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My guess is that how well hunger dice work for your group has a strong correlation with how often your ST calls for rolls.
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Nov 27, 2019 17:30
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neaden posted:My guess is that how well hunger dice work for your group has a strong correlation with how often your ST calls for rolls. This. The book also is pretty explicit about throwing out rules you don't have any interest in using. I find the hunger mechanic/dice interesting and actually look forward to bringing it into play in either the next session (because my dumb drunk rear end forgot to do it in the first session) or one going forward because it potentially opens up interesting RP moments for the players.
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Nov 27, 2019 18:25
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Personally I like to throw out the rule about attributing human rights violations in Eastern Europe to a vampire scheme but that’s me
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Nov 27, 2019 18:38
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Kurieg posted:Nope, Kami are created by Gaia and tend to be the weakest of the 3, but also given more free will to pursue their directives. Gorgons are never created from people, always from animals or plants, and the existence of a Gorgon is a huge sign to werewolves that "Hey we should probably fix what's causing the Wyld to make gorgons before they start attacking cities." Yeah, otherwise you get Mothman.
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Nov 27, 2019 23:40
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I ride bikes all day posted:Using their results in ways that aren’t akin to a teenager declaring that a 1 in D&D means you stab yourself isn’t difficult. Considering the system was redesigned by edgy larpers doing their WoD heartbreaker, this is absolutely the mentality that went into it afaic - it doesn't feel particularly different thematically from the remaining factions both feeling like cheap sabbat knockoffs. Also there's plenty of elements reminding you that you're a vampire in a game about playing vampires without having to mechanically enforce a risk of falling to the beast for botching on mundane poo poo.
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Nov 28, 2019 03:05
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The hunger die seems cool but also like it has more than a bit of Exalted 2e Limit Break issues: 'big dramatic freakout happens at random' isn't a good way to make the story work, and it's not a story-reinforcing thing like most NWoD designs (well, the good ones, anyways). Maybe let players choose to not roll their Hunger dice, directly reducing their dice pool as they commit more and more of their willpower into restraining the Beast? Would that work? IDK if you can get multiple hunger dice in your pool over time, but having players make the choice between 'you get worse and worse at doing things but can theoretically stave off the hunger, or you can be competent but also letting your concentration slip leads to bloodmurder' would create a better sense of why sometimes the dice come up red?
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Nov 28, 2019 03:47
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Loomer posted:Yeah, otherwise you get Mothman. Mothman's cool. He predicts bridge collapses and poo poo.
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Nov 28, 2019 04:30
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MonsieurChoc posted:Mothman's cool. He predicts bridge collapses and poo poo. Well yeah, it's real easy to predict a bridge collapse when you're the one making it collapse.
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Nov 28, 2019 05:00
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Agnosticnixie posted:Also there's plenty of elements reminding you that you're a vampire in a game about playing vampires without having to mechanically enforce a risk of falling to the beast for botching on mundane poo poo. Forgive me if I'm misreading this, but you've brought up botching mundane rolls a couple times. I suppose if you ST is having you to go the dice to make sure you don't get into a car accident every time you drive, or other such trivialities, it would get old fast. If you're only really hitting the dice for dramatic moments, it makes a lot more sense. A bestial failure on picking a lock meaning you snap the pick, get frustrated and bust down the door makes sense. In the example of the violin recital, the character breaks the violin for failing her. Or attacks the conductor for making a snide face when the character misses a note for the 3rd time. One of the big positives about hunger and the hunger dice for me is how you simply can't evade it without killing someone. It adds some weight to the vampire's desire to kill that the player (hopefully) can't ever fully understand. I ride bikes all day fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Nov 28, 2019 |
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Nov 28, 2019 06:12
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I ride bikes all day posted:Forgive me if I'm misreading this, but you've brought up botching mundane rolls a couple times. I suppose if you ST is having you to go the dice to make sure you don't get into a car accident every time you drive, or other such trivialities, it would get old fast. If you're only really hitting the dice for dramatic moments, it makes a lot more sense. A bestial failure on picking a lock meaning you snap the pick, get frustrated and bust down the door makes sense. In the example of the violin recital, the character breaks the violin for failing her. Or attacks the conductor for making a snide face when the character misses a note for the 3rd time. Or I could have a better, less ridiculous way than hunger dice to handle this (called rleplaying! - also you should not be failing poo poo you succeeded just because you're feeling peckish ffs) because all your examples leave me a bad taste and are still literally in the realm of "you rolled a 1 and stab yourself in the balls". Sure if your idea of playing VtM is as Buffy vampires, whatever, knock yourself out, that's not a playstyle I like to play or ST. edit - I am especiallly not in it for this edgefest where the ST demands mandatory killing as a solution to everything, this doesn't make the game more mature, this doesn't make the game deeper, it doesn't actually add any sort of moral conflict for the player or the character, it just makes it Buffy or Blade from the vampires' perspective which is in complete discordance with why I'm interested in this game (i.e. not for the edgy fuckery that was the stereotypical Sabbat game in the 90s) and I doubt I'm alone there. Agnosticnixie fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Nov 28, 2019 |
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Nov 28, 2019 06:40
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hungry dice can only be cured by consuming one (1) Hungry Man XXL Mighty Mighty Meatloaf frozen entree with dessert.
