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While "don't worry about it, it's all busted" is typically the ultimate answer to any question of consistency or cohesion for WoD, I think the common insistence of "they're not really meant to crossover" is wrong and tiresome. Each line makes frequent, specific references to the others, up to and including detailed rules about how their contradictory rules interact. They're obviously not written with some total compatibility in mind, but that could be said of stuff within a single book, and that doesn't stop them from releasing whole books entirely centered around crossovers. It's all on some level dumb and impossible to reconcile, but that doesn't mean the questions aren't fun to hash out anyway, and the books aren't trying to stop you, except for a handful of hypocritical author essays or rear end in a top hat "it's allowed but it sucks" Abomination rules.
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Nov 29, 2018 03:07
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I wouldn't say that the oWoD games were intended to be a series of parallel universes where one line fully exists and vague shadows of the others are also present, only that that's the way it works best.
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Nov 29, 2018 03:11
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To me, it always seemed that the games were designed with the intent of being separate and having a few nods of acknowledgement to the other gamelines, but fundamentally with the cosmology of your own characters being the objectively correct one. Later books and revisions waffled a bit on the idea and introduced more methods to cross-over between game lines, largely in response to player demand, but it takes all sorts of really tortured retconning to make all the literally-true but mutually contradictory creation myths compatible with each other, which really only ends up making them all worse and less interesting for it. In the end, they settled on a sort of "all myths are true, even the contradictory ones" type of approach. It kind of does the trick in terms of letting you play a frankengame featuring mages, changelings, werewolves and vampires all in one group, if you really have to, but of course that kind of thing also gave us Kindred of the East and its "Asian people have a different kind of soul and go to special Asian hell when they die" embarrassment of a game line, so it's not all sunshine and roses, either.
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Nov 29, 2018 03:18
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Yeah, that was sort of the intention - to have them all part of the same world, and late Revised took steps in trying to conciliate the disparate cosmologies, but there was no editorial process to maintain any level of consistency since the start, so that was a hopeless task from the beginning and that's without even getting into the rules.
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Nov 29, 2018 03:19
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Pope Guilty posted:I wouldn't say that the oWoD games were intended to be a series of parallel universes where one line fully exists and vague shadows of the others are also present, only that that's the way it works best. Yeah. And it varies by edition, too. In late 1E and 2E they went hard on it, with a vampire being able to have Garou Lore or even Wyrm Lore and assorted. That got scaled back in Revised to werewolves being Lupines again, with maybe having a dim idea that some in a certain area call themselves a special name (the Tzimisce and the Shadow Lords, for example) and mostly just deciding they're not worth the effort to bother because why stick your hand in a blender if you don't have to.
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Nov 29, 2018 03:20
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Playing oWoD is basically like playing a game based on 20 years' worth of independently written fanfiction for the original core book of the game line. You can try to make sense of it all, but it's better if you don't.
Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 03:28
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ZearothK posted:Yeah, that was sort of the intention - to have them all part of the same world, and late Revised took steps in trying to conciliate the disparate cosmologies, but there was no editorial process to maintain any level of consistency since the start, so that was a hopeless task from the beginning and that's without even getting into the rules. I remember also in the book about Nephandi they said the Nephandi who hailed Satan and/or Yog-Sothoth side-eyed the Wyrm ones as being, basically, converts to the Black Spiral Dancer religion.
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Nov 29, 2018 03:34
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ulmont posted:I admit my decades-old memory of WoD cosmology is fading, but I thought that Werewolves and Vampires both had shared Avatars (fragments of Gaia and Caine respectively) that were incompatible* with Mage-style magic? I never paid enough attention to Changeling to comment on Morgan Le Fay, but I would have expected that situation to be similar. Yes, generally that's the case. My famous names list has double-duty names largely because of lack of consultation or reuse of persons - for instance, where you see a Garou-Vampire, it's because that personage appeared in one book as a vampire and another as a garou, same with vampire-mage, etc. Exceptions for mage-fae do exist as it isn't strictly impossible for fae changelings of DA:Fae to also have an avatar as I recall, and it's more thematically appropriate insofar as the verbena and the old faithers explicitly claim/have descent from genuine mage-fae lineages. Pope Guilty posted:I wouldn't say that the oWoD games were intended to be a series of parallel universes where one line fully exists and vague shadows of the others are also present, only that that's the way it works best. It's not a coincidence that Ascension, the last of the major oWoD line 'apocalypse' books, took explicitly that tack and spent about three pages laying out this idea that no, all of them are real and true, but you're in the Mage-hued one. Which itself could be a neat apocalypse game, come to think of it - jumping frantically from collapsing universe to universe, trying to find the one where your specific powers as a collective can stop the cascading failure of reality because you can't stop the root cause itself directly, just its avatars (antediluvians, a giant gently caress-off space comet sent by the wyrm, etc), even if it means saying goodbye to the world you knew and replacing your doppelganger who never turned into a mage/werewolf/changeling/vampire in a world with vastly different power dynamics. Kind of a 2012 meets Quantum Leap meets Mission Impossible thing.
