World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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Barbed Tongues: Mar 16, 2012

Mendrian posted:

Short terms should honestly be the norm for a LARP. Regular, long-format games are just lovely formats for political games. Cliques are good in a political game! But when it runs for 7 years, it means nobody ever has a chance to start over or try something new.

The problem is everybody likes what they accomplish and are scared to try again.

One of the local Masq serials here had some success in addressing that with a shelf-life rule. Auto-retired characters at two years, or one year if you took a Wanderlust flaw for some bonus Chargen points. You knew you were on the clock if you wanted to go for Praxis or a cool legacy/dynasty. I think it also had the side effect of creating more staff recruitment opportunities, too, as some people would dip their toes into narrating at the pause rather than jump right back in with a character.

They were also aggressive in gatekeeping, limiting players to only students/alumni of the state college here. That cut out a lot of the creep factor, but also meant the majority of players were freshmen/sophomores which tended to skew things toward more heroic adventure play than dark political.

# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:02

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# ? May 11, 2024 22:14

Pocky In My Pocket: Jan 27, 2005; Giant robots shouldn't fight!

MoonKnight posted:

HAHAHA.

Mage LARP becomes the type of situation that ends up discussed re: powerlevels, stacking +1s and stupid applications of spells, and using your dots to ruin the fun of other people.

Changeling becomes 'pretty princess the trauma gangbang'. And my only experience with Dreaming LARP can be best described as 'Changeling the Child Porn' due to physical relationships between childling PCs and adult wilder and grump PCs.

Forsaken can't get its head out of Apocalypse's rear end.

NWoD LARP suffers from power creep badly; you can build characters that do max successes (which translates to max damage) on a 2 (you only fail on a 1, or if draw a 1, or your pool doesn't surpass a default number decided for the game; the book recmmends 10 with every 5 a success, but 8/4 gives the best mapping to dice successesyou without much XP invested into it. I've watched NWoD LARPs turn into 'how can I get all the stackable +1s to this'. It's even worse in a large org like the MES, where approvals are arbitrary and someone in one city might get no pushback for a concept, while the same concept (or similar enough, using say the same bloodline/covenant combo for example) might be denied on the grounds that 'the ST doesn't feel it's appropriate' despite there being ten other similar concepts and combos of stuff in the global game

The issue is the people. LARP can be great, but you have to vet your group well.

10div5 is ~the woooorst~ number system and locally we've chucked it on the basis that it's awful and everyone hated it. You can get dice rolling Apps. It's 2019. Just use tabletop rules.

# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:46

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Pocky In My Pocket posted:

10div5 is ~the woooorst~ number system and locally we've chucked it on the basis that it's awful and everyone hated it. You can get dice rolling Apps. It's 2019. Just use tabletop rules.

How did this system work? I participated in a nWoD LARP back in 2004 or 2005, but I was only around for one session and didn't actually do anything that required an RNG.

Also, what was the original implementation of the MET/oWoD RNG? Some local aficionados attempted to rework that LARP system into something better, and while they made some progress they were basically missing the forest for the trees by not changing it enough. In particular everything was decided by RPS, but because ties went to whoever had more traits in an area (even by a difference of +1) you had a system that was more brittle than Fire Emblem. Also you could use your skill dots as rerolls but your opponent could cancel these with their own, so even a point of difference in skills also made for significant gaps in play.

# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:56

MoonKnight: Jul 14, 2018

NGDBSS posted:

How did this system work? I participated in a nWoD LARP back in 2004 or 2005, but I was only around for one session and didn't actually do anything that required an RNG.

Also, what was the original implementation of the MET/oWoD RNG? Some local aficionados attempted to rework that LARP system into something better, and while they made some progress they were basically missing the forest for the trees by not changing it enough. In particular everything was decided by RPS, but because ties went to whoever had more traits in an area (even by a difference of +1) you had a system that was more brittle than Fire Emblem. Also you could use your skill dots as rerolls but your opponent could cancel these with their own, so even a point of difference in skills also made for significant gaps in play.

For the NWoD ones, you carried a 'hand' of cards, an Ace through 10. You tallied up your total pool like you would in TT, and drew a card. You added the number on your card to your total. A 1 was an auto failure; a 2-10 added; and a 10 meant you drew a second time and added that second number. Then you used the XdivY formula; if your total exceeded X, you had succeeded; then you divided your total by Y to get number of successes. So getting a 16 in 8div4 would be 3 successes, for example.

