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Basically, Demons own.Ferrinus posted:Oh, yeah, like, I couldn't have done any better. It's just, there's an annoying tendency in the White Wolf fanbase in general to, as soon as something falls under criticism, take a deep breath, type the BBcode to begin italics, and then start writing some prose about how meaningful and moving it is that a vampire hunter's stake has splintered against a Gangrel's impregnable turtle shell or whatever. That doesn't actually help!! I was this close to ragging on you for not working Protean 2.0 into your last rant, but drat if you didn't deliver. 
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Apr 14, 2015 23:48
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The Hero thing really feels like a dated jab at Everquest players. And I think Beast might work if the Beast and its host exist in an antagonistic relationship. While the host is satisfying the hunger, he has some autonomy. Maybe he only eats bad people, or steals things that won't be missed. But then if he fails to satisfy the Beast? Black out, go full NPC, and now you get to deal with whatever mess the Beast made while it was driving. The disconnect is that Beast seems like you're Dr Jekyll doing solids for his bro Mr Hyde, and that really loving misses the point.
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Apr 14, 2015 23:48
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whydirt posted:How do Demon soul bargains work? Are they just getting your soul after you die or the ability to hide in you while you live or something else? What can they offer humans to make such a deal? When a Demon comes to collect on a Soul Pact, it doesn't take the soul so much as it devours it and steps into the resulting hole. This destroys the human or whatever being that signed it utterly, body and soul, while the Demon gets to masquerade as the being until it gets tired of that Cover. Now, this is obviously a lovely deal if the Demon collects, but a Demon doesn't exactly have to let them know exactly what happens and they can offer immense benefits for allowing this. A Demon can offer wealth, healing, fame, and more to a potential signer and give it. In game terms, this is an immediate 4 or 5 dots in a certain Merit for the signer. EDIT: Beaten by everyone else. But to give an example of a pact: I did a game here in The Game Room, and one of my players made a Pact with a guy to steal his identity as a member of a cult for a few months, used it to infiltrate the cult, blew the Cover, and then managed to redirect the ensuing hunter Angel that came to investigate into hunting down the person who made the Pact in the first place. Fun times. SunAndSpring fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Apr 14, 2015 |
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Apr 14, 2015 23:50
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moths posted:The Hero thing really feels like a dated jab at Everquest players. It doesn't seem like your Human Soul and your Beast Soul are intended to be separate things. Like I said before, a lot of the language and descriptors they're using are making me think its more like a Coming Out or Dysphoria metaphor. The whole Low Satiety Nightmare Romps or w/e seem more like your subconscious manifesting your identity the only way it can. Except in your case its not having weird dreams or hitting on someone when you're drunk, its blitzing through nightmares flipping tables. Mind you my queerness doesn't get the itis after pride parades though, so the max satiety rule still clunks with me a bit.
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Apr 14, 2015 23:57
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Rand Brittain posted:Basically, the Unchained don't want your soul; they just need to pop it out and toss it away so they can claim everything else. I always thought it fit, since Changelings don't exactly warp reality in the course of establishing contracts, do they? They just alter fate such that whatever you bargained for tumbles into your lap. Meanwhile, demons effectively shift the whole world into a parallel timeline in which you, rather than your no-good brother, inherited grandpa's fortune.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:07
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Ferrinus posted:I always thought it fit, since Changelings don't exactly warp reality in the course of establishing contracts, do they? They just alter fate such that whatever you bargained for tumbles into your lap. Meanwhile, demons effectively shift the whole world into a parallel timeline in which you, rather than your no-good brother, inherited grandpa's fortune. This narrative doesn't always work for Changeling deals, I think. They can also give Merits such as Stunning Looks, and how you explain that with luck?
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Apr 15, 2015 00:09
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Win a sweepstakes for free plastic surgery? Get punched in the face juuuuuust right?
