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Yawgmoth posted:I generally dislike the new combat system for this reason. It feels very Exalted to have these huge defenses that you have to burn resources to beat (and can be negated with similar expenditure) and once you run out you're just hosed. I mean it works, and it's not terrible, but I certainly prefer the old skill+att+tool bonus and def being just the lower of two attributes. The thing about the new combat system is it's not really designed to model "combat" in the sense that most RPGs model it. It's meant to model the application of violence as a means to achieve your goals. That's why fight scenes start out with a declaration of intent, it's why the Beaten Down and surrender rules exist, and it's why the math is balanced to heavily favor spending Willpower and seizing any advantage you can. (And remember, just because weapons are no longer equipment bonuses to dice pools doesn't mean you can't get equipment or circumstance bonuses from other factors.) It's also why Defense drops for every subsequent attacker. It's not meant to be a tactical minigame, it's meant to be an escalation, and to ask the question "how far are you willing to go to get what you want?" You might have to punch a dude three or four times before he'll cry uncle and give in. Or you could give him one good crack with a baseball bat and he'll probably give in right then and there. Or you get five of your buddies together, jump him on his way to his car after work, and kick seven shades of poo poo out of him. And, hey, if you're really worried about those huge defenses and you're all out of tricks and up against a wall, one little snub nosed .38 renders them moot. (Unless you're fighting something freaky and supernatural, I grant you, but that's a slightly different kettle of fish.) Now, sure, sometimes some of that doesn't apply. Sometimes a fight is all about "we need to kill that thing in the basement of Jenkins House" and not "I want Benny to give me my goddamn money." And yeah, maybe in those cases it's not so much a moral question of escalation, but it's still a question of "how much of yourself are you willing to put into making this thing not be alive any more?" And if you run out of Willpower or whatever tricks and you can't find away through its defenses, that's a sign to run the gently caress away and come up with a new plan. Maybe something involving C4 and some unlicensed renovation.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:16
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So my players and I have settled on the main thrust of the campaign being that there are secret Seers of the Throne double agents infiltrating the local Mage scene and Consilium and they dunno who it is, so that's fun. The temptation is always there to pull a Manchurian candidate twist on one or more PCs, as well as this information being a lie set up to manoeuvre the PCs into being the actual Seer influence loving things up, though I'll probably not do that on account of it being sort of dickish. Reading up more on derangements in the core rulebook, does anyone use them as written? Any popular alternatives?
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Aug 17, 2015 21:20
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Conditions, because derangements are the literal worst.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:21
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Mors Rattus posted:Conditions, because derangements are the literal worst. Yes. Get the free GMC rules update from here and cast derangements into the void where they belong.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:25
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GimpInBlack posted:The thing about the new combat system is it's not really designed to model "combat" in the sense that most RPGs model it. Yes it is. That's why it contains distinctions between accuracy and damage, a bunch of 3.5e D&D feats, etc. The sense of brinksmanship and is-this-really-worth-it calculations were supported better by the old combat system with its turn by turn attrition than by the new combat system with its unhittable backflipping ninjas and fuckawesome instagib deathblows. This reminds of of "elders now have to be smart" being appended to rules that made elder vampires way more powerful during the daytime.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:54
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Yeah my eyes rolled out of my head, out the front door and halfway down the street after I read that section.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:54
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GimpInBlack posted:The thing about the new combat system is it's not really designed to model "combat" in the sense that most RPGs model it. It's meant to model the application of violence as a means to achieve your goals. That's why fight scenes start out with a declaration of intent, it's why the Beaten Down and surrender rules exist, and it's why the math is balanced to heavily favor spending Willpower and seizing any advantage you can. (And remember, just because weapons are no longer equipment bonuses to dice pools doesn't mean you can't get equipment or circumstance bonuses from other factors.) It's also why Defense drops for every subsequent attacker. It's not meant to be a tactical minigame, it's meant to be an escalation, and to ask the question "how far are you willing to go to get what you want?" You might have to punch a dude three or four times before he'll cry uncle and give in. Or you could give him one good crack with a baseball bat and he'll probably give in right then and there. Or you get five of your buddies together, jump him on his way to his car after work, and kick seven shades of poo poo out of him. And, hey, if you're really worried about those huge defenses and you're all out of tricks and up against a wall, one little snub nosed .38 renders them moot. (Unless you're fighting something freaky and supernatural, I grant you, but that's a slightly different kettle of fish.) GimpInBlack posted:Yes. Get the free GMC rules update from here and cast derangements into the void where they belong.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:27
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omg omg omg omg
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Aug 17, 2015 23:45
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Swagger Dagger posted:omg omg omg omg 
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Aug 17, 2015 23:49
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Swagger Dagger posted:omg omg omg omg I'm now afraid of what that's going to cost to print and ship, even with the PoD discount backers are getting. 
