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Axelgear posted:So, as a general suggestion, Night in the Woods is a great game by itself but there's some really great inspiration for the WoD setting in it too. The dream sequences and dark cults in particular are great Mage inspiration. Life is Strange strikes me as a time-focused Acanthus awakening tbh.
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Feb 24, 2017 19:31
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Hello fellow goons, I fell in love with oWoD Mage when it seemed like a good thing in the 90s, so much so that when nWoD Mage came out, I vowed I wouldn't read the book so that if I ever played, I could play it raw as a newly awakened character. It's been a while and a whole new edition, but a friend is finally looking like they want to run Mage. He's given us some very basic descriptions of the Paths and Spheres, and told us to pick a mortal concept, then he'll run the Awakenings for whatever path we choose. Right now I'm thinking about a bio/nano-technologist as the mortal side of things, going down the Thyrsus path. Someone who uses viruses to fight cancer only to realize that maybe cancer has its own spirit/soul and what the gently caress do you do when you realize that kind of thing? My big questions are 1) That kind of dynamic supported by the material? I know a good story can make just about any concept work, but I'm hoping I'm not swimming upstream or anything. I'm not sure how 'molecular' the spirit world gets, in a sense. Could I have a Boron or Penicillin familiar or something like that? 2) Since it's mortal charGen first - are they any skills that you'd recommend I pick up for utility that might not be immediately obvious in a blue-book Doctor build? I seem to recall speed-reading through MageChat that magick is a lot more tied to skills now. Thanks!
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Feb 24, 2017 19:53
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There are probably cancer spirits out there. They are also not good to have around and are probably something you'd want to exterminate unless you felt like literally capturing and taming the concept of cancer to afflict your enemies with. You could have a medicine spirit familiar. though the odds of it being so specific as to be penicillin are low, simply because it'd end up eating the energy of the idea of 'medicine' rather than the idea of 'penicillin' specifically pretty quickly, for fear of starving to death. The key to understanding spirits is that they are magical aliens that have no human thoughts - they are focused solely on pursuing and encouraging the thing they are a spirit of, and destroying the natural enemies of that thing. So a medicine spirit wants people to use more medicine, wants more medicine to be produced, and wants to destroy disease - without any particular care for the consequences of any of that, even if it'd mean overmedication or needless medication or addiction.
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Feb 24, 2017 19:57
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Spirits are basically gluttons for whatever concept they represent. They are also so drat dumb when they are weak that they have no thoughts beyond "consume". As they get more powerful, they may develop a consciousness beyond that. Eventually, they can become an individual capable of independent thought. At least, that's what I remember about spirits from the Werewolf book.
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Feb 24, 2017 20:05
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That's basically accurate, rank 0-1 spirits are essentially animals, and it's only around rank 4 that they begin to be able to approximate real understanding of any human thought not directly related to their obsessions.
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Feb 24, 2017 20:08
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Mors Rattus posted:That's basically accurate, rank 0-1 spirits are essentially animals, and it's only around rank 4 that they begin to be able to approximate real understanding of any human thought not directly related to their obsessions. I think I can work with this, especially with the idea of appropriation - taking a base spiritual concept and deliberately elevating it for more widespread uses other than just its inherent theme.
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Feb 24, 2017 20:11
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Magnusth posted:Despite all this, Nwod larps are only just in the last few years starting to happen, and are very slowly overtaking masquerade larps. There are litterally people who weren't alive when revised was published who prefer oWoD over nWoD. It boggles the mind. If none of you are using the actual rules anyway, why is it that surprising that some people prefer the old fluff?
