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citybeatnik posted:So here's a rules interaction i trying to work my head around. Blood Stained Love introduced a merit that boosts your Humanity with regards to Blush of Life, eating, and boning. Either +1 or +2. Which means, hilariously, you can be effectively Humanity 9 or 10 at start. So you look sickly while eating a burger or whatever. But... I believe they vomit up the undigested material later, but I suppose they could also pass it through the digestive tract, completely undigested, and excrete it. Chew thoroughly. Edit: the 5e rulebook says at H10, they can 'digest food as if human.' That's a clunky way of putting it. As you say, gut flora doesn't suddenly spring into life. Unless the idea is 'you've spent so long at H8 and H9 to get to H10 that you probably have developed some gut flora, but we're not going to bother talking about how messy a process that is, because this isn't that kind of game.' No Blush of Life, you vomit it up pretty much right away; roll composure to make it to the bathroom or bushes first. Blush of Life, you vomit it up an hour later, hopefully in private. Humanity 9 or 10, I guess the food passes through undigested. Again, chew thoroughly. Can you post the actual merit text? I don't have a copy of Blood Stained Love. TheCenturion fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Feb 2, 2024 |
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Feb 2, 2024 20:21
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I’m sorry but you need to play out a scene of the vampire eating the poop of someone to inherit their gut bacteria. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense! Can you just eat the stomach instead? Don’t be absurd. And don’t look under the table at my pants.
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Feb 2, 2024 22:28
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TheCenturion posted:I believe they vomit up the undigested material later, but I suppose they could also pass it through the digestive tract, completely undigested, and excrete it. Chew thoroughly.
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Feb 2, 2024 23:06
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TheCenturion posted:I believe they vomit up the undigested material later, but I suppose they could also pass it through the digestive tract, completely undigested, and excrete it. Chew thoroughly. Humanity 10/9 also means you have perma-Blush on so i guess you could still have it going? You can digest raw and rare meat at humanity 9 as well as most liquids. And you can drink wine fine at Humanity 8 as well (but need to activate Blush of Life with a reroll). Anyway, here's the actual text. quote:Not all Kindred resemble walking corpses as they lose themselves to the Beast. For purposes of the Blush of Life, eating or drinking, and sexual intercourse, treat your Humanity score as one point higher than it is (maximum 10), or two points higher if this merit was purchased for 4 dots. Nosferatu cannot select this merit, and Hecata can only select it as a two-dot merit. This merit doesn’t combine with others that treat your Humanity as higher: if you have multiple ways to treat your humanity as higher than it is, choose the most effective one in any situation. You're obviously not meant to start with Humanity 9+ at creation so this is mostly just an absurd edge case that led to a fun discussion with my group about things that don't actually involve the aftermath. "Digestion" v "consuming", whether a vampire can move vitae about from a wound for bonding purposes via force of will or if you need to activate Blush for your heart to pump it out, why on earth a vampire would need to trick a routine medical exam in the first place, etc. Plus an actual deeper reading of the Blush of Life rules where you need to use it to actually work a touch screen. I maxed it out for my Lasombra in an upcoming game because it fit with his background being a hedonistic rear end in a top hat while being mostly useless in the actual game set in Anchorage. Plus fits with some Folkloric Blocks he'll run into based off Knik practices that are going to come as a huge surprise to him. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Feb 3, 2024 |
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Feb 3, 2024 01:36
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I'm not sure I like blush bumping your humanity instead of just a flat narrative effect of "you can pass as alive for a scene"
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Feb 3, 2024 03:19
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Soonmot posted:I'm not sure I like blush bumping your humanity instead of just a flat narrative effect of "you can pass as alive for a scene" Blush of Life works for a night and basically does that, yeah. Up All Night the merit only interacts specifically with Blush, eating, and boning. It does not, as an example, let you halve sunlight damage (Humanity 10) or heal Superficial as a human (Humanity 9), nor stay awake past dawn. Nor will you be able to avoid the social roll penalties you start to hit at Humanity 5 or less (such as, amusingly, only being able to write lovely purple prose per the blurb on 238). But if you have the merit at +1 and are Humanity 7 you can drink (significant pause) wine and reroll the Rouse checks for Blush of Life as if you were a Humanity higher.
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Feb 3, 2024 04:19
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citybeatnik posted:Blush of Life works for a night and basically does that, yeah.  a whole book about how vampires can gently caress. God drat I love how stupid the WoD is. I did buy it, but I haven't had a chance to read the pdf for it or Blood Sigils (which is very pretty in print) yet because I'm back to melting my brain reviewing 1e books. Succubus Club was real good for a book from 91.
