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Fuzz posted:Getting a matching Resonance can temporarily jump your rating up by 1 without giving you a power, that's the abnormal situation. I'm not sure I'm parsing that correctly - I know it can give you a bonus die but in my head that's not the same as raising the rating.
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Jul 7, 2023 08:41
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citybeatnik posted:I'm not sure I'm parsing that correctly - I know it can give you a bonus die but in my head that's not the same as raising the rating. Ehhh, the only time actual rating vs number of die matters is with stuff like Celerity, where let's say you only have Celerity 4 and don't have Blurred Momentum and some lady wants to Lightning Strike stab you in the face. In that situation anyone with a Celerity of 5 could match her speed and thus negate the power, if you had a resonance bonus to Celerity, that would count as Celerity 5 for the purposes of you negating the power and matching speed. The other situations where it could matter is for something like Prowess, where if you only had Potence 2 but had the Resonance boost, it'd count as Potence 3 for the purposes of the damage modifier, so you'd get +2 to melee damage (since it rounds up) instead of +1, or +3 to unarmed damage instead of +2.
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Jul 7, 2023 14:05
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Ah, alright - those are edge cases that haven't really come up in our game all that much due to 1) how stingy both the system and our ST is with xp and 2) we're all a bunch of old grognards from the bad old days of the New Bremen chat (seems like half of the dang vampire ST team, myself included, are in the sessions) so most of the time we just go "gently caress this random rolling poo poo". The ST's take is that anyone with intense resonance is at least a mildly important NPC that you run into on the regular as opposed to it happening due to a dice roll. We get into the occasional kerfluffle re Discipline learning since just going "yo I need some of that Sad Juice so I'm going to some emo poetry so I can learn Obfuscate" doesn't always fly and since our cotorie's a jumble of different clans (Malk, Noss, Tzim, Tremere, Ventrue, and Ravnos) getting a group herd that serves everyone is next to impossible. That's not even getting into the cornucopia of Predator Types we have - my Ravnos can't feed from locals so thank god the game's set in Los Angeles. I like the fluff behind the system - the clans are drawn to various groups of people as much by how their resonance empowers them as by philosophy - but the bookkeeping can be a little over the top.
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Jul 7, 2023 18:35
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Refresh my memory, is Resonance for learning a Discipline or raising it?
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Jul 7, 2023 19:30
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Dawgstar posted:Thanks. I dig the rules by the by. I'm thinking of running a Hecata game if I can get enough interest and will probably yoink them for my game. Thanks! It worked pretty well for the games we did, hope it works out for you! Fuzz posted:I always find with static exp costs, people tend to beeline end stage powers and you get really specialized and lopsided characters, rather than something with more nuance. Honestly that's all features for my group rather than issues, letting them get to their cool powers more easily, and also this is a dicepool system, so it does reward specialization and I feel it is fine to let players do just that. That said, in the three campaigns I ran with this, and a fourth in which I was a player, only one character got to a level 5 discipline (and that was our notorious resident power player). This will naturally change, since I am about to wrap up a Mage game during the Black Plague and the follow up will be an Anarch Revolt campaign with the returning vamp PCs as Ancillas, so I might eat my words. I feel this also side-steps the "pick a predator style that will give you a third dot in a discipline" being the optimal play from ~XP-economics~. I do like that linear XP table, though! Definitely an improvement on the base rules. I might give it a try if I run V5 with a new campaign instead of a follow up.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:21
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Dawgstar posted:Refresh my memory, is Resonance for learning a Discipline or raising it? Both.
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Jul 7, 2023 23:45
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ZearothK posted:I feel this also side-steps the "pick a predator style that will give you a third dot in a discipline" being the optimal play from ~XP-economics~.  Same book.
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Jul 8, 2023 05:36
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ah, the "there was an old lady who swallowed a fly" school of game design
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Jul 8, 2023 13:26
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I'm just glad that the thing I complained about immediately to be met with a chorus of "it's not a big deal" "it's just 10xp" "an out of clan discipline is totally worth the shortfall since it's so rare" etc is now such a widely acknowledged problem people are breaking out indesign or whatever in the course of fixing it.
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Jul 8, 2023 17:51
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Ferrinus posted:I'm just glad that the thing I complained about immediately to be met with a chorus of "it's not a big deal" "it's just 10xp" "an out of clan discipline is totally worth the shortfall since it's so rare" etc is now such a widely acknowledged problem people are breaking out indesign or whatever in the course of fixing it. It's always been a problem, people have been using that rule for years.
