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barcoded posted: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? Not 100% sure, but I think the rulebooks give an example of what actions can cause a player to drop their humanity. For example, to drop from 2 to 1, I think you need to commit premeditated murder, while to drop from 9 to 8 it's something banal like commit tax fraud.
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Mar 18, 2014 12:47
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I always did this section with stealth and it was a lot of fun to me, but also very time consuming. Just barging in and killing everyone sounds a lot less interesting than trying your hardest to go unseen.
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Mar 18, 2014 12:50
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As your Humanity dips lower after doing morally corrupt poo poo like casual murder and stuff, you'll contract what your ST (game master) considers a thematically suitable derangement. Paranoia, megalomania, a certain eating disorder (will only take blood from red heads, for example) and so on. Regaining humanity can be done through RP and spending chunks of XP to do it. Most of the time it's not a huge deal from what I've read (I've only gotten to play Vampire at the table twice and my ST was god awful) but in the rules, the worse your humanity the harder it is to blend in with non-vampires. One interesting thing I remember reading from the books is how they describe Elders who, over the course of hundreds if not thousands of years, have a really skewed humanity rating. Obviously they've done countless horrifying things to other beings in order to preserve themselves, so in order to not just be reduced to Humanity 0, they develop a very alien mindset that no longer really thinks on the same level as Joe Bloodsucker. BTW Humanity 0 is literally "Feed, kill, sleep," over and over. Any character that falls that far becomes unplayable.
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Mar 18, 2014 12:51
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I remember that my first Ventrue run's museum trip went rather well with stealth up until the camera part. Then I just said "gently caress it" and started murdering guards because I saw no real way to get through with my skillset. In my current Toreador run, the whole thing was a lot more fun. At that point, I knew that once I reached the sarcophagus, I won't have to go back, so once I hit the cameras, I just repeatedly cast Celerity 5 and blitzed my way past all the guards, taking very little damage in the process and not killing anyone (which was the main goal as opposed to maybe not getting caught).
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Mar 18, 2014 13:37
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TheMcD posted:I remember that my first Ventrue run's museum trip went rather well with stealth up until the camera part. Then I just said "gently caress it" and started murdering guards because I saw no real way to get through with my skillset. I find it amusing in this game how blasé they are about security cameras. A vampire being recorded killing or moving at super-speed on security tape should be a pretty major masquerade violation but it just never comes up at all.
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Mar 18, 2014 14:27
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I thought vampires didn't show up in cameras.
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Mar 18, 2014 15:03
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PureRok posted:I thought vampires didn't show up in cameras. The footage of a bunch of people being murdered by something invisible then. Either way it's pretty bad for those who want to keep the supernatural secret.
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Mar 18, 2014 15:04
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Vampires generally do show up in cameras.
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Mar 18, 2014 15:09
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The only vampires who doesn't show up in mirrors and other reflective stuff are the ones from Clan Lasombra, the other vampires can be filmed just fine. And yes, a vampire being taped while doing supernatural stuff is a pretty clear masquerade violation.
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Mar 18, 2014 15:09
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double nine posted:Not 100% sure, but I think the rulebooks give an example of what actions can cause a player to drop their humanity. For example, to drop from 2 to 1, I think you need to commit premeditated murder, while to drop from 9 to 8 it's something banal like commit tax fraud. Shamelessly lifted from a VtM wiki, here's the table of the sort of act required to have a chance of losing humanity in the tabletop: 10 Selfish thoughts (e.g., hurting someone’s feelings) 9 Minor selfish acts (e.g., cheating on taxes) 8 Injury to another, accidental or otherwise (e.g., physical conflict) 7 Petty theft (e.g., shoplifting) 6 Grand theft (e.g., burglary) 5 Intentional mass-property damage (e.g., arson) 4 Impassioned crime (e.g., manslaughter) 3 Planned crime (e.g., murder) 2 Casual/callous crime (e.g., torture, serial murder) 1 Utter perversion, heinous acts (e.g., combined rape, torture and murder; mass murder) The average human is about humanity 7. A vampire maintaining max humanity is pretty much eligible for sainthood. So if the Bloodlines protagonist was going by tabletop rules, they'd drop to 2 or 3 pretty drat fast (depending on whether or not they're trying to be 'good') but would probably level out there. The way it works is that when they perform an action that breaches the tier they're on or any below it, they have to roll willpower, to represent trying to justify it to themselves - if they fail, they lose humanity. There's modifiers based on whether it's a worse sin than the tier they're on, whether they had justification for doing it, and so on. If they 'botch' the roll by getting at least one 1 and no successes - it's one d10 per point of willpower, and a success is 8 or more (or less for particularly heinous sins) - the vampire picks up a derangement decided on by the Storyteller, usually based on the act that caused it. If I was trying to stat the protagonist in tabletop I'd go with 5ish humanity based on their familiarity with lockpicks during the tutorial and high willpower considering they're not a gibbering mess by the time Jack's done with vamp 101. So they'd likely still be as sane as they started by the time they level off at 2 or 3.
