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Games like Demon or Mage in which the oppressive status quo is inconceivably vast and powerful are much more revolutionary than games like Geist which explicitly assure you that that you can win a specific battle whose victory will measurably and believably improve modern, day-to-day existence. Destroying the God-Machine or casting down the Exarchs demands the will from players and Storyteller to decide that such a radical departure from the status quo is possible even when everything seems to indicate otherwise.
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Apr 17, 2019 18:54
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I'm not sure I understand the criticisms of Geist not being coherent. You died, you're a deadman, you can now SEE that there's a system of oppression in place and there's an underclass of dead people (that you now belong to), and can see them getting exploited by the underworld, its agents (Reapers) and by amoral mortals (Necromancers). If you're saying there's no explicit compulsion for them to help and not just abuse their powers to get wealthy and comfortable, sure, but if I understand Mage correctly, it's sort of assumed that most of the player characters are NOT going to just ignore their system of oppression and join the Seers. You've joined an exploited underclass, what do?
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Apr 17, 2019 19:46
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"Eat the rich" probably takes on a whole new meaning when you're half-dead and ridden by an iconic poltergeist.
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Apr 17, 2019 19:57
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I am excited to play out all the Geist feeding scenes of just wolfing down gross slop to recharge your magic. Overall I really like the book so far.
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Apr 17, 2019 20:20
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Also, it probably-to-definitely galvanizes your resolve to improve the world of the living and especially the dead when you've come to know with absolute certainty what's waiting for you (and everyone else) in eternity. And you have a finite amount of time to make the infinite better when you (and everyone else) end up there.
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Apr 17, 2019 20:21
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As has been noted elsewhere it has Group Beats as the standard, as opposed to a suggested option as other books have put it. I've already seen a person complaining about it being 'Beat welfare,' and how a person who blows off games has been getting the same experience as everyone else (the book doesn't suggest giving experience to players who aren't there), despite the game having just come out yesterday. nofather fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Apr 17, 2019 |
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Apr 17, 2019 20:48
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beat welfare beat welfare beat welfare
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Apr 17, 2019 20:55
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Mors Rattus posted:beat welfare Well someone had to take up the mantle after 4th Edition "d20 Obamacare" Dungeon & Dragons died.
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Apr 17, 2019 20:58
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Dawgstar posted:"Eat the rich" probably takes on a whole new meaning when you're half-dead and ridden by an iconic poltergeist.
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Apr 17, 2019 20:58
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And again, none of that is bad necessarily, but idk why you’d make this game in the Storyteller system beyond whatever brand recognition it can offer.
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Apr 17, 2019 21:01
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nofather posted:As has been noted elsewhere it has Group Beats as the standard, as opposed to a suggested option as other books have put it. I wish I had the power to wedgie people across all distances, because goodness that person needs it. Beat welfare, Christ.
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Apr 17, 2019 21:01
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Basic Chunnel posted:And again, none of that is bad necessarily, but idk why you’d make this game in the Storyteller system beyond whatever brand recognition it can offer. Ferrinus posted:Games like Demon or Mage in which the oppressive status quo is inconceivably vast and powerful are much more revolutionary than games like Geist which explicitly assure you that that you can win a specific battle whose victory will measurably and believably improve modern, day-to-day existence. Destroying the God-Machine or casting down the Exarchs demands the will from players and Storyteller to decide that such a radical departure from the status quo is possible even when everything seems to indicate otherwise.  So you could say that a game without these as key themes, and into which you forcibly introduce these themes, is a sort of Will Triumph, a "Triumph of the Will" so to speak. Perhaps it demonstrates a certain, I don't know what to call it - Willpower? Maybe more like a will TO power. Nessus fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Apr 17, 2019 |
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Apr 17, 2019 21:31
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nofather posted:I've already seen a person complaining about it being 'Beat welfare,' and how a person who blows off games has been getting the same experience as everyone else (the book doesn't suggest giving experience to players who aren't there), despite the game having just come out yesterday. Well, they sound fun.
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Apr 17, 2019 21:54
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Well, they sound fun.