And the only LARP versions of OWoD that have been written had RPS as their base mechanic. It went through a couple of permutations in the original Laws of the Night, but what you describe is pretty much par for the course. The newer MET VtM from By Night Studios cares more about your pools and they matter more (you don't use pools for retests; they're more like TT pools), with a lot less janky stuff, but having more traits still matters on a tie since ties go to the person with the higest pool. But it runs a lot better because of pulling out all the retest options and such, so you really only have 1 retest per challenge in MET VtM.

# ? Jan 9, 2019 21:10

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

MoonKnight posted:

For the NWoD ones, you carried a 'hand' of cards, an Ace through 10. You tallied up your total pool like you would in TT, and drew a card. You added the number on your card to your total. A 1 was an auto failure; a 2-10 added; and a 10 meant you drew a second time and added that second number. Then you used the XdivY formula; if your total exceeded X, you had succeeded; then you divided your total by Y to get number of successes. So getting a 16 in 8div4 would be 3 successes, for example.

but 16/4= 4. :confused:

# ? Jan 9, 2019 21:15

MoonKnight: Jul 14, 2018

Yawgmoth posted:

but 16/4= 4.

Sorry, I wasn't clear on XdivY, my bad. You start at the 'success' level of 8 if your number surpasses that total, so it's 'first success at X, then an extra success every Y further.' So with 8div4 it's:

8 = 1 success
12 = 2
16 = 3
20 = 4

And so on and so forth.

MoonKnight fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 9, 2019

# ? Jan 9, 2019 21:25

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

MoonKnight posted:

And the only LARP versions of OWoD that have been written had RPS as their base mechanic. It went through a couple of permutations in the original Laws of the Night, but what you describe is pretty much par for the course. The newer MET VtM from By Night Studios cares more about your pools and they matter more (you don't use pools for retests; they're more like TT pools), with a lot less janky stuff, but having more traits still matters on a tie since ties go to the person with the higest pool. But it runs a lot better because of pulling out all the retest options and such, so you really only have 1 retest per challenge in MET VtM.

What's the name of this book? While it sounds like the new system is still binary as hell, hopefully it doesn't have as pronounced of the "max out your traits and max out your relevant skill dots or the RNG will loving curbstomp you" problem that the devs didn't clue into.

# ? Jan 9, 2019 21:25

MoonKnight: Jul 14, 2018

NGDBSS posted:

What's the name of this book? While it sounds like the new system is still binary as hell, hopefully it doesn't have as pronounced of the "max out your traits and max out your relevant skill dots or the RNG will loving curbstomp you" problem that the devs didn't clue into.

Mind's Eye Theatre: Vampire the Masquerade is the newest MET OWoD book, published in 2013. They also released MET: Werewolf the Apocalypse and are at some point doing MET: Changeling the Dreaming as well.

# ? Jan 9, 2019 21:30

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

MoonKnight posted:

Mind's Eye Theatre: Vampire the Masquerade is the newest MET OWoD book, published in 2013. They also released MET: Werewolf the Apocalypse and are at some point doing MET: Changeling the Dreaming as well.

I took a look at this and it's a lot less of a mess than I remember from the LARP. It still has the dumb business of Celerity/Temporis granting more actions, but that's frankly small potatoes compared to the larger changes for the good.

Retests only trigger once ever unless someone overbids (at 2x).
Trait pools are likely to be very close together to the point that temporary effects can tip a balance.
There's a limit on downtime actions so that the active folks don't just declare ten things and hog the plot.
Even single dots in skills do something, and beancounting for maximum dots matters less against static NPCs.
There isn't a weird divide between XP and freebies that enables a bunch of dumb arbitrage (gently caress why do designers keep doing this).
Better Generation isn't an unmitigated good to the point that neonates are mechanically told to gently caress off.
Not only is diablerie less incentivized by the changes to Generation, but it also has a once per year restriction and you have to personally commit to it rather than grabbing your buddies and doing a funny ritual.
Clan differences are meaningful rather than just being there to enable cheaper discipline purchases.
There are suggestions for graduated XP so that it's not just the elder show 24/7 when a LARP gets to 2+ years, or something sillier like 7 full years.
Backgrounds give actual rules for nearly everything instead of just declaring, "gently caress if I know and I'm the game designer make something up in this mechanically complicated system ".
Mass combat outright tells you to limit the number of attacks on any given character and to run something more dynamic than just pointing 10+ people at the same big target. In contrast, said LARP's final encounter was something like 40+ people all declaring "I attack" against a giant monster until we ran it out of resources. It was tedious as gently caress.