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Mar 18, 2014 15:14
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Tiggum posted:The footage of a bunch of people being murdered by something invisible then. Either way it's pretty bad for those who want to keep the supernatural secret. Does the lore have government agencies dedicated to whitewashing evidence of supernatural phenomena, something like the Syndicate in X-Files?
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Mar 18, 2014 15:32
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Tehan posted:So if the Bloodlines protagonist was going by tabletop rules, they'd drop to 2 or 3 pretty drat fast (depending on whether or not they're trying to be 'good') but would probably level out there. The way it works is that when they perform an action that breaches the tier they're on or any below it, they have to roll willpower, to represent trying to justify it to themselves - if they fail, they lose humanity. There's modifiers based on whether it's a worse sin than the tier they're on, whether they had justification for doing it, and so on. If they 'botch' the roll by getting at least one 1 and no successes - it's one d10 per point of willpower, and a success is 8 or more (or less for particularly heinous sins) - the vampire picks up a derangement decided on by the Storyteller, usually based on the act that caused it. Not Willpower, but rather Conscience. The question is "do you feel remorse for your transgressions?" If you succeed, you do, and don't lose part of your soul. If your Conscience fails you, you grow more callous and don't hold yourself to as high a standard.
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Mar 18, 2014 16:06
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The Merry Marauder posted:Not Willpower, but rather Conscience. The question is "do you feel remorse for your transgressions?" If you succeed, you do, and don't lose part of your soul. If your Conscience fails you, you grow more callous and don't hold yourself to as high a standard. After all, once you've murdered multiple people, burning down an empty building just doesn't seem as big a deal anymore.
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Mar 18, 2014 16:31
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The Merry Marauder posted:Not Willpower, but rather Conscience. The question is "do you feel remorse for your transgressions?" If you succeed, you do, and don't lose part of your soul. If your Conscience fails you, you grow more callous and don't hold yourself to as high a standard. So wait, should that be interpreted as "do you feel guilty over this act Y/N?"? That looks a bit like a going to Confession.
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Mar 18, 2014 16:39
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steinrokkan posted:Does the lore have government agencies dedicated to whitewashing evidence of supernatural phenomena, something like the Syndicate in X-Files? Government agencies are generally clueless or so riddled with vampiric influence that they're completely hamstrung. There are some agents who start to figure out the truth (V:TM came out in the mid-90's when X-Files was huge after all) but they're usually killed or dominated or ghouled if they get too far in. Some Kindred don't even mind these guys so much since any human who's good enough to connect the dots on their own usually makes a strong and resourceful servant once they're blood bonded to a vampire.
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Mar 18, 2014 16:40
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steinrokkan posted:Does the lore have government agencies dedicated to whitewashing evidence of supernatural phenomena, something like the Syndicate in X-Files? Government agencies are so thoroughly infiltrated by every flavour of supernatural critter there's probably exactly one regular person in the entirety of all the governments of the world, who I can only assume terrifies the poo poo out of all his coworkers who can't figure out what the gently caress he is.
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Mar 18, 2014 17:00
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double nine posted:So wait, should that be interpreted as "do you feel guilty over this act Y/N?"? That looks a bit like a going to Confession. To be fair, the roll is made to determine what exactly the character is feeling about the act as it's committed. If the player tries to use it to game the system, the storyteller has the prerogative to drop dice or even drop Humanity without a check if the character routinely commits actions that would call for a conscience roll, and that's beyond the penalties that come when committing an act several steps down from the character's current Humanity.
