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LatwPIAT posted:It's not about the Metis, it's about players who played the game by spending every second in wolf-form, having lots of sex with other werewolves, and creeping out other players at the table. Making sex between werewolves have practical consequences was a reaction to that and an attempt to put a stop to it. Which is wild because you can literally just say "Hey Adam, we're not going to keep telling this story if it keeps being creepy." and Adam will stop.
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Jun 20, 2020 20:20
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Relevant Tangent posted:Which is wild because you can literally just say "Hey Adam, we're not going to keep telling this story if it keeps being creepy." and Adam will stop. Yeah, it was not a problem to try to solve with setting crafting. Writing a slap on the wrist for werewolf sex into the setting doesn't communicate that Forsaken is not a game where werewolves have sex, it communicates that Forsaken is (at least in part) a game where werewolves have sex and that's bad, which obviously was not the goal and is a confusing and discordant message to the reader. Contrast with Vampire doing the same thing with Humanity but intentionally and to better results: the consequences of Humanity loss are not meant to stop Vampire characters from hurting people and doing the wrong thing. It doesn't communicate that Vampire is not a game where vampires hurt people, it communicates that Vampire is a game where vampires hurt people and that's bad. Mechanical punishments can't stop Creepy Adam. Only you, at the table, can stop Creepy Adam.
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Jun 20, 2020 21:31
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A fun question from game design is "what is intended play," and a very viable answer is "anything that the system responds to." Stanley Parable is a great example here - the game gives you explicit instructions, but only a madman would play that and think that the intent of the game was to do what the narrator tells you. 90% of the game's content is "do the opposite of what the narrator wants to see how he responds," and the only thing that actually discourages you is when he doesn't respond or doesn't respond differently to a different action. So, putting in rules about what happens when werewolves gently caress that are "penalties" isn't really discouraging. It just kind of draws attention to the problem spot. In general it's the dopiest problem in the hyphz thread: attempts to mechanize away or through what are start-to-finish social problems, problems that are pretty easy to resolve with "talking to players and setting expectations like adults."
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Jun 20, 2020 21:43
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Relevant Tangent posted:Metis's parents were probably dead (childbirth and Harano respectively (they really shouldn't have made Harano a thing)) so you didn't have to worry about the ST kidnapping them and they're substantially better mechanically than the other two options. Smart play would have been to just make it so if Garou gently caress nothing happens. Which is exactly what W:TF 2nd edition did. Uratha can gently caress, they can have kids, they're no more likely to be werewolves than anything else because who is and isn't a werewolf is decided by Luna, who is goddamn insane. There's also nothing weird that happens because of it because the spirits just plain do not care. I Am Just a Box posted:Contrast with Vampire doing the same thing with Humanity but intentionally and to better results: the consequences of Humanity loss are not meant to stop Vampire characters from hurting people and doing the wrong thing. It doesn't communicate that Vampire is not a game where vampires hurt people, it communicates that Vampire is a game where vampires hurt people and that's bad. Compare what Harmony in W:TF1st said ("You are ascribing to be pure spirit, you will be human but that is shameful and bad") vs what harmony in W:TF 2nd said ("You actually need to be in harmony between flesh and spirit, If you indulge one too much you must indulge the other in equal measure.") Tulip posted:A fun question from game design is "what is intended play," and a very viable answer is "anything that the system responds to." Stanley Parable is a great example here - the game gives you explicit instructions, but only a madman would play that and think that the intent of the game was to do what the narrator tells you. 90% of the game's content is "do the opposite of what the narrator wants to see how he responds," and the only thing that actually discourages you is when he doesn't respond or doesn't respond differently to a different action. A reminder that W:tA had rules for healing someone by loving them in crinos form, and a rite that required a giant crinos orgy. The writers were entirely at fault for what happened in W:tA and the way they tried to blame the players for it in later books (And W:tF)just felt mean spirited. "No you aren't allowed to get off on this transgression! Only we're allowed to get off on this transgression!"
