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Jan 20, 2021 15:44
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Halfway through book 10 of the clan novels (Giovanni) and I'm enjoying them a fair bit, despite some very 90's/early 00's bits. Slurs etc. And one extremely bad bit about a vampire who can only feed from rape survivors, and when his entourage of rape survivors gets killed he forces some guy to rape a hotel employee so he can keep her as a blood bag 
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Jan 20, 2021 15:55
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Biplane posted:Halfway through book 10 of the clan novels (Giovanni) and I'm enjoying them a fair bit, despite some very 90's/early 00's bits. Slurs etc. And one extremely bad bit about a vampire who can only feed from rape survivors, and when his entourage of rape survivors gets killed he forces some guy to rape a hotel employee so he can keep her as a blood bag 
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Jan 20, 2021 15:57
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Biplane posted:Halfway through book 10 of the clan novels (Giovanni) and I'm enjoying them a fair bit, despite some very 90's/early 00's bits. Slurs etc. And one extremely bad bit about a vampire who can only feed from rape survivors, and when his entourage of rape survivors gets killed he forces some guy to rape a hotel employee so he can keep her as a blood bag That's.....hoooboy that's some edgelord content right there.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:10
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Biplane posted:Halfway through book 10 of the clan novels (Giovanni) and I'm enjoying them a fair bit, despite some very 90's/early 00's bits. Slurs etc. And one extremely bad bit about a vampire who can only feed from rape survivors, and when his entourage of rape survivors gets killed he forces some guy to rape a hotel employee so he can keep her as a blood bag ...this makes me very mad. Very very mad.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:43
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Nessus posted:I used to think Alexis Kennedy was an answer here but then he went and arguably became worse than Lovecraft himself Basically same. And by basically same, I mean I wrote more words on Kennedy's Cultist Simulator in one year than I did for grad school that year, and worked out a lot of thoughts about Modernism as a literary movement and intellectual moment. Then the whole thing where AK was a controlling rear end in a top hat who dated his employees came out and I bailed hard. Obligatory links to the essays in question: High Modern, Holy Mansus Eliot at the Ecdysis The second one I finished about 48 hours before things came out about AK.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:53
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Biplane posted:Halfway through book 10 of the clan novels (Giovanni) and I'm enjoying them a fair bit, despite some very 90's/early 00's bits. Slurs etc. And one extremely bad bit about a vampire who can only feed from rape survivors, and when his entourage of rape survivors gets killed he forces some guy to rape a hotel employee so he can keep her as a blood bag WoD, WoD never changes.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:55
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Biplane posted:Halfway through book 10 of the clan novels (Giovanni) and I'm enjoying them a fair bit, despite some very 90's/early 00's bits. Slurs etc. And one extremely bad bit about a vampire who can only feed from rape survivors, and when his entourage of rape survivors gets killed he forces some guy to rape a hotel employee so he can keep her as a blood bag Good ol' Jan Pieterzoon. I'm not sure where else that gets mentioned and obviously hopefully nowhere else because good lord.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:59
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Jan 20, 2021 21:12
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No matter how powerful they get there's always at least one mage just rocking a leather jacket, which is pretty cool.
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Jan 20, 2021 21:28
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I'm interested in the new Scion books but I don't have the others.
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Jan 21, 2021 02:36
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Dawgstar posted:Good ol' Jan Pieterzoon. I'm not sure where else that gets mentioned and obviously hopefully nowhere else because good lord. I don't remember it being brought up anywhere else, aside from a passing mention somewhere about his "unfortunate dietary restrictions". Might've been in Beckett's Jyhad Diary.
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Jan 21, 2021 04:15
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Dawgstar posted:Good ol' Jan Pieterzoon. I'm not sure where else that gets mentioned and obviously hopefully nowhere else because good lord. Holy hell how did I miss that bit about him. I'm glad he got iced in V5
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Jan 21, 2021 06:51
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DantetheK9 posted:I don't remember it being brought up anywhere else, aside from a passing mention somewhere about his "unfortunate dietary restrictions". Might've been in Beckett's Jyhad Diary. Yeah, it's not in the Ventrue Revised book where he's got stats. He's got Humanity 6 which feels super high for his... requirement. Unrelated, the gist of Scion Dragon is playing third party to Gods and Titans and that's pretty cool, with inspiration from Leverage and Burn Notice and I'm down. I haven't backed Mythos yet so what's our hook there?
