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I can't bring myself to hate on people who brought food to the homeless victims of Hurricane Katrina, not even if they believe they are vampires. It's also too close to making fun of people for their religious beliefs for my taste.
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Jul 15, 2015 16:13
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Blockhouse posted:Decided to set my Werewolf game in the worst most corruption-ridden place I could think of: East St. Louis Ah, scenic Hub City.
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Jul 15, 2015 16:20
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Well, I was thinking more of using them as a front for vampires, or a way for Guardians to do something
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Jul 15, 2015 17:20
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I tried setting a Changeling game in Toronto once. It ended up making it worse, rather than better, because I had trouble feeling I could bullshit. It was always Toronto, not "the slightly spookier version of Toronto I am making up". I know the city, and it remains that place for me. It's a lot easier to feel you can make something up when you kind of already are. Plus, some weird anal-retentive part of my brain told me I was lieing about the city to people who'd never been there, even though I doubt any of them seriously believed there were a pair of magical old men that ran a shop selling haunted vinyl LPs in Kensington Market, or that Sick Kids hospital is home to an eternal battleground between avatars of Hope and Despair. Lesson was, I advise against using a city you know personally, but that's applicable only if you're as neurotic as I am. Also, the Guardian write-up is rad. The new Masque merit makes me tingle with thoughts of Hotline Miami.
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Jul 15, 2015 17:39
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I actually do know East St. Louis personally, having lived about half an hour away from it all my life (and knowing it for most of my childhood as "the place you lock your doors when you drive through"), but I'm not too worried about it because it's already straight up hosed. Like 60% of it is the abandoned warehouse district that comes up in superhero stories and you're always sure it's bullshit but nope, here it is.
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Jul 15, 2015 17:47
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Info on the Demon Story Teller's Guide is up http://theonyxpath.com/demonstorytellers-guide/quote:Chapter Five: Shards Infernal offers three alternate settings for games of Demon: The Descent. Want to run a chronicle featuring cyberpunk demon hunters? The story of demonic prophets who are the only thing that stands in the way of a world-ending apocalypse? How about a chronicle set in Biblical times? This chapter provides rules for all of them. They have my attention
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Jul 15, 2015 18:21
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Twibbit posted:Info on the Demon Story Teller's Guide is up http://theonyxpath.com/demonstorytellers-guide/ That Cyberpunk Demon Hunters thing sound like original Shin Megami Tensei, which is super rad. Anyone check out the Spectres preview for Wraith 20?
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Jul 15, 2015 22:15
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Twibbit posted:Info on the Demon Story Teller's Guide is up http://theonyxpath.com/demonstorytellers-guide/ This does sound amazing, and I'm a big fan of demon anyway.
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Jul 15, 2015 22:42
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I'm really interested in the Biblical setting because I have an idea for a game where the PC demons are Jesus' apostles trying to use his ministry to undermine the God-Machine.
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Jul 17, 2015 01:14
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paradoxGentleman posted:I can't bring myself to hate on people who brought food to the homeless victims of Hurricane Katrina, not even if they believe they are vampires. Their website makes them seem rather chill and it feels like they are an organization created to give a support system to those who feel they are outcasts with no one to turn to. No idea how they actually are in practice.
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Jul 17, 2015 01:29
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Mysterium preview is up.
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Jul 17, 2015 15:57
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I'm not a huge fan of the Egregore merit - maybe I haven't fully grokked the new spellcasting rules but it seems pretty underpowered, especially compared to the Arrow's one which is simple, potent and thematic. I mean, the old Mystery Initiation wasn't great, but the initiations themselves were so great and flavourful it didn't need to be. If anything it seems nerfed from what it was before - for one thing the second dot no longer helps you plant and decode secret mysterium messages. Other than that the order writeup looks great though!
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Jul 17, 2015 16:07
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Flavivirus posted:I'm not a huge fan of the Egregore merit - maybe I haven't fully grokked the new spellcasting rules but it seems pretty underpowered, especially compared to the Arrow's one which is simple, potent and thematic. I mean, the old Mystery Initiation wasn't great, but the initiations themselves were so great and flavourful it didn't need to be. If anything it seems nerfed from what it was before - for one thing the second dot no longer helps you plant and decode secret mysterium messages. The Egregore Merit does lean pretty heavily on some of the new spellcasting mechanics that maybe aren't readily apparent from previews, and also on the Order's theme as "the academia order." It's maybe not as immediately flashy or readily-obvious in its uses in a vacuum as Adamant Hand, but when you leverage it in concert with the Mysterium's other, generally pretty strong, support systems for members, it can be pretty effective. Like, that first dot doesn't look super impressive until you realize that probably pretty close to every low-ranked Mysterium mage in the Caucus probably has it, which means you can walk into just about any Athenaem and grab five apprentices to help out on a spell without worrying about anybody having to roll chance dice because they don't have the right Arcana or whatever. That's a pretty easy +5 bonus to a spell, one that's not a Yantra and so sidesteps all the restrictions on those.