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Apr 17, 2019 21:56
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I believe the term you're searching for, Nessus, is 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.' From, y'know, famous antifascist communist and general cool guy Antonio Gramsci.
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Apr 17, 2019 21:57
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Nessus posted:Is there something about rolling d10s against target numbers from a trait-derived pool that requires the game to be dismal and hopeless? Street Fighter is also a Storyteller game. Were they just not allowed game consoles
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Apr 17, 2019 21:59
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Ferrinus posted:Games like Demon or Mage in which the oppressive status quo is inconceivably vast and powerful are much more revolutionary than games like Geist which explicitly assure you that that you can win a specific battle whose victory will measurably and believably improve modern, day-to-day existence. Destroying the God-Machine or casting down the Exarchs demands the will from players and Storyteller to decide that such a radical departure from the status quo is possible even when everything seems to indicate otherwise. Well aren't you making them less revolutionary by telling us all this?
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Apr 17, 2019 21:59
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Basic Chunnel posted:Who are these people who come to tabletop to simulate Street Fighter
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Apr 17, 2019 22:05
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neaden posted:Well aren't you making them less revolutionary by telling us all this?
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Apr 17, 2019 22:11
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Basic Chunnel posted:Who are these people who come to tabletop to simulate Street Fighter I always though that was a weird thing for an RPG, same thing with that WWE D20 game, but different strokes I guess
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Apr 17, 2019 22:19
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Geist's goal isn't any less revolutionary than Mage's or Demon's, it's just revolutionary in reference to an imaginary horror-fantasy form of oppression, instead of positing an imaginary horror-fantasy antagonist as the embodiment of real forms of oppression.
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Apr 17, 2019 22:28
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Nessus posted:
Ah, so you are a fascist. neaden posted:Well aren't you making them less revolutionary by telling us all this? No, it’s not a secret. It’s a test. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Apr 17, 2019 |
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Apr 17, 2019 22:29
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FrostyPox posted:I always though that was a weird thing for an RPG, same thing with that WWE D20 game, but different strokes I guess
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Apr 17, 2019 22:38
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Basic Chunnel posted:Who are these people who come to tabletop to simulate Street Fighter Street Fighter was actually really good Dumb Fun because it let you realize your terrible OCs, I made a Sumo Ninja and it was great. EDIT: Ironslave posted:I wish I had the power to wedgie people across all distances, because goodness that person needs it. Beat welfare, Christ. There's a merit for that, I think.
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Apr 17, 2019 22:39
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Basic Chunnel posted:Who are these people who come to tabletop to simulate Street Fighter There is actually a nice game for it. Fight! The dev is pretty cool (in case he turns out to be Adolph Jong Stalin, this is based on one conversation) and they're trying to get a second edition out right now. But on the (very few) general rpg forums I've been on, basically if there's any trend, like a new anime or popular new fantasy or sci fi series or tv show, inevitably you have a month of 'I want to make a RPG based on this new thing.' So a Street Fighter RPG in the 90s kinda fits like an Elder Scrolls game does now. nofather fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Apr 18, 2019 |
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Apr 17, 2019 23:08
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Loomer posted:More ratios and demographics. All, unless otherwise noted, on a whole supernatural community basis and exclude wraiths for obvious reasons. I haven't looked at Project stats for a long time, but I assume the US is too volatile data-wise from all the books set there to come to an easy ratio?
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Apr 18, 2019 00:30
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nofather posted:There is actually a nice game for it. Fight! The dev is pretty cool (in case he turns out to be Adolph Jong Stalin, this is based on one conversation) and they're trying to get a second edition out right now. Eh, why not signal boost.
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Apr 18, 2019 01:12
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I really want Fight 2e to make it but it doesn't look good You know what does look good? Geist!
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Apr 18, 2019 05:14
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Blockhouse posted:I really want Fight 2e to make it but it doesn't look good One of the things that I appreciated during my relatively quick read was that it was clear that the authors had approached the concept of religion as a community exercise in a respectful and non-hostile way, which was refreshing since I am used to RPG religions either being nothing but oppressive hierarchies or otherwise intrinsically bad, neutral-waste-of-time at best.
