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This is really dumb, but if they can bite kinfolk and make them Garou, then the Garou suddenly don't actually need kinfolk as much anymore. They can bang any mortal at all and bite 100% of their children. You'd need to keep some kinfolk (or just be vaguely lucky) to keep the cycle going indefinitely, but every nonsterile male garou suddenly becomes a werewolf factory with a 17 year timer before the next crop of a hundred werewolves comes of age. Its still a nightmare scenario and a problematic hellscape of a world, but its not extinction and the numbers wnd up way in their favor lretty quickly. Kinfolk aren't necessary, they just make the odds of a Garou baby higher. I'm sorry for this post and the continued derail. Worst snipe in history.
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Sep 22, 2018 10:00
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Captain Monkey posted:This is really dumb, but if they can bite kinfolk and make them Garou, then the Garou suddenly don't actually need kinfolk as much anymore.
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Sep 22, 2018 10:16
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Yeah, I don't disagree that fucks up the story, it just isn't gonna wipe out the Garou, and it is an efficient way to raise a huge army if you're willing to do horrifically inhuman things to thousands of people.
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Sep 22, 2018 10:34
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The primary concern there is lethality and sterility. Let's say we have 1 Garou dad who creates 20 offspring with non-kinfolk. Half of his offspring are kin and half are mortal (PGttGarou page 206), and for the sake of argument we get 50/50 male/female with no complication factors like homosexuality, sterility, early death, etc. He then bites the 5 male kinfolk. In line with the reading that the majority die and fail, we lose 3 kin for 2 garou! Sweet! Before, we had 10 kinfolk who could either a, create guaranteed kinfolk/garou (90/10% chance respectively) if mating with garou or likely kinfolk (50%/1% garou) if mating with each other, while we now have 5. If each becomes a baby factory who turns out ten while they can (and just like deadbeat garou dad, the male kinfolk can produce a fuckton more possible kin with a lot of women), then our second generation looks like this: No Bite, with Garou: 10 Garou, 90 kinfolk. No Bite, with other Kin: 1 garou, 50 kinfolk, and 49 normal babies. With bite, with garou: 5 Garou, 45 kinfolk. With bite, with other kin: .5 garou, 25 kinfolk, and 24.5 normal babies. So, sure, we can then bite those kinfolk. So we do just that, and then our reproductive base drops to 5 Garou and 22.5 Kinfolk for WBWG or .5-12.5 WBWK. If we're biting as many kin as we can, we very rapidly stop breaking even on our number of Garou and kinfolk even in a vacuum, because every single Garou we produce this way is sterile. The only way to maintain a population growth is to go Garou/Kin exclusively. But our garou and kinfolk are not in a vacuum. Werewolf is high lethality (I'll have the numbers to prove it once this stage of the project is done, too), so we can expect attrition rates to kill off some of those kinfolk before they produce the 10 kiddies we need from each of them, and definitely to kill anywhere from one third to one half of our garou before they've had a chance to sow their wild oats unless we start adopting deliberate baby farming harems from the rank of cub. So then, we actually get something like this, if we assume a conservative 10% attrition rate on kinfolk (predation by banes, fomori, BSDs; disease; deliberate but unnoticed sterilization by Pentex; random crimes, etc) and 25% on Garou: NBWG: 7.5 surviving garou and 81 kinfolk. NBWK: .75 surviving garou and 45 kinfolk. WBWG: 3.75 surviving garou and 33.75 kinfolk. WBWK: .375 surviving Garou and 18.75 kinfolk. If we then apply the bite to our second generation bitten populations with the same 'bite the boys' approach, we wind up with 5.625/3.125 more (sterile) Garou for WBWG/WBWK, but we wind up with only 16.8/9.3 reproducing kinfolk respectively, and they can only make: WBWG: 16.8 garou, 151.2 kinfolk WBWK: .93 garou, 92.07 kinfolk. Factor in the lethality: WBWG: 12.6 Garou, 136.08 kinfolk WBWK: .6975 garou, 82.863 kinfolk Are we producing more Garou than we're losing? To address that we need to consider how our non-bite population's doing at this point. Well, from the same assumptions, the third generation of reproduction: NBWG: 81 garou, 729 kinfolk NBWK: 8.1 garou, 