn them off by going into the security room you saw two screenshots ago, but it's likely that you'll be caught if you don't have any dots in obfuscate. We go in there and turn them off even though we've taken care of the guards. It's just a boring computer interaction without anything extra -- no need to show it off.  We've seen that there are two lines. You can imagine that the red line takes us towards wherever the sarcophagus is being stored. But let's follow the green line first, see what that takes us to.  The green line eventually takes us towards this side-room. It looks like there could be some interesting artifacts in there, maybe even that thing Pisha was looking for. How do we get in?  We shoot our way in. Deceptively simple.  And just like that, there's the fetish statue. Pisha should be pleased, though it looks a little weird.  Moving on, the green line also takes us to a side-room with a door entrance. Shocking, I know. We pick up this general museum key from the room.  The green path eventually meets up with the red path, counter-intuitively, but we can't go any further because we don't know the code.  So we follow the red path backwards, and we're eventually led to this nice little office. In the desk we find a gold ring and a watch -- why these would be left here overnight is beyond me -- and take them, and on top of the desk we find a note.  People sure love to leave sensitive passwords lying around in the world of darkness. With this, we'll head through the previously locked door.  Passing a deactivated camera, we're eventually led to another security room.  THe life expectancy of any security guard in the world of darkness must be pretty low. We take care of him, and by that I mean take him out to dinner, and continue forward...  ...but our path is blocked by these laser beams! The solution is to go back into the security room we just passed and shut them off via a computer terminal. Alternatively, you can attack an electrical panel on the wall, but that makes the beams flicker in and out. It's easier to just shut them off. All they do is sound the alarm if you touch them, they're not sci-fi burning lasers.  Continuing forward, we're taken through a storage area, low lighting and boxes everywhere. This must be the place.  It should--  gone!?  Beckett!?   Beckett? What are you doing here?This shouldn't be surprising, come to think of it. If there's a discovery to be made, Beckett will be near.  I'm an archaeologist, so I thought I'd indulge in a quick study of this Ankaran Sarcophagus everyone's so riled up about. My guess, from what I've read about it, is that it's a mummified Mesopotamian king. I needed confirmation. Did you get to examine it at all? Oh, I really wish I had. All this speculation about the sarcophagus containing an Antediluvian and being a portent of Gehenna is making me cringe. These are the kinds of ridiculous, superstitious assumptions I came here to debunk.We're forced into asking about what we already know of: Antediluvians? No one I know has ever met one, but each of the clans and their bloodlines supposedly trace their origin to an original vampire - an Antediluvian. Some swear these grandsires still exist into the present. But then, Kindred and kine believe a lot of strange things. And Gehenna? Armageddon, doomsday, the end of all Kindred. It's a common facet of most mythologies - fear that the world will end. Many believe Caine and the Antediluvians will return to consume or destroy all Kindred. I wholeheartedly disagree. Why do you disagree? Beckett's pompousness is unfitting. His argument here doesn't actually demonstrate that Gehenna is false. Bobbin Threadbare posted:It should be noted that (as any good scientist would) Beckett would later toss his assumptions aside once the Ravnos Antediluvian rose in India. Instead, he rededicated himself to researching ways to stop the other Antediluvians from destroying the world, and in the one Gehenna scenario where that's possible he plays a major role. Humans and Kindred are just as capable of managing their own destruction as a deity. A self-realized Gehenna warrants more vigilance than a god-induced one, don't you agree? Such is my argument... which so frequently falls on deaf ears.The argument that Gehenna is just the projection of the Kindred's ability for self-destruction would be a better one, but it's not an argument that Beckett makes. We can ask Beckett more questions about Gehenna, but also his pet fascination, the thin-bloods. Can you tell me more about thin-bloods? Thin-bloods rarely exhibit features or powers of their clan and many can't Embrace. Some are even rumored to have reproduced. Many Kindred are terrified that their weak blood heralds the dissipation of every bloodline. Somewhat of an ignorant, reactionary response, don't you think? Who's Caine? Caine is the biblical first Kindred and founder of the mythological First City, Enoch - a place where Kindred and kine coexisted. I believe Caine's a figure concocted to personify the transition from nomadic society to agrarian society. That myth, like most, has been twisted by time. Are there any other signs of Gehenna? What prophecy doesn't have vague, apocryphal signs? Let's see, the usual ones cited are the appearance of thin-bloods, Caine sightings, doom, gloom, that route. This is all fascinating stuff... how long have you been studying Kindred lore? This bumped up our academics stat by one. I don't like any of these answers, but I'll choose the least stupid one. We're the next evolution of human beings. Yes, I've heard that theory before. It certainly seems plausible, but there's little proof to support it. Still, it's a better explanation than a divine sentence for manslaughter. I agree. Look at that poo poo eating grin. Goodbye, Beckett.The screen fades out...  ...and then we're transported back downtown. LaCroix isn't going to take this well, but we'll have to wait until next time to tell him. I'm sorry if this update wasn't very good. I don't like this quest, so it's hard to make it interesting. gatz fucked around with this message at 10:44 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 05:48
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That is the shittiest security system. The lasers are visible and come out of really obvious emitters, and it looks like there'd be tons of room to get by underneath them if you weren't limited to moving like a video game character who can only run, walk or crouch. gatz posted:
If you're ruling out the supernatural explanation, aliens sounds like the best option to me. Perhaps some sort of Deus Ex style nanotech that causes strange and unintended side-effects in humans. gatz posted:...and then we're transported back downtown. I really hate when games do this. Maybe I wanted to go back through the bulding to check for stuff I'd missed. 
