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Ventrue have the most forgiving weakness because all you have to do is be a Good Person who only uses legitimate violence so you never roll to lose Humanity much less degenerate.
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Sep 20, 2012 01:50
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The coolest book in the whole Forsaken line was Predators, iirc, the one where it has the Azlu spider-demons which were cool gross and scary as hell.
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Oct 2, 2012 20:52
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Spray the warlock with convenient and easy to track radioactive isotopes, use Matter-enhanced robots to apprehend him.
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Nov 30, 2012 20:42
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Learning a Legacy also seems to me one of those things it's really worth traveling for in the setting, so that could also be a factor.
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Dec 30, 2012 17:54
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Nicolae Carpathia posted:The Ladder's own ends correspond to everybody's good, though, by transcending the Lie and the trials and travails of the Fallen World. They might fail or gently caress up that goal, but their goal is literally Everybody's Life Becomes Wonderful And Nobody Needs The Silver Ladder Anymore. Check your thaumoprivilege, maybe some people would rather the potential of their minds, souls, and bodies remained something they weren't even aware of??
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Jan 24, 2013 19:01
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Kylra posted:Neither of those negates it being imperialistic though unless you're going to ignore the power and culture differential between the Ladder and Sleepers. I'm not trying to say they're necessarily evil for it, just that that is technically what it is, even if this time it does happen to actually be good for them (which given Banishers at least isn't technically the case the whole time). Is it imperialism when you teach children to read or am I being thaumonormative?
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Jan 24, 2013 19:03
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Arivia posted:The Seers have an empire, the Pentacle wants one - their empires merely aren't mortally political. That's not accurate though, except possibly in relation to whatever nonhuman entities inhabit the Realms Supernal, that according to Pentacle ideology must be shackled and made to kneel before humankind. The whole goal of the Pentacle is to destroy: 1. the means by which the Lie is established and maintained, allowing for the destruction of 2. the Lie itself - the blocks on human enlightenment established by the Exarchs. For the Pentacle to be imperialists who want to create an empire analogous to that of the Lie, they would need to have in-hand a different Lie they would want to impose, maybe because they have some other Lie they prefer. Then it's not really about whether or not its a Lie, its just a question of what consensus determines the Lie. But that's not what the Pentacle wants! They want to unmake the Lie and give all humankind their putative birthright, which is magic. That's fundamentally incompatible with everything having to do with the Seers and the Exarchs. Certainly I agree with Ferrinus, that putting a human face on the Exarchs makes for a much worse story on a wide variety of levels, and that an honest reading of the setting certainly doesn't support giving the Exarchs complex or sympathetic motivations. They are, literally, malignant gods who want to undermine human agency and fulfillment. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jan 24, 2013 |
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Jan 24, 2013 19:52
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Kylra posted:Technically they are trying to build an Empire of sorts to wipe out the Exarchs. Organizing and even fighting isn't building an empire.
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Jan 24, 2013 20:12
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At the actual gaming table, Fate remains the best.
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Feb 11, 2013 01:40
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Pope Guilty posted:Speaking of Changeling, couldn't Clarity just be called Mundanity? As far as I can tell it's not about having a clear-eyed view of the world and your condition, it's a measure of how hard you work to pretend you're not a Changeling. How about... "Banality"?
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Feb 14, 2013 15:32
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Well get on with it then. Reveal the Fru-tang secrets.
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Mar 19, 2013 15:10
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I imagine its simultaneously possible, contradictory, horrifying, and true for Abyssal entities to inscrutably reinforce each other and "cooperate" in ways that are hazardous to even theorize.
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Apr 6, 2013 18:19
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My little wizards: shaving is magic
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May 9, 2013 06:35
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Clarity. There are two possibilities for it reaching zero, depending on the power stat, Wyld. Hitting Clarity 0 results in a completely insane creature unable and unwilling to distinguish reality from fantasy. So usually it results in a broken Changeling.
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Aug 12, 2013 15:06
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It's interesting that a coterie of gentry would snatch a troupe of changelings like that. That has implications.
