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Digital Osmosis posted:Did, idk, Gygax once print an essay yelling at someone who wanted him to write rules for playing a half-dragon, or something like that? The rationale I've heard from Mike Mornard is that they were fine with PC balrogs, because you're going to start as a level 1 balrog and a level 1 anything isn't very dangerous. Their group had a few PC undead, which required you to start as a Skeleton at level 1, and work your way up through zombie, wight, wraith, and so on before you could play a vampire. Hell, the cleric was invented to deal with overpowered PC vampires.
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Jun 29, 2021 14:31
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Digital Osmosis posted:This was such a weird idea. Seems relatively prevalent at the time too, not just in WoD but in other pen and paper RPG design. Anyone happen to know where it comes from? I feel like it was institutionalized enough that it was almost part of a coherent ideology of game design and was more than a gently caress you to anyone who wanted to play a "super special totally the best" type character... not that PCs serving as blatant wish-fulfillment is even an actual problem of course, unless it disrupts the game. Did, idk, Gygax once print an essay yelling at someone who wanted him to write rules for playing a half-dragon, or something like that? The problem, of course, is that if your player base treats your game as being about special snowflake Mary Sues with gothic superpowers, then that's actually what your game is actually about, regardless of how often you tell them that the things they want to do with your game are wrong. Froghammer fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 14:54
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Froghammer posted:The problem, of course, is that if your player base treats your game as being about special snowflake Mary Sues with gothic superpowers, then that's actually what your game is actually about, regardless of how often you tell them that the things they want to do with your game are wrong. I mean, as a writer you're well within your rights to simply keep writing what you want to write. Players have control over their tables but they don't have control over what you publish, so if you really don't want to publish playable rules for x y or z thing, you can just simply not, and if players are really that determined they can create homebrew rules. "Intended play" is a fuzzy and interesting concept even when talking about like, fairly constrained video games (frankly I'd accept that turning the gamma up higher than the pre-game calibration tells you is breaking 'intended play,' though I'm going to keep doing it), and with a TTRPG where what you're selling is not a story but a set of tools it becomes much looser. I would say it's safe to say that *OD writing is frequently, almost constantly, not received in the overtly intended light. Pretty much every single Vampire game I've ever played in or heard trip reports from was a comedy, not a horror, but even given that knowledge their attempts to make "OK we'll make rules for stuff we don't want people to play but we'll make them unappealing" has backfired so comically every time that I'm starting to wonder if they actually do know what they're doing and "no we're trying to make a serious horror game" stuff is all setup to the inevitable punchlines.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:42
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I think the only problem there is that "vampire game descends into a comedy of errors" is kind of like call of cthulhu games doing the same thing, where if the developers are too in-on-the-joke, it stops being a funny surprise and turns into the intended play pattern. Also right now if you made "Vampire: The edition where they're all comical fuckup idiot dipshit morons, explicitly," people would probably say it's inspired by What We Do In The Shadows? (which you know what, you could do worse than, but still).
