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Desiden posted:So, has OPP voiced an "official" take on this to any degree? I'm guessing not, since presumably they have to tread carefully with the licenses and whatnot. Still, I can't imagine it sitting well with most of their crew. Dave Brookshaw admitted as much. There's only so much they can 'protest' since they are licensing their biggest material from Swedracula at the moment but it sounds like 'internal controversy' would be the very smallest phrase I'd put on it.
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Feb 19, 2017 04:01
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Yeah, I would not be surprised if a deal like that had some language in what they can say about WW.
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Feb 19, 2017 04:09
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I feel the surface explanation for Cheiron- that they're a perfectly normal pharmaceuticals holding company that just happened to figure out you can get all kinds of biomedically useful components from kidnapping and vivisecting supernaturals- is the best one. It fits better with the rest of Hunter (barring space-filling stuff like Les Mysteres), it allows for an intrusion of bureaucratic dystopian horror, and it gives a good dose of banality-of-evil stuff- you're stuck with actively useless guides and orders not because your bosses have centipedes for faces, but because they're cubicle drones who've dissociated themselves from the fact that they're sending people out to capture vampires and other gribblies.
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Feb 19, 2017 04:12
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Brainiac Five posted:I feel the surface explanation for Cheiron- that they're a perfectly normal pharmaceuticals holding company that just happened to figure out you can get all kinds of biomedically useful components from kidnapping and vivisecting supernaturals- is the best one. It fits better with the rest of Hunter (barring space-filling stuff like Les Mysteres), it allows for an intrusion of bureaucratic dystopian horror, and it gives a good dose of banality-of-evil stuff- you're stuck with actively useless guides and orders not because your bosses have centipedes for faces, but because they're cubicle drones who've dissociated themselves from the fact that they're sending people out to capture vampires and other gribblies. Cubicle drones are the ones typically messing things up at the lower levels, yeah. My understanding is that the higher end of Cheiron's management is supposed to be where the eldritch conspiracy is. The rest is just corporate. Presumably any human operating at the higher end is complicit. That's not to say that Cheiron doesn't occasionally do good things. Or that it's not a massive bureaucratic nightmare at the lower end of things. It's just that the canon seems to imply that at the very top end they're being run by very bad things. Which is actually entirely in line with the a fair number of the conspiracies Hunter presents. In fact, many of the older or more powerful Hunter groups have some explicitly bad thing about them that puts them in a morally grey territory. Just off the top of my head, the Maleficarium is a crumbling and corrupt organization run by a ghoul that's still being ridden by his addiction and is actively using the organization to feed his needs. Task Force Valkyrie is being run by (hopefully patriotic) vampires. At least one of the conspiracies is literally a front for the God Machine to hunt down rogue angels he needs killed or reabsorbed. The Ascending Ones are deep into the drug trade (No surprise there.  ) despite explicitly being one of the only factions that will actually focus on saving lives rather than putting monsters down. Heck, even the Lucifuge, which is in some ways arguably the most heroic conspiracy out of the bunch are still a bunch of ruthless demon-tainted humans that can practice satanic rituals for supernatural effects.It's no surprise that some monsters would eventually get into the Hunter business too. Especially since as Vampire repeatedly points out, influence over humanity is the best way to cover a supernatural being's own rear end and remove their foes with minimal risk. And what better way to hide among the metaphorical sheep than to pose as the shepherd? Of course like the rest of the CoD you can go for a more banal explanation. It's really up to interpretation and what you want to run. The books hammer that point constantly. Personally speaking I kind of like the murkier nature that some of the books present. It gives conspiracy oriented PC's something to rail against outside of faceless uber monsters once they hit either the higher levels of their respective organizations or some really high XP amounts. Archonex fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 04:28
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And VASCU is once again the best conspiracy
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Feb 19, 2017 04:43
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I dislike having Cheiron and TF:V, the modern conspiracies, controlled by monsters because it's such a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes them horror. TF:V's particularly galling because military horror isn't "The CIA is secretly run by Bin Laden" it's "You're a cog in a colossal death machine that's nominally fighting for good, but leaves thousands of innocent casualties in its wake." It's all about being in a fight for your life with little sense of the larger strategy, a gigantic bureaucracy, and a lot of civilian casualties that has you wondering what you're really fighting for. Demon's a spy game, it's a line that should be wondering if the God Machine is secretly controlling the agency. TF:V's about having access to airstrikes, but getting a no-go order on a murderous vampire because the magic CIA's concluded he'll be easier to corral or control than the current power in the city. I can kind of like the idea of Cheiron having an evil masterplan because it underscores "capitalism renders its participants utterly short sighted to what they're doing to the world around them," making abyssal incursions a jacked-up version of global warming. But at the same time, they so easily become the wackiest gonzo conspiracy that I feel they need the banality of evil to balance them out and keep them from going full Pentex goofballs.