405 kinfolk. Factor in lethality: NBWG: 60.75 Garou, 656.1 kinfolk NBWK: 6.075 Garou, 364.5 kinfolk So how many Garou are we getting by comparison? Our best case, NBWG, is giving us 60 fertile Garou. WBWG by contrast gives us only 12.6 fertile garou and 22.68 sterile Bitten, for 35.28 Garou in total. We are effectively losing 25 potential Garou by the Third Generation, and worse, those Garou are fertile and capable of passing it on in a way that the Bitten are not. So while WBWG is capable of producing a net growth of Garou, it is a back tier option in terms of actual population growth when compared to carefully shepherding kinfolk stocks, and pretty much requires mandatory harems and a total focus on breeding. Remember - Garou x Human: 50% odds of making a kinfolk or a human. Garou x Kinfolk: 10% odds of a Garou, 90% odds of kinfolk. Kinfolk x kinfolk: 1% odds of a Garou, 50% odds of kin, and 49% odds of human babies. Bitten x Anything: Nada, they're 100% sterile and can't even Bite. We don't know exactly how lethal the bite is, just that 'the majority... died... but a precious few endured'.From the errata we have some idea, which is that it's a Test requiring people to pass against a static challenge with a difficulty of 15, composed of the mental+survival attributes, with the maximum rating of mental being 10 and survival 5, but 5 dots is the 'average' rating for an attribute while 7 is the 'strongest' at default creation, so we have 1/3 base line success and a very low probability of having the requisite 15 score to equal the challenge if you fail, so anywhere from a 60 - 66% fatality rate is what we're looking at. Bitten also tend to be extremely violent for the month of their transformation and their first change takes an entire night locked in a perpetual frenzy and rage, and some are locked in that state permanently, which we may assume poses more risks to garou and kinfolk of 'friendly fire' during the Bitings. Worse, and impossible to quantify, is that many Garou are just plain not able to make the Change. 'Nearly half a generation' suggests anywhere from 30 to 49% of potential garou don't change without the Bite, which again, is more lethal than not, so those already low numbers might need to be dropped further.
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Sep 22, 2018 11:25
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Captain Monkey posted:Yeah, I don't disagree that fucks up the story, it just isn't gonna wipe out the Garou, and it is an efficient way to raise a huge army if you're willing to do horrifically inhuman things to thousands of people. Probably one obstacle to this plan is that there is no way you are going to train all these people. While of course you can form war societies to train them up, only about one-fifth are going to be straight up Ahroun even if all of them will probably be able to fight. The Wyrm of course does not have this problem between (insert depressing statistic about something in industrial capitalism here) and being entirely willing to stuff people through the Black Spiral, name them after a fart, and hurl them into battle.
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Sep 22, 2018 11:33
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I'm not familiar with WtA so I dunno if it's a setting or mathematical thing I'm missing, but why are we biting the boys and not the girls? You said yourself that males can (at least in theory) spread their genes around far more efficiently, so it seems inefficient to turn them dead or sterile.
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Sep 22, 2018 11:40
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Basically because the most efficient way of producing new Garou is one male Garou acting as a stud for a group of female Kinfolk. 10% of his offspring will become Garou. While in theory our male kinfolk can perform the same role for female Garou, Garou are out there fighting poo poo constantly and putting their uteruses at risk (though as I recall one of the new books that NWW meddled in has some... Interesting comments about pregnant garou?) so the safest new source of Garou will be female kinfolk kept safe behind the lines, and as kinfolk x kinfolk matings are inefficient producers, this makes male kinfolk significantly more expendable than female. Kinfolk x normal human isn't well detailed but I'd assume at that point we start to get into further dilution of maybe 10 - 25% chance of producing more kinfolk.
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Sep 22, 2018 11:44
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Get, is that you?