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Feb 3, 2024 04:34
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joylessdivision posted:
Oh it's hella loving stupid and the only parts I've read are the merits and the Disciplines since it has a ceremony for Oblivion. Some folks in my group gush about it and it apparently does a halfway decent job of discussing boundaries and consent...? I dunno. I just find the idea of a dude used to partying in Miami or Ibiza getting shitcanned to Alaska like he's being sent to New South Wales to be hilarious. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Feb 3, 2024 |
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Feb 3, 2024 06:59
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citybeatnik posted:But if you have the merit at +1 and are Humanity 7 you can drink (significant pause) wine and reroll the Rouse checks for Blush of Life as if you were a Humanity higher.
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Feb 3, 2024 07:13
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Don't ask the Storyteller to mediate the mechanical consequences of the miracle of Christ during play — settle that poo poo in synod zero.
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Feb 3, 2024 07:53
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citybeatnik posted:I dunno. I just find the idea of a dude used to partying in Miami or Ibiza getting shitcanned to Alaska like he's being sent to New South Wales to be hilarious. Let me tell you a little tale about the SA forums and a pop star named Pitbull…
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Feb 3, 2024 12:48
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joylessdivision posted:
Blood Sigils is unironically one of the best books to come out since, like... Damnation City.
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Feb 3, 2024 14:53
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citybeatnik posted:
That does indeed sound hilarious. Fuzz posted:Blood Sigils is unironically one of the best books to come out since, like... Damnation City. I'm looking forward to reading it at some point, but I'm not running any games currently so my drive to read the 5e books I have is lessened because I'm back on my classic WoD review grind.
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Feb 3, 2024 17:00
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I'd like to write an article on mental health and its depictions in RPGs and was curious to mine the collective knowledge of the World of Darkness thread. I'm thinking about things like sanity systems and depictions of particular disorders. I'm very familiar with Call of Cthulhu but not as much so World of Darkness, especially more recent books. I'm also really interested in how the different games include or discuss psychiatric medicine in the context of supernatural creatures. In terms of mental health and identity related topics, I'm most familiar with Changeling, Werewolf, and Vampire touching on them. - Vampire's Malkavians/Malkovians are obvious. - I have a vague memory of Changeling having some material on banality that might relate to antidepressants or other meds but I never played it. This is the kind of thing that can be exaggerated in forum discussions too, so I wanted to check. - I had heard that recent Werewolf dipped into some areas relating to identity (trans characters) and vaccination. I wasn't sure if Werewolf, past or present, had much to say about werewolves and mental health. For the Changeling and Werewolf stuff, which books would be best to read more? Are there other books I'm missing (maybe World of Darkness Slashers?) that would be relevant?
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Feb 4, 2024 18:43
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Mental health has always been terrible in wod. In all the old school corebooks, losing your morality Stat would lead to derangement. So I'd look into the core books of the big three plus changeling, the players guides too. Slashers might have something in there because they have the Hannibal lector splat, but I can't recall off the top of.my head. CoD moved away from using derangements but I think promethean and changeling both touch on issues of mental health.
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Feb 4, 2024 18:50
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Changeling: The Lost is very much a look at PTSD from abusive environments.
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Feb 4, 2024 18:55
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Sionak posted:I'd like to write an article on mental health and its depictions in RPGs and was curious to mine the collective knowledge of the World of Darkness thread. The two books that come to mind for Changeling (Dreaming specifically) and Apocalypse are Valkenburg Foundation (Werewolf) and Book of Storyteller Secrets. Valkenburg directly deals with the "Lunatics" or Garou who didn't get picked up by spirits before their change and now can't deal with their true nature, Storyteller Secrets has an adventure focused on saving a kid who is a Changeling who has been taken to a mental hospital. It's been a while since I read either of them, but Valkenburg felt like it was treating the ideas a bit more respectfully than one might expect from 90's WW. Secrets suffers a bit from the broader issue that Dreaming had of "Psychotherapy is bad because Banality and killing the imagination maaaan" thing, so ymmv with that one. As for modern stuff, 5e has been explicit about not presenting Malkavians as caricatures of mental illness, and being generally more sensitive to how to portray those aspects compared to the 90's stuff.