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Jun 29, 2021 15:45
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citybeatnik posted:You can pry my Ratkin book out of my cold dead hands. Was thinking about how good this book is. It's just because they went totally loving wild, right? Like, I feel like usually having someone edit and say no and shoot down ideas is a good thing but Ratkin really benefited from not holding back. Froghammer posted:The problem, of course, is that if your player base treats your game as being about special snowflake Mary Sues with gothic superpowers, then that's actually what your game is actually about, regardless of how often you tell them that the things they want to do with your game are wrong. Yeah, that's what I meant. If everyone wants to be a snowflake then uh, they're gonna. I was thinking the other day of how much I liked how super powers are handled in the PbTA game Masks, which is a teen superhero game. The playbooks (classes) are basically about where your main source of drama is instead of what kind of stuff you do, and each has some suggested powers. There's a bit about power selection and the author basically says "Look, the suggested powers work well with the theme of the playbook. Go ahead and use whatever for whatever, but if you pick the "big strong protector whose drama comes from their fierce loyalty to their friends" playbook and a power like "climb walls" or the "outclassed kid with a chip on their shoulder from trying to prove they belong with the other superheroes" playbook and a powers like "invulnerability, cosmic blasts" things might conflict." So like if people are clambering for Abomination rules but you, the dev, think allowing PC Abominations breaks the intended tone of the game: either write the rules but make sure the ST knows the tone issue, so they know what they'll be in for if they allow it; or explain the tone issues and politely decline to write rules, with the caveat that if a ST wants to make up some rules because that's the kind of game they're running go for it. Don't write rules that penalize the player for having badwrongfun, or write rules that are punitive in the hopes of avoiding badwrongfun. That's just being a rear end in a top hat.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:50
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And the problem there is that if you want to play WWDitS, you're better off with a rules-lite indie game that's actually designed for comedy improv. Hell, somebody made that game, it's called Low Stakes.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:50
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Halloween Jack posted:it's called Low Stakes.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:52
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To be fair they did give several actually playable versions of Abominations over the years. Because of course they are a thing that exists in both Vampire *and* Werewolf, so dealers choice on the best version of whichever you want to use. Last set was just a few years back for the V20 Black Hand book and W20 Changing Breeds even. It's not super in depth on the wolf side of the equation in Black Hand [Being a Vampire product], but it has stepping sideways and the various forms, and it's totally playable without being broken. And really in a game where the loving Tzimisce exist they aren't even that monstrous, so who cares? Someone wants to play one let them. The werewolf side plays up the spiritual nature more, the key feature of which is your power is based around your Gnosis. You use it like Humanity, and you can can't regain it naturally. When it's gone, there goes your wolf powers, and also you are probably completely feral and batshit insane from losing the defining characteristic of your life up to date. And that's it. Even going super in depth on what the strict mechanics is only about two paragraphs. And it doesn't break anything, it's not super complicated, the world does not end for them existing. Just let people do the thing they want to do and move on.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:58
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Froghammer posted:In theory, I think it comes from game designers wanting to maintain tone. The ur-example is Abominations: oWoD Werewolves that had been Embraced who were extremely powerful but frequently driven insane by conflicting desires and obligations. Players were screaming for rules for playable Abominations, but White Wolf's party line was "This is a game about horror, not about special snowflake Mary Sues with gothic superpowers. Abominations are only suitable as villains and NPCs". At least we can all be thankful that the 90's WW fans screaming about wanting to play snowflake monsters lead to the devs going "Fine! You want a magical Mary Sue, we'll give you a loving Mary Sue" and Samuel Haight was born. 
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Jun 29, 2021 15:59
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Tulip posted:I would say it's safe to say that *OD writing is frequently, almost constantly, not received in the overtly intended light. Pretty much every single Vampire game I've ever played in or heard trip reports from was a comedy, not a horror, but even given that knowledge their attempts to make "OK we'll make rules for stuff we don't want people to play but we'll make them unappealing" has backfired so comically every time that I'm starting to wonder if they actually do know what they're doing and "no we're trying to make a serious horror game" stuff is all setup to the inevitable punchlines. I still remember the nWoD 'Players' bloodline which specifically meta-dunks on this type of gamer in the write-up and mechanics. Brutal.
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Jun 29, 2021 16:05
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Digital Osmosis posted:So like if people are clambering for Abomination rules but you, the dev, think allowing PC Abominations breaks the intended tone of the game: either write the rules but make sure the ST knows the tone issue, so they know what they'll be in for if they allow it; or explain the tone issues and politely decline to write rules, with the caveat that if a ST wants to make up some rules because that's the kind of game they're running go for it. Don't write rules that penalize the player for having badwrongfun, or write rules that are punitive in the hopes of avoiding badwrongfun. That's just being a rear end in a top hat.
