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Angry Lobster posted:Yeah, it's pretty neat. This was always my experience as well. The big issue with V:TES is that it deeply rewards complete investment in the game and it is very difficult to be a 'casual' V:TES player. Like a friend can toss you a deck they made, sure, but decks are so complicated that often that's not sufficient to get into the game. In Magic, if I don't really 'get' the game I'll play with a pro and get walloped in 5-10 minutes. In V:TES, I can sit in a multiplayer game for two hours just slowly dying inside because my deck just doesn't work.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:03
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Mendrian posted:This was always my experience as well. It sounds like this might benefit greatly from a digital implementation? Tabletop is always going to be best for card games, but a digital version could help people get into it without having to schedule IRL meetups? I realize that this discussion will never have any impact on the actual thing, but, I'm curious about VTES and am also pretty sure I will never play it in the absence of a digital version.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:39
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Mendrian posted:This was always my experience as well. Agreed, the time investment is a big hurdle, like any 4+ multiplayer board games. I'm trying to set up a game for this weekend and it's been difficult, to say the least. Since the game is rising again in popularity,at least in Europe, due to being back to print, I hope more new people will become interested and jump into it. Joe Slowboat posted:It sounds like this might benefit greatly from a digital implementation? Tabletop is always going to be best for card games, but a digital version could help people get into it without having to schedule IRL meetups? It would be amazing if Paradox licensed it to receive the MTG Arena treatment, but it will probably never happen. Anyway, right now you have two ways to play it digitally, Jyhad Online (asynchronic, similar to play by post ) or the VTES module for LackeyCCG. I've seen videos of the later on youtube and doesn't seem too bad. You can also check Vekn.net and see if there's a Prince or any other organized group in your area, maybe you'll get lucky.
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Jun 14, 2019 22:27
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I’ve demoed VTES at my local GG, and it was well received, but the depth required to play it was simply insurmountable to a bunch of invested Magic players. It was pretty upsetting to see them all hype playing it, but the moment we stopped none of them were willing to buy and just went back to playing Commander.
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Jun 15, 2019 00:06
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Mage time travel Shifting Sands question! I thought the 'until' in this statement means that you need your time-travel duration to last all the way back to the present, as a softcap. If your duration doesn't go all the way to the present, then you can explore 'alternate outcomes' without having your changes stick. But I've also heard from some people that that's not necessary. If your 'present' is scene 3, and you jump back to the start of scene 1, then you can back scene 1 changes and then pop back, and scene 2 will 'fill in the blanks'. If that's the case instead... who is the 'you' in scene 2? Whose memories do they have?
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Jun 15, 2019 03:45
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:It's very telling that the lead at the time of development thought 1st edition was the ultimate vampire edition. I also feel like the the person doing the heavy lifting on writing, Ken Hite, making a game about spec. ops and spies killing vampires and writing the Cainite Heresy for Dark Ages had some impact too. Objectively speaking, there's definitely some good ideas and changes in there but there are a lot of bad ones and it's a mess. It's just a badly formatted and designed book too that is full of questionable choices in everything. Back in the old days when bogged down with some medical issues and what the Malkavian would call a slightly "hypomanic" creative outburst I tried to get interest from my friends in a game that basically was about the rise of authoritarian and eventually fascist (Francisco Franco & Augusto Pinochet, no more natsoc than Wernher von Braun) due to the rising human threat. The reason humans all started getting their poo poo together? Following this even on September 11th, 2001 mortals just loving flip out in ways that are hard to predict and at a time when everyone is watching each other for anything looking weird. The USA PATRIOT Act immediately started to raise fears for basically humans accidentally enacting and forming the greatest intelligence and investigatory weapon to date. It really ramps up with the Snowden era and ability to drone strike people, but from the start they are just scared people keeping tabs on everything. Specifically, Currency Transaction Report (CTR) are filled if you deal in cash transactions totaling over just $10,000 a day. If avoiding it, a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) is filed because our freedom is just too much to put at stake. Customer Identification Program (CIP) and Know Your Customer policies are avoidable but just a pain. The real issue isn't even that Dominate can't fix these problems, since if you catch them before they go to the data vault they're fine, it's the additional burden on the system and now immediate need to cow the Sabbat before they destroy the Masquerade (pretty nice since a good Junta needs a legitimate forever war). So this is to establish on record that I used the phrase "a level of danger not seen since the inquisition" and therefore am keeping a good old "crazy paranoid person lawsuit" in my back pocket. [br] Jokes aside, there are some cool ideas in the game which I think should naturally be handled better as the company gains more experience or just the game goes in another direction. I'm fine with that, since there seems to be a lot of people who feel empowered or that this continues the strong themes of social justice or various things I've read in