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Aug 18, 2015 00:18
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Pussy Cartel posted:I'm now afraid of what that's going to cost to print and ship, even with the PoD discount backers are getting. Well, W20 and Chuubo are $100 to print premium, and they're about 575 pages, and this is about 125 more. So... more than that, plus shipping! Dang. /me imagines what the deluxe copy is going to weigh.
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Aug 18, 2015 00:53
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In case anyone's interested: a friend of mine is playing a member of the Shepherd bloodline in a Vampire game, and we ultimately decided that the listed discipline spread + devotions were just too lovely and half-assed to put up with and that we'd be better off condensing them into a single five-dot discipline power. Here's the first: quote:Conestoga is the unique discipline of the Shepherd bloodline. It allows Shepherds to safeguard and manipulate groups of humans.
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Aug 18, 2015 01:21
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You may want to mention the house rules for rote actions that that power was designed to go with. By-the-book rote with 9-again would be ridiculous.quote:Rote Actions: Intense preparation, or the use of special tools or powers, can turn an a roll into a rote action. After an action is rolled and its successes tallied, each die from the original pool that didn’t produce a success is picked up and rolled as a separate dicepool. The player then chooses whether to use the successes of the first or second roll for the task being attempted.
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Aug 18, 2015 02:28
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Swagger Dagger posted:omg omg omg omg 
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Aug 18, 2015 03:34
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Magnusth posted:So, i'm concidering running an Nmage game. Two things: You're going to want to tailor this to your group. A game where the players are generally drawn towards any one or two of the Pentacle is going to look very different from a fully mixed group. So I'm going to talk about dramatic structures for a moment, because this may be helpful in setting up things like foreshadowing, recurring themes, etc. There are a variety of different possible ways of structuring stories. Some of the most common for structuring cohesive climactic stories are by dividing them into acts. An act, simply put, is a section of the story that ends with a point of no return that pushes the story forward. Aristotle argued that plays should have three acts- beginning, middle, and end. This is what was common in 19th-century and early 20th-century drama, and an overly-rigid style of this has become predominant for aspiring writers and mass-market movies. Horace argued for five acts, which Freytag has formalized as exposition-rising action-climax-falling action-denouement. This is what Renaissance and Early Modern dramatists preferred to use. The areas of Chinese cultural influence have traditionally used a four-act structure, called kishoutenketsu, which is an acronym for introduction-development-twist-conclusion. Musicals and light operas are traditionally split into two acts. There are also less common eight-act, nine-act, and twelve-act structuring approaches. With that in mind, I'm going to ignore three-act because it's not all that helpful here. Instead, I'm going to start with five-act and then move around as needed. So in the five-act structure, the first act is what sets the stage for the drama by introducing us to the principle characters and the central conflict of the story. The second act provides a series of events that build tension and interest. The third act is where the turning point of the story occurs, and the tension from the second act is released. The fourth act features the confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist, and the fifth act wraps up the story and provides a final moment of release. Othello exemplifies this. Act 1 introduces the characters, the setting, and the central conflict of Othello versus Iago. Act 2 consists of Iago forming his plan and putting it into action, while Act 3 shows us the turning point for Othello's character- he falls prey to doubt. Act 4 then shows Othello attempting to fight what Iago has unleashed in him, and failing. Act 5 then wraps the play up by killing off the cast and ending with Othello's grief-stricken suicide and the promise of a grisly fate for Iago. You can also see the turning points at the end of each Act, except 5. Act 1 ends with the characters all going to Cyprus, Act 2 ends with Cassio's dismissal, Act 3 ends with Othello's handkerchief changing hands from Desdemona to Iago to Cassio, and Act 4 ends with Desdemona showing herself to be purely innocent. All of these move the story inexorably forward and present a point of no return for the characters. So