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Jan 21, 2021 15:46
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Dawgstar posted:Yeah, it's not in the Ventrue Revised book where he's got stats. He's got Humanity 6 which feels super high for his... requirement. Forces some guy to rape a hotel employee so he can keep her as a blood bag makes Humanity 6 seem a bit off, but it's one of those kind of horrible things about real life that it wouldn't really be all that difficult to find someone that qualifies.
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Jan 21, 2021 18:33
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Dawgstar posted:Yeah, it's not in the Ventrue Revised book where he's got stats. He's got Humanity 6 which feels super high for his... requirement. Mythos just looks like a new pantheon and monster lists, but nothing seemingly more than that. I backed both, but way more excited about Dragons.
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Jan 21, 2021 18:50
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LatwPIAT posted:Forces some guy to rape a hotel employee so he can keep her as a blood bag makes Humanity 6 seem a bit off, but it's one of those kind of horrible things about real life that it wouldn't really be all that difficult to find someone that qualifies. "Pay someone else to take the morality hit so I don't have to" Is definitely something I could see a player character do.
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Jan 21, 2021 19:13
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Kurieg posted:"Pay someone else to take the morality hit so I don't have to" Is definitely something I could see a player character do. Oh certainly. I'm pretty sure that ordering someone to commit a vile and despicable act is itself a rather vile and despicable act still, but I guess the distancing would help keep their Humanity up for a little bit.
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Jan 21, 2021 19:33
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Maybe he's just really good at rolling high on Humanity rolls.
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Jan 21, 2021 19:47
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And this discussion is exactly why it is a bad idea to write that.
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Jan 21, 2021 20:05
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LatwPIAT posted:Oh certainly. I'm pretty sure that ordering someone to commit a vile and despicable act is itself a rather vile and despicable act still, but I guess the distancing would help keep their Humanity up for a little bit. On the other hand, you're creating two victims instead of one. It should be extremely dehumanizing, doubly so for a vampire.
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Jan 21, 2021 22:43
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It's a terrible idea, but the book does, as memory serve, present it as genuinely disturbing Pieterzoon himself. Of course, it focuses on his feelings rather than the goddamn horror show he's just created and positions him as a victim, but arguably it's a humanity drop in the actual text. Logistically, the restriction would actually be fairly easy to satisfy, and in the right hands - which, to be honest, are probably never going to be near Vampire ever - could even be part of a story about overcoming acts of sexual violence despite their long term harm by emphasizing the vampirism as sexual violence and sexual contagion motif to position the Ventrue who can only feed thus as precisely that: the victim of a bodily invasion that has left them struggling with a condition that renders them Other in their society, and who can relate only to those with similar trauma (and as a Ventrue, with dominate, you could even explore the issue of repressing vs reconciling traumatic experiences, and so on) at the risk of inflicting further injuries to them (or, potentially, helping them - it's a case where the Ventrue in question has an incredibly good reason to set up and fund counselling services, and where continuing injury and unaddressed trauma is both unnecessary and actively unhelpful.) None of this is good tabletop gaming material, mind - it'd need to be a novel, and it'd need to be incredibly carefully handled.
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Jan 22, 2021 10:38
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Loomer posted:It's a terrible idea, but the book does, as memory serve, present it as genuinely disturbing Pieterzoon himself. Of course, it focuses on his feelings rather than the goddamn horror show he's just created and positions him as a victim, but arguably it's a humanity drop in the actual text. Logistically, the restriction would actually be fairly easy to satisfy, and in the right hands - which, to be honest, are probably never going to be near Vampire ever - could even be part of a story about overcoming acts of sexual violence despite their long term harm by emphasizing the vampirism as sexual violence and sexual contagion motif to position the Ventrue who can only feed thus as precisely that: the victim of a bodily invasion that has left them struggling with a condition that renders them Other in their society, and who can relate only to those with similar trauma (and as a Ventrue, with dominate, you could even explore the issue of repressing vs reconciling traumatic experiences, and so on) at the risk of inflicting further injuries to them (or, potentially, helping them - it's a case where the Ventrue in question has an incredibly good reason to set up and fund counselling services, and where continuing injury and unaddressed trauma is both unnecessary and actively unhelpful.) None of this is good tabletop gaming material, mind - it'd need to be a novel, and it'd need to be incredibly carefully handled. The only industry writers who I think could come close to tackling it probably wouldn't want to and I couldn't blame them.