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Feb 4, 2024 18:57
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Sionak posted:Are there other books I'm missing (maybe World of Darkness Slashers?) that would be relevant? Mage: The Ascension had Marauders who are insane mages who's mental illness warps reality around them to the point where they are surrounded by a "bubble" of their own reality and anyone within that radius is subject to how they view the world.
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Feb 4, 2024 19:00
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Dawgstar posted:Changeling: The Lost is very much a look at PTSD at from abusive environments. Deviant can also be extremely trans coded and/or PTSD coded. Lost straight up has the specific angle of PTSD from sexual abuse, too, which it handles... not well compared to the other topics. Beast straight up tries to normalize sociopathic and hurtful abuser pathologies... One of the options is to basically play a supernatural pedophile. So yeah, every flavor of White Wolf psychology has been not good.
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Feb 4, 2024 19:04
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The most common issue with Malks was people trying to hew too close to 'actual' diagnosistic traits when you can delude yourself into thinking the blood of the person you drank is trying to take over your mind from the sheer guilt of being an undead monster. The clanbook touched on that with the narrator being freaked out by the latest crop of neonates who blamed their behavior on human issues instead of talking with gods or inbalanced humors because "holy poo poo if they can do that they can excuse anything".Gravitas Shortfall posted:Mage: The Ascension had Marauders who are insane mages who's mental illness warps reality around them to the point where they are surrounded by a "bubble" of their own reality and anyone within that radius is subject to how they view the world. I always read them (and Banishers in MtAw) as Awakening first and then running into their issues, with the Dynamic nature of Marauders warping less "reality" and more "the Consensus". Their issue is an inability to square the circle with existing in consensual reality. Which is how you end up with that one dude who basically goes "I think people are kind deep down" really loving hard to the point that the WoD, as corrupt as it is, treats them like a grain of sand stuck in an oyster so that doesn't spread. I did play an Etherite who exhibited all the aspects of the Dark Triad and knew he was a psychopath. He just decided that the most "rational" and self-interested behavior involved mutual cooperation and advancing the Utopian agenda. A frequent discussion with the other members of his mixed cabal was why, if he was skilled with Mind, he didn't "fix" his disorders. His view was that his very existence was a denial of consensual reality. Might not have been the most respectful thing looking back but it worked for a Berlin gutterpunk. I'm sure someone way more thoughtful than myself can dissect the intersection between how there's a difference between 'sane / insane' as a societal construct v mental disorders, how culture impacts certain mental disorders (i recall reading a while ago that the hallucinations common in schizophrenia have a different 'tone' depending on upbringing), and how that all actually works in a game where you might actually be visited by angels telling you to go punch a MiB in the face. Hellblade and its protagonist come to mind as well.
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Feb 4, 2024 19:50
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I feel like Marauders suffered from attempts to make them into a "faction", allied with the Wyld, instead of letting them be the most obvious "fail state" for mages who hit bottom in terms of accepting that their model of the universe is not the universe. As it is, nine times out of ten they're just monkeycheese crazy.
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Feb 4, 2024 21:02
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Lots of good threads to pull on that I was unaware of. Thanks, all.
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Feb 4, 2024 22:38
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Sionak posted:For the Changeling and Werewolf stuff, which books would be best to read more? In the case of Changeling: the Dreaming, I believe the Autumn People supplement goes as far as to explicitly have a therapist/psychologist antagonist who is dangerous because they will deny your character's supernatural nature and therefore inflict banality. Almost all of the first edition nWoD/Chronicles of Darkness books included a Morality stat or monster counterpart with defined sins, and falling to low levels of Morality risked suffering "derangements," the list of which was a mixture of generic psychic stresses and explicit diagnosed mental disorders. The second edition books renamed the core stat Integrity, centering it around subjective shocks rather than sins, and removed derangements, replacing them with broader conditions like Shaken and Guilty. Changeling: the Lost's Morality/Integrity stat is Clarity. In Second Edition specifically it is presented as being about vulnerability to having your truth denied and questioned, and the conditions Clarity damage yields dance closer to psychological conditions, like Fugue and at its worst level catatonia. Mage: the Awakening has counterparts to Mage: the Ascension's Marauders, fail state wizards who lost all their Wisdom and with it the ability to control their own magic, which overflows into the world around them, defined in 1e's Left-Hand Path and 2e's Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed. Right up to the Second Edition corebook these wizards were called the Mad or Mad Ones. Nameless and Accursed renames them Enraptured or the Rapt to avoid conflating them with stigmatized depictions of mental illness. The characters of Deviant: The Renegades have undergone tragic transformations with side effects, modeled with a point-buy system where each Variation power must be paired with a proportional Scar drawback. Mental type Scars can include conditions like a substance Dependency (which may or may not be a real world abusable substance), Hallucinations, or Paranoia, in addition to less specifically defined Scars like Frozen Heart (emotional distance and inability to connect) and Glitch (moments of confusion and dissociation).
