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Basic Chunnel posted:What’s the Bloodlines nod? Malkavian intro. There's a Loresheet that's based around being associated with Jeannette/Therese, and it's written with a very Bloodlines focus (the 2 dot Lore there is 'Performing Monkey' which is written up as 'the sisters give you missions as you've proven a reliable asset'), and talks about the Asylum being the biggest rival to the Succubus Club for vampiric night life.
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Aug 5, 2018 16:21
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PST posted:
I feel I ought to point out that whoever censored the non-Neil Gaiman name forgot to censor the name in his reply message, thus rendering the prior censoring completely pointless.
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Aug 5, 2018 16:38
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Looks as if the last part being added/amended isn't the fact and it's the same text in both, just slightly different formating. If they've reprinted something they didn't have the rights to though (As he's got the copyright on the piece), they might still be getting a lovely chat with his lawyers. Depends on if the original contract for Art of Vampire was for a single use, or a limited license to allow them to use it again etc.
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Aug 5, 2018 17:03
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They're actually going to do a Sabbat book, even with them off fighting in "The Gehenna Wars" and all. I am very excited for Montreal By Night Revised.
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Aug 6, 2018 23:21
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Soonmot posted:So it's basically the D&D cartoon from the 80's? I'm down. It's also basically, Forgotten Realms, the setting that originally had a portal in... the GM's kitchen leading to Waterdeep, and included a map of the GM's house in setting material. Everyone played themselves and absolutely nobody argued about anyone else's stats.
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Aug 7, 2018 00:06
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A friend of mine was at gencon and got the book, so tonight I got to flip through it in some more detail, and drat, the layout is even more awful than the screenshots and preview pages made me believe. Remember how the old white wolf books liked to sometimes have little notes, snippets of articles, transcripts, or whatever laid over the page? The first part of this book is just Swedracula deciding that's the most awesome thing ever and barfing out like 30 to 40 pages that are nothing but that poo poo. And its all off kilter to the pages and there's plenty of those lovely fonts that are impossible to read, plus at least one image that's written on an image of a cell phone that's lying on an angle on a table and looks badly superimposed via photoshop among other "clever" attempts at displaying imagery. And like 90% of it is snippets of bullshit that barely makes sense if you're already a fan of VtM and know who the people writing letters are, and will be utterly meaningless to any of the "new players" that nuWW thinks they're going to bring in. After that its not quite as glaringly obnoxious for a while, but the three column stuff is annoying, plus it just sort of randomly switches between two column and three column, and is all over the place with its art design. Some pages are 2/3rds a picture of a building with some meaningless phrase like "hide your greatness", and then others have no decoration at all, just plain white for a stretch of 4 or 5 pages. There's no consistent borders, font choices, or background colors like in old books; it feels like someone making a scrapbook out of pages of rolling stone and random magazine ads for cologne. In all seriousness, if I didn't already know what VtM was and thumbed through this book, I would at best view it as a kind of cheap looking lower tier RPG, and at worst find it incoherent and not bother reading past a few pages. "Style over substance" would at least imply there was a coherent style; this is just weirdly aping a million different "stylish" things and then throwing them all at the wall. On the plus side, the art does explain how the second inquisition has been so effective. Even more vampires dress like dumbasses now than in the past. The old world of darkness had plenty of stupid clothing, don't get me wrong; but at least the bulk of it was still suits and jackets, or fetish-y clubwear that you might actually see lurking around a goth club in the 90s. Most of the stuff here would look stupid at some sort of postmodern fashion show, let alone wandering around a bar somewhere. Gah, how does nuWW suck so bad at this? This book feels like its at a point where it took more effort to write something this bad than it would have to just put out something average or kinda good.
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Aug 7, 2018 01:49
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 Is that Guy Fawkes mask at the top supposed to be a sticker over the cell phone's camera?