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Jan 22, 2021 16:24
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I appreciate that the Mask of the Mythos' pantheon choices aren't just the obvious ones and they're making me go "who the gently caress is Albtraum"
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Jan 23, 2021 05:59
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Blockhouse posted:I appreciate that the Mask of the Mythos' pantheon choices aren't just the obvious ones and they're making me go "who the gently caress is Albtraum" - Not sure if it's an editing thing (like "the Hibernate purview should really be Dreams") or a conscious, reviewed choice that some folks like Nodens are "yeah we uhhh just made up half their Purviews fresh for this book, exclusively for this god but not anyone else in the pantheon" - Same with some new Callings being very, very niche (and also, seeming like they could probably just be replaced with the Titanic Callings, but that'll wait until after we see the rules for these) - Hastur's just as public domain as the name The King in Yellow! Use that! It's fine! Otherwise it's Neat so far.
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Jan 23, 2021 06:10
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Are they using Big Daddy C? I backed but I have no idea how to access any of this preview content because I am carrying a major metropolitan university upon my powerful herbivore shoulders, and also, I don't know how to read. It would make sense to avoid using Hastur for the sake of "lol HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR" jokes -- that one's pretty niche but, you know, no need to facilitate it.
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Jan 23, 2021 06:21
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Nessus posted:Are they using Big Daddy C? I backed but I have no idea how to access any of this preview content because I am carrying a major metropolitan university upon my powerful herbivore shoulders, and also, I don't know how to read. If it works like previous Kickstarters, then you should be able to click the Updates tab on the Kickstarter page and see updates titled "Backers Only - Manuscript Preview #1" or whatever, which will contain PDF links to the raw text of the book's various chapters. There's usually some other updates mixed in that cover shorter excerpts from later parts of the book early.
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Jan 23, 2021 06:30
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Cthulhu's there, they really zeroed in on the sleep/dream theming and associating dreaming with drowning
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Jan 23, 2021 07:05
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Nessus posted:It would make sense to avoid using Hastur for the sake of "lol HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR" jokes -- that one's pretty niche but, you know, no need to facilitate it. They do use him, but only by titles like the King in Yellow. It would be hard to live up to Delta Green's portrayal anyway.
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Jan 23, 2021 16:00
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The Green Flame's Scions being the Pantheon's quirky trickster weirdos is an odd choice but I'm down with it, I guess?
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Jan 23, 2021 17:40
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Aberrant is cool but the Quantum Powers cost and construction is a little byzantine with the Power Tag system. I think that I like it, and will figure it out, but so far it's the only part I've not loved. Lots of mechanics with Scale and stuff but I assume that will become easier with time. I know some of the people who've been writing for other parts of the Trinity Continuum and so far am pretty pleased. Apologies if this isn't the place for Trinity Continuum discussion.
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Jan 24, 2021 00:42
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Aberrant is cool but the Quantum Powers cost and construction is a little byzantine with the Power Tag system. I think that I like it, and will figure it out, but so far it's the only part I've not loved. This is pretty much the thread for all the systems and settings that come from the White Wolf lineage, so it's the exact place to talk about it.
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Jan 24, 2021 01:08
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Yawgmoth posted:Very excited to be gearing up to fight a 6th gen Tremere that has Auspex 7 and Celerity 7 according to my sources, as well as some amount of thaum and a deep love for archery. She's been doing some kind of horrible magical experiments involving jamming boiling oil/tar into water spirits and we're hoping to get her to explain herself before we beat the piss out of her and then eat her. She gave us an offer before we threw down: She'd ally with us and tell us all of the defenses of Ceoris (the Tremere stronghold), including all of the wards, population, and how to get in... but in return we'd have to betray our recently awakened buddy who we have (so far) ascertained is some hybrid of third generation vampire and mummy. Being that I'm a Tzimisce, the idea of allying with a Tremere is a pretty big "gently caress no" on principle, even before considering the guy she wants us to destroy is currently a guest of mine. Now I'm wondering what kind of ~*secret info*~ she could have told us, but I'm pretty sure we made the right decision on eating her anyways.