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Jun 20, 2020 22:12
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Children of Gaia Revised was just That's My Fetish with oWoD mechanics attached.
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Jun 20, 2020 22:47
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Kurieg posted:
I realize that this is just the biggest "what the gently caress ever", but it didn't heal anything, it allowed the Garou to ignore a frenzy result. My rp circle would always mock this Rite and it was colloquially known as "Rage Fuckin". The most hilarious part is that the revised Tribebooks would include alternate MET rules for a lot of things, including this Rite. "MET: Owing to the nature of this rite, this is best done through Storytelling." Most of the awful Werewolf internet discourse I see would simply not exist if the First Tenet of the Litany and Metis would just go away. At every corner there's someone who has really Along with all of it's other problematic content, it devoted way to much of it's text to the do's and don'ts of Werewolf sex. Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jun 20, 2020 |
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Jun 20, 2020 23:47
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Kurieg posted:The writers [...] just felt mean spirited. "No you aren't allowed to get off on this transgression! Only we're allowed to get off on this transgression!"
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Jun 20, 2020 23:59
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NGDBSS posted:Children of Gaia Revised was just That's My Fetish with oWoD mechanics attached. Ethan Skemp apologized for letting it through. He said it was entirely on him for not paying attention.
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Jun 21, 2020 00:09
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Free Gratis posted:I realize that this is just the biggest "what the gently caress ever", but it didn't heal anything, it allowed the Garou to ignore a frenzy result. My rp circle would always mock this Rite and it was colloquially known as "Rage Fuckin". The most hilarious part is that the revised Tribebooks would include alternate MET rules for a lot of things, including this Rite. "MET: Owing to the nature of this rite, this is best done through Storytelling." No, there's a rank 3 CoG Gift that lets you heal essence, health, or willpower of living being or spirit. it does not specifically require you to gently caress that person or spirit but it's explicitly encouraged(it requires a touch that conveys affection or warmth "or something more intimate"). Do not question me on this, I have stared into the abyss.
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Jun 21, 2020 00:43
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Free Gratis posted:At every corner there's someone who has really "Breath Deep" was the werewolf paperback where that work around was first encountered by me. But yeah i agree with ya there. I'm not sure who it was that first came up with what happens if you're a Mwtis and succumb to the Thrall of the Defiler Wyrm but i hope they're on a watch list somewhere.
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Jun 21, 2020 00:58
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Relevant Tangent posted:Which is wild because you can literally just say "Hey Adam, we're not going to keep telling this story if it keeps being creepy." and Adam will stop. You're mostly right, though there's a couple of things I would note: 1) If Adam shouldn't be doing it in the first place, the system probably shouldn't enable him 2) Some Adams are perfectly fine and rewarding people to play with except when they can play That One Thing they think is funny/acceptable and everyone else don't, and it'd be great to not have to have the conversation with Adam about why he doesn't get to play this thing that's in the book (especially if Bob gets to, because Bob doesn't take it too far) 3) Having been on RPG online forums, I think there's a certain value to not encourage or enable the Adams of the world, their lengthy stories of how they were creepy in their personal games and everyone clapped, and their fifteen-post theorycrafting about why the creep should actually be a central part of the setting. Like I get that a lot of this is community-building and having adult conversations with people, but at the same time what you put in a game, what you enable in a game, and what you discourage in a game affects what people think should be part of conversations about the game, and like, I have seen some homebrew I wish I could unsee. 
