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Sandboxes are fine and good, but it is probably good that you don't start with the sandbox. Rather you should lead into it, start with something with a more set direction. Use that to set up foreshadowing and leads that will help provide structure once things open up and they're left to their own devices.
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Jun 1, 2023 08:08
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I mostly do sandboxes with a "timer" going on the background for a big event that in my own head that would play out even if the players never interact with it. Of course through their sandbox adventures they get plenty of chances to be involved and change the course of things. The biggest barrier I've found for some players is they're used to the adventure being driven by an NPC shoving them on the path so they don't quite wrap their head around having to push their own story that way.
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Jun 1, 2023 09:02
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For Mage I had a general setting and some arc villains (or at least, arc nefarious NPCs) in mind, and then in play I just kept throwing different plot holes and NPCs at the players until some of them stuck.
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Jun 1, 2023 09:09
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Oh yeah, my own WoD games have had a split between setting-oriented and plot-oriented chronicles. I do think the former is much more rewarding BUT ALSO the possibility of the game floundering is much higher. Like yeah, those chronicles involve a lot of work on building the setting with a thumb on the intents and means of the movers & shakers plus a few big events that can be deployed later to up the stakes. A central inciting incident in session 0/1 is a very good idea to provide an early focus, so I think you are on the right path, but at the end of the day that kind of game is very much player-driven, so it very much involves a lot of improvisational riffing with them as you explore this setting and their characters together. As I said, this can be a lot more rewarding than a more directed chronicle as the players make a delightful mess of your sandbox and eventually find their own things to focus on. It requires players with initiative and curiosity about the chronicle and when that happens it is fantastic, one of the main reasons why I am still in this hobby. If that doesn't happen or the storyteller mismanages things there is a good chance of everyone losing their enthusiasm as the chronicle doesn't find its focus and then everyone is throwing mournful looks towards a return to the PHB, but seriously, it is totally worth the shot.
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Jun 1, 2023 11:53
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Some players are better than others at doing their own thing, so it'll depend a bit on your players.
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Jun 1, 2023 12:26
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Rubix Squid posted:Sandboxes are fine and good, but it is probably good that you don't start with the sandbox. Rather you should lead into it, start with something with a more set direction. Use that to set up foreshadowing and leads that will help provide structure once things open up and they're left to their own devices. Yeah, even with players who are suited to sandbox play, which yours may or may not be, starting the game out with more focus and structure is a good idea for setting up themes and tone, especially for a game none of you have played before. Also maybe just ask the players what they would like to do, if you haven't already.
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Jun 1, 2023 13:11
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Anonymous Zebra posted:
They absolutely will. Your set up is perfect, go with that, but make sure each player has a personal investment in what you decide is the main plot. Discuss this with your players first, too. Let them know they can do what they want, that events will occur and change based on if they involved themselves or not, but that their characters should be proactive. Have plot events effect, if not them, then their loved ones and allies so they want to go and stick their noses in things. Also make use of the "teleporting dungeon" concept: When they invariably go off the rails and do something you didn't plan for, or are even just getting too deep in the weeds with random side plots you made, seed in clues and stuff for the main plot. They need this specific bit of information? Then no matter what the decide to do, that info will turn up there. I'll link you to the google doc for my current game, while the work on the NPCs and locations and stuff is important and help, jump to the bottom and look what I've done for the plots. I have the bones and broad strokes, letting my players actions create the meat of what needs to happen so they actually feel fullfilled but the story rolls out in a more or less predictable manor.