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Jul 8, 2023 20:06
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Fuzz posted:It's always been a problem, people have been using that rule for years. Sure, and some portion of players were quick to fix XP scaling problems with the oWoD, nWoD, Exalted, etc. as well. But I remember making the obvious criticism of predator type back around V5's release and immediately getting a bunch of far too familiar responses like, oh, so XP is the only thing that matters?? You don't think versatility is good???
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Jul 8, 2023 23:36
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My bigger beef is with Blood Leech. It's just a dumb and lovely PT and way out of scale with all the others, both in penalty and in power level since you get a BP bump with it. LAbN sorta proved my point in that the PT itself ends up becoming a huge part of the character and their narrative and it just keeps coming up constantly and is borderline distracting/overly melodramatic for one player. I'm one of those old school farts that thinks if any one thing on your sheet is so overbearing as to fundamentally define your character and a large part of their interactions with basically everything, that's a crutch and badly designed. Even Organovore isn't that in your face.
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Jul 9, 2023 00:22
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Fuzz posted:My bigger beef is with Blood Leech. It's just a dumb and lovely PT and way out of scale with all the others, both in penalty and in power level since you get a BP bump with it. LAbN sorta proved my point in that the PT itself ends up becoming a huge part of the character and their narrative and it just keeps coming up constantly and is borderline distracting/overly melodramatic for one player. I'm one of those old school farts that thinks if any one thing on your sheet is so overbearing as to fundamentally define your character and a large part of their interactions with basically everything, that's a crutch and badly designed. Even Organovore isn't that in your face. Honestly past a certain point while I enjoyed LA By night I mostly just remember Annabelle crying which did not seem to impede her leading the region's Anarchs at all.
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Jul 9, 2023 01:12
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Dawgstar posted:Honestly past a certain point while I enjoyed LA By night I mostly just remember Annabelle crying which did not seem to impede her leading the region's Anarchs at all. Literally any episode where she wasn't involved in the later seasons was good. I can't remember a character I went from liking to absolutely hating over the course of a story as much as Annabelle.
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Jul 9, 2023 04:55
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Glad it isn't just me who remembers that character mainly for excessive crying.
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Jul 9, 2023 10:33
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Flakey posted:Glad it isn't just me who remembers that character mainly for excessive crying. Yeah, it was obviously Ishii's first Vampire game and a neonate is a great POV character if you're trying to hook people into your hashtag vamily but after it's all said and done I genuinely don't think the whole Chosen One vibe was necessary and additionally maybe Erika was a bit confused on 'Brujah = emotional' so in this case that meant thinking her head were waters, and her eyes a fountain of tears. Everybody else is good to great (and I don't even think Ishii is bad, exactly, just tiresome),* though, and I'd recommend it if watching such a thing is a thing you'd do. *Annoyingly on my rewatch I forgot Satine Phoenix shows up as a member of the Ministry and even before we knew she was a lovely person I think her portrayal on some level turned me off on the Ministry as a clan. She just turns up the once, though. Had a busy schedule of abusing employees and convention staff to get to, I imagine.
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Jul 9, 2023 14:35
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Hey WoD thread, I know some of you also hang out in the F&F thread so you know I've been reviewing classic WoD books, but for the folks who don't read that thread, today marks a year that I've been reading and reviewing classic WoD books over on Joylessdivisions World of Dorkness So far I've worked through 13 first edition (and one 2nd edition) books covering the 5 original 1e corebooks and the first supplement released post corebook. Currently I'm working my way through the Samuel Haight adventure in the "Haighters Gonna Hate" series with both "Valkenburg Foundation" and "Storytellers Handbook to the Sabbat" completed and "Rage Across the Amazon" currently in draft. So if you're interested, give it a read and watch as I slowly lose my mind reading 90's RPG schlock!
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Jul 9, 2023 19:03
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joylessdivision posted:So if you're interested, give it a read and watch as I slowly lose my mind reading 90's RPG schlock! It's been fun. You point out the flaws but you've also made the buy-in.
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Jul 9, 2023 23:04
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To accompany this self-promotion with my own shamelessness, I'm also reviewing the best and worst of the oWoD's novels in there at the moment. We just wrapped Book 1 of the Masquerade of the Red Death trilogy.
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Jul 10, 2023 02:05
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Fuzz posted:
Do they have alternatives for clan-specific cotorie merits? Because i sure would like to have something other than "spend 9xp for the undead equivalent of Cockney rhyming slang".
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Jul 10, 2023 14:33
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What's the minimum amount of dice do you want in your predator pool on average?
