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Kurieg posted:Yes, he later talks about how playing a Nazi doesn't make you a Nazi so it's totally okay that he has extensive rules on how to play a Nazi Sargeant Rage Did Nothing Wrong
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Feb 13, 2022 17:26
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Loomer posted:The gently caress is he even on about? I have literally never met a single player who has said anything like this. Sounds like he's trying to cry about how "Wokeness" has ruined games by citing Chick Tracts and Brucatto's delusions about playing evil wizards as being the reason sensible people say "Keep that Nazi poo poo away from my loving table, thanks." Instead of..you know, the sensible response being "GTFO Nazis". Seriously gently caress him, and I think less of those podcasters now for not pushing back on his bullshit. Not to say I had a heap of respect for them to begin with, I'd listened to enough of their episodes to get the impression they have a very specific idea of how Vampire should be played and anyone who doesn't like their way is just wrong.
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Feb 13, 2022 18:27
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Digital Osmosis posted:do you think you could honestly tell the difference between an online community in the final stages of disquiet and uh, any other online community? KiwiFarms turns its gaze inwards. Semi related my Promethean campaign is going great, my players have switched into substantially off-character refinements and it's created really fun tensions as the players lean into and learn their new refinements. Something feels great about a game where "joining a book club" gets described by the players as "exhilarating."
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Feb 13, 2022 18:33
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joylessdivision posted:Sounds like he's trying to cry about how "Wokeness" has ruined games by citing Chick Tracts and Brucatto's delusions about playing evil wizards as being the reason sensible people say "Keep that Nazi poo poo away from my loving table, thanks." The hosts, unprompted and even with a little pushback from Ericsson, directly attribute a pause in the Chechen pogrom to the Camarilla book controversy. They basically call him a hero. From what I could find with some cursory reading, the thing they're talking about was a "lull" in the tortures and killings that started a year before Camarilla came out, and things actually ramped up after the controversy (though of course I wouldn't directly tie that to the bad vampire book).
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Feb 13, 2022 18:34
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Tulip posted:KiwiFarms turns its gaze inwards. It just occurred to me that Promethean would make a phenomenal knock-off of Disco Elysium.
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Feb 13, 2022 18:59
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Digital Osmosis posted:It just occurred to me that Promethean would make a phenomenal knock-off of Disco Elysium. omg it fits perfectly
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Feb 13, 2022 19:12
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I guess I'm tired of having to ask this every time splat books get discussed, so can people explain how the stories work in practice. Vampire: Political intrigue Werewolf: Captain planet Hunter: Survive and destroy the monsters in your community, get killed by a dumb mistake three sessions in Standard WOD: horror movie the TT-RPG, get killed by a dumb mistake session one, end up playing something else session 2 with same characters. Mage: The matrix by way of harry potter Demon:? Mummy:? Promethean: Seems like this would be a lot of personal development stuff, but how do you manage to do this with a group of people without it being boring for people not being focused on? Wraith: Above except dead people and moving on? Changeling: Promethean except people who are way too into celtic stuff?
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Feb 13, 2022 19:24
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Changeling the Lost is about coping with lost youth and the trauma of being an abuse survivor who is trying to return to human life. Promethean the Created is about being something that reality rejects but despite literally everything being against you, you can someday become human as long as you hold out hope and continue on your pilgrimage. Mummy is about being a tool for others to accomplish goals and you're always losing your memories unless you cooperate and you struggle with who you really even are since you don't know what year it'll be next time you wake up and which things you'll have remembered and which you'll have forgotten, just that you will be very strong and have a task to accomplish before getting to return to sleep. Demon is about a cog in a machine gaining self-awareness and escaping from the machine and having to deal with troubles of keeping a stable identity among the humans while avoiding being taken out by the rest of the machine's gears who recognize your self-awareness as a flaw and that it is time for you to be recycled.
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Feb 13, 2022 19:45
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While there is some nature-mythology connection in Forsaken, I really wouldn't characterize it as "Captain Planet." That's much more an Apocalypse thing, and you seem to be talking about Chronicles and not World.
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Feb 13, 2022 20:10
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I'm about to run Awakening for the first time, and I have a question about the spellcasting mechanics: Certain spells that do things like Tune In or like Oath Fulfilled don't seem to have any use for Potency. Is Potency still used when determining spell factors for casting?