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Jun 21, 2020 01:11
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LatwPIAT posted:1) If Adam shouldn't be doing it in the first place, the system probably shouldn't enable him Forsaken's not enabling Adam in this scenario by getting rid of the ghost babies and just not saying anything meaningful about werewolf sex, though, any more than the Magical Realm Whizzard is enabled by any game that doesn't stop to specify that in this game nobody ever urinates. Sex exists, in Werewolf werewolves exist, but Adam is the one causing problems through uncomfortable focus. The problem lies more with the expectations set by Apocalypse, whose sexual hang-ups are a whole lot more involved and spiral out of the definition of "breeds" of Garou and one of the secondary conflicts being a population crisis. This narrative frame did kind of enable Creepy Adam, even before getting into outliers like the Children of Gaia rites. Forsaken never set up this framing, though. This starts to get into that territory where the early nWoD launch was overcautious to separate itself from the oWoD gamelines: if the ghost-babies serve as a course-correction at all, the course they would correct only arises if you play Forsaken with the assumptions of Apocalypse. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 21, 2020 01:55
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Kurieg posted:No, there's a rank 3 CoG Gift that lets you heal essence, health, or willpower of living being or spirit. it does not specifically require you to gently caress that person or spirit but it's explicitly encouraged(it requires a touch that conveys affection or warmth "or something more intimate"). Ah that one. I misread where you said "and a rite" and the specificity of crinos form made me think you were only referring to the rite. I don't agree that it pushes intercourse as strongly as you believe it does, and it's definitely not the "loving them in crinos form" that you described earlier. I dunno, Lover's Touch never weirded me out that much, whereas the Rite of Clouds and Rain was probably written by someone whose favorite rule is Animal Magnetism. Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 21, 2020 03:29
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citybeatnik posted:"Breath Deep" was the werewolf paperback where that work around was first encountered by me. Guess what, the "Sequel" to Breathe Deeply and Tribebook:CoG were written by the same guy! Funny that.
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Jun 21, 2020 03:50
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Ferrinus posted:I have my issues with Requiem 2E, but one thing I'll always admire it for is not being quietly ashamed of thinking vampires are cool and letting vampires be powerful. Meanwhile V5 is as self-conscious about VtM Revised as VtM Revised was about VtM 2E and - I'd bet money on this - as 2E was about 1E. Just stuck in a constant flight from the "superheroes with fangs" that haunt their nightmares. I feel like this discounts the fact that, in V5, there always exists a possibility that you will use a power at no cost. You can, in theory, do cool poo poo all the time and barely get penalized for it. I would even argue that passing a Rouse check on a discipline acts as an incentive to do more cool poo poo further down the line. Failing a check, however, means you have to feed, which creates an opportunity for conflict, which is also cool.
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Jun 21, 2020 04:55
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ElNarez posted:I feel like this discounts the fact that, in V5, there always exists a possibility that you will use a power at no cost. You can, in theory, do cool poo poo all the time and barely get penalized for it. I would even argue that passing a Rouse check on a discipline acts as an incentive to do more cool poo poo further down the line. Failing a check, however, means you have to feed, which creates an opportunity for conflict, which is also cool. First off, while your powers cost 0-1 blood rather than 1 blood, you also have a pool of 5 blood rather than 10, so you don't really get to use more powers on average. I think the fact that you don't know whether you're going to lose blood or not until after committing is actually disempowering in itself because it makes it harder to plan ahead and causes you to see each use of your powers as more risky. Note that this isn't strictly a bad thing, and I don't think the instinct to tamp down on and complicate vampire power is necessarily misguided. However, it's definitely an ideological point of unity between VtM 5E and VtR 1E. What I was really talking about there, though, were the powers themselves, which are verrrry piecemeal and low-key. Like, if you actually get all the way up to Potence 5 you will actually be more dangerous to other supernatural creatures than if you had Potence 0, but not until that fifth dot. Again, this isn't necessarily bad - it just means that vampire combat prowess lives mostly in blood surge and the physical Disciplines are largely there to allow for stunts - but it's a level of repression beyond even that of VtR 1E's low-key, workmanlike, but straightforwardly effective physical Disciplines.
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Jun 21, 2020 06:00
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In requiem 2e the basic function on physical disciplines are always free and the first level of all disciplines is always free.
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Jun 21, 2020 06:25
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Soonmot posted:In requiem 2e the basic function on physical disciplines are always free and the first level of all disciplines is always free.
