|
PHIZ KALIFA posted:Outside of By Night System's LARP books being supposedly written by in-game events, are there any RPG lines which still let the players write the game? I believe that Wyrd's Malifaux/The Other Side has some degree of this. They have done global campaigns over the years that will dictate some of the world's storyline, which also impacts their skirmish/wargame.
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 16:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 13, 2024 04:06 |
|
|
The Changeling posted:I believe that Wyrd's Malifaux/The Other Side has some degree of this. They have done global campaigns over the years that will dictate some of the world's storyline, which also impacts their skirmish/wargame. Including not bringing models to the new edition (although they're technically 'playable') because they're dead in the fluff which is irritating, but I guess no more than Warhams just plain ol' not putting out current rules for existing models. Dawgstar fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Nov 20, 2018 |
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 16:51
|
|
|
I don't think there is no place for a Metaplot in modern gaming, but as a focus for what you do in your campaign? Get out of here. L5R certainly had some great things happen because of player choices, but so much dumb stuff happened because they had to have as many as 15 options for each choice. I think the best use of Metaplot is probably Hunter. Reading the books in order gives you a cool story about the emergence of Hunters and then things going wrong without anything happening in it that fucks with your characters. Having your whole clan leave the Camarilla because reasons, that you also had no control over? Great world building.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 17:06
|
|
|
PHIZ KALIFA posted:1) is your name a The World Ends With You reference? Discworld, actually.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 19:20
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Discworld, actually. THIS IS GOOD.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 21:01
|
|
|
Discworld is always good.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 21:05
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Including not bringing models to the new edition (although they're technically 'playable') because they're dead in the fluff which is irritating, but I guess no more than Warhams just plain ol' not putting out current rules for existing models. I was introduced to the setting through TTB and the Nythera AP, which was interesting. It made me feel like I was playing a White Wolf game - bunch of crazy poo poo happening around our group with a bunch of characters next to none of us knew anything about (because only two of us, GM included, played at the time).
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 21:30
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:I don't think there is no place for a Metaplot in modern gaming, but as a focus for what you do in your campaign? Get out of here. L5R certainly had some great things happen because of player choices, but so much dumb stuff happened because they had to have as many as 15 options for each choice.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 21:38
|
|
|
The position of Primogen makes even less sense in most parts of nWoD, where clan has all of the political connections and power of, like, your high school yearbook.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 21:40
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:The position of Primogen makes even less sense in most parts of nWoD, where clan has all of the political connections and power of, like, your high school yearbook. LARP makes this extra confusing by clarifying that the clan leadership is called the PRISCI while the Prince's advisors, who often but not always represent covenant representation, are called PRIMOGEN. It does not explain why anybody give a single poo poo about clan leadership though. To clarify, clan leadership would make sense in a city with only a handful of active blood families, since blood ties are a thing.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 23:17
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:I don't think there is no place for a Metaplot in modern gaming, but as a focus for what you do in your campaign? Get out of here. L5R certainly had some great things happen because of player choices, but so much dumb stuff happened because they had to have as many as 15 options for each choice. Hunter metaplot ruled. The BBS angle was really fun.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 23:35
|
|
|
Mendrian posted:To clarify, clan leadership would make sense in a city with only a handful of active blood families, since blood ties are a thing. I don't know much about oWOD vampire demographics but this makes sense, doesn't it? Outside of megacities on the London, New York, Beijing etc scale, it seems like there would only be enough vampires in any given clan in one city to make up a single lineage, maybe two. Though this does make not as much sense in Europe where travelling from one big city to another, even in another country, only takes a few hours and so there would be a lot of mixing around.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 01:17
|
|
|
Nessus posted:I remember in that book about like, Boons and poo poo - which, incidentally, they should have come out with seven years prior - they talked poo poo about the idea that clan would be a universal primary organizing principle, or that there'd always be "a" Brujah primogen and "a" Ventrue primogen or whatever. One of the hardest things i did on a chat i helped develop was force the players to figure out that the Prince's primogen council was made up of Kindred that he wanted their opinions on things that actually mattered in the city and not based off of clan. And the moment i stepped down it reverted to it anyway.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 02:42
|
|
|
