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bewilderment posted:Elaborating slightly - Sin-Eaters see ghosts everywhere and if a whiny ghost notices that you can see it, it'll whine you and bug you into helping it, so that's what they do if they don't wanna be ghost-superheroes in some other way. To elaborate even further: You're basically the ghost whisperer with a side order of Terminator-esque and deathly superpowers. You also are a nigh unstoppable walking talking humanoid bag of karma for immortals that subsist by eating souls or murdering people. Like vampires. Especially vampires. It's mentioned in one of the books that features them that lots of geists hate vampires because of the work they force onto them from ghosts wanting their help after they get sucked dry. Also if they step outside the role of "ghost whisperer" and do anything to make the world a better place they're probably going to go nuts from repeated resurrections, get their soul forged into a soul steel ashtray by a pissed off Kerberoi, or just die horribly trying to fix the Underworld (Which is a mess, really.) to be something more benevolent like the sample Geists in the one example dominion they're mentioned in in the Book of the Dead book. The Sin of Onan posted:Yeah, I always thought that the big let=down for Geist was that there wasn't really much to do. Contrary to popular belief Geist isn't pointless in terms of having mechanical and a narrative point. The real problem is that all of the content that gives them something to do is in other books. The Book of the Dead is a good example of this. It has a ton of Geist related related stuff (Right down to one piece of fiction showing an antagonistic geist that pretty much unleashes hell on earth in a localized area.) and gives a bunch of examples of just what a Geist actually might do in the Underworld. However you might never guess this since at first glance it largely appears to be a generalized book for the NWoD/CofD. Archonex fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Jan 14, 2017 |
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Jan 14, 2017 18:52
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I don't really buy insanely powerful sin-eaters getting nagged by mostly impotent ghost as a driving splat-wide problem unless the sin-eaters are actual employees in some kind of netherworld bureaucracy that'll impose consequences on them if they gently caress their job up.
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Jan 14, 2017 22:00
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Ferrinus posted:I don't really buy insanely powerful sin-eaters getting nagged by mostly impotent ghost as a driving splat-wide problem unless the sin-eaters are actual employees in some kind of netherworld bureaucracy that'll impose consequences on them if they gently caress their job up. So what you're saying is they need some kind of... hierarchy or something.
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Jan 14, 2017 22:09
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Ferrinus posted:I don't really buy insanely powerful sin-eaters getting nagged by mostly impotent ghost as a driving splat-wide problem unless the sin-eaters are actual employees in some kind of netherworld bureaucracy that'll impose consequences on them if they gently caress their job up. Power doesn't really have anything to do with why Sin-Eaters are overrun with ghosts.
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Jan 14, 2017 22:29
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Rand Brittain posted:Power doesn't really have anything to do with why Sin-Eaters are overrun with ghosts. I mean you could eat Aunt Edith's ghost for power or because she won't shut up about investigating the hospital where she died, but if your response to being asked for favors from dead people is rending them into pieces then maybe you're the guy whose vampire ignores all the political intrigue to dual wield .45 at the darkness. And that's fine, if your players are that gonzo anyway I think basically running 'Ghostbusters but we're also the Crow a little' is a fine and noble endeavor.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:04
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I Am Just a Box posted:New York City got the city setting appendix chapter in Geist. I don't recall much of it being particularly notable, but I'm not a city native, so maybe that changes the perspective on it. Speaking of city appendices, what's Beast's?
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Jan 15, 2017 00:13
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With geist you are also incredibly outnumbered. You can eat ghosts and gently caress them up instead of helping but they have friends and your bad rep will have things get after you.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:14
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Xelkelvos posted:Speaking of city appendices, what's Beast's?