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Jul 10, 2023 15:02
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citybeatnik posted:Do they have alternatives for clan-specific cotorie merits? Because i sure would like to have something other than "spend 9xp for the undead equivalent of Cockney rhyming slang". Maybe some book does, can't attest to quality. That one has clan specific mythic flaws and new clan compulsions, though.
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Jul 10, 2023 15:56
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Started a campaign with some friends last Friday and I'm thinking about writing up each session in the thread, if that's cool? If it's annoying just let me know. Kind of want to journal the whole thing. So, I am one of three players. The set up is a vampire circus, the Crimson Circus, run by a Toreador elder named Alaric and staffed by vampires, ghouls, and some human herds. At the story's beginning, the circus has just arrived in Philadelphia after having to make a hasty exit from New York. The circus's second in command, sort of a sheriff figure, has abruptly left and the ringleader is not revealing why. They are rushing to setup the attractions as quickly as possible, the first night in Philly. Then we get to our coterie of neonates, though they are only coworkers at this point. First is Michael, a black sheep ventrue treated as a disgrace to the blood. We aren't exactly sure all of why yet. She operates as the bookkeeper of the circus, and has essentially become the second in charge by default. She is called to meet with Alaric the ringleader upon rising, early in the night. Alaric instructs her on a few things to be taken care of around the circus, and that she is taking over the absent 2nd in charge's position. She heads out to see to a few things around camp, learning what the Brujah Judas is doing, at which point we transition to the next pc... Marley Oakes, a Ravnos illusionist and fortune teller that only recently joined the circus after awakening from a torpor of many years. Sort of a... Jim Jones before he killed everybody kind of guy. More groovy and affable. Manipulative and clever. He is setting up his own tent, and speaking with a few of the other workers that also operate in the outskirts around the main tent. One of the other vampires shows him a strange item, a sort of ink pen shaped item said to be magical. It gives the wielder delusions of grandeur, Marley learns. Also, he considers using chimerstry to gently caress with someone that's being a dick, but decides to stay chill and go with the flow. Just sort of getting comfortable with the circus operation still. We move on from Marley to a very different sort of guy. Judas of the brujah clan, a pain in the rear end thats been with the circus for a few years. A former ghoul for several decades, he is well acquainted with vampire culture, but largely uses that knowledge to know how to piss people off. He awakes last, and the bruiser meanders out of his trailer to find a gangrel tight rope walker named Izzy practicing her craft outside. He sneaks over and snips the wire she is practicing on. Rather than being annoyed, she challenges Judas to a contest later for who can hunt the most humans, with the prize being an ak47. After agreeing, enthusiastically, judas is approached by his "boss"... judas fluctuates between a main attraction as a daredevil and knife thrower, to being busted down to regular carny work. After a gently caress up from the last show, he's back to helping set up the kiddie rides. The human boss of the carnys orders him to fill the dunk tank, and leaves. Judas ignores him and goes to find his human herd member, who is also his supplier for the side business he runs selling hard drugs behind the teacups. Before they can hammer out everything, an all-hands meeting is called. All three characters arrive at the main tent to listen to the Ringleader. He stresses the importance of a good first impression to the city, to quickly set everything up and put on a good show tonight. He also instructs everyone not to get into any altercations with the protestors outside. Best behavior. Michael then gives a few words as well, standing at his side, to encourage the workers further. The meeting concludes, and judas corners Michael immediately, offering to sort out the protestor problem if she helps him get his motorcycle show back. She agrees, but also orders him to get Marley as well. The three of them make their way to the main entrance to meet the unions. The leader of the protestors is adamant about wanting to meet the ringleader, thoroughly ignoring Michael. Judas pretends to be Alaric, for all of about 5 seconds before he fucks it up. Marley makes use of his rank of Presence to Awe the group, to rescue the situation. He gets 5 successes. All the protestors suddenly see reason, and are convinced to just wait for a couple days until things die down... but Judas is Impatient. The Brujah promptly fails his roll to resist impatience, and bluntly says why wait? Let's march them to Alaric and give them whatever they want. He's pro-union, after all. The union members, awed by Marley still, tell him to stop being a dick. This triggers a low difficulty frenzy roll... which he also fails. Before he can start ripping people apart, however, Michael steps in to calm him down. The protestors leave with their lives, as Judas regains control. Michael calms the pissed off brute with another job, to bring the union leader to her alone. Alive. And that is where the first session ends. I thought it was pretty good, though the storyteller definitely went a little easy on me with the frenzy... probably should've been a lot messier and honestly I'll push to be messier next time. I also need to take better notes, I've forgotten a few of the details. Everybody was awesome though and I'm really looking forward to the next session.