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Jul 17, 2015 16:24
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Yo. Hey. Yo. "Guanxi" isn't face, it's social capital and bribery, the thing the Mysterium cares a lot about. "Mianzi" is face, and it's not a Mysterium thing. Honestly I think it's stupid to bandy either term around, as though there's simply no way to render in English the concept of being owed favors, but at least the 1E book described the term correctly. Also, yeah, the Egregore merit is lame and does not actually serve to make the mystagogues look like masterful archivists or explorers. It also doesn't really seem to follow the themes of the initiations each dot level is named after at all - like, okay, I dove into the astral and received a direct revelation as to my personal significance to the living force of magic, and my reward is more widely-distributed fame? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Jul 17, 2015 |
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Jul 17, 2015 16:27
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Once again, the development order document doesn't deign to describe their example characters in Sleeper occupational terms to satisfy a forum meme, and is better for it; perhaps the writers are learning from their mistakes. I don't see what makes any part of the Egrogore merit specific to the Mysterium other than a made-up fictional justification. Even the Eidetic Memory merit is restricted to Order Lore- which has nothing to do with being good at academics or exploration- and the second dot, if I read it correctly, is the sort of anti-disguise tool that would be universally enjoyed in a game system where almost every single aspect of reality is hackable.
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Jul 17, 2015 21:39
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Gerund posted:Once again, the development order document doesn't deign to describe their example characters in Sleeper occupational terms Howww strange! To be fair, though, it's definitely true that the Arrow writeup should be the one, if any, to focus on its sample character's Sleeper occupations and general hobbies. Libertines revere Sleeper creative and technological pursuits, Mystagogues value academics and Guardians value espionage for completely practical reasons, but Arrows place real metaphysical value on skill itself - in one sense, it sort of doesn't matter what an Arrow does so long as that thing is challenging and yet that Arrow perseveres at it and excels over forces of opposition. This dovetails nicely with Arrow dismissal of the Duel Arcane, since the Duel Arcane is a contest designed to completely exorcise the relevance of any of its contestants' material qualities save for willpower. The Arrows don't think it's legitimate to purely test soul against soul - they think body, mind, and soul are all a magical unit and therefore necessary to perfect. The thing is, they're supposed to perfect everything - adaptability is strength - so rather than an Arrow lawyer, you should get an Arrow lawyer/marksman/rock climber/chessmaster. As well, they're doing that for something - the Order is more than a gym membership, and the endless quest for self-mastery isn't done for its own sake but to achieve greater cosmological goals like freeing magic from the Exarchs' clutches. So, like, you can actually tell that Guardian #2 is probably in the army (or pretends to be), and that Mystagogue #2 might be the curator of an actual Sleeper museum, but you can also see what their inhabiting those roles means to the Pentacle.