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Jun 1, 2023 13:24
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In my experience, for a sandbox if you're not sure how players will find it. Have $organisation mention that they'll always pay for information about $rival or something
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Jun 1, 2023 13:37
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Anonymous Zebra posted:So, I have a question for anyone that's successfully run a chronicle to real live people before. I'd really like to stress that I'm looking for people who have actually run a game at least once to completion and not just theory-crafting on how a game should be run (which is why I'm not asking this on the Chronicles of Darkness discord). My D&D group this last Saturday finally committed to letting me run H:tV (1e) when the next DM finishes his game (which might be months from now, or weeks if he crashes and burns like he always does), and so the reality of actually running the game has now finally caught up. So, here's my question: Depends on your specific group of players. I've had groups that need to be actively railroaded, and I've had groups that will run wild with the barest of setup. Now, a fairly standard trick is to build your setting, plot out a time line of major events with a few branches; 'In five years, the Duke of Sandwich will lead a coup against the King. If the players do nothing, the coup succeeds, but the Duke's forces are decimated in the process, and a civil war ensues, destablizing the region and allowing the neighbouring Empire of Black Armour And Cool Helmets to annex some territory, the scattered Goblin Tribes to unite and claim the southern provinces, trade goes down, monster incursions go up, etc etc. If the players support the Duke, the coup succeeds, stability is maintained, and the Duke institutes changes X Y and Z; maybe some good reforms, maybe some bad reforms. If the players support the King, the Duke is defeated, and the King maybe realizes how out of touch he's been, and makes some positive change, or maybe becomes paranoid of future coup attempts and cracks down, leading to....' And so on. In other words, create five or six basic storylines of what's going to happen in the next five years. Then, drop the PCs into the middle. Run some adventures that expose them to those storylines, then see where they want to go. Have regular discussions with them about what sort of games they're looking for. Maybe next week they want to dive into the goings on in the Goblin Tribes. Maybe that NPC that means nothing, but you had a particularly florid description for, piqued their interest. Well, now that bard isn't just a random background character, now they're a propaganda agent for the Duke, trying to sway sentiment against the king. Or maybe they're an agent of the King, sent into the service of the Duke, reporting back. Maybe they're a plant from the Empire of Black Armour and Cool Helmets, one agent of many, trying to destabilize the kingdom with competing propaganda. Maybe they're an agent of the Dragon Lords of Kelravin, ancient wyrms who have slumbered for a millennia, awakened by the grand conjunction, awoken to a world very different than they left, but just begging to be 'liberated' and placed under the 'benevolent rule' of these ancient tyrants. Who knows? On a somewhat unrelated note, I always wanted to do a one-shot that's also a backdoor pilot to a campaign where you take some experienced D&D players, and put them into a straight up ridiculous power fantasy. The level one fighter cleaves hordes of orcs in twain. The level one wizard annihilates enemies left and right. Everybody sings their praises. The King regularly calls them to court to thank them for their heroic deeds. And keep it up into one of the players says something along the lines of 'this is crazy, I can't believe it.' At which point that player is instantly separated from the group and given a sheet to read that details them waking up in some sort of suspension pod, remembering that they were on a long space voyage, and put into a fantasy full-immersion VR RPG to ride out the voyage. But the room is dark, with flickering lights, glitching computer displays, distant alarms wailing, signs of battle, etc etc. They have the option to start waking up players; every minute of their time, they can pull another PC out of the sim, but time passes differently in the RPG, so people still in the sim have two or three minutes to talk amoungst themselves before getting pulled, one by one. Once all the players awaken, well, there they are, quite confused, when something starts banging on the door to their barracks. Oh poo poo, fade to black.
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Jun 1, 2023 15:24
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I usually look at it like a time travel movie, and set all the pieces, locations, history, and characters headed to a "bad ending." Then as players interact with NPCs or the environment, that interaction nudges the story in other directions - and we can all find out where it's going together, which is a really fun thing. Like, right now I'm running Wraith. I've sketched out the last couple hundred years using the characters' backgrounds, and put some of the forces their stories suggest on a trajectory towards disaster. So far they've been staying engaged with the major parts, which are (predominantly) things that they themselves have given me to work with. What's nice is that if they choose to ignore everything, the campaign has a defined and cataclysmic end point. Another nice thing is that you never have a "correct answer" that you're subconsciously or overly trying to guide players towards. They'd better do something about these adversaries, and I know what'll happen if they don't, but that's all I know. The antagonists can then react organically, and that feels more spontaneous and real to me.
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Jun 1, 2023 15:59
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moths posted:I usually look at it like a time travel movie, and set all the pieces, locations, history, and characters headed to a "bad ending." Some RPGs codify this into the rules. I'll never not sing the praises of Ray Winninger's Underground, but it had a fantastic system to define any given area through a series of parameters, and players can change those parameters. There's rules for knock-on effects, and rules for making permanent changes, or changes without affecting other parameters. wikipedia posted:As part of the political and social nature of the game, and to encourage games to be about righting the many wrongs in the setting, the designer included Parameter Rules. This is a mechanism wherein the players could change the entire setting. The rules allowed the players to change the parameters of an area, or even the country or the whole world. The drawback is that affecting one parameter (like Quality of Life or Education), would adjust another (like Take-Home Pay or Wealth). Because they are heroes the players can, with enough time and effort, change parameters without penalties if they perform actions that lead to change.