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Aug 7, 2018 02:05
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I mean the why is pretty obvious:it's aggrandized fan fiction. Imagine the average larper; or yet, a Camarilla district level organizer. Now imagine you told that person they were in charge of the next edition. Edit: Also Swedracula seems to think Masquerade's short lived cultural relevance was due to its writing, its sex appeal, and its approach to issues. As opposed to say, 90s kids graduating right around the time a very 90s videogame was released. The fact that Bloodlines was basically solely responsible for the mass appeal of Masquerade and yet they keep doing everything but making a videogame is maddeing. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 02:22
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Bloodlines released in 2004, after the death of Masquerade, and was a very minor game at the time, a buggy mess overshadowed by the utterly massive, genre-dominating Half-Life 2, released the day before. V:tM's popularity was not driven by it at all and Bloodlines was a sleeper hit whose current reputation didn't emerge until the fan patched started becoming a thing. The real thing that drove Masquerade's popularity was the fact that the 90s was the height of the goth subculture and the height of the RPG nerd industry, and its being a fairly innovative product that appealed to both. (A very high percentage of goths being giant nerds didn't hurt.)
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Aug 7, 2018 03:49
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Uh, trying to say that Bloodlines is the only reason VtM was popular is a bit...wrong. Don't get me wrong, Swedracula is still completely wrong about why HE thinks VtM (or the owod in general) was as popular as it was, or how or why people played it, or exactly what its "cultural relevance" was, but trying to suggest that the only reason VtM was popular back in the day was because of a PC game released at the end of VtM's lifespan...well. Better folks than I could get into why VtM had so much appeal with college kids and the segments of roleplaying society that wanted an alternative to DnD (back when it was still 'Advanced' DnD (2nd edition), the appeal to drama students over wargamers, the early years of LARP growth within the industry, etc etc etc, blah blah blah. And don't get me wrong, Bloodlines is definitely a pretty strong "gateway drug" to the VtM (and owod) setting for people that have never roleplayed with actual dice or character sheets before, just their steam profile. It's something VtR (and the nwod/cofd) doesn't have an equivalent for, so that is true, it would be accurate to say that it's been the strongest advertisement for VtM and the owod over the past ten+ years. If that was what you meant, then you're totally correct there. Honestly, it's a shame that lovely documentary wasn't done by a far more competent bunch, because exploring what the actual cultural relevance of VtM and the old wod were on the roleplaying/larping community and that generation of college kids and, well, roleplayers, could have been a pretty interesting subject.
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Aug 7, 2018 03:50
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When the oWoD stuff came it absolutely resonated with a cohort of weird "counter-culture" types, mostly disaffected white kids who struggled for relevance in the heady days of the late 80s and 90s, whose angst was a response to increasing cultural hegemony rather than the negative material conditions of the time. The goth scenes were flourishing and there absolutely were folks Vampire LARPing low key at goth clubs. The later games focused on the quieter sub-cultures of the time, as expressed most keenly in their neo-Luddism and rejection of modernity. These works also were rooted in the experience of relatively privileged white folks, and thus had a lot of elements that had not aged well, and many that were included simply for the sake of being shocking. As material conditions became worse over all and a, slightly, greater awareness of the larger societal dysfunction became known to the folks writing these games, the games matured and attempted to be more empathic in their attempts to offer a counter to the dominant culture, while also being more morally complex and better written, culminating ultimately in the CoD being a stark improvement over the writing that happened twenty-five years ago. The problem with Swedracula is that he wants to jump things back to the shock jock 90s White Wolf that appeals to rich white goths, while ignoring how disrespectful this is to pretty much everyone else. So yeah, I don't see the video game has anything to do with it? Like, at all?
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Aug 7, 2018 04:09
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GimpInBlack posted:The whole "vampires only feel echoes of the emotions they remember from life" thing was in the Requiem 1e core book, but was effectively ignored and walked back by most of the supplements, and in Requiem 2e it's explicitly no longer true. Yeah, there were never actual game mechanics backing this up and it never really made sense except as an excuse vampires liked to tell themselves.
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Aug 7, 2018 05:24
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It comes directly from Anne Rice which is the main source material/inspiration for oWoD vampires. Doesn't surprise me that it would crop up in oVampire games.
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Aug 7, 2018 05:33
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, there were never actual game mechanics backing this up and it never really made sense except as an excuse vampires liked to tell themselves. I'm still glad it was there, because it let a friend of mine play the character concept of "Vampire who is a DJ who only makes really lovely remixes".