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Jul 17, 2015 23:30
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So basically that dumb Heinlein quote about specialization being for insects is the Arrow ideal? After around a year and a half of playing with/running the new Vampire LARP rules, I have two major complaints (aside from the lack of non-Stock NPC rules for non-vampire supers): Influences and Status. The old LARP Influence system had a number of Influence types- Street, Business, Police, Politics, Bureaucracy, etc. Each Influence type was its own Background, and you would buy levels in them separately- so you could have Industry Influence at level 2, Police at level 4, and Street at level 1, for example. It was encouraged for the Storyteller to set limits on how much Influence existed in a given city for each sector- so a Rust Belt city probably has a lot of Industry influence (though not as much as before), but very little High Society. This is good for the game because it gives people to fight over (if there's only room for one person with Finance 6 in the city, players who want their characters to run the local financial sector are going to have to contest for it). To actually use your Influence, you look at the chart for the Influence you want to use and see what each level gets you, then spend a number of levels equal to the action you want to do (or whatever the Storyteller agrees is equivalent, if it's not on the chart but plausible). So if you have Police 4 and you want to get somebody's plates run, you can expend one level of Police Influence (bringing it down to 3 until it refreshes at the end of the month) and now you have three levels to spend. If you then wanted to cancel a minor investigation (which was I think level 3), you could spend your remaining three levels of Police Influence to do it and be out of strings to pull until it refreshes. In the new system (Mind's Eye Theater: Vampire: the Masquerade), Influence is two Backgrounds: Influence (Elite) and Influence (Underworld). Each goes to 5, and for every level you buy, you choose a specialization. (So you could have the Police specialization in Elite, representing that you donate a lot of money to the local cop union, and also in Underworld, representing that you slip bribes to crooked detectives and patrolmen). Each Influence type has a particular sort of action you can take at each level, and you can take one action per level of Influence you have per month, at any level up to your rating (so if you have Influence (Elite) 5, you can take 5 level 5 actions every month). Instead of representing variable levels of control as the Influence types in Laws of the Night did, the new system's Influence specialties let you take actions at one level higher than you have as long as you can justify how one of your specialties would let you do it. The problem is twofold. First, it's massively homogenizing; two characters with Influence (Elite) 3 have the same range of actions available to them. In the old system, to get poo poo done in the mortal world, you needed somebody with the right kind of pull, whereas anybody who drops a few XP can accomplish drat near anything in the new system. This makes individual characters less individual and less valuable (why bother hunting down the guy who basically owns the local police department when you have five people available whose generic Influence can do the same job?), and reduces the need to fight over things, which is, from a metagame standpoint, bad. (Because seriously, if you're running a Vampire LARP, you always want more things for the PCs to fight over.) The second issue is that this is a huge power boost available on the cheap. Especially if you take Influence with starting points, it's not much XP to max out your Influence, and it causes problems for the ST when loving everybody has a ton of Influence that they can do basically whatever they want with. The other major complaint I have is Status. The new Status system replaces the old system (where various positions conferred named Status traits that didn't actually mean anything) with a system of named Statuses with passive and expend effects. For example, the Sheriff gets Enforcer, which has the Passive effect of allowing the character to carry weapons into gatherings where they would normally be forbidden, and the Expend effect (meaning the Status must be expended and lost for the rest of the night) of assigning the Warned Status to a vampire who's broken the local law. A Prince with Authority can give out certain status traits freely with Authority's passive effect or expend Authority for the night to give out Disgraced or Forsaken. There's also negative statuses (Warned, Disgraced, and Forsaken) which carry escalating penalties- at Forsaken, other members of your sect can kill you without sanction. (Being blood hunted imposes Forsaken, for example.) This is a bit of a pain to keep straight since there's a bunch of Statuses, but that's not my complaint- I even went and made and printed out index-sized Status cards, similar to D&D 4 power cards, to pass out to players so they could keep them in a pocket and track which Status they had and what they could do with it. And we muddled through that way. And that's fine- new systems take time and experience to learn. No, my complaint is that people won't loving stop using the names of the Status traits in IC discussions and talking like the individual mechanics designed to give mechanical bite to the IC society's rules of social conduct exist IC. I hear people using the terms Warned, Disgraced, and Forsaken IC, as if the OOC Status mechanics were a set of written-down laws that exist IC. And the stupid, awkward ways people talk about the mechanics themselves IC- you hear people saying poo poo like "As I am Prominent, I find you Honorable" and it makes me want to berate them and ask why ever since the new rules came out they talk like assholes. Under the old system Status was mostly for measuring your vampire dick against everybody else's. Under the new system, it's mostly for talking like some kind of bizarre alien.
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Jul 18, 2015 04:21
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Man, between the new Demon stuff and the Guardians material, Onyx Path seems to be on an upswing. Not sure what to think of Egregore, though; I'm not really feeling it, though that may probably be my own personal taste. I prefer disguises, cloak-and-dagger stuff, and the Mysterium materials seem aimed toward, I dunno, office politics or something.
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Jul 18, 2015 05:17
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CommissarMega posted:Man, between the new Demon stuff and the Guardians material, Onyx Path seems to be on an upswing. Not sure what to think of Egregore, though; I'm not really feeling it, though that may probably be my own personal taste. I prefer disguises, cloak-and-dagger stuff, and the Mysterium materials seem aimed toward, I dunno, office politics or something. Office politics getting wildly out-of-control has always been a Mage thing though.
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Jul 18, 2015 05:24
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MonsieurChoc posted:Office politics getting wildly out-of-control has always been a Mage thing though. 
