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https://twitter.com/vampiresnvino/status/1267647698594721792?s=19
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Jun 2, 2020 16:32
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Nessus posted:The White Sox? Really? Not the Cubs? The Cubs at least have a curse. gently caress the cubs. That cabal was probably south side.
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Jun 2, 2020 18:00
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Soonmot posted:gently caress the cubs. That cabal was probably south side. I tried to say it in a nice game specific way, but yes, this is accurate and what I was really saying.
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Jun 2, 2020 18:41
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When you go farther back in first edition (so basically the rule in Boston Unveiled and Chicago) your cabals tend to be single Order, which was weird. Chicago even organized cabals by Order, so the Guardians of the Veil section then shows you a bunch of cabals full of Guardians of the Veil. There's members that stand out as exceptions (like a Madame Strega) but the write ups usually call out how them being in another order is an asset. People have said that it seemed like the original intent was that everyone in a player group would all be of the same y-splat, I've no idea but the examples are a pretty good argument for it. Fortunately it seems to have been less of a rule as time went on.
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Jun 2, 2020 22:14
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nofather posted:People have said that it seemed like the original intent was that everyone in a player group would all be of the same y-splat, I've no idea but the examples are a pretty good argument for it. Fortunately it seems to have been less of a rule as time went on. That's an interesting design choice if they were going for that. Single splat games have always been a tiny exception to the rule in WW stuff.
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Jun 2, 2020 22:28
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You know I've noticed that people don't ever seem to be into the idea of a narrow-cast group even if it would make perfect sense in most of these games that you would have groups that are mostly members of a particular affinity, splat, or sub-splat. If anything people seem to want to spread out maximally. It's interesting and I suppose some of it is player choice, but it seems like you can get a deeper and more connected experience with unified splats, too. To explain what I mean here a little, I mean you have the higher order group (Garou) and then the sub-groups (Tribe etc.) and then perhaps even subgroups of THAT.
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Jun 2, 2020 22:29
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Nessus posted:You know I've noticed that people don't ever seem to be into the idea of a narrow-cast group even if it would make perfect sense in most of these games that you would have groups that are mostly members of a particular affinity, splat, or sub-splat. If anything people seem to want to spread out maximally. It's interesting and I suppose some of it is player choice, but it seems like you can get a deeper and more connected experience with unified splats, too. Oh, sure. In Werewolf you could have Camps. Changeling had Kith and Courts. Semi-related I find I like in Requiem there's more of an emphasis on your Covenant than your Clan. A Nosferatu can be the top of the Invictus. Doesn't feel nearly as stratified (even as, yes, nothing technically prevents a Nosferatu from being Prince in oWoD etc). A full Covenant party doesn't seem so out of reason as it would full group of the same Clan.
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Jun 2, 2020 23:09
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nWolf 2e embraced the idea of the party being, itself, your strongest tie. Pack over Tribe is the default, there, and I think it's a really good decision.
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Jun 2, 2020 23:10
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Mage 2e also emphasizes the Pentacle Alliance as, well, an alliance. There are internal tensions, but an individual cabal is expected to draw on multiple revolutionary mystery cults, which each bring their own specialties and skills to the table - as well as their own agendas. It makes for a manageable amount of interpersonal tension, in my experience, that ultimately leads to the cabal as a more important organization but enriched by multiple Orders. There are exceptions, of course, and I think NPCs are generally expected to be more likely to clump with like-minded wizards, because that's a good reason to have the PCs bouncing around between other cabals or treated as go-betweens and free agents. Which is good! The PCs being subtly but meaningfully more dynamic than the other cabals in their area is both more manageable for the ST and does a lot to explain why they end up at the center of everything story-shaped.
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Jun 2, 2020 23:21
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Joe Slowboat posted:There are exceptions, of course, and I think NPCs are generally expected to be more likely to clump with like-minded wizards, because that's a good reason to have the PCs bouncing around between other cabals or treated as go-betweens and free agents. Which is good! The PCs being subtly but meaningfully more dynamic than the other cabals in their area is both more manageable for the ST and does a lot to explain why they end up at the center of everything story-shaped. It's a neat way of under-writing one of the main aspects of how a PC group is separate from a group of NPCs in either WoD, in that they can implicitly trust each other and have each other's back. (Yes, unless you're playing a 'scheme against everybody' game, whatever.) That is a huge advantage in Vampire and honestly is probably a mandate for a group of the Lost or Prometheans. Certainly doesn't hurt anywhere else.