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Aug 14, 2013 19:07
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Little_wh0re posted:After re-reading Grimoire of Grimoires a few times I can't help but feel that its not that useful as a book. Too many of the grimoires in it are too dangerous to really use, I kinda go back to it hoping there might be one I could point at and say "I'd quite like to own this" but far too many of them just kinda kill you or send you mad. The Hildebrand Recording is awesome scary, in part because of the kickin rad illustration that goes along with it. But also because it really was perfect for the WoD, with insane Scandanavian drug lords and eccentric billionaires scheming to get their hands on this thing. It was the best one, and one of my favorite writeups in the whole game, because it was the most alien and mysterious object, something that was genuinely impossible to truly understand and likely not from this world at all. Although I don't know how we're supposed to know what the sound of rending flesh or torn skin or whatever it describes at the end actually is. In hindsight that part was a little... idk, conclusory? But basically why wouldn't you want to own that? Turn in your Pentacle card right now if you don't want to grab a piece of that power and wrestle it to the ground. Doesn't a different grimoire in there also have that rote to make someone's skeleton jump out of their body, turn into steel, and jam with you.
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Sep 3, 2013 11:53
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Ferrinus posted:Daeva: the clan of complex, detailed note-takers. What Clan writes the social pages if not Daeva?
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Sep 5, 2013 06:09
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The antagonists in WtF really are cool as hell. Also Ferrinus is definitely right that the Pure are straight up Garou, not BSDs. I think the major problem with Werewolf is basically that it's about... werewolves. Which are just not that interesting no matter what you do with it, unless you're one of Those People Who Are Really Really Into Wolves, Dogs, Wolf-People, Et Cetera. They're just a really specific and narrow cultural touchstone compared with vampires or magicians. I think this was also a problem in Apocalypse. I appreciate what the writers do with it to try to broaden it -- and I do think that, hands down, Forsaken is a much better direction to take it than Apocalypse -- but there's only so much you can do with someone who, fundamentally, interacts with the world on a human-dog continuum.
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Sep 12, 2013 05:04
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Ferrinus posted:If you use Nightmare on someone with 1 net success, you scare them. If you Nightmare them for 5 net successes, you scare them really bad. But if you use Nightmare on someone for 11 net successes, you still just scare them really bad, you don't make their head explode or something. Well let me be the first to ask: why not?
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Oct 8, 2013 10:20
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Yeah it owns. And really it's more like John le Carré but with Transformers (the Michael Bay ones that look all weird and poo poo, and they turn into people instead of cars). The God-Machine is a huge part of what makes it so cool - it's an amazing idea for an antagonist, with the potential to get real deep thoughts about it - (if vampires are a sort of psychosexual terror, the God Machine is our - you and me in the real world - inability to imagine alternatives to capitalist etc. hegemony). The way the characters work is cool as well. Instead of tracking a morality stat you're more like a body-snatcher, and your morality stat is how secure your various snatched identities are. At any moment you can destroy one of those identities and "go loud", at which time you transform into a monster with, basically, a huge range of abilities and a maxed out powerstat. The writing is also pretty good. It goes a ways - though not nearly far enough - to discard unnecessary Greek or whatever other occult terms and uses primarily espionage jargon to express important concepts. I'm a really big fan, a couple hours into a game with some friends and it's basically just amazingly cool.
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Jan 9, 2014 08:03
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Yeah the Arrow is indisputably all about becoming a Tough Fighter, and not in some elementary metaphorical way either. The Arrow does not, emphatically, try to alter Sleeper culture in general. That's a job for Cryptopolies and Labyrinths. That's not to say the Arrow doesn't act as an "advisor" to Sleeper forces they've somehow compromised, but that's a very different job from a Ladder propagandist identifying and exploiting ideological gaps in Fallen civilization. The Arrow material is very clear about their "every Marine a rifleman" kind of attitude. Mission creep is a possibility, but it will always be with an eye towards militarizing things, in a practical way. If it doesn't help the Pentacle win battles against Seers, or anyone else, the Arrow isn't going to be very interested in it until it's properly weaponized. An Arrow with a day job as a defense attorney makes perfect sense, but not because "the real fight is in the courtroom", it's because there's plenty of dangerous and desperate people (and their weapons, money, drugs, etc) caught up in the criminal justice system who might make good Tough Fighters (and the weapons, money, drugs, material etc doesn't hurt either!). Any concern for the Fallen justice of the matter is likely a distant second priority, because There's A War On. A real one, where victory is possible and then maybe Existence wouldn't be Struggle anymore.
