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You’re very bad at reading actual words and not the phantoms of those words against a cave wall.
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Feb 27, 2020 01:57
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Archonex posted:At this point i'm just not going to argue because there's literally nothing I could accomplish by doing so. And still you post here
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Feb 27, 2020 02:01
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Archonex posted:My point was that given the logic he was using, the Dark Era's segment in question literally brought nothing to the table outside of it's own setting. Ergo, it had no merit to the main game itself and should have been viewed in the same light as the Primordial War stuff. I'm going to completely say that the point I was arguing with you about was absolutely niche weird setting stuff with no actual bearing on the game at table, so yeah, I was arguing about something that doesn't matter. I'm saying that so that you understand it's not me trying to win my argument with you, which I will completely concede, when I say that this here is a huge false equivalency. The problem being identified for Primordial War stuff is that there never was, and probably never will be, and are some weird, but impressive barriers in the way of, a Primordial War playable setting. The Primordial War was never intended to be playable when details about the Time Before were provided - they were intended to in some way reflect into the present, or else win forum arguments. This is qualitatively different from each and every Dark Era, which are more akin to Shards of the Exalted Dream (which ironically had a version of the present day where the Primordial War went very differently, but crucially does not provide a playable Primordial War setting). It is fair to say that including information about the Vinca or a Shard in a corebook for the line would be against Mors' position, but that's not what Mors was defending or proposing. You're the one who brought in the Dark Era and your analogy was not an accurate one; Dark Eras function very differently from setting prehistory as distantly removed from and completely uninvolved in the present of the setting as the Primordial War details in question. (Ironically there do exist good Primordial War details - things like 'this one Yozi hates the Exalted in a specific way because of their trauma from the War' or 'The Dragon Kings fought on the side of the Sun and humanity, since before the War they worshipped the Sun... but human sacrifice to the Sun was discontinued after the war.' These reflect directly on the present in useful ways for using characters like the Yozis, Dragon Kings, and the Sun.) Anyways this argument would be going really differently if that false analogy wasn't stuck at the center of it.
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Feb 27, 2020 02:16
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Joe Slowboat posted:I'm going to completely say that the point I was arguing with you about was absolutely niche weird setting stuff with no actual bearing on the game at table, so yeah, I was arguing about something that doesn't matter. I really never cared about winning an argument or anything like that either. I did get annoyed that this derail completely hosed what we were talking about before, however. The reason I brought up the prehistory setting in Dark Era's is that it explicitly is the one so far away from anything to do with the main game/setting in the CofD/NWoD as we know it is that it had might as well be the lore and thematic equivalent of the Primordial War. And don't get me wrong! That chapter of the Dark Era's book is a great addition and fills some blank spaces! But unless your game is going to some really weird places it's never gonna come up. It's fluff. Filler. Backstory. The other time periods actually do have some links to the modern setting (Though they can be hard to note depending on the setting.) whereas the prehistory one is pretty much right up there in relevance to the main game lines as the Primordial War is to Exalted. Likewise, I understand fully well that there won't be a Primordial War book. That was not and has never been my point. Nor was I getting focused on winning the argument or anything like that. My point was that if he's saying that the content needs to have hooks to inspire people to play the game then parts of Dark Era's (Especially the prehistory bit.) should have provoked the same ire since at least a fair bit of it is centered around expanding largely irrelevant background content similar to what the Primordial War lore does for Exalted. TL;DR: I was saying that his point makes no sense while arguing with you.  The only real difference is that the Vinca chapter has got like 3 scenarios that are fleshed out enough to really play in any detail. Two of which are almost certain to end with your characters suffering a grisly fate at some horrible nightmarish entity (like an Idigam at potentially the height of it's power. One of them literally involves an army of werecreatures showing up and wanting to know why the locals possess the soul of their god. Which...Uh, yeah. Good luck being a werewolf or mage and surviving given what Werewolf has to say about that particular type of being.). It's not really filled out enough to be playable in the long term and is more there to help fill out the spaces, like his issue was with the Primordial War. It's not a perfect analogy, I understand that. But it was the best one I had available offhand to try and get my point across. Then he pivoted to "Well, it has the rudiments of a game attached to the setting so that's fine." and I started getting lovely one liners. So I stopped giving a poo poo and pointed out how incredibly stupid this whole derail has been since it's literally just a series of escalating quibbles over minutiae as i'm forced to post ridiculous amounts of  .