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Feb 24, 2017 20:19
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Are you playing first or second edition Mage, and are you using the corresponding bluebook mortals core? Just to get a sense of what is available in terms of character design. It's also worth specifying that spirits of cancer are not identified with the phenomenon of cancer. Spirits of the Shadow Realm in the nWoD/CofD are symbiotic in nature with whatever creature or phenomenon colors their resonance, but they don't necessarily share destinies. That is to say, getting rid of all the cancer won't by definition get rid of all the cancer spirits, and vice-versa, but it will have a dampening impact, because cancer spirits won't have any cancer resonance to eat and thrive on, and the occurrence of cancer in the absence of its natural spirits will be somewhat muted. (Not to mention spirits that grow fat and strong enough tend to start trying to exert their Influences into the Material Realm to make more of whatever it is they feed on.) Ambitions to figure out a way to control and weaponize the nature of disease spirits in order to proliferate desired phenomena in the manner by which a disease spreads, say? That kind of thing is Mage all over. It will probably blow up in your face several times in the process of trying to get it to work. This is half the fun of Mage: being a crazy visionary with dangerous ideas.
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Feb 24, 2017 20:23
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I Am Just a Box posted:Are you playing first or second edition Mage, and are you using the corresponding bluebook mortals core? Just to get a sense of what is available in terms of character design. 2E Mage and yes on the 2E Core (expanded investigation rules, etc.) I Am Just a Box posted:Ambitions to figure out a way to control and weaponize the nature of disease spirits in order to proliferate desired phenomena in the manner by which a disease spreads, say? That kind of thing is Mage all over. It will probably blow up in your face several times in the process of trying to get it to work. This is half the fun of Mage: being a crazy visionary with dangerous ideas. Excellent.
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Feb 24, 2017 20:25
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Starting considerations for medical nanorobotics: 1. You want Professional Training. The Professional Training Merit is intentionally highballed to incentivize characters invested in being connected to their field in ways that create potential plot hooks and NPCs for the Storyteller. Some of its effects are less useful than at first glance (rerolling nines won't impact the outcome of your rolls much, it just feels good), but in general, if your field or vocation is a significant part of who your character is, you want Professional Training. 2. Non-magical use of the Medicine Skill is very limited in scope. It mostly serves to prevent bleeding out and stabilize characters so that they can recover using the rules for their natural healing rate, and to provide infrastructure for when that rate can't proceed on its own. This probably won't be an issue for you, being that you are not a primary care physician and you have the Life Arcanum, which is very not limited in scope. 3. Not character generation, but in play: spend Willpower like they're candy and your teeth are invincible. Willpower is easy come, easy go, and should be spent in any situation where you're pushing yourself because you need this to work, including anything you ever do in combat. It's a balance point; rolls will frustate you if you're too stingy with your Willpower.
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Feb 24, 2017 21:08
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I Am Just a Box posted:3. Not character generation, but in play: spend Willpower like they're candy and your teeth are invincible. Willpower is easy come, easy go, and should be spent in any situation where you're pushing yourself because you need this to work, including anything you ever do in combat. It's a balance point; rolls will frustate you if you're too stingy with your Willpower.
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Feb 24, 2017 22:57
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Barbed Tongues posted:1) That kind of dynamic supported by the material? I know a good story can make just about any concept work, but I'm hoping I'm not swimming upstream or anything. I'm not sure how 'molecular' the spirit world gets, in a sense. Could I have a Boron or Penicillin familiar or something like that? As others have stated, there probably wouldn't be a general boron or penicillin spirit, but there'd likely be medicine spirits. Spirits tend to aggregate more according to concepts than literal reality; think of the word or adjective people would categorize things in more than the specific thing itself. That's why a pile of cash will produce a spirit of wealth and money, whereas a pile of inked canvases will produce a spirit of art and creativity, despite them being materially fairly similar. Barbed Tongues posted:2) Since it's mortal charGen first - are they any skills that you'd recommend I pick up for utility that might not be immediately obvious in a blue-book Doctor build? I seem to recall speed-reading through MageChat that magick is a lot more tied to skills now. All skills have their uses, especially in 2e. How useful they are really depends more on context than on which skill you focus on. Something important to note, though, is that Academics is no longer tied to the Research action, and you can use any relevant skill (Occult, Science, Investigation if no other applies, etc.). Academics is more tied to things like history, philosophy, and such, whereas things like the hard sciences are under the Science skill. It behooves anyone who has worked in a lab to have at least a dot of Crafts, just so they can fix valves or jury-rig up a setup to perform an experiment.