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Feb 19, 2017 04:48
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Archonex posted:Cubicle drones are the ones typically messing things up at the lower levels, yeah. My understanding is that the higher end of Cheiron's management is supposed to be where the eldritch conspiracy is. The rest is just corporate. Presumably any human operating at the higher end is complicit. That's not to say that Cheiron doesn't occasionally do good things. Or that it's not a massive bureaucratic nightmare at the lower end of things. It's just that the canon seems to imply that at the very top end they're being run by very bad things. Which is actually entirely in line with the a fair number of the conspiracies Hunter presents. All the Compacts and Conspiracies are bad. Hunters are supernatural monsters. They are not good.
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Feb 19, 2017 05:11
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Archonex posted:As mentioned, here it is. I'll leave the majority of the chapter out to encourage people to pick it up. It really is a good book and covers all sorts of different game lines from a human or hunter perspective. Most of it is stuff like slashers, vampires, and other low to normal tier threats. Then you get to this chapter, which opens up with one of the ten photographs that makes it clear that you're getting into some real end-game level threats right off the bat. I absolutely love the concept of soft places, places where the walls between worlds break down and the unwary can accidentally wander through, and it's a shame that this is one of I think two places it ever comes up.
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Feb 19, 2017 05:15
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Brainiac Five posted:All the Compacts and Conspiracies are bad. Hunters are supernatural monsters. They are not good. Hey now, let's not paint with too broad a brush. Some hunters are monsters who are not supernatural.
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Feb 19, 2017 05:19
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I Am Just a Box posted:Hey now, let's not paint with too broad a brush. Some hunters are monsters who are not supernatural. Well, they do have supernatural powers, just very low-key ones. Gambling willpower, Profession Merits, Tactics,- these are all things blue book characters can't use. You've gotta have the, uh, "Hunter template" to use them.
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Feb 19, 2017 05:34
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Profession merits are core in 2e, anyone can take them.
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Feb 19, 2017 05:35
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Brainiac Five posted:Well, they do have supernatural powers, just very low-key ones. Gambling willpower, Profession Merits, Tactics,- these are all things blue book characters can't use. You've gotta have the, uh, "Hunter template" to use them. Risking Willpower and using Tactics are the mechanics for people driven and crazy enough to pick up a wrench and try to beat a witch to death with it. They're no more supernatural than the Assets, Faults, and different dot scales that the, uh, "Child template" from World of Darkness: Innocents are: genre-appropriate tweaks to represent people doing something different from the people in blue book stories. It's a hard row to hoe to argue that hunters gain some kind of magical eldritch power to gang up around a thing and throw a net on it. They just practiced, dude. Other games don't use them because if you're playing Vampire, who cares about practicing throwing a net on a guy when you could be getting more and more dracular instead? It's a level of mechanical detail not relevant for other games. Now, the Lucifuge, the Field Projects Division, the Knights of Saint Adrian? Supernatural monsters. Just saying, they don't have a monopoly on monstrocity.
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Feb 19, 2017 06:09
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Precambrian posted:I dislike having Cheiron and TF:V, the modern conspiracies, controlled by monsters because it's such a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes them horror. TF:V's particularly galling because military horror isn't "The CIA is secretly run by Bin Laden" it's "You're a cog in a colossal death machine that's nominally fighting for good, but leaves thousands of innocent casualties in its wake." But you're still a cog in a colossal death machine that's nominally fighting for good, but leaves thousands of innocent casualties in its wake, even if the person up at the very top has been 35 for a very very long time. The reality of who's in charge of TF:V or Cheiron is not a necessary or even expected factor in games set with those organizations (especially if your ST hasn't read Compacts and Conspiracies). The horror of your average TF:V game is not going to come from the ST continually reminding you "By the way, guys, these orders ultimately come down from vampires! wwwooooOOOooooo!"
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Feb 19, 2017 06:15
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Brainiac Five posted:All the Compacts and Conspiracies are bad. Hunters are supernatural monsters. They are not good. The Union disagrees. *EDIT* Although I suppose you could argue that their supernatural ability is "NIMBY, as enforced by homemade flamethrowers and nailguns".