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Nov 28, 2019 06:49
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the superbowl commercial for the Mighty Mighty Meatloaf entree (w/dessert) stars Jason Mraz covering "The Impression That I Get" on ukelele and marimba. it has been linked to no less than twelve suicides in the ska community.
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Nov 28, 2019 06:51
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If dogs were spontaneously domesticated across the globe at roughly the same time, we must ask the question, 'who created the good boys en masse?' We may point, perhaps, to the earliest Progenitors - but could they have all decided to tame the wolf? Surely not. What strange, sinister conspiracy is responsible? The Ixoi? The Rabisu? Mere fate and chance? God's last great gift to the forsaken masses of man? No, my good goons, I put it to you that the true mother of the good boys and girls were the earliest Bone Gnawers, who - seeing an opportunity to get a meal for nothing, a place to sleep, and a belly rub without having to engage in tedious small talk - persuaded lupine kinfolk to come and play nicely with the humans so that they might pose as the goodest of boys.
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Nov 28, 2019 07:08
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Agnosticnixie posted:Or I could have a better, less ridiculous way than hunger dice to handle this (called rleplaying! - also you should not be failing poo poo you succeeded just because you're feeling peckish ffs) because all your examples leave me a bad taste and are still literally in the realm of "you rolled a 1 and stab yourself in the balls". Sure if your idea of playing VtM is as Buffy vampires, whatever, knock yourself out, that's not a playstyle I like to play or ST. Yeah I donno what part of this made you decide being an asshat was the way to discuss this, but good on you. You are clearly a much more mature roleplayer. I'm really confused as to how tying killing people to mechanics is an "edgefest" when you're playing a vampire in a gothic personal horror game. I missed the Twilight movies - maybe that's more along the themes you're looking for? You might want to start with actually reading the hunger dice rules, as you've very clearly conflated Bestial Failure and Messy Critical.
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Nov 28, 2019 08:06
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I ride bikes all day posted:Yeah I donno what part of this made you decide being an asshat was the way to discuss this, but good on you. You are clearly a much more mature roleplayer. I'm just saying it's a playstyle I dislike but if you're going to take it this way: I missed the part where Carmilla goes on a rampage because she messed up. Clearly Le Fanu writing a vampire lesbian story about a character based on his wife really meant to describe her as an uncontrollable bestial monster. Agnosticnixie fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Nov 28, 2019 |
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Nov 28, 2019 08:10
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Agnosticnixie posted:I'm just saying it's a playstyle I dislike but if you're going to take it this way: I missed the part where Carmilla goes on a rampage because she messed up. Clearly Le Fanu writing a vampire lesbian story about a character based on his wife really meant to describe her as an uncontrollable bestial monster. I think we have a fundamental disagreement about one of the core themes of the game. I really like the personal horror aspect of the White Wolf games, and I think the mechanic really helps drive it home. If your game is more politics and coterie focused, I can see where it would be more of an annoyance. That fair?
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Nov 28, 2019 08:22
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I don't think this is a disagreement about narrative tone, it's a disagreement about randomness vs. intentional creative control.
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Nov 28, 2019 08:40
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I think the thing I dislike about hunger dice is the subtle play difference vs "classic" hunger. In "classic" hunger systems (both Requiem and Masquerade used similar systems) hunger is a known factor you can attempt to control and will probably fail to. Frenzy occurs when you're hungry, in the presence of some stimulus, and fail a specific frenzy roll. I like this, because if you're playing a "good" character you basically have to manage all three of those factors and if you can, you can master hunger. You'll probably fail spectacularly.