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Feb 24, 2017 23:36
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Axelgear posted:It behooves anyone who has worked in a lab to have at least a dot of Crafts, just so they can fix valves or jury-rig up a setup to perform an experiment. tbh Crafts in general is just ridiculously broad. Everything from cooking to sculpting to building an IED.
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Feb 24, 2017 23:44
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Axelgear posted:a general boron spirit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21Ty3O0Vac4 Whether it later becomes a spirit of insipid jingles, chemistry, or both is completely up to you.
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Feb 25, 2017 00:13
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Surely a boron spirit would be an elemental.
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Feb 25, 2017 00:55
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Mors Rattus posted:There are probably cancer spirits out there. Smarter medicine spirits would actually carefully ensure disease remains at a constant but non-lethal rate. Colds for everyone forever. CONSUME MORE MEDICINE.
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Feb 25, 2017 01:07
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So what you're saying is I should use the summoning circle I already have to conjure the specific medicine spirit of the antihistamines I take and banish him so he can no longer cause my allergies?
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Feb 25, 2017 01:17
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Loomer posted:So what you're saying is I should use the summoning circle I already have to conjure the specific medicine spirit of the antihistamines I take and banish him so he can no longer cause my allergies? Yes. This plan has no flaws whatsoever.
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Feb 25, 2017 01:19
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Hi everybody, I've been interested in doing some tabletop stuff for a while. I've done a couple of sessions of Pathfinder but nothing that lasted very long. Vampire the Masquearde: Bloodlines is one of my favourite games, so I was thinking I would check out the world of darkness in general. Is this a good idea for someone who is very wet behind the ears for tabletop stuff, and what's a good place to start and find games in general?
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Feb 25, 2017 01:26
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Check out Meetup.com in your area, there's generally some meetup there.
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Feb 25, 2017 01:30
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Yawgmoth posted:This is important to note for any character because the last time I tried running nWoD, my players treated WP like it would never regenerate and ended up wasting roughly a hundred points between them over the course of the game from all the times they would have gotten extra WP but were already full up. I spend WP so much, and encourage it so much, so the pain I feel at this is so real lmao SPEND WP AND DO GOOD
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Feb 25, 2017 02:17
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Can Demons Install Gadgets using Embeds only from the list they know, or any Embed? (Wow, that is a soup of capitalized proper nouns. loving WoD.) It seems like the latter, but I figured I'd ask in case I missed something.
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Feb 25, 2017 02:38
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I think you need to know it first
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Feb 25, 2017 02:55
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Pope Guilty posted:Surely a boron spirit would be an elemental. You're a boron.
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Feb 25, 2017 02:57
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For something that gives a limited version of the embed or exploit it's based on, and costs a dot (not point, a full dot) of willpower to create, that's a pretty raw deal.
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Feb 25, 2017 02:58
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Willpower costs one experience to recover a lost dot, though, effectively meaning you can arm allies and proxies with different variations on your own powers for the cost of a one-dot Merit per item.
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Feb 25, 2017 03:05
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What book would I need to learn more about The Thing like monsters? Skinchangers? Antagonists? I have an idea that the hunter cell that was wiped out which my players will be asked to investigate the how and why, was taken out by a shapeshifter who's family/pack was murdered by the now deceased hunter group.
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Feb 25, 2017 04:13
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crime fighting hog posted:What book would I need to learn more about The Thing like monsters? Skinchangers? Antagonists?
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Feb 25, 2017 04:17
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Crasical posted:For something that gives a limited version of the embed or exploit it's based on, and costs a dot (not point, a full dot) of willpower to create, that's a pretty raw deal. One of the reasons I just made it so expended WP dots recover in a week, especially since I hate using beats.
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Feb 25, 2017 09:34
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I guess I bought too hard into the description of Psychopomp Demons as being the Fixers of the demon world, the ones who provide gear and resources to their Ring. I was excited to play a reality-hacking Q-Branch agent who handed out hypnotic laser pointers and morphic fake ID's to people.