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Jan 24, 2021 03:57
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citybeatnik posted:Quick question re Roads in DA20. Follow up question to this now that I've done some looking on my own: why the gently caress does Path of the Devil, the odd duck out of the Road of Sin by using Self-Control per the book instead of Instinct, still have "failing to Ride the Wave of Frenzy" as a rank 8 transgression when it is not mechanically possible?
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Jan 24, 2021 04:25
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One day, when I have regressed to whatever state I was in pre-2020, I will play Deviant, now that it's out.
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Jan 24, 2021 07:37
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When I skimmed the original Deviant kickstarter draft, the Variation/Scar stuff mostly felt like a clunky imitation of a Champions/Mutants & Masterminds point buy superhero system. Is it about the same in the newest version?
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Jan 24, 2021 09:09
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I'd be happy to get a plain language :effortpost: on how the mechanics work - these days I can't muster the attention span to read and comprehend a new rulebook
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Jan 24, 2021 20:29
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Basic Chunnel posted:I'd be happy to get a plain language :effortpost: on how the mechanics work - these days I can't muster the attention span to read and comprehend a new rulebook The "gaining more Scars in play" part is going to gently caress this allllll up so for purposes of this discussion we will just file that away under "pray for a swift death or talk to your ST." But, in general, the power level of the game is based on Variation Magnitude. Pretend this is called "Dots' Worth of Powers." The total number of points anyone will start with is actually VM + 1, because your Origin gives you a free level of magnitude (power dot) based on whether you're born with it, signed up for it, fell into some nuclear waste while doing janitorial services, etc. So like, let's say we're starting a game, keeping it low level, Variation Magnitude of 2. Origin here is Genotypal, which is the "born with it" origin, and will give us a free level of magnitude for a Subtle Variation. I choose...Camouflage, using 1 VM for that, and 1 for the free point I got (since it's Subtle), so it's Camouflage 2. I choose "Mobile" which keeps it going while I'm moving. For the other 1 point I have, let's give me an offensive power! I choose Lash, which is the default "this is every attack power" customizable thing. I make it Gentle (a free choice), Soporific (you get 1 point to allocate for putting 1 into Lash, it scales up as you go so a 5-dot Lash has a lot going on and is also brutally powerful), and uses Firearms for my attack rolls. I end up with something that doesn't hurt people, but it's easier to hit with, and when it does, it puts them into a narcotic haze, and is aimed like a weapon. Maybe I'm snatching some of the breath out of their mouths, at a distance. Now, I need to "entangle" "Scars" or...spend Flaw Dots. For Camouflage, I want it to be always-on. This guy can't make people notice him without shouting in their faces and making a big fuckin deal out of it. So I take the Scar 'Relentless Variation' ( = 'always on'), and since I got 1 point free, I only need to make it a level 1 Scar even though it's attached to a level 2 Variation. I can also choose whether it can be turned off with Concentration. I do so when building this power. For Lash, I want it that constantly switching off people's brains has made our Invisible Man feel a little hollow inside. So I entangle it with the Scar 'Frozen Heart' which at 1 rank is purely roleplaying penalties (free real estate, baby, and opportunities for free Beats). For now, it's still 1 dot, since the Variation is 1 dot. What if we start at a higher power level? Well, that's where we start to get into some complicated things, and people's lives start to be noticeably horrible for being Deviants, instead of just being 'mostly pretty bad.' So let's remake our Hollow Man at VM 10. Camouflage, let's bump up to 3 (+1 from our Origin), for 4. This lets us make it Multi-Sensory---he's invisible, inaudible, has no scent, and anything happening near him is too---smash a window with a baseball bat, who cares, it's silent now because you are in your own personal hell! Lash, well let's just make that a 2-dot power, and change things around so now it does Bashing damage, but has a base damage rating (like a weapon), called 'Deadly.' Now if we hit with it, it's going to give someone a wicked migraine. But wait! We also add a 1-point, not-part-of-the-cost-scaling 'Deviation' to it, called Scrambling. This applies the Insensate Tilt to anyone we hit, so while they're taking a solid sock of damage, they're