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Jun 29, 2021 16:07
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I think the only problem there is that "vampire game descends into a comedy of errors" is kind of like call of cthulhu games doing the same thing, where if the developers are too in-on-the-joke, it stops being a funny surprise and turns into the intended play pattern. Also right now if you made "Vampire: The edition where they're all comical fuckup idiot dipshit morons, explicitly," people would probably say it's inspired by What We Do In The Shadows? (which you know what, you could do worse than, but still). WWDITS is already just a vampire campaign with cameras rolling. Like there's no need to change anything about WOD if you want to play WWDITS, every VTM/VTR campaign I've seen or heard of converges on WWDITS. The trouble is that I don't think it would be nearly as funny for the players if they knew the designers were actively encouraging it. Half the fun of WOD is that you're not just making jokes, you're making jokes at the designer's expense. (if this sounds like contradicting what I said earlier - first I mean that the designers aren't being straightforward comedy guys but are deliberately playing straight man/13th clown/tsukkomi if you're a weeb, and second this seems extremely unlikely it's just a weird feeling sometimes when trying to figure out 'why the gently caress are these guys making rules they actively want to go unused')
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Jun 29, 2021 16:14
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I liked how in oWoD, the various main lines were interconnected, but not fundamentally. Like, if you're playing Vampire, yes, the garou are there, all the tribes, breeds, Gaia, blah blah blah, but they're faceless killers that are death for a neonate or even a coterie stepping foot outside the cities, and sometimes stepping foot into the wrong streets or alleys, but they're more like plot devices and macguffins, rather than 'oh by the way, there's this entire other spiritual war going on, blah blah blah.' OTOH, if you're playing WW, you're in a desperate battle to slow the advance of the Wyrm, and sure, there are leeches around, smell of the Wyrm, probably in knowing thrall, but who cares about their politics? Descendents of Caine? Whatever, rip and tear, glory and blood. But either way, you can take them or leave them as you see fit. I feel like nWoD/CoD has too many moving parts. It's one thing to say 'there are things in the darkness most people don't know about' and maybe there's a huge civilization of vampires, but there's also a few werewolves kicking around, and maybe there's a huge civilization of were-woofs, but there's still a few blood suckers kicking around, but I feel like it beggars belief to say 'yes, there's, lets see, absolutely vampires, werewolves, changlings, beasts, deviants, mages, promethians, mummies, hunters, and various minor bits, all fighting over basically the same land and resources, and nobody really notices.' Like, drat, is there even room for humans amoung all this?
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Jun 29, 2021 16:27
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TheCenturion posted:I liked how in oWoD, the various main lines were interconnected, but not fundamentally. Like, if you're playing Vampire, yes, the garou are there, all the tribes, breeds, Gaia, blah blah blah, but they're faceless killers that are death for a neonate or even a coterie stepping foot outside the cities, and sometimes stepping foot into the wrong streets or alleys, but they're more like plot devices and macguffins, rather than 'oh by the way, there's this entire other spiritual war going on, blah blah blah.' I'm lighting the candles to summon Loomer here to go into a little more depth about just how overpopulated the oWoD, at least, was with supernaturals, given Loomer's status as the keeper of true knowledge of that setting's demographics.
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Jun 29, 2021 16:31
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TheCenturion posted:Like, drat, is there even room for humans amoung all this? Canonically? No. The core pitch for the nWoD is that literally everyone has had an encounter with the supernatural at one point or another and that there isn't really a Masquerade so much as a tacit agreement not to think or talk too much about things that go bump in the night, because it's too horrifying to contemplate and marks you out as a target. The other thing is that there are only double-digit numbers of Prometheans in the entire world, Sin-Eaters were so rare up until recent decades that they didn't really have cultural continuity since they used to only be (re)born during periods of mass death and cultural trauma, Demons are staggeringly paranoid and half their powers revolve around concealing their existence to the point of, like, "can retroactively declare they were never there", and so on. The three major splats all either have mechanics that automatically confuse or render amnesiac people who witness them, mind control / memory alteration powers, or in the case of Mages, both. And, finally, all the splats are outnumbered by various types of uncategorized Horrors. The splats aren't even really perfect or permanent categories, themselves; a "vampire" isn't someone who's inherited the curse of Cain like in the oWoD, it's more like a supernatural version of carcinization -- "one of the World of Darkness's many attempts at evolving a vampire." For mechanical reasons they're grouped together into the same game line but it's more like arbitrarily marking out a portion of the bottomless variety of Spooky poo poo based on shared characteristics or origins than an inherent truth. (Much like real life taxonomies, come to that.) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 16:33