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Mar 18, 2014 06:08
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I always hated the V:TM signature characters. Every single loving one of them was both smug and boring in equal measure.
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Mar 18, 2014 06:11
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Tiggum posted:If you're ruling out the supernatural explanation, aliens sounds like the best option to me. Perhaps some sort of Deus Ex style nanotech that causes strange and unintended side-effects in humans.
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Mar 18, 2014 06:24
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Ephemeron posted:There are two more possible explanations that we could give to Beckett: one that requires low Humanity and another that is only available to Malkavians. The low-humanity choice: "We're demons and the blood of the world is ours to take freely." The Malkavian choices: "The reason we exist is because the jellyfish will it so. WHY ELSE?" and "You don't get it? Hee hee, oh ho ho... WE'RE A JOKE!" The first Malkavian response, like much of the rest of the Malkavian dialogue, reminds me of this awful thing.
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Mar 18, 2014 06:31
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gatz posted:"The reason we exist is because the jellyfish will it so. WHY ELSE?"
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Mar 18, 2014 07:16
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There really needs to be a :wesp: smilie.
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Mar 18, 2014 07:20
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It should be noted that (as any good scientist would) Beckett would later toss his assumptions aside once the Ravnos Antediluvian rose in India. Instead, he rededicated himself to researching ways to stop the other Antediluvians from destroying the world, and in the one Gehenna scenario where that's possible he plays a major role.
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Mar 18, 2014 08:05
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Couldn't you use Dominate 1 & 2 - Trance & Brainwipe - to cover stealth sections instead of murder? I thought I remembered doing that during my Ventrue play-through.
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Mar 18, 2014 10:32
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Your natural history museums suck then, gatz. Come visit.
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Mar 18, 2014 10:39
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MaskedHuzzah posted:Couldn't you use Dominate 1 & 2 - Trance & Brainwipe - to cover stealth sections instead of murder? I thought I remembered doing that during my Ventrue play-through. If this were tabletop honestly the only thing the guards would remember is making eye contact with a well-dressed woman. Venture are scary.
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Mar 18, 2014 10:41
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 Here's a snippet of G. Bach's voice acting from two updates ago. MaskedHuzzah posted:Couldn't you use Dominate 1 & 2 - Trance & Brainwipe - to cover stealth sections instead of murder? I thought I remembered doing that during my Ventrue play-through. Absolutely. The problem is that I kinda forgot that those powers existed. Bobbin Threadbare posted:It should be noted that (as any good scientist would) Beckett would later toss his assumptions aside once the Ravnos Antediluvian rose in India. Instead, he rededicated himself to researching ways to stop the other Antediluvians from destroying the world, and in the one Gehenna scenario where that's possible he plays a major role. Thanks for the heads up. I'll quote your post in the last update.
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Mar 18, 2014 10:42
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Someone earlier in the thread mentioned that vampires pick up bits of craziness everytime their humanity drops (IIRC). Since your humanity can yo-yo over the course of a bloodlines playthrough, I assume tabletop would have it as a much more stable stat? How does that mechanic work?
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Mar 18, 2014 12:35
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