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Nov 29, 2018 04:49
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quote:It's not a coincidence that Ascension, the last of the major oWoD line 'apocalypse' books, took explicitly that tack and spent about three pages laying out this idea that no, all of them are real and true, but you're in the Mage-hued one.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:00
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Cardiovorax posted:It's also no coincidence that the books that made an explicit point of this tend to be the most coherently written ones and also the most true to the core themes of their game line. I used to keep getting the impression that most of the crossover stuff was written by people who really didn't get what the distinct, individual flavour of each game was supposed to be, so we got stuff like the Technocracy being in cahoots with Pentex, because shacking up with evil demonic werewolf ghosts is totally what the Technocracy is into. Well, they had money. (This is literally the explanation in the Syndicate book. Sure, the Special Projects Division has stopped sending home reports, and anybody who goes to check on them gets mailed back to us in a zip-loc bag, but they keep meeting their projected profits every quarter! Surely if anything was wrong they wouldn't be sending us money all the time, right?) Rand Brittain fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 05:03
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Cardiovorax posted:It's also no coincidence that the books that made an explicit point of this tend to be the most coherently written ones and also the most true to the core, sa themes of their game line. I used to keep getting the impression that most of the crossover stuff was written by people who really didn't get what the distinct, individual flavour of each game was supposed to be, so we got stuff like the Technocracy being in cahoots with Pentex, because shacking up with evil demonic werewolf ghosts is totally what the Technocracy is into. This was especially rampant in the early works from what I saw, which probably had to do both with the lines still gelling into their own distinct thing and early oWoD being especially into just sort of grabbing things that sounded cool on a one off basis. One of the weird effects I always noticed with that was the tendency to try to lump everything "evil" together, but not as much things that were "good". So you'd have BSDs, sabbat, and unseelie fae teaming up for some reason, and things like malkavians on the Pentex board of directors, but much less, say, salubri teaming up with Children of Gaia. Not that plopping all the non-evil stuff together would have been better, but that difference always kind of stood out to me. I don't think it was an intentional hint at something, but I could be wrong.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:21
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I don't get why so many people (and roleplayers, no less) have such a problem with co-existence of contrary concepts, and such an issue with that it's perfectly okay these are mutually contradictory. It's a series of cosmologies; It's okay for one to say the Judeo-Christian myth is correct, and simultaneously have consensual reality AND the Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm Triat. There's no need to reconcile this - They clearly exist because the very existence of the beings is proof, and all can be true at once. Ineffable beings, states and powers beyond mortal ken are fine, no? That way lies trying to explain how things actually work which are better off explicitly unexplained.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:22
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Shockeh posted:I don't get why so many people (and roleplayers, no less) have such a problem with co-existence of contrary concepts, and such an issue with that it's perfectly okay these are mutually contradictory. It's a series of cosmologies; It's okay for one to say the Judeo-Christian myth is correct, and simultaneously have consensual reality AND the Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm Triat. There's no need to reconcile this - They clearly exist because the very existence of the beings is proof, and all can be true at once. It's a bit hard to construct an engaging narrative that touches on these higher bounds when they're all contradictory, though, which raises the question of why you're including them in a shared setting in the first place if they're either not usable because they're too hard to fit together, or not usable because they don't fit together and can't form a structural basis for your local events in your local game. EDIT: "It's ineffable. By which I mean, we can't be effed to deal with it." or give an eff or whatever the Good Omens pun actually was
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Nov 29, 2018 05:28
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Shockeh posted:I don't get why so many people (and roleplayers, no less) have such a problem with co-existence of contrary concepts, and such an issue with that it's perfectly okay these are mutually contradictory. It's kind of like that. For better or worse, the fluff and setting backstory was (and still is) a large part of the draw of the Old World Of Darkness. A setting where the world was simultaneously created by the Literal Bible Jesus God, a bunch of nature spirits, AND from the effects of human collective belief literally being what decides how the universe works? That is a setting that is pure nonsense, because you can't have all of these at once unless you simply don't care that each of them means the other two can't be also true. And if you are that aggressively disinterested in narrative coherence, there's no point in having that much setting fluff in the first place, so why bother at all? Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 05:29