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Jun 1, 2023 18:11
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I think setting up a sandbox-type setting for that Hunter game is perfectly fine, but you should have a general idea in mind of what's likely to grab the characters' attention or pressure them to act by default, and in what order, if they don't start poking around or messing with things. That way if they find themselves at a loss for what to do first you can smoothly reveal that one of their flatmates has been drained dry of blood or whatever and then storytell their way through that challenge.
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Jun 1, 2023 18:54
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Here’s another recap. This time I ran a little experiment and had not prepped much of anything to give me more time to write a bigger adventure for the next time. I also had noticed that my players have many running situations they should take care of, if only they had time, so I wanted to give them an opportunity to do whatever they want. As usual, our coterie consists of Augustus the Amish Banu Haqim and Thomas the Triad Tremere. It is New Year’s Eve and I tossed the ball immediately to the players by asking them where we are and what’s going on. The coterie is trying to find a new haven, since the current one is compromised, but we’re doing that off-screen by rolling Int+Finances once a week, since I’m not interested in running a game about apartment hunting. My players decided to check in with their neighboring coterie, the Culture Club. Luckily this was the one thing I had vaguely planned in advance, in case my players would be completely stumped by the lack of direction. Portia of Culture Club was hosting a party at her club, to introduce a new Primogen for clan Toreador and to lobby her club to become an Elysium. The coterie is of course not invited to the backroom ceremony and they learn all of this after they encounter Uncle Smelly of Clan Nosferatu, although they don’t recognize him first because he is using Mask of a Thousand Faces and looks just like any random dude in a bar. Uncle Smelly is there because his clan was not invited, and he can’t have Kindred thinking that Nosferatu can be excluded from the city’s political machine. He doesn’t know who the new Toreador Primogen is going to be (because I haven’t created that character yet), but he explains to the players how Elysiums work and what is the role of the Keeper of Elysium. Uncle Smelly doesn’t believe that this club will be made into an Elysium, since that would require the Keeper’s blessing and the current Keeper is missing. The discussion is interrupted when a bouncer informs Uncle Smelly that the owner of the club, Portia, has requested he leave the premises, or more specifically “Get that scab out of here!” The coterie recognizes that this was a deliberate choice of words, letting the Kindred know that Uncle Smelly has been recognized as a Nosferatu. Uncle Smelly decides to leave without a hassle, since he reasons that his skill are rusty if someone so young can see through his disguise. Augustus tries to defend Uncle Smelly, feeling that Uncle has done nothing to warrant such rude behavior and name calling. He is told to take his complaints up with the manager, the bouncer is just doing his job. Next up the players decided to try and solve a problem they have, since it was a social gathering and gathering information would be easy. They wanted to know whose domain a nearby hospital belonged to. The coterie owes a “debt” to the Malkavian Primogen. The coterie's actions lead to a security breach and the Primogen had to figuratively pay an arm and a leg to contain it, and feels that the players own him an actual arm and a leg. The player’s plan is to obtain these from a hospital and want to contact the local Kindred about it instead of causing trouble in someone else’s domain. I had to scramble for a bit to come up with a random vampire who rules over a random hospital, but luckily I had in my toolbox a suitable character waiting to be slotted into the story. The coterie meets Ken Vincent, childe of the Malkavian Primogen. He is willing to listen to the coterie’s proposal, but is constantly checking his watch and making it clear that he does not work overtime. They come to an agreement that Vincent will get an arm and a leg from the hospital mortuary and deliver them to the Primogen. In exchange the coterie owes him a minor boon. We shall wait and see how this goes, but I’m starting to feel that my players are treating Malkavian characters as logic puzzles to be figured out, so I’m going to have to correct that. The coterie returns to the matter of a new Toreador Primogen being crowned tonight and try to find their way into the meeting. I try to imply that a secret meeting they have not been invited to, between the highest members of a secret society, is not somewhere you can just bumble into, but they are insistent and I give in and have them find the location just as the meeting is over and everyone leaves. Which is fine, since Augustus is still miffed about how Uncle Smelly was treated earlier and confronts Portia about. A social combat ensues. Portia is not pleased that the coterie has learned about the secret passages in the club and uses them freely, while Augustus is not pleased that a friendly Kindred was removed from the establishment and called a Scab. Portia inquires if the Child of Haqim would have preferred another term, like Sewer Rat, Orlok or Leper to draw unwanted attention and risk the Masquerade. Augustus insists that there was no need for such an offensive term, “friend” would have been just as suitable and Portia explains the term Scab was used to make sure the bouncer doesn’t understand what’s going on but Uncle Smelly does. Now, a downside of playing remotely is that I didn’t see my players reactions when it was time to roll dice and Portia had all of the dice. I’ve previously said that Portia is a much older vampire pretending to be younger, but my players were too shocked by the amount of dice to comprehend any implications from it. I was going to have Augustus just roll against a fixed difficulty, but decided to actually roll the dice to make it more unpredictable. On the first roll Augustus was trounced and took a lot of Willpower damage, but on the following rolls he rolled great and I rolled poorly, resulting in two ties. And after that our session petered out. I was prepared to go longer, but I had nothing to throw at my players and my players had run out of stuff to do, so we decided to call it a night. Anyways, lesson learned, my players are not too comfortable with complete sandbox freedom and I need to give them at least something.