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Feb 19, 2017 06:15
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Mors Rattus posted:Profession merits are core in 2e, anyone can take them. Another checkmark against 2e. I Am Just a Box posted:Risking Willpower and using Tactics are the mechanics for people driven and crazy enough to pick up a wrench and try to beat a witch to death with it. They're no more supernatural than the Assets, Faults, and different dot scales that the, uh, "Child template" from World of Darkness: Innocents are: genre-appropriate tweaks to represent people doing something different from the people in blue book stories. It's a hard row to hoe to argue that hunters gain some kind of magical eldritch power to gang up around a thing and throw a net on it. They just practiced, dude. Other games don't use them because if you're playing Vampire, who cares about practicing throwing a net on a guy when you could be getting more and more dracular instead? It's a level of mechanical detail not relevant for other games. But they aren't described as such anywhere, they're described as something unique to Hunters, and Hunters already don't paper over the supernatural like normal human beings do in the World of Darkness. Furthermore, all Hunters are expressly capable of becoming an explicitly supernatural being. The Hunter origin myth provided implies a supernatural origin, and while you could argue that being able to pass the screening for VASCU is a retroactive thing like a character joining the Lucifuge from being a tier-1 Hunter, if it isn't, then it's a Hunter thing that all of them are uniquely prone to becoming a Slasher. I mean, to an extent this is splitting hairs about whether someone is merely abnormal in a normal way or abnormal in a supernatural way, but poo poo, all the other lines use supernaturalism as a metaphor. citybeatnik posted:The Union disagrees. The Union's thing is that they don't give a drat about what's happening outside of their defended neighborhood, yeah. But their supernatural power is the ability to cover up their murders of supernaturals. Brainiac Five fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 06:21
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I like the Long Night. They're my particular kind of hosed-up and feel comfortably familiar to where I come from that they feel eminently understandable to me. They do a nice job of representing the eternal battle between the noble hope and promise of faith that all people may be redeemed, and the grim reality that this often simply isn't the case. They feel like an understandably traumatized group of people who are desperate for some meaning and clarity to their suffering, and who often hold out compassion even for the monsters that hurt them in the first place.
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Feb 19, 2017 06:24
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Brainiac Five posted:Another checkmark against 2e. Your logic is weird and backwards. A blue book human could learn how to teamwork or whatever. But to do so they'd have to take up the fight against monsters.
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Feb 19, 2017 06:30
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:Your logic is weird and backwards. A blue book human could learn how to teamwork or whatever. But to do so they'd have to take up the fight against monsters. And a blue book human could learn the Disciplines. But to do so they'd need vampire blood in their system.
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Feb 19, 2017 06:33
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If you're insinuating you have to be a supernatural monster to learn how to hit people with a truck or be good at your career I think you have seriously misread Hunter.
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Feb 19, 2017 06:36
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What, you didn't have to take a blood oath as a part of your career training?
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Feb 19, 2017 06:47
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Daeren posted:If you're insinuating you have to be a supernatural monster to learn how to hit people with a truck or be good at your career I think you have seriously misread Hunter. I am saying that Hunters have mechanics that normal people don't get, can't access, and assuming that this is because they're just normal people who hunt monsters is part of a major misreading of Hunter. It is actually more parsimonious to assume that they've got a low-level supernatural ability that allows them to temporarily shut down a Mage's ability to perform Supernal magic than it is to assume that Mages lose their Nimbus if they get hit on the head in the right place normally. Or that normal people can get the benefits of gambling Willpower any time, it's just not in the rules.
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Feb 19, 2017 06:51
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The Tactics from Hunter are a bit of an air-breathing mermaid problem where they take things any character should be able to do and paywall them. (And here's a radical idea: nHunter shouldn't be a separate gameline. They're mortals who hunt monsters, occasionally with weak supernatural powers - this makes them Blue Book mortals, who are mortals who investigate the supernatural and hunt monsters, occasionally with weak supernatural powers.)
LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 06:54
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LatwPIAT posted:The Tactics from Hunter are a bit of an air-breathing mermaid problem where they take things any character should be able to do and paywall them. (And here's a radical idea: nHunter shouldn't be a separate gameline. They're mortals who hunt monsters, occasionally with weak supernatural powers - this makes them Blue Book mortals, who are mortals who investigate the supernatural and hunter monsters, occasionally with weak supernatural powers.) Nah, Hunters exist to exterminate the supernatural. This is clear in the corebook, and it's why the rules are that they either burn out, get out, or become a Slasher. It's why the harmless Promethean and Changeling in the corebook are described as potential enemies. It's why Hunter Conspiracies are 1) cops, 2) troops, 3) big pharma, 4) the inquisition 5) the spawn of satan, 6) drug cartels, 7) a cult of grave-robbers, 8) cannibals, 9) a religious terrorist organization, 9) a cult of murderers, 10) another cult of murderers, and 11) losers who let themselves get possessed by spirits. Well, they can't all be winners.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:00
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Hunters are regular people the same way Michael Douglas in Falling Down is a regular person. They're mundane and powerless in the same way Batman is.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:04
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Hunter is a gameline with its own unique tropes and genre concessions designed to help frame its drama. It only becomes an issue if you start viewing it as a statement on the physics of the World of Darkness.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:09
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Also, I looked it up.Brainiac Five posted:But [Risking Willpower] aren't described as [mundane] anywhere, they're described as something unique to Hunters, and Hunters already don't paper over the supernatural like normal human beings do in the World of Darkness. quote:What can a human being will himself to do? A man trapped under a fallen tree cuts off his own leg with a penknife. A woman lifts a car to rescue her child. A husband breaks a man’s neck with his bare hands, saving his wife from an attacker. These aren’t miracles, and they aren’t born of the blood undead or gifts from spirits. They just represent what human beings are capable of doing…if they have the will. quote:WHY SHOULD HUNTERS HAVE ALL THE FUN? E: Also using Professional Training as proof they're supernatural because mortals don't have it in the book written years prior, then immediately complaining that the edition update give normal mortals those rules, should probably tell you the intent of the authors here.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:10
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Archonex posted:Cubicle drones are the ones typically messing things up at the lower levels, yeah. My understanding is that the higher end of Cheiron's management is supposed to be where the eldritch conspiracy is. The rest is just corporate. Presumably any human operating at the higher end is complicit. That's not to say that Cheiron doesn't occasionally do good things. Or that it's not a massive bureaucratic nightmare at the lower end of things. It's just that the canon seems to imply that at the very top end they're being run by very bad things. Which is actually entirely in line with the a fair number of the conspiracies Hunter presents. I treat this a bit like Esoterrorists to a degree. The degenerate cultists at the top of the conspiracy don't see a problem because in their warped minds these beings will see their inherent greatness. Being on the board of directors of a multinational corporation is a hell of a drug. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 07:12
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Daeren posted:Also, I looked it up. So Hunters have more willpower than any normal human being. Okay. So we can describe that as a supernatural power in the same way Batman's ability to fight a dozen people at once is effectively supernatural, or we could insist that it's normal. And making Profession Merits something that anyone can access is pretty much gatekeeping "being good at your job" now, instead of having Hunters be the type of psychos to turn their knowledge of carpentry into a means to murder a busload of Sin-Eaters and have it work.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:14
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Mors Rattus posted:Profession merits are core in 2e, anyone can take them. Professional training is stupidly powerful, too
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Feb 19, 2017 07:21
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Brainiac Five posted:So Hunters have more willpower than any normal human being. Okay. So we can describe that as a supernatural power in the same way Batman's ability to fight a dozen people at once is effectively supernatural, or we could insist that it's normal. As to the first point, you're conflating 'mundane' and 'normal'. Obviously Batman's ability to karate chop six dudes with guns without getting shot isn't 'normal' but it's undeniably 'mundane' or perhaps even 'non-supernatral' if you want to put a finer point on it. Pointing at Hunter and asking, 'well, aren't these just normal dudes, and if they're normal dudes, shouldn't they be defined by what's available in the core blue book?' is kind of a non-starter because the books have different purposes. The blue book is not and was never meant to be the final word on all non-supernatural humans. It describes a gritty investigation-oriented universe in which brushes with the supernatural are scary and out of your league. It's a game unto itself with its own tropes and genre conventions, falling somewhere between Call of Cthulu and the X-Files and Scooby Doo. Hunter is not that; it describes a different kind of mortal entirely. There is no supernatural difference between most Hunters and 'other' humans, but there's a world of difference between what those games look like. Thus the difference in mechanics. I don't think Profession ever added much to the game and I don't think it did much for Hunters in terms of that very same genre convention, but I could take it or leave it as a result.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:24
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Mendrian posted:Hunter is a gameline with its own unique tropes and genre concessions designed to help frame its drama. It only becomes an issue if you start viewing it as a statement on the physics of the World of Darkness. Agreed. I think this is where some of the disagreements between whether it's cool that half the conspiracies are run by supernaturals or not comes from, too.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:26
