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How are you guys doing Aspirations? I'm about to start a Hunter 2e game and the ST is at a loss. The game seems to think that fulfilling Aspirations is a key way players accumulate Beats, but none of us can really picture how that works, short of rolling over your Aspirations every week like "Aspiration: [what I want to do in the next scene/session]". What's the intended/experienced rate of Aspiration turnover, and how do you write Aspirations/pace games to meet it? How central are they to your 2e games?
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Jul 21, 2021 10:15
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I have never once been able to get myself to use aspirations.Ghost Leviathan posted:I do like the idea of the God-Machine being aligned with various other conspiracies mostly because maintaining the status quo is in their common interest. From the other end of things, Seers and some vampires might be aware of the God-Machine to a degree and see it as a potentially useful tool. It's all fun and games until your fingers get caught in the gears. Which is probably planned for.
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Jul 21, 2021 11:04
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Attorney at Funk posted:How are you guys doing Aspirations? I'm about to start a Hunter 2e game and the ST is at a loss. The game seems to think that fulfilling Aspirations is a key way players accumulate Beats, but none of us can really picture how that works, short of rolling over your Aspirations every week like "Aspiration: [what I want to do in the next scene/session]". That's exactly how you use them. The long term ones help to shape the campaign, woke the sorry term ones are what you're character wants to do right now.
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Jul 21, 2021 13:05
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Yeah that's pretty much it. The GM should look at everyone's aspirations and use them as a guide for what can/should happen next session.
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Jul 21, 2021 13:57
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I use them pretty frequently. I don't use them as the main xp but I also completely redid xp to be similar to Apocalypse World (i.e. end of session questionnaire). Aspirations should be pretty achievable, and that helps me plan sessions that, well, do what the players want.
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Jul 21, 2021 14:34
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Rubix Squid posted:I have never once been able to get myself to use aspirations. I mean, if that isn't a plot hook I don't know what is.
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Jul 21, 2021 16:37
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Attorney at Funk posted:How are you guys doing Aspirations? I'm about to start a Hunter 2e game and the ST is at a loss. The game seems to think that fulfilling Aspirations is a key way players accumulate Beats, but none of us can really picture how that works, short of rolling over your Aspirations every week like "Aspiration: [what I want to do in the next scene/session]". We used them for a while for things like "punch Vince McMahon in the face" style of things to do. Where they're planning on going to fight someone. They're supposed to be super simple to accomplish. "Research vampire cooties" "Learn how to shear a werewolf" "Buy black market munitions" These are all things that can be accomplished in one scene and make great aspirations. We stopped using them when we switched to just getting flat XP and AXP every session and only used the mage Obsessions. So if Hunters have a long term goal system in place, those are really useful for molding where the story is going to go longer term and we used those for four years.
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Jul 21, 2021 17:06
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Attorney at Funk posted:How are you guys doing Aspirations? I'm about to start a Hunter 2e game and the ST is at a loss. The game seems to think that fulfilling Aspirations is a key way players accumulate Beats, but none of us can really picture how that works, short of rolling over your Aspirations every week like "Aspiration: [what I want to do in the next scene/session]". You can also, technically, make Aspirations out of character goals for your character, which is really useful. Like, say you want this character to have to emotionally deal with the loss of a friend, and you want that to have some plot hooked into it or whatever, you could have Aspiration: Be Forced To Deal With Bob's Death, or whatever. This both signals that this is a goal you have in mind to the rest of the players and makes doing that inherently valuable to you (and, if you have Group Beats, to everyone). Something like that could be a subplot for a handful of sessions, generating beats throughout, until you decided you no longer want to develop that side of the character or you feel the story has run its course. Keeping aspirations entirely in-character robs them of one of their best uses, which (much like conditions), is 'ensuring the group benefits mechanically when I get stuck into this problem or situation' - which helps sweeten the pot for everyone, as well as hopefully making it clear to them what kind of thing you're broadly aiming for that you might enjoy them getting mixed up in.