how does all this rambling bullshit help you? Well, let's take a look at how you would construct a campaign, or chronicle, or whatever, for Mage: the Awakening using the 5-act as a guide. Act 1, the exposition, would consist of the characters Awakening and learning about Awakened society, and coming into contact with the big, central features that are going to define the overall story. Depending on how much the players know about Mage, this would end with either them committing to a position within Awakened society, or with them taking some defining action involving the central features. Of course, the key issue is that you're writing this as you go in collaboration with the other players. So what you would want to do is come up with some brief blurbs to toss out to your players and see what they bite onto. These will in turn probably define the basic conflicts and themes for the rest of the campaign, in conjunction with who they align with. So for example, if they bite onto Seers-related stuff and are all Arrow and/or Ladder, then your game is probably going to be about the whole "destroy the servants of the Exarchs" thing. If they bite onto Abyssal happenings and lean Veil/Mysterium, the game is probably going to focus on protecting reality from anti-existence. These are simplified and relying on stereotypes. If you get Thearchs focusing on the Lower Depths, you're going to have to improvise quite a bit, but you can still build with that. I would suggest building a working framework. I have one, that I conjured up in ten whole minutes, for Mage.  (Fig. 1: magecube.png) Then, you can classify your blurbs into categories like these, and build up a picture of what interests your players about Mage, and also what you can use to have refreshing sessions that aren't dealing with the main plot. So, in Act 2 when you've gotten to the end of Act 1, you should have a pretty good idea of what the basic conflict is going to be. The next step is to develop this basic conflict into a complex one. You need to establish what Freytag called a climax, but what should really be more accurately called an "inflection point", because it's where the emotional tone undergoes a basic shift. This is what will constitute Act 3. But Act 2 needs to set up Act 3. So you need to keep the basic conflict in mind as you put together adventures according to the desires and actions of the players, and use the basic conflict to put together a context for those actions that will lead to the turning point. You also need to make sure that the characters are in position for the turning point to make sense with the story so far. What Freytag calls the rising action and I'm calling Act 2 is going to be the longest part of the story, though in Renaissance drama Act 2 and parts of Act 3 would generally share that role. Act 3 is the "climax", the point at which the emotional tone generally turns around. Going back to the Arrow+Ladder vs. Seers concept, Act 3 is when they mass-Awaken people, or build an army of Proximi and Sleepwalkers, or turn the Fallen World's structures against the Seers. In a comedy, it's when things start looking up for our heroes. In a tragedy, it's when things start falling down. In a Godzilla movie, this is when the evil kaiju launches its deadliest attack and Godzilla seems down for the count. Act 4 is the "falling action", and this is basically where the protagonists and antagonists have at it. So for The Blues Brothers, this is everything from when they escape through the trapdoor to the handcuffs closing on their hands in the Cook County Clerk's office. Act 4 doesn't really require that much planning. You've figured out which way things are going, now you just need to carry through the hanging threads and keep up the credible opposition. Act 5 is the "denouement". This is where we wrap up the plot threads and show how all this played out, and provide a moment of release from the ride. So in The Blues Brothers, to double up on examples, this is "Jailhouse Rock". We get to relieve the tension of that final chase with a musical number and all the cast and crew enjoying themselves. By the point you're thinking about this, it should be pretty obvious what the players are aiming for. Depending on the outcome of the climax and Act 4, either give it to them, or provide a counterpoint, but you should have plenty to engage with. I hope this rant, with its inconsistent, wide-ranging examples, was helpful to you. Also, please don't consider this a straitjacket. This is only one way to structure and examine stories, and although this is far too long already, I would love to be able to use kishoutenketsu to provide another approach. EDIT: Also, this only really works for looking at the group as a whole. Each character's individual story will have more acts than this, under the definition of "act" all the way back at the beginning. Effectronica fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 04:03
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Swagger Dagger posted:omg omg omg omg Finally, the fabled Tome of Page XX.