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Apr 15, 2015 00:16
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paradoxGentleman posted:This narrative doesn't always work for Changeling deals, I think. They can also give Merits such as Stunning Looks, and how you explain that with luck? Part of it's just your acne clearing up and you always having good hair days and catching the light in just the right way, etc, and I think part of it's good old-fashioned faerie magic that glamours you so you're beautiful.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:17
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It's also notable that there is pretty much nothing out there that kills you deader than a demonic soul pact. You don't get a ghost, you don't get an afterlife, you don't get anything. You're just gone. Depending on if you believe the Underworld is the only afterlife out there, this may be considered a benefit. The Underworld's a pretty lovely place.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:20
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How does a demon get their first cover in the first place then? How do they get from "Running away from god" to "Hiding inside an edgar suit"?
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Apr 15, 2015 00:26
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paradoxGentleman posted:This narrative doesn't always work for Changeling deals, I think. They can also give Merits such as Stunning Looks, and how you explain that with luck? The same way you explain spending experience points on a merit to get it, but sped through an instantaneous training montage. And the pledge blessing very specifically avoids allowing Giant Size to be taken by dint of blessings being capped at 3.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:30
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Kurieg posted:How does a demon get their first cover in the first place then? How do they get from "Running away from god" to "Hiding inside an edgar suit"? Generally they keep the one they had before they fell. The Fall fries the systems used to link the Demon and the GM together and as a result the Demon + Cover just sort of blip off the grid. If the pre-Fall Demon doesn't have a cover for whatever reason, they better hurry up and get one, cause that's a bad day for them.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:31
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Kurieg posted:How does a demon get their first cover in the first place then? How do they get from "Running away from god" to "Hiding inside an edgar suit"? Their original cover is whatever identity the God-Machine put them in in the first place.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:31
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Kurieg posted:How does a demon get their first cover in the first place then? How do they get from "Running away from god" to "Hiding inside an edgar suit"? It's important to remember that angels have covers too, in this sense.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:47
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Luminous Obscurity posted:If the pre-Fall Demon doesn't have a cover for whatever reason, they better hurry up and get one, cause that's a bad day for them. Yeah, technically any angel can fall, even those with no cover or a weird cover like a black dog or a cursed split-level rambler, but for playability purposes, PC demons are all assumed to have been placed by the God-Machine with a reasonably robust, human cover. Attorney at Funk posted:It's important to remember that angels have covers too, in this sense. Right. Angels don't track Cover as a game mechanic because a) they can't act outside the identities the God-Machine gives them and b) even if they could, they have the G-M's Infrastructure constantly supporting it and compensating for any glitches, but the same fundamental structures that allow an angel to manifest in the guise of Professor Cuddingsworth, the weird physics instructor, are what let a demon maintain a human identity. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 00:48
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Yeah, the God-Machine sets you up in a human identity. Why can't it remember it put you there when you Fall? Well, that's because: A. it doesn't think, and B. it's not infallible. Things get lost. Mistakes are made. You can, in fact, fool God. When a Demon falls, the universe around it actually very briefly breaks down - causality goes haywire, mysterious events occur from the occult force of it all, and the God-Machine just loses track of what's going on.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:49
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Or the more menacing option that nobody really Falls, and it's all just another level of operation for the God-Machine. Probably not true most of the time but hey, not like that will stop demons being paranoid as poo poo about it.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:51
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Kurieg posted:How does a demon get their first cover in the first place then? How do they get from "Running away from god" to "Hiding inside an edgar suit"? The God-Machine, equipped as it is with so many fallback functions and logistical supports, manufactures edgar suits to smooth its angels' passage through human society — a feat demons can sort of reproduce with a lot of legwork. If you need an entirely new Cover, annihilating someone is the fast and easy way. The slow way is to make a whole lot of little pacts - an ex-boyfriend here, a nuclear family there, a work history or two - and eventually amass enough to weave them together into a psychic amalgam, creating an artificial person retroactively and stepping into that person's shoes. There's also the fast and hard way — let the God Machine make more edgar suits and steal those. Of course, it typically only produces one when it needs to sheath an angel, but if the demon locates the project from which the angel is entering its mission into reality and occupies the metaphysical space the angel is meant to be stepping into, he steals all that was to be the angel's, cover and mission both included. It's a package deal, but if you execute the mission as expected, it's easy to drop back off the radar again with your ill-gotten cover in hand. As for the angel you shoulder-tackled out of existence, what becomes of him? Decent people shouldn't think too much about that.