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also -- because there are a LOT of answers to this question and it's a favorite subject of mine -- the status quo in the ChroD isn't an innately stable one. it's something that forcibly kept in place by multiple god-like powers whose interests mostly align (except when they don't, and Strix start nesting in God-Machine Infrastructure and turning it into a miniature version of their home dimension because that's a thing they can do for some reason) which means that as you look to the future there's a lot of room for humanity to either claw it's way back on top (in fact, depending on exactly how you feel about the Exarchs, you could argue they already have and it just didn't help lol) or end up with the G-M or the Exarchs or the Underworld solidifying their power, while in the past there's a pretty compelling secret history as to why humanity's place in the world is so fearful and oppressed, and yet, not openly hunted or enslaved or what have you Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 16:43
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Froghammer posted:IIRC this was the tone they tried to take with Abominations and Fera, but Werewolf by nature draws in furries like a moth to a flame, and circa late 90's / early 2000's that was a subculture absolutely bursting with people who just had to be special and different. White Wolf was hit more or less immediately with a deluge of "Okay Werewolves are cool but what about Werecats and Werebirds and I know you said these three Tribes were extinct but I want to play one so what about those and also oh poo poo there are apparently Werewolves who are also Vampires and are considered outcasts from both worlds and shunned by everyone what about those and also" Part of the issue is that if you have anthropomorphic animal people in a work, the furry fandom will find it and latch onto it. You can't stop it. The trick is to not acknowledge it. Sure, put out books for non-wolf shifters. It'll sell like hotcakes. But don't give them weird sex taboos. Don't make them supernaturally sexy. Don't make magic spells that require transgressive furry sex. And Don't, do not, explicitly call out the furry fandom in your work. Cause sure, that'll play to the furries, but they were gonna buy your work anyways, all you've done is make everyone else think your product is "The furry sex game". WTF2's sidebar of "Yes they can have sex, and kids. There's nothing weird about it. Why are you asking?" is very important for a reason.
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Jun 29, 2021 16:51
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I don't have anything against it, but I can just tell when a game is a furry game, with or without sexual content. For example, I've seen at least half a dozen sci-fi games where the characters look like Mass Effect models, but a smiling tiger head is copypasted where the helmet would be. It just strikes me as goofy. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 16:59
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Yeah, there's a difference between say, Werewolf: The Apocalypse which kind of stumbled backwards into being a furry thing due to the writers they hired, and, say, Hic Sunt Dracones which is a game that wears it's libertarian furry credentials on it's sleeve and is *full* Of weird sex stuff (and internalized misogyny, natch)
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Jun 29, 2021 17:03
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Canonically? No. The core pitch for the nWoD is that literally everyone has had an encounter with the supernatural at one point or another and that there isn't really a Masquerade so much as a tacit agreement not to think or talk too much about things that go bump in the night, because it's too horrifying to contemplate and marks you out as a target. Yeah, this. And it's cool. It reminds me of one of my favorite bits from Buffy-- when her high school class awarded her a special "class protector" award at prom and the speech was basically "Look, we all know that there's some weird poo poo out there but we refuse to acknowledge it. But we also all know our class has had the lowest mortality rate due to supernatural bullshit in years, and it's thanks to Buffy, so let's give her this trophy and then go back to never thinking about it ever again."
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Jun 29, 2021 17:37
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Digital Osmosis posted:Was thinking about how good this book is. It's just because they went totally loving wild, right? Like, I feel like usually having someone edit and say no and shoot down ideas is a good thing but Ratkin really benefited from not holding back. The gifts included turning in to Itchy from the Itchy and Scratchy Show, turning a chainsaw in to the Ratkin equivalent of a klaive by just shoving a spirit in to it, wearing a bastet skin for armor (that made all other ratkin laugh at you for looking like an idiot), and "what if a prison wallet but magic?". One of the NPCs is pissed off that Disney stole his rodent idea. There's a gnosis equivalent of frenzy where the example is a spirit speaker stripping down naked and attacking wall outlets with a fire ax because they were convinced that spider spirits had spun webs through the electric wires. And the opening comic is a gonzo misadventure of a Twitcher dying while taking out a materialized major spirit in a not-McDonalds' parking lot. It is fantastic.
