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DB, I've been meaning to ask, is there likely to be a legacy book for 2e in the future? Or is it making your own?
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Dec 11, 2016 13:49
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Vanguard Warden posted:So I am almost entirely new to WoD (outside of user-stories I've read on forums and the VtM:B videogame), and I'm looking to run a game of Chronicles of Darkness 2e for a similarly unfamiliar group soon, probably VtR 2e. Does anyone have any specific advice for STing nWoD2e outside of the usual advice for GMing any game? To add on the pursuit of goals and poo poo, I like to use the aspiration feature to encourage this. My group tries to have a short, medium, and long-term aspiration at all times. Another thing my group does is put all accumulated xp into a pot and split it up evenly at the end of each session. This is to help keep everyone at a similar power level in case some players aren't as comfortable or proficient in interacting with the beats xp system as others.
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Dec 11, 2016 16:13
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Vanguard Warden posted:So I am almost entirely new to WoD (outside of user-stories I've read on forums and the VtM:B videogame), and I'm looking to run a game of Chronicles of Darkness 2e for a similarly unfamiliar group soon, probably VtR 2e. Does anyone have any specific advice for STing nWoD2e outside of the usual advice for GMing any game? For me, it was getting used to different methods of problem solving. I'd been most familiar with D&D for my prior rpg experience so my mindset was always thinking of a dramatic showdown which would inevitably result in a violent and dramatic conclusion. And while violence can, and probably will, be part of the campaign the player's should be aware that they have many, many ways of dealing with problems. Social engineering, blackmail, betrayal and deception are all tools they have available and, from an ST's perspective, should work. If they have an enemy and spend the time and effort absolutely destroying their social connections and turning them into a pariah, it may not be the dramatic rooftop showdown you imagined but the end result is the same. Those tools are also things they should be on the lookout for when dealing with other vampires. It shouldn't be a constant thing, where everyone they meet is trying to double cross them like the Johnson stereotype from shadowrun, but its probably going to happen sooner or later. Vampires are assholes. Also try to be open minded. Because of the broad nature of the tools the players have available you might find that their enemy's plan has an exploitable flaw you didn't realize when you came up with it. That's great! That means they're thinking about things the right way. You still might throw some obstacles their way to keep things interesting but it's a great sign they're engaged in the game and thinking creatively. That's all I can really think of at the moment. I hope its helpful advice.
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Dec 11, 2016 16:55
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:DB, I've been meaning to ask, is there likely to be a legacy book for 2e in the future? Or is it making your own? Maybe. I had an idea for a new format for them. I have a couple of nearly-finished 2nd ed Legacies I had to make for my own chronicle I'll put up online, once I've finished writing the current thing I'm writing.
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Dec 11, 2016 17:03
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Demon question: The rulebook clearly states that the duration of a Pact does not have to match between the demon and the signer, the canonical example being a compulsive gambler trading his wife away forever in exchange for one day of riches. The rulebook also states that "Duration aspects count toward the demon’s total, since the ability to dictate the term of a contract benefits the demon." How do these things interact? The examples seem to suggest that when the duration is equal on both sides, it's the demon that pays the cost. But what if it isn't? In the gambler's wife example, surely that must count as a deal stacked heavily in favor of the demon? Or are demon's free to shaft mortals on duration as much as they want, limited only by their ability to make someone agree to such a lovely deal?
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Dec 11, 2016 17:04
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Demons are free to shaft mortals. Cost, however, is the higher of the two durations, on the demon's side of the equation at all times.
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Dec 11, 2016 17:16
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Kibner posted:Another thing my group does is put all accumulated xp into a pot and split it up evenly at the end of each session. This is to help keep everyone at a similar power level in case some players aren't as comfortable or proficient in interacting with the beats xp system as others.