Archonex fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Feb 27, 2020 |
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Feb 27, 2020 02:49
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...I think you have a very, very different understanding of the Dark Eras sections than most people here. I'm currently playing in a Sundered World game! (Set a few thousand years earlier, but the mechanical and setting framework of the Sundered World Dark Era is very much in play.) The Sundered World Dark Era has significant mechanical and setting support for playing a game set in that era, using the core rules and systems of the Werewolf and Mage cores; a Dark Era is pretty comparable to the example setting locations in the core book for Mage or Werewolf 2e. For example, there are breakdowns on how each Mage Path manifests, and full mechanical conversions from Woof tribes to tutelage by individual Firstborn. There's specific rules for spellcasting in the era, and how the Shadow is different before Wolf's death. They're significantly more playable than even something like Dreams of the First Age, though Dreams would not fall under Mors' criticisms.
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Feb 27, 2020 02:53
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Joe Slowboat posted:...I think you have a very, very different understanding of the Dark Eras sections than most people here. I'm currently playing in a Sundered World game! (Set a few thousand years earlier, but the mechanical and setting framework of the Sundered World Dark Era is very much in play.) The Sundered World Dark Era has significant mechanical and setting support for playing a game set in that era, using the core rules and systems of the Werewolf and Mage cores; a Dark Era is pretty comparable to the example setting locations in the core book for Mage or Werewolf 2e. See, I can only see so many narrative hooks in the Sundered World setting. Depending on how the folks I play (Currently it'd be played since my house burned down. Though that'll probably change once I can move back to my old place.) with approach it they'd burn through it pretty quick. Or they'd end up running into a brick wall. The problem lies in how constrained the range of the setting is. If you're a mage that isn't fairly powerful or set up right you're going to be limited to the surroundings of whatever village you start at/maybe at most surrounding villages. Likewise, while Werewolves are great for a wilderness focused setting a lot of the really interesting content unique to that time period can be out of their league to interact with. In addition to that you don't have a wealth of time period specific events to dicker about with to add some flavor like you do with the ones past the prehistory setting. Since, y'know, it's prehistory and there isn't as much known about that time period in the real world as compared to something like Requiem for Regina. Obviously there's stuff like the ruins of the Time Before. But from what I recall even the book says that traveling into them means basically a good chance at achieving suicide by proxy. So it's not like you can make a session by session game of exploring them without risking wiping the party. Taking on any sort of Pangaean also seems right out without it being the culmination of an entire campaign or it being rather anticlimactically weak. And I have a hard time seeing enough extra content there to carry it that far that wouldn't involve lapsing into dipping into the modern era for ideas. Though I guess you could deal with the presumably horrific ramifications of actually taking one out. All that being said, exactly what sort of stuff have you all gotten up too in that version of the setting? I'm curious what your experiences with it have been like. Edit: Mind you, I make those remarks about the Sundered World setting with the caveat that the some of the people i've played with have a very head on approach to problem solving. Obviously your mileage may vary. These are the folks that when first playing Requiem came up with the brilliant idea of using an explosion to deal with a far older and more established vampire. Coincidentally, they didn't stay in that city for too long. Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Feb 27, 2020 |
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Feb 27, 2020 03:17
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Archonex posted:Also, i'd argue that there are human spirits. Look up how demons (As in, the actual demonic demons.) work in 1e. They can literally spawn from humans that get too far into their vice. The process of birthing a demon tends to drive said (likely evil) human insane however. If you follow the logic of a lot of the game lines in that offspring of a given being belong to the type of creature in some way then that basically makes at least some Inferno type demons the children of humanity once removed. Which has all sorts of horrific implications you could play with if you were wanting to examine the existential horror of just what sort of spirits come from humanity. That depends on how you want to go about defining spirits and that is a good one. Over in my ever-expanding framework I've got demons of the inferno and their ilk as being a fundamentally different kind of ephemeral being. That said I don't have humans as having always been special in regards to not having spirits, it's just been uh, like 100,000 years since that was the norm.