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Mar 18, 2014 17:04
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:To be fair, the roll is made to determine what exactly the character is feeling about the act as it's committed. If the player tries to use it to game the system, the storyteller has the prerogative to drop dice or even drop Humanity without a check if the character routinely commits actions that would call for a conscience roll, and that's beyond the penalties that come when committing an act several steps down from the character's current Humanity. Alternatively, the Storyteller can also relax the rules a bit - the usual example is your character waking up from a frenzy coated in gore and going "oh god, what have I -done-?" But then you end up with people trying to game THAT system... People tend to look at succeeding on a Conscience roll as falling down in to tears for some odd reason, but my own view on it is that it involves you going "well that was some hosed up poo poo" and then performing actions to rectify that (which would explain why your humanity tends to stay up). There's going to confession, yes, but there's also the noblesse oblige you find with the Ventrue and others.
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Mar 18, 2014 20:24
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Anyway Humanity is a weird kinda garbagey system which is why White Wolf came up with the Paths since they needed to explain how all the various Elders who have done absolutely terrible things (some of them to survive, and depending on which clan and elder you're talking about potentially an eclipsing amount for uh, other reasons) end up having any sort of sentience left.
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Mar 18, 2014 21:44
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Shugojin posted:Anyway Humanity is a weird kinda garbagey system which is why White Wolf came up with the Paths since they needed to explain how all the various Elders who have done absolutely terrible things (some of them to survive, and depending on which clan and elder you're talking about potentially an eclipsing amount for uh, other reasons) end up having any sort of sentience left. This makes sense anyway, considering that as vampires get older and older you end up with increasingly Lovecraftian horrors whose only connection to humanity is that they might happen to look like one.
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Mar 18, 2014 22:14
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Shugojin posted:Anyway Humanity is a weird kinda garbagey system which is why White Wolf came up with the Paths since they needed to explain how all the various Elders who have done absolutely terrible things (some of them to survive, and depending on which clan and elder you're talking about potentially an eclipsing amount for uh, other reasons) end up having any sort of sentience left. It's the usual Alignment arguments that people get in to, only dressed up slightly since WW was originally a minor rebellion against said Alignment restrictions. Paths tend to devolve down in to "I do what I want!" or an excuse to roleplay out gore-fantasies (incidentally, there's also rules out there in case you want to play a Fomori or a Black Spiral Dancer. Because.). The Revised Dark Ages Vampire did a better job of it, as their various Roads and the individual Paths there-of were explicitly different philosophies in dealing with the Beast, whether that be through icy control (Kings), trying to find your place in some higher plan (Heaven), distracting it (Sin), denying it (Humanity), or trying to become one with it (Beast). Each of the clans had a reason to be on any of those Roads and a good deal of the political tension came from not just clans but followers. Looking at it now, to my untrained eye, I can't help seeing a parallel with the Dark Age Roads and the nWoD Covenants.
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Mar 18, 2014 22:14
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Another quirk of humanity is that it governs how well you can fit in. You can simulate being "alive" by spending 8-humanity blood points to flush your skin, simulate heartbeat, etc...so a humanity 8+ vamp can effortlessly appear normal for free. There's also a point--I want to say Humanity 4 or so--that you get a negative modifier when interacting with regular humans in a non-intimidating manner. This also applies to vampires on paths (at any level). Once you're that low on the morality scale--where you're closer to the Beast than you are to your humanity--there's just something tangibly 'off' about you that people instinctually feel uneasy. And yes, humanity/path violations are checked via conscience or conviction, of which the average character has 3 dots in, or even less. Very easy to fail that roll, let alone botch it. Still, its possible to pass. This is the kludgy "system" behind the core gameplay conceit of losing touch with humanity, so its pretty explicitly laid out that STs should play with it as they feel appropriate--with an emphasis that if the character is doing monstrous things, it should slide towards becoming a monster in truth regardless of how you justify it. In fact a simple failure on the conscience roll is actually your character giving a justification for his acts, saying "gently caress it, I can do this if I feel I need to/is necessary." Succeeding on the roll means the character feels genuine remorse and possibly horror at what they've done and don't want to do that again. OAquinas fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 22:52
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steinrokkan posted:Does the lore have government agencies dedicated to whitewashing evidence of supernatural phenomena, something like the Syndicate in X-Files? It's not really the government which does this. The Camarilla have government pawns which help to do this, and the Technocracy does this, and generally quite effectively (since they can literally make evidence up and disappear). You see, if people don't believe in the supernatural, a lot of supernatural creatures weaken. The ones which don't, Bygones, end up requiring Quintessence to survive. The reason why vampires and werewolves can still exist is unknown. My favorite theory was that vampires are actually Bygones-Vampires just adapted to their situation by evolving the ability to drain Quintessence from living subjects (humans). This actually fits the mechanics. A Bygone needs 1 Quintessence a day or else they fade away. A Blood Point converts to 1 Quintessence. Guess how much Blood a vampire needs to wake up? As for Werewolves, Delirium's explanation would imply that the existence and fear of werewolves has been directly implanted into what makes a human human, which means that belief in them can't be eradicated.
