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MonsieurChoc posted:Don't mind if I do!
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Sep 5, 2015 16:58
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Oh man the first session of my nMage game is gonna start in a few minutes. I thought I was ready. I thought I was ready! At this point I figure if I throw enough Nazis and rolling boulders at them, they'll never know the difference.
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Sep 5, 2015 21:55
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pkfan2004 posted:Whoa, excellent! *air guitars* Please also include a Time mage, the Spaniard Jorge deCarlin
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Sep 5, 2015 22:02
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More along the lines of JJBA naming conventions/Broken Ones: Kris Kross, a banker from Boston who was bit with Oregon Trail fever and moved out to strike it rich and ended up merged with a Prey Spirit. Now all he really wants to do is hoard food and get his wife Kid N. Cross (née Play) pregnant to make a big brood of kids. She's having none of that and has kicked him out until he gets a job, so now he bums around getting jobs where he can and supporting his family with cash. He'll give whoever pays him and keeps him safe his services, cunning with numbers and strategy and acquisition thanks to his weird enhancements. Downside: absolutely a total coward. Whenever things get tough and menacing, he can't resist trying to save his own skin or hiding, up to jumping ship to the other side if it keeps him safe.
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Sep 6, 2015 01:01
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BirdieBedtime posted:Oh man the first session of my nMage game is gonna start in a few minutes. I thought I was ready. I thought I was ready! I know how you feel. I figured just killing everyone in a bar using lighting except them then letting them solve the mystery would work. It's going okay so far....
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Sep 6, 2015 01:38
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Soonmot posted:This is someone who has the Best Opinions and I am totally jealous. Thanks. Pope Guilty posted:The big thing about modern Masquerade is that I find it harder and harder to believe that the Masquerade could be effectively maintained in the modern world. This is one of the (smaller) reasons I just let my players kick it wide open. I can't really see it surviving past the 2020s without governments and such willfully and knowingly collaborating with its enforcement. Once it hits that point its going to end up more progressively more in the hands of humans who want to keep the status quo than anything else.
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Sep 6, 2015 08:14
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I mean, when you run Vampire (either one, really) it's up to you if the masquerade is realistic or not. If you think it's interesting for players to enjoy their private dramas and deal with Kindred issues than it's usually a good idea to keep the masquerade in place, and justify it however you want. It ain't too hard in oWoD since you can just rub a couple of really ancient and powerful vampires on the problem and they make YouTube and Verizon just sort of go away. If you think the idea of vampires interacting with humans more often and potentially getting into a conflict with them, go nuts, but I have a hard time imagining that story going any way except one -- humans try to kill vampires. You could True Blood it up, I guess, and that might be cool. We think the masquerade is unrealistic because we can't imagine people seeing a supernatural event and not recording it and sharing it. Fair enough; but I still maintain most of those videos that slip through the cracks of immediate response, fiscal channels and Dominate are still going to get relegated to the weird parts of the internet. As a vampire it isn't hard to just sit back and wait to see what kind of people believe in this stuff and deal with it that way, rather than trying to clamp down on every individual infraction. I don't think a video of someone drinking blood or flipping over a car or even chucking a fireball around is going to shatter the masquerade in one fell blow. The fact of the matter is that random human NPCs in the World of Darkness just don't give a poo poo. Most of them are too busy with their soul-crushing jobs and their various addictions to notice that stuff. They aren't going to infiltrate secret vampire meetings and they certainty aren't going to interpose themselves in the middle of a murder. I think real, smoking-gun style masquerade breaches are probably pretty rare -- maybe once every year or two in major metro areas, and the mainstream media isn't going to cover that stuff even if it's public.
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Sep 6, 2015 09:34
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I like how the nWoD shifted masquerade so it wasn't actually a huge secret; everyone has a few stories about how they woke up one night and saw a skeleton in their front room or something. Just people on the whole prefer to nope on out any time that happens, because it's better feeling like the world's fundamentally safe and that vampires don't exist.
