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Kurieg posted:The only way you get to transform into a dragon is in one of the apothesis failure states. Or if you go into your Lair and body-jack your Horror in dreams, but yeah.
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Nov 12, 2015 21:15
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Yeah, Beast is actually much more interesting after Apothesis.
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Nov 12, 2015 21:19
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Pope Guilty posted:Really? I thought you had to be a reincarnated person with a special Avatar in order to awaken. Yea, I had thought the reason the Avatar Storm didn't kill sleepers but shredded mages was because Sleeper had no Avatar to interact with and instead embedded themselves and forcibly Awakened people. That might just be in one of the specific Ascension endgame scenarios though. That, and all of the Avatars that became the Avatar Storm shards were just kind of floating around in the Umbra waiting to get delivered by psychopomps (back in the day) or just reincarnated into people which is by the Nephandi ones were so bad because they kept coming back. Might be mixing up my metaplots though.
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Nov 12, 2015 21:57
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Luminous Obscurity posted:He was a Co-Developer. Rose Bailey's presence did a lot to help the end product. Also, if memory serves, the initial concept of Demon was from her. I stand corrected, all credit where it's due. That helps explain Beast more, then.
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Nov 12, 2015 22:35
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Kai Tave posted:Except Demon: the Descent covers the whole "truly alien non-human outsiders crashing into the World of Darkness' urban horror setting" way, way better. I keep having to remind myself that the same person who wrote Demon also wrote Beast because man, they could not be more different on every conceivable level. See, I disagree there, since Demons don't really come across as truly alien. In fact, they're far from it; they're so human that they can disguise themselves as one and pass as them very easily. That is a core conceit of the setting: Yes, you're really Hamaliel, Fourth Cofactor of the Great Wheel, now smote to ruin by your fall from grace, and your essential self is a six-winged, twenty-eyed lion-spider that breathes carbon dioxide and exhales liquid ammonia, but none of that remotely stops you from being Joe Wingam, the friendly owner of the local truck stop, who brings cookies to the PTA meetings every second Sunday. Vampire does a far, far better job of making you actually non-human than Demon ever does because Vampire actually includes direct mechanics to represent the non-human instincts that becoming undead has shoved under your skin. The Beast (the Vampire kind) is an amazing mechanic that, once you realize is just another aspect of your character's personality, truly feels like a proper representation of an inhuman mindset. Demon doesn't have these things. Beast marginally does with its Hunger mechanic, because it causes Beasts to think about and obsess over things that no sane human would consider as important (a human and a Beast might both consider it wrong to steal, but only one of them not only find it desirable but outright life-affirming to hunt thieves down and bloodily carve marks into their face). Yes, the motives Beasts have at the moment are expected to be absolutely vile but that can be fixed.
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Nov 12, 2015 22:54
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Luminous Obscurity posted:He was a Co-Developer. Rose Bailey's presence did a lot to help the end product. Also, if memory serves, the initial concept of Demon was from her. Who was behind Heirs to Hell then?
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Nov 12, 2015 22:55
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Axelgear posted:See, I disagree there, since Demons don't really come across as truly alien. In fact, they're far from it; they're so human that they can disguise themselves as one and pass as them very easily. That is a core conceit of the setting: Yes, you're really Hamaliel, Fourth Cofactor of the Great Wheel, now smote to ruin by your fall from grace, and your essential self is a six-winged, twenty-eyed lion-spider that breathes carbon dioxide and exhales liquid ammonia, but none of that remotely stops you from being Joe Wingam, the friendly owner of the local truck stop, who brings cookies to the PTA meetings every second Sunday. Demon packs most of that alieness into the setting. As a demon you can pretend to be Joe Wingam, friendly owner of the local truck stop but you also can't stop seeing infrastructure and angels are going to come down to hunt you. You are trying really hard to be a human but the alien side of you is going to keep showing up to shake you out of it. A good version of Beast would have something similar as one of your goals, Hunger should be a necessary evil and not your reason to live.