I'll have to pass it along the next time that scene comes up in my group, since some of the other participants are in a successor LARP that uses the same old crufty structure.

NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Jan 10, 2019

# ? Jan 10, 2019 00:02

Pocky In My Pocket: Jan 27, 2005; Giant robots shouldn't fight!

its hard to convey how awful 10div5 is to someone who hasnt played it. it forces you to minmax to have a chnace of doing anything. you get a 10% chance of failing everything you do and its almost impossible to be genuinely good at anything. its super super awful to play with

the various fixes, 8div4, 8div3 and so on are only marginally better.

there was a different card based draw where you use a full deck with two jokers which at least was more engaging to use* - but really tabletop rules works best nowadays

*calculate your pool then draw three cards. each number below your pool is a success. court cards are always fails. if you draw a joker then draw an additional two cards. for pools over 10 then draws under the unit number are two success (i.e. a pool of 14 has 1-4 being 2 success', 5-10 being 1 success)

# ? Jan 10, 2019 00:27

Pope Guilty: Nov 6, 2006; The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.

There's also some issues. My big ones are:

Those abilities you get for having one dot of a skill are sometimes super-useful (even a single dot of Computers gets you a free Downtime Action each month) and sometimes extremely situational (i.e. Science lets you spend a Downtime Action to, if anything relevant is presented, maybe get some useful information). The worst is Awareness- with even a single dot in Awareness, you get to test every time somebody uses a Discipline on somebody else to see if you detected it. And you get that at one dot, so 1 or 2 XP, depending on your Generation, lets you add a rock-paper-scissors to everybody's uses of Dominate or whatever and also makes it impossible (since, guess what, everybody will take a dot in it) to use social Disciplines subtly without getting caught. Do you really find that Toreador magnetic? Or is he just using Presence? You don't have to guess! Eliminating or extremely nerfing the Awareness ability and raising the dot level at which abilities are gained (either universally to like 3 or 5 or varying based on how powerful the ability in question is) would help a lot.
Reducing Influences to Underworld and High Society and making the actual content of your influence irrelevant is really super-bad. The old Influences system was a bit complicated, but the homogenization is a really radical overcorrection that removes one of the better mechanical motivations for players to work with and against each other and that's extremely bad for the game.
XP, unless extremely carelessly spent, makes characters better faster than under the old rules. Keep XP low and relatively even and this won't be a problem, but it takes surprisingly little XP to max out pools for various tasks in ways that would make the average internet D&D 3E minmaxer salivate.

Overall it's a good system and a good move from LotN, but it could've used more thought and testing.

(Also people no-poo poo say the names of status traits out loud in-character and goddammit that is like a D&D cleric telling you IC what level they are, but it's my fault for playing with the MES.)

# ? Jan 10, 2019 00:38

Mors Rattus: Oct 25, 2007; FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Given Onyx Path even has a dice app now, these card things are needlessly baroque.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 00:43

Pope Guilty: Nov 6, 2006; The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.

The MET:VtM Status system is actually pretty slick and it'd work great if it were a card game and not something that people need to keep in their brains while also playing a character.

So Status comes in four kinds: Innate, Abiding, Fleeting, and Negative. Innate Status you get for something innate to you, like if you were at Thorns for the Camarilla you've got the Architect status. Abiding Status is for ongoing situations that raise you above others, like if you're the Sheriff you get Enforcer and Privileged. Fleeting status is a temporary reward for something you did, like if you kill the target of a Blood Hunt you get Triumphant. Each (non-Negative) status trait has a passive ability and a spend ability; you always get the passive ability as long as you have the status, but you can expend the status and give up the passive ability to benefit from the spend ability. Innate and Abiding status refresh at the next game, Fleeting status is just gone when expended.

So let's go back to the Sheriff. He's got the Enforcer abiding trait. The passive lets you carry weapons anywhere vampires usually can't (i.e. to Elysium) and designate two other vampires as deputies who get a Fleeting status that's basically a baby version of Enforcer, and you can spend it to issue a Warned status. (Which would remove your ability to go armed, which is, uh, maybe not great design.) He's also got Privileged, the passive of which prevents people who don't have certain status traits from accusing him of lying and can be spent to give somebody the Vulgar negative trait. So here we have the abilities of a Camarilla position mostly baked into a couple of status traits, which is neat.