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Jul 21, 2021 17:56
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Joe Slowboat posted:You can also, technically, make Aspirations out of character goals for your character, which is really useful. ...Chuubo's quests?
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Jul 21, 2021 20:32
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Stephenls posted:...Chuubo's quests? I mean, if you made them significantly crunchier, yeah, they could become Chuubo's Quests. I don't think I would in this engine, though.
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Jul 21, 2021 21:52
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I always thought the GM was obvious: it's a Thing that prevented (out of self preservation) the various doomsdays and Gehennas by turning the owod into the nwod it's done now, but is still preserving itself and the status quo, and the only reason angels are falling now is that the world changed proof: there is no and there will never be a similar Gehenna clusterfuck happenieng, the GM made and makes sure of that
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Jul 22, 2021 14:18
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I mean, you do you, but there’s no connection between the two settings by default.
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Jul 22, 2021 14:36
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I stand by the GM being a meta joke about how there's a certain strain of STs/GMs who have these weird convoluted plans for the game that makes no sense to the players. Demon is a game about a bunch of players gleefully yanking the story off its rails and chosing to adopt the nWoD version of Boblin the Goblin as opposed to doing what the module says to do.
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Jul 22, 2021 19:07
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I like to think of vampires, mages, and demons as operating on different wavelengths and so they're not invisible to each other, but that their concerns frequently "miss" each other's goals. Like how the Seers have "infiltrated" Task Force: Valkyrie, but all they care about is bloating the military budget. They just don't care if men with guns are blasting vampires and mystics in Syria except in that they should be spending more money on lightning guns and excess humvees to do it. The way I think of it, imagine if a mage in Manchester, NH discovers that black cats are slightly more probable in the city. He picks up on the weirdness and, the WoD being full of such weirdness, traces it to a weird park that's altering probability. He studies it, maybe tests some ways to fiddle with it, but he's more interested in the way it changes probability than what color the cats of New Hampshire are. Whereas a demon would immediately see it as infrastructure--the cat situation is just a way the God Machine calibrates its ability to detect statistical weirdness to track down demons and other things that shouldn't be. Making more or less black cats messes with the God Machine's ability to do that... by a small amount, there are many other systems in place to calibrate detection. But the demon would be very interested in the cats that the mage writes off as just a side effect. They're both too small and too big for his attention, which is, at the same time, looking too closely at one isolated piece of the system and has too big of a focus on the Supernal world to pick up the whole picture. If the mage messed up the infrastructure in his studies, he might get a hitman dispatched on him, but for all he knows, that's the Seers or just some dick wizard who already found the park and doesn't want anyone else messing with it. That it's all about a cosmic weather station maintaining proper cat ratios might never occur to him.
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Jul 22, 2021 19:19
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Precambrian posted:I like to think of vampires, mages, and demons as operating on different wavelengths and so they're not invisible to each other, but that their concerns frequently "miss" each other's goals. Like how the Seers have "infiltrated" Task Force: Valkyrie, but all they care about is bloating the military budget. They just don't care if men with guns are blasting vampires and mystics in Syria except in that they should be spending more money on lightning guns and excess humvees to do it. And conversely, when the mage is identifying sublime or cosmic forces that can be seen through the structure of things present, the way Fate is wrapped around the cats and the park, that's entirely over the head of Demons (as it reasonably should be). Mages are looking at the ideal, the pattern, the symbolic implications - which they intend to use to rework the universe - while Demons are looking at the practical, the applied, the structure of systems that exists here.
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Jul 22, 2021 20:40
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Yeah, their perspective is simultaneously too big and too small because they're on separate frequencies of looking at the world. The mage won't think to "think bigger" to understand that there's a GM mechanism for viewing the cats and interpreting the data because he already is thinking bigger, in terms of patterns and symbols. So with the CoD, you can overlap a lot of supernaturals in a city who deal with similar issues, but still miss each other (until the story needs the players to collide with the vampire/mage/demon/werewolf community).