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Nov 12, 2015 23:06
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Also Demons are good at PRETENDING to be Joe Normal as a survival mechanism but they're ultimately doing it by bartering for bits of other peoples' existences and stitching them together into a person suit. E; and anyway Beasts aren't all that alien anyway, they're abusive rear end in a top hat otherkin and that's about it. There's nothing cool and alien about Abuser: The Self-Serving. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 23:30
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Axelgear posted:See, I disagree there, since Demons don't really come across as truly alien. In fact, they're far from it; they're so human that they can disguise themselves as one and pass as them very easily. That is a core conceit of the setting: Yes, you're really Hamaliel, Fourth Cofactor of the Great Wheel, now smote to ruin by your fall from grace, and your essential self is a six-winged, twenty-eyed lion-spider that breathes carbon dioxide and exhales liquid ammonia, but none of that remotely stops you from being Joe Wingam, the friendly owner of the local truck stop, who brings cookies to the PTA meetings every second Sunday. Actually, Demons are a really easy alien role to play: People who aren't immersed in their experiences. That whole thing you do when you emote your character's freaking out while you're thinking "Okay, great, so what weapons are in this room"? That's how demons actually think. And once you realise that, you've got a great hook for how bizarre their thing is.
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Nov 13, 2015 01:03
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spectralent posted:Actually, Demons are a really easy alien role to play: People who aren't immersed in their experiences. That whole thing you do when you emote your character's freaking out while you're thinking "Okay, great, so what weapons are in this room"? That's how demons actually think. And once you realise that, you've got a great hook for how bizarre their thing is. Exactly. A demon that actually, unwittingly reacts exactly the way it's thinking at all times is a pathological demon. Every little tic, every reaction, every outward emotion is a deliberate choice. Some demons suck at this, and thus come off as  monotone Matrix-style Agents even if they're a storm of internal emotion. Other demons are fantastic at perfectly mirroring human reactions, and may even make a deliberate effort to be genuine with their reactions, but that makes it all the creepier when they can just stop and snap to a completely different demeanor in a heartbeat. Demons approximate humanity, they were human enough to Fall, but they are decidedly not human. When it comes down to it, all demons have a perfect level of sociopathic detachment from their projected emotions, even though they have genuine ones.Imagine interrogating a husband who's a complete emotional trainwreck over the death of his wife, big wet tears and genuine offense and fear at the slightest hint of suspicion, then you show him a picture of him at a crime scene. His posture hardens, the tears stop instantly, his face goes slack, his eyes grow cold, and he starts lying so convincingly that he makes you doubt your own evidence for a second, and can only conclude he truly believes his own web of lies. That's a demon backed into a corner. When the act stops working, they'll stop acting.
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Nov 13, 2015 01:17
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I mean, the major thing about that to me is that it represents the IC/OOC split that naturally emerges anyway, and brings it nicely into the game. A lot of players are amateur tacticians and operation directors just because that's a big bit of the hobby. But in most games, the whole "Is he going to respond better with a sob story here or is getting mad going to go more interesting places?" thing is a decision you're making for your character, or, again, freaking out IC while planning the counterattack OOC. It's really easy, I found, to point out this is a very real process demons are undergoing, and players get it. You don't have to give them a bennies or emotional guidance system; just make it clear their demons aren't the people they're pretending to be. Those are their PCs. Your demon's thought processes are like yours. So, I'm not disagreeing, to be clear, but rather re-establishing that I think it doesn't matter that demons don't have an RP mechanic like the Beast or Satiety, since they make use of one of the most basic RP mechanics in any game: You're not your PC. And neither's your demon.
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Nov 13, 2015 01:29
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Kurieg posted:Who was behind Heirs to Hell then? That one was him, afaik. His Promethean supplements were good, too. I wonder if he's just better at working with established concepts rather than having to craft something wholesale.
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Nov 13, 2015 02:56
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My guess is that the original topic made it closer to home for him and so it became harder for him to judge its quality and merits, or to see the incresing problems in its tone.