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I'd say 'aggressively disinterested' in a bit much, no? I'm trying to maintain the course that either extreme is probably unhealthy. As long as the intra-setting, immediate and visceral (I felt such a nerd typing that.) aspects are coherent, it's okay for the cosmology to be bananas and contradictory. After all, it's a cosmology, you can't be certain. Mage is the best at handling this, because each Tradition says their way is right, and they simultaneously complement, conflict AND in places contradict one another. Hell, you can even get good story mileage out of the 'in world' conflict between them. I wouldn't be happy either though if we reached the Midichlorians stage, because once explained all that happens is the classic dickery follows - *Pushes glasses onto nose, adopts nasal voice* "Actually you can't do that through Obfuscate because..."   quote:A setting where the world was simultaneously created by the Literal Bible Jesus God, a bunch of nature spirits, AND from the effects of human collective belief literally being what decides how the universe works? That is a setting that is pure nonsense, because you can't have all of these at once unless you simply don't care that each of them means the other two can't be also true. I'm more saying they can be true, all at once, and that's fine. Shockeh fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 05:36
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It's totally fine for there to be diegetic contradictions between characters and philosophies, but when you write a shared universe and present your audience with third-person omniscient information that's a huge mess because you're a) having a passagg spat with another freelancer or b) you just don't care, you're kind of being an rear end in a top hat.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:40
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That Old Tree posted:It's totally fine for there to be diegetic contradictions between characters and philosophies, but when you write a shared universe and present your audience with third-person omniscient information that's a huge mess because you're a) having a passagg spat with another freelancer or b) you just don't care, you're kind of being an rear end in a top hat. Conversely to previous posts, this I'm totally in agreement with. If the rationale was purely A or B, then sure, it's just gibberish, I'm only defending the aspect that it's okay for contradictory third person information and/or unreliable narrators to exist.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:43
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quote:I'd say 'aggressively disinterested' in a bit much, no? Maybe it won't matter a lot to your average playing session, but it does matter a lot to how the metaplot of each setting works, and it's why they each got their own end-of-story apocalypse sourcebook instead of all just sharing the same one. A lot of people got really pulled into having their campaigns tie into one aspect or another of those metaplots, and having them not be a confusing mess of mutually contradictory forces and motivations trying to all be true at the same time is kind of important there. Mage gets kind of a pass because the idea isn't that all the various factions are right, it's that they're all wrong and just not generally aware of the true underlying grand theory of magical everything. It's why archmages get to do things like not need their Tradition's specific magical knicknacks anymore: they figured out which parts actually matter and which are just window dressing.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:45
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It also becomes a problem when you present third person narrators as omniscient truth speakers. Or don't call out information as unreliable.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:45
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Kurieg posted:It also becomes a problem when you present third person narrators as omniscient truth speakers. Or don't call out information as unreliable. No narrator does.  (See also: Literally every prophet in human history.)E: Said as nicely as possible!
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Nov 29, 2018 05:49
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Yeah, basically, the problem was not that the narrators contradicted each other, but that the out-of-character objectively true setting facts did. Different factions having different ideas about what the same thing means is of course fine.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:50
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Incidentally, Joe Slowboat makes a good point - Depends on whether your game style tends to touch on these aspects, rather than making them dressing; My Werewolf games were typically Umbra light, fighting Pentex & Banes, and my Vampire games concentrated on the survival and mystery angles, so I didn't need to care about the 'Higher' aspects. YMMV. And yes, my love/interest in Mike Carey's Lucifer as an equally happy-to-be-contradictory setting is alive and well, thank you.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:55
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Kurieg posted:It also becomes a problem when you present third person narrators as omniscient truth speakers. Or don't call out information as unreliable. Especially when the authors of those narrators don't agree on which ones are actually correct, or whether it matters if they are. Of course ultimately this comes down to early 90's White Wolf just being some little gaming company that had a few cool ideas that turned into a (sub)cultural phenomon, and not some Transmedia Visionary that had a bizarre aggression towards editorial oversight.