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Feb 13, 2022 20:27
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Defenestrategy posted:I guess I'm tired of having to ask this every time splat books get discussed, so can people explain how the stories work in practice. Demon is most designed as a spy thriller. You are small, you are sneaky, you are being hunted by an incredibly powerful but also incredibly stupid conspiracy. Demons have an absolutely incredible depth of options for how to influence people and disguise one action as another, and have easily the most powerful options in any line for disguises. They do have the ability to fight a crazy fight, but this is a very limited resource with significant potential blowback, and so it ties into the broader feeling of the mechanics: you go loud because you were forced into a corner or because you've encountered a very limited place where it's justified to gently caress your own self up that bad to get it done. Demons themselves are divided by motivation - some are utopian separatists, some are trying to destroy the conspiracy in a direct way, and some are trying to figure out how to get back into the conspiracy. Promethean does involve a ton of personal development, but it has been the least boring campaign I've run (OK Wanderhome was even more so). Prometheans are extremely thematically trans: they were born one way and they are striving to be another. Group play turns out to be very good in my experience because this means that the players end up discussing amongst themselves their own journeys of self discovery, and learning to rely on and love others is a fundamental part of developing as a human (individualistic personal development is a dead end for a social animal, after all). Changeling I'm less familiar with, having not actually played a campaign about it, but it's more about being a survivor. Prometheans have less "history" than most humans, Changelings have considerably more. Where they're similar is that they're both rather existential, but Promethean is the most optimistic RPG I've ever played to an almost distressing extent, while Changeling is frankly kind of rough.
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Feb 13, 2022 20:38
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A Renaissance Nerd posted:I'm about to run Awakening for the first time, and I have a question about the spellcasting mechanics: Every spell has at least Potency 1 as precondition for existing at all. For spells that don't have a direct use for Potency like the ones you mention, you can leave it there to avoid dice penalties. However, stuff like Dispel Magic faces off against a spell's Potency, so it would be trivially easy for someone to shut it down. For short/instantaneous spells that feed you information, it is generally safe to not care about Potency. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Feb 13, 2022 |
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Feb 13, 2022 20:41
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, No. Oh, wait until you read Khaldoun Khalil's runins with Dawkins and the covering for institutionalized racism at OPP. https://www.patreon.com/posts/racism-and-onyx-39912924 My thoughts are yes, it was almost assuredly racist, he's being polite/professional (model minority mindset) by not enumerating the details. I have been in the same situation myself, and you can be labeled "problematic" or "troublesome" super easily as a minority and just get ganged on and boycotted to hell, so the relatively vague and tame language is basically trying to not whip up a shitstorm in an attempt to let the company save face so you're not some angry little darkie trying to smear them/specific employees with details of horrible comments. Dawkins helped cover it up by lying about the comments, then essentially telling the author to "get over it" when called out on it. Classy! Fuzz fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Feb 13, 2022 |
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Feb 13, 2022 20:42
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Promethean is a good game but I agree strongly with the "so optimistic it's almost distressing" assessment. Being a Promethean is basically an unbearable purgatory you're born into and your only option is to transform into something else. Anyone who gives up on that transformation or finds it beyond their means is either going through a temporary period of despair and not thinking rationally, or has become a monster in truth. It sucks to be a Promethean -- you're a living powder keg who almost literally can't have friends (except for others who are broken in exactly the same way you are), who poisons everything around them, and who only exists to die and be reborn as something better (who won't remember being a Promethean, but will live the life you never could). The optimism, therefore, is entirely centered on the possibility of becoming something else. The game goes to great lengths to establish that attaining the New Dawn is rare, too personal to easily replicate, and poorly understood -- but always possible. So it's optimistic in the sense of there being a way to achieve your goal, but very little support for wondering if that goal is really something good or worth the cost. (Because if you indulge that line of thinking you're on the fast track to becoming a Centimanus.) Which is great if all you're looking for is a horror premise, but becomes kind of dubious if you try to map it to queer or disabled experiences -- which Promethean frequently does, at least implicitly. Now, granted, for some people I think the fundamental unfairness in this setup and the particular aspiration the New Dawn represents resonates, and being Promethean isn't explicitly a metaphor for queerness or disability, and when it is invoked it's often to explain the trauma their creators left them with rather than their fundamental nature as supernatural beings. It's not a premise I'd throw out wholesale or dismiss as hopelessly problematic, just a pitfall you have to navigate very carefully. But personally I did not enjoy actually playing Promethean very much, and my attempt to make a Promethean character who was skeptical of the New Dawn basically only left narcissistic villainy as a mechanical and narrative option -- and even once I went "sure, okay" and leaned into that, I ended up with a character arc that probably would have worked a lot better for a Vampire. There just isn't much room in the game for anything but being reborn in fire. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Feb 13, 2022 |
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Feb 13, 2022 21:04
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Werewolf: The Forsaken is neighborhood watch in Silent Hill. It's really cool.