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Feb 25, 2017 09:58
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You can, they're just one-shots. Read Flowers of Hell.
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Feb 25, 2017 10:15
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I don't have that book. Care to give me a quick summary?
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Feb 25, 2017 10:20
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I think I may have confused my own rulings with what the book says. The book says that one-shots are supposed to be easier and given the resulting gadgets consume their hardware when used it makes sense to me that they'd just cost a point of WP instead of a whole dot, even if you can make a lot at once.
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Feb 25, 2017 10:45
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I watched Dr Strange for the first time last night and all I could think was that these Guardians of the Veil are heavily invested in Correspondence. Definitely made me think that Mage would actually be Good and Cool to play.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:52
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So how easy would running a game of Hunter be for someone new to running tabletop games? I mean have the premade adventure from that Bundle of Holding so that helps.
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Feb 25, 2017 18:04
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LOCUST FART HELL posted:Hi everybody, I've been interested in doing some tabletop stuff for a while. I've done a couple of sessions of Pathfinder but nothing that lasted very long. Vampire the Masquearde: Bloodlines is one of my favourite games, so I was thinking I would check out the world of darkness in general. Is this a good idea for someone who is very wet behind the ears for tabletop stuff, and what's a good place to start and find games in general? Honestly World of Darkness, especially Chronicles is a fairly easy game to pick up and learn. Making a character is a matter of filling in dots in what you'd want to be good at, and thanks to a flattened cost for things there's no longer a weird metagame incentive to hyper specialize at character creation. If you want a more in depth look you can check out my fatal and friends writeup of the core book here. The tricky part is generally knowing what combination of skills and stats to roll for a given task but the book has thankfully collected a lot of these in a single spot. And of course you can check out any of the ongoing pbp games or actual plays to see it in action. It gets a bit more complicated when you add another splat like vampire but not to a degree that's unmanageable. You tend to have more choices to make and a few more dots to fill out, as well as learning some of the key mechanics of it. For vampire things like frenzy and morality are new or replacing a system in WoD. And of course if you have any questions you can always ask the thread.
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Feb 25, 2017 18:52
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xanthan: The Vigil bundle was really solid (although not including Slasher was an odd decision, it was definitely a more iconic Hunter book than Block by Bloody Block and maybe Compacts & Conspiracies), and first edition Vigil (which is what you've got there, excepting the rules update appendix in Mortal Remains) is probably the most accessible form of the nWoD/CofD you could run short of a straight blue-book game. You'll want to come in with a head ready for improvisation, but that's just generally a good rule for any tabletop game. One useful thing to keep in mind is that, especially when coming up with stuff on the spot because players always surprise you, you don't necessarily have to keep track of an NPC's entire sheet's worth of discrete traits. It's often better to break them down into a couple dice pools: one number for when they're doing something they're particularly threatening or able with, another for when they're average or improvising, maybe a third for if you're exploiting their weakness. If I recall correctly, the Vigil bundle did not contain either the World or Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook, which is a big caveat. The first edition corebooks are all designed to bolt onto the World of Darkness Rulebook, so they don't contain the complete rules system on their own. If you've got the WoD Rulebook already, though, you're all green. LOCUST FART HELL: Good job! You made me type "LOCUST FART HELL." Playing one of the WoD games is generally pretty fine for a beginner, but picking which game to play may be confusing, so bear with me: Due to a long story involving editorial decisions, corporate mergers, and buy-outs, there are actually two major World of Darkness universes, which both spent long periods of their publishing history just being called World of Darkness. They're both made up of gamelines with titles in the Monster: the Subtitle format, so for example: Vampire: the Masquerade is part of one universe, and Vampire: the Requiem is part of the other. Net slang has