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Jan 15, 2017 00:20
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This geist talk really reminds me of Sixth Sense where the kid can see dead people and has to help them with their issues.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:25
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Senior Scarybagels posted:This geist talk really reminds me of Sixth Sense where the kid can see dead people and has to help them with their issues. That and Ghost are the intended arc, yeah.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:27
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Daeren posted:That and Ghost are the intended arc, yeah. I also want to say Scooby Doo and the 13 Ghosts, where scooby doo has to stop the ghosts.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:31
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Xelkelvos posted:Speaking of city appendices, what's Beast's? Going off of BHM's continual quest to make sure that I will never be out from under the weight of Beast... Someplace in North Dakota. Bismarck is a hive of human suffering but it isn't well known enough, Fargo maybe?
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Jan 15, 2017 00:39
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Flint, Michigan.
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Jan 15, 2017 01:20
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I would say East St. Louis but then they would be near my mage stuff and thats not ok, even if I can just pretend really hard it doesn't exist
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Jan 15, 2017 01:45
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Mors Rattus posted:Flint, Michigan. Reminds me of the writeup (which you probably did) of Werewolf 2e in F&F where the writeup of Alice Springs, Australia is probably less bad to live in than the actual real life Alice Springs, which is too depressing.
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Jan 15, 2017 03:26
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I forget, which city did Hostel take place in? Probably that one.
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Jan 15, 2017 03:31
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Gumball Gumption posted:With geist you are also incredibly outnumbered. You can eat ghosts and gently caress them up instead of helping but they have friends and your bad rep will have things get after you. Don't forget that the Underworld has...mechanisms for dealing with people like that. Like Lowgate Prison. Which is basically what people imagine being tortured in Hell would be like. If you go loving around in the Underworld and break too many laws or act too inhuman they'll send people after you so you can be dragged in and sentenced to a very, very, very, very long time in the jail. Said time in jail means being tortured until you literally lose your vice. Like, it's gone. Forever. This is not a good thing, unless you want your game to be about a bunch of emotionless robots. There's also the "fix the Underworld" bent for games. Which is probably full on epic or tragic in its scope. The Book of the Dead has an example in the form of a Dominion that was basically abandoned when a group of Geist's showed up. They ended up turning it into a sort of frontier town and haven for the dead and living "immigrants" from the surface. Except during the time when the game suggests you play one of the Geists has been murdered, they're slowly growing to distrust each other as a result, another may be slowly being altered into becoming its next Kerberoi by dint of taking the leadership position since they first showed up, and it's starting to look like a few of the original inhabitants may still be around and slightly homicidal. Said immigrants to the Dominion also include a werewolf looking to figure out why there's a pack of undead werewolves roaming the Dominion. She's also slowly losing her mind because it turns out that Werewolves do not do well outside a pack in the underworld due to being oriented towards a whole different plane of existence and (presumably, it's never quite stated for sure) being mortal essence users. There's also a crime boss ghost that's basically lord of his own tiny little territory in the Dominion, numerous minor characters of various unique colors, and one pissed off ghost that may or may not be the former Kerberoi of a small empire that dwelled in the depths of the Underworld in this dominion. The book also shows how an antagonist Geist attacking PC's doing a different type of game might work. See the aforementioned talk about the fiction between chapters to show what I mean. Her way of handling the issue of ghosts was to just "crash the gates" between worlds and let them pass freely from the Underworld to start jacking bodies and walking around in public. It's not so subtly implied that she's also batshit insane. Book of the Dead really is a must have if you're wanting to play with Geist's. It presents so much stuff that you wouldn't think of otherwise and fleshes out the issue of "What do Geist's do outside of hanging out with ghosts?". Edit: Also it helps to remember that ghosts aren't mostly impotent. Only new ghosts (IE: One's you're most likely to encounter in the living world.) are impotent. Ghosts that have been around for a bit can wield essence related powers and have numina. Really old ghosts are likely to be either insane, cannibalistic/life stealing/possessing monsters wanting a second shot at life, geists, or full blown Kerberoi/death lords. Incidentally the Book of the dead also shows what happens when a cannibalistic ghost gets it in their head to establish a Dominion and start stealing essence from the other legitimate Kerberoi in neighboring dominions. Archonex fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 04:04
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Rand Brittain posted:Power doesn't really have anything to do with why Sin-Eaters are overrun with ghosts. It does have something to do with whether ghosts are an obligation or an annoyance, though. Is the driving impetus of the game really to stop an endless procession of people from waving their hands in front of your face when you're trying to watch TV? Are all-powerful dark forces really going to come after you if you just ignore or expel them? People mentiont that actually going down into the underworld and starting a ruckus is a bad idea, which seems obvious but also irrelevant because why would you in the first place?