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Feb 4, 2024 23:20
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Now I do want to run a "Like A Dracul" game. Dammit.
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Feb 5, 2024 03:52
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TheCenturion posted:As you say, gut flora doesn't suddenly spring into life. Why not? I mean, presumably a vampire is using the mystic power of the Blood to move around and think rather than metabolizing nutrients in human bodily fluid to chemically power their muscles or whatever, so burning a little more to simulate the digestive process doesn't seem unreasonable. With the caveats that this was V:tR and the character was also using Cruac to do it, I played a vampire that used the blush of life in order to take a poo poo on the hood of a Seer of the Throne's car. It would be a shame if that were ruled out.
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Feb 5, 2024 04:53
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If a player invokes their Dream merit while free-floating in the Temenos, it's reasonable to give them rote action on that right?
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Feb 5, 2024 05:00
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MonsieurChoc posted:Now I do want to run a "Like A Dracul" game. Dammit. The Ichiban games are very Changeling, or Unknown Armies.
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Feb 5, 2024 05:44
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Attorney at Funk posted:If a player invokes their Dream merit while free-floating in the Temenos, it's reasonable to give them rote action on that right? First edition? I think so, yeah, but to be honest, I don't think I'd require a roll for the Dream Merit in the first place, Temenos or otherwise. Slows things down, the results of a failure are not interesting, the benefits of a success are not unbalancing.
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Feb 5, 2024 06:18
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MonsieurChoc posted:Now I do want to run a "Like A Dracul" game. Dammit. I ran one on the forums years and years and years ago, though the actual game ended up being on the old goon SynIRC cluster. Was fun, though we ran it very comedy vibed and Big Trouble in Little China style with KotE with a heavy dose of people's Yakuza titles being directly reflective of their demon forms. The rest of the WoD cosmology was completely ignored and didn't exist, and the whole Second Breath conceit was more like a D&D Warlock vibe in that bad people would often involve the favor of infernal powers in life, and then when they die the price is their soul and some level of eternal servitude with a lackey demon personality grafted to you. Very heavy homebrew.
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Feb 5, 2024 16:46
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Fuzz posted:I ran one on the forums years and years and years ago, though the actual game ended up being on the old goon SynIRC cluster. Was fun, though we ran it very comedy vibed and Big Trouble in Little China style with KotE with a heavy dose of people's Yakuza titles being directly reflective of their demon forms. The rest of the WoD cosmology was completely ignored and didn't exist, and the whole Second Breath conceit was more like a D&D Warlock vibe in that bad people would often involve the favor of infernal powers in life, and then when they die the price is their soul and some level of eternal servitude with a lackey demon personality grafted to you. Very heavy homebrew. Sounds awesome.
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Feb 5, 2024 17:28
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Dammit Who? posted:Why not? I mean, presumably a vampire is using the mystic power of the Blood to move around and think rather than metabolizing nutrients in human bodily fluid to chemically power their muscles or whatever, so burning a little more to simulate the digestive process doesn't seem unreasonable. With the caveats that this was V:tR and the character was also using Cruac to do it, I played a vampire that used the blush of life in order to take a poo poo on the hood of a Seer of the Throne's car. It would be a shame if that were ruled out. Because The Blood is inherently unable to create life. That's the whole point. It's stolen life force. It's a zero sum game. It's explicitly taking somebody else's vital, animating energy away from them, leaving them diminished in the process, to fuel your own inherently unnatural, cursed state of existence. "A Beast I Am, Lest a Beast I Become" because you need to take blood, or you'll turn into a ravening monster. But the very act of taking blood is inherently violent and abusive, and every time you do it, you're risking killing somebody. Which pushes you away from the Beast. Every feeding is either a reminder of what you've lost, or a reminder of what you're turning in to. My interpretation of humanity 10 in 5e would be 'you can eat it, enjoy it, and it will pass through your gullet and need to be expelled, but you're not 'digesting' it nor gaining any kind of nutrition from it whatsoever. It's yet another reminder of what you'll never have in your life again.'