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Mar 18, 2014 23:18
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citybeatnik posted:(incidentally, there's also rules out there in case you want to play a Fomori or a Black Spiral Dancer. Because.) Splatterpunk Fomori games are hilarious. Freak Legion Forever.
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Mar 19, 2014 00:20
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MJ12 posted:The reason why vampires and werewolves can still exist is unknown. My favorite theory was that vampires are actually Bygones-Vampires just adapted to their situation by evolving the ability to drain Quintessence from living subjects (humans). This actually fits the mechanics. I'm not sure about that, I don't know much of Mage, but I think it's not correct, at least the point about the werewolves. Garou are children of Gaia and spiritual beings, and like the spirits of Gaia, they have always been and will always be there as long as Gaia lives (at leat until they all die horribly on the Apocalypse), their existence do not change based on shifts of belief, like spirits of Paradox do. The thing with WoD is reality is a matter of perception, what is stated in one setting may very well be the truth, even if in another setting is not, for example Vampire's vision of God as the traditional omnipotent being rather than werewolves who simply see it as a Celestine spirit, and not even the most prominent. EDIT: ulmont posted:Splatterpunk Fomori games are hilarious. Freak Legion Forever. Hell yeah, Fomori games are incredibly fun, albeit short-lived due to the hilarous tendency they have to kill themselves in the most gory ways. Angry Lobster fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Mar 19, 2014 |
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Mar 19, 2014 00:41
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gatz posted: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. Jellyfish? That is just insultingly poor. You think that they could at least try to keep the Malkavian PC even slightly consistent? Is it really too much to expect that if there's a game or other form of media that explores or deals with the subject of mental illness, which is a tremendously broad category, that they'd go out and develop a clue? Something tells me that if there was a character or group of characters whose supernatural curse involved having some particular malady, that they wouldn't get confused and give him cancer for one scene, pneumonia for the next, and spontaneously detaching limbs whenever it seems fitting. I'd probably better wrap this post up before it turns into a meandering rant on the treatment of mental health in media and popular culture, but the Malkavian sourcebook opinions noted earlier are also way off base. The difference there is at least that the narrator is unreliable as all hell, literally on account of a supernatural curse, but I'd hate for some poor kid going through a rough time to pick up the Malk sourcebook and decide that, yeah, medication really is just some sort of happy pill crutch for the weakminded and irresponsible.
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Mar 19, 2014 03:38
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David Corbett posted:Jellyfish? That is just insultingly poor. You think that they could at least try to keep the Malkavian PC even slightly consistent? It's been mentioned already, but I've played the base game as a Malkavian and I'm pretty sure that the jellyfish line was not in there, so odds are you should be mad at the modder. The actual game's special Malkavian dialogue usually has a deeper meaning, like the Malk instinctively knows something about what's going on but can't quite put it in words that most people would understand. That said, Malkavians are not going to be the shining example you want them to be no matter what. Their madness isn't necessarily the same thing as a mental disorder. The symptoms might be similar but they aren't people that are actually suffering from the types of mental illnesses you're thinking of. I kinda get what you're getting at but a fictional supernatural curse isn't going to be to be equivalent to a real life situation and I'm not sure why you're expecting that.
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Mar 19, 2014 03:50
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David Corbett posted:I'd hate for some poor kid going through a rough time to pick up the Malk sourcebook and decide that, yeah, medication really is just some sort of happy pill crutch for the weakminded and irresponsible. Disclaimer: In real life mental illness is not caused by the ghost of a dead god living in the collective subconscious of your vampire clan. Please see a doctor if you believe you suffer from any of these conditions. But yeah, VtM rode the wave of counterculture pushback against over-prescription of psychoactive drugs in middle-class America during the 80s and 90s. These days a more pressing concern is young people actually suffering from mental illness, in part due to or exacerbated by a horrific lack of opportunities, a rapidly shrinking middle class and the overwhelming sense of disenfranchisement. So yeah, some of it doesn't carry over that well. You can find similar stuff in the Werewolf books about Captain Planet villains owning pharmaceutical companies.