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Sep 6, 2015 11:56
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There are too many well-documented, terrible and lethal phenomena, right here in the real world, that get you labeled a crank for believing, discussing or taking seriously. I think it's actually quite absurd to think the Masquerade would be so fragile. You guys are talking about the Internet like its 1999 and everyone can just put things on Limewire and share it instantly with the whole world no problem. In the real world most people have a ghost story or two, things that happened that they have no way to explain rationally but that they experienced anyway. A majority of Americans even believe in ghosts. Nonetheless, you try to bring up ghosts as a way to get out of a Disorderly Conduct charge or something and you'll become a laughingstock. Most Americans believe in UFOs but sitting congressman Dennis Kucinich was laughed at for saying he had seen one, when he was running for President. Edit: actually a majority of Americans no longer believe in ghosts. However, more people believe in ghosts than racism, and equally as many believe in evolution. A third of Americans think UFOs are alien visitors and a quarter of Americans believe in witches. I don't think it really changes my point though. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Sep 6, 2015 |
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Sep 6, 2015 13:47
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A modern Masquerade would probably involve a dedicated social effort to make vampires more cliche than Bigfoot and Elvis ghost sightings combined. Everybody in oWoD probably has a vampire story or two, but nobody wants to come across like the fringe idiots and cranks kindred have used to saturate all media. E: Imagine if guns themselves were sentient, pulling the strings from the shadows, and part of how the gun control "discussion" was framed. moths fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Sep 6, 2015 |
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Sep 6, 2015 14:26
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pkfan2004 posted:More along the lines of JJBA naming conventions/Broken Ones: Kris Kross, a banker from Boston who was bit with Oregon Trail fever and moved out to strike it rich and ended up merged with a Prey Spirit. Now all he really wants to do is hoard food and get his wife Kid N. Cross (née Play) pregnant to make a big brood of kids. She's having none of that and has kicked him out until he gets a job, so now he bums around getting jobs where he can and supporting his family with cash. He'll give whoever pays him and keeps him safe his services, cunning with numbers and strategy and acquisition thanks to his weird enhancements. Downside: absolutely a total coward. Whenever things get tough and menacing, he can't resist trying to save his own skin or hiding, up to jumping ship to the other side if it keeps him safe. Thanks! I'm gonna jot down all of these and add them to my NPC colelction, just in case.
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Sep 6, 2015 14:51
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For me it's mostly about ubiquity. Look at how cell phone cameras have, via their being everywhere and peoples' tendency to whip them out the moment something untoward happens, affected the public perception of police violence against black people, exposing it as something which happens frequently and regularly. Watch also the technologically slow-moving cops' inability to comprehend that yes, there will very likely be video of you doing a heinous thing to that man, and no, people aren't just going to believe you because you're a cop. Now apply that logic to vampire poo poo and a population that makes your parents who can barely work a web browser look like software engineers...
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Sep 6, 2015 15:36
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Why do you think Vampire films persist? It's because they make discrediting actual breaches easier, they want the public consciousness to retain them just enough to make writing off actual sightings as the work of conspiracy nuts.
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Sep 6, 2015 16:39
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Question. If I have first edition of Vampire the Requiem, would the second edition be a good purchase or not?
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Sep 6, 2015 18:45
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I asked this a while back, and they recommended VtR 2nd, and now that I followed their advice, I agree. I like some of the fluff from 1e books, so I ported it over, but the 2e books rules are solid
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Sep 6, 2015 18:57
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Is the God-machine transition and the first edition enough to get the second edition rules? Edit: and what exactly are all the difference between the two? Hiro Protagonist fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Sep 6, 2015 |
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Sep 6, 2015 19:03
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Requiem 2e includes the reworked rules for the disciplines. Humanity is changed fairly significantly - it's now about your ties to human beings somewhat more than your morals, and losing Humanity can be protected against by a Touchstone, a person you care about, albeit not necessarily positively. Your killer, your daughter, the boss who always checked up on you, whatever. A lot of disciplines are fairly significantly changed. The GMC update in cludes the changes from derangements to conditions and the new combat rules but I would say Vampire 2e is still a good buy.
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Sep 6, 2015 19:17
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The changed discipline that has raised the greatest complaints is Terror, since not it includes allucinations.
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Sep 6, 2015 19:27
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The proliferation of cell phone cameras and youtube makes it easier to capture evidence of vampirism, but it also degrades the concept of "evidence". For example, let's say there's an actual "slenderman" type creature active in the real world right now. If somebody posted a video and said "yes, I know there are dozens if not hundreds of 'creepypasta' videos in this same genre, all competing to have the best production values, but this one's real! You gotta believe me!", would you believe them? Even given that there are actual irl murders attributed to the slenderman? If there were a group of people who actually believed in the slenderman based on those videos, would it matter to anyone else? People will happily dismiss the evidence of their own eyes if you give them a context that makes it easy to do so. All it takes is a few supernatural Vine stars showing themselves "bench pressing a car, for real! *wiiiink*" and suddenly nobody's taking your cell phone vid of a guy outrunning the 12:10 train to Sacramento seriously. (We used this to our advantage in the last crossover game I played, working from the principle that if you saw a bunch of vaguely-teen/post-teens arguing in a McDonald's booth about vampires and werewolves, you would not imagine for a second that something important was going on.)