reviews. Largely the comparison of the Camarilla to the United Nations and traveling the world to “keep the peace” while "answering to nameless masters" seems to set a tone I'm less interested in since the whole pawns in banking and Congress and being "one percent of the one percent" who also now "cling to their faiths like straws in a storm". Which is a shame, because largely those are all themes present in the original setting and now just made so much more limiting for what is meant to be a storyteller's kit type game (which I understand can be ignored, its more a comment on writing). Making the Primogen basically the Prince's small council removes another large degree of adversarial power dynamics, it largely seems like a game that has boiled down into Camarilla Bad vs. Anarch Good. There is great stress to holding onto feudalism or capitalism as inherently ingrained in the Camarilla, yet the Justicars have a term limit. This could always be attributed to the rising power of ancillae with newer political views putting pressure out their. It's just the lacking of irony in how it talks about the Camarilla's moral code bringing about their attitude that they are better than all other Kindred before immediately going on a tangent about abortion law and capital punishment, or uses the slang term banker, or in my favorite names a living Pope as bringing back to order the Catholic Mujahideen. I’m for/against all those things, but something about seeing the game be written so limited and tied to present time (not an enjoyable time) just kind of makes it feel like self-gratifying escapist power fantasies that always is telling me about how its about brooding inevitability of destroying all you know. There’s been definite value in reading it and ideas worth using, so I consider it time and money well spent. Especially since I tracked down that Chechnya section, which was something to read and now I will try to stifle criticism of what I’m sure was immediately polarizing.
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Jun 15, 2019 09:25
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V5 is good and fun to play
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Jun 15, 2019 17:00
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V5 crammed like two editions of metaplot into one corebook because its devs made the same mistake as MET:VtM and assumed they needed twenty years of metaplot advancement at the same density as if WW hadn't stopped publishing.
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Jun 15, 2019 22:33
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Really, I think it was partially that they had to stand out from V20 but also not stand out too much. A lot of people like it thought.
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Jun 15, 2019 22:37
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Anyone have that drawing of a RPG group wearing cloaks while playing? One guy is blowing his brains out, another is stabbing his own hand, etc. I can't for the life of me find it.
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Jun 16, 2019 20:54
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Google "Black Dog." It's from the Pentex book for Werewolf.
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Jun 16, 2019 20:55
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Rand Brittain posted:Google "Black Dog." It's from the Pentex book for Werewolf. Thank you kindly!
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Jun 16, 2019 21:00
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crime fighting hog posted:Thank you kindly! This is what you want.  The fun parody of White Wolf itself, with games such as Zombie the Putrescence/Revenant the Ravishing, Lycanthrope the Curse, Deviant (no subtitle) and such fun workers as Jules Bruccatio FORSOOTH AND HEY NOONY NONNY MY SKYCLAD PAGANS!
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Jun 17, 2019 01:29
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Don't forget some of their rivals, like Apex which produced the hit trilogy Undead Cowboy, Radioactive Undead Cowboy, and Undead Cowboy in Space.
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Jun 17, 2019 01:34
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Well placed phallic candles
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Jun 17, 2019 01:42
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MoonKnight posted:This is what you want. What sort of monster would cut out the Thai Cuisine?
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Jun 17, 2019 01:46
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EimiYoshikawa posted:What sort of monster would cut out the Thai Cuisine? Not to mention my favorite book on the stack, SATANS I'd forgotten that chapter also contains an excerpt from one of the Black Dog game rulebooks, where it introduces the list of Talents (ordered alphabetically, starting with Assbeating) under a song quote from Apocalypse Skullfuck's "Feel My Angst."
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Jun 17, 2019 02:34
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Dawgstar posted:Don't forget some of their rivals, like Apex which produced the hit trilogy Undead Cowboy, Radioactive Undead Cowboy, and Undead Cowboy in Space. That's amazingly on point.
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Jun 17, 2019 04:27
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Dawgstar posted:Don't forget some of their rivals, like Apex which produced the hit trilogy Undead Cowboy, Radioactive Undead Cowboy, and Undead Cowboy in Space. Pinnacle and White Wolf were chummy in the 90s. Enough to get a W:tWW/Deadlands crossover at least.
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Jun 17, 2019 16:40
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Is Pinnochio a Changeling, a Hobgoblin, a Fetch, or a Promethian? Is Gepetto the True Fae, or is Gepetto a Wizened controlled by Michael, King Of All Mice?
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Jun 17, 2019 17:04
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Promethean, definitely. Gepetto just has a shockingly high Resolve + Composure with which to resist Disquiet. (As you might expect for a man whose reaction to being eaten by a whale was to just set up a little home in its stomach and wait to see if things improve.)