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Nov 13, 2015 03:01
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zeal posted:What? What the hell is the point of playing a dragon if you don't play a dragon at some point? Daeren posted:Exactly. A demon that actually, unwittingly reacts exactly the way it's thinking at all times is a pathological demon. Every little tic, every reaction, every outward emotion is a deliberate choice. Some demons suck at this, and thus come off as
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Nov 13, 2015 04:08
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With Beast - ignoring for the moment the major thematic problems - it seems like they should have gone slightly closer to Demon. Make it so you are not, and have never been, human. For the purposes of ordering a pizza, you put on your human face (maybe literally. Hey, gently caress it - you're a twelve-foot spider-lady who feeds on mortal terror, may as well own an actual skinsuit!) and try not to freak out at how wrong it feels. Set it up as a game line where the mechanical penalties, the need to burn power, etc isn't so much when you're doing non-human things, but comes from putting on that mask and trying to blend in with the foolish mortals who perpetually try and interrupt your fiendish plans. Rampaging downtown as Godzilla? Easy enough if you're Godzilla. Getting an airplane ticket from Hawaii to DC so you can fight your archnemesis, the Bogman of Baltimore, without being shot to pieces on the way for being a rampaging Godzilla? Not quite so easy, so put on your skinsuit and try to remember how humans do things. Also it becomes a perfect nerd allegory: weird, socially inept creatures blustering their way through society while trying to hide that they are fundamentally horrifying creatures at their core.* Basically I'm saying just make it a game where you play a scooby-doo villain. (* says the man wasting his life compiling the entire oWoD.)
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Nov 13, 2015 05:25
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Feeding on fear is like, the lamest and most pathetic thing for a monster to do ever.
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Nov 13, 2015 05:26
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Ferrinus posted:Feeding on fear is like, the lamest and most pathetic thing for a monster to do ever. What about monsters that feed on ironic detachment?
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Nov 13, 2015 05:27
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I think we call those hipster spirits.
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Nov 13, 2015 05:48
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Ferrinus posted:Feeding on fear is like, the lamest and most pathetic thing for a monster to do ever. Agreed. Go full spiderlady and feed on the juicy innards of the mortals or go home.
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Nov 13, 2015 05:56
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Ocanthus posted:Yea, I had thought the reason the Avatar Storm didn't kill sleepers but shredded mages was because Sleeper had no Avatar to interact with and instead embedded themselves and forcibly Awakened people. That might just be in one of the specific Ascension endgame scenarios though. That, and all of the Avatars that became the Avatar Storm shards were just kind of floating around in the Umbra waiting to get delivered by psychopomps (back in the day) or just reincarnated into people which is by the Nephandi ones were so bad because they kept coming back. Might be mixing up my metaplots though. Iirc, the avatar storm got full of shards because a lot of mages hung out in the umbra, especially high-power or elder mages, because there's no paradox in the umbra so it's a magical safe space where you can chill in your demiplane, or have Gandalf style firework competitions, or be actually 600 years old without reality pitching a shitfit at you. So a sudden massive storm breaks through, and all these guys bite it and their avatars are shattered and become embedded in the boundaries of the umbra. Also mages tended to hold their big conclaves and things in the umbra, because it was easier to get to teleport to someone's personal demiplane than to have everyone (currently in a magical cold war) gather in one easily targeted place, so some mages fell afoul of it because of that, I think particularly in one of the Ascension endings. I think you might be mixing up the aftereffects, from Revised edition, where because of the storm shards embedded in the gauntlet you took aggravated damage for every failed dice when passing into the umbra, since the shards were effectively magnetised to your awakened avatar. Out-of-universe the reason was they wanted to have Revised be more grounded, less High Adventure, and making travel to the Umbra more punishing was part of that. I think it was kinda dumb, because the umbra was rad, and Werewolf wasn't doing much with a realm of concepts made manifest anyway, but trippy spirit adventures and stealing werewolf's spotlight were deemed a bad thing. Edit: Just realised, the avatar shards embedding into people is I think one of the other Ascension endings, the one that heavily involved Psychopomps (who I think were only ever mentioned in one other book)? Nephandi do have the thing where their worst aspect is the predatory reincarnation part, they'll either corrupt you now or kill you so they can corrupt you next time, and once they've got you, every reincarnation will either be Nephandi or have a strong pull to become one. Ambi fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Nov 13, 2015 |
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Nov 13, 2015 05:58