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Jul 10, 2023 17:55
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Actual plays are always welcome to post in here! My players have met with the Carthians on the other side of town, set up a meeting between the their faction and the carthians where the carthians were allowed to create their own set of "justicars" and only those two coteries, are allowed to enter the rival territory. They were then attacked by ghost possesed humans and, with the help of their werewolf allies. Managed to get the leadership safe and reverse the possessions while mantaining the masquerade. Currently, the nosferatu is learning that his sire is an actual monster, as he was tasked with kidnapping a shopkeeper from his sire's territory and making the man watch as his family's car was hit by a train and then set on fire, for the sin of trying to improve his neighborhood. Hari, the nosferatu was then pulled towards no man's land by blood sympathy and met his grandsire who's in charge of the circle of the crone. Our venture unwittingly helped out a demon who she is sure is a fae do some rube goldberg bullshit in exchange for information, the gangrel found out that her mentor figure is actually the vampire who was the mythical pirate founder of Santa Sangre and the story behind her cursed sword. Our Deava is setting up a series of favors that will allow the lancea to begin embracing agains since they were almost totally wiped out in the war and our mekhet is throwing a concert in order to create a sex cult that was interuppted by tainted drugs.
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Jul 10, 2023 18:35
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I may be starting up recruiting for a recorded AP of my Old West campaign, now in V5. I managed to get Foundry to ape the New York games. Linked because people may hate the images. Still working out kinks and getting all the assets together, plus, you know, actually finding reliable players that aren't poo poo, which is the hardest part. 
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Jul 10, 2023 18:47
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Mors Rattus posted:some days you just really want to gently caress up a door Omnicrom posted:Ages and ages and AGES ago I remember a website where a lady posted the highlights of her RPG sessions, one of which involved spending about two hours trying to figure out how to get through an open, unlocked, completely safe doorway. Yeah, this happened in the first Mage game I ever played too. A full party of mages stuck in a hallway arguing over the safest and Wisest way to get through a door, ultimately deciding to use an Artifact to disintegrate it. It was, of course, unlocked.
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Jul 10, 2023 23:40
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Dammit Who? posted:Yeah, this happened in the first Mage game I ever played too. A full party of mages stuck in a hallway arguing over the safest and Wisest way to get through a door, ultimately deciding to use an Artifact to disintegrate it. It was, of course, unlocked. Guess that sets me apart from most STs 
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Jul 11, 2023 00:16
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Dammit Who? posted:Yeah, this happened in the first Mage game I ever played too. A full party of mages stuck in a hallway arguing over the safest and Wisest way to get through a door, ultimately deciding to use an Artifact to disintegrate it. It was, of course, unlocked. I asked him today why he did what he did and he replied that he thought obsfucate wouldn't work because at level 1, i wouldn't let him walk past armed guards into a secure area since at that level you're not invisible, just unremarkable.
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Jul 11, 2023 01:34
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Soonmot posted:I asked him today why he did what he did and he replied that he thought obsfucate wouldn't work because at level 1, i wouldn't let him walk past armed guards into a secure area since at that level you're not invisible, just unremarkable. Always assume that what you think is obvious when you're communicating a situation to players is not nearly as obvious as you think. It's just a thing about tabletop thinking, you get distracted by other things or you have other assumptions.
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Jul 11, 2023 04:30
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AmiYumi posted:I had a group take a moment OOC to thank me once because I just handwaved getting through a locked door - they were professionals breaking into the flophouse apartment of a missing guy, I figured they knew what they were doing and had time so why bother when success/failure wasn’t meaningful? I think this is a good STing principle in general, that you should only call for a roll for something if both failure and success would be acceptable and interesting outcomes. If not, either change the stakes or don't botther rolling. If I recall rightly that's part of the philosophy behind the Trail of Cthulhu system, that "roll to find a clue" isn't a good way to run a mystery because if you fail the roll the game stops until you figure something else out. However, I think a lot of rolls that wouldn't pass that test in other systems would in Mage, becuase the roll often doesn't determine whether you succeed but when and how. Like, as a full party of mages, we were going to get through that door. There was no question about that. What made the situation interesting (and I have to stress that the ST didn't intend to make this a barrier for us, we dumbassed our way into it all on our own) is what we were willing to do, what resources we were willing to expend or collateral damage we were willing to accept to get through it.