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Dec 11, 2016 17:45
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People have already dropped some great Vampire advice so here's a couple of fastballs: * Ask yourself "what television show do you most want this game to look like?" Are you The Wire? The West Wing? True Detective? This may seem like a shallow question but the meaty part underneath is, "What are the themes and tones of your game?" If you tell your players up-front what your expectations are - "this is going to be The West Wing, with fangs" - you can expect them to formulate coherent goals around that. Vampire is a huge game, and while themes of violence and personal horror run under the whole thing, the collection of different clans, covenants, bloodlines, and settings means that without direction you can end up with a muddy brown color of a game as players try to player Vampire Scooby Doo alongside Vampire Murder Club. Better yet ask them what show they'd like it to emulate. * When you write the game, don't focus so much on plot arcs as character arcs. Plot is relevant because you want something to push the players towards some kind of conclusion; but it's much more useful to know this NPC hates this NPC but owes their life to this NPC, who in turn is a childe of the second NPC etc. Once you have a framework for your most important NPC - and resist the urge to write hundreds of NPCs - the game will largely run itself. * Vampires are by nature stagnant and tends towards safe, stable lives whenever possible which is of course the antithesis of drama. Go after PC assets sparingly but directly; you don't want them to feel like their XP is wasted because you're constantly burning their haven down. Ideally go after assets that aren't explicit, things that aren't tied up in Merit dots. * Good antagonists are rational but impassioned; they do things that make sense but are motivated by desires and emotions. PCs, in my experience, and particular in Vampire, for some reason, do their best to rise above insults and barbs, avoid conflict, and don't react unless they absolutely know they are in the right. And that's fine. Your antagonists should respond more sympathetically or, even better, pathologically. * At its heart Vampire plays two games at once. It forces characters to examine how much of a monster they want to be while simultaneously asking them to navigate a political mire where they cannot possibly hope to please everyone without antagonizing someone. Use that to fuel the drama in your stories. It's possible to play kickin' rad games of unruly punk-rock neonates rolling around the country in a busted rear end bus hunting dog-sized supernatural spiders or whatever but I'm dealing with the default assumptions. Supernatural elements should create scenarios where characters - PC and NPC - are forced to voice and act on opinions, which is where Vampire's political interactions really shine.
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Dec 11, 2016 20:35
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Well, obviously, every single World of Darkness game and non-World of Darkness game is The Wire.
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Dec 11, 2016 20:39
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Kibner posted:Another thing my group does is put all accumulated xp into a pot and split it up evenly at the end of each session. This is to help keep everyone at a similar power level in case some players aren't as comfortable or proficient in interacting with the beats xp system as others. Yeah, when I noticed that XP was earned per-player I immediately thought about adding up the group's beats at the end of each session, dividing it by the player count, and then rounding it up to the nearest XP to end sessions at clean and neat totals. I feel like some of the people in my group would be very much not okay with the each player's XP totals being all over the place. Thanks for the advice, guys, it's all been super useful. Does anyone have any specific advice about running a mixed Vampire/Hunter game? I've already heard the most common suggestion on the subject (to just not do it, especially if you're new), but I'm not sure that I could convince some of the people in my group to play a pure Vampire game, and adding mortal PCs to the mix doesn't seem like it would complicate the rules/water down the theme by too much. My plan was to calculate an amount of extra XP to give the hunters to bring them up to a rough equilibrium with the vampire PCs, and find a really good excuse for them to work together.
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Dec 11, 2016 22:17
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Vanguard Warden posted:Yeah, when I noticed that XP was earned per-player I immediately thought about adding up the group's beats at the end of each session, dividing it by the player count, and then rounding it up to the nearest XP to end sessions at clean and neat totals. I feel like some of the people in my group would be very much not okay with the each player's XP totals being all over the place. This is usually flat-out stated as an optional rule. Only a few books don't have it. I'd never run a 2e game without Group Beats.
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Dec 11, 2016 22:33
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Or, in the case of werewolf, it's not even optional, the optional rule is 'don't do this thing.'
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Dec 11, 2016 22:43
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Ferrinus posted:Well, obviously, every single World of Darkness game and non-World of Darkness game is It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
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Dec 11, 2016 23:10
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Vanguard Warden posted:Thanks for the advice, guys, it's all been super useful. Does anyone have any specific advice about running a mixed Vampire/Hunter game? I've already heard the most common suggestion on the subject (to just not do it, especially if you're new), but I'm not sure that I could convince some of the people in my group to play a pure Vampire game, and adding mortal PCs to the mix doesn't seem like it would complicate the rules/water down the theme by too much. My plan was to calculate an amount of extra XP to give the hunters to bring them up to a rough equilibrium with the vampire PCs, and find a really good excuse for them to work together. Honestly you might run into problems with this, you might not, it really depends on the group. One problem that may arise is no amount of xp is going to fix the disparity between human skills and vampires having disciplines. The smoothest talker isn't as effective as the vamp who snaps their fingers and voila, mind control. Vampires also have ways of boosting their stats way above the human maximum. The big thing that the humans have as far as real advantages go is running around during the day when vampires have to sleep, but when playing a game you can't really do that without splitting the group in half for relatively long periods of time. Those are the big things I can think of but honestly you know your group better than I do. If they won't be bothered by this stuff then I wouldn't worry about it too much.