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Jun 29, 2021 18:17
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citybeatnik posted:The gifts included turning in to Itchy from the Itchy and Scratchy Show, turning a chainsaw in to the Ratkin equivalent of a klaive by just shoving a spirit in to it, wearing a bastet skin for armor (that made all other ratkin laugh at you for looking like an idiot), and "what if a prison wallet but magic?". One of the NPCs is pissed off that Disney stole his rodent idea. There's a gnosis equivalent of frenzy where the example is a spirit speaker stripping down naked and attacking wall outlets with a fire ax because they were convinced that spider spirits had spun webs through the electric wires. And the opening comic is a gonzo misadventure of a Twitcher dying while taking out a materialized major spirit in a not-McDonalds' parking lot. it's been a really long time since anything besides Wraith has made me want to play an oWoD game
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Jun 29, 2021 18:19
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It's the best book White Wolf ever printed. 
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Jun 29, 2021 18:54
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Yeah, so - in Masquerade, the thousand-year old global conspiracy of vampires is desperate to keep the Masquerade in case their existence become public knowledge and yadda yadda yadda. In Requiem, everyone important - even the mortal "normals" - know vampires exist. Each individual vampire is running a Masquerade to prevent the people around them from figuring out that they, *specifically*, are a vampire. The oWoD had gothic trappings all over the place, unnecessary gargoyles on skyscrapers, people in trenchcoats posing it up, but had pretensions that normal life for its inhabitants looked, well.. normal-ish. The nWoD *looks* like our world, but it really, really isn't.
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Jun 29, 2021 19:28
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I'm actually pretty impressed with how COD makes the various supernaturals integrate. It's a sort of fluid statics thing where the parts all fit together but in a non-obligate way. It's not like a clock where if you take out how Werewolfs interact with Vampires the whole thing breaks apart, you can have 0 Vampires and have a lot of that function covered by nearly any other supernatural but with very different implications and flavor.Tuxedo Catfish posted:The other thing is that there are only double-digit numbers of Prometheans in the entire world, Aside, this is probably the simplest example of the problems with the Promethean rulebook. There's explicit mentions that there is, as you said, less than a hundred Created on the planet, which means like one hundred million mortals per Created (page 12). Which means that in practical play, if there's enough Created on the planet just to sustain the basics of moving through Advanced Refinements let alone enough to fuel Centimanni, Petrificati, and Alchemist related antagonists, you get a very rapid conflict where everyone's asking "how the gently caress did the PCs find all these guys, it's not like they've got a social network." There's ways to make this work in gameplay, like having fast cuts that cover years, but you can also just say "yeah there's actually a few thousand" without much trouble. I don't know if this is because the implication of something being a one in a hundred million condition wasn't really thought through or if the writers just kind of continued to write as if the population of Prometheans was much larger than they wrote earlier. Semi-relatedly this all finally got me to finally read Rossum's Universal Robotics and Frankenstein, A+ would recommend please read them.
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Jun 29, 2021 21:02
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Yeah, so - in Masquerade, the thousand-year old global conspiracy of vampires is desperate to keep the Masquerade in case their existence become public knowledge and yadda yadda yadda. yeah, for all the dislike it got for being just gross, I never thought the story section in World of Darkness: Chicago with the serial killer loving his meat-lined hole was pointless. It did an effective job of hammering home just how hosed and different and twisted the New World of Darkness was, that this kind of crime was comprehensible and reachable, only a stepping point towards darker things. (Similarly with the bit about the God-Machine sending the conquistadors to South America.) I kind of like that approach - the New World of Darkness is the twisted, most horrible conspiracy version of everything you can think of, and it's up to you and your group to decide what subset of that you actually want to tell stories about (and can handle safely.) The converse side is not necessarily being able to trust the writers with handling horrible conspiracy versions of everything due to a demonstrated lack of care/awareness of where they're treading.