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Jul 18, 2015 05:36
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I'm trying to hammer together a workable character in the Shepherd bloodline (from "Ancient Bloodlines" and the murky, long-forgotten year 1857 AD) and I am not sure I have ever seen a less appropriate bloodline discipline, anywhere, than Obfuscate for a group of self-appointed overseers embracing the metaphor of the sheepherder. I'm kind of in awe of it, really. It's like giving a scarecrow a cloaking device. Like one of their devotions requires an Obfuscate 2 prerequisite and in exchange gives you...+1 to stealth rolls in a crowd, to blend in with the sheep. Putting aside how lame that bonus is, if you went to check on your flock and you found the shepherd you hired hiding among the sheep, how quickly would you fire his rear end? Literally the most important thing he does is "be visible to would-be predators!" Crion fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Jul 18, 2015 |
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Jul 18, 2015 07:31
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What is this from? Stressed out office wizard looks like my sort of guy.
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Jul 18, 2015 07:35
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Night10194 posted:What is this from? Stressed out office wizard looks like my sort of guy. Ugly Americans
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Jul 18, 2015 08:25
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Taken from us too soon
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Jul 18, 2015 17:41
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Pope Guilty posted:So basically that dumb Heinlein quote about specialization being for insects is the Arrow ideal? Cool, a friend of mine has invited me along to the local BNS LARP and I was considering spending my initial background dots on influence (since there's very little character-fitting to spend it on for a low-generation neonate after one dot of generation), lol, glad to hear that it's as busted and quadratic as I thought.
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Jul 18, 2015 23:05
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WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:Cool, a friend of mine has invited me along to the local BNS LARP and I was considering spending my initial background dots on influence (since there's very little character-fitting to spend it on for a low-generation neonate after one dot of generation), lol, glad to hear that it's as busted and quadratic as I thought. Best part is either everyone has tons of Influence and using the subsystem becomes a hellish slapfight, or nobody does and you can stomp everyone into the ground with a handful of emails to the ST.  Politics!
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Jul 19, 2015 05:43
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WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:Cool, a friend of mine has invited me along to the local BNS LARP and I was considering spending my initial background dots on influence (since there's very little character-fitting to spend it on for a low-generation neonate after one dot of generation), lol, glad to hear that it's as busted and quadratic as I thought. Note also that Generation is incredibly cheap (one dot = 11th Gen, two dots =9th, then 8th, 7th, and 6th). Everybody at game who isn't bothered by the expense of Skills and Backgrounds (since those are 1x new level for Neonates and 2x new level for everybody else) will buy up a bunch of Generation. Which actually does lead to another complaint. Mechanically, there's huge advantages to being a Neonate or an Elder, (Neonates get cheap skills and backgrounds and access to combo Disciplines, Elders get access to Elder Disciplines but can't use combo Disciplines), but Ancilla basically can spend an extra blood per turn while being forced to pay Elder prices for Skills and Backgrounds. If you're playing Camarilla and want to play an Ancilla, by far and away what you want to do is take one dot in Generation and take the Machiavellian Prodigy Merit, which means that you're regarded as being a member of one social class above what you normally would be.
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Jul 19, 2015 07:36
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Pope Guilty posted:Note also that Generation is incredibly cheap (one dot = 11th Gen, two dots =9th, then 8th, 7th, and 6th). Everybody at game who isn't bothered by the expense of Skills and Backgrounds (since those are 1x new level for Neonates and 2x new level for everybody else) will buy up a bunch of Generation. Clearly the solution is to go Neonate and Full Anarch. Always go Full Anarch. 
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Jul 19, 2015 08:26
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Silver Ladder preview is up.
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Jul 20, 2015 05:01
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Looks good, although I think the Merit's kind of overstuffed. Am I crazy or was there no full Free Council preview?
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Jul 20, 2015 06:14
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Ferrinus posted:Looks good, although I think the Merit's kind of overstuffed. Am I crazy or was there no full Free Council preview? ...I could have sworn that I've read it, but when I go through the Mage tag I can't find it anywhere. (FAKE EDIT: Found it in the "New Order" post. The Free Council.)
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Jul 20, 2015 06:26
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Pope Guilty posted:So basically that dumb Heinlein quote about specialization being for insects is the Arrow ideal? It's dumb when you're not a wizard. If you're a wizard, why not be good at everything? In any event, it's really Miyamoto Musashi: Miyamoto Musashi posted:When I apply the principle of strategy to the ways of different arts and crafts, I no longer have need for a teacher in any domain. Musashi's own application of this was back and forth. He was a pretty good artist. He claimed his methods could be scaled up to general strategy, but he never did particularly well at battles.