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Apr 15, 2015 01:00
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I presume it doesn't remember where you were because Cover isn't just a cover identity but a piece of magical infrastructure that works to protect you from anyone seeing through your disguise.
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Apr 15, 2015 01:06
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, the God-Machine sets you up in a human identity. You're the bit of the god machine that cared about your Mission and Cover.
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Apr 15, 2015 01:11
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At any given time, the God-Machine is coordinating probably millions if not billions of apparently aimless plots. Even with its powers, it cannot intervene directly everywhere at once, nor can its angels.
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Apr 15, 2015 01:32
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How intentional is it that God-Machine shortens to GM? Coincidence or the designers being cute?
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Apr 15, 2015 02:17
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Coincidence, I think, since its first mention was in a fiction snippet in the original nWoD core.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:18
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Mors Rattus posted:Once upon a time, before man existed, there was a machine. This machine has been around for all of human civilization, but we can't see it. It hides itself in the world, both natural and man-made. It acts for a purpose, bringing forth terrible and glorious machine-angels, in order to fulfill arcane conditions needed to produce what it needs and to put it together the right way. We don't know what it needs, or why it needs it. It would be wrong to say it wants, because it does not think. It would be wrong to say it is malevolent, because it does not feel. It would be wrong to say it plans, because it is not a person. But it changes the world, and its changes are according to some design that no one could ever hope to understand. Its changes are not kind, though they can be positive. They are terrible, though not always to the people near them. The God-Machine takes what it needs, with neither remorse nor pity, and produces horrors and wonders with neither hatred nor pride. Well, I'd say I want to play Demon now.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:19
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I'm kind of wondering where the conflict is in Beast is after you kill your Hero. You've got no moral compass like other splats, so I guess you just wander around and make humans feel bad to satiate your Hunger until another plucky moron comes to kill you. Of course, other splats also have to feed off or collect some sort of thing (Vitae, Aether, Glamour, etc.), but the difference is that those games keep those things in the background. You might describe how your vampire goes and drinks a bit of blood from a girl you met at the bar who you seduced, but it's just a stepping stone to fulfilling other goals, like using the blood you drank to turn invisible or hypnotize a guy. Whereas this is the only goal I can think of that you have asides from murdering those who want to stop you from Beasting it up.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:24
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Well, I'd say I want to play Demon now. This is the correct opinion to have.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:24
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SunAndSpring posted:I'm kind of wondering where the conflict is in Beast is after you kill your Hero. You've got no moral compass like other splats, so I guess you just wander around and make humans feel bad to satiate your Hunger until another plucky moron comes to kill you. Of course, other splats also have to feed off or collect some sort of thing (Vitae, Aether, Glamour, etc.), but the difference is that those games keep those things in the background. You might describe how your vampire goes and drinks a bit of blood from a girl you met at the bar who you seduced, but it's just a stepping stone to fulfilling other goals, like using the blood you drank to turn invisible or hypnotize a guy. Whereas this is the only goal I can think of that you have asides from murdering those who want to stop you from Beasting it up. Having a recurring goal isn't inherently bad. For a game that does it right, again, I point to Werewolf. Werewolves have the same goal every month: find something to Sacred Hunt and then loving murder it. Might be a spirit that's trespassing where it shouldn't, a Claimed up to no good, a Shartha doing Shartha poo poo, or some dude you really don't like. But what we're doing tonight, Pinky, is what we do every night - hunt.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:28
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Mors Rattus posted:Having a recurring goal isn't inherently bad. For a game that does it right, again, I point to Werewolf. Werewolves have the same goal every month: find something to Sacred Hunt and then loving murder it. Might be a spirit that's trespassing where it shouldn't, a Claimed up to no good, a Shartha doing Shartha poo poo, or some dude you really don't like. But what we're doing tonight, Pinky, is what we do every night - hunt. You need to be be a writer for OPP if you aren't writing already. About Beast: It sounds to me like a Supernatural upgrade of Slasher in terms of its abilities and some of its motives. It seems like a splat that better acts as an antagonist with a mechanical ruleset to work off of than it does something that is played.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:51
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Reading through the oDemon short story collection and I forgot how good some of the stories in it are, and how loving insanely bad things got in LA by the end of the oWoD. Cannibalism! Mass torture and killings! Indiscriminate shootings by the National Guard! No bloody wonder the Anarchs were open to a Camarilla prince moving in for Bloodlines.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:53
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Beasts make good NPCs right now, but I'd have no idea to make a campaign for a group of them. Maybe if it was a group with just one Beast and a bunch of dudes from another splat, it would work out.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:54
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SunAndSpring posted:Beasts make good NPCs right now, but I'd have no idea to make a campaign for a group of them. Maybe if it was a group with just one Beast and a bunch of dudes from another splat, it would work out. It would seems really tricky to do so unless their Hungers were just so or their was a more generically compelling reason like a group of Heroes got together to team up and kill their respective Beasts like some reverse Superhero/Power Rangers set up.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:59
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Thinking about it, there's no reason for a Sailor Moon fangame because Sailor Moon is the story of a plucky Pylon of Seers who face Abyssal manifestations, Libertines, and finally face down a Silver Ladder Archmage. Or maybe they're Ochemata.