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Sep 22, 2018 12:16
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This is my very special hell. Time is a flat circle, and I will always be posting about werewolf reproduction rates.
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Sep 22, 2018 12:22
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I assume Kinfolk x muggle just keeps giving you the same outcome, 50% Kin, 50% muggle, tiny chance Garou. Now, the muggle may have that persistent tiny chance of Garou.
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Sep 22, 2018 12:26
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Complicating all of this further is that Gaia can go 'nah gently caress it' and spawn a garou or kinfolk line whenever she likes, too.
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Sep 22, 2018 12:33
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Loomer posted:Complicating all of this further is that Gaia can go 'nah gently caress it' and spawn a garou or kinfolk line whenever she likes, too.
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Sep 22, 2018 12:44
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Nessus posted:More seriously as Mors said, just assume VASCU is Dale Cooper's FBI, not the Actual Real Life FBI.
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Sep 22, 2018 13:23
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Halloween Jack posted:(Namely "why do you keep doing this and how do you make a living.") Sell off the remnants by the pound. Drain mages for their blood, recruit a rogue ghoul to sell it to vampires who you then track down and murder, sell their ash to "medicine" shops. Basically, push the "hunter" label to its absolute logical limit. You could run a whole chronicle where a hunter crew collects enough pelts that their buyer is able to run that hosed up "skinwalker" ritual and then attempts to snuff them out cuz They Know Too Much. edit- Werewolves regenerate organs, right? How much does a kidney run for? Push your characters into acts of monstrous cruelty in order to fund their Scooby Doo Murder Clubs once they get too feral for their old lives. Digital Osmosis posted:my friend you are looking for Demon Hunter X and their coverage of the Shih. spoiler alert: they loving rule Thanks for the suggestion! PHIZ KALIFA fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Sep 22, 2018 |
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Sep 22, 2018 14:09
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Nessus posted:I'm sorry, you've already gone too far. Your red ballcap is in the mail. Welcome to the Republican Party. quote:I'm looking forward to the Sabbat books because I've always found the Sabbat more compelling than the Camarilla, even if I suppose the Sabbat lends itself less to the billionaire fantasy vampire husband archetype.
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Sep 22, 2018 14:17
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I think I might do an appendix for the project's stats book on Garou reproduction now, actually. Might as well take that line of thought and use it. I've already got some shaping up around the basic needs of glamour, blood, and quintessence per annum globally and their implications so it'll fit right in
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Sep 22, 2018 14:21
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Nessus posted:I'm looking forward to the Sabbat books because I've always found the Sabbat more compelling than the Camarilla, even if I suppose the Sabbat lends itself less to the billionaire fantasy vampire husband archetype. Honestly, I agree with you, Sabbat Revised is probably my favorite Masquerade book. I feel the Camarilla/Anarch mode of play is pretty well covered in Requiem, but the Sabbat didn't really have a successor. Belial's Brood is more like 1st edition Sabbat, and you can run the Lancea Sanctum in a way similar to the Sabbat, but it really isn't the same.
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Sep 22, 2018 14:30
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Sell off the remnants by the pound. Drain mages for their blood, recruit a rogue ghoul to sell it to vampires who you then track down and murder, sell their ash to "medicine" shops. Basically, push the "hunter" label to its absolute logical limit. Or just take their mundane valuable. Crimes in general seem like a decent solution. The guys on Supernatural solve both the money and authority issues by being grifters and drifters, getting away with endless credit card fraud and impersonation of law enforcement by just moving on to the next town. It's not the default state for a WoD chronicle, but it works pretty well for Hunter. Another classic is working as a hustler pretending to be a psychic/ghost hunter/exorcist, because it conveniently doubles as a (semi-)legitimate source of income and as a way to hear about legit spookiness. Or just be a dropout. Monster hunting is portrayed as something akin to addiction or clinical obsession, so a hunter can easily take the role of someone who's hosed for those reasons; the homeless beggar, the ex who sleeps on your couch and steals money from your purse, or (to bring back Supernatural again) the estranged brother who barges back into your life unannounced and pulls you right back into the bullshit you thought you'd left behind. Honestly, just find one of those threads where goons gawk at people living in their mother's root cellar and pissing in jars and replace "spends thousands of dollars they can't possibly have on anime wankdolls" with "spends hours outside goth clubs looking for people with weird accents and pronounced widow's peaks" and you've got yourself a hunter.