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Feb 13, 2022 21:35
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It is. WtF made me actually want to play a woof - shaking down spirits, negotiating with eldritch abominations, eating a bag of shattered glass and using it to make sounds out of first language
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Feb 13, 2022 21:37
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So, has anybody gotten further into the Lore of the Traditions previews than the tiny dip I took, as the Kickstarter gets close to its ending?
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Feb 13, 2022 21:57
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Promethean is a good game but I agree strongly with the "so optimistic it's almost distressing" assessment. Being a Promethean is basically an unbearable purgatory you're born into and your only option is to transform into something else. Anyone who gives up on that transformation or finds it beyond their means is either going through a temporary period of despair and not thinking rationally, or has become a monster in truth. Oof yeah. I think part of why it's worked so well for me and my group is that it's so unambiguous about a particular narrative arc: your character has a deep, overwhelming desire to become a human. Part of character creation, arguably the part we spent the longest on, was that each of them had to articulate what's so great about being human? For a bunch of depressed 30somethings, this is an incredibly tough and troubling question. The centrality of that is probably a lot of why I tend to think of it as a very trans game. As a cis man, I could not reasonably articulate to you any particularly compelling reasons that being a man is great. I can point to aspects of male privilege that are nice e.g. higher wages, and I can point to kind of surface level things I like e.g. having a beard, but my friends that are trans men have way more impressive, thoughtful answers than me. That's where the parallel kicks in: I was born a human and have always been a human, and I do not have a standpoint on which I could understand why somebody would want to grow to have that in common in with me. A Promethean is a person who does have that standpoint, and so creating a Promethean means empathizing with an other who wants what you have, meaning you have to figure out what you have that's so great. I don't know how much further I'd want to push the allegory than that but it's something that's been very meaningful to me, as a person with a cis person who has a lot of trans friends and can only really understand their experience through inevitably imperfect empathy, and as a depressed person who, objectively, doesn't have it that bad. Having to articulate "OK so taking for granted that somebody wants to have certain things in common with me, why me" is a really great exercise and has driven my players in some really fun directions. Promethean isn't my favorite RPG and I definitely have criticisms of it, I just don't think they're nearly as interesting or provocative as what I like about the game (for example, I think the underlying core system just kind of sucks. That is...a very boring criticism, especially to bring up in the world of darkness thread).
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Feb 13, 2022 22:23
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Also, as a trans person and someone who's an anxious mess in a way that gels with what Promethean's doing but never played it themselves, I'll give the game this much. As the game became more intentionally trans-coded (or at least more aware trans people exist), it also became less focused on how becoming human erases your current self entirely. Those elements are still there, but I do feel like they did get meaningfully better at not making that part feel weirdly sad over time.
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Feb 13, 2022 23:00
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Digital Osmosis posted:It just occurred to me that Promethean would make a phenomenal knock-off of Disco Elysium. paradox should have sent somebody to brighton asap to get a contract with za/um after the discolike game won the thingie, just saying
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Feb 14, 2022 03:16
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ZA/UM will provide bespoke drops of $500 limited editions hand-made by a bookbinder in Estonia. The full rules will not be otherwise available, although there will be an SRD equivalent. There will be rules on how to use your Net Worth instead of gold coins to purchase potions.
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Feb 14, 2022 05:19
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The GM of my CTL game calls it PTSD: The Home Game. You're a bunch of alien abduction victims with emotion fuelled magic trying to get by and stay remotely sane while hiding from your incredibly powerful and horrifyingly alien abusers and deal with each others' endless bullshit on top of your own.
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Feb 14, 2022 10:07
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Still a better game than The Dreaming, even if it's often cringey and  .
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Feb 14, 2022 13:36
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Fuzz posted:Still a better game than The Dreaming, even if it's often cringey and To the people out there who read this and have Changeling: the Dreaming as their favorite game line — I see you. Let me be clear, I'm not one of you, but you are not forgotten. Unfavorable Reception Fave Solidarity.