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Feb 27, 2020 03:28
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Ahem. The Vinca era was not hinted at before Dark Eras. The era came about because Rose had the idea that mages are so city-dependent in her view of them, so focused on society and academia, that it would be interesting to see them before any of that - what does the Greek and Indian philosophy splat look like pre-Greece and India? I chose the Vinca thanks to a tenuous association with my own academic past, plus their physical location and temporal place at the dawn of agriculture. Rose and Rich were suggesting Stonehenge on the skype call when they asked me to do it. We went pre-Sundering because we knew it was a different thing to the Fall, because werewolf had plenty of info spread around about what pangaea was like, and because Stew was up for it as werewolf developer. We rejected doing an era pre-Fall out of hand, as it's deliberately mysterious and contradictory as to what the pre-Fall Time Before looked like. Sundered World isn't a Primordial War analogue. It's a Dreams of the First Age analogue. A "during Atlantis" era would be like a Primordial War one, which is why we didn't do it. (and the spheres cataclysm maps to the Fall, too, thinking about it)
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Feb 27, 2020 10:28
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Archonex posted:This wasn't really his point. At all. Or to be charitable if it was he sure as poo poo was not at all decent at getting it across. Here's his original post on the issue of the games again. Only now he's saying that adding on a self contained setting is okay instead of "Well, it needs to serve play within the narrative." like he was getting at before. I.. What? he specifically calls out that something must be playable at the table, which all of dark eras is, except the beast parts of course.
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Feb 27, 2020 14:52
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MAGE CHAT Is Magical Traditions any good? I'm interested in the blending of real world beliefs with Supernal magic. Despite…whatever is going on with the Free Council book that is apparently bad, does it at least also have a couple interesting things to say about, like, Dadaism as Supernal expression or technomagic or whatever?
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Feb 27, 2020 15:08
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It's widely regarded as quite bad. I have not read it.
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Feb 27, 2020 15:26
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Rand Brittain posted:It's widely regarded as quite bad. I have not read it. I have read it. It is quite bad. If you really want to blend the two, research the real world stuff you want to add and then add it yourself. It’s much easier and less cringing.
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Feb 27, 2020 15:39
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That Old Tree posted:MAGE CHAT Generally speaking this is better done in 2e as yantras.
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Feb 27, 2020 15:40
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Oh well. Thanks again, thread!
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Feb 27, 2020 15:47
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Oh poo poo!!! Who's gonna be there https://twitter.com/AlexWard777/status/1232841052614037504
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Feb 27, 2020 18:04
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Erika Ishii!!!!
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Feb 27, 2020 18:04
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That Old Tree posted:MAGE CHAT Magical Traditions is, as I recall, not super customizable, and Ascension-y in that the traditions presented are taken at face value as powers of their own rather than expressions of supernal truth. The Mage Chronicler's Guide has a much better take on the same idea for First Edition, with explicit customizability and example focuses ranging from Psychogeography to Dialectical Marxism to Punch Magic. Of course, Second Edition largely folds these ideas in and integrates them in the form of yantras.
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Feb 27, 2020 18:18
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Dialectical Marxist Punch Magic is the Free Council's greatest weapon.
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Feb 27, 2020 20:13
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Fun fact: The first named, specific form of necromancy the Bible calls out as Bad and You Shouldn't Do It is Ov, which is described by the sages as calling up the spirits of the dead, which speak through your armpit. Yes, your Mage can use armpit farting as a Death yantra.
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Feb 27, 2020 20:37
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Mors Rattus posted:Yes, your Mage can use armpit farting as a Death yantra. I mean I guess if you have to come up with some esoteric justification for what we were all doing already, this is fine.
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Feb 27, 2020 21:12
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Joe Slowboat posted:Dialectical Marxist Punch Magic is the Free Council's greatest weapon. It’s the Arrow’s. Free Councilors are too libertarian to do real theory.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:18
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Good lord I can't keep up with this thread. For Vampire players: Do you ever feel bad for not focusing on your clan discipline? Right now I'm a Lygos who doesn't care about Nightmare past the first dot because he doesn't want to be a scary/intimidating person. I'm all in on Obfuscate and Auspex. Our Daeva has way more in Dominate than Majesty and our Gangrel would much rather talk to stray cats than have her own claws. We all have Humanity 7 or 8 and have never killed a human. Folks, I think we're bad at being vampires. This is 2nd edition, btw.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:28
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Well, you've managed to walk a very narrow line, at least! Typically I think Vampire is probably the one where low investment even in clan-exclusive powers is normal, and indeed most beneficial. Higher dots in Disciplines can be quite powerful, but in terms of how much you get out of your investment, the first dot is usually the biggest for vampires, followed by the second, and the rest aren't anywhere near as game-changing. Mostly, this is because early Discipline dots tend to be costless to use, and thus are effectively permanent additions to your arsenal at all times, while later ones have costs.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:31
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Inzombiac posted:Good lord I can't keep up with this thread. Eh sounds fine. My best character was a nos who was very much more obfuscate than anything else. If your characters are fun to play and you look forward to gaming, keep at it.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:36
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We are having a lot of fun, indeed. It's nice to have a story going that doesn't have the same melodramatic trappings of a typical WOD game. Sure, we are wrestling with our new realities but all of us, I think, are doing a great job being basically good people. That'll change soon as the story is unfolding and we're dealing with Changelings. The world population stopped growing in the 70s as worldwide abductions of children became so widespread that people have just accepted it. The issue is too big for anyone to solve... so far. The ST framed it this way, "You, in the real world, know for a fact that human trafficking is happening all over. How are you, personally, going to stop it? Now imagine nearly all missing persons case going unsolved for decades. How demoralizing would that get and how quickly would it numb us?"