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Apr 18, 2019 05:39
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Nessus posted:How broke-rear end are the Geist powers? Also I forgot to answer this, the craziest one IMO is The Tomb; at 2 dots as long as you have the representation or another object with some conceptual link to something that's been lost or destroyed, you can summon a plasmic recreation of it that lasts for several days.
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Apr 18, 2019 05:52
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Crasical posted:Also I forgot to answer this, the craziest one IMO is The Tomb; at 2 dots as long as you have the representation or another object with some conceptual link to something that's been lost or destroyed, you can summon a plasmic recreation of it that lasts for several days.
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Apr 18, 2019 05:57
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Spector29 posted:I haven't looked at Project stats for a long time, but I assume the US is too volatile data-wise from all the books set there to come to an easy ratio? Oddly enough, the US is probably the best place to establish a representative ratio because it had so much coverage. Most other countries got a mention here and there, often off hand and difficult to draw conclusions from, while we have figures for 388 seperate locations in the US. Many are, of course, minor mentions as well, but the bigger the data set, the easier to generalize even with the volatility. The US is at 1:31,800 supernatural:mortal, and 1:57,000 vampire:human, for reference. My current thinking is to take certain well represented nations - Canada, America, Australia, the UK, France, Russia, Germany, Egypt and China - and use that to suggest broader patterns based on length of human settlement, population density, and an 'x factor' for anything that would suggest higher or lower ratios (e.g. lack of industrialization means a lower end vampire ratio but a higher end fera ratio, most of the time), and map that out to poorly represented areas first within those nations and then internationally to arrive at the calculated total. The current batch of figures I'm reporting are just the 'raw' ratios - exactly as we see the world represented in the books, with a handful of alterations to accomodate things like the proportionality of sidhe:commoner changelings in Concordia where what's explicitly stated (in that case, something like 1:10) doesn't match at all with what's represented (closer, as memory serves, to 1.2:1 in the same case). I'm also setting it all down into proper spreadsheets with formulas so it's easy to add entries if someone else wants to continue the project into V20 and beyond, and documenting the kind of information that's most helpful versus what's interesting but essentially useless demographically, along with what I wish I'd recorded but won't be going back to revisit - for instance, would it be interesting to map humanity, discipline and road ratings among vampires across editions, regions, sects, and clans? Yes. Am I willing to spend another year+ to do it when I'm about to start my PhD and taking on new leadership roles in my esoteric communities? No - especially not if no one's paying me. It's the same reason I'm cutting it off now rather than pursuing V20 content - the project already involved reading something on the order of 800 books (averaging on the order of 175 pages each, when you weigh the novels against the little 80 page splatbooks) as it is. That's one hell of a literature review - and it shows how prolific White Wolf really were, since it comes out to something like 60 books a year for the run of the oWoD. The failure to include some of the most interesting data is a methodological flaw on my part but at least it's one that the groundwork has been done to cover. Likewise, when I started it was all just written down in text files with inconsistent format, which meant I couldn't just macro it into useable form - the last three years or so have in large part been just a process of cleaning the data up in my spare time, while also exploring some vital areas with limited scope like cause of death for wraiths. It should be quite a lot easier for anyone who wants to follow up those things I didn't record, fortunately, because most of the time where it's available it can be 'roadmapped' based on other data like the presence of an embrace date, a faction, or detailed notes in the entries for unique individuals from certain books, whereas when I started a whopping ten years ago there wasn't really any such roadmap to go off for the vast majority of published content and there still isn't outside of the Project. The big, helpful aspect of it is that where possible I recorded every unique instance of an already known vampire, but only in terms of what the book actually said to pick up on changes between editions, retcons, etc, so even if there's 30 mentions of say, Victoria Ash, there's only two or three that show meaningful detail so you'd only have to go to those three books to check. It's now a nerdy, but not