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Terrorforge posted:Here's a relevant question: how much of your life can you actually trade away to a demon before you've effectively made a soul pact? Because afaik there's nothing mechanical stopping any old mortal for bartering away their relationship to everyone they've ever known, every experience they've ever had, every significant object they've ever owned etc. etc. If a mortal can trade away, say, their entire childhood, I don't see any barriers to a Mage doing effectively the same with their life up until their Awakening. I think that's actually a pretty neat story hook and while I wouldn't want it to be repeatable I think that could be a lot of fun. I don't imagine that makes for a particularly stable person. Also I have visions of Memento as the player character gradually learns poo poo about their old life, which a Demon is currently living in.
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Jun 1, 2016 02:23
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I'm pretty sure if you sell your sympathetic name to a demon you wind up like Outis and just don't have a normal life or a sympathetic name (although I guess Outis didn't actually lose his sympathetic name). And all it cost you was everything you are! MAGES: BAD AT NEGOTIATION
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Jun 1, 2016 02:24
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Mendrian posted:I think that's actually a pretty neat story hook and while I wouldn't want it to be repeatable I think that could be a lot of fun. Yeah it's a neat idea; kind of a supernatural spin on the whole "junkie trading away increasingly precious things for their next fix" trope. You don't normally trade any memories, though. Only someone who is directly affected by the pact has memories altered. If you trade away your boyfriend to a demon, your boyfriend will think he's always been dating the demon, but you, the demon and anyone else who knows you or him will know that you used to be dating. It goes both ways, too; the demon gains no inherent understanding of what they've bought. That's why smart demons do research on their You could however spin that as a side effect of trading away too much; as you give up more and more of the relationships that connect you to the world, even you start to forget who you are. e: also that sounds a lot (though not quite) like a Fetch. Mummies and elder vampires also have shades of this, though obviously the lives they've forgotten were usually lived long ago and not taken over by anyone else - though it might certainly feel like the actions of another person Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 02:31
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What happens when a changeling sells the part of their mortal life that the fetch took over? Because that sounds like a great way to gently caress up a fetch you hate.
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Jun 1, 2016 02:59
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Yawgmoth posted:What happens when a changeling sells the part of their mortal life that the fetch took over? Because that sounds like a great way to gently caress up a fetch you hate. Doing this sort of thing is also possible a good way to make a Demon mad. Same way if a mage's enemy somehow got their names on the old sympathetic name and tried laying a whammy on. "Why did I just get hit by a lightning bolt?"
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Jun 1, 2016 03:03
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Yawgmoth posted:What happens when a changeling sells the part of their mortal life that the fetch took over? Because that sounds like a great way to gently caress up a fetch you hate. I'm...huh. Does this fall under the "you get hosed if you try to soul pact a supernatural entity/pact off their supernatural bits" or not? Because now I'm pondering the ramifications of a changeling pacting away parts of, or all of, their mortal life and basically the only thing I can solidly conclude is the end result would be loving scary.
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Jun 1, 2016 03:13
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Yawgmoth posted:What happens when a changeling sells the part of their mortal life that the fetch took over? Because that sounds like a great way to gently caress up a fetch you hate. Well that depends on how you envision the God-machine interacting with Arcadia and the True Fae. My gut instinct says that because pacts are all about transferring the connections that bind you to the real world, and a Changeling has been whisked away from reality and had those connections usurped, they're no longer yours to trade away. It occurs to me that a Fetch is quite a lot like a demon who's made a soul pact, only without expelling the contractee from existence. There's some crossover potential for you, especially since Changelings are also creatures of oaths and pacts. Hell, maybe a changeling comes hope to find that their usurper has in turn been usurped by an unknown creature of steel and hellfire - and it might even be willing to trade them back... e: poo poo, maybe fetches are demons and Arcadia is someone's Hell - or worse, Heaven Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 03:14
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Terrorforge posted:It occurs to me that a Fetch is quite a lot like a demon who's made a soul pact, only without expelling the contractee from existence. There's some crossover potential for you, especially since Changelings are also creatures of oaths and pacts. Y'know this conversation makes me remember one of the comments about Demon shortly before its teaser post about soul pacts was that they could do something that changelings in particular would find utterly horrifying. The mechanics for how pacts and pledges work are also incredibly similar, though that's almost certainly less "makes u think" and more that it was a solid mechanical skeleton to riff off of.