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Sep 22, 2018 14:36
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Loomer posted:Rechecking a few books for the Garou and timeline stuff (and by 'a few' I mean pretty much all of 'em before 1996 or so, which is when I shifted to a much more methodical, detailed, and consistent model of notation, and also where we enter White Wolf's middle period) and I have to vent a little at how loving dumb early white wolf is. Sabbat supported Hitler, because... Evil? Werewolf was especially bad about this. I'm pretty sure some of the writers didn't really have a strong grasp on the Sabbat as they're involved with for example Pentex. Why? Because they're evil, duh.
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Sep 22, 2018 14:42
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Pope Guilty posted:Werewolf was especially bad about this. I'm pretty sure some of the writers didn't really have a strong grasp on the Sabbat as they're involved with for example Pentex. Why? Because they're evil, duh. Yeah, the early stuff really is just a shrug and an 'evil is evil, right?'
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Sep 22, 2018 14:50
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Now that it's communicable, you'd think the other changing breeds would bite their kinfolk. Then the wolves can focus on war while eveyone else does their intended jobs better that angry square blocks in round holes.
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Sep 22, 2018 15:10
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Pope Guilty posted:Werewolf was especially bad about this. I'm pretty sure some of the writers didn't really have a strong grasp on the Sabbat as they're involved with for example Pentex. Why? Because they're evil, duh. Also the crossover-itis in late 1E early 2E helped matters not at all - you had the Sabbat, Pentex/BSD, the Shadow Court and (sometimes) Nephandi acting as a sort of Legion of Doom. Complete with a Technocracy-built base that rises out of a swamp, probably. Or things like Pentex having a Malkavian antitribu (former Nazi war criminal, even) and a Giovanni sitting on the Board of Directors. Revised did away with them, but didn't just retcon them out of existence. It turns out that the Malk's high-level Dominate was the only thing keeping some of the loonier Fomori experiments under control and when he was gone, well, PLOT HOOK. Edit: Loomer, you're officially the expert on the Kindred bodycount - for my own curiosity, how did those two buy it? Dawgstar fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Sep 22, 2018 |
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Sep 22, 2018 15:39
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Dawgstar posted:Also the crossover-itis in late 1E early 2E helped matters not at all - you had the Sabbat, Pentex/BSD, the Shadow Court and (sometimes) Nephandi acting as a sort of Legion of Doom. Complete with a Technocracy-built base that rises out of a swamp, probably. Or things like Pentex having a Malkavian antitribu (former Nazi war criminal, even) and a Giovanni sitting on the Board of Directors. Enzo Giovanni bit it at Madeline Giovanni's hand in one of the god awful Horizon War novels, IIRC, but I don't remember Zettler dying in the classic run of the oWoD. It's also not in my files, though it's possible it's in V20 content I haven't indexed/read yet. EDIT: Grabbed the book and checked. Decapitated with a blunt letter opener after being staked, to be precise. Probably one of the worse ways to go.
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Sep 22, 2018 15:57
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Loomer posted:Enzo Giovanni bit it at Madeline Giovanni's hand in one of the god awful Horizon War novels, IIRC, but I don't remember Zettler dying in the classic run of the oWoD. It's also not in my files, though it's possible it's in V20 content I haven't indexed/read yet. Yeah, I was mistaken on Zettler. I was thinking about how all the Board dies in the Time of Judgement Apocalpyse book, so he at least isn't any more dead than usual. It still does let the fomori off their leashes, but it hasn't happened yet. (Unlike the rest of Werewolf, I guess.) Speaking of V20, he's mentioned in the V20 Dark Ages book Tome of Secrets. Well, somebody named 'Harold the Zettler' so probably.