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Jul 22, 2021 21:40
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A mage discovering that infrastructure is A Thing would probably set off some pretty wild theories, since it is functionally the fallen world replicating effects typically considered to be Supernal without having any Supernal involvement at all. Cue horrible disasters as they proceed to build their own infrastructure just because they worked out roughly how to do so and they can.
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Jul 24, 2021 11:07
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Obligatum VII posted:A mage discovering that infrastructure is A Thing would probably set off some pretty wild theories, since it is functionally the fallen world replicating effects typically considered to be Supernal without having any Supernal involvement at all. The Fallen World does that all the time. That's what the average mystery is that mages are already used to investigating and trying to harness and use for their own ends to wildly hubristic results. In terms of supernatural activity without supernal projection, the God-Machine causing a river to boil over by ritually wounding all firstborn daughters born to a town's fishermen is on par with a priest of the Shadow Congregation who ignites a fiery blade by fueling apocryphal prayers to secret saints with his will and faith, which is on par with every wish made over a piece of silver dropped into a lake coming true in hideously ironic fashion through the lake's sheer hate.
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Jul 24, 2021 11:40
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As far as weird-rear end phenomenon go, those are far more easily understandable to mages since they're already working through things the masters among them are already used to toying with. The God-Machine meanwhile, IMO, should always lean on the side of what you feel the first time you see someone pulling a arbitrary code execution in a speed run even if that someone happens to be a master of several different arcana.
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Jul 24, 2021 12:09
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Yeah, the idea of the G-M doing incredibly impressive things being weird because they aren't Supernal isn't that compelling to me-- every other splat does incredibly impressive things that aren't Supernal. What's compelling, IMO, is that the G-M knows how and why it's infrastructure works (insomuch as the G-M "knows" anything.) That is, an Autumn Court Sorcerer Queen or Ordo Dracul Sworn of Mysteries or whatever knows a hell of a lot about how to do their various splat magic, and even maybe a good deal about why their magic works, but the G-M presumably knows all of it down to the level of the various subatomic particles and whatever happens if you split the Glamour. What is and isn't Supernal is always a tricky line because, well, the Supernal is like a system of categorization for everything else-- but if you declare someone bleeding out to be "not wounded actually, for a certain definition of wounded" they heal. I think uniquely Supernal effects (that aren't just manipulating other Supernal effects) are mostly limited to the kind of categorization change that's like "this has always been this way." So while the G-M could re-write time because it can basically move back in time and change things, Supernal magic can be like "nah, the cosmic truth of the universe is just that the thing I wanted to re-write never actually happened in the first place."
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Jul 24, 2021 17:56
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Is Promethean the only line with a splat (Argentum) specifically for studying other supernatural beings?
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Jul 24, 2021 18:01
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Is Promethean the only line with a splat (Argentum) specifically for studying other supernatural beings? Yes, because mages don't have that as a subtype, it's just what they do.
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Jul 24, 2021 18:02
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Werewolves have a bunch of groups dedicated to hunting other types of supernatural being, although they're often quite specific and I can't remember if any of them are player splats or just, like, spirits / Hosts / etc.
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Jul 24, 2021 21:54
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Hunters in the Darkness would consider vampires and mages part of their responsibility in keeping humanity in line
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Jul 24, 2021 22:12
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Soonmot posted:Hunters in the Darkness would consider vampires and mages part of their responsibility in keeping humanity in line I think you mean Iron Masters? Hunters in the Darkness are the ones who take care of Hosts if I recall correctly. Vampires are kind of a special case because you can argue your way into fitting them into multiple categories, though I think the Iron Masters generally call dibs.