Vulpes Vulpes posted:Hunter metaplot ruled. The BBS angle was really fun. I really dug following the 'big names' across the various sourcebooks.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 02:48
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:I have decided metaplots are cool and good if done like they are in the Requiem Clanbooks, where it's super subtle but there. It's however even there definitely an optional extra. See, I don't really consider that a metaplot, per se. (Although, I do consider them loving awesome, go read the Clanbooks if you haven't yet guys.) There's an ongoing plot set in the world, but it doesn't really tie directly into the situation of your campaign unless your Storyteller goes way the gently caress out of their way to make it tie into your campaign. oWoD metaplot affected things like which clans were in which political alliances, or even were alive - they affected the base assumptions of the setting. Of course a given group could have chosen to ignore the changes to the status quo, but it there were still things like "the ravanos are mostly dead now" or "no one can really go to deep astral space anymore" that would likely affect most campaigns. Like if a storyteller killed off Frances Black I'd be sad but it wouldn't alter the role that Mekhet or the Dracul play in the world. I've been craving some post-apocalyptic poo poo after beating the new Fist of the North Star game, so I re-read my old Deadlands: Wasted West games and they had a slightly different way of dealing with the metaplot. Some of it I liked - they never did anything like "this major faction is now dead" which kept it from being all-consuming, it was mostly just a string of epic adventures that ended in a big battle between the good guy factions and the bad guys factions with the PCs playing a pretty pivotal role. Some of it I didn't - there were still some writer's pet NPCs doing stuff I thought was too pivotal, and a lot of the GM guides would be like "we're not telling you what the cause of this weird thing we mentioned because we're saving it for later" which is really annoying. Still, it felt pretty different from a lot of the oWoD metaplot because, again, that was used to change fundamental assumptions about the campaign setting. And what if like, the PCs had already hosed with something major the metaplot decided to play with? I mean obviously you could adapt around that, but then why have the metaplot in the first place? I guess what I'm saying is: recurring characters - good. Linked adventure paths - can be good. Needing to buy supplements to understand the ever changing status quo of the setting - bad because it fundamentally doesn't interact with the players' agency.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 08:25
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Wraiths don't really count for the 'everyone is a supernatural' thing. Not everyone becomes a wraith though, only folks who died with great regret or other problems.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 08:46
|
|
|
Tias posted:Not everyone becomes a wraith though, only folks who died with great regret or other problems.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 09:41
|
|
|
So far I think it's werewolf that has the highest concentration of historical figures.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 10:16
|
|
|
Digital Osmosis posted:I guess what I'm saying is: recurring characters - good. Linked adventure paths - can be good. Needing to buy supplements to understand the ever changing status quo of the setting - bad because it fundamentally doesn't interact with the players' agency. I think the best metaplot-like stuff is material which gradually reveals or introduces new poo poo going on in the setting (if the Requiem Clanbooks concentrate on revealing hot secrets about the Clans in question, as it sounds like is the case, then that'd be a good example of that), rather than stuff which changes or (even worse) shuts down existing setting elements. Saying "The Pizza War's over now, the Domino Directorate won" shuts down a whole angle which people could have based their games around. (Sure, they could still, but odds are new material coming out for your game is going to be based on the assumption that the Domino Directorate won the Pizza War, and the more time goes by and the more the "canon" setting diverges from your home game the less useful new products are.) It's subtracting something from the setting and making it less game-worthy. (The worst example of this is 2E AD&D-era Dark Sun, where the first version of the boxed set establishes all these cool plots, and then all of the stuff players could conceivably do in the setting more or less got resolved in novels, so the 2nd edition boxed set ended up flailing around looking for something for players to do. I'm a big believer in game settings taking the Harn approach of saying "We present a snapshot of the setting as of a particular date, speculating about what happens after that is left to the individual campaign", because that removes the temptation to resolve stuff and end up with a setting which has been half-"solved" already.) Saying "The Pizza War has taken a shocking twist when it turns out that the Domino Directorate are actually aliens from the Moon" is bad for similar reasons, particularly since if you make that sort of sudden alteration then even a campaign which was deliberately trying to stick to the canon setting (because its participants have this weird, inexplicable, perverse enjoyment of metaplots) likely now clashes with the canon setting because all sorts of poo poo went down based on the assumption that the Domino Directorate are human beings like anyone else, and now that's contradicted. Saying "Disaffected drop-outs from the Pizza War have splintered off from the major factions and have established a pasta-based commune on the Moon", though? That I'm cool with, because you're not resolving an angle which people could base their campaigns around, you're not contradicting anything already established about the Pizza War (so long as all of the pasta commune members are newly-described NPCs and you aren't having a major Pizza War figure drop out to make pasta on the Moon), and you've added a new thing with its own opportunities and possibilities.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 12:19