also numb to the whole world. Cool, great. We've already made a human nightmare. But we've still got a couple points left, so what the hey. We give him Sacred Flesh 1 --- this lets him give someone a power, without a Scar attached to it, for a scene. Let's pick Camouflage. He can share some of the wealth! We give him Carapace, 2 dots, giving him armor like a flak jacket. Reality itself does not want to engage with him as much now. We give him Hyper-Competence (Stealth) 1 - This gives you a floating perma-specialty in basically anything you do with this skill, in essence a free +1 to all Stealth rolls. It also gives you exceptional success on 3 success instead of 5. Getting real hard to find this guy if he doesn't wanna be found. Finally, we give him Anomalous Biology 1 - Breathless. Now he doesn't even breathe. And for Scars, we start to get weird with it. Camouflage, we just make it even more Relentless. Good news is, the book explicitly says Camouflage at 3+ is one of those things that sucks enough to have that it should be cheaper in terms of Scars! Great! We're still a ghost in the world! For Lash, and Carapace, we do something interesting----we pick a higher-level Scar, and assign it to both of them. In this case, you can take Lash 2, and Carapace 2, and entangle them with Frozen Heart 3. Now it sucks too! FH 3 means we get a -3 to any untrained social skill instead of -1, our MAX ratings in Empathy, Expression, and Persuasion are reduced by half this Scar's Magnitude, rounded up (so those skills are capped at 3 for us). On top of that, we start out as Stoic each chapter---this makes us a better liar, at the cost of not being able to spend Willpower on things that would be in line with our actual emotional state (so no lining up a REAL strong Lash on someone if you get mad at them). Stoic is cleared by failing rolls like Empathy, so until we are reminded of how shut off we are, we're just going to be a cipher with stunted WP access. For Hyper-Competence and Anomalous Biology, we do that same 2-for-1 deal, but this time with Dependency. This means we start to suffer deprivation symptoms every chapter if we haven't gotten our fix since the start of the previous chapter, and we choose the symptom, Ill, which means we don't heal naturally while jonesing, and take Bashing damage each day until we get our fix again. Finally, for Sacred Flesh, we give it Involuntary Stimulus. You bump into him, he's a little contagious. Oops! We started out as a guy that's hard to notice unless he's standing right in front of you trying real hard, who can make people light-headed with a little focus. We are now playing a ghost in the world, whose social interactions are severely hobbled by his inability to hold a human connection even when he can get people to notice he exists, and whose primary mechanisms for interacting with people are either grabbing onto them and dragging them a fraction of the way into the unobserved hell he lives in, or tearing out their ability to perceive and engage with the rest of the world by making them essentially comatose. For added fun, there are optional "Forms" you can attach, like "does this come from a symbiote," "did you make yourself like this," or the one most relevant to our Hollow Man, "Transmissible," which is my personal favorite for a Deviant campaign where every character is potentially an accidentally apocalyptic threat on a long enough timetable. All for engaging with +Variations, - Scars, = someone having a real bad day.
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Jan 24, 2021 21:14
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As the person who invented it, the only difference from your usual Benefit + Drawback system is that your Drawbacks are linked to *specific* Benefits. Deviant's gameplay loop is pitched toward your Drawbacks slowly but surely getting worse over a Chronicle, and the Benefits they're linked to increasing in power as they do.
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Jan 24, 2021 21:33
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Deviant and Mage sit on opposite ends of the spectrum of complexity focus. That is to say, not how complex they are, but where and in what ways. Deviant has some of the most involved character generation in the Chronicles of Darkness, poring over options and different ways of implementing ideas; the comparison to point-buy superhero systems is apt. Once your character sheet is set, though, an individual deviant just has a few tricks. They may be really powerful, in direct proportion to how crippling and awful the downsides of their Divergence are, but the deviant's capabilities are straightforward. A mage, meanwhile, sets down a few Arcana dots and picks out a couple favored praxes, but once chargen is done and they enter play, those few dots translate to a million different possibilities of use to consider in every situation.
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Jan 25, 2021 00:47
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