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Jul 24, 2021 22:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Werewolves have a bunch of groups dedicated to hunting other types of supernatural being, although they're often quite specific and I can't remember if any of them are player splats or just, like, spirits / Hosts / etc. Pretty much all of the player character splats fall under the Iron Masters' ambit except for Sin-Eaters ("Claimed by the dead is still Claimed"). Deviant applies as probably a universal exception: most deviants go to the Iron Masters as more like humans than other werewolves, devouring hosts, ephemeral spirits, or spirit-flesh fusions, but a deviant can be drat near anything in terms of nature and source of transformation so there are probably some Coactives that are fused with living spirit enough to draw the Storm Lords, maybe even a Chimeric shapeshifting worldwalker that's close enough to argue it counts as Uratha-adjacent, etc. If you want to get really deep, if the Eaters of the Dead ever manage to gather enough wolves and power to transcend lodgehood and become a new tribe, they'll instantly claim-jump all the undead currently hunted by the Iron Masters, and then argue heavily with the Storm Lords over who's the best authority when hunting the Bound. There are a lot of smaller organizations (Z-splats and secondary/supplementary Y-splats) that revolve around specific supernatural phenomena, like the covenant of stigmatic vampires who made contact with God-Machine infrastructure and interpret it as a holy charge, and many Hunter compacts and conspiracies. There are some that even just revolve around either researching or negotiating with other supernatural forces in general: Hunter's Network Zero and Null Mysteriis, the Weihan Cynn covenant of dead wayfarers who made deals with courts of other monsters, the Changeling First Edition entitlement of ambassadors and diplomats with other creatures who had an ugly patchwork sigil that was just every minor splat symbol they had on hand from either World of Darkness strung together randomly in a ring. (In First Edition, Argentum actually gets kicked down to that "secondary" rung with the Weihan Cynn; they were introduced in a supplement book, and only became core Promethean material in 2e.) And then of course there's the splats that take a minor in investigating other supernatural phenomena, that have their own thing but also stand out as being general supernatural research bugs. The Ordo Dracul, the Autumn Court, probably could make a case for every Order of mages here. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jul 24, 2021 |
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Jul 24, 2021 23:32
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Joe Slowboat posted:I think you mean Iron Masters? Yeah I absolutely meant iron masters lol
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Jul 25, 2021 01:19
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I Am Just a Box posted:Pretty much all of the player character splats fall under the Iron Masters' ambit except for Sin-Eaters ("Claimed by the dead is still Claimed"). It is worth noting, though, (not that telling them this is likely to help) that the Storm Lords are 100% wrong on this point. The Bound aren't Claimed, they're, well, Bound, which is a Manifestation most werewolves dont really have any experience with seeing as it's a) pretty rare and b) restricted to geists.
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Jul 25, 2021 08:29
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Mors Rattus posted:Yes, because mages don't have that as a subtype, it's just what they do. Mages do have a splat dedicated to *opposing* other supernatural beings, though. The Tremere. When they were in the Diamond, the Tremere’s motto was Magic Must Be Tamed. They sought out other beings and took their stuff. In modern times, the remnants of the Order see it more as securing their own food supply - a Beast loving up everyone’s souls is like poison in the well.
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Jul 25, 2021 10:11
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Mages do have a splat dedicated to *opposing* other supernatural beings, though. The Tremere. Huh, how'd they go from what sound like the magic police to liches exactly, seems like a weird evolution?
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Jul 25, 2021 19:31
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I think being the self-appointed police both suits their megalomania and is convenient for their desire to absorb every possible piece of soul-manipulating magic.
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Jul 25, 2021 19:49
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GimpInBlack posted:It is worth noting, though, (not that telling them this is likely to help) that the Storm Lords are 100% wrong on this point. The Bound aren't Claimed, they're, well, Bound, which is a Manifestation most werewolves dont really have any experience with seeing as it's a) pretty rare and b) restricted to geists. It's a pretty meaningless nitpick. It was obvious from the moment the Werewolf 2e corebook dropped, before anything about Geist 2e was revealed, that this didn't mean the Bound were literally ghost-Claimed, and the conditions are different enough that even in-universe the Storm Lords can probably recognize that it's a different kind of merger. They don't care. Their point is that they are wary of and hunt fusions of spirit and flesh, and other kinds of ephemera are close enough to raise their suspicion. (Thus why I think there are probably some coactive deviants that would raise their hackles too, despite the Remade being even less like the Claimed.)