There's also Negative traits. Each sect has its own negative traits (like the Camarilla's Vulgar and the Anarchs' Cherry) but the main ones everybody uses are Warned, Disgraced, and Forsaken. Warned is "you broke some minor rule or social convention, watch your rear end", Disgraced is "you've hosed up bad and better watch yourself", and Forsaken is straight up Kill On Sight unless the local authority says otherwise.

There's a couple of problems with the system. The first is that there are, let's count them, 47 positive and 9 negative status traits in the game, each with its own passive and spend abilities. That's too loving much to keep in your head, even if only about 25 of them are relevant to any single faction. Back when the book released I made index-sized Status Cards for each Status that could be printed and cut out and carried around, but people stopped bothering with them after a couple of months.

The second issue is that talking in-character is going to sound goony enough without people using the names of the status traits as though they were discrete units of something that characters IC know they possess rather than mechanics to represent interpersonal power and status. We're playing the same game we were before we switched, there's no reason for your character to start talking about people being capital-F Forsaken all of a sudden.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 01:07

Magnusth: Sep 25, 2014; _{Hello, Creature! Do You Despise Goat Hating Fascists? So Do We! Join Us at Paradise Lost!}

Jesus loving christ, get out of the neolithic era and stop using RNG in your goddamn larps what the actual gently caress? what? why? whyyyyy would you do that?

# ? Jan 10, 2019 01:18

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Pope Guilty posted:

Those abilities you get for having one dot of a skill are sometimes super-useful (even a single dot of Computers gets you a free Downtime Action each month) and sometimes extremely situational (i.e. Science lets you spend a Downtime Action to, if anything relevant is presented, maybe get some useful information). The worst is Awareness- with even a single dot in Awareness, you get to test every time somebody uses a Discipline on somebody else to see if you detected it. And you get that at one dot, so 1 or 2 XP, depending on your Generation, lets you add a rock-paper-scissors to everybody's uses of Dominate or whatever and also makes it impossible (since, guess what, everybody will take a dot in it) to use social Disciplines subtly without getting caught. Do you really find that Toreador magnetic? Or is he just using Presence? You don't have to guess! Eliminating or extremely nerfing the Awareness ability and raising the dot level at which abilities are gained (either universally to like 3 or 5 or varying based on how powerful the ability in question is) would help a lot.

Honestly I will take a chance of Awareness spotting someone's use of Social Disciplines over the boring mess that was "5 dots or GTFO". Unless you've invested a lot in it you're likely to fail, since you need the higher trait pool to break ties in your favor and the opposing party gets Mental + their choice of Subterfuge/Willpower. And it's not going to be subtle out of character unless both the user and the target are both NPCs, so as players you'll probably know something's up anyways.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 01:19

Mors Rattus: Oct 25, 2007; FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
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Magnusth posted:

Jesus loving christ, get out of the neolithic era and stop using RNG in your goddamn larps what the actual gently caress? what? why? whyyyyy would you do that?

A certain degree of randomness is honestly a pretty useful thing to have when PVP is going to happen, as it will in a WoD LARP, and you don't want it to be resolved based on, say, the physical skills of the players (as in boffer LARP) or by negotiation (because these are WoD LARPers and this is going to go badly). Having a theoretically neutral arbiter, like cards or dice, is useful to prevent tantrum spirals.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 01:36

Magnusth: Sep 25, 2014; _{Hello, Creature! Do You Despise Goat Hating Fascists? So Do We! Join Us at Paradise Lost!}

Mors Rattus posted:

A certain degree of randomness is honestly a pretty useful thing to have when PVP is going to happen, as it will in a WoD LARP, and you don't want it to be resolved based on, say, the physical skills of the players (as in boffer LARP) or by negotiation (because these are WoD LARPers and this is going to go badly). Having a theoretically neutral arbiter, like cards or dice, is useful to prevent tantrum spirals.

Okay, but if anyone throws a tantrum, you kick them from your loving larp because what the gently caress? Just don't play with people who can't play nice with others.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 01:40

Mors Rattus: Oct 25, 2007; FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Magnusth posted:

Okay, but if anyone throws a tantrum, you kick them from your loving larp because what the gently caress? Just don't play with people who can't play nice with others.