|
|
|
I think the first thing I'll do with the compiled data is print out a list of all the real/mythical figures who were really <x>, since it's now on my mind. It's within spitting distance! On a real level, once the Garou data entry is done there's the merging process, then maybe another thousand entries to enter (re-enter, really) for septs, another thousand on top of that for various kinds of spirits, and then some standardization work (as the finalization of the data set has evolved, for instance, each supernatural's sheet has diverged - date of death is column e on some, column c on others. It's easily fixed, fortunately. Trickier is standardizing the years active model, which is one of the few fields that should and indeed must be carried over into the compiled and simplified set of all supernatural entities, as it is quite strongly distorted by the presence of immortal vampires - but nonetheless it's extremely helpful to be able to prune out all entries active only in the victorian era when considering modern data, etc. Specific data like auspice or seeming gets ditched for the compiled and simplified set, for obvious reasons) and then a final pass of cleaning up the actual entries themselves (basically just scrubbing all commentary not transcribed to notes) before it's ready for release.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 14:39
|
|
|
Clan leadership positions are handy in a LARP, especially a large LARP, because they give people something to fight over. And more things to fight over keeps LARPs moving. This is why the BNS Influence rules are poo poo- they take one of the major things for players to fight over and remove any kind of exclusivity or competition from it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 18:28
|
|
|
Loomer posted:
This made me imagine a werewolf in some dead-end cubicle farm death-raging when his database crashes.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 19:27
|
|
|
Were you hungry when you wrote this post?
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 20:05
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:Clan leadership positions are handy in a LARP, especially a large LARP, because they give people something to fight over. And more things to fight over keeps LARPs moving. Right but one of the hardest things in a LARP is getting people to care about a thing organically. Like, 'Clan leadership is good is because its a prize to be fought over' is a legit stance but also its an honorific with no power. I think in the original Requiem LARP rules the only role of the Prisci was to elect a Prisci-Harpy who could then strip or add clan status from members of the court. But clan status is irrelevant - if you outrank some dude in your own covenant that's going to be more important, and the only punishment for not respecting someone's clan rank in an opposing covenant is the loss of clan status which, as previously established, you don't care about in this hypothetical scenario. In the four or so LARPs I was involved in this basically meant you had a handful of people who really wanted people to care about clan status, and the majority of people not giving a poo poo about it, because for the most part you had everything to lose by being invested in it and very little to gain. I think this is an example of how having a kludge like clan status implemented in the rules without careful consideration about why it matters to actual characters is kind of a mistake. I'm sure somebody, somewhere has managed to make clan status matter but in my experience only the largest clan in any given LARP can make it stick and even then only if they carefully cultivate a reason to make people give a poo poo about it. And if you've done all that, you've basically invented a local covenant from the ground up, so good work?
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 20:31
|
|
|
UrbicaMortis posted:This made me imagine a werewolf in some dead-end cubicle farm death-raging when his database crashes. Would watch World of Office Space.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2018 21:11
|
|
|
Trying to run their operations as Agile Scrums with daily standups is absolutely a thing the Adamantine Arrow would do. Free Council wouldn't - a scrum master is hierarchy which fosters the lie.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 00:21
|
|
|
Is there a bj zanzibar for CoD? I have a poo poo hard time creating gifts for my WtF players, especially since I'm still really unfocused on what purity facets should do.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 03:20
|
|
|
Okay, the worldofdarkness.com store has just updated the file for the Masquerade Revised corebook from a scan to an OEF file. At this point I think they must be recreating these books layout files from scratch or something. It's gone beyond "it turns out Onyx Path didn't bother to update the books on DTRPG" into something that requires a more complex explanation.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 04:27
|
|
|
Anward probably let Steve Bannon put a virus in the PDF or something.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 09:54
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:It's gone beyond "it turns out Onyx Path didn't bother to update the books on DTRPG" into something that requires a more complex explanation. I assume their regressive transmedia pipe dreams made them shovel excessive resources at a side-project, and they're exercising market fragmentation in a likely foolish bid to try to extract more return on the investment.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 10:03
|
|
|