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Nov 29, 2018 05:55
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Although, to be fair, it had that too. I remember reading horror stories about freelancing teams of three people being told to each write one third of a book and never communicating with each other at all, never even mind having a proper editor. I mean, being a small company excuses some things, but at some point, you're just plain not trying hard enough.
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Nov 29, 2018 06:06
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Just go with Demon history: Reality used to be multi-faceted in a way that it isn't after the Fall. Things were multiple instances all at once [So that Adam and Eve were both perfect exemplars of the human form, and also a mass of proto-hominids evolving into early human tribes]. The seven days of creation were seven literal days, and also entire epochs of the universe. Then poo poo blew up and all those layers sort of crunched down into one imperfectly. Why does poo poo not conform to a simple, linear and consistent view of reality? Because reality was never made to be one particular facet of condensed existence, and there are flaws and inconsistencies in it's wounding. Or, in short: Blame God, everyone else does even when it's their fault.
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Nov 29, 2018 06:24
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Yeah, it's one way to resolve the whole thing, but I also think it's kind of a dumb one, because it results in something thematically weaker than each of the individual lines has going for them when taken by themselves. It makes your own world-shattering racial tragedy feel kind of pathetic when, at any given moment, there are four or five of those going on and really, you're not that special, it doesn't really matter to anyone but yourself.
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Nov 29, 2018 06:35
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I think it's been said before but it bears repeating: It's obnoxious how Geist has EVERY power start with "Boneyard causes the Boneyard condition. Want to know more about that? FLIP TO THE BACK OF THE BOOK FOR THE CONDITIONS LIST, JIMBO."
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Nov 29, 2018 07:26
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Mulva posted:Just go with Demon history: Reality used to be multi-faceted in a way that it isn't after the Fall. Things were multiple instances all at once [So that Adam and Eve were both perfect exemplars of the human form, and also a mass of proto-hominids evolving into early human tribes]. The seven days of creation were seven literal days, and also entire epochs of the universe. Then poo poo blew up and all those layers sort of crunched down into one imperfectly. Why does poo poo not conform to a simple, linear and consistent view of reality? Because reality was never made to be one particular facet of condensed existence, and there are flaws and inconsistencies in it's wounding. Yeah I generally treat Demon as canonical when I actually try to make sense of the oWoD as a whole (which I usually don't), down to avatars being spiritually-assimilated angel corpses.
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Nov 29, 2018 07:33
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I've ST'ed for 17 years give or take, and I'd say that other boojums are best used for a story now and again, not as a Underworldesque free for all. Doing so caters to munckin players basest tendencies and makes it hard to tell a story in the system you're running.
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Nov 29, 2018 09:10
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A few compiled ratios, at the moment without Wraith (Wraith is tricky to count for this - you can have millions of wraiths in a city but only a few hundred or thousand who can meaningfully interact with the human population). Greater Mexico City: 1:9,500. Miami: 1:20,000. Washington D.C. greater metropolitan area: 1:45,000 The US as a whole: 1:30,000-29,000 with nominal KJ addition.
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Nov 29, 2018 09:27
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Nov 29, 2018 09:30
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Loomer posted:A few compiled ratios, at the moment without Wraith (Wraith is tricky to count for this - you can have millions of wraiths in a city but only a few hundred or thousand who can meaningfully interact with the human population).