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Mar 19, 2014 04:06
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 I'm sure the writers felt smug about the True Black Hand reference in option 4. 
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Mar 19, 2014 04:44
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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Would a 300 year old vampire historian know or care about what a "comic book" is?
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Mar 19, 2014 04:47
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Ensign Expendable posted:Would a 300 year old vampire historian know or care about what a "comic book" is? I figure at that point talking to anyone younger than you is a constant avalanche of newfangled bullshit you don't understand, and tuning it out becomes second nature.
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Mar 19, 2014 04:51
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David Corbett posted:Something tells me that if there was a character or group of characters whose supernatural curse involved having some particular malady, that they wouldn't get confused and give him cancer for one scene, pneumonia for the next, and spontaneously detaching limbs whenever it seems fitting. Actually, it is pretty common to see a generic cough plus a fever when an unspecified illness is called for.
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Mar 19, 2014 04:56
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Ensign Expendable posted:Would a 300 year old vampire historian know or care about what a "comic book" is? Even with the dustiest of old tomes, you run out of stuff to read after a while.
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Mar 19, 2014 05:07
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A lot of the particularly bad fishmalky stuff we'll see mentioned is :wesp:. There are a couple (lookin at you stop sign, even if you were funny to suddenly encounter) but mostly it was written to be someone who is aware of a lot of the truth of things. Just in a very muddled and confusing way they don't understand. If I remember right it was actually the very last thing written (or nearly) precisely so they could work it out this way.
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Mar 19, 2014 05:09
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IMJack posted:Even with the dustiest of old tomes, you run out of stuff to read after a while. Sascha Vykos apparently trolls online chat rooms and cybers, if you believe a handful of throw-away lines scattered here and there.
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Mar 19, 2014 05:43
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Shugojin posted:A lot of the particularly bad fishmalky stuff we'll see mentioned is :wesp:. There are a couple (lookin at you stop sign, even if you were funny to suddenly encounter) but mostly it was written to be someone who is aware of a lot of the truth of things. Just in a very muddled and confusing way they don't understand. The stop sign is entirely justified because it's hilarious, unlike the jellyfish thing.
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Mar 19, 2014 06:03
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Angry Lobster posted:I'm not sure about that, I don't know much of Mage, but I think it's not correct, at least the point about the werewolves. Garou are children of Gaia and spiritual beings, and like the spirits of Gaia, they have always been and will always be there as long as Gaia lives (at leat until they all die horribly on the Apocalypse), their existence do not change based on shifts of belief, like spirits of Paradox do. It's kind of a gray area. It's well worth noting that in the WoD, both vampires and werewolves have a pretty powerful entity that A) verifiably exists and B) is backing them up directly. It also doesn't hurt that neither of them ever quite left the popular zeitgeist after the dawn of the modern era, so a normal human who sees a dude with fangs is going to immediately say "...holy poo poo, vampire," which gives them a spot in the Consensus by default. The idea that Bram Stoker has more to do with keeping vampires alive and a going concern than any single vampire ever did is amusing to me on several levels.
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Mar 19, 2014 06:10
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Shugojin posted:There are a couple (lookin at you stop sign, even if you were funny to suddenly encounter) Tiggum posted:The stop sign is entirely justified because it's hilarious, unlike the jellyfish thing. That's actually from the unmodified game. Same with the argument with the News Anchor.
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Mar 19, 2014 06:13
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Wanderer posted:The idea that Bram Stoker has more to do with keeping vampires alive and a going concern than any single vampire ever did is amusing to me on several levels. If I recall correctly, didn't Stoker basically blow up Kindred society by accident when he published that book?
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Mar 19, 2014 06:16
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citybeatnik posted:If I recall correctly, didn't Stoker basically blow up Kindred society by accident when he published that book? That's one that I honestly don't know. White Wolf came out with Victorian Age Vampire, but IIRC it bombed.
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Mar 19, 2014 07:37
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