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Jun 1, 2023 23:52
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EDIT: Holy poo poo this post is kind of long. Sorry guys. Thank you all for the comments. I suppose a large part of this is going to be dependent on the players and what types of characters they want to play. We’re still not there yet, as we haven’t finished our current campaign, and there is another DM in the queue before me. Several of the players have never played Hunter, but I just found out that one guy has, and another guy has been secretly LARPing Masquerade for years, so that’s a bonus. If you don’t mind, I wanted to share the structure of the city and the overarching plot I had planned out to see if it sounds good. Feel free to skip the rest of this post if you don’t want to read a summary of my setting. The chronicle would take place in the city of Silver Springs, which is a fictional city, but partially inspired by a real city I randomly found on Google Maps when I was cruising along the Columbia River looking for a good map to rip off for the game. The real city is called Longview, and when I looked into it, I found it had a pretty LOL history. The area where the city now exists was originally noted by European explorers because there was a giant promontory they named “Mount Coffin”, which was apparently a Native American burial ground for the local tribe, which practiced above-ground “sky” burials. Eventually the area was bought by a Lumber Baron, who hired a city planner who used Washington DC as a template to create a planned city, making it one of the largest privately-owned planned cities at the time. At some point, “Mount Coffin” was dynamited to create gravel to build the roads. Yes, the real history of this place is a planned city based off DC whose roads are literally made from the remain of an exploded Native American burial ground. So, that gave me a bit of inspiration. Here is the “secret history” of Silver Springs. The European expedition was actually funded by a secret society of wealthy occultists and hedge wizards hoping to discover untapped sources of power in the West, or even evidence of the Lost Civilization of Mu. When they stumbled upon “Mount Coffin” (gonna need to rename that, it’s almost too on the nose), what they actually discovered was that the formation was hollow and led underground into a chamber containing ancient texts carved into the walls and…something…slumbering under the ground. It turns out in the language of the local natives, that the formation had a completely different name, “The Cradle of the Infant”. At some point in the distant past, some ancient civilization managed to trap an entity into quiescence under the earth and left detailed instructions on the walls of the “Cradle” on why it should never be woken up and how to keep it asleep. The Occultists were thrilled at the discovery, and spent over a decade translating the texts, and eventually decided that they could harness the power of this thing by building a better prison that could “leak” some of its energy for them. There is a long history of conspiracy theories and studies on the city planning of Washington DC. L’Enfant legitimately did some nifty mathematical tricks in planning the city, and there is some great reading on the subject and how his original plan never was completely realized (https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2018/02/21/l%E2%80%99enfant%E2%80%99s-sacred-design-washington-dc). In any case, Silver Springs is a case study of Sacred Geometry writ large. The entire city is a planned mystical grid built for the sole purpose of containing “The Infant” and siphoning a portion of its power into the 9 members of the “City Planning Commission” which oversees all new construction of the city (in actuality the 9 men who studied the creature and conceived of the scheme). The roads and sidewalks (made from the original material of the Cradle) cross in complex sacred designs, and the people walking and moving along them daily serve as a ritual strengthening of the grid. All of the buildings, skyscrapers, metro tunnels (finished and unfinished), etc. all serve as complex components of a city sized occult matrix that has been running uninterrupted for roughly 100 years. One of the first things these men did after moving the Infant into the “Nursery”, a structure they built under what would become City Hall, is summon a pair of ephemeral entities (Angels?) which were each given a specific task. The first one’s job is to maintain the grid and ensure that it continues functioning, while the second one was tasked with protecting the grid from discovery. I really dislike the God-Machine as an antagonist, but I love the idea of “covers”, so each of these two beings created complex covers that allow them to achieve their purposes. The first one’s cover is the bureaucracy that controls construction and upkeep