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Nov 29, 2018 09:51
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Loomer posted:Someone really needs to give the aristocracy some condoms. Even in the modern day they keep pumping out tons of kids. I take it you're not a Crusader Kings 2 player? Pumping out tons of kids is the most important job of an aristocrat! Mors Rattus posted:They were also groups, whereas these Entitlements are almost entirely singular entities, with group ones ('legion entitlements') being extremely rare and coveted. Aww, that's kind of a shame. Entitlements-as-groups often made more sense to me than the seasonal courts did (I know, I know, the seasonal courts not making sense is their whole point...) I really liked the idea that there were small - but still sometimes politically relevant - groups of Changelings dedicated to murdering fetches, taming hobgoblins, negotiating with the Fae, or whatever. Although I will say Entitlements-as-personal-supernatural-bargains definitely matches the word better, and is more in line with what "titles" eventually came to mean with regard to the Fae.
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Nov 29, 2018 09:53
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That Old Tree posted:
All supernaturals with the exception of wraiths and only nominal ballpark figures for Kuei-jin (e.g. 50 in San Francisco), since KJ still has to be finalized. A few more: Chicago 1:5,500 Cincinnati 1:8,900 Los Angeles ~1:6000 NOLA metropolitan area 1:11,000 SF Bay Area 1:13,000 SF in isolation 1:1,700 Hawaii in toto 1:17,500 O'ahu island 1:45,000 Kaua'i island 1:6,000 Las Vegas in isolation 1:5,200 Clark County in toto: 1:15,000 Australia in toto 1:25,000 Brisbane: 1:21,000 These are also maximum recorded ratios, as they don't distinguish between those who died at some point in the 20th century and those who didn't. For most locations that'll only knock off 5-10% maximum but for others it can create real outliers. I'll do a fine tuned one later on once KJ is settled down that gives the maximum recorded and one that factors in deaths in say, 1950 and keeps them from affecting ratios for 2000. Digital Osmosis posted:I take it you're not a Crusader Kings 2 player? Pumping out tons of kids is the most important job of an aristocrat! Don't be absurd. Just go and unlock the immortality quest chain and then become a satanist to destroy your enemies with black magic like all true rulers. Nessus posted:The figure's that low in DC? What the hell. Is it just because it didn't get covered as hard as Miami? D.C. got very little air time despite its own dedicated splatbook. Miami got a couple of terrible novels and a lot of offhand references, as well as a Garou sept.
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Nov 29, 2018 10:09
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So I found out where to preorder Changeling:tL 2nd, and it's loving 70 USD with shipping  Are us euro fans just condemned to eternal assfucking for being born on the wrong continent, or will there be a cheaper way of getting it?
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Nov 29, 2018 10:10
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Tias posted:So I found out where to preorder Changeling:tL 2nd, and it's loving 70 USD with shipping Since there's a Lightning Source printer in Europe, it might be cheaper shipping to get a PoD copy, but their base price would still be $60-$100 depending on print quality. Also I think the printer is in Britain, so make whatever use of it you want before they have a referendum on voluntarily sliding into the sea or finish Brexiting or whatever. Also I'm not 100% sure how it's worked out in the past, but usually I think the Kickstarter and Backerkit tradprint preorders out of the US go through a distributor, which I would hope brings down shipping some. Did it tell you what it would be? That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 10:28
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Brisbane supremacy. :clap:
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Nov 29, 2018 11:01
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That Old Tree posted:Since there's a Lightning Source printer in Europe, it might be cheaper shipping to get a PoD copy, but their base price would still be $60-$100 depending on print quality. Also I think the printer is in Britain, so make whatever use of it you want before they have a referendum on voluntarily sliding into the sea or finish Brexiting or whatever. After I selected my country, it said shipping would be 45 
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Nov 29, 2018 12:04
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This crossover talk is making me think about looking at the same thing except for CoD. It's been a while since I read some of their things, though, or I just never did, so I can't remember some stuff and am not sure if it's any better there; some seem like they'd work fine, like Prometheans being able to fit into whatever with little issue because their "grandest" thing, the Principle, is a mystery even to them does doesn't seem to do much anyway, and whether the God-Machine exists or not doesn't affect most other lines since it can just be doing its thing in the background and is probably a demiurge figure rather than the true creator even in its own lore. On the other hand Beast's lore makes everyone else (except Demons) much less interesting if it's true, but that's because Beast is dumb and terrible.
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Nov 29, 2018 12:05
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Shockeh posted:Brisbane supremacy. :clap: The Northern Rivers has a higher supernatural ratio, so go suck an egg you loving maroon!
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Nov 29, 2018 12:12
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