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Jun 21, 2020 07:31
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Kurieg posted:Guess what, the "Sequel" to Breathe Deeply and Tribebook:CoG were written by the same guy! Funny that. Don - who didn't do Mokole or TCOG but did BD - was probably the worst of the stable of repeatedly contracted authors. By, like, a mile. He's responsible for As One Dead, starring The Brujah Who Is Also A Toreador Who Needs To Breathe And Everyone Wants To gently caress And Has A Raven And Totally Reincarnates As It And Belongs To The Inconnu And Is The Best Vampire Ever.
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Jun 21, 2020 08:47
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Loomer posted:Don - who didn't do Mokole or TCOG but did BD - was probably the worst of the stable of repeatedly contracted authors. By, like, a mile. He's responsible for As One Dead, starring The Brujah Who Is Also A Toreador Who Needs To Breathe And Everyone Wants To gently caress And Has A Raven And Totally Reincarnates As It And Belongs To The Inconnu And Is The Best Vampire Ever. How does someone like that not get dropped like a rock after the first incident, let alone several?
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Jun 21, 2020 09:54
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Obligatum VII posted:How does someone like that not get dropped like a rock after the first incident, let alone several? Being able to meet deadlines can be the only priority people have in this industry sometimes, especially if you're trying to shovel five books out the door every two months. Plus if you're really prolific you can have a ton of content in the pipeline before anyone really sees it.
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Jun 21, 2020 11:02
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Obligatum VII posted:How does someone like that not get dropped like a rock after the first incident, let alone several? As TOT notes, reliability. That aside, Don actually had a few decent works - his short stories are perfectly reasonable if not outstanding, while Breathe Deeply is a perfectly cromulent Werewolf novel in its own merits - and was a contractor during the 93-96 period, when White Wolf was doing a big chunk of its novel publishing through Harper-Collins rather than exercising direct publishing and editorial control (not that that necessarily helped - the notoriously terrible Masquerade of the Red Death trilogy and As One Dead were both direct White Wolf publications). It was his first full length novel for White Wolf and a direct WW publication (but for the RAGE line, which had somewhat looser quality controls as did the VTES novels) and was a reasonable read, which got him credit, and the poo poo-house books Such Pain, Pomegranates Full and Fine, and As One Dead came after that. The very worst of his stuff - the rest is mostly forgettable but can't dig him out of the As One Dead hole - was a partnership with Nancy Kilpatrick (one of several Anne Rice knockoffs), which is where we got Bianka the Half Toreador Half Brujah Awesomest Vampire Ever, and she probably had a pretty big influence on that particular direction given Don's other works avoid quite that level of Anne Riceian Mary Sue (a term generally useless, but actually helpful when analyzing Bianka) tone. It wound up being his second last piece of work for White Wolf (and Kilpatrick's only) - everything after that is reprints and a short story that was probably already commissioned for the Dark Tyrants anthology of V:tDA stories. So it looks like they did drop him, though obviously we can't know if they dropped him or he quit or whatever.
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Jun 21, 2020 12:01
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Ferrinus posted:First off, while your powers cost 0-1 blood rather than 1 blood, you also have a pool of 5 blood rather than 10, so you don't really get to use more powers on average. I think the fact that you don't know whether you're going to lose blood or not until after committing is actually disempowering in itself because it makes it harder to plan ahead and causes you to see each use of your powers as more risky. Note that this isn't strictly a bad thing, and I don't think the instinct to tamp down on and complicate vampire power is necessarily misguided. However, it's definitely an ideological point of unity between VtM 5E and VtR 1E. Which does sort of hilariously undercut the claims that V5 has no 'resource management.' It's just a different color and more random. That Old Tree posted:Being able to meet deadlines can be the only priority people have in this industry sometimes, especially if you're trying to shovel five books out the door every two months. Plus if you're really prolific you can have a ton of content in the pipeline before anyone really sees it. On some level I think WW wanted novels because if you're an RPG company putting out novels then you're just like TSR and didn't actually pay attention to novels other than as you say them hitting their deadlines.