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Apr 15, 2015 03:37
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Effectronica posted:Thinking about it, there's no reason for a Sailor Moon fangame because Sailor Moon is the story of a plucky Pylon of Seers who face Abyssal manifestations, Libertines, and finally face down a Silver Ladder Archmage. Or maybe they're Ochemata. Wrong, everyone knows the tribal ban of the Blood Talons is "fight evil by moonlight, win love by daylight, never run from a real fight".
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Apr 15, 2015 03:52
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Attorney at Funk posted:Wrong, everyone knows the tribal ban of the Blood Talons is "fight evil by moonlight, win love by daylight, never run from a real fight". Now I'm envisioning Fangor Bloodthane reciting the Sailor Moon themesong with all the serious of the litany and it is fantastic.
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Apr 15, 2015 04:08
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I always quote Sailor Moon when I play Werewolf, old or new. My fellow players usually throw erasers at me (also known as "the blame"), but I know in my heart that I am right.
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Apr 15, 2015 04:38
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Effectronica posted:Thinking about it, there's no reason for a Sailor Moon fangame because Sailor Moon is the story of a plucky Pylon of Seers who face Abyssal manifestations, Libertines, and finally face down a Silver Ladder Archmage. Or maybe they're Ochemata. What would that make Madoka Magica then? (In case you don't know and spoilers for the series They're girls granted a single wish in exchange for getting special powers that run off of their positive emotions and having to hunt fallen versions of other girls like them. Overuse of the powers and a buildup of negative emotions causes them to fall and become the monsters they are hunting)
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Apr 15, 2015 05:29
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Xelkelvos posted:What would that make Madoka Magica then? (In case you don't know and spoilers for the series They're girls granted a single wish in exchange for getting special powers that run off of their positive emotions and having to hunt fallen versions of other girls like them. Overuse of the powers and a buildup of negative emotions causes them to fall and become the monsters they are hunting) Hunters that hunt Slashers.
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Apr 15, 2015 05:37
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Loomer posted:Reading through the oDemon short story collection and I forgot how good some of the stories in it are, and how loving insanely bad things got in LA by the end of the oWoD. Cannibalism! Mass torture and killings! Indiscriminate shootings by the National Guard! No bloody wonder the Anarchs were open to a Camarilla prince moving in for Bloodlines. The fact that it's you posting about Demon: the Fallen reminded me that I had some information on a spreadsheet.  (Does not include the three Earthbound lore options.)
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Apr 15, 2015 05:52
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Xelkelvos posted:What would that make Madoka Magica then? (In case you don't know and spoilers for the series They're girls granted a single wish in exchange for getting special powers that run off of their positive emotions and having to hunt fallen versions of other girls like them. Overuse of the powers and a buildup of negative emotions causes them to fall and become the monsters they are hunting) bewilderment posted:Hunters that hunt Slashers. Yeah, pretty much.
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Apr 15, 2015 12:41
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Emy posted:The fact that it's you posting about Demon: the Fallen reminded me that I had some information on a spreadsheet. Good ole Demon. I believe that the reason this happened was that, among other things, Stamina + Survival was the general "how much raw elemental power can you channel" dicepool, so it was what you rolled to summon fire or water or wind or-
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Apr 15, 2015 12:42
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