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Pope Guilty posted:Really? I thought you had to be a reincarnated person with a special Avatar in order to awaken. Every human being has an Avatar, and they all probably reincarnate and even oscillate between Sleeping and Awakened states. Most people are Sleepers, so they only "magic" they can do is enforce the Consensus. In Ascension, becoming a mage isn't an innate or accidentally-triggered state, but an achievement. Theoretically, anybody can do it, but nobody really knows how to make it happen reliably. You probably have a better chance if you study under a mage, but it may well be that your Avatar subtly got you to apprentice yourself. So anyone could be a person whose Avatar has been through a dozen Awakened lives, but just hasn't got around to it this time. It's pretty strongly implied that an Avatar that's Awakened before will tend to Awaken again, however. Nobody knows whether your Avatar is your true self, some emergent quality of being human, or something that's hitched along for the ride with humans. Anyway, the Avatar Storm in Revised consisted of mostly Sleeping Avatars and a few Awakened that were ripped apart by various cascading disasters and prevented from reincarnating. Mages got hit by the Storm because their Avatars are Awakened and violently reacted to competitive intrusion from another Avatar. Sleepers didn't because their Avatars are Asleep and passive. It's sort of like if you lived in an ultramodern house with lots of glass surfaces, and an intruder crept in. If you're asleep he hangs out, eats your food and watches Netflix. If you're awake you grab that rear end in a top hat and smash him through layers of glass before hurling him off your balcony. Unfortunately, in this analogy "you" are your Avatar and that cool house is your Pattern. In Judgment (the ToJ scenario I wrote) Sleepers tended to Awaken because eventually somebody rummaging through your poo poo in your house wakes you up. It created a vital disturbance. If I remember correctly, I had to cut a bit describing a Seeking when you've got an Avatar shard in you: an inner journey that gets interrupted by this foreign element that the representations of your Avatar are immediately hostile to. You know, like when Uncle Grandpa showed up in Steven Universe. In that example I'm the Avatar and change the channel because that was terrible, Jesus Christ Cartoon Network.
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Nov 13, 2015 06:27
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MalcolmSheppard posted:So anyone could be a person whose Avatar has been through a dozen Awakened lives, but just hasn't got around to it this time. It's pretty strongly implied that an Avatar that's Awakened before will tend to Awaken again, however. Nobody knows whether your Avatar is your true self, some emergent quality of being human, or something that's hitched along for the ride with humans. Of course, in reality we all know it's the latter, specifically a cannibalized piece of a slain angel or demon. Haha, just joshin' with ya!
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Nov 13, 2015 06:30
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Ambi posted:Nephandi do have the thing where their worst aspect is the predatory reincarnation part, they'll either corrupt you now or kill you so they can corrupt you next time, and once they've got you, every reincarnation will either be Nephandi or have a strong pull to become one. Canonically, every Nephandi who reincarnated and wasn't evil was faking. No coming back from the inversion of your soul. Couldn't even be a Marauder, once you'd pledged yourself that was it. Infernalism for DA Mage was a good book, I thought it was better than the equivalent book for Mage even if that one did include playable Marauders.
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Nov 13, 2015 07:02
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Thinking about it, we shiuld have gotten something more like Beast: the Drakengard.
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Nov 13, 2015 07:04
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MonsieurChoc posted:Thinking about it, we shiuld have gotten something more like Beast: the Drakengard. Caim fits just fine in Werewolf as a Rank 5 Murder Spirit.
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Nov 13, 2015 07:10
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Ambi posted:Avatar Chat MalcolmSheppard posted:Avatar Chat Thanks for the clarifications! Figured I was getting all the interpretations jumbled
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Nov 13, 2015 15:12
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Zereth posted:Yeah, I feel like the game really should have approached not from the "you're a human with a special soul" angle, but from the "You are not, and never have been, a human, you're a loving dragon and you're just wearing a thin human mask because you don't want to get shot out of the sky by fighter jets" angle. I've always liked the idea that if characters from other splats use any of their powers to find out what Morality you are, Demons read back with something like "about 60% human" instead of any amount of good/evil. That must be so freaky for a Mage or a Vampire or something. "Ah yes, I shall search his soul for sin to determine if he is a good person or not" ... "yes, he is very definitely human." It's a thing I think Beast actually did well. You scan them for Morality, and the answer you get back is "They are very hungry." That's freaky as gently caress when you were looking for their morality.
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Nov 13, 2015 23:21
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Thank you everyone for reminding me how much I love Demon. I've not played any WoD for ages so I forgot how awesome the Demon rules are. Man, I need to play that game again.
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Nov 14, 2015 00:51
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I just got the 2nd Vampire book and it feels a little overly complicated. Maybe in practice it will make more sense but the structure of it gives a lot of new terms before they mechanics are described. It's a game book, not a Frank Herbert novel.