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Dec 11, 2016 23:27
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I'm working up a little post on how the series Utopia lends itself beautifully to being inspiration media for the oWoD, while we're on the subject, and last night I had a lightbulb moment. In a Werewolf take on it, Philip Carville - a brilliant man prone to delusion - is utterly, completely dedicated to reducing the global population to an enormous extent. Carville is a perfect illustration of why it's a drat good thing there are very few Ratkin in high places. The only problem with that read is that his viewpoint shifts, but we might readily account for that as a result of him losing a little of his gibbering Wyld spark from all that time in a lab or being too in touch with his homid side once he spawns his daughter. " Scientist: Besides, there are three thousand five hundred species of mosquito. They've been around for a hundred million years. You think you can just yank them out of existence? I mean, you do realize half the birds in the Arctic tundra will starve to death. I mean, you have actually thought of that, or are you loving idiots? Phillip: Cure malaria? Why do you want to cure malaria? Malaria is doing a great job, leave malaria alone. Scientist: Young man, you are drunk. Phillip: Yes, I am. And in the morning we'll both still be cunts. ... Let me explain something to you. The sun throws a certain amount of energy onto this planet. We turn it into food, clothing, shelter, etc. It supports an amount of us, and it took 30,000 years for that amount to become one billion. Then we found a way to use ancient sunlight, sunlight trapped in oil and coal. We started to live off that. What happened? In just 130 years, our population doubled. The next billion took thirty years. The fourth billion has taken just 14. So here's the question. What do you think is going to happen when that oil and coal runs out in, say, a hundred years? When there's ten billion living on a planet that can support only one?" Hell, the entire Network could be turned into an amazing storyline about a faction of Bone Gnawers, Glass Walkers, and Ratkin who realized that the right way to deal with mankind is mass sterilization, and that the only way to go about that is to dose almost everyone at once with the agent. Race against time to stop them by the more pro-human Garou, while the others stop, shrug, and go 'actually that's a nice way to handle the impergium's return, go ahead'. Civil war in the Garou Nation and amongst the Fera, especially if the genetic group the agent excludes from effect just happens to be the kinfolk of only one tribe or sub-tribe faction. Red Talons and Black Furies screaming and tearing open trucks full of the flu vaccine because - even if they agree in principle with limiting human reproduction, especially in a non-violent way - they still oppose the Weaver and the Wyrm, who are both so thoroughly intertwined with the Network's goals that it's end result won't be idyllic utopia but a horrifying dystopian Mad Max future.
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Dec 12, 2016 01:08
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Loomer posted:oWod Utopia stuff. I use this show as inspiration for my MtAw 2e game. It's just so very full of mystery and questions that to me are not sufficiently answered. I was disappointed it didn't get a 3rd series and it was shot beautifully. I spun it out further, but some of the major mysteries run in the same directions as that show did. Now I have to watch it again.
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Dec 12, 2016 02:30
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It's one of those shows where I keep finding any excuse to rewatch it. Strongly recommended viewing for anyone running oMage whether they want to harvest its story or not, just for being great at conveying the idea of how terrifying the Technocracy actually is on the personal level of those being pursued. Dead-eyed killers who turn up at your door, the terror of the ubiquity of surveillance being actively used against you, knowing that at any moment they might be at your door again. A vast, seemingly monolithic enemy that rules as much by fear they might be listening or the police officer you're talking to might work for them than by actually being omnipotent and omniscient - and worse, an enemy motivated not by those simple and easy things like greed, hatred, or revenge, but by righteous zealotry and raw idealism. An enemy that can be entirely certain it's doing the right thing for everyone when it's sending men to pull your eyes out to get the information out of you, shooting a school full of children to frame and discredit you, or shattering the lives of your loved ones to try and lure you out.
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Dec 12, 2016 02:41
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Personally, I could never really get through it. It's very stylish, it looked great, but I didn't find a ton of substance under the style. The plot just kept not making enough sense for me to follow it from scene to scene and I had to give up around episode 5. ...I think. This is the one about the comic book and it has the two weirdo hitmen, right?
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Dec 12, 2016 02:49
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Yes, though I'm surprised you made it to episode five and weren't a convert by then since that's most of the first season. Episode Five had the Genghis Khan speech.
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Dec 12, 2016 02:53
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I may have my count off. I made it through several episodes and then dropped it.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:09
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Loomer posted:" Scientist: Besides, there are three thousand five hundred species of mosquito. They've been around for a hundred million years. You think you can just yank them out of existence? I mean, you do realize half the birds in the Arctic tundra will starve to death. I mean, you have actually thought of that, or are you loving idiots? Isn't Malthusianism mostly disproven. Like that's a really super insipid insight and I'm guessing it comes from a character who isn't in a place where he'd normally die of malaria.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:10
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Night10194 posted:Isn't Malthusianism mostly disproven. Yes, but it's still a lot of fun in the world of magic and makes for some interesting activities. Especially when some powerful mage still believes it and starts causing a mess for the rest of them.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:22
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Jhet posted:Yes, but it's still a lot of fun in the world of magic and makes for some interesting activities. Especially when some powerful mage still believes it and starts causing a mess for the rest of them. I suppose wizards using privileged claptrap to cause mass mayhem is basically the entire core of Mage.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:23
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Yeah, more or less. The whole idea behind the series is that a bunch of well meaning, terrifyingly powerful nutters are about to drag everyone kicking and screaming into hell whether we want to go there or not out of fear of what might happen next. The exchange above also takes place in the 1970s, when Malthusianism was rather more in vogue.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:23
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Night10194 posted:Isn't Malthusianism mostly disproven. That said, if your goal is to stop the destruction of the world via global warming, genocide is a solution. William Ruddiman argues that a lot of otherwise inexplicable shifts in atmospheric CO2 levels correlate with large-scale plagues and genocides - notably the Native American genocide which triggered the "little ice ages" in Europe.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:36
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Personally, I believe in Doctor Manfred von Zorbo's vision of moving everyone to floating sky cities.