insane, proposition to find out these things, and with a consistent data format and layout it can be directly added rather than the torturous record-convert-merge process I had going on. For those curious, the basic layout was like this: Sire -Childe --Grandchilde -Ghoul For non-vampires, it worked the same, but like so: Sept -Pack --Packmember Unfortunately, while this seems like it'd be easy to convert I used the same notation for very different things in the same file. Easy for a human to parse, but not a machine, and even worse, I was inconsistent in the rest of the data - for instance, sometimes a pack's leader had the pack embedded below them and sometimes they were just embedded under it, while in Vampire files sometimes it was 9 Ventrue and sometimes Ventrue 9, and so on. Because this varied significantly it wasn't a simple thing to transfer over and had to be done more or less by hand. So to clean it up I had to go through every entry in an excel file and transfer the data manually into the appropriate cells. When you consider that the 20th century alone encompasses over 150,000 entries - and that's without things like chantries, septs, companies, etc, just individuals - and there's also another 50,000 or so entries for historical data... That's a lot of poo poo to transfer. The average number of cells (each splat has a different count of what's relevant) was around 15, with Vampire having 40 - things like splat, date of birth, date of death, date of embrace/awakening/whatever, location, nation located, nationality, gender if known, historical figure, the source, etc, so that means something along the lines of 3 million bits of info to enter, though in reality few entries contain all so it was probably closer to just 1 million.
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Apr 18, 2019 06:02
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Can we use the Project to curse Swedracula and steal his garmonbozia?
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Apr 18, 2019 06:05
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Nessus posted:Ah, Unlimited Gun Works I have a bad habit of overvaluing combat powers that I really should tamp down on; I'm not playing DnD anymore, for chrissake. Blowing stuff up with a lightning bolt is cool but not really the best thing to build around. ...Oh poo poo, look at El Chupacabra man on page 204 Uh, short summary of some of the high/interesting points of the Haunts, I don't wanna dump a super in-depth summary of the powers, buy the book, ect: CAUL: Get some minor bonuses for being a wriggly fellow, gain armor equal to caul dots, increase your size and strength, get spider climb, wings, swarm form, eventually you can barf out homunuluses. You can get lethal Unarmed this way but as with all the haunts but The Rage it's limited. CURSE: Get a pool of 'Bitchslap points' you can use to make something bad happen to someone. Starts at giving them a -2 to a roll, increases to inverting their equipment bonus, give people Bad Tilts, drops social rolls to a chance die, or make the target able to see/hear/touch/Get eaten by ghosts DIRGE: Sing about something: People who go along with the idea get a +2, people who go against the idea have to spend a willpower every action that resists the intent. Sing a song of 'stop being so angry you shits' at frenzying vampires and raging werewolves, great fun. Higher levels let you pass out the Inspired condition, feed ghosts, Get perfect social impression and roll their Dirge stat to open Doors in social Manipulation (!!!), Supress/hand out Badfeels Conditions (Including Beaten Down) MARIONETTE: Sort of a combo of mind control and poltergeist, you get tendrils of ectoplasm that you puppet people and things with. Manipulating larger objects is easier with higher levels, and you can eventually make the control semi-autonomous. Memoria: I'm not covering this one 'cause I don't really understand how it works. ORACLE: You die a little bit and pop your ghost out to answer questions. Because you're dead, YOU can't ask the questions, you have to get someone to ask on your behalf, AND you can only answer from a list of specific questions. Also, if you dramatic fail this power then you just die for real. RAGE: All the other powers that you can hurt people with usually have limits that prevent them from causing too much harm to keep this Haunt from being overshadowed. Just at one dot: You get a weapon bonus on your unarmed equal to plasm spent (5 plasm for chainsaw fists), you deal lethal damage to ghosts, and you can use your dots in Rage instead of dots in Brawl if you want (And don't suffer the penalty for being untrained in brawl). As you increase the dots It evolves into a ranged attack that can autofire, drops physical tilts, deals aggravated damage, and eventually conjures up an environmental tilt that the Rage-user is immune to. SHROUD: shoot up inside your geist and get all spooky. Get charges on cast, spend charges to dip into twilight. Learn to fly, possess people, drag people into Twilight so that ghosts can eat them, drag people into the Underworld to be a dick. and I already talked about the Tomb.