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Nov 14, 2015 02:09
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Inzombiac posted:I just got the 2nd Vampire book and it feels a little overly complicated. Maybe in practice it will make more sense but the structure of it gives a lot of new terms before they mechanics are described. The rules for feeding have two different kinds; one system for people who want to roll dice where the ST is supposed to motivate players to play the role of the victim and nearby NPCs by offering their regular characters Willpower points and a different method for people who want to roleplay that involves a complicated storygame[1]-like scene of declarations and responses where the ST or feeding player can hand out Beats to players for participating as NPCs - that then ends in a dice roll. The really weird thing is that the mechanical result of feeding depends on which approach you take. [1] Like, Jeepform RPGs and stuff like Polaris
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Nov 14, 2015 02:18
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Vampire and Werewolf 2E both increased the number of special powers, properties, and exceptions a character started with and needed of track of straight out the gate, before any Disciplines or Gifts ever got written down on your character sheet, and I don't think it was to either game's advantage. It remains to be seen what Mage is going to look like, because of the big three it was probably the game that front-loaded PCs with the most special actions and options (I'm not talking about the actual effects of the Arcana, I mean like the two different kinds of pattern scouring, high speech, atlantean rules, the different spell factors, ritual vs. spontaneous casting, arcane scrutiny...), so even if 2E just keeps that list as-is it'll be dumping a load of stuff on your plate as soon as you make a guy.
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Nov 14, 2015 02:20
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If you're going to cut anything out of Requiem 2, skip the Predatory Aura. It has a lot of rules for something that's trying to express a simple concept. That'll save you a big headache.
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Nov 14, 2015 03:26
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Has Bruce Baugh's Facebook icon always been the lock from the cover of first edition Wraith? Because if not, that's pretty exciting.
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Nov 15, 2015 16:35
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How well does Mage handle a single big badass Mage fighting against a party of 4/5 basically starting level PCs on his own? Purely hypothetically of course.
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Nov 15, 2015 17:13
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How badass of a Mage and what splat are the PCs? If the Mage is a master of at least one Arcanum, generic humans are probably hosed (assuming the Mage wipes everyone out before his defenses are unraveled by disbelief); freshly generated Mages will likely fare even worse since they don't even have disbelief to protect them. The Mage can cast their best combat rote, roll their huge dice pool agains the PCs' paltry Resolve 3 + Gnosis 1, and teleport them all to Siberia.
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Nov 15, 2015 18:36
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Is it sad I see this and the first thing I think is "Oh poo poo a Tzimisce sculptor?
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Nov 15, 2015 19:44
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crime fighting hog posted:Is it sad I see this and the first thing I think is "Oh poo poo a Tzimisce sculptor? That seems like a fairly reasonable response.
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Nov 15, 2015 21:52
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Prison Warden posted:How well does Mage handle a single big badass Mage fighting against a party of 4/5 basically starting level PCs on his own? Purely hypothetically of course. It depends on how well the starting mages can think laterally. In the right situation, sheer cleverness can outdo raw power. However, if the big badass really wants them dead and is willing to fight as clever/dirty as the average PC, it could get real ugly real quickly. It also depends quite heavily on what the big bad mage specializes in.
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Nov 15, 2015 22:39
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Circumstances are king in WoD combat, and Mages are often the kings of preptime. Even a newly Awakened Mage can do some pretty incredible things with a few hours to prepare themselves, and even an experienced Awakened is going to be in a lot of trouble if they get taken by surprise in an alleyway.
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Nov 15, 2015 23:56
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Axelgear posted:Circumstances are king in WoD combat, and Mages are often the kings of preptime. Even a newly Awakened Mage can do some pretty incredible things with a few hours to prepare themselves, and even an experienced Awakened is going to be in a lot of trouble if they get taken by surprise in an alleyway. This is basically what happened. Without getting too much into it, the players had more trouble with the single VASCU agent who showed up after the enemy Cabal's sleepwalker called the cops than they did the badass Adamantine Arrow grandpa they were fighting. I'm super glad I decided to throw in a couple of VASCU agents, since the players immediately assumed that the weird mental stuff that one of them is doing means he's a puppet under Seer control. They're getting super into the "trust no one" thing I've got going, they have no clue whether the Adamantine Arrow tried to kill them because he took the chance to eliminate a couple of young, inexperienced mages or if it's because he's really the Seer they're after.
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Nov 16, 2015 00:14
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