Holy crap. Just caught up on the recent events with nuWW, and, wow. Negative as my opinion on them was, this is not something I'd have ever predicted. Glad it finally got Paradox to take action, though it's ridiculous that it took an international incident before they got WW under control. Hopefully Ericsson sees consequences for this in particular. Unrelated, how's the new Promethean stuff? There was talk of it but it kind of got overshadowed, for obvious reasons. I hear the Zeky are back, and also basically unplayable? Shame; I love the idea of them, ridiculous as it is. Roland Jones fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Nov 23, 2018 |
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 11:12
|
|
|
Roland Jones posted:Unrelated, how's the new Promethean stuff? There was talk of it but it kind of got overshadowed, for obvious reasons. I hear the Zeky are back, and also basically unplayable? Shame; I love the idea of them, ridiculous as it is. If you mean Prom 2e, flavor and themes are still up to Promethean caliber, which is to say they're very good and engaging. Mechanics are the worst case thus far of CofD 2e's general trend towards unnecessary complications and details, with overuse of Conditions and the subdivision of each Refinement into specific Roles the Promethean has to assume and live out. Disquiet and Wastelands are in a fairly good place, a little more lenient and gameable without being toothless. If you mean the new Night Horrors book, it's a mixed bag. I'd say it's worthwhile overall, just the bad parts are very bad. The Zeky are even more doomed and miserable than before, titanically powerful and dangerous, and missing one of their core mechanics. On the other hand, they somehow brought clones back from the 1e core in a new form that's actually very cool and interesting, and at its best, both deeply sympathetic and incredibly horrifying. Some good general antagonist Promethean characters too, and the Petrificati hit all the right themes of poignant tragedy. There's also a Brain That Wouldn't Die, so points there.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 11:55
|
|
|
I Am Just a Box posted:If you mean Prom 2e, flavor and themes are still up to Promethean caliber, which is to say they're very good and engaging. Mechanics are the worst case thus far of CofD 2e's general trend towards unnecessary complications and details, with overuse of Conditions and the subdivision of each Refinement into specific Roles the Promethean has to assume and live out. Disquiet and Wastelands are in a fairly good place, a little more lenient and gameable without being toothless. Meant the latter, but honestly I kind of missed most of the talk of the former when it came out too so a summary of it as well is much appreciated. Thanks. I wonder if I'm ever going to see anyone actually run this game. I've been fairly interested in it after I heard about it, but it's not something that seems to show up much, which admittedly is not a surprise.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 12:53
|
|
|
Found a Scion 2E podcast for those interested: http://penguinfringedabyss.com/Podcasts.aspx?game=18&campaign=9
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 18:21
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:Okay, the worldofdarkness.com store has just updated the file for the Masquerade Revised corebook from a scan to an OEF file. It could be as simple as Onyx Path not having the files for the books, being a separate company, but WW having acquired them when they bought the WoD's resources - I heard V5 uses concept art from the cancelled MMO as artwork in places?
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 23:25
|
|
|
From some of Matt McElroy's posts on RPGnet, it looks like Paradox is indeed making it their business to recreate book files, and the updated files will be passed on to DTRPG in time.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 23:44
|
|
|
I know vampire 2e has Blood and Smoke to go with it, does Mage have anything like that?
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2018 02:12
|
|
|
Not sure what you mean. Blood and Smoke was just the name of the 2e corebook before the IP owners permitted Onyx Path to actually call it a second edition. If you mean the Strix Chronicle in the form of the Parliament of Owls chapter exploring a signature antagonist, Mage 2e's corresponding signature focus is the Fallen World Chronicle, expressed in the World of Magic chapter. The signature trouble sorcerers get into is their own tendency to respond to all the strangeness strewn about the Chronicles of Darkness by excitedly poking it with a stick.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2018 02:19
|
|
|
Or, more simply, 'yes, it's Awakening 2e.' But yeah, the long version is also correct.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2018 03:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 13, 2024 04:06 |
|
|
Huh, got my hands on the Promethean 2E stuff, and looking at it (really neat so far, on a tangent), I think one thing has actually improved for the Zeky in 2E compared to 1E: I'm actually not finding anything that suggests that they can't survive their New Dawn anymore, and some things that suggest they can. First, Night Horrors: The Tormented doesn't actually mention the whole "whoops, you're still radioactive" thing that Saturnine Night did as far as I can see. Meanwhile, the new New Dawn in the core book seems much more... Powerful, I guess? It rewrites history to fit the new you into it, creates new possessions and stuff for you, and explicitly "burns away" your old body and replaces it with that of a "normal person". Given all the other hosed up stuff it can just erase and paper over, I don't see why it can't make a Zeka's new body not so radioactive they instantly kill themselves. Which is not to say that being a Zeka isn't awful. It's still a really bad experience, and 2E seems to have added some "fun" stuff and made the journey they face even harder. But, if tehy make it to the end of that journey, they might actually get to enjoy it rather than having it ripped away immediately. The problem is, you know, getting there.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2018 04:02
|
|