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Sep 7, 2015 00:48
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Dammit Who? posted:(We used this to our advantage in the last crossover game I played, working from the principle that if you saw a bunch of vaguely-teen/post-teens arguing in a McDonald's booth about vampires and werewolves, you would not imagine for a second that something important was going on.)
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Sep 7, 2015 00:54
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Hey guys, your favorite brands here, just posting an extremely bae and on fleek video of some supernatural shenanigans that is definitely real and not a viral advertisement
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Sep 7, 2015 01:07
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I think to cause the public to sit up and take notice you'd need a TFV version of Manning or Snowden- someone who leaks a poo poo ton of reports and evidence of the supernatural from a very obviously official source.
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Sep 7, 2015 01:13
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That's awesome!
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Sep 7, 2015 01:14
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Dammit Who? posted:Hey guys, your favorite brands here, just posting an extremely bae and on fleek video of some supernatural shenanigans that is definitely real and not a viral advertisement Fleek isn't an actual word. Under-twenties aren't saying fleek. I refuse to accept this.
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Sep 7, 2015 02:32
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Dammit Who? posted:Hey guys, your favorite brands here, just posting an extremely bae and on fleek video of some supernatural shenanigans that is definitely real and not a viral advertisement It's all fun and games until someone pranks a Hunter.
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Sep 7, 2015 02:39
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Kavak posted:I think to cause the public to sit up and take notice you'd need a TFV version of Manning or Snowden- someone who leaks a poo poo ton of reports and evidence of the supernatural from a very obviously official source. That's precisely what happened in the games Rubix Squid is talking about. A VASCU agent PC determined that the threat we were dealing with had finally reached the point where it demanded public acknowledgement and assistance, and released over a decade of his training booklets and field notes, covering everything from vampires to mages to straight up slashers. He used Teleinformatics to send it to every law enforcement agency and media HQ in the country at once, while simultaneously hosting several dozen torrents of it. He also declared that several of them were disguised as random porn, films, or  so they'd avoid immediate purging (and so more people would stumble on it.)
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Sep 7, 2015 02:44
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Kavak posted:I think to cause the public to sit up and take notice you'd need a TFV version of Manning or Snowden- someone who leaks a poo poo ton of reports and evidence of the supernatural from a very obviously official source. You literally just described Interview With the Vampire. We've come full circle. To be less blithe: I think an Interview scenario with just normal Jane or Joe vampire backed up with evidence sounds like an awesome hook for a game.
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Sep 7, 2015 02:47
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Came up with another one: The Man With The Red Right Hand: A government official transformed after merging with a Nexus Crawler. Lost most of it's sentience in the process, becoming the main servant/legbreaker of one of the Storm Walkers. Instead of the full Reality Break charm, it can inverse causality in a subject: effects start to arrive before the cause, and if the target doesn't take the action that caused the effect, they get hit by a Paradox like a Mage. Haven't come up with it's weakness yet. Light? Government forms?
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Sep 7, 2015 07:45
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Mendrian posted:You literally just described Interview With the Vampire. We've come full circle. I haven't read the book in like a decade and I don't recall if Louis talked about that in the movie- was breaking the masquerade-equivalent one of the things he was trying to do?
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Sep 7, 2015 07:55
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Kavak posted:I haven't read the book in like a decade and I don't recall if Louis talked about that in the movie- was breaking the masquerade-equivalent one of the things he was trying to do? I always thought so, yeah. It seemed clear at the time of the interview Louis had gotten pretty sick of being a vampire and was trying to create drama in a subtler way than Lestat would later attempt. I don't think he'd made up his mind to attack Daniel (the interviewer) until pretty late in the story and ended up letting him live anyway. The vampire community pretty much hated him for it.