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Jul 11, 2023 07:12
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In CineD the topic came up of the Invisible Man sci-fi series from the early 00s, which apparently was actually pretty good despite fuckall budget, and its premise is interesting- a secret agent is given an implant that allows him to turn invisible, though there's problems with it including that every time he uses it is gives him brain poisoning. And the secret government agency he works for, the only place who can supply treatment for it, has no budget, no authority, and gets no respect from any other part of the government, and even gets shunted around between government departments and put up to all kinds of odd jobs. Feels like it could be a concept for a Deviant character, and having a support structure that's existent but shoestring makes for an interesting dynamic.
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Jul 11, 2023 11:12
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I Am Just a Box posted:Always assume that what you think is obvious when you're communicating a situation to players is not nearly as obvious as you think. It's just a thing about tabletop thinking, you get distracted by other things or you have other assumptions. Good point. We did turn it into a fun scene where he ambushed a cop using nightmare and the rat living in his chest that's replaced his heart.
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Jul 11, 2023 15:57
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Ghost Leviathan posted:In CineD the topic came up of the Invisible Man sci-fi series from the early 00s, which apparently was actually pretty good despite fuckall budget, and its premise is interesting- a secret agent is given an implant that allows him to turn invisible, though there's problems with it including that every time he uses it is gives him brain poisoning. And the secret government agency he works for, the only place who can supply treatment for it, has no budget, no authority, and gets no respect from any other part of the government, and even gets shunted around between government departments and put up to all kinds of odd jobs. How does deviant handle working (semi-willingly) with the conspiracy? It's been years since I watched the show, but as I recall more often than not the agency wasn't really portrayed as evil.
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Jul 11, 2023 16:58
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Explodingdice posted:How does deviant handle working (semi-willingly) with the conspiracy? It's been years since I watched the show, but as I recall more often than not the agency wasn't really portrayed as evil. They're called the Devoted. I believe there's a sourcebook supposed to come out dedicated to this.
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Jul 11, 2023 17:10
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TheCenturion posted:They're called the Devoted. I believe there's a sourcebook supposed to come out dedicated to this. It has come out. It seemed good at what it does from a quick skim, but what it does is a lot of the mechanical interaction with the conspiracy that's theoretically interesting but when I read it I just bounce off.
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Jul 11, 2023 17:48
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Yes. The Devoted Companion came out just a few weeks ago. It’s laser-focused on how to run a Deviant game based around the Devoted (Deviants who still work for a Conspiracy. This Conspiracy can be the one that created them, or another that recruits them later.) I don’t use it much right now since I’m running a standard game of Renegades (Deviants who escaped and fight Conspiracies), but it looks perfect for what it’s designed to run.
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Jul 11, 2023 17:49
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TheCenturion posted:They're called the Devoted. I believe there's a sourcebook supposed to come out dedicated to this. Any indication as to how that sourcebook might revise or adjust conspiracies? The core of Devient seemed to depend on having an antagonist force constantly at your back, so am interested to see if they can make the turn. e. Or, since it apparently the Devoted sourcebook came out, does the game still work without a conspiracy to oppose?
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Jul 11, 2023 18:25
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Pakxos posted:Or, since it apparently the Devoted sourcebook came out, does the game still work without a conspiracy to oppose? Yes, if you want it to. Also it's not assumed that you aren't opposing your conspiracy. Just that you are part of it. Being a part of it doesn't mean it's not an issue, doesn't have things you'd want to change or combat. After all it's still the same game, and consider how the conspiracies want to treat the average Deviant. Great, well that's sort of place the average Devoted is part of. You can tell a story where your Devoted are generally accepted members of some degree of functioning organization, or you can tell a story where the are basically just lab rats that don't have to be captured first. They give you options. But if you wanted to play a group that has a few Devoted and has a focus other than snagging Deviants off the street and being nebulously evil, it's 100% possible.
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Jul 11, 2023 19:23
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Mulva posted:But if you wanted to play a group that has a few Devoted and has a focus other than snagging Deviants off the street and being nebulously evil, it's 100% possible. Hm - this is trpgs so everything is possible, but from your descriptions it doesn't sound like it provides as many mechanical/story widgets for a play-style other than Tetsuo the Iron Bounty Hunter.
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Jul 11, 2023 19:27
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You can also be fighting a Conspiracy while serving a different one as a Devoted. Conspiracies often have opposing agendas and fight all the time. The Avengers could be positioned as a Devoted cohort serving a Conspiracy (SHIELD) by fighting another (HYDRA). The main mechanical difference is that the Devoted ratio of Loyalty:Conviction Touchstones is flipped, so they’re more focused on protecting the allies & assets than avenging themselves against their enemies. Gatto Grigio fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Jul 11, 2023 |
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Jul 11, 2023 19:43
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