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Feb 27, 2020 22:44
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Mors Rattus posted:Well, you've managed to walk a very narrow line, at least! Typically I think Vampire is probably the one where low investment even in clan-exclusive powers is normal, and indeed most beneficial. Higher dots in Disciplines can be quite powerful, but in terms of how much you get out of your investment, the first dot is usually the biggest for vampires, followed by the second, and the rest aren't anywhere near as game-changing. Mostly, this is because early Discipline dots tend to be costless to use, and thus are effectively permanent additions to your arsenal at all times, while later ones have costs. I think this is why - from a mechanical perspective* - I really like Daeva. Similar to oWoD Brujah, being able to punch harder, run faster and look hotter is never not useful. *I like the Daeva in general too, I feel I should point out.
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Feb 28, 2020 02:18
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Exalted 2e was just... obsessed with its own writing. It kept trying to play mindblowers with each new revalation and all it did was make interesting things less interesting. Like the discussion of each demon being part of a demon one level above it was cool. Trying to break down the sprititual physics of this in 2e was less so. Saying that the procollapse world was more advanced than the present was fine; trying to clarify exactly how far advanced, less so, and on. Basically any time the writers examined the setting too closely it got stupider. My favorite example of this are the in-setting mechanisms for exaltation. Its just so so stupid when you break it down in detail. It works fine in abstract so keep it abstract!
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Feb 28, 2020 02:41
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Inzombiac posted:We are having a lot of fun, indeed. Yeah this owns.
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Feb 28, 2020 03:13
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Backed Hunter 2e, excited to see what becomes of it but not exactly sure I'd be up to running it. Only experience running anything was a short lived D&D group, any advice?
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Feb 28, 2020 05:09
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xanthan posted:Backed Hunter 2e, excited to see what becomes of it but not exactly sure I'd be up to running it. Only experience running anything was a short lived D&D group, any advice? A big one is to make sure all the players are broadly on the same page about what kind of game this is, and that they have ideas about how their characters fit together. Session Zero is really valuable. If everyone's already bought in to the premises and the basic dynamic (and their characters already know each other) that makes life much easier for you as a GM, and lets them get on with hunting already. Secondly, try running a shorter game or two with limited monsters (like one particular dracula, or a haunted house, or a cult), and use them to phase in more mechanical subsystems as you go. Start off with basic rolls, investigation, and basic combat (possibly down and dirty combat). Also, don't be afraid to let players win - it can still be horror-flavored urban fantasy even if the players stake the monster. In fact, you can get some very fun personal horror out of their victory, and how far they'll go. As you add in more mechanical subsystems across sessions and maybe short monster-of-the-week storylines, you should try out the social rules with Doors. Don't start off using them on players, just let them get a hang for how they work on NPCs. Get them and yourself used to more complicated systems over time; you can almost certainly think of ways to 'spotlight' a particular small part of the system in each session. That way you don't frontload the complexity but you do make it available, and you get a hang of it so you can tell when to juggle a given system into play as things get more complicated. Also? GROUP BEATS. That should be, like, the first subsystem you introduce, if you think that'll work. Suddenly everyone gets an out of character bonus for pursuing their Vices, making bad decisions, and following their Aspirations - it's a great way to get players enthused about that.
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Feb 28, 2020 05:22
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Mendrian posted:Exalted 2e was just... obsessed with its own writing. It kept trying to play mindblowers with each new revalation and all it did was make interesting things less interesting. I was never there, but I remember accounts of the gonzos on various forums that started talking about how using a combination of charms at a certain location would theoretically allow you to attack every person in the world at once and how there were heated debates as to why someone hadn't gone and already used said combination to kill every mortal human in creation. I suspect when it came to 2e Exalted that life imitated art.