of the city. It is the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of faceless government employees that exist only on the city website. It’s the rubber stamp that approves or denies construction permits. It’s the first of several paper-thin facades that only make sense when you are in the city, but crumble with persistent investigation. The second one’s cover is the “Oregon Office of Investigation” a state-run law enforcement agency (which the state doesn’t even know exists), that investigates matters that are beyond the city’s police force. The Director of this agency as well as a number of its agents are actually the cover for the second entity, which investigates strange phenomena in the city and then suppresses or eliminates anything that might reveal the existence of the grid or endanger it. Normal mortals work at and run these institutions, completely unaware that the people they answer to, or receive orders from are facades that don’t really exist. The magic of the city makes it hard for locals to recognize things like that the members of the City Planning Commission have never been seen in person, or that the OOI has had the same four agents working at it for 30+ years. Since the founding of the city, many monsters have moved in, mostly for their own purposes to dominate humans, cause suffering, or otherwise make their dens or nests. Most of these horrors have no idea about the strange origins of the city, while a few have noticed the mystic energies of the place and have tried tapping into it for their own purposes, none of them know the true scope of the work though since anything that comes close, human or horror, is eliminated by the twin entities. And what of the 9 men who built all of this? Well, poo poo went bad for them, for it turns out one of them was not a man at all but a creature born from the union of an Appalachia witch and some creature from the void between the stars. He had been trying to spread his genes for decades before he came upon the secret society, and he easily impressed them with his arcane gifts and occult knowledge. This creature, calling himself James Bell at the time, didn’t see The Infant as a means of power, but as GOD itself and secretly planned to awaken it to bring about a new eldritch utopia on Earth. His initial attempt to do so led to the death of the majority of the other occultists and led to a disastrous flood that damaged large parts of the early city. However, he failed. The city rebuilt itself (through the efforts of the first twin) and the last surviving occultist used the power of the grid to create a Cover for himself changing his identity so completely that even Bell’s magics couldn’t find him. And that’s been the status quo for nearly 100 years. The grid hums away, the city grows and shrinks like any other, the whole system on autopilot since all the men who built it are either dead or in hiding. But things are about to change. On one fateful night, the PCs will be playing a poker game together when tragedy strikes. The kindly old man living in the penthouse above is struck down by a truly random act of violence and all hell breaks loose. This event is the session 1 inciting event which will bring the group together as a cell, and the man struck down was the last surviving member (besides Bell) of the original 9 founders of the city. With his death, things will begin to spiral out of control and Bell will soon again make an attempt to awaken what he thinks is his God, likely with similar disastrous results. That’s kind of where I’m at right now. I’ve been trying to structure some scenarios that will clue the players into all of this as they go about hunting the city’s horrors. I can share some of those if people are interested, but I think this post is long enough already.
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Jun 2, 2023 05:05
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That's a very cool setting but if you want them investigating things, make sure to directly involve them in whatever caused the founder's death or at least be directly affected by some obvious and strange fallout related to it.
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Jun 2, 2023 14:17
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Anonymous Zebra posted:EDIT: Holy poo poo this post is kind of long. Sorry guys. That sounds rad, I hope it works well for you and your players! The God-Machine is only an antagonist if you force it to be. The God-Machine Is.
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Jun 2, 2023 16:25
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Small town conspiracy is always fun, and difficult to get more ridiculous than it does in real life. And now I'm reminded how Ghostbusters revolves around an apartment building that was designed and built specifically as a 'supernatural superconductor' to invite an interdimensional entity to destroy the world.