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Feb 5, 2024 18:43
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MonsieurChoc posted:Sounds awesome. Were I to run it nowadays, I'd probably take the whole "just got out of prison" vibe literally and run it as either Deviant or Lost, in rules at least, while pulling from stuff like the Thousand Hells book to instead have it be that a bunch of Yakuza Oyabuns are basically escaped freakshows from some strange mythical hell they were either cast into, captured into, or straight up born into and now they're chilling in the material world, abusing their power. Add in a Taskforce Valkyrie and/or VASCU styled arm of the Tokyo police investigating all of it, and that's makes for a fun time.
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Feb 5, 2024 20:18
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Fuzz posted:Were I to run it nowadays, I'd probably take the whole "just got out of prison" vibe literally and run it as either Deviant or Lost, in rules at least, while pulling from stuff like the Thousand Hells book to instead have it be that a bunch of Yakuza Oyabuns are basically escaped freakshows from some strange mythical hell they were either cast into, captured into, or straight up born into and now they're chilling in the material world, abusing their power. Spirited Away probably hits real different
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Feb 5, 2024 20:40
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TheCenturion posted:My interpretation of humanity 10 in 5e would be 'you can eat it, enjoy it, and it will pass through your gullet and need to be expelled, but you're not 'digesting' it nor gaining any kind of nutrition from it whatsoever. It's yet another reminder of what you'll never have in your life again.' That was one of the discussions my group touched upon. But then you run into the phrase "digest as a human" and it made me thoughtful, if only because the notion of a brutish personification of Affluenza realizing that he still has some connection with humans and thus falling down a rabbit hole of introspection that he is not equipped for is kinda cool. The real answer behind all of this is, of course, "they didn't put that much thought into it initially because you couldn't start with more than Humanity 8".
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Feb 5, 2024 21:51
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What about Nagajara or Marcelarius and vampires with the flaw where they need to eat fresh bloody meat? Do they get gut fauna?
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Feb 5, 2024 22:46
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ZearothK posted:What about Nagajara or Marcelarius and vampires with the flaw where they need to eat fresh bloody meat? Do they get gut fauna?
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Feb 5, 2024 22:56
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Guys, Vampires are animated corpses. Maybe magic let's them digest food?
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Feb 6, 2024 00:22
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Getting into the weeds, but that's the nature of this discussion... not all digestion is done by microbes in the guts. Microbes, especially bacteria, mostly digest complex sugars that humans lack enzymes to metabolize. But the bacteria don't always use every component of those sugars and so there is additional nutrients for the human host. A lot of digestion is still done by human digestive enzymes before reaching the microbe filled gut. As an example, it's possible to raise "germ free" mice that have no gut microbes (or any others). They're sickly but viable as long as they're kept isolated from new infections. All that said, there's pretty much got to be some element of "it's magic" or vampires would rot from the inside out as their original gut microbiome escaped into dead tissue that (presumably) has no remaining functioning immune system. Sionak fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Feb 6, 2024 |
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Feb 6, 2024 00:31
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Vampos are inherently fueled as much by the act of taking from a living thinking thing as they are by the actual blood itself. It's why you can't really get by suckin down a cow. I think the 'Big Humanity means you're pretty close to being human again haha yaaay' thing is sort of just short-sightedly written; if we go with the 'vampirism is a wound on the soul' thing, it's less fixing the wound and more magical thinking denying it to an absurd degree.ZearothK posted:What about Nagajara or Marcelarius and vampires with the flaw where they need to eat fresh bloody meat? Do they get gut fauna? Really, the flaw here is 'you must ruin the thing you feed on in a way that is inimical to its continued life and not possible to hide,' not so much the meat itself.
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Feb 6, 2024 01:53
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Fuzz posted:Were I to run it nowadays, I'd probably take the whole "just got out of prison" vibe literally and run it as either Deviant or Lost, in rules at least, while pulling from stuff like the Thousand Hells book to instead have it be that a bunch of Yakuza Oyabuns are basically escaped freakshows from some strange mythical hell they were either cast into, captured into, or straight up born into and now they're chilling in the material world, abusing their power. One of my backup character concepts for a Lost game I'm in is a West Court Draconic Fairest with pretty obvious inspirations. Heh, I might go with how most supernatural social structures are basically organised crime, and blend seamlessly into equivalent mortal structures. It's all too easy to present a vampire as a living metaphor for organised crime, an ultimately parasitic entity that exists to benefit off of others without giving much in return.
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Feb 6, 2024 05:48
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