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Jun 2, 2020 23:33
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A game of vampire where everyone is best buddies no matter what sounds super boring and counter textual 💤
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Jun 2, 2020 23:45
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Dawgstar posted:Flipping through it I saw a cabal that was apparently dedicated to the White Sox and while I don’t think it is out of bounds a group of mages like baseball it did not really feel like a group of people who are pathologically determined to explore the nature of reality. What if I were to tell you that the Chicago White Sox have been involved in more perfect games than any other team in the MLB? Baseball is all about freak statistical occurrences happening between long periods of nothing much. Baseball fandom is maybe the closest thing there is in sports to mages' quest to figure out the "hows" and "whys" of reality.
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Jun 3, 2020 00:57
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What’s really fun is that you can also organize disagreements and tensions OOC to make sure that they’re suitably dramatic - my players in my three and a half year long chronicle (almost) never came to blows but they did get up to a lot of shenanigans on the way. One of them stole a church! Another was sort of developing into a cultist of a Bound goddess. But the players were talking about it and they could rely on each other to have their backs when things got hairy.
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Jun 3, 2020 01:00
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ElNarez posted:What if I were to tell you that the Chicago White Sox have been involved in more perfect games than any other team in the MLB? Baseball is all about freak statistical occurrences happening between long periods of nothing much. Baseball fandom is maybe the closest thing there is in sports to mages' quest to figure out the "hows" and "whys" of reality. Being a a White Sox fan provokes a very important mystery to investigate: why are the Cubs so much more popular when they suck in so many different ways at the same time?
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Jun 3, 2020 01:29
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Joe Slowboat posted:What’s really fun is that you can also organize disagreements and tensions OOC to make sure that they’re suitably dramatic - my players in my three and a half year long chronicle (almost) never came to blows but they did get up to a lot of shenanigans on the way. One of them stole a church! Another was sort of developing into a cultist of a Bound goddess. But the players were talking about it and they could rely on each other to have their backs when things got hairy. Exactly. To quote Stanley from The Office: "We don't have to get along, we just have to work together."
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Jun 3, 2020 01:50
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Dave Brookshaw posted:WoD: Chicago was, if I remember correctly, partly written before Mage 1e was finished. It came out four months later, so knowing how production timescales match up that's either true or it was written before Mage came out and anyone played it. It's... Um... Yeah. As someone who really got into the WoD with the nWoD, I was really excited for Chicago and you can kind of see it just get worse and worse from beginning to ending. The Vampire stuff is great, Werewolf is okay, Mage is generally pretty bad. It does have some cool ideas at least, I like the symbolic White Sox cabal. e: I posted this and then saw the like next page was about that cabal! Nice! And yes, it was really apparent to me as a new reader that Vampire and Mage in particular pushed being all the same social splat REALLY REALLY hard. The covenants just didn't cooperate that well outside of pressure, and I distinctly remember reading all of Guardians of the Veil and going "if the rest of the Pentacle find out what the Guardians are REALLY about, they'd kill them all so quick." Arivia fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Jun 3, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2020 02:38
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Did oWoD ever tackle Haarp? I had some ideas for my Werewolf group involving a Technocracy-advised US military invasion of the Umbra to harness "alternative green energy." Haarp seems like a great fit for an oversized, artificial caern but I'm drawing a blank on how to use this beyond "prevent this disaster from happening."