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Mar 15, 2014 06:49
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Use that in a cipher to make a new power like that "You now have your own personal soundtrack wherever you go" media demon ability from In Nomine.
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Mar 24, 2014 11:49
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Johnnie5 posted:Twoooooooooooo Biiiiiiiiiiiiiits!!!!!!!!! With Devils Advocate you can also get people with the "rabbit season" style-trick from the same scene.
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Mar 25, 2014 03:42
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In some of the preview material back in 2004 I could have sworn there was a Banisher group straight out of Boondock Saints (which I thought was a lot cooler in 2004 than I do today), I forget if they stuck around or not.
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Apr 3, 2014 18:38
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With a lot of dots in Fate and Time you should be short-circuiting all kinds of mysteries by going straight to the end, rewinding unfavorable combat turns, creating powerful logic circuits of curses and boons to defend yourself and your friends, and combining all of that with the excellent scrying and mind-reading abilities you've picked up from the Mastigos path. Your character is the perfect spy - impeccable timing, always lucky, can read minds, and see the future, past, and present nearly anywhere. Fate even lets you circumvent the NSA problems of correlating vast amounts of evidence because you can Know which pieces fit together right away. Never late (nor are you early), never unprepared, all without any work on your part. You also get the notary-public powers of Fate. My Acanthus character in Ferrinus' long running Mage game did all kinds of stuff like that, but especially instantly solving mysteries or at least always knowing where to go to find the next clue, or basically being able to read the narrative of the game itself, made for a real utility character that could pull the rest of the party through all kinds of obstacles.
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May 28, 2014 14:37
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As a longtime Acanthus player, I really liked Fate. But most of the example Fate effects were really boring and obvious "luck" spells. Most of the more interesting Fate spells were tucked away in much later supplements or gated behind Mastery. Like being able to apprehend the best or worst a person is capable of and edging them towards it - or warping/changing those possibilities - that's a really heady power. Because if you have the ability to manipulate something as powerful as True Love (for instance) you really have to have a good excuse for resolving situations in a way where Everyone doesn't get saved. Basically I found other game lines more helpful to unpack Fate and Destiny as concepts more than just getting 8-again or asking the ST where each and every clue in the scene is to find.
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Jul 19, 2014 20:00
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Demon isn't the Matrix, it's Transformers. 
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Aug 22, 2014 18:48
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Are the Coils of the Dragon a bunch of Embeds?
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Sep 7, 2014 20:35
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SunAndSpring posted:It'd be interesting to explore how exactly one deals with being the son or daughter of a being whose world view is wildly different from your modern day norms. I haven't read it but I know there's a thread for that. Can you imagine the email forwards from a 5000 year-old hyper-entitled godling? DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 08:35
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I would absolutely disagree that NWoD requires more setting knowledge than CWoD. You can make a genre pastiche character in either and do fine (it's what I do anyway, even with experience). But for a variety of reasons - some of which relate to metaplot, others to basic genre definitions, and some to baked-in system facts that all add up to make new world of darkness games much more approachable for beginner players -and - characters.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:49
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moths posted:The complexity comes from the two things that primarily define your character interacting with other PC and NPCs' two big things. Yeah, if you know the setting it's no big deal - but five clans and five covenants can be a lot to juggle for a new V:tR GM, and I wouldn't wish that on a first-time-ever GM. I would definitely disagree that those two things make a character more complex, and here's why: your family and your role in society are separable. So while in theory, yeah there's 25 combinations (although if you start getting into antitribu etc. then wouldn't Masquerade still have more complexity than Requiem?) it's easy to explain to someone than your Clan is mandatory and is basically your extended family and blood; meanwhile Covenant is your place in society. And if you don't know what Covenant you'd want to be in thats ok because you don't have to be in a Covenant at all and in fact choosing a Covenant is a perfect storyline for new players to establish their characters and the setting simultaneously. e. To put it another way, you lose something of the Tremere if you don't ever actually hear the story of Tremere and Saulot and the Hermetics or whatever (not asking for a clarification either). But you don't really miss out on what the Ordo Dracul really is all about if you don't bother learning about the Three Brides of Dracula or whatever. The reason for that is that in Masquerade the camera is sort of pointing towards the Elders as a result of the setting-defining Jyhad and the game mechanic of Generation. On the other hand, your opinion of Anoushka is only important insofar as whether or not you're dedicated to following her Ladder -- it's otherwise a historical quirk without relevance on the modern night. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 06:17
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Attorney at Funk posted:You know what's pretty beta? Literally being Dominated. This is surely one of the niceties of Society, to be aware of that but to never actually say it out loud.