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Jun 29, 2021 21:23
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The past few pages mentioning the Ravnos has reminded me of one of those little things that bugged me 20 years ago. I haven’t gone back to double check, but wasn’t the “antediluvian dies, clan goes apeshit” thing originally presented as a curse Ravana placed on his clan, purposefully, using their signature discipline? I remember being bothered when later books made that just happen as a side effect whenever an ante bites it.Tuxedo Catfish posted:Canonically? No. The core pitch for the nWoD is that literally everyone has had an encounter with the supernatural at one point or another and that there isn't really a Masquerade so much as a tacit agreement not to think or talk too much about things that go bump in the night, because it's too horrifying to contemplate and marks you out as a target.
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Jun 29, 2021 22:38
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Unironically yes it is.
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Jun 29, 2021 23:04
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I'm admittedly not an expert on any of these settings, (I mostly just play the video games and enjoy the lore ) but IIRC in Hunter: The Reckoning it says that most people just aren't aware of all the shenanigans all the monsters are up to, the only reason Hunters and Bystanders are aware of it is because they have what most people in-game consider a psychotic break with reality and start hearing voices and seeing things. There's something keeping regular people from being aware of everything that's going on, and the Messengers break that in some people. I'm not saying go full Swedish Dracula or anything, but there's a lot of stuff that happens in the real world we will never know about, so it's possible for all these game lines to coexist at once.
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Jun 30, 2021 02:55
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Arivia posted:I kind of like that approach - the New World of Darkness is the twisted, most horrible conspiracy version of everything you can think of, and it's up to you and your group to decide what subset of that you actually want to tell stories about (and can handle safely.) The converse side is not necessarily being able to trust the writers with handling horrible conspiracy versions of everything due to a demonstrated lack of care/awareness of where they're treading. It's what makes me sad that the push for V5 seems to be slowing down stuff for Chronicles. It's this great big hosed up world, and you have a giant toolkit full of books that make it alive for what game you want to play. I had a lot of fun using things from lots of different places, where I could use them without needing backstory about Faeries or Gaia. And it was really easy to make it so the players were the most important characters at the table. NPCs would scheme and plot and be 'important', but never more important than the people sitting at the table and entirely expendable where I could start a brand new campaign tomorrow in that world and those new players would be the most important parts of the story without anyone noticing. It's freeing that no one sits down to make a character and expects the Prince to be someone from a book that they read a trilogy where x, y, and z happened.
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Jun 30, 2021 03:08
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Tulip posted:Aside, this is probably the simplest example of the problems with the Promethean rulebook. There's explicit mentions that there is, as you said, less than a hundred Created on the planet, which means like one hundred million mortals per Created (page 12). Which means that in practical play, if there's enough Created on the planet just to sustain the basics of moving through Advanced Refinements let alone enough to fuel Centimanni, Petrificati, and Alchemist related antagonists, you get a very rapid conflict where everyone's asking "how the gently caress did the PCs find all these guys, it's not like they've got a social network." There's ways to make this work in gameplay, like having fast cuts that cover years, but you can also just say "yeah there's actually a few thousand" without much trouble. I don't know if this is because the implication of something being a one in a hundred million condition wasn't really thought through or if the writers just kind of continued to write as if the population of Prometheans was much larger than they wrote earlier. I have not gone through Promethean but you could also probably say that nearly all Created are in one particular region or several regions of the world, which would skew the local numbers while keeping the other factors intact. "Gee, what is it about Ohio that makes people keep defying the laws of God and man and going on blighted journeys of self-discovery?" "I bet Michigan's involved, somehow."
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Jun 30, 2021 04:57
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Nessus posted:Hell yeah, literature. There's also the Qashmallim, who could be directing the Created in secret so that they find each other. Promethean has a pretty blank check (like Mage) to have coincidences occur as long as they follow the themes.