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Jun 2, 2023 17:34
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Soonmot posted:That's a very cool setting but if you want them investigating things, make sure to directly involve them in whatever caused the founder's death or at least be directly affected by some obvious and strange fallout related to it. Indeed. I am adapting a module called "Nightmare on Hill Manor" which was originally designed as a nWoD quickstart. The short summary is that there is an apartment complex build on the same ground as a family manor which burnt down killing the whole extended family. The secret history of the manor is that the patriarch of the family was haunted by some kind of entity that followed him wherever he went, but he finally met a mystic who showed him how to ward his land against the entity and the man finally got some peace as long as he never left the grounds of his estate. Eventually the entity found a way to possess a maid and managed to get her to burn the manor down with all the residents inside. It turned out that the same wards that kept the malevolent entity out, also trapped the ghosts of everyone else on the grounds of the manor where they eternally re-live burning up over and over. These ghosts were actively dangerous to anyone that tried to build on the land, and the original mystic felt bad about the whole thing so he sealed all the ghosts up in a cage, and ultimately moved into the penthouse of the apartment complex to make sure the ghosts couldn't harm anyone else. In the module, the death of the mystic releases the ghosts who (still trapped in the building itself) immediately pull a portion of the apartment complex into some kind of limbo state where they can torture and assault the residents. The PCs have to navigate past possessed neighbors, ghostly manifestations, and ultimately destroy the anchor that is allowing the ghosts to affect the material world. In my adaptation, the mystic upstairs is the surviving occultist who hid himself from Bell. His death is legitimately unrelated to the larger city plot, but while investigating him and trying to figure out how to free the apartments, a bevy of clues to his true identity will be made apparent to the PCs. Once they actually succeed, I intend to have them wake up in a hospital and told that a fire tore through the apartment complex and they are lucky to be alive. They'll be interviewed by the police, but there was also be an Office of Investigations agent there as well. If they tell their ghost story to the cops, the agent will be there to explain that poor maintenance led to a power outage and a giant fire, and that a carbon monoxide leak throughout the complex led to people being "confused" about what really happened. They'll be reassured that plenty of people had some wild hallucinations in the chaos, but that the situation was just one of bad luck and shoddy workmanship. This will be their first experience with the agents of this office, and the first clue that the Office of Investigations is going around actively suppressing certain events. Ghost Leviathan posted:Small town conspiracy is always fun, and difficult to get more ridiculous than it does in real life. Hah, you caught me. I've loved that aspect of Ghostbusters for a long time. I always thought it was really cool that some random occultist hid a beacon for some elder destroyer in a downtown apartment building. I've also always been obsessed with secret societies and the conspiracy theories behind Washington DC and all the Freemason crap people come up with on the internet. I know it's all BS, but some of it is so convoluted and fun to read about.
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Jun 2, 2023 18:12
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Sounds like a fun time! In other news, I was thinking of playing through Bloodlines again, thought about how the sheriff turned into the giant bat monster and then thought how cool it would be to have some werebats in my game, so I spent the morning recreating the Camazotz for my vampire game. They do to the land of the dead, what the werewolves do to the spirit world, basically. And yeah, that steps on geist's toes a bit, but we never introduced any geist NPCs in the werewolf game this is a sequel to. Plus a couple of my players can see ghosts and interact with them, I'm introducing the giovanni as a new secret sect of vampires, complete with necromancy bullshit, and the next chapter is going to be about stopping a ritual that uses a city wide disaster to fuel it and open a portal to the underworld.
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Jun 3, 2023 00:39
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Are there any good resources or collections of supernatural items for oWoD? I've put a traveling curio van in my game that one of the characters has a membership card to buy from and I'm just kind of looking for inspiration.
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Jun 3, 2023 03:36
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TheKingslayer posted:Are there any good resources or collections of supernatural items for oWoD? I've put a traveling curio van in my game that one of the characters has a membership card to buy from and I'm just kind of looking for inspiration. This Green Box Generator for Delta Green is a godsend for "give me ideas and I'll stat them up if I gotta": https://greenbox.robertshippey.net/
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Jun 3, 2023 03:42
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:This Green Box Generator for Delta Green is a godsend for "give me ideas and I'll stat them up if I gotta": https://greenbox.robertshippey.net/ lol ok after a few rolls I already love this "An appealingly new hammer. If someone should attempt to use it properly they will find every strike perfectly secures the nail it hit. If used as a weapon they well find half the damage inexplicably applied to them." That's a lot of fun and for sure going in the van.