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Aug 18, 2015 05:16
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Cabbit posted:Finally, the fabled Tome of Page XX. Should've had a Book XX in Grimoire of Grimoires.
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Aug 18, 2015 08:38
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Effectronica posted:Lots of I have wanted to run something for a while but get stuck on how to make all my ideas into a story, this was a helpful post for starting to put things into a structure.
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Aug 19, 2015 01:10
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about story structure.
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Effectronica posted:HowToBeAGoodST.txt
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Aug 19, 2015 01:53
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Effectronica posted:...and although this is far too long already, I would love to be able to use kishoutenketsu to provide another approach.  Please do!
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Aug 19, 2015 04:02
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Okay. I need some help with this. In running a hunter game, how do players actually track a vamp/were/mage/whatever? Whenever the splatbooks describe them, they seem to be amazingly good at covering their tracks. Vampires can conceal bitewounds, mages can fix their passage with spells, and werewolves are just big dudes/dudettes that seems like a bunch of hippies.
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Aug 19, 2015 11:15
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DJ Dizzy posted:Okay. I need some help with this. In running a hunter game, how do players actually track a vamp/were/mage/whatever? Whenever the splatbooks describe them, they seem to be amazingly good at covering their tracks. Vampires can conceal bitewounds, mages can fix their passage with spells, and werewolves are just big dudes/dudettes that seems like a bunch of hippies. "Good at covering their tracks" doesn't mean "perfectly rational actors who never make mistakes." Vampires and werewolves both frenzy. Mages poke around weird places, deal in black-market artifact trading, and plenty of them are at the heads of actual cults who may very well be up to nefarious deeds on their own. Nobody has the time, awareness, or mystical power to mask every single possible lead that could tie back to them. Take a vampire, for instance. Say a body turns up in the morgue, suspiciously low on AB-. That trips any hunter's suspicions if he's worth a drat, so it's off to the races. You start by identifying the victim. Build a profile, figure out his habits and his patterns. Figure out where he's been, what he's been up to, where he was last seen. Was it at a nightclub? Start interviewing people. Sure, maybe the vamp put a mind-whammy on the bouncer and the bartender, but did she put one on every single person in the club? Unlikely. Get a description of people the victim was seen with. Start staking the place out. Monsters are creatures of habit just like people. Odds are good this one will be back. Look for patterns in suspicious deaths and disappearances. Does the vampire have a "type?" Troll some bait out there. Figure out the distribution of missing persons cases that fit your pattern--whatever's in the center, odds are good the thing lairs somewhere around there. Pattern recognition and data analysis are key to hunting just about anything that has the wherewithal to cover its tracks--patrolling the neighborhood with baseball bats and silver buckshot-loaded shotguns really only works for mindless predators. If you're really stuck for inspiration, maybe pick up and read some true crime books or mystery novels--the same techniques real police use to track serial killers are largely applicable to hunting monsters, with some allowances for the weird supernatural poo poo. And finally, consider this: As you say, monsters are very good at covering their tracks. That means, by and large, the only ones that even show up on a hunter's radar are the stupid, the inexperienced, and the ones that gently caress up. You know that old adage that criminals are getting smarter and more innovative because the cops keep catching the dumb ones? Yeah, that applies to monster hunters, too. Drop that revelation on your hunters and watch the existential dread creep in.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:04
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For vampires, especially, it's not easy to maintain a steady supply of fresh human blood, from people who won't expose you, while you also have to sleep during the day and thus have to fake or go without a lot of elements of basic human identity (like a valid driver's license). Even in a major city there are only so many (for example) nightclubs where a vampire could reliably drain the blood of a drug-addled party boy on a regular basis. Everyone should read Damnation City even if they don't play Vampire.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:27