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Nov 28, 2019 08:47
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The hunger die should only be used when you're at a breaking point, imo. Like oh, I just Celerity'd myself into John Woo-land and burned all my vitae and uh whoops there's this innocent person next to me, boy I'm hungry. but at some point you could just do this with like. good DMing. and not attach it to an arbitrary roll as is WoD's wont. PHIZ KALIFA posted:the superbowl commercial for the Mighty Mighty Meatloaf entree (w/dessert) stars Jason Mraz covering "The Impression That I Get" on ukelele and marimba. it has been linked to no less than twelve suicides in the ska community. The Unknown Armies thread is thataway.
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Nov 28, 2019 09:12
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Someimes while attempting a challenging task at work, I get unlucky and immediately need to take my lunch break.Loomer posted:No, my good goons, I put it to you that the true mother of the good boys and girls were the earliest Bone Gnawers, who - seeing an opportunity to get a meal for nothing, a place to sleep, and a belly rub without having to engage in tedious small talk - persuaded lupine kinfolk to come and play nicely with the humans so that they might pose as the goodest of boys. Wouldn't the first Good Boys be lupine kinfolk of human-born garou? It seems like a more natural starting point because of their commonality.
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Nov 28, 2019 13:30
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moths posted:Someimes while attempting a challenging task at work, I get unlucky and immediately need to take my lunch break. Nah, those are just regular wolves. They provided the stock, but on their own are just plain old wolves. It requires a sinister, calculating mind to turn the wolf to a dog - the mind of a bone gnawer who, knowing what is to come, knows that only by creating the dog can he get belly rubs on the reg without the silver fangs signing off on it.
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Nov 28, 2019 13:50
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The lupine kinfolk would have I guess turning them into dogs was another matter though.
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Nov 28, 2019 13:54
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I will fistfight you behind the burger shack to defend the honour of my theory that Bone Gnawers, being the Best Tribe, also created the Best Boys.
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Nov 28, 2019 13:56
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No I agree that Bone Gnawers are the best tribe but making wolves into doggos was probably Magework or a long forgotten good guy Tzimicze.
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Nov 28, 2019 14:26
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The Progenitors do claim credit, but they do that for everything.
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Nov 28, 2019 14:43
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The whole point of hunger is to illustrate a never ending struggle for control and it’s kinda cheapened if you as the player have the choice to never risk losing control. And hunger dice don’t force roll failures. They force roleplay of barely contained inhuman compulsions. Dross fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Nov 28, 2019 |
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Nov 28, 2019 15:50
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Dross posted:The whole point of hunger is to illustrate a never ending struggle for control and it’s kinda cheapened if you as the player have the choice to never risk losing control. Yeah it's this. Not everyone who comes to Vampire has played table top before, adding a tangible risk/reward element to using your cool vampire powers adds something to give the players to work with. Also I feel like a bit of narrative helps with the hunger rising, LA by Night does this, with the storyteller acting as the voice of a characters Beast when their hunger rises, adding some additional narrative for the players to work with as they RP an internal struggle with their hunger. This is not in the book (at least not that I saw, I may have missed it) but I feel like it's a really excellent way to work the hunger into the game in a way that gets the players thinking beyond "3 squares are filled in on the sheet"
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Nov 28, 2019 15:58
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I don't think anybody has an issue with a hunger/frenzy mechanic, because vampire has always had that, just the specific implementation of hunger dice. I prefer the all or nothing nature of frenzy/blood pool because my roleplaying is forcibly arrested less. Passing the rear end in a top hat bar and being told I have to now roleplay something spicy because the dice say it's spicy time isn't for me. With frenzy you have highly destructive boughts of desperation which still amounts to struggling with the Beast without the pencil snapping of hunger dice. This is a personal preference.
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Nov 28, 2019 16:55
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Mechanics are always a “forcible arrest” of your roleplay. Sometimes the dice say your cool ninja wall run double stab fails and you have to deal with the consequences of that too. Do you flip the table when that happens? The difference between hunger dice and blood pool is that the blood pool system can be played in such a way that hunger is never a threat and that runs counter to the in universe reason for its existence. The pencil snap is the nature of the Beast. Dross fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Nov 28, 2019 |
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Nov 28, 2019 17:04
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Given how much vampire fiction going back to Dracula emphasizes that vampires can in fact exercise self-control for their long term plans and survival... is there a way to ameliorate hunger dice besides drinking someone? I’d there a resource or approach that lets you not roll them on dramatically uninteresting rolls?