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Jun 3, 2020 19:25
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Arivia posted:I distinctly remember reading all of Guardians of the Veil and going "if the rest of the Pentacle find out what the Guardians are REALLY about, they'd kill them all so quick." The Guardians of the Veil esoteric doctrines are pretty clearly at least suspected by the rest of the Pentacle, because the Guardians operate on the principle of 'if they hate and fear us it reinforces our role as sin eaters.' It's actually specifically addressed that while the Guardian esoteric doctrines are certainly more distressing than the exoteric doctrines, they still fall within acceptable Diamond orthodoxy (they allow that it is possible for a mage to be worthy of magic - the Hieromagus; 'all thrones are false' will certainly annoy the Ladder but it's not like that's not what everyone thinks the Guardians do anyways). That's not to say the esoteric doctrines becoming common knowledge wouldn't hurt the Guardians, but it's not really either plausible or fun to imagine the Guardians being able to successfully hide their beliefs from the rest of the Pentacle for hundreds of years without anyone ever spilling the beans. Brookshaw has also drawn a distinction between devout Guardians and pragmatic Guardians - they've both killed an enemy of magic and passed the Crimson Veil, so they're both blood in on the mystery cult, but one might live in preparation for the Hieromagus while the other just sees the Guardian doctrines as an important check on the hubris of others. Or even just be focused on being a wizard spy. The Guardians are terrible, but the Diamond knows how terrible they are - hell, the Guardians know how terrible they are! The Interfector is a public office. Having a Guardian in your cabal likely means having a certain amount of inherent tension, not 'guess Jim is going to murder us in our sleep some time.'
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Jun 3, 2020 19:35
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moths posted:Did oWoD ever tackle Haarp? HAARP is a giant radio antenna so it could also be over infusing the local Umbra as it operates with Weaver taint, knowingly or unknowingly, that's spreading at an alarming rate.
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Jun 3, 2020 19:48
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Joe Slowboat posted:The Guardians of the Veil esoteric doctrines are pretty clearly at least suspected by the rest of the Pentacle, because the Guardians operate on the principle of 'if they hate and fear us it reinforces our role as sin eaters.' It's actually specifically addressed that while the Guardian esoteric doctrines are certainly more distressing than the exoteric doctrines, they still fall within acceptable Diamond orthodoxy (they allow that it is possible for a mage to be worthy of magic - the Hieromagus; 'all thrones are false' will certainly annoy the Ladder but it's not like that's not what everyone thinks the Guardians do anyways). I'm not saying you're wrong as the line has developed until now, but I was discussing the very beginning of the nWoD, where Guardians of the Veil was the first order book and like the fourth MtAw book period. To me as a new reader, it seemed very obvious that Guardians wouldn't mix well with other Pentacle mages in a cabal, same as I was finding reading the Vampire covenant books around the same time.
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Jun 3, 2020 19:56
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Arivia posted:I'm not saying you're wrong as the line has developed until now, but I was discussing the very beginning of the nWoD, where Guardians of the Veil was the first order book and like the fourth MtAw book period. To me as a new reader, it seemed very obvious that Guardians wouldn't mix well with other Pentacle mages in a cabal, same as I was finding reading the Vampire covenant books around the same time. With the covenants, I really only got the feeling the the "opposite" ones wouldn't mix well. That having invictus and carthian together or lancea and crone together would be a problem, but mixing invictus, crone, and ordo would be fine.
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Jun 3, 2020 20:09
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moths posted:Did oWoD ever tackle Haarp? For ultimate punchline, have a Garou bust out of some fool's mirrorshades. SURPRISE, rear end in a top hat! IT COUNTS!
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Jun 3, 2020 22:35
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https://twitter.com/worldofdarkness/status/1268221320845721601?s=19 ✊
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Jun 4, 2020 00:30
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I haven't played any tabletop in maybe 16 years and finding my old dice bag the other day reminded me of the hobby; as a matter of fact, just looking at my Vampire The Masquerade dice (the ones with the blood splat on one tip and the rose symbol) caused me to spontaneously remember about a third of the Revised Edition rules, stuff I thought I had completely forgotten. I mentioned it to my wife and she seemed interested in playing something- now's not a good time to start inviting friends over for game night, obviously, but it is a great time for two people with a lot of spare time to learn a game system, and for one of them to start doing concept writing. After looking at the nWoD titles she said Geist, Vampire and Changeling sounded the most interesting (all my old edition books are long gone). Would it be best to just buy all three core books as pdfs on Drive Thru RPG so she could look through them and decide which one sounds the most up her alley? Also, are just the core books enough to start learning the rules\building out story hooks? If she decided, say, Geist is the one that sounds the best, what materials would I need to form a sound base to work from? Is nWoD still all D10?