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If you've ever seen the earlier seasons of Supernatural, they give some pretty good ideas. Newspapers don't just ignore murders or disappearances, and it's not too hard to speak to the family of a given victim. If, say, a Vampire's victim frequented a nightclub where he went the night before he died, his family is probably going to say so. In a narrative sense, it might be interesting to have other leads once the PCs arrive at the scene of the crime. It's important to remember that, even if a Mage (or whatever) had the ability to perfectly cover its tracks, it wouldn't necessarily always do so every time. It might get sloppy, or have other Mages who want it dead and assist by undoing its cover. Just keep in mind that it can be narratively bland for a monster to always have 100% mastery of all its powers.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:45
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Halloween Jack posted:For vampires, especially, it's not easy to maintain a steady supply of fresh human blood, from people who won't expose you, while you also have to sleep during the day and thus have to fake or go without a lot of elements of basic human identity (like a valid driver's license). Even in a major city there are only so many (for example) nightclubs where a vampire could reliably drain the blood of a drug-addled party boy on a regular basis. It's kind of ironic how BvD comes from the best Requiem book.
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Aug 19, 2015 17:07
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Don't forget that weird poo poo just happens in WoD as well, it doesn't hurt to give them a sudden and mysterious lead, ideally that will give you two plot hooks, one where the lead is pointing and the other to whoever or whatever dropped the lead. My Hunter game started with every Hunter in the city waking up with a deck of playing cards by them, each card has the name of a monster on it, organized by type. So if all goes well, my players have 53 plot hooks, a mess of monsters they can pursue and also, where the hell did this deck of cards come from and who wants all these Monsters dead?
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Aug 19, 2015 17:50
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Hunters should also get leads from their Contacts (particularly from their Professions). The WoD is weird and people see weird poo poo. Cops, doctors, and journalists are good examples, but also all kinds of blue-collar workers.
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Aug 19, 2015 17:58
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"All kinds of blue collar workers see weird poo poo" is basically the why of one of the compacts, even. For that matter, in a tier 2 or 3 hunter game, they should be getting leads from their compacts and/or conspiracies. The Network Zero guy gets an email with a youtube link going 'Check this poo poo out'. The Null Mysteriis flips through an underground peer reviewed journal about migration patterns in the haemophagic population. Etc.
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Aug 19, 2015 18:11
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Also, when in doubt, follow the money. Sure, some vampires are masters of Dominate and some wizards have enough Mind magic to bend memories into pretzel shapes, but lots of times that's not feasible for whatever reason. If all investigation into, or coverage of, a mysterious death or other weird shenanigans suddenly stops, start looking for the bribes. Maybe sometimes it only leads to a crooked city councilman who can't afford a scandal in an election year, but sometimes it'll net you a Dracula. Depending on where your game is set, too, consider the modern omnipresence of surveillance. Big cities like New York, London, and Chicago have cameras everywhere, and even out in the sticks there are cameras lots of places you wouldn't think to look, and pretty much everybody in the US these days has a high-def camera on them all the time. Now, a lot of that poo poo gets a few views on Youtube and a bunch of comments about how it's totally Photoshopped look you can see the pixels, because that's how the World of Darkness works, but if you have a good idea when and where something happened you can probably get a lead that way. Halloween Jack posted:Hunters should also get leads from their Contacts (particularly from their Professions). The WoD is weird and people see weird poo poo. Cops, doctors, and journalists are good examples, but also all kinds of blue-collar workers. Contacts and Allies are a hunter's lifeblood, yeah. To the point that I usually give characters a couple dots for free when I run the game. Denim Avenger posted:My Hunter game started with every Hunter in the city waking up with a deck of playing cards by them, each card has the name of a monster on it, organized by type. So if all goes well, my players have 53 plot hooks, a mess of monsters they can pursue and also, where the hell did this deck of cards come from and who wants all these Monsters dead? That's a really cool hook.