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Jun 21, 2020 12:02
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Nessus posted:Yeah? Are they basically the same concept as the VTM ones? I remember Potence was one of those Disciplines that looked boring until you thought through what an automatic success on a strength check looked like. Celerity (Celerity) dots apply directly as a free bonus Defense rating that can be used against Firearms attacks. You spend blood to multiply your running Speed or to jump ahead of people in the initiative order (even after they declared what they're going to do that you're going to pre-empt). Resilience (Fortitude) dots apply as bonus Stamina (and thus bonus Health) and downgrade points of aggravated damage to lethal for free. You spend blood to use your Resilience dots to ignore incoming points of damage. Vigor (Potence) dots apply as bonus Strength (which is part of the melee to-attack roll in nWoD) and multiply your jumping distance for free. You spend blood to apply Vigor as an additional weapon damage bonus (which upgrades unarmed attacks to lethal) and to use anything you can deadlift as a wielded or throwing weapon.
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Jun 21, 2020 13:56
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Note that this means Vigor is crazy good at damage increase, since increased accuracy is also increased damage.
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Jun 21, 2020 14:10
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Loomer posted:Don - who didn't do Mokole or TCOG but did BD - was probably the worst of the stable of repeatedly contracted authors. By, like, a mile. He's responsible for As One Dead, starring The Brujah Who Is Also A Toreador Who Needs To Breathe And Everyone Wants To gently caress And Has A Raven And Totally Reincarnates As It And Belongs To The Inconnu And Is The Best Vampire Ever. Who was responsible for the vampire who superman flew across the ocean?
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Jun 21, 2020 14:35
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Kurieg posted:Who was responsible for the vampire who superman flew across the ocean? That was Brian Herbert. Moral of the story for anything Brian Herbert writes is don't loving hire Brian Herbert. He only got one gig with White Wolf, though - it was a co-author situation so it's hard to say if it was him or Marie Landis who was responsible for just how poo poo that novel was, but neither worked for White Wolf again.
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Jun 21, 2020 15:38
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Obligatum VII posted:How does someone like that not get dropped like a rock after the first incident, let alone several? Be great, be easy to work with, hit your deadlines: pick two. It's not a restriction on a given author's abilities, more that you can be incredibly bad at writing but if you're pleasant and hit the deadlines the publishers will let a loooot slide, and a really great author who's a jackass who blows past deadlines regularly will generally be regarded as not worth it.
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Jun 21, 2020 15:54
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Dawgstar posted:Which does sort of hilariously undercut the claims that V5 has no 'resource management.' It's just a different color and more random. And, like... resource management is good. In fact I would go so far as to say that its unique systems for resource management have been the single strongest and most distinctive element of the Vampire game series as a whole. Why would someone pretend otherwise?
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Jun 21, 2020 19:14
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Resource Management is good. Resource Management that you have no actual control over and can take away narrative agency if you're simply unlucky is bad.
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Jun 21, 2020 19:16
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Kurieg posted:Resource Management is good. I mean, we are playing a game with dice. A power that costs 1 Vitae instead of 1d2-1 Vitae but still has to pass a roll (and/or overcome a roll of the target's) to work is still something that's ultimately out of your control and might end up costing you the resource of Vitae and the resource of your main action in a conflict turn, and while that sucks and feels bad, I'm not prepared to call random outcomes - even random outcomes which have a possibility of "you hosed up and nothing happens" - inherently bad. That said, I don't really think the extra layer of unpredictability added by random blood costs in a game that already has an action economy and random action outcomes is a good thing. I think it might be better if spending blood were deterministic but when you spend blood you might risk some sort of bestial failure/messy critical-esque result, which could be as easy as "mark down your Hunger increase before making any rolls, and make sure to include your new Hunger total in any rolls you make for the power you're using".