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Jun 4, 2020 07:06
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nWoD is still all d10. In terms of materials, if you're playing in person with the nWoD Second Edition rules, you might some cards or small pieces of paper to represent Conditions, or one of the preprinted Condition Card sets sold on DrivethruRPG. Used well, Conditions are like narrative markers that come up to remind you of opportunities to play into genre, that come and go in play. (The books do not always use them well.) The more comfortable you are with improvising effects on the fly, the more likely you're fine just taking index cards and writing "Spooked" or "Lethargic" on them when a Condition comes up. If you're just playing with your wife alone, you may not really need cards, since all the focus will be on one character so you can remember status easier. Make sure the books you buy say Second Edition. Second Edition nWoD corebooks like Vampire or Geist contain the full rules to run a game of Vampire or Geist, but First Edition books did not work this way, also requiring a World of Darkness Core Rulebook that all the monster cores share. Vampire and Changeling are both very good games, and Geist is solid enough, that if you have the money and reading time to spare, buying the PDFs and looking them over isn't a bad idea. There's very little in the way of Second Edition supplements published yet for any gameline except Vampire and maybe Demon, but I think the corebooks for everything except maybe Mage and Mummy do a pretty good job of providing enough structure to sketch out a chronicle setting and start playing. Each book contains one chapter dedicated to short overviews of several sample domains, both as premade plot hook settings and as examples of what you can do with a game of Vampire or Changeling. There is one important distinction that can trip up folks used to playing oWoD rules you should note. oWoD measured success by gradation; a particular roll could require more than one die to show a success, and a one or two success roll was characterized as a narrower or lesser result than rolling three or four successes. nWoD does not do this; nWoD rules mostly measure difficulty of an action by how likely you are to roll any successes at all, with a die only rolling a success on an eight, nine, or ten. This is a technical note to give out before you even read the books, but it's important to get used to rolling ten dice, getting one success, and going "yes, good, I succeeded" instead of "dang, I barely scraped by."
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Jun 4, 2020 07:42
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HAARP having Weaver side effects fits perfectly, thanks guys. That opens a lot of doors.
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Jun 4, 2020 14:39
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Those are some really solid picks and Box answered your questions. If you're just going to run something for one person, I highly suggest picking up promethean as well, it really is one of the best games in the line and even beats out Geist for being the most hopeful. A highly personal journey on discovering what it is to be human and eventually achieving that goal might be fun for you two. Honestly, I really enjoy all the second editions (except beast which I will not buy).
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Jun 4, 2020 14:54
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Since we're talking about it, here's my rough ranking of how objectively good the current nWoD 2e/CofD lines are:
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Jun 4, 2020 16:07
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If you end up playing vampire just learn V5. Its the newest edition, streamlined, and a very good system.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:11
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I'd add that Promethean is uniquely well suited to a one-on-one game, if that's what you're considering running. Geist has some mechanical development tied up in its krewe communities, and Vampire and Changeling have their respective communities of covenants and courts to navigate, but Promethean runs equally as strong, if not better, with one player character as it does with full party dynamics. You could run a Promethean game without even other Promethean NPCs and it would hold. But of course, you play what you're interested in playing, and even Geist can hold up with one player character, having more themes to work with than just krewe communities.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:15
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That's all great info, thanks! I'll have to check again, to make sure they're 2nd edition, but the core books all said they we $19.99, so it wouldn't be the end of the world to spend $60 so that she had all three in front of her and could browse them (if she ends up not liking any of them, I can restart my time honored tradition of buying and just reading WoD books. Pretty sure, back in the day, I had.a three foot high stack of books and used approximately four inches of them to ever play or GM). Soonmot posted:Those are some really solid picks and Box answered your questions. If you're just going to run something for one person, I highly suggest picking up promethean as well, it really is one of the best games in the line and even beats out Geist for being the most hopeful. A highly personal journey on discovering what it is to be human and eventually achieving that goal might be fun for you two. Initially, when (if) we find one we're both into, we're going to run 1:1 stuff so we can get familiar with the rules and flow of gameplay. Then, when the world is all Corona'd out, we have a few friends that have expressed interest in the past who have expressed interest\played a while ago, so I was thinking I'd put together something bigger for a group of four and she can be the person in group that helps clarify rules when needed. Promethean wasn't one that jumped out at her and I'm kinda catering this to what she's most interested in, since she's never tabletopped before and, to be honest, I think a good portion of her initial interest is stemming from the fact that I'm excited, if that makes sense. Wanna cater primarily to her interests.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:28
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Here's a question about Forsaken 2E which kind of stems from the 'single splat' talk a few pages back. With every tribe now having a specific thing to hunt, be it other werewolves, people, etc., does it still lean into 'having multiple tribes are good' notion? Like you can cycle through the chosen prey and give each pack member the spotlight?