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Aug 7, 2018 05:35
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Meinberg posted:When the oWoD stuff came it absolutely resonated with a cohort of weird "counter-culture" types, mostly disaffected white kids who struggled for relevance in the heady days of the late 80s and 90s, whose angst was a response to increasing cultural hegemony rather than the negative material conditions of the time. The goth scenes were flourishing and there absolutely were folks Vampire LARPing low key at goth clubs. The later games focused on the quieter sub-cultures of the time, as expressed most keenly in their neo-Luddism and rejection of modernity. These works also were rooted in the experience of relatively privileged white folks, and thus had a lot of elements that had not aged well, and many that were included simply for the sake of being shocking. Sorry if im not being more clear. I'm not saying Bloodlines is the only reason Masquerade was popular. I'm saying it's the only reason that, for a hot second, somebody outside of a gaming store had any idea what it was.
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Aug 7, 2018 06:08
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Sorry to constantly come in with nMage questions, but I've hit a weird wording issue in the rules. The Fate 2 spell "Exceptional Luck" can grant the subject a boon, and with two additional Reach, the boon can affect spellcasting rolls. The boon table lists three kinds of boons: granting 9-again on a number of rolls equal to Potency, granting a number of dice equal to Potency on a number of rolls equal to Potency, and applying a variety of conditions. Only the first type of boon, however, explicitly calls out that +2 reach can be spent to let the target use it to benefit spellcasting rolls. The other two mention nothing relating to spellcasting at all. So, does the +2 Reach effect on Exceptional Luck allow any kind of boon, including the extra dice on rolls, apply to spellcasting, or does it only apply to the single boon in the table that calls itself out as being applicable to spellcasting rolls with Reach expenditure? (This is, of course, the result of our resident powergamer shoving a large pile of math at me and explaining how the extra spellcasting dice means he can get Potency 11 on a Life spell that thus makes them heal five bashing damage every 2 seconds. He seems unimpressed by me saying that if I allow him to do this, the party's foes will be doing similarly rule-breaking things as well.)
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Aug 7, 2018 08:37
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One of the factors that made Vampire: The Masquerade super popular is that it was one of the first high-profile games that weren't about murder-hobos (though a lot of people did play it that way), and it appealed to a lot of players who weren't into that style, at least locally it was the first RPG that you'd see women playing regularly. Plus it was very much in the Zeitgeist of the time, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles were best-sellers, and its movie adaptation, plus Lost Boys and Coppola's Dracula were huge cultural markstones, Goth was most definitely in and it was the right RPG to explode at the time. Bloodlines is a really good game, clunky but with competent enough art direction that it hasn't aged too poorly, but it has never been more than a cult hit.
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Aug 7, 2018 11:42
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ZearothK posted:Bloodlines is a really good game, clunky but with competent enough art direction that it hasn't aged too poorly, but it has never been more than a cult hit. Also a very talented voice cast, as I remember playing it recently. John DiMaggio, Grey Griffin, and a bunch of other people that if made with its relative budget probably could not afford today.
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Aug 7, 2018 12:44
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Reene posted:It comes directly from Anne Rice which is the main source material/inspiration for oWoD vampires. Doesn't surprise me that it would crop up in oVampire games.
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Aug 7, 2018 13:14
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Nessus posted:If this is the case where are the rules that let you go suck a bunch of elder blood up and get a bronze tan in the sun before learning how to fly? How about the part where you go back in time and drink the blood of the good Lord due to the intervention of the Devil? High level Fortitude, Thaumaturgy and being a True Brujah. But really, Interview with the Vampire and the Lestat books informed a lot of early Vampire. The more gonzo elements of the latter Vampire Chronicles actually work really well with the weird 2nd edition stuff too and some of late revised. ZearothK fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 13:21
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Yeah at least one of those is just Temporis.
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Aug 7, 2018 13:32
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah at least one of those is just Temporis.
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Aug 7, 2018 13:37
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blastron posted:Sorry to constantly come in with nMage questions, but I've hit a weird wording issue in the rules. I'm pretty sure the game intentionally doesn't provide ways to use spells to add dice to spells, so as GM I would say that that Boon can only grant 9-again to spellcasting, not bonus dice. Also, make them write up, not necessarily the math, but the actual ritual and actions they take to make the spell happen. Big spells are really doable but they generally take ritual casting and lots of effort, and you can and should figure out what the parameters are on that. Then throw a werewolf in the death rage at them when they have all this regen, and the two of them can just take painful sections out of each other repeatedly for rounds. They'll get to show off their cool power and also it won't totally wreck the tension. Other ways to respond to players pushing spells to the limit is to put them in situations they don't expect, in this case presumably non-combat conflict, or dealing with Sleepers where regenerating your flesh constantly can cause problems. The Guardians of the Veil in particular will be a bit miffed at any Mage going around playing Wolverine. Don't do this punitively, just use their actions as a springboard to more challenges. (Also, mechanically, that kind of healing won't restore lost limbs or extremities, so... if you really want, you could let them have this for a while if the math works out, but wait for them to get reckless enough to lose a limb somehow. Oh, hubris!) ...but more seriously the way to deal with this is to talk to the player OOC and explain that this might be disruptive to the game's intended tone and no mechanical system is perfect, therefore sometimes it can produce unwanted or undramatic results. Your current go-to has clearly been 'ramp up the power' and that seems to be what this player expects, but make sure your other players are on board with that. They may not want to have to powergame spellcasting to survive and win, even if this one guy is fine with that.