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Dec 12, 2016 04:10
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MonsieurChoc posted:Personally, I believe in Doctor Manfred von Zorbo's vision of moving everyone to floating sky cities. This seems more productive. Would they have high spires everywhere? Or jetpacks?
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Dec 12, 2016 04:26
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Malthusianism also isn't so much disproved as less directly correlative and relevant in the industrial era, especially in our post Green Revolution society. The basic logic still holds up: too many people will lead to not enough food, and too many people with too little food will then lead to less people after a crisis. The big difference between then and now is that we're much better at managing food and population growth, and the crisis is more likely to arise from a combination of oil, Phosphate, and energy shortages than from food proper. It also isn't inevitable as the theory stipulates, and a lot of the finer details and ideas are wrong. Where we are now as a species is in a constant push against the crisis state, as so far we're keeping up with the demands of a growing population, albeit at the expense of long term environmental degradation. If we cease to do so, then the broad strokes of Malthusian theory will be fully relevant again, more or less as a simple result of attempting unlimited growth using what are ultimately finite resources. We can push and stretch and get more efficient, and potentially we can do so for a long time, but attempting infinite growth on finite resources is always going to fail eventually. That dovetails into why a lot of people view mankind's only potential for sustainable infinite growth is space, where the necessary resources are essentially infinite for our scale's needs. This is also part of why Utopia works story wise as a sect of extremist garou and ratkin. They sit in the camp that values environmental protection over human lives, so they deliberately want to return the world to a state where the crisis hits in order to reduce our population, and would prefer to do it sooner, not later, to try and soften some of the impact on the earth.
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Dec 12, 2016 04:30
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That was the main bad guys in Rainbow Six. I can never take that seriously as a villain again.
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Dec 12, 2016 04:35
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Night10194 posted:That was the main bad guys in Rainbow Six. Also recently seen as the bad guy's motivation in Kingsman. Semi-notable in that movie is that as portrayed, while the bad guys get stopped, they do get to put their plan into action for about ten minutes, causing a presumably non-zero number of fatalities worldwide, given that we see 40 deaths in the smaller scale test that lasts only 4 minutes.
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Dec 12, 2016 04:43
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It does seem to crop up a fair bit as motive these days.
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Dec 12, 2016 05:03
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It worked for Master Asia.
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Dec 12, 2016 05:05
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It was also the motivation underlying the bone-deep psychopathic conspiracy in the ludicrous, hyper-grim BBC show Utopia
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Dec 12, 2016 05:28
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Really? I had no idea.
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Dec 12, 2016 05:43
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Demon: the Descent is a game of techgnostic espionage where you can play as the fallen infiltrators of a world-spanning godlike machine in a spy thriller in the vein of John le Carre - or you can do what my gang of idiots and I are doing and use a tiny, contained gravitational singularity to roll over and crush a gang of paramilitary thugs while humming Katamari music in-character. have i mentioned before i loving love demon for how flexible it is in tone
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Dec 12, 2016 06:03
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bewilderment posted:Also recently seen as the bad guy's motivation in Kingsman. Semi-notable in that movie is that as portrayed, while the bad guys get stopped, they do get to put their plan into action for about ten minutes, causing a presumably non-zero number of fatalities worldwide, given that we see 40 deaths in the smaller scale test that lasts only 4 minutes. Yeah i hope the sequel goes into that because the movie played it off like "Well since this one baby didn't die everything's A-OK!"
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Dec 12, 2016 06:43
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Loomer posted:Really? I had no idea.
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Dec 12, 2016 08:20
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Speaking of Utopia, Netflix's new Dirk Gently show has some of the same creative team and is extremely nMage (particularly Fate).
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Dec 12, 2016 11:15
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Flavivirus posted:Speaking of Utopia, Netflix's new Dirk Gently show has some of the same creative team and is extremely nMage (particularly Fate). I need to look into that because I love me some Holistic Detective work.
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Dec 12, 2016 14:56
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Xelkelvos posted:I need to look into that because I love me some Holistic Detective work. The first series is still airing on the BBC and BBCAmerica. I'm expecting it'll be up on Netflix not too long after that unless there's some deal with the BBC for streaming for however long.
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Dec 12, 2016 16:29
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