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Dec 31, 2014 02:39
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I didn't used to feel this way but it really is true that the goals of the Diamond, Seers, Libertines, etc. are all totally different and lead to very, very different worlds but the goals of the Technocrats and Traditions do not. Like, if the Technocrats win nothing really changes, if the Traditions win things don't really change except you have efreets instead of thermostats or whatever. But if the Exarchs win they can enslave the human soul forever, not only stamping out magic and mages, but also enslaving all ordinary humans to greed and fear for the rest of time. On the other hand, a Pentacle victory would see reality melted down into a chaotic paradise where all humans are as gods and have their every whim and wish fulfilled by the limitless power that belongs to everyone.
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Jan 27, 2015 07:27
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Dammit Who? posted:Nothing's stopping them from saying "oh, I've written a computer program that analyzes electromagnetic radiation modulated by brain waves that occur in the presence of hostility, and that's different from your cauldron that reflects the face of your enemy," but they all know on a fundamental level, on a game-mechanical level that that isn't true, that it's all bullshit. Hands down the easiest illustration of this is the fact that there are "decent Technocrats" who reject the totalitarianism of the T.U., and "bad Traditionalists" who are totalitarian Hermetics or whatever. But a "decent Technocrat" and a "decent Hermetic" probably want things that aren't all that different - and in fact as the line went on this sort of thing became more and more commonplace for players and in source material - cooperation across party lines. But in Awakening, that can't happen. "Decent" Seers (an impossibility?) and "Decent Diamonds" still want things and are driven by goals that are totally, fundamentally, at odds. An Earth ruled by distant, beneficent Exarchs is totally different from the chaos paradise of unlimited power for everyone with a human soul. I mean look at the difference in attitude towards something like the Abyss. Humanitarian Seers and humanitarian Diamonds have utterly opposite perspectives on what it is, what it means, and what should be done about it.
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Jan 27, 2015 08:02
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The UK has a tradition of state-sponsored LARPing hundreds of years old though - a lot of Americans follow it really closely but nothing we have can match the sheer baroque horror - at every level, from costumes to makeup to the wonderful weekly plot lines - of the royal family!
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Feb 11, 2015 19:54
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paradoxGentleman posted:Why is that, I wonder? Is there something in the sort of thing that appeals to them that encourages that mentality? A nerd can be defined as a person who is bad at performing gender but very good at performing whiteness. Simultaneously creates their own identity entirely through recreational media consumption. So they're sort of extra alienated, bourgeois people with a bad or no experience with sex and race stuff, whose worldviews are heavily shaped by escapist or utopian media...
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Feb 12, 2015 17:37
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Strontosaurus posted:Wolves didn't even exist while Pangaea was around. My hypothesis is that Father Wolf was actually a dino. Please set a Uratha game during the Mesozoic Era. i have used an ancient spirit of tyrannosaurus that spent sixty five million years as increasingly bizarre magath before trying to reconquer its original essence as a monster of the week before
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Feb 23, 2015 22:17
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Strontosaurus posted:Tell me more. It was an ancient predator-spirit embodying the tyrant lizard king, it persisted long after the k-t more or less unchanged but gradually took on more and more the essence of pure hunger and predation, and cockroaches, until the 20th century when it found some reconstructed fossils of its old self in the Smithsonian and could start piecing itself back together again from the public imagination version. it ended up possessing the fossils and being materialized by a Mage who wanted an impressive super weapon to use against Those loving Seers in georgetown, before the TF:V pcs hosed it all up and blasted it to bits DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Feb 23, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 23:01
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They're the ultimate survivors My original plan was, the whole encounter was going to be a lot longer and involve the PCs needing to enlist the help of the ghosts and spirits of the American History museum to stop the shenanigans of this one wacky Thyrsus causing problems in Natural History. Imagine the weary murder-spirits of the guns of the Somme, or whatever horrifying entity lies waiting in Enola Gay over a Air&Space. I canned it when one of the players made a "night at the museum" joke though. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Feb 23, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 23:09
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Post how it goes over. Definitely have it possess the skeleton and at least