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Aug 7, 2018 13:48
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Mendrian posted:I'm not saying Bloodlines is the only reason Masquerade was popular. I'm saying it's the only reason that, for a hot second, somebody outside of a gaming store had any idea what it was. Right, and it's the whole reason Paradox bought White Wolf in the first place, or at least I thought. The sale was nearly three years ago and we have only one video game confirmed in development and it has nothing but concept art to its name.
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Aug 7, 2018 14:15
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blastron posted:So, does the +2 Reach effect on Exceptional Luck allow any kind of boon, including the extra dice on rolls, apply to spellcasting, or does it only apply to the single boon in the table that calls itself out as being applicable to spellcasting rolls with Reach expenditure? It is mostly consistently worded (just repeated in two places). Just think of the Boon/Hex section as a subset of the spell. So that information tells you where you can apply the +2 Reach for spell casting modification. The die bonus boon is meant for mundane skills (usually a single Skill), and modifying skills aren't going to do anything here unless you're increasing them for the Mudra yantra. Then give the player a situation to use whatever level of spell you've settled on him being able to cast. Whether it's werewolves or a verge that strips away at a person's health every round from the wind or some other terrible and supernatural environmental tilt. Or Prime masters who dispell magic with their yet unknown legacy (that you'll undoubtedly have to write because someone will want to play it). It will encourage cooperation, because you've rewarded compromising on the spell, and still provided a suitably awesome opportunity to use it. I don't know how much you're letting the power get out of control, but I've just given up mostly. We just stick to the Practices and I let the dice get out of hand. But my players are also messing with Mastery and heading towards a second. Their challenge is also much less fighting at this point because they'd wipe the floor with most things and the only creatures that really get them thinking are the really big bads.
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Aug 7, 2018 15:59
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Fate is absolutely loving bonkers but the dice tricks are actually less dangerous than the condition granting.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:01
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah at least one of those is just Temporis. Nessus posted:I hope the one where you become able to fly, like Superman. I thought we were talking about Anne Rice, not Araki Hirohiko.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:46
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The Salubri were inspired from 3x3 Eyes also. V:tM has always been anime.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:15
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I Am Just a Box posted:I thought we were talking about Anne Rice, not Araki Hirohiko.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:15
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blastron posted:(This is, of course, the result of our resident powergamer shoving a large pile of math at me and explaining how the extra spellcasting dice means he can get Potency 11 on a Life spell that thus makes them heal five bashing damage every 2 seconds. He seems unimpressed by me saying that if I allow him to do this, the party's foes will be doing similarly rule-breaking things as well.) There might be a specific rote in the book I don't know about, but I don't think this is how recurring effects work. Normally, a recurring effect within a duration only activates as often as the character's ritual casting time. So, let's say you're Gnosis 3 and set up a spell that heals 5 bashing and has a duration over a day. Your ritual time is an hour, so you'd heal that 5 bashing every hour over the next day after having cast the spell.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:57
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Meinberg posted:There might be a specific rote in the book I don't know about, but I don't think this is how recurring effects work. Normally, a recurring effect within a duration only activates as often as the character's ritual casting time. So, let's say you're Gnosis 3 and set up a spell that heals 5 bashing and has a duration over a day. Your ritual time is an hour, so you'd heal that 5 bashing every hour over the next day after having cast the spell. This is a good point, you can't accelerate ritual intervals for recurring effects. There might be an example Life spell that provides faster regen though, I seem to recall it being discussed at my table (and the example spells sometimes play a little fast and loose with the build-an-imago rules).