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Feb 28, 2020 05:28
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Omnicrom posted:I suspect when it came to 2e Exalted that life imitated art. Ah yes, the Creation Slaying Oblivion Kick. Technically possible for a particular canon character to perform according to his writeup, and by the transitive property, another character with the explicit goal of killing the entire world who had in his writeup that he knew all charms published that he could possibly know. Actually I think there were plural of those second category of characters, the Deathlords (who got written as actually trying to kill everything in 2e, rather than begrudgingly helping that while actually pursuing their own agendas like 'conquer the entire underworld so everyone knows I'm the greatest general in history' etc.) So, I see why that discussion was had: 2e was very into the idea that the mechanics fully simulated all the cause and effect links in Creation, and that it was fully knowable and rationalized and unfortunately the simulation they'd built caught fire and fell over if you looked at it funny.
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Feb 28, 2020 05:43
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Please stop making up lies and attacking the gentleman gamer whoever you are. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 28, 2020 15:50
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Metapod posted:Please stop making up lies and attacking the gentleman gamer whoever you are. Errr... Context?
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Feb 28, 2020 15:56
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CottonWolf posted:Errr... Context? https://twitter.com/clackclickbang/status/1233346306598473733?s=21
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Feb 28, 2020 16:06
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Okay... and why do you believe that this "gentleman gamer lie maker-upper" is on this specific forum?
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Feb 28, 2020 17:17
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Everyone posted:Okay... and why do you believe that this "gentleman gamer lie maker-upper" is on this specific forum? I mean, you've Met a Pod, right? They post here like everyone is equally hooked into V5 Actual Play social media as they are, and also like to posture as if we're a pernicious, oppressive blight out to destroy V5 for being a mediocre game. Really, their goal seems to be to get the conversation away from Chronicles and onto New Old WoD by any means necessary, even if it makes us all resent V5. I recommend ignoring them.
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Feb 28, 2020 17:30
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Why doesn't my ST let me play a child character? Why does he automatically assume that he will emote NPCs being sexual with me? Why does he automatically assume that my party mates will do it? Edit: last part was too harsh. Blitz of 404 Error fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Feb 28, 2020 |
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Feb 28, 2020 17:41
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xanthan posted:Backed Hunter 2e, excited to see what becomes of it but not exactly sure I'd be up to running it. Only experience running anything was a short lived D&D group, any advice? Everything Slowboat said was good. I personally never used social doors because my group tends to be loose and not apt to take on complex systems. A good Hunter game should have several layers at play early on. Introduce the BBE for the chapter (or just the concept of it. They don't need to meet Dracula on the first day), establish tension within the group (competing ideals and/or methodologies) and then each Hunter should have something personal to lose. My last Hunter game I ran had a group of greenhorns investigating "demons" that were killing and eating people to use their biomass for... something. One Hunter only cared about murdering them on sight, one wanted to capture and study them and the last one didn't want to get too involved too quickly. Taking a page from Vampire, each one had a personal anchor that they needed to protect at all costs. I forced them to choose a person in their lives who wasn't a hunter and didn't know about monsters. It lead to a alter-ego playstyle that worked out well. At the end of the day, you can run a game that is mostly killing faceless cultists or a game about investigation where you don't meet the monster until the last session. Hunter is highly flexible and, in my opinion, the easiest to learn. As a regular person, you can slip into the fiction really easily.
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Feb 28, 2020 17:48
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean, you've Met a Pod, right? They post here like everyone is equally hooked into V5 Actual Play social media as they are, and also like to posture as if we're a pernicious, oppressive blight out to destroy V5 for being a mediocre game. V5 is made by fans, and it oozes that out of every pore to a point where its kind of a problem. What's more, it's clearly made by fans who came in through bloodlines and never really engaged with a lot of the metaplot. As a result parts that don't really work for that view of what vampire is got cut out rather brutally. (Elders get sent to the middle east, and the Camarilla is no longer the supreme government of all vampiredom by its own reckoning but a country club for elders). Some of this depends on your taste whether you like it, (I personally think the change to the camarilla is an improvement.) some of it is just stupid (Knowing Tourette from Bloodlines is a merit on its own) It also means that a lot of mechanics have been built either by stapling it on top of existing stuff without regards to how it would fit, or refuses to meld with the system as they've actually made it. My personal most annoying bugbear (Although easily fixable) is that their new main character creation system distributes dots based on background choices (Which is cool and good) but these point are static, while the character advancement costs are exponential. Which means you get the worst of both worlds of CoD and WoD, which is super annoying because this problem was fixed in CoD 1st edition. There's also some new mechanics which don't really work (Hunger dice are cool as a concept, but the implementation is sort of bad), some mechanics which clearly only exist to facilitate the creators own characters (2 dot instant sexswap ritual for thin bloods comes to mind), etc. Overall the hatetrain is exaggerating its badness (As usual really), but it's still bad.
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Feb 28, 2020 17:56
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