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Jul 25, 2021 19:51
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A game is ending and the Gm wanna switch out and I might end up running a game of Changeling: the Lost. I'm gonna need a refresher though. Gotta crack up my 1e books (since I don't have the 2e one and even then I'd have to completely rework the XP/Conditions sytem).
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Jul 26, 2021 06:12
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Changeling really has a new vibe post-Epstein.
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Jul 26, 2021 06:59
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Fantastic Alice posted:Huh, how'd they go from what sound like the magic police to liches exactly, seems like a weird evolution? "We operate on the boundaries of human existence, learning new magic from otherworldly entities" -> "Nonhuman entities have magic of their own that should be humanity's, and we take it" -> "We imprison gods and force them to teach us" -> "We have bitten off more than we can chew and been imprisoned by one of our own prisoners, which has damaged our souls" -> "We're free again, and now our hunger for external magic is literal" -> "We're a Diamond Order dedicated to the human soul, understanding the demarcation between it and the inhuman, and expanding that boundary. We hunt Reapers and Monsters (and the mid- and high-ranking members literally consume them)" -> "Some French thearch who wanted to be immortal figured it out and outed us to Convocation out of spite when we wouldn't Hollow her" -> "Screw the Diamond, we didn't need them anyway. Society is for the weak. Every Custos for himself" They got found out (amusingly, by someone *even worse*) and started saying the quiet part loud. (Seriously. Wildcat, the mage who outed them, is a ghost mage in Night Horrors: The Unbidden. In 2e terms she'd be what you get when you Synthesise a mage and a Strix, and is still active nearly a thousand years after the Tremere were banished. It was the minor continuity note I honestly didn't know about the setting while I was Developer, and only figured out when re-reading every single Mage book a while back for reasons. I traced it to an editorial mistake in Left Hand Path, where her real name from that Night Horrors - Lady Catherine Beldam - got mistakenly corrected to "Bedlam", which itself got carried forward.) Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 09:01
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Thanks for sharing that. That really gels with my whole "let's have Tremere vampires too" shenanigans I've got going on. They both hate each other of course.
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Jul 26, 2021 11:12
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MonsieurChoc posted:A game is ending and the Gm wanna switch out and I might end up running a game of Changeling: the Lost. Get the 2e upgrade, it's much better.
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Jul 26, 2021 14:11
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Pretty much the only parts of 2e that aren’t a straight upgrade are talecrafting/dreamshaping, which is confusing and weirdly mathed, and oaths, which got hit harder with a nerf bat than was necessary to prevent the world breaking shenanigans the 1e pledgecrafting could get up to.
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Jul 26, 2021 14:20
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2e's Contracts in particular are a big step up from 1e's in fun and structure. My biggest complaint with Changeling 2e is my biggest complaint with most every 2e line, which is that rules are tucked through the book so haphazardly it's a pain to use as a reference document.
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Jul 26, 2021 17:15
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and hedge navigation! and understanding the basics of what a changeling is and does from the text if you haven't read 1E. and maybe entitlements, I'm still not super clear on those even after reading Oak, Ash, and Thorn. I think 2E is a major upgrade and would suggest running it over 1E but I also feel like it's... not entirely a complete game, somehow. Basic stuff like "what is a seeming? what is a kith? what is an entitlement?" don't get spelled out enough -- though I suppose I might just be thick here -- and some of the subsystems are overtly fiddly and difficult. But the freedom, new power curve, general 2E CoD rules and new setting elements all rule, so...???
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Jul 26, 2021 20:55
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