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Feb 15, 2022 00:36
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I am finally reading Beckett's Jyhad Diary and it's a very fun read; it's personally the best tone I've ever read in Vampire, the pulp calibrated to almost perfection. Just lmao that it took 20+ years of refinement to get here though, white wolf could certainly benefit from more reads like these. (also: just another monumental lol that for every book like this, I seem to have to trudge through a wagon of the bad white wolf littérature before stumbling into another Horror Recognition Guide, a very peculiar curse)
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Feb 15, 2022 05:46
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The GM of my CTL game calls it PTSD: The Home Game. You're a bunch of alien abduction victims with emotion fuelled magic trying to get by and stay remotely sane while hiding from your incredibly powerful and horrifyingly alien abusers and deal with each others' endless bullshit on top of your own. Says you. I'm going to crush Mickey Mouse's skull with a cold iron wrench then go sailing with a friendly hob goose named Steve.
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Feb 15, 2022 05:54
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:To the people out there who read this and have Changeling: the Dreaming as their favorite game line — I see you. Let me be clear, I'm not one of you, but you are not forgotten. Unfavorable Reception Fave Solidarity. I mean, the Dreaming is still a fine game, it's just the Lost is way better, in terms of plot, setup, and vibe. True Fae in CoD are loving terrifying.
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Feb 15, 2022 06:58
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Just had the terrible thought that the SA forums has a reflection in the Umbra
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Feb 15, 2022 11:16
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Just had the terrible thought that the SA forums has a reflection in the Umbra Yeah, it's called 8chan and it's in the Thousand Hells.
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Feb 15, 2022 15:15
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Just had the terrible thought that the SA forums has a reflection in the Umbra catlady gbs but the catlady is Grandmaw
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Feb 15, 2022 15:22
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Fuzz posted:Yeah, it's called 8chan and it's in the Thousand Hells. 
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Feb 15, 2022 16:05
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Dammit Who? posted:Says you. I'm going to crush Mickey Mouse's skull with a cold iron wrench then go sailing with a friendly hob goose named Steve. It can be both in the same game. 
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Feb 15, 2022 16:13
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Rand Brittain posted:So, has anybody gotten further into the Lore of the Traditions previews than the tiny dip I took, as the Kickstarter gets close to its ending? I mean, it's basically what you'd expect from an M20 book. Anything specific you're interested in? M20 gonna be M20 posted:NFTs (Non-Fungible Tass/Talismans)
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Feb 15, 2022 20:14
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Who's rote is it? It's the VA they can just be punched for it, if it's the Technocracy well yeah they're the villains.
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Feb 15, 2022 20:28
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Five Eyes posted:I mean, it's basically what you'd expect from an M20 book. Anything specific you're interested in? I'm mostly just wondering to myself whether I'm going to buy it out of a sick fascination and a general sense of "well, it can't possibly be worse than some of the 'authentic' Ascension books I've already collected." Is Mage 20th Anniversary worse than Blood Treachery? That's a hard question to answer!
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Feb 15, 2022 22:40
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 From this week's Monday Meeting Notes, looks like Awakening isn't actually vaporware!
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Feb 15, 2022 22:47
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm mostly just wondering to myself whether I'm going to buy it out of a sick fascination and a general sense of "well, it can't possibly be worse than some of the 'authentic' Ascension books I've already collected."
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Feb 15, 2022 22:54
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NGDBSS posted:How terrible was Blood Treachery? I'm at least familiar with M20 being an objectively bad game. Blood Treachery is a book about mages (the Order of Hermes) going to war against vampire wizards (the Tremere). They decide that the best way to carry out this war is to storm the vampire chantries, at night, with guns. It also has the entire plot spelled out in the form of a multi-act play with the Oracles acting the part of the Greek chorus, which means that literally everything important happens and the war ends (and is revealed as pointless) without your player characters having the chance to do anything. It also discusses the rules for mages becoming ghouls, as written by someone who thought that the whole thing was such a disgusting exercise in powergaming that the rules are in effect: "Nothing! You get nothing! You lose all your wizard powers and then you die." It also discusses various ways that mages could try to curse vampirism, and then at the end mentions "but none of these will work because mages can't roll more successes than God."
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Feb 15, 2022 23:00
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Rand Brittain posted:"but none of these will work because mages can't roll more successes than God." Psh, that's what they think.
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Feb 15, 2022 23:04
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Rand Brittain posted:Blood Treachery is a book about mages (the Order of Hermes) going to war against vampire wizards (the Tremere). They decide that the best way to carry out this war is to storm the vampire chantries, at night, with guns. The best part is that the rules to be a Mage Revenant didn't exist before the guy went on a rant about how much of a bad idea it was... giving it rules.
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