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Jan 15, 2017 04:15
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Ferrinus posted:It does have something to do with whether ghosts are an obligation or an annoyance, though. Is the driving impetus of the game really to stop an endless procession of people from waving their hands in front of your face when you're trying to watch TV? Are all-powerful dark forces really going to come after you if you just ignore or expel them? People mentiont that actually going down into the underworld and starting a ruckus is a bad idea, which seems obvious but also irrelevant because why would you in the first place? No, it really doesn't. Unless you're the kind of person who's actively going to try and discorporate somebody who's begging you for help.
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Jan 15, 2017 04:22
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Ferrinus posted:People mentiont that actually going down into the underworld and starting a ruckus is a bad idea, which seems obvious but also irrelevant because why would you in the first place? By this logic no one should ever play DnD since the dungeon's are dangerous places full of bad things that will kill your characters. Or no one should play Hunter since the monsters kill or infect you with what they have. After all, they're not hurting you specifically, right? You'd go down into the Underworld for the same reason that Hunters take up the Vigil. For the same reason that Mage's foolishly quest for powers that will probably hurt more people than they help. For the same cause that the Carthians keep up their whole "hope and change" deal for centuries on end. You and you alone had a glimpse of a wider, bigger world and are curious about it or want to make things better. The Underworld is depicted as being a remarkably dysfunctional place in the example Dominions. Anyone looking at it and thinking "Yes, this is what I want my afterlife and the afterlife of my friends and family to be like." is loving insane. If you had deathly superpowers and the ability to say "gently caress the rules, I live." whenever you die, wouldn't you at least take a shot at trying to improve the situation? And that's setting aside the fact that maybe you've got other reasons. Maybe you want to bring a loved one back? Maybe a friend got on the wrong side of the locals and you need to bail them out? Maybe you need some ancient or esoteric knowledge? Or hell, maybe you'd just want to try and stake out a claim of your own? Becoming a Kerberoi/Deathlord is basically godhood, after all. Archonex fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 04:25
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Rand Brittain posted:No, it really doesn't. Unless you're the kind of person who's actively going to try and discorporate somebody who's begging you for help. Well, you could tell them to leave first. But is that it? Ghosts ask you for favors? That's the central motivator that saves Geist, the equivalent of drinking blood in Vampire or seeking humanity in Promethean? Archonex posted:By this logic no one should ever play DnD since the dungeon's are dangerous places full of bad things that will kill your characters. Or no one should play Hunter since the monsters kill or infect you with what they have. What I don't get is why any of this requires the sin-eater template to interact with. Yeah it's a lot of cool stuff to explore or challenge if you've got the motivation to, but sin-eaters don't have the motivation to more than other supernaturals do and it's just writer fiat that they have better access. So you've still got the problem that the central character type has no inherent motivation or particular reason to exist - it's just that it exists in a rich setting, which is a necessary consequence of supplements that aren't bad.
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Jan 15, 2017 04:31
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Ferrinus posted:What I don't get is why any of this requires the sin-eater template to interact with. Yeah it's a lot of cool stuff to explore or challenge if you've got the motivation to, but sin-eaters don't have the motivation to more than other supernaturals do and it's just writer fiat that they have better access. So you've still got the problem that the central character type has no inherent motivation or particular reason to exist - it's just that it exists in a rich setting, which is a necessary consequence of supplements that aren't bad. Sin Eater's are the default game for interacting with the Underworld, yeah. That doesn't mean that their existence is invalidated because other games can interact with it too. I mean, it's mentioned several times that vampires can reach Arcadia but that doesn't mean that Changelings are somehow invalidated just because the undead can get bum-hosed by some insane True Fae as well. There are themes inherent to Geist just like in every other game. One of those themes is that you have a second chance at life. Sure, it came at a terrible price, but you're alive. Which is more than most other humans can say. So what are you going to do with the time you've got left? Are you going to party like it's the last night of your life for the rest of your life? Or are you going to try to make a difference and see just how far you can go? Or are you going to take that newfound power and see how far you can take it? It's definitely a potentially more optimistic game in the underlying themes it presents. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have a point.