Yes, this is correct to do, but it doesn't change the fact that people who are playing nicely can still have firm ideas about what they want, for their own enjoyment and fun and story, that do not match with each other and will spend ten minutes arguing that can be short-circuited by, again, a neutral arbiter.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 01:44

Magnusth: Sep 25, 2014; _{Hello, Creature! Do You Despise Goat Hating Fascists? So Do We! Join Us at Paradise Lost!}

Mors Rattus posted:

Yes, this is correct to do, but it doesn't change the fact that people who are playing nicely can still have firm ideas about what they want, for their own enjoyment and fun and story, that do not match with each other and will spend ten minutes arguing that can be short-circuited by, again, a neutral arbiter.

so, like, i've played in larps where the main method of resolution was 'talk to each other as adults' and this has never happened, and it would never happen in a larp that's well-organized and managed. And sure, if all else fail, have a coin toss or something. Or have mechanics or metatechniques that handle conflict fundamentally differently.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 01:50

joylessdivision: Jun 15, 2013

Magnusth posted:

Okay, but if anyone throws a tantrum, you kick them from your loving larp because what the gently caress? Just don't play with people who can't play nice with others.

Well yes, however nerd social fallacies.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 01:54

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Magnusth posted:

Just don't play with people who can't play nice with others.

this is precisely why I don't go to any larp ever

# ? Jan 10, 2019 02:26

Pope Guilty: Nov 6, 2006; The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.

Magnusth posted:

so, like, i've played in larps where the main method of resolution was 'talk to each other as adults' and this has never happened, and it would never happen in a larp that's well-organized and managed. And sure, if all else fail, have a coin toss or something. Or have mechanics or metatechniques that handle conflict fundamentally differently.

"Agree on an outcome if you can and if not use an RNG-based system" is how basically all LARPS work dude

# ? Jan 10, 2019 02:28

MoonKnight: Jul 14, 2018

Pope Guilty posted:

Lots of words about Status

Status was the bread and butter of the game I ran (also boons). We did the same thing with status; you had cards that you carried for your types of status, that stayed in your character folder with your stuff, and at least for our group of about 40 it worked well.

As far as the announcements, it's not too much of a big deal IMO. It's like pronouncing someone guilty or innocent. 'I am an Enforcer of this court, my weapons are permitted under Camarilla law' or 'As the Authority of the Camarilla in this domain...',. and such.

I get the YMMV part, but it's not bad in and of itself.

MoonKnight fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Jan 10, 2019

# ? Jan 10, 2019 03:06

cptn_dr: Sep 7, 2011; Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies

Dragging the conversation away from LarpChat and into MageChat for a second (sorry), does anyone know if there's an Atlantean rune for "Awakening"? I'm trying (roughly) translate "Ko taku reo taku ohooho, ko taku reo taku mapihi mauria" (My language is my awakening, my language is the window to my soul) into High Speech for a character to have tattooed as a yantra.

Roughly it would translate as "[Language, Awakening] [Language, Knowing, Soul]".

So far, I've got "Language" as [[Mind, Weaving] [Forces Making]], and Soul as [Death, Fate, Mind, Prime, Spirit], even though I haven't quite figured out what that'll look like.

cptn_dr fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Jan 10, 2019

# ? Jan 10, 2019 04:37

Mendrian: Jan 6, 2013

Mors Rattus posted:

Given Onyx Path even has a dice app now, these card things are needlessly baroque.

Yup!

12 years ago when I was designing a LARP I spent almost 3 months observing probability in an attempt to come up with a better system. The whole time I was thinking, 'this would be so much easier if I could just design a simple handheld device to roll dice.'

We have that now. It should be the norm.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 04:55

Joe Slowboat: Nov 9, 2016; Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements

Awakening should be the Watchtower/path rune of the character, and Language should be Mind/Prime.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 05:23

Ataxerxes: Dec 2, 2011; What is a soldier but a miserable pile of eaten cats and strange language?

Pope Guilty posted:

"Agree on an outcome if you can and if not use an RNG-based system" is how basically all LARPS work dude

I have to say that this really isn't the case here, but different countries do things in different ways. Of the last five larps I have attended only one had an RNG based system (the Chronicles of Darkness game I mentioned before). Of the 4 others 2 were social games (WoD & Victorian horror) where you would discuss in a side room with the GM's if a conflict would arise and the last one was a Witcher larp with boffer/latex weapons where conflict, for the characters who had weapons in the first place, was player vs. NPC and if you could fight then you could, but fighting wasn't the main point there.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 09:28

Ataxerxes: Dec 2, 2011; What is a soldier but a miserable pile of eaten cats and strange language?