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Jun 3, 2023 03:52
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Soonmot posted:Sounds like a fun time! A Camazotz was my favorite super-special-rare-one-of-a-kind-look-at-me-I'm-the-real-protagonist character I had in middle school. Is this oWoD or ChroD? Either way I wouldn't mind seeing what you came up with. Love me some werebats.
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Jun 4, 2023 17:35
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Digital Osmosis posted:ChroD? What's with everyone coming up with stupid abbreviations for it lately? ChroD ChoD (terrible) CofD CDark nWoD (still in use by old grogs) All things I've been seeing lately. Just call it CoD to mirror the formatting of WoD, why is this so complicated.
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Jun 4, 2023 17:57
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i will not. Call of Duty is about a completely different kind of monsters!
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Jun 4, 2023 18:04
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Fuzz posted:What's with everyone coming up with stupid abbreviations for it lately? Because I'm not letting these fuckers get away with trying to pretend the "Chronicles of Darkness" is anything but the new new World of Darkness! They may have rebranded, but I remember! 
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Jun 4, 2023 18:28
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Digital Osmosis posted:A Camazotz was my favorite super-special-rare-one-of-a-kind-look-at-me-I'm-the-real-protagonist character I had in middle school. Is this oWoD or ChroD? Either way I wouldn't mind seeing what you came up with. Love me some werebats. Short version is the five forms as normal, only instead of a dire bat, they get a bat swarm form. I tried getting cute with names and calling these aspects, but am kind of meh on what I have. For Auspices I went with Breed, which is the type of bat they're descended from and dictates their bat form. I had 5 initially, but two of them really overlapped because I went for a mystic type and medium type , so I jsut folded both of those into the vampire bat breed. You get the mystic, the spy, the warrior, and the socialite splats. Finally, for the tribes, I cut it down to three based on how the prefer to deal with their dead. Long version: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1giHyOwMQ0FH4rcbcGz_AZrNHTlrGsAqmn1JDDYaY1l8/edit?usp=sharing
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Jun 4, 2023 19:23
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I Am Just a Box posted:We know that Rose Bailey was batting around the ideas that she eventually crafted into Demon: the Descent at least as far back as Hunter: the Vigil and put that DNA into the greater demons (as well as into a couple NPCs in other pre-Demon books, like Midnight Roads). They have five Fiendish Flaws that scan like Hunter's interpretation of what was presumably an X-splat concept that was later abandoned. Sample demon Mister White yearns to return to a rightful "clockwork reality." There are definite differences at this early stage, with some kind of compulsive need to tempt people into vice, and pacts that exchange vice for knowledge rather than lives for material gain. (Seems possible that World of Darkness: Inferno and Demon: the Descent might have been two branching evolutions of a single brainstorming cluster?) Very interesting, thank you!
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Jun 4, 2023 19:33
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NWoD as "New World of Darkness" makes so much sense that I really don't know why they made it more complicated. Maybe they didn't want people thinking it only took place in the Americas?
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Jun 4, 2023 20:41
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ChroD looks hilarious so its best.
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Jun 4, 2023 20:54
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moths posted:NWoD as "New World of Darkness" makes so much sense that I really don't know why they made it more complicated. It caused brand awkwardness when they decided they wanted to start making more old World of Darkness books and didn't want to make more new World of Darkness books.
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Jun 4, 2023 20:54
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every person i've ever talked to about the game lines outside this thread didn't know the difference or at least got them mixed up, which is probably why they did it it's just that they presumably think of this as brand dilution, while i think it's hilarious
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Jun 4, 2023 21:18
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:every person i've ever talked to about the game lines outside this thread didn't know the difference, which is probably why they did it *licenses the creation of "20th anniversary" editions of the previous games* *starts making new editions of the previous games again* *stops licensing the creation of additional products for the new-but-now-not-newest games* please help, my brand is so dilute. who could have done this
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Jun 4, 2023 21:20
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"diplomatic incident with chechnya? racist asian vampires? nazi furs? nah, that was White Wolf, these games aren't even made by the same company. no, they're still incredibly problematic, just for completely different reasons"
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Jun 4, 2023 21:20
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:*licenses games but different from the current games* A very "Who killed Hannibal" moment here.