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Jan 15, 2017 04:36
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I've never understood the idea that sin-eaters have nothing to do. Yeah their splat didn't give them an overreaching goal the way others do but you can still come up with character motivations. I literally started playing in a geist game with a "Jet Set Radio" theme and my character is working on creating her own skate brand and plans on having her edge come from baking in powers from mementos and other undead artifacts. That means diving into the underworld, exploring, and finding poo poo. That also means her digging is going to uncover some bad poo poo. That's what she does. Archetypes are also full of motivation. She's a Necromancer because she got a taste of the weird poo poo and wants to break it over her knee and figure it out, something the book tells you to do as a Necromancer. Another character was a medic before he died and was the sort of dude who would get suckered by every begger with a sad story. He is now a pilgrim because of how much he hates seeing people suffer even after death.
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Jan 15, 2017 05:04
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You can also come up with character motivations for mortals. I'm not saying it's impossible to play a sin-eater game but rather that it's pointless - regular old humans who happen to have the sixth sense at the low end of the power scale, or Moros and Bone Shadows and so on at the high end, can pretty much take care of the entire helping annoying ghosts<---->becoming lords of the dead spectrum. If Geist is about helping ghosts, then sin-eaters helping ghosts should be some kind of structurally and metaphysically supported thing that everyone has to deal with in some way, rather than a paean to the virtues of private charity. Of course, I've always been of the opinion that you shouldn't be playing as a sin-eater in the first place; you should be playing as a geist.
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Jan 15, 2017 05:17
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Ferrinus posted:You can also come up with character motivations for mortals. I'm not saying it's impossible to play a sin-eater game but rather that it's pointless - regular old humans who happen to have the sixth sense at the low end of the power scale, or Moros and Bone Shadows and so on at the high end, can pretty much take care of the entire helping annoying ghosts<---->becoming lords of the dead spectrum. No one said that it was just about helping ghosts. I just posted a bunch of huge posts detailing the stuff they can do that other lines can't. Also on the mortals thing: Regular old non-conspiracy humans really aren't a match for most supers without prep time and the advantage of surprise. A group of Geists can just roll into a building and start putting holes in things while taking what would normally be fatal hits for anyone else. All while using powers from the various keys to sling death related curses everywhere that slowly rot the faces off of everyone nearby and have their corpses get possessed by vengeful ghosts. Or to put it another way, a Geist is a super. A potentially benevolent one that humans may tolerate but is too alien from the perspective of Hunters most of the time. Also, even Moros and Bone Shadows can't do some of the stuff that Geist characters can do. You're ignoring the different keys they have access too and the fact that at the top end the dead conspiracies make you even able to laugh off attacks from a mage doing their damnedest to destroy you. Though I have to say that I don't really get your logic. By your own logic the idea that Moros, death interested mortals, and Bone Shadows can do some of what Geist's do ought to mean that all but one of them ought to be invalidated and don't need to exist when it comes to interacting with the dead. Archonex fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 05:39
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No, because Moros, Bone Shadows, vampires, and other death-centric subdivisions of the other supernatural lines actually come with built-in defining conflicts that, among other things, generate believable answers for "so what do these guys do all day". Meanwhile, sin-eaters literally have less motivating struggle than beasts do. Beasts see to their Satiety and search the world for plot hooks. Sin-eaters just search for plot hooks.