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Nov 28, 2019 17:48
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Joe Slowboat posted:Given how much vampire fiction going back to Dracula emphasizes that vampires can in fact exercise self-control for their long term plans and survival... is there a way to ameliorate hunger dice besides drinking someone? I’d there a resource or approach that lets you not roll them on dramatically uninteresting rolls? Those vampire stories also involved a whole lot of eating people, generally remorselessly. Hunger is a sliding scale that goes up as you do things that would cost blood points in the old systems. Generally speaking you're replacing 1 or 2 dice in your pool with hunger. If you roll no successes and roll a 1 on a hunger die, it's a bestial failure. This replaces the botch mechanic. If you roll a critical success and part of that critical is on a hunger die, you have a messy critical. You succeed, but some part of your beast assists you, for better or worse. It doesn't come up all that much, but it's always there, always a threat.
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Nov 28, 2019 18:25
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Joe Slowboat posted:Given how much vampire fiction going back to Dracula emphasizes that vampires can in fact exercise self-control for their long term plans and survival... is there a way to ameliorate hunger dice besides drinking someone? I’d there a resource or approach that lets you not roll them on dramatically uninteresting rolls? You roll a Hunger die for every point of Hunger you have, whenever you need to roll for anything besides a check on a single die. There's two kinds of rolls where Hunger dice can gently caress with you: Messy Criticals and Bestial Failures. A messy critical is when you roll a critical (at least two 10s in one roll) and one of the Hunger dice is a 10. You succeed, but you likely go overboard with it due to your Beast sticking its nose in. Like instead of knocking out a guard, you rip his throat out and now there's that to deal with. It's success with a nasty cost, where you end up breaching the Masquerade, or gaining a stain on your humanity, or losing a dot in a Merit/Background/Loresheet, or whatever else the ST dreams up. Bestial failures are when you don't roll enough successes and also one of the Hunger dice is a 1. When this happens, you not only fail whatever it was you were trying to do, you get some other nasty thing to deal with - either a compulsion (roll to find out what kind of an rear end in a top hat you're going to act like), or if your group doesn't want to RP those you could instead end up losing a dot in one of your Merits/Backgrounds/Loresheets, taking a point of aggravated damage, or increasing your Hunger by one (so next time you get even more Hunger dice to roll - whee!) You can spend a point of Willpower to re-roll up to 3 of your dice (not Hunger dice), which allows you to try to mitigate these. Willpower is a kind of mental/emotional Health bar, that can get damaged in social conflicts and can be used to resist frenzying. As neaden said above, it becomes more of an issue the more often you have to roll for anything, because you're more likely to see those Hunger dice come up 1 or 10 the more often you roll them. When you have several dots of Hunger (because every time you use a Discipline above level 1 you have a 50/50 chance to increase it, and every night you wake up you have the same chance), it can start getting obnoxious. If you don't want to deal with the negative effects of Hunger you're probably either feeding multiple times a session (which you can do in combat, to be fair) or you're sticking to level 1 Disciplines and avoiding rolls as much as possible. Or you can play however you want and roll the rear end in a top hat Dice when your ST tells you to. It's gonna happen more often you wish it would.
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Nov 28, 2019 18:38
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Mot having played it, it seems like there are two related problems here. First, the consequences of the bestial success or failure are a little too high. Second, the system wants you to spend a lot of table time to try and avoid the danger (time roleplaying a hunt, instead of just rolling seduction or night time creepy stalking or whatever). Would it work to just decrease the consequences of the hunger? Treat it more like one of the enemy crits from the Star Wars/Genesis games? Because in addition to always reminding you that you’re a vampire, it seems like mechanically what they are doing is adding a success-with downside or fail-with more downside mechanic. That’s pretty similar to threats/dark side crits in the Star Wars world. Say that instead of a stain or full on masquerade breach when you bestial success, you instead got penalties to your roll for the rest of the scene or whatever, as your beast interfered with your actions?