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Aug 19, 2015 18:20
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GimpInBlack posted:Depending on where your game is set, too, consider the modern omnipresence of surveillance. Big cities like New York, London, and Chicago have cameras everywhere, and even out in the sticks there are cameras lots of places you wouldn't think to look, and pretty much everybody in the US these days has a high-def camera on them all the time. Now, a lot of that poo poo gets a few views on Youtube and a bunch of comments about how it's totally Photoshopped look you can see the pixels, because that's how the World of Darkness works, but if you have a good idea when and where something happened you can probably get a lead that way. The Panopticon Ministry is probably still high-fiving each other on top of a mountain of tass-cocaine over Google's ascendancy, and the evolution of telecom in general over the past two decades. Like, you really can't make any reasonable argument against them being the King Shits of Poop Mountain in most of the postindustrial world, magically, especially since these days the Ministry of Mammon is probably angling for the final dagger thrust into the Hegemonic Ministry, Paternoster is dealing with the slow decline of faith in much of the world, and the Praetorians are rapidly finding themselves in a world where war depends on the Panopticon's favorite toys.
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Aug 19, 2015 20:21
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It should also be noted that in the WoD, people are generally more clued in than most monsters want to believe. They like to believe they're perfectly hidden, but it's at least equally true that humanity is willfully ignoring them. People know there's weird poo poo all around them, they just willfully ignore it in order to live peaceful lives. This can become significantly less true in areas with a strong Union presence, for example, where the response will stop being 'ignore it and pretend it doesn't happen' to 'mention it to the local Union rep and then pretend it doesn't happen.' (And you can pretty much pinpoint the exact moment in Damnation City where Requiem turned the corner. I want to say it's in chapter 3.)
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Aug 19, 2015 20:40
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Mors Rattus posted:It should also be noted that in the WoD, people are generally more clued in than most monsters want to believe. They like to believe they're perfectly hidden, but it's at least equally true that humanity is willfully ignoring them. People know there's weird poo poo all around them, they just willfully ignore it in order to live peaceful lives. This can become significantly less true in areas with a strong Union presence, for example, where the response will stop being 'ignore it and pretend it doesn't happen' to 'mention it to the local Union rep and then pretend it doesn't happen.' Yeah, I think the tone got expressed best in a single moment in Compacts and Conspiracies, where (going from memory here) an example of the stuff Union hunters might benefit from is that they might be running down the street from a horrible monster, only to get a revolver tossed to them from the back alley door of a late night cafe, and see the busboy give them a quick hopeful nod as he shuts the door. E: I was close quote:It’s a Secret… Except, Not Really Daeren fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 19, 2015 20:47
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Daeren posted:The Panopticon Ministry is probably still high-fiving each other on top of a mountain of tass-cocaine over Google's ascendancy, and the evolution of telecom in general over the past two decades. Like, you really can't make any reasonable argument against them being the King Shits of Poop Mountain in most of the postindustrial world, magically, especially since these days the Ministry of Mammon is probably angling for the final dagger thrust into the Hegemonic Ministry, Paternoster is dealing with the slow decline of faith in much of the world, and the Praetorians are rapidly finding themselves in a world where war depends on the Panopticon's favorite toys. Yeah, in any version of WoD where the Seers are significant power players, Panopticon pretty much dominate the entire post-industrial world. Mammon might have more direct, temporal power to effect change (or, probably more accurately, to block it), but in terms of "firmly integrating our cult's vision of Exarchal dominion into the Fallen World," it's hard to argue against Panopticon being the blue-ribbon winner, at least outside the developing world. Paternoster I think is stronger than people give them credit for on account of the whole "decline in religion" thing. It's true that churches generally have less temporal power today, but Paternoster has adapted where Hegemonic hasn't. They're perfectly content to distract Sleepers from seeking enlightenment by making them scorn all spiritual pursuits and see the universe as one of cold, deterministic logic and nothing else. Their job, after all, is to hide the true Exarchal religion from Sleepers and keep them fractious and factionalized based on beliefs. They're just as happy with militant atheists loudly proclaiming that all religion is a cancer on humanity as they are with Catholics massacring Huguenots over points of doctrine. I also see them as suborning any group that encourages dogma and doctrine over looking for your own answers, even if those groups wouldn't describe themselves as religions per se. I imagine hierodules are perfectly comfortable acting as high-ranking members of just about any political party, for example. Sorry, that turned into more of a magechat detour than I intended. I'm prepping an Awakening chronicle, so it's on my mind a lot. 