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Jan 15, 2017 05:47
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Ferrinus posted:No, because Moros, Bone Shadows, vampires, and other death-centric subdivisions of the other supernatural lines actually come with built-in defining conflicts that, among other things, generate believable answers for "so what do these guys do all day". So wait, your argument is that "I don't believe you when you say they have things to do?" when I describe stuff that came directly from the books that shows them doing things that no other supernatural can do? What the gently caress. How am I supposed to argue with that?
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Jan 15, 2017 05:50
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I know they can do all sorts of stuff. Sin-eaters are insanely powerful. They just don't have to be insanely powerful because they don't have compelling motivations for doing the things they do besides "I'm feeling charitable" or "I'm feeling bored", because sin-eaters as a whole are not united by some underlying hunger or threat or tension that brings them together/sets them against each other/underlies their existence. They're just death-themed superheroes. They're like vampires that don't drink blood or Prometheans that don't cause Disquiet. And make that VAGUELY death-themed superheroes, because of course a geist isn't even a ghost, being half-spirit. They had to reach for the provenance of another game line just to diversify their guys' power set a bit!
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Jan 15, 2017 05:54
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Ferrinus posted:I know they can do all sorts of stuff. Sin-eaters are insanely powerful. They just don't have to be insanely powerful because they don't have compelling motivations for doing the things they do besides "I'm feeling charitable" or "I'm feeling bored", because sin-eaters as a whole are not united by some underlying hunger or threat or tension that brings them together/sets them against each other/underlies their existence. But...They do have uniting struggles. A bunch in fact. The Geist in your head is going to push you to do things. Bad things. And if you don't then it's going to take over and do them anyways. Every time you die and ressurect you're going to lose a piece of yourself to the thing living inside you, similar to degenerating. And then there's the trouble that comes from having an ancient and likely insane super-ghost living in your skull that has every reason to drive you bonkers so it can take over your body. Hell, even beyond that one guy up above even mentioned one of the "class" descriptions for Geist's that mentioned how they're driven to seek out occult content. Something that's likely to bring trouble separate from all of the trouble they come pre-equipped with. Like, these things exist. Just because you don't see them having merit doesn't mean they have merit. Geist has a ton of issues, the biggest of which is that all of the details regarding antagonistic content seems to be located in other books that you're expected to already own. But they have the things you're saying they need. If the ST isn't enforcing these things then that's not the game line's fault. Archonex fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 06:01
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Archonex posted:But...They do have uniting struggles. A bunch in fact. The Geist in your head is going to push you to do things. Bad things. And if you don't then it's going to take over and do them anyways. Every time you die and ressurect you're going to lose a piece of yourself to the thing living inside you, similar to degenerating. And then there's the trouble that comes from having an ancient and likely insane super-ghost living in your skull that has every reason to drive you bonkers so it can take over your body. I'm pretty sure the Geist in your head isn't going to push you to do things. At worst it will whine at you if you don't do things, kind of like regular ghosts do. That's one of the game's design problems; the source of your superpowers is toothless as a threat. The difference between Mage and Geist is that you become a mage by grasping for knowledge and power, core mage progression mechanics involve accumulating knowledge and power, and mage power is inherently deleterious to the world around mages (both by psychologically damaging any humans that experience it and by threatening to unleash the abyss). The tension inherent in mage is that you have special knowledge and power, neither of which you have the power to simply relinquish or ignore, and that that knowledge and power both makes you powerful enemies and endangers those around you when put to use. You could refactor Geist so that the entire game is a struggle for supremacy, supremacy attained by exploring, learning about, and mastering the secrets of death and the underworld... but in that case, why aren't you playing Mage?