taken to generally calling them, respectively, the oWoD or cWoD, and the nWoD or CofD (because the second one has since been rebranded as the Chronicles of Darkness). Bloodlines is licensed for the oWoD and contains elements from Vampire: the Masquerade (obviously), Kindred of the East (the Kuei-jin), Werewolf: the Apocalypse (the giant gently caress-off werewolf and the optional shark monster fight — yeah, those are playable character types), and arguably Wraith: the Oblivion (the ghosts of the Ocean House Hotel). A lot of oWoD material is very nineties, both in terms of writing tone and mechanics, which is a caveat that matters more to some than others, and in terms of corebook availability, the major gamelines effectively have three or four edition corebooks each: first, second, revised, and a giant 20th Anniversary Edition that was designed as a nostalgia product for fans and compiles as much material as possible from past supplement books. oWoD generally inclines towards an exaggerated atmosphere, where goth subculture is heavily represented, violent crime rates are higher, the end of the world is literally looming near, the little guy is being stomped down harshly, and international conspiracies of monsters are pulling strings everywhere. The oWoD gamelines are Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Wraith: the Oblivion, Changeling: the Dreaming, Hunter: the Reckoning, Demon: the Fallen, Mummy: the Resurrection, Kindred of the East, and Orpheus. While Bloodlines is explicitly an oWoD product for Vampire: the Masquerade, it's surprisingly quite appropriate for the nWoD as well. The nWoD inclines towards a less exaggerated, subtler and murkier tone, with lots of isolated countryside, a more local focus where supernatural meddling is less likely to connect around the world, and mystery and the unknown is prevalent, with lots of supernatural content that doesn't fit into the categories the monsters of the various gamelines are used to, like precognitive mothmen and malicious wish-granting lakes. Its mechanics are tighter and arguably better tailored to tabletop as a medium. nWoD has two rules editions and the added confusion of a central "blue-book" rulebook for playing as normal or mostly-normal humans. The first edition gameline corebooks do not contain the full system, but rather bolt onto the system provided in the "blue-book" rulebook, but the second edition corebooks do contain the full system and don't require any other book, except for the Demon corebook which requires either edition of the "blue-book." The nWoD gamelines are Vampire: the Requiem, Werewolf: the Forsaken, Mage: the Awakening, Promethean: the Created, Changeling: the Lost, Hunter: the Vigil, Geist: the Sin-Eaters, Mummy: the Curse, Demon: the Descent, and a bad gameline we won't recommend. That's a big infodump to start with but it gets much simpler once you narrow down what you're interested in playing. If you want to play vampires, I'd say both Masquerade and Requiem can do a Bloodlines style game fine. Masquerade has more of a hot-war going on by default between the Camarilla and the Sabbat, and characters are more tightly identified with the clan they inherit from their sire. Requiem's vampire politics are more detailed, with five basic "covenants" that feud and jockey for position with one another, ranging from alliances to cold war and sabotage, while a character's clan colors more their inborn nature or night-to-night approach to unlife than their political or philosophical leanings, and there are occasional disruptions from implacable outside enemies in the form of VII and the Strix. They'll both feel pretty familiar, using the five-dot scale for Attributes, Abilities/Skills, and Disciplines, and Requiem borrows a bunch of concepts from Masquerade, like the practice of Elysium and the need to manage your Humanity.
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Feb 25, 2017 19:40
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Much as everyone would love to play a Bloodlines TTRPG, I find it's generally inadvisable to try and replicate a video game style of play in tabletop, it just won't work with most groups and you'll end up with a lot of railroading and lulls in gameplay. Better to stick with the templates provided in the books and figure out which elements of tone and mystery you want to represent.
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Feb 25, 2017 19:50
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Basic Chunnel posted:Much as everyone would love to play a Bloodlines TTRPG, I find it's generally inadvisable to try and replicate a video game style of play in tabletop, it just won't work with most groups and you'll end up with a lot of railroading and lulls in gameplay. Better to stick with the templates provided in the books and figure out which elements of tone and mystery you want to represent. But what about Super Mario World of Darkness?
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Feb 25, 2017 20:57
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Senior Scarybagels posted:But what about Super Mario World of Darkness? Plumbers: the Jumping.
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