Also, my previous posts about WoD/CoD larps in Finland were more about larps here in general, so here is more about the actual topic. Since copyright laws in here are also not like those in the US and since almost no-one who makes pen and paper rpg's in English can read Finnish most of the larps about various iterations of WoD are basically the GM team making up their own rules and only using the setting, or parts of it, as the backround. Also, as most games are run by just a few people on a budget of only a few hundred, or at, most a few thousand euroes no-one makes any profit from them.

There were WoD city chronicles sometimes around the turn of the millenium, but I didn't participate and most lasted only a few years if that. There have been numerous one-shot Vampire larps, some games centered around the other splats and quite a few mixed games. The trilogy I participated in had a group of changelings, vampires+ghoul, werewolves, mages and hunters, with some other creatures in NPC roles or only appearing as single characters (mine was the only player character Sin Eater, there was one NPC Sin Eater also but I didn't meet them).

An urban larp is relatively easy to organize here, for that one they used the apartments of the GM team, the house of one player, one rented small theatre for the final scene and just some locations out in the parts of the city that are not frequently visited by people (an old war memorial in the woods, the remote corner of a park, the ruins of a burned-out sawmill, etc) and as the last games was in early December there weren't that many people just walking around or drinking beer in the park anyway. The informed the local police that strangely dressed people would be around that theatre at such and such time, and the police didn't bother anyone. Also, as the props of the characters were not really obvious (everyone wore a ribbon on their sleeve, the color indicating the vague type of the character) the players could and would just walk around, sit in cafes or restaurants and so on. The GM team hid a series of small balsa wood boxes in the city, with a small note in the side saying that this is prop for a larp, please don't open it if you are not involved and not one of these boxes was vandalized or stolen. These boxes could then be opened by the players as the game progressed and the players found them, and they contained differen things for different groups.

One rule of that game was that a player character dies only if the player wants them to, and as the last scene of the game was a desperate ritual to plug a hole in the sky that had been opened by Void worshipping lunatics, with 5 players performing the ritual as the rest fought NPC zombies, when the ritual was over there were quite a few goodbyes from characters that the players had deemed mortally wounded. It's a good larp when the blood is fake and the tears are real, as one participant said.

One other thing is that as pretty much all WoD/CoD stuff is written by Americans from an American perspective many of the critters and horrors are kinda unknown to us, or are very different in the local folklore. This applies especially to both Changeling games, the whole Seelie/Unseelie thing is not how the Finnish mythology (more about it for exampe here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnic_mythologies) works. There have been many larps that have drawn inspiration from the idea of a World of Darkness, that is to say that the world is almost like ours but something is off. Most of these games are not WoD/CoD larps as such, the monsters aren't the usual suspects and there usually isn't that much fighting, but the influence is there. There were many folk beliefs that especially the agrarian people followed fairly recently, the last Karelien poem singers were still alive when Finland became independent in 1918, for example.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 09:55

Ataxerxes: Dec 2, 2011; What is a soldier but a miserable pile of eaten cats and strange language?

Also, if you are interested in Finnish magical beliefs a book has been translated about them: http://www.salakirjat.com/product/158/the-magic-songs-of-the-finns

# ? Jan 10, 2019 10:00

Loomer: Dec 19, 2007; A Very Special Hell

The Seelie/Unseelie thing is barely how Celtic fairies work.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 10:06

Mors Rattus: Oct 25, 2007; FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Loomer posted:

The Seelie/Unseelie thing is barely how Celtic fairies work.

Oh yeah no that poo poo is Victorian in its entirety, basically. Irish fairies are just magical irish people that do rear end in a top hat poo poo half the time and like to kidnap kids or foretell deaths or drown people, and Scottish faeries are similar but even more antagonistic.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 13:22

Loomer: Dec 19, 2007; A Very Special Hell

On a similar note, one of my longstanding gripes with Dreaming is that it went 'hey, let's go hella irish and welsh in our backstory!' but then used a standard 'knights are a thing, right?'-level understanding of feudalism with no relation at all to the systems of kingship and nobility that emerged in Ireland and Wales, both of which would have worked far better with Dreaming's goals, themes, and motifs. Like for real, one of my 'maybe someday' projects is a rebuild of Changeling to use Welsh medieval social strata (chance of happening: 0.000000001% because fuuuuck that) because it's literally right there in the book next to the one on super generic white hippy new age 'celtic myth'.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 13:38

Ataxerxes: Dec 2, 2011; What is a soldier but a miserable pile of eaten cats and strange language?