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Sep 22, 2018 16:20
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Loomer posted:though as I recall one of the new books that NWW meddled in has some... Interesting comments about pregnant garou? A pregnant woman's uterus draws up behind the ribcage in Crinos form, and it's functionally impossible for a Homid to get an abortion because subconsciously every woman wants to have babies and they'll frenzy at the thought of their baby being taken away. Please kill Swedracula, save me from this hell.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:15
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Can't wait for Tzimisce to start following the Path of the Tradwife.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:22
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...but... even with the... extra mass... that's... I think I liked the 'it's not a good idea to change shape past the second trimester' or whatever.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:23
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Well, I mean, the best answer is in fact 'you are still allowed to adventure while pregnant if for some reason your game group wants to do a pregnancy plot.' Then you just don't say how that works. It's magic. It just works.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:24
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Where do the heart and lungs go?
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Sep 22, 2018 17:25
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They don't go anywhere! The fetus is protected in mystical wombspace.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:27
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Loomer posted:Where do the heart and lungs go? I'm also concerned what happens when you jam the uterus between the ribcage and spine.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:29
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Loomer posted:Where do the heart and lungs go? I don't think you understand the metaphysical Implications of havING THAT BABY YOU WHORE WOMAN! POPPING OUT CHILDREN IS WHAT YOU ARE GOOD FOR AND YOU SHOULD BE GLAD WE EVEN ENTERTAIN THE THOUGHT OF YOU FIGHTING ON PAR WITH A MAN!!! Mors Rattus posted:Well, I mean, the best answer is in fact 'you are still allowed to adventure while pregnant if for some reason your game group wants to do a pregnancy plot.' The implications of the Garou breeding thing are best left as vague background details and any time they call it to the forefront it gets very weird and creepy.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:30
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Mors Rattus posted:They don't go anywhere! The fetus is protected in mystical wombspace. I could honestly buy 'they go into the great Umbral Womb for a while' over this.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:31
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Here's the text.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:37
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I mean, I'm not a woman but I'm reasonably certain that abortions aren't painful. Particularly since breed form homid garou can benefit from painkillers and anesthesia.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:40
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Kurieg posted:The implications of the Garou breeding thing are best left as vague background details and any time they call it to the forefront it gets very weird and creepy. Didn't Forsaken 2E finally do away with anything weird happening with two werewolves who mate? Like, no deformed breed with a racist name, no murderous ghost babies, just the same possibility of a kid as anyone else that has a slightly increased chance to be a werewolf one day? I have the same question about Animal Attraction, which I finally ran into an actual example of in text while reading a Hunter: The Reckoning book.* *Moonstruck, for the intensely curious. The narrator is investigating a town out west that has problems with what are probably Red Talons and her guide who is secretly a Pumonca does the sex whammy on her. She describes it as 'very rough, very pure.' It's written by... MATT MCFARLAND! Surprise! Oh, you weren't.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:41
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Dawgstar posted:Didn't Forsaken 2E finally do away with anything weird happening with two werewolves who mate? Like, no deformed breed with a racist name, no murderous ghost babies, just the same possibility of a kid as anyone else that has a slightly increased chance to be a werewolf one day? Yes. Also 2e Forsaken packs can include far more than Garou. Wolf Blooded, Mages, Vampires, Spirits, Hunters, whatever they want in service of the Siskur Dah.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:43
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Kurieg posted:Yes. Also 2e Forsaken packs can include far more than Garou. Wolf Blooded, Mages, Vampires, Spirits, Hunters, whatever they want in service of the Siskur Dah. The 2e section on pregnancy is actually really good because it basically is just 'this is only going to provide penalties if the player wants it to' and doesn't try to explain the biological happenings of half-spirit wolf monsters.
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Sep 22, 2018 17:54
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Kurieg posted:Here's the text. what the hell am i reading
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Sep 22, 2018 17:57
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Kurtofan posted:what the hell am i reading One of the sections of W20 Changing Ways that we're pretty sure (as opposed to definitely sure) NuWolf dictated to OPP.
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Sep 22, 2018 18:07
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