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Jun 4, 2023 21:33
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Trying to explain what game I actually wanted to run when I was selling Hunter: The Vigil (original flavor) was certainly something else. "So, back in '91 White Wolf released Vampire: The Masquerade and it was really popular so they ended up creating a shared meta-plot setting (but not necessarily a shared rule set) for a bunch of different games which they called "The World of Darkness", or WoD. *players nod along* "Then back in the early 2000's they ended all of those game lines with assorted apocalyptic meta-plots and made a whole new storytelling system with new game lines. They named this new system, "The World of Darkness". But that was confusing, so most people called it the "New World of Darkness", nWoD, while the older games were called just called the "Old World of Darkness" oWoD. *players squint their eyes but continue to nod* Also most of the games in the nWoD had the same name as in the oWoD except for the text following the colon, so Vampire: The Masquerade (VtM) became Vampire: The Requiem (VtR), or Mage: The Ascension (MtA) became Mage: The Awakening (MtA)...what...oh yea, both mage games have the same acronym, you need to extend it out to MtAc or MtAw...okay so moving on... *players squint harder* ...you can ignore all of that because the game I want to run is this one *shows book* Hunter: The Vigil *one player starts asking about Hunter: The Reckoning 5e* Ok, ok. So White Wolf imploded and was bought by an Icelandic MMORPG company who wanted to use the license to make a World of Darkness MMO...what?....I think the Old World of Darkness, not the new....Ok, so at some point they started putting out 20th Anniversary versions of the oWoD games, but also 1.5E versions of nWoD games....huh...who was putting them out?....I don't actually know....a third company I haven't mentioned yet...I think... ????? Okay, lets just skip to the end, another video game company bought White Wolf and some Swedish guy revived Vampire.....what? No....VtM, not VtR. This was Vampire 5e, but also they decided to make other oWoD games as new editions, and this shared game system is called.....................The World of Darkness (WoD), and now the oWoD is referred to as the "Classic World of Darkness" (cWoD). Meanwhile another company kept making nWoD stuff which they called 2e, but they didn't want to be confused with WoD or cWoD, or oWoD, so they named their system the "Chronicles of Darkness" (CoD, CofD, ChroD, fuckme). Okay, got all of that?EDIT Also, none of the books you buy will reflect these acronyms and all of them will just say "World of Darkness" on them.
Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Jun 4, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 21:52
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moths posted:NWoD as "New World of Darkness" makes so much sense that I really don't know why they made it more complicated. It was never officially "New World of Darkness," it was always officially just "World of Darkness" and it was the fans who had to call it nWoD to distinguish it. Giving it a distinct official title was the better move, and something different than "new" both avoids defining it purely by contrast with the oWoD and, later on, avoids confusion and inaccuracy when new oWoD books started coming out concurrently, and now this point we've reached where the oWoD books are newer than the nWoD books. But they sat on their original decision to just call it 'World of Darkness" for way too long, so by the time Paradox made them change it, everybody got confused as to what the name change meant. Officially, CofD is just a line-wide rebranding, so first edition books are still valid to refer to as CofD content even though they say "World of Darkness" on them. It just means the same thing as "nWoD." But I've seen people use "CofD" as synonymous with "nWoD second edition." I've even seen people refer to "nWoD second edition" as the second edition stuff that came out before the name rebranding and "CofD" as the second edition stuff that came out after.
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Jun 5, 2023 00:58
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LatwPIAT posted:Because I'm not letting these fuckers get away with trying to pretend the "Chronicles of Darkness" is anything but the new new World of Darkness! They may have rebranded, but I remember! The New World of Darkness can be drafted and vote in the States. But can't rent a car yet.
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Jun 5, 2023 02:37
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If someone hasn't made "nWoD" shirts in the style of the nWo from wrestling they're just leaving money on the table.
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Jun 5, 2023 03:18
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Think I'll line up a MtAw campaign for after my friend wraps up a campaign of a different game that I'm in. What would break if I were to just hand out experience every other session (or every big session) instead of messing with beats? I feel like beats are hard to keep track of sometimes, even if you use the group beats option. Also, trying to think of a cool city to set it in so I have an excuse to read history books about the city. Currently in a toss-up between Mexico City, Paris, and Berlin. Whirling fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Jun 5, 2023 |
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Jun 5, 2023 06:50
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