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Jun 30, 2021 05:18
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Nessus posted:Hell yeah, literature. See also all those astronauts coming from Ohio. Being in Ohio just makes you want to physically and spiritually get as far away as possible from Ohio. Joe Slowboat posted:There's also the Qashmallim, who could be directing the Created in secret so that they find each other. Promethean has a pretty blank check (like Mage) to have coincidences occur as long as they follow the themes. And Promethean alchemical hobo-sign and such seems to serve to hold onto culture and practices across great gulfs of distance and time.
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Jun 30, 2021 08:20
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Okay but the most important question is: where do I find Low Stakes?
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Jun 30, 2021 16:01
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https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/343626/Low-Stakes
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Jun 30, 2021 16:02
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:I'm admittedly not an expert on any of these settings, (I mostly just play the video games and enjoy the lore ) but IIRC in Hunter: The Reckoning it says that most people just aren't aware of all the shenanigans all the monsters are up to, the only reason Hunters and Bystanders are aware of it is because they have what most people in-game consider a psychotic break with reality and start hearing voices and seeing things. There's something keeping regular people from being aware of everything that's going on, and the Messengers break that in some people. Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series relies on the Mist to explain why mortals don't see supernatural shenanigans. It's certainly a nice catchall for resolving some of the more unbelievable events that happen.
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Jun 30, 2021 17:26
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't have anything against it, but I can just tell when a game is a furry game, with or without sexual content. There's also a long-running harem power fantasy novel series with that exact thing.
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Jun 30, 2021 18:44
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I'm lighting the candles to summon Loomer here to go into a little more depth about just how overpopulated the oWoD, at least, was with supernaturals, given Loomer's status as the keeper of true knowledge of that setting's demographics. Please stop praying to Loomer, they're growing too powerful.
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Jun 30, 2021 22:14
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Obligatum VII posted:Please stop praying to Loomer, they're growing too powerful. Too bad! They looked away for five seconds and you know what that means!
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Jul 1, 2021 02:49
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Tetrabor posted:Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series relies on the Mist to explain why mortals don't see supernatural shenanigans. It's certainly a nice catchall for resolving some of the more unbelievable events that happen. The oWoD had similar things for several (not all) of its supernatural splats, by a different name each time it came up: werewolves inflicted the Delirium, changelings the Mists, wraiths the Fog, demons Revelation. These largely all did the same thing as I recall, so the different names each time bothered me. nWoD uses this conceit less, but it's there for some: werewolves inflict Lunacy, mages' spells cause Dissonance when witnessed directly, and mummies cause Sybaris. I have never much liked this as a solution for the suspension of disbelief of a hidden-supernatural modern world setting. It feels like dodging the question, answering "how do monsters hide in the shadows?" with "monsters are invisible, they couldn't be noticed even if they wanted to." (Not literally of course, but in spirit.) If all supernatural events appear with a mundane shroud, if you never get that moment of seeing how a person reacts to a human being sloughing off their form and some kind of vampire kraken rising from within, then on some level it's not really a supernatural world hidden within human society. It's two separate worlds as separate lenses interpreting one event. It's a cop-out and an anticlimactic one; it robs the premise of one of its core fun factors. nWoD also flirts with this idea in a form I'm more comfortable with. The second edition rules include experiencing gross supernatural phenomena as one of the typical triggers for an Integrity breaking point. The sample questions to establish a character's approach to Integrity further contextualize this by asking "what have you forgotten?" The explanatory text establishes that this probably isn't literal amnesia, but simply unsettling past brushes with the supernatural which the character has been able to convince herself might not have happened, or must have been misinterpreted or a dream or something, because she doesn't want to face the implications otherwise. Which goes back to what Dave Brookshaw put forth: mortals do see supernatural shenanigans. But they grow up in a society where everybody dodges the subject nervously, and most of them take after that behavior too, possibly after a few scrapes and lucky breaks. And they start actively avoiding investigating this poo poo whenever they can. Because what their society has silently communicated to them is that the supernatural is listening, and it's capable of anything. If you let on that you see it, if you step a little too close, it might let you go. Or it might eat you whole. Mieruko-chan fits.
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Jul 1, 2021 04:20
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