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Sep 7, 2015 08:11
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Mendrian posted:We think the masquerade is unrealistic because we can't imagine people seeing a supernatural event and not recording it and sharing it. Fair enough; but I still maintain most of those videos that slip through the cracks of immediate response, fiscal channels and Dominate are still going to get relegated to the weird parts of the internet. As a vampire it isn't hard to just sit back and wait to see what kind of people believe in this stuff and deal with it that way, rather than trying to clamp down on every individual infraction. I don't think a video of someone drinking blood or flipping over a car or even chucking a fireball around is going to shatter the masquerade in one fell blow. The fact of the matter is that random human NPCs in the World of Darkness just don't give a poo poo. Most of them are too busy with their soul-crushing jobs and their various addictions to notice that stuff. They aren't going to infiltrate secret vampire meetings and they certainty aren't going to interpose themselves in the middle of a murder. I think real, smoking-gun style masquerade breaches are probably pretty rare -- maybe once every year or two in major metro areas, and the mainstream media isn't going to cover that stuff even if it's public. Someone can successfully capture an Abyssal manifestation and even upload it to YouTube, but it's going to sit there along with Marble Hornets or a fuckload of fake ghost videos. I can imagine a bunch of vampires or a pylon of Seers doing nothing but making creepy (but obviously fake) clips and releasing them for everyone to see.
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Sep 7, 2015 09:32
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It wouldn't take much to get Vampire believers further pushed into crank territory by attributing high profile crimes to them. Like the woman who poisoned her family because she thought they were vampires, or the mass killer who shot up a school full of "vampires." A few decades of this, and it would become almost automatic to report serious vampire chat to authorities, since it's a seeded red flag of impending violence. And Kindred: the Embraced makes perfect sense as misinformation in the oWoD. "Oh your boss is a Kindred member of the Johnny Brujha tribe? Just like on TV? Hold on, I've got to make a few phonecalls..."
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Sep 7, 2015 13:23
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What We Do In The Shadows would be great as an 'IC' documentary by a couple of ventrue, a couple of gangrel and a nosferatu, actually.
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Sep 7, 2015 13:32
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I love that WWDITS could be legitimately a Masquerade breaching movie made by a bunch of genuine Kindred as a 'funny thing to do', with the only exception being that as it's WoD, literally less than a week after it was released, a friendly Archon shows up in New Zealand, murders them all in short order then the Camarilla spoofs it up to the max to ensure nobody believes it and goes looking.
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Sep 7, 2015 13:59
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The Camarilla must love the found-footage genre. I've posted poo poo that seems like it'd be perfect for actual found footage from the oWoD - poo poo like Absentia, The Tunnel, etc. Well, if the genre exists, it takes half the work of dealing with those pesky masquerade breaches out of the equation. Frantic calls that "I found a tape of people being butchered and eaten by vampires in an old meat locker full of human skeletons, help me!" are shrugged off as nothing more than viral marketing. If a video does surface, they steal it, tack on some actors and commentors, and release it from a bad studio with little promotion.
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Sep 7, 2015 17:40
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I love that in my mental WoD, there is now 'Breach Studios - Cinema in Plain Sight' run by entirely genuine people making bad send-up movies, and actually owned by a few canny Kindred who offer 'cover up services' in the form of making a film.
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Sep 7, 2015 17:53
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Loomer posted:The Camarilla must love the found-footage genre. I've posted poo poo that seems like it'd be perfect for actual found footage from the oWoD - poo poo like Absentia, The Tunnel, etc. Well, if the genre exists, it takes half the work of dealing with those pesky masquerade breaches out of the equation. Frantic calls that "I found a tape of people being butchered and eaten by vampires in an old meat locker full of human skeletons, help me!" are shrugged off as nothing more than viral marketing. If a video does surface, they steal it, tack on some actors and commentors, and release it from a bad studio with little promotion. Back in the day I had a character I was about to play when a game collapsed who wrote horseshit occult books which were mostly designed to make believers in the supernatural look like idiots. If I resurrect the concept, this is going on his sheet somewhere.
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Sep 7, 2015 18:04
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I have a vampire character, just waiting to be used, that's a professionald ebunker that got recruited by the Tremere and now debunks poo poo to preserve the Masquerade. His only Thaumaturgical Path is the Path of Counter-Magic.
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Sep 7, 2015 18:24
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I've been enjoying calling David Cameron's political team the Camarilla and know that it is a vampire thing. In case some better nerd puts egg on my face, the Camarilla are right wing bastards right?
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Sep 7, 2015 21:09
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In the sense that they are neo-feudalist assholes who care about gathering personal power and loving over everyone else. They don't especially hold ideological positions beyond that.
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Sep 7, 2015 21:20
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