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Jul 20, 2015 07:33
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MonsieurChoc posted:Anyone check out the Spectres preview for Wraith 20? I'm still reading through it (it's 60 pages!), but it seems OK so far. The rules themselves are fully written out as if they're meant for Spectre PCs, and some terms are introduced without definition, but that's just :WoD101:.
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Jul 20, 2015 11:39
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So, this might be an attempt to carve up a dead horse and try to use parts of it and other horses to make a horrifying Frankenhorse, but a couple weeks back, I dug up an old idea I had way back when the Beast playtesting began and someone loosely described the setting to me. After all the discussion over the Kickstarter draft and the revisions that went on here, I decided to try and hammer it into something workable. Not too long ago, I finished the fluff section for it, and I was wondering if people might be willing to have a gander at it. Here it is. I admit, it can't fix Beast's obvious issue of being something of a scavenged grab-bag of themes taken from other game lines, in need of a niche of its own, but it's an attempt to at least make Beast into something that could be fun to play. If this is the wrong thread for this stuff, I apologize. Just seemed the most appropriate place to toss it up. Also, pre-emptive apology for using pastebin, too, but I didn't really want to use my Drive.
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Jul 22, 2015 03:49
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Last Order's up! No, not the Free Council, they were spoiled a year ago. The other guys. http://theonyxpath.com/everybody-wants-to-rule-the-world-seers-of-the-throne-mage-the-awakening/ Join the Seers!
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Jul 24, 2015 00:56
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As powerful as the Crowns are, the actual drawback is really lame - you maybe lose fractional XP, assuming you either fail to do what you were going to do anyway or maybe you get unlucky with timing? I want to see Made Seers be extra-vulnerable to the spells of their superiors or likely to get puppeteered by a one-tier-higher Profane Urim or something. In general, I don't like Seers who are better at magic as opposed to better supported in the use of magic and/or free of the drawbacks the Fallen World imposes on magic. A Praetorian should actually have weaker kung fu than an Arrow, but their spells should fail to weaken or unravel when witnessed by soldiers, or they should be able to call down tactical ochema airstrikes.
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Jul 24, 2015 01:14
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Ferrinus posted:In general, I don't like Seers who are better at magic as opposed to better supported in the use of magic and/or free of the drawbacks the Fallen World imposes on magic. A Praetorian should actually have weaker kung fu than an Arrow, but their spells should fail to weaken or unravel when witnessed by soldiers, or they should be able to call down tactical ochema airstrikes.
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Jul 24, 2015 01:26
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I bet that Mage Armor thing they've got going on is still a house, though. Put another way, if Seers are actually just as fearsome as Pentacle mages when it comes to magic the Pentacle specializes in... what's there for the Pentacle to tempt the Seers with? "Freedom?" A given Arrow or Mystagogue or whatever might have obligations as or more burdensome as those of a random Seer and as likely as not is actually even less focused on the cosmic big-picture stakes of the entire interOrder conflict in the first place, so what's even the point? For my money, it is if anything the Pentacle that's the devil whispering in any given mage's ear. The Seers preach submission and compromise, while the Pentacle likes overweening pride and self-aggrandizement, whose Orders (at least the Diamond Orders) are all devoted to forging their devotees into some sort of personally-potent mythic archetype. Yeah, yeah, okay, having a steady job and a life of luxury is all right for some, but what about being the ultimate polymath badass? What about being a master of secret lore, even the kind the gods themselves don't want you to know? What about pulling off the Jafar thing except, and this bit's important, you just save your third wish for a rainy day and think really carefully about how you'll phrase it in the meantime? The Diamond isn't all about power fantasy, but it scratches a psychic itch that the Pyramid can't, and it should scratch that itch in a material, game-mechanical way as well as in an abstract ideological way.
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Jul 24, 2015 01:33
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I mean, I think "serving the literal rulers of reality gives you The Cool Magic" is a pretty coherent statement that's in keeping with the thematic tenets of Mage as it's been established. The real tragedy about this writeup is that it didn't use the superior, original version of the song.
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Jul 24, 2015 01:39
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Androc posted:I mean, I think "serving the literal rulers of reality gives you The Cool Magic" is a pretty coherent statement that's in keeping with the thematic tenets of Mage as it's been established.
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Jul 24, 2015 01:42
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