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Jan 15, 2017 06:07
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I was thinking about it and Sin Eaters have another thing that binds all of them. They have died and they know they're going to die again. They know that there is an end and they've seen what it is and it sucks. They are the most aware of how little time they have and they are going to use every ounce of it. Because of this they're all very driven people. Some of them are driven to fill every vice. Some of them are going to be endlessly charitable. Whichever way they go they know that they have very little time to do it in. I'm also just not sure what you're looking for from Geist. Yeah, it has some mechanical flaws but it doesn't lack for flavor or motives. If you're looking for mechanics on why your character gets up every day you're not going to find it but I also don't know why you need it. Mechanics for why not following your Geist would be bad but you can work around it. In our game not following your Geist and actively fighting with it is a good way to get hurt, lose synergy, and is probably the place where the GM gets to have the most fun in playing something that's started fighting for control of your body. I'd love a rework of the mechanics. A rebalance would be great because if you look through the book they're both insanely powerful and really underpowered. But the game is not lacking for things to do, fight, and explore.
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Jan 15, 2017 06:27
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What would you suggest as a fix, Ferrinus? I'm honestly curious, you generally come up with good and interesting ideas. Maybe 2ed Geist will couple resisting your geist with sets of Conditions and breaking points? I'm all for adding teeth to geists, from a player perspective. I don't think anyone is actually arguing, just talking past each other. Ferrinus isn't saying there's nothing sin eaters might be interested in or cool things for them to do, but that the core horror of being a sin eater seems to be the monster you're carrying around...that you can forget about as a player because the game itself isn't reminding you about it. If I've misrepresented anyone's stance that's my bad, but that's my take. Also to be totally fair I usually think of Mage as the game line where it's easiest to just go 'nah, gently caress it, I'm staying home'.
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Jan 15, 2017 06:35
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If it was up to me I would make you actually play as a ghost (or a "geist", which is an extra strong/weird ghost of some stripe) such that you share the same fear all ghosts do: losing your anchors, fading away and being forgotten. Depending on how fanciful I was feeling I would do exactly what I suggested in the post that started this discussion - make sin-eaters (well, make geists, because you should play as the creature the game is named after) actual agents or employees of some kind of byzantine underworld bureaucracy whose job is making sure that people die properly, souls are collected and ferried, etc. Sort of a fusion between Sidereals and Abyssals from Exalted.
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Jan 15, 2017 06:39
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I've run Geist in a similar way before - the players got shoved back into their bodies by what was basically a grim reaper company. They were basically especially tough ghosts possessing their own bodies, and the role the game gives the Geist normally was filled by their spooky manager.
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Jan 15, 2017 06:43
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Ferrinus posted:If it was up to me I would make you actually play as a ghost (or a "geist", which is an extra strong/weird ghost of some stripe) such that you share the same fear all ghosts do: losing your anchors, fading away and being forgotten. 
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Jan 15, 2017 06:48
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That feels like it just makes the game not Geist. Really that sounds like Wraith or some sort of game about Grim Reapers. I'd rather just see Geists get some mechanics. They don't bind to humans just to live life again, they also bind to them to strengthen themselves. The archtype you pick would also give you a way to strengthen your geist so that player motivation and geist motivation have some synergy. If you do go against them it would make sense to see mechanical penalties. Stat penalties, maybe the risk that you can die and not come back, at the extreme end you'd have something similar to Exalted's limit breaks where you black out and the Geist gets a little time to themselves to feed themselves.
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Jan 15, 2017 06:55
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Gumball Gumption posted:Really that sounds like Wraith ding ding ding we have a winner
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Jan 15, 2017 06:59
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Yeah, Wraith already exists. I'm not super into playing Wraith when I want to play Geist. It'd be cool to see it steal the Wraith idea of a shadow and have another player play your Geist but that also seems like it could get messy.
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Jan 15, 2017 07:10
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Ferrinus posted:If it was up to me I would make you actually play as a ghost (or a "geist", which is an extra strong/weird ghost of some stripe) such that you share the same fear all ghosts do: losing your anchors, fading away and being forgotten. why don't you just read up on actual chinese or japanese myth where White Wolf took all that poo poo from, instead of making it a "fusion between Sidereals and Abyssals from Exalted" Also Geist is awful, namaste
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Jan 15, 2017 07:14
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I'm pretty sure Exalted came first.
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Jan 15, 2017 07:26
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