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Jun 21, 2020 19:21
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Kurieg posted:Resource Management that you have no actual control over and can take away narrative agency if you're simply unlucky is bad. In a broad sense you do have a minor amount of control over it. Increase your blood potency and you can reroll Discipline rouse checks And yes, the purpose of the mechanic is to take away your narrative agency. There's a beast inside of you who's trying to control you and take away your agency. The idea that determinism and narrative control are ideal and "randomness" and inability to be powerful in a predictable way is bad isn't at all expressed in V5. I haven't seen any of the developers talk about it expressly but it was clearly a conscious choice. Not only can you fail the thing you're trying to do, but if you try to do powerful things the clock might tick closer to midnight and the Beast can come out, and there's not a hell of a lot you can do to stop it. That's like, Vampire.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:29
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Kurieg posted:Who was responsible for the vampire who superman flew across the ocean?
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Jun 21, 2020 22:34
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GNU Order posted:In a broad sense you do have a minor amount of control over it. Increase your blood potency and you can reroll Discipline rouse checks I'm not getting what you and Ferrinus are talking about? Is it that you can spend the blood, roll the discipline and hit your successes, but hunger still makes the discipline fail to go off? Or is it just frenzy? Frenzy I'm cool with, because like you said, the Beast is a constant presence. A successful power use not actually happening does not sound fun and it's why I took the alternate paradox rules from earlier in this thread for my mage game. If players roll their successes, their spell works as cast, the paradox they fail to contain then affects the environment in ways that enhance the drama of the scene instead of taking away their agency. Basically, what are the rules for discipline use in V5? Nessus posted:Anne Rice put that evil on us. Lestat is basically Superman Was Vampire Lestat published before Lost Boys? I know Interview was, but they didn't fly in that, I don't think. Lost Boys was the first thing I remember vampires flying around (not as bats) in.
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Jun 22, 2020 16:11
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Soonmot posted:I'm not getting what you and Ferrinus are talking about? Is it that you can spend the blood, roll the discipline and hit your successes, but hunger still makes the discipline fail to go off? Or is it just frenzy? Frenzy I'm cool with, because like you said, the Beast is a constant presence. A successful power use not actually happening does not sound fun and it's why I took the alternate paradox rules from earlier in this thread for my mage game. If players roll their successes, their spell works as cast, the paradox they fail to contain then affects the environment in ways that enhance the drama of the scene instead of taking away their agency. You use Disciplines whenever you want. If needed, you make the roll and whatever happens happens. In addition, some disciplines cost you a Rouse check, which takes place after you use the Discipline, and which, depending on your Blood Potency and the level of Discipline you're using, you may reroll once. (For instance, players at Blood Potency 1 may reroll Rouse checks happening as a result of using a level 1 Discipline)
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Jun 22, 2020 17:13
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If you fail a rouse check you gain a level of hunger. Which turns one of your dice for all rolls into a hunger dice. IF you ever get a failure with a hunger dice at a 1, you get a bestial failure and something bad happens. If you get a crit and your hunger dice is a 10, it's a messy crit and You succeed far far far too much.
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Jun 22, 2020 17:19
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Notably, if you're at Hunger 5, you can't make voluntary rouse checks (which you need to heal yourself, use disciplines, and so on). You are in effect out of blood.
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Jun 22, 2020 17:28
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Also the only way to get to hunger 0 is to drain someone to death.
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Jun 22, 2020 17:35
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Kurieg posted:If you fail a rouse check you gain a level of hunger. Which turns one of your dice for all rolls into a hunger dice. IF you ever get a failure with a hunger dice at a 1, you get a bestial failure and something bad happens. If you get a crit and your hunger dice is a 10, it's a messy crit and You succeed far far far too much. Messy crits are so weird.
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Jun 22, 2020 17:49
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Dawgstar posted:Messy crits are so weird. Some of them can be hard to figure out in play. The other day I had a messy Sense the Beast crit. What? I played it as getting in the face of the one I detected, almost causing a Masquerade issue. Instead of "oh theres a fellow vampire lets have a friendly chat like gentlemen" it turned right into a shitshow. Basically messy crits are "your Beast was helping!" except it sucks at helping.
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Jun 22, 2020 17:57
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