Mors Rattus posted:

Oh yeah no that poo poo is Victorian in its entirety, basically. Irish fairies are just magical irish people that do rear end in a top hat poo poo half the time and like to kidnap kids or foretell deaths or drown people, and Scottish faeries are similar but even more antagonistic.

Finnish fairies are kinda similar, some will do things for you if you placate them just right, most will just mess your up. And that's why I like The Lost more than The Dreaming, drives home the point that most of those stories were not happy, but warnings about scary horrors. To me Chronicles of Darkness succeeds better in the "the poo poo hit the fan but you survived it somehow, but what will you do now?" than the older WoD games, and that is the kind of starting point I like in game about urban horror.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 14:21

01011001: Dec 26, 2012

Crasical posted:

The +2 that the Hedge gets to its rolls is in the Changeling book page 201, in the 'Dice modifiers' sidebar. (It also gives more fun dice-adders for the Hedge, like 'the characters are in a hurry' giving the hedge +2)

I feel like the intent is that in a place that's as 'raw narrative' as the Hedge, it's fair enough to say that the 'context of the scene' might change fairly often, forcing new roll-offs to see who's got the Edge this time. There is also an optional rule for Seizing the Edge by guessing your successes on a roll.

It's my opinion that the math is wonky. I was willing to say 'well, okay, maybe it was intended that Dreamscaping is supposed to be an activity for 'advanced changelings' and that's why the dice stack so heavily against the player attempting to make dream-sculpting effects. Now that I've seen the same problem in another location of the book under close inspection, I'm beginning to have doubts as to how much playtesting these rules got.

It gets wonkier and clunkier when you consider the possibility of group navigation through the hedge. Also a smart PC is just going to pick the same thing over and over if they've got one particularly good attribute+skill combo, which gets pretty stale pretty fast.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 18:15

PHIZ KALIFA: Dec 21, 2011; #mood

Ataxerxes posted:

Also, if you are interested in Finnish magical beliefs a book has been translated about them: http://www.salakirjat.com/product/158/the-magic-songs-of-the-finns

This is cool as heeeeeeeeckkkk, thanks Ataxerxes. Reading Moomin I'm always curious how much Jansson invented versus how much is adapted from local legends.

Has anyone heard of any LARPs collaborating with Escape Room style groups? Having a set of interlocking parlour puzzles for folks to squabble over while other players do their plot wankery would make for a fun twist.
I'd also love to run something like "Scenes from the Succubus Club" where it takes place in an actual radio station, playing mood-appropriate music, which would feature snippets of in-game dialogue between the songs. It might be difficult to live-splice a coherent narrative in between Voltaire and VNV Nation, but the worst case scenario is I War of the Worlds my city into an imagined invasion of nerdy goths.

# ? Jan 11, 2019 00:28

MonsieurChoc: Oct 12, 2013; Every species can smell its own extinction.

I started replaying Secret Woprld this week and it really is the oWoD mmo. You just play as a super-powered Imbued created by Gaia recruited by the Knight Templars.

# ? Jan 11, 2019 04:49

Idrin: Jun 11, 2007

Or the Technocracy (illuminati in game)

# ? Jan 11, 2019 04:57

The Unlife Aquatic: Jun 17, 2009; Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars

Or Malkavians with a leadership structure. (The Dragon)

# ? Jan 11, 2019 05:08

citybeatnik: Mar 1, 2013; You Are All
WEIRDOS

The Secret World is one of those games where I really dug the story but the whole MMO structure led me to just Youtube all of the story scenes instead of slugging my way through all of it.

# ? Jan 11, 2019 06:25

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# ? May 11, 2024 22:14

The Unlife Aquatic: Jun 17, 2009; Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars

citybeatnik posted:

The Secret World is one of those games where I really dug the story but the whole MMO structure led me to just Youtube all of the story scenes instead of slugging my way through all of it.

Yeah, it's a game that honestly might have worked better as some sort of novel or a TTRPG. One day I wanna turn the Dragon into an Agency.

# ? Jan 11, 2019 06:32

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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