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Mendrian posted:As to the first point, you're conflating 'mundane' and 'normal'. Obviously Batman's ability to karate chop six dudes with guns without getting shot isn't 'normal' but it's undeniably 'mundane' or perhaps even 'non-supernatral' if you want to put a finer point on it. Pointing at Hunter and asking, 'well, aren't these just normal dudes, and if they're normal dudes, shouldn't they be defined by what's available in the core blue book?' is kind of a non-starter because the books have different purposes. The blue book is not and was never meant to be the final word on all non-supernatural humans. It describes a gritty investigation-oriented universe in which brushes with the supernatural are scary and out of your league. It's a game unto itself with its own tropes and genre conventions, falling somewhere between Call of Cthulu and the X-Files and Scooby Doo. Hunter is not that; it describes a different kind of mortal entirely. There is no supernatural difference between most Hunters and 'other' humans, but there's a world of difference between what those games look like. Thus the difference in mechanics. See, that's the thing. You're assuming that the World of Darkness is basically a comic-book universe where being able to hold down a helicopter or block bullets with a shield is "peak human athletic ability", instead of a horror universe where that's a supernatural ability. Which plays into how people treat Hunter as a kind of superhero game where you go around busting up monsters and it's good. Instead of a game about playing a group of stone cold psychos who are in a downward spiral from killing people and things that are genuinely malevolent to killing for rules nobody but you understands. EDIT: Like, on a basic level, Hunters are people who kill, not because they'll die if they don't, or because they lose control every so often, or because they were careless with power, or because of trauma, or because the world hates them, or for reasons of self-preservation, or because they've been warped into doing so unconsciously, but because they've made a conscious and deliberate decision to kill. To decide who gets to live and who gets to die and who gets to be lobotomized. Brainiac Five fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 07:29
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Brainiac Five posted:See, that's the thing. You're assuming that the World of Darkness is basically a comic-book universe where being able to hold down a helicopter or block bullets with a shield is "peak human athletic ability", instead of a horror universe where that's a supernatural ability. Which plays into how people treat Hunter as a kind of superhero game where you go around busting up monsters and it's good. Instead of a game about playing a group of stone cold psychos who are in a downward spiral from killing people and things that are genuinely malevolent to killing for rules nobody but you understands. Superhero and horror go hand in hand pretty well. One of the explicit inspirations for Hunter is Punisher. WOD is really wishwashy about whether its game mechanics simulate the metaphysics of its world or are merely impressionistic ways of abstracting story events. There former is almost always true within a single line, while any description of other lines is focused on impressionistic symbolism, both in-universe and from the perspective of players. Hunter is complicated because it's predicated on the existence of the other games; while it has its own monsters, other lines' monsters' existence is much more important and prominent.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:56
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Cease to Hope posted:Superhero and horror go hand in hand pretty well. One of the explicit inspirations for Hunter is Punisher. Well, we have an actual quote describing how a particular mechanic does simulate a physical event, in this case. Punisher also isn't horror and Punisher comics are about a man whose reaction to violence is unceasing, hideously disproportionate violence, who is more or less totally unlikable beyond him occasionally torturing a sex trafficker to death.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:59
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Traditional Games > World of Darkness Megathread: Batman is effectively supernatural
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Feb 19, 2017 07:59
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Brainiac Five posted:Punisher also isn't horror quote:Punisher comics are about a man whose reaction to violence is unceasing, hideously disproportionate violence, who is more or less totally unlikable beyond him occasionally torturing a sex trafficker to death. uh
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Feb 19, 2017 08:01
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Brainiac Five posted:Well, we have an actual quote describing how a particular mechanic does simulate a physical event, in this case. iunno that sounds p horrifying to me - theres just as much horror in the things humans can do to one another as there is in squid creatures with names that look like a cat had a seizure on your keyboard
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Feb 19, 2017 08:03
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Is the movie John Wick horror now too? The Unlife Aquatic posted:iunno that sounds p horrifying to me - theres just as much horror in the things humans can do to one another as there is in squid creatures with names that look like a cat had a seizure on your keyboard There are a substantial number of action movies that that description fits once you cut out the particular extreme example of ultraviolence. Hell, Space Mutiny does feature the hero burning someone alive, so I guess that's a horror movie now too?
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Feb 19, 2017 08:03
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Brainiac Five posted:Well, we have an actual quote describing how a particular mechanic does simulate a physical event, in this case. Also there was that time he made a literal deal with the cosmic force of death to carry on an unceasing war of violence, sacrificing everything he ever was and ever could be other than an incarnation of murder up on the altar of unceasing righteous violence.
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Feb 19, 2017 08:04
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Red Harvest, Yojimbo, and A Fistful of Dollars are about a man coming to a bad place, experiencing a bit of the violence involved there, and deciding to annihilate everyone involved, leaving only a handful of named characters alive. Are they horror?
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Feb 19, 2017 08:06
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