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Nov 28, 2019 18:55
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imagining vampires failing hunger checks and immediately falling into pitch-black slapstick
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Nov 28, 2019 19:21
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In my experience of revised VtM and V20 keeping your character's blood pool topped up was relatively easy and it was an area that my STs were rarely interested in exploring. I like the idea of V5's hunger dice (though I haven't had the chance to play the game), although the clan compulsions that go hand-in-hand with it seem a tad prescriptive. Like a lot more than other clan features could be in previous editions. On LA By Night they say that a character can feed on someone until they die to drop their hunger to 0, but can a player do that with any regularity without tanking their humanity?
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Nov 28, 2019 19:58
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Veeta posted:On LA By Night they say that a character can feed on someone until they die to drop their hunger to 0, but can a player do that with any regularity without tanking their humanity? To put it very basically, you lose Humanity from gaining Stains. What generates a Stain is part of the Chronicle setup. For LA by Night, the rule is "killing an innocent." The characters could, if they wished, justify reducing their hunger to 0 by eating people who don't fall under that header.
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Nov 28, 2019 20:17
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The way my gaming group ended up dealing with the Predator's Taint mechanics from Vampire 1E was to decide that unless you were in exceptional circumstances, failing the frenzy check meant your character acted out or lost their composure briefly in a way that could raise suspicion or cause embarrassment (maybe to the tune of few lost dice on social rolls, ST's call) but not instantly turn a dialogue scene into a fight scene. As in, you meet another vampire, you fail your Resolve + Composure roll, and the result is that you loom forward and bare your fangs at them or lean back and hiss like a cornered cat before getting a hold of yourself. So, I bet Hunger would be a lot more palatable if A) the effects scaled to the number of hunger dice (or hunger dice showing 1s/10s) such that they started out mostly cosmetic and only became devastating threats to your stats as your Hunger level got higher, and B) the book was clear that the actual narrative impact of the hunger effect was supposed to roughly match the impact of the roll itself, so an idle Int check to see if you remember a name is never going to be able to do as much damage as an attack roll in a fight even if you somehow roll nothing but red 10s on the Int check.
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Nov 28, 2019 20:20
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Dross posted:Mechanics are always a “forcible arrest” of your roleplay. Sometimes the dice say your cool ninja wall run double stab fails and you have to deal with the consequences of that too. Do you flip the table when that happens? I mean, you do you man. Personal preference. It's been so loving long since I played Masquerade that I fully admit I don't remember how hunger works except that it uses a Self Control check. Requiem, on the other hand - the average player can, at best, start the evening with 9 blood and they get 'hungry' at like 4. This gives you a leeway of 5 blood under ideal circumstances. Hunger checks happen in the presence of blood, smell, sight, or taste, and you can still make them if you've got blood to spare, they're just easier. Having played Requiem with lots of players who have tried to play 'good' characters, it is not something that is 'never a threat' since I've watched smart and well-meaning characters fall down the Humanity ladder with very little effort. It isn't a non-issue, but it is an 'event'; when the Beast takes over, it's Frenzy, and that allows you, the players, to otherize the activity. The sort of... for lack of a better term, micro-aggression that hunger dice facilitate just isn't for me, it doesn't feel like grappling with a supernatural force so much as dealing with a serious anger mood disorder. That just isn't fun for me. I can see how it would be fun for others. I've been playing vampire for like 20 years, I know what I like and I am perfectly comfortable with the themes of Vampire, I just specifically don't like this thing.
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Nov 28, 2019 21:12
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I ride bikes all day posted:Those vampire stories also involved a whole lot of eating people, generally remorselessly. These stories actually involved not that much eating people and didn't focus on it a lot. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles definitely do have a fair amount of eating people, a lot more than even Dracula and of the 19th century vampire novels it's the one that has the most eating people. Heck, good vampire fic is as old as the first vampire novel (well a year younger but even Polidori's Vampire had fanfic) - Stoker literally wrote some of it. As a matter of fact if you kept score I'd say there's probably more time spent on gay subtext in Dracula than on literal feeding, which is largely done offscreen and barely mentioned outside Lucy's resurrection chapters and the ship (and that's more of an implication in the novel than a statement). Agnosticnixie fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Nov 29, 2019 |
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Nov 28, 2019 23:00
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I ride bikes all day posted:To put it very basically, you lose Humanity from gaining Stains. What generates a Stain is part of the Chronicle setup. For LA by Night, the rule is "killing an innocent." The characters could, if they wished, justify reducing their hunger to 0 by eating people who don't fall under that header. So kinda like in Bloodlines. And also like in Bloodlines where if they're not 'innocent' you can do what you want.
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Nov 28, 2019 23:23
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