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Apr 18, 2019 07:01
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Oh boy time to hammer at Geist powers to make them fit my brand of crazy again again. Again again again?
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Apr 18, 2019 09:59
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Nessus posted:Ah, Unlimited Gun Works Having access to a gun seems like a pretty tame power for Geist.
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Apr 18, 2019 12:51
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The one thing that Geist IMO really lacks is some explanation bow your average Bound goes from "I can speak to ghosts and I cannot be killed" to "I will form a death cult/revolutionary organization that will topple the hell and establish a new, better order". It's not like everyone who sees the other people's misery actually acknowledges systemic problems that cause it; even less decide to actually do something with it. You could expect much more Bound to ignore or use ghosts to their own ends, than actually help them. This is especially important given how passive the main enemies are. You may be a scrawny Mysterium nerd that tries to find the recipe for immortality, but it doesn't mean the Seers won't come to gently caress you up; even a demon Integrator has to avoid angels and steal Aether to survive. Meanwhile, the Reapers are usually pretty content to leave the Bound alone, unless they interfere. The Kerberoi are even worse, because you actually need to come to them and break one of their laws before they even start caring about you. Yeah, these laws are usually pretty stupid and obscure, but it doesn't change the fact that you have to make a trip to one of the Domains and spit on the local Kerberos' shoes before they eventually catch you and give you several months of community service. Gantolandon fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Apr 18, 2019 |
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Apr 18, 2019 14:36
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Gantolandon posted:The one thing that Geist IMO really lacks is some explanation bow your average Bound goes from "I can speak to ghosts and I cannot be killed" to "I will form a death cult/revolutionary organization that will topple the hell and establish a new, better order". It's been a while since I read the kickstarter drafts, but unless something changed, I think that's explicitly up for you to decide. You're a sin-eater, which means you're not one of the Bound organizations who reacted by seeing the systemic issues at the root of the afterlife and either shrugged or went 'so I gotta get mine'. Bound explicitly can profit from or relatively safely ignore the status quo, so, if I'm remembering right, it's on you to decide why your character decided not to. Edit: And, really, the average Bound probably DOES decide to shrug or profit, I don't know if it really does breakdowns, but it makes sense to me that the revolutionary fringe against death is a fringe. Doc Aquatic fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Apr 18, 2019 |
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Apr 18, 2019 14:43
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Yeah, the need to actually be self motivated rather than just doing mostly the thing your faction does is a nice thing. And unlike Vampire there is a pretty obvious Thing To Do.
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Apr 18, 2019 14:46
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Gantolandon posted:The one thing that Geist IMO really lacks is some explanation bow your average Bound goes from "I can speak to ghosts and I cannot be killed" to "I will form a death cult/revolutionary organization that will topple the hell and establish a new, better order". It's not like everyone who sees the other people's misery actually acknowledges systemic problems that cause it; even less decide to actually do something with it. You could expect much more Bound to ignore or use ghosts to their own ends, than actually help them. It's like vampires being forced into action because someone's picking off their herd, except here the herd gives you companionship and constant reminders of who you're doing this for, instead of just gross blood. Which kind of goes to a greater point: PC Bound are written to be dramatically unlike most, if not all, of the other WoD splats, because they aren't just fighting for baseline-to-marginally-less-inconvenient-subsistence, or explicitly for their own survival, they're actively attempting to make a better (under)world. The horror here is that the status quo, while changeable, still has the potential to suck to an extent that there's no liberation from, no improvement save what you bring to it, just the sucking force of entropy and decay held back by will, and often those will the most will are insane psycho-tyrants that will eat your friends and family out of habit rather than hunger. It's Mage except you want to cast the spell "not have to worry about grandma becoming a single eternally scream-blinking eye of the vast worm at the heart of the thousandth winding underspire" instead of shooting for tiny godhood. Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Apr 18, 2019 |
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Apr 18, 2019 15:19
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