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Aug 7, 2018 18:03
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Meinberg posted:There might be a specific rote in the book I don't know about, but I don't think this is how recurring effects work. Normally, a recurring effect within a duration only activates as often as the character's ritual casting time. So, let's say you're Gnosis 3 and set up a spell that heals 5 bashing and has a duration over a day. Your ritual time is an hour, so you'd heal that 5 bashing every hour over the next day after having cast the spell. I imagine they're using Body Control (Life 2) to half the healing time for bashing to the tune of 11 potency (to reduce it to some terribly short amount of time). That means it heals "naturally" every time that time is up.
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Aug 7, 2018 18:08
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Yes, that’s right, they’re using Body Control to halve (exponentially, since that’s what the example in the spell description implies) healing time. I’m really glad that the Reach effect on that spell that adds an extra 1/0 armor doesn’t seem to scale with Potency, otherwise I’d have to deal with 11/0 armor on top of them regenerating 5 bashing per second. Potency 11 isn’t going to necessarily be a thing, though, since I’ll go with the more conservative reading of Exceptional Luck and not allow the conditions or bonus dice to affect spellcasting rolls, just the dice trick.
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Aug 7, 2018 18:28
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blastron posted:Yes, that’s right, they’re using Body Control to halve (exponentially, since that’s what the example in the spell description implies) healing time. I’m really glad that the Reach effect on that spell that adds an extra 1/0 armor doesn’t seem to scale with Potency, otherwise I’d have to deal with 11/0 armor on top of them regenerating 5 bashing per second. Doesn't this also mean they can only heal Bashing in combat? You need actual treatment and bed rest to heal Lethal, which they won't get mid-fight. So this works fine for shrugging off fists and similar, but is pretty much not applicable the moment someone pulls a knife. Or a crowbar. I'd say it's pretty harmless to let them have a sitting healing effect that lets them recover quickly from fights, because if they have Life 3+ they can always heal up after fights anyways.
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Aug 7, 2018 18:37
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Not to be contrarian, but the wording on the second boon is thus: Grant a dice bonus equal to Potency on certain actions (usually a single Skill) for a number of rolls equal to the Potency of the spell during its Duration. And the modification is worded as: +2 Reach: The boon or hex can affect spellcasting rolls. Considering that Spellcasting is an action, and the +2 Reach effect is worded as an additional possible parameter, that reads like "Grants a dice bonus (+5, for example) on Spellcasting (with +2 Reach) rolls for (5) rolls during its Duration."
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Aug 8, 2018 00:32
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Nessus posted:If this is the case where are the rules that let you go suck a bunch of elder blood up and get a bronze tan in the sun before learning how to fly? How about the part where you go back in time and drink the blood of the good Lord due to the intervention of the Devil? Why can't oVampire characters do the things introduced in Rice books that came out half a decade after oVampire did? I dunno, man. More seriously, Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat are directly cited as inspirations in the first Vampire books. So like I said, it doesn't surprise me that players would draw things directly from those, of which "you see their memories and feel their emotions when you drink their blood" is a recurring one.
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Aug 8, 2018 02:03
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Spector29 posted:Not to be contrarian, but the wording on the second boon is thus: I’d agree, but the spell casting modification was repeated in only the first written boon. So I lean toward it having been repeated for a reason there and not in the second boon as written. Doesn’t bother me either way, but having crazy spells is a constant in my group. That would be quite the crazy Fate spell just to heal bashing quickly. Must be some use for it, but unless I’m remembering wrong, it wouldn’t help with the bashing from paradox? I could just be confusing editions/house rules.
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Aug 8, 2018 02:11
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Been roped into a WtA game, how do I make a Red Talon Lupus Ragabash not suck mechanically? Think I got 48 xp to play with on top of normal things. Terratina fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Aug 8, 2018 |
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Aug 8, 2018 02:38
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Reene posted:Why can't oVampire characters do the things introduced in Rice books that came out half a decade after oVampire did? I dunno, man.
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Aug 8, 2018 02:55
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Terratina posted:Been roped into a WtA game, how do I make a Red Talon Lupus Ragabash not suck mechanically? You're a Lupus, so congrats on having the highest starting Gnosis possible. Bump up your Rage and your Willpower because you'll need both at decent levels and then figure out what Gifts you want and make sure you have decent dice pools for them. And you're a Ragabash so Stealth and Subterfuge will probably come up a lot. Brawl and Athletics will never hurt. Crinos form can carry you through most fights.
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Aug 8, 2018 03:08
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