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Jun 1, 2016 03:17
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Mildly off-topic: if a Demon makes a pledge with a changeling with the Stricture "I won't lie to you," are they essentially getting free pledge points for that Stricture, since there's no way that that Demon can violate the pledge any way but intentionally? My instincts say yes, since supernatural truth perception reads Demons however they want it to do, but would it fall under the heading of "you don't get credit while making a pledge if the stricture is impossible to violate"? (Kind of a stupid question, I know, but it bugs me.)
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Jun 1, 2016 04:04
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Poltergrift posted:Mildly off-topic: if a Demon makes a pledge with a changeling with the Stricture "I won't lie to you," are they essentially getting free pledge points for that Stricture, since there's no way that that Demon can violate the pledge any way but intentionally? My instincts say yes, since supernatural truth perception reads Demons however they want it to do, but would it fall under the heading of "you don't get credit while making a pledge if the stricture is impossible to violate"? Sure you do; just because you can't violate it except on purpose doesn't mean you can't violate it.
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Jun 1, 2016 04:10
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Poltergrift posted:Mildly off-topic: if a Demon makes a pledge with a changeling with the Stricture "I won't lie to you," are they essentially getting free pledge points for that Stricture, since there's no way that that Demon can violate the pledge any way but intentionally? My instincts say yes, since supernatural truth perception reads Demons however they want it to do, but would it fall under the heading of "you don't get credit while making a pledge if the stricture is impossible to violate"? I know it's arguably against RAW, but I'd let the Wyrd smack a demon for consciously lying even if nobody but the demon can tell, because it enjoys people hoisting themselves through attempted rules lawyering.
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Jun 1, 2016 04:27
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How is DrivethruRPG's print on demand? I have the spirit of an octogenarian and like to have physical copies of books, but I don't want to spend money on them if they're going to fall apart or anything. I've heard the Mage 20 book's spine literally snaps in half because the book is gargantuan, and I wonder about the quality of other books. But, if the book is going to disintegrate after use, I'd obviously rather pay half price and just go for the PDFs.
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Jun 1, 2016 04:28
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FrostyPox posted:How is DrivethruRPG's print on demand? I have the spirit of an octogenarian and like to have physical copies of books, but I don't want to spend money on them if they're going to fall apart or anything. I've heard the Mage 20 book's spine literally snaps in half because the book is gargantuan, and I wonder about the quality of other books. But, if the book is going to disintegrate after use, I'd obviously rather pay half price and just go for the PDFs. I haven't had any issue with the 2e books. The paper and color quality are not up to what the 1e retail books were, but I have had no issue with heavy weekly use of my Werewolf book for the last 8 months or so.
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Jun 1, 2016 04:36
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Thanks! Physical books it is, or maybe the Physical book + PDF bundles.
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Jun 1, 2016 04:41
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Jumping back to W20 chat, I've decided to make a Metis Philodox Shadow Lord that's going to basically try to be Vetinari. 1) How boned am I? 2) How do I discourage other players wanting to make shadow lords just to be assholes? Our pack is pretty chill, follows crow, etc. 3) How on earth do I make "palms of hands face outwork" in to an actual flaw with mechanics?
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Jun 1, 2016 04:41
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citybeatnik posted:3) How on earth do I make "palms of hands face outwork" in to an actual flaw with mechanics? If you've got full on backwards hands, maybe something to do with dexterity-related rolls. If it's just textures/subtle, probably let people have a perception roll to realize, followed by a not insignificant social penalty from them going 
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Jun 1, 2016 04:49
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Daeren posted:If you've got full on backwards hands, maybe something to do with dexterity-related rolls. If it's just textures/subtle, probably let people have a perception roll to realize, followed by a not insignificant social penalty from them going Full on backwards hand. It was originally a bone gnawer named "Three Left Feet" before I decided to with Twice-Sinister the shadow lord. The dexterity difficulty does sound good though...
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Jun 1, 2016 04:52
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Terrorforge posted:Well that depends on how you envision the God-machine interacting with Arcadia and the True Fae. My gut instinct says that because pacts are all about transferring the connections that bind you to the real world, and a Changeling has been whisked away from reality and had those connections usurped, they're no longer yours to trade away. I'm not up on Werewolf except some of the core lore from oWoD and the like, but the book intimates that Luna has power that's potentially as-or-more formidable than the GM's, which seems kind of nuts. The GM's basically a cancer that's infected the whole of the universe. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 05:08
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Selling the part of your life before you were kidnapped and turned into a Changeling sounds like a stellar way to shoot your Clarity straight to hell because you no longer have the reference point of reality that having been a mortal human being gives. So sure, you hosed your fetch proper, but now you have no loving idea what's real and isn't because the part of you that you rely on to tell you that no longer ever happened to you.