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Aug 19, 2015 21:20
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Oh, please keep going. I've basically no idea what I'm doing, I'm frantically scribbling notes on all this poo poo.
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Aug 19, 2015 22:10
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Mage politics is always more interesting than Mage mechanics.
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Aug 19, 2015 23:07
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Pope Guilty posted:Mage politics is always more interesting than Mage mechanics. Okay, so next comes the several-page derail about the mechanical reasons that an Adamantine Arrow couldn't be a defence attorney...
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Aug 19, 2015 23:27
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Also keep in mind that the vampires/werewolves/mages/etc in your Hunter game don't have to exactly be the same vampires/werewolves/whatever that exist in their respective game lines. This is actually the default assumption of Hunter as a stand-alone game. So maybe vampires in your hunter game can't lick their wounds closed, or werewolves are just singular psychopaths who change at the full moon, or mages can't cast any magic without children's tears or something.
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Aug 19, 2015 23:30
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Tezzor posted:Also keep in mind that the vampires/werewolves/mages/etc in your Hunter game don't have to exactly be the same vampires/werewolves/whatever that exist in their respective game lines. This is actually the default assumption of Hunter as a stand-alone game. So maybe vampires in your hunter game can't lick their wounds closed, or werewolves are just singular psychopaths who change at the full moon, or mages can't cast any magic without children's tears or something. In addition, tweaking The Rules is a great way to make jaded or experienced players poo poo their pants and scramble to figure out what's going on. Horror is all about the unknown, after all, and if you've read thousands of pages about draculas, draculas aren't nearly as scary out-of-character. You know how they work, even if your character doesn't, so there's some comfort to be had. When what you think is a dracula suddenly starts budding off headspiders like The Thing when lit on fire, and shows little sign of actually being injured? You're probably as  as your character is. Even minor mechanical or fluff tweaks can send complacent players into fits of make-triple-sure-it's-dead-oh-god-did-it-just-twitch-burn-it-more paranoia.
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Aug 19, 2015 23:53
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The Barret Commission are a great example of a bunch of people who follow money, economics and politics to find monsters, especially vampires and some mages.
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Aug 20, 2015 00:07
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| # ? May 5, 2024 09:46 |
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Tezzor posted:Also keep in mind that the vampires/werewolves/mages/etc in your Hunter game don't have to exactly be the same vampires/werewolves/whatever that exist in their respective game lines. This is actually the default assumption of Hunter as a stand-alone game. So maybe vampires in your hunter game can't lick their wounds closed, or werewolves are just singular psychopaths who change at the full moon, or mages can't cast any magic without children's tears or something. Daeren posted:In addition, tweaking The Rules is a great way to make jaded or experienced players poo poo their pants and scramble to figure out what's going on. Horror is all about the unknown, after all, and if you've read thousands of pages about draculas, draculas aren't nearly as scary out-of-character. You know how they work, even if your character doesn't, so there's some comfort to be had. When what you think is a dracula suddenly starts budding off headspiders like The Thing when lit on fire, and shows little sign of actually being injured? You're probably as
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Aug 20, 2015 00:17
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