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Jun 4, 2020 16:29
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A pack benefits greatly from having multiple tribe members who can direct the different forms of the Sacred Hunt. You may have a Hunter in Darkness who's most vigilant about the threat of Hosts and a Bone Shadow whose attention falls sharpest on spirits, but you're almost never going to have a pack territory that is threatened solely by a single type of prey. If hosts are the problem of the day most pressing, the Bone Shadow's not going to lose interest and leave, she's going to help her packmate sweep the territory clean of hosts until the problem's solved.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:49
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mysterious frankie posted:That's all great info, thanks! I'll have to check again, to make sure they're 2nd edition, but the core books all said they we $19.99, so it wouldn't be the end of the world to spend $60 so that she had all three in front of her and could browse them (if she ends up not liking any of them, I can restart my time honored tradition of buying and just reading WoD books. Pretty sure, back in the day, I had.a three foot high stack of books and used approximately four inches of them to ever play or GM). Give me your email in spoiler text.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:55
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I Am Just a Box posted:A pack benefits greatly from having multiple tribe members who can direct the different forms of the Sacred Hunt. You may have a Hunter in Darkness who's most vigilant about the threat of Hosts and a Bone Shadow whose attention falls sharpest on spirits, but you're almost never going to have a pack territory that is threatened solely by a single type of prey. If hosts are the problem of the day most pressing, the Bone Shadow's not going to lose interest and leave, she's going to help her packmate sweep the territory clean of hosts until the problem's solved.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:55
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Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken, and the rest of the Chronicles of Darkness game are based on a completely different system than what the old world of darkness used, and even what the original new world of darkness used. The name of the stats are the same but how the mechanics work is very different. That said the COFD games are all mechanically consistent with each other. Once you learn the vagarities of how Vampire works, you have a solid baseline for how Werewolf works, or how Mage works, and only need to learn the differences. V5 is a completely different system by a different designer that's meant to be the "Inheritor" of World of darkness: Revised, but the rules are still completely different to the way the old world of darkness played and Vampire is the only game that uses it right now (Though Werewolf 5th edition should be coming out soon-ish on the geologic timescale) Lurks With Wolves posted:
Never Ever play Beast. If you want to know why, offsite Educational material can be provided upon request. I Am Just a Box posted:A pack benefits greatly from having multiple tribe members who can direct the different forms of the Sacred Hunt. You may have a Hunter in Darkness who's most vigilant about the threat of Hosts and a Bone Shadow whose attention falls sharpest on spirits, but you're almost never going to have a pack territory that is threatened solely by a single type of prey. If hosts are the problem of the day most pressing, the Bone Shadow's not going to lose interest and leave, she's going to help her packmate sweep the territory clean of hosts until the problem's solved. The weird tribal animosity from 1st edition werewolf was mostly excised in 2nd edition. In 2nd edition your Pack is the most important thing to you, if a decision comes down to your pack or your tribe the correct answer is "Your Pack" and your tribe will definitely understand because it's made up entirely of werewolves who should also be making that same choice. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 17:06
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There's a Beast primer in the OP
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Jun 4, 2020 17:10
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Soonmot posted:Give me your email in spoiler text. blondlot@hotmail.com
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Jun 4, 2020 17:26
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mysterious frankie posted:I haven't played any tabletop in maybe 16 years and finding my old dice bag the other day reminded me of the hobby; as a matter of fact, just looking at my Vampire The Masquerade dice (the ones with the blood splat on one tip and the rose symbol) caused me to spontaneously remember about a third of the Revised Edition rules, stuff I thought I had completely forgotten. V5 is probably going to bet the best system to learn for a new player, as it was for me. They just released a new book and also the roll20 sheet is extremely well made. Very new player friendly overall.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:43
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Since we're talking about it, here's my rough ranking of how objectively good the current nWoD 2e/CofD lines are: To give a very different perspective, my rankings:
I don't know enough about Geist, Hunter, etc. It's entirely probable that LWW and I have different priorities/experiences. Nearly all the games I've played have been with the same people, over a decade and a half, and we tend to play pretty loose, lots of improvisation, and a lot of escalation followed by introspection.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:49
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