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Jun 1, 2016 05:09
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WOD monsters worry about the masquerade or what have you being broken - but the masquerade is broken all the time, it just ends up looking like this:       
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Jun 1, 2016 05:41
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I want a story based on the DBZ show that didn't exist.
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Jun 1, 2016 05:44
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"Disappearing Weed" I suspect there wasn't any "Glitch in the matrix" there. E: I mean, there was no "glitch in the matrix" in any of those, but that one can be attributed to something other than paranoid schizophrenia.
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Jun 1, 2016 05:46
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At some point you have to actually question what, short of a vampire Embracing the President and the Joint Chiefs on live television, would actually break the Masquerade in any meaningful sense.
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Jun 1, 2016 06:08
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Pope Guilty posted:At some point you have to actually question what, short of a vampire Embracing the President and the Joint Chiefs on live television, would actually break the Masquerade in any meaningful sense. The Masquerade can be preserved from both ends. Revealing the threat before it is nullified could jeopardize Project Door-Doom, among others. Relax citizen, we have it all under control.
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Jun 1, 2016 06:18
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I wasn't aware that was a subreddit, but I am loving it.
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Jun 1, 2016 06:22
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Network Zero's gonna keep trying somehow.
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Jun 1, 2016 06:22
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The official Mage point of view is that the Lie is the force that stops most people remembering about it or talking about the supernatural, but naturally this is only true in a Mage game, or a game using Mage-dominant cosmology.
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Jun 1, 2016 06:48
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bewilderment posted:The official Mage point of view is that the Lie is the force that stops most people remembering about it or talking about the supernatural, but naturally this is only true in a Mage game, or a game using Mage-dominant cosmology.
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Jun 1, 2016 07:04
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Zereth posted:Isn't this mechanically only true for Supernal-related stuff? Everything else is on its own for hiding itself.  So, mechanically, yes, but "Why does humanity not collectively notice all the weirdness around them" is answered in Mage by "that's the lie at work".
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Jun 1, 2016 07:30
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I like to think with things like the Masquerade, there's very little chance of vampires being collectively outed. I think that's what vampires are scared of, sure, but someone releases a video of two vampires slugging it out in Manhattan most viewers are going to discount it as a movie set or a viral ad campaign they don't quite understand (is this for Twix?). The problem is that it galvanizes just enough people - usually the wrong kind of people - to make life uncomfortable for vampires. It puts a few zealous and brave people on an obsessive collusion course with vampire-kind.
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Jun 1, 2016 13:44
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Mendrian posted:I like to think with things like the Masquerade, there's very little chance of vampires being collectively outed. I think that's what vampires are scared of, sure, but someone releases a video of two vampires slugging it out in Manhattan most viewers are going to discount it as a movie set or a viral ad campaign they don't quite understand (is this for Twix?). The problem is that it galvanizes just enough people - usually the wrong kind of people - to make life uncomfortable for vampires. It puts a few zealous and brave people on an obsessive collusion course with vampire-kind. You'd think that Twitter and social media would make it easier for people to out vampires, if only as a nuclear option by the Sabbat to expose the various ghouls and what not that have stuck around for too long. But then one of the things about oWoD is that the masses are stupid and lazy in much the way that the elites are all either corrupt or impotent.
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Jun 1, 2016 13:48
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The God-Machine is supposed to be largely responsible for the World of Darkness being what it is, and it takes great pains to hide itself and its agents. I don't think I've seen it stated explicitly that it actively maintains the Lie or the Masquerade, but even if it isn't deliberately wiping away evidence of the existence of wolfmen and frankensteins it's probably spent the entirety of human evolutionary history instilling us with a deep-rooted instinct to leave weird poo poo well enough alone. e: the new World of Darkness, that is citybeatnik posted:You'd think that Twitter and social media would make it easier for people to out vampires, if only as a nuclear option by the Sabbat to expose the various ghouls and what not that have stuck around for too long. 
Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 13:58
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The other thing about the CofD world is that in many ways, the Masquerade/whatever...uh, isn't upheld. People experience weird poo poo and learn to ignore it. They pretend it doesn't happen, or they become hunters. But there's a consistent tone, at least in the mortals and hunter books, that the average person is willfully ignorant, rather than deceived or actually ignorant. It's a thing that exists, and you know it exists, but you pretend it doesn't so you can pretend that your world makes sense.
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Jun 1, 2016 14:37
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Mors Rattus posted:The other thing about the CofD world is that in many ways, the Masquerade/whatever...uh, isn't upheld. People experience weird poo poo and learn to ignore it. They pretend it doesn't happen, or they become hunters. But there's a consistent tone, at least in the mortals and hunter books, that the average person is willfully ignorant, rather than deceived or actually ignorant. It's a thing that exists, and you know it exists, but you pretend it doesn't so you can pretend that your world makes sense. I think of it as the Sunnydale Principle.
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Jun 1, 2016 14:46
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I don't like the idea of too many artificial / metaphysical blinders in CofD; that feels like the sort of thing that pulls things away from human agency, which strikes me as more of a habit of the oWoD. Of course, things like the God-Machine and the Exarchs put in more of a "cosmic war" element. And fine for folks that want to focus on that, if does make me wonder if there's a meandering away from the more local and personal stories that were the nWoD's strength.
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Jun 1, 2016 16:02
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Mendrian posted:I like to think with things like the Masquerade, there's very little chance of vampires being collectively outed. I think that's what vampires are scared of, sure, but someone releases a video of two vampires slugging it out in Manhattan most viewers are going to discount it as a movie set or a viral ad campaign they don't quite understand (is this for Twix?). The problem is that it galvanizes just enough people - usually the wrong kind of people - to make life uncomfortable for vampires. It puts a few zealous and brave people on an obsessive collusion course with vampire-kind. The second edition of Requiem puts a nice touch on this. Outside of its context as one of the hoary old Traditions inherited by vampire culture from the Roman Camarilla, "the Masquerade" is no longer a term for the collective ignorance of humanity. (As Mors says, in the CofD humanity isn't collectively ignorant, but collectively feigns ignorance for its own comfort.) Vampires as a whole don't have a Masquerade. Individual vampires have Masquerades, because that's what's actually relevant and dangerous. Your Masquerade is your effort to avoid the people around you twigging on that something about you, personally, is unnatural and dangerous, because videos of dead men moving jittery fast on Youtube Netzo affiliates won't motivate people to take up torches and stakes, but if the rumors about that advisory contractor management fawns over get too prevalent and too wild, some of the braver dudes down at the docks are going to get interested enough to sniff around. And come time to act, their neighbors are going to whistle and look the other way. There's no need for arson charges, officer, something must have just caught fire in there. These things happen.
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Jun 1, 2016 16:23
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Admittedly I haven't played a lot of God-Machine stuff, but I feel that at least in that case, the vastness of the antagonist kind of helps with a local setting. Because you can never truly beat nor escape it, it serves the same narrative function as the storm that traps the protagonists in the haunted house; it answers the question of "why don't you just leave" with "there's nowhere to go". Imo it's less of a cosmic war than a cosmic dictatorship, and God-Machine stories are less about fomenting revolution and more about stealing enough potatoes to feed your family. e: unless that's what you want to do, natch Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 16:28
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My favorite bit of "masquerade" Stuff in 2e is Lunacy. If you gently caress up the roll to resist lunacy hard enough you get dragged into it wholesale.
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Jun 1, 2016 16:32
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Kurieg posted:My favorite bit of "masquerade" Stuff in 2e is Lunacy. If you gently caress up the roll to resist lunacy hard enough you get dragged into it wholesale. It can even spontaneously make you a wolf-blooded!
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Jun 1, 2016 17:24
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Some kind soul has transcribed Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 short horror story The Horror of the Heights, which I recommend. In narrative objects it will probably remind you of something like Lovecraft; the sensitive eccentric and his hideous demise, the story reconstructed from a bloodstained diary, the ominously-titled manuscript ("The Joyce-Armstrong Fragment" is a hell of a grimoire name), etc. It's not a "cosmic horror" story, though- which I like, since in a World of Darkness you want horror on every scale. I especially like the way Doyle spends a lot of time painting "literally the sky" as a sort of alien, undiscovered country, writing in a time when traveling through it was the province of a small band of explorers. I feel like this story describes a common arc for the more adventurous, dedicated kind of hunter. "Forty-three thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me" are the sort of last recorded words you'd see pop up often.
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Jun 1, 2016 19:31
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