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Jun 17, 2019 17:10
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He was a Child of Osiris and chose to hang out in the whale cuz it was a reliable source of vitae.
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Jun 17, 2019 17:37
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Quick Size issue. Originally I wanted all characters to be size 4, because the age limit was 14 to 17. But one of the players pointed out that size 4 for someone at 17 years old is a bit silly. In that case, I'm thinking of splitting up size by age. So 17 year olds will stay size 5. But, having a bigger size confers advantages, specifically health. Should I be thinking of a way to balance this for players playing younger characters?
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Jun 17, 2019 17:37
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Use size 5 for everyone and just decouple narrative and mechanics, imo. ChroD mortals are squishy enough as it is. If you really want to simulate it, figure out a rough value in dots and make it a purchasable merit starting from a size 4 baseline.
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Jun 17, 2019 17:42
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OscarDiggs posted:Quick Size issue. Adding to what other people said, your campaign is set in America - it's not unrealistic for younger children to be big.
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Jun 17, 2019 17:44
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OscarDiggs posted:Quick Size issue. Make "small" a Persistent Condition and allow some players to choose it, if someone wanted to play a precocious youngster or a squirrly stealthy sneaker type it might be nice to have that option.
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Jun 17, 2019 17:51
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Okay, that all makes good sense. Thanks all.
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Jun 17, 2019 18:07
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OscarDiggs posted:Quick Size issue. Size 4 would be, like, that one teenager that constantly keeps getting mistaken for a kid in late-ish elementary school. The sort that likely have fairly sizeable issues about it. Size 5 is for basically anyone in or past puberty outside of those aforementioned seriously tiny people. (contari-wise, there would be children that are size 5, too, like my friend in grade 5 who was 6'4, but he was kind of an outlier, obviously)
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Jun 17, 2019 19:02
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Make "small" a Persistent Condition and allow some players to choose it, if someone wanted to play a precocious youngster or a squirrly stealthy sneaker type it might be nice to have that option. Also, this is a better solution to the issue than the whole two-dot 'small' "merit" that is a literal mechanical hindrance in 99% of situations.
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Jun 17, 2019 19:04
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Jun 18, 2019 03:11
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Okay, final couple of questions. First, are there any rules or guidelines about warning merits through role play only, instead of role play and paying tor them? Say, intervening and helping someone with a bully earns you a 1 dot ally. Second, can I put some finalised low key magic ideas I've had here in this thread for some comments? I've used some of the source books for some ideas, but I'd like a second set of eyes, if that's alright of course.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:53
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OscarDiggs posted:Okay, final couple of questions. I don't think there's anything published for that. Based on how Merits work, I'd say if you're going to do that you'll just want to eyeball it as best you can, anyway, instead of trying to follow some general guideline when Ally 3 and Contacts 3 are really different from each other. quote:Second, can I put some finalised low key magic ideas I've had here in this thread for some comments? 
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Jun 18, 2019 19:05
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Okay... well. This is a pretty threadbare example that might need a bit of changing, but it's the sort of low key Hedge/Witchery type magic I wanted to go for. quote:Animism: Cat
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Jun 18, 2019 19:35
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A Tremere gave my coterie a quest to bust into Doissetep. How uh... boned are we?
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Jun 19, 2019 15:43
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Foreskin Problems posted:A Tremere gave my coterie a quest to bust into Doissetep. How uh... boned are we?
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Jun 19, 2019 15:49
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We're a lunkhead group of vampires. I'm... concerned that this is the end of our game.
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Jun 19, 2019 15:52
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OscarDiggs posted:Okay, final couple of questions. I'm a huge fan of awarding merits based on play. But I also tell my players, that if they want them to be permanent, they need to spend xp on them. Once they've made use of the merit once, and so haven't bought it properly, whenever it would generate the most drama to lose it is when it goes away.
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Jun 19, 2019 15:57
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Mages will gently caress you up big time. Also Doistepp is in another reality and depending on your GM may be in the middle of a Cold War with other even worse wizards, getting hit with a literal spirit nuke, being attacked by a different even worse group of wizards who've figured out how to weaponize The End Of All Things, or just in ruins from one of the above. Also wizards can look at you and know you're vampires and have so many ways of murdering vampires it's easier to list the ways they can't kill you. ERROR FILE NOT FOUND Probably better off just eating the Tremere, frankly.
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Jun 19, 2019 15:58
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Doissetep is also the home of the guys who particularly specialize in fireballs, and is in fact located in the elemental plane of fireballs, aka Mars.
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Jun 19, 2019 15:59
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otoh it's normally impossible for a Dracula to get to Doistepp so maybe the Tremere (the clan that literally betrayed their way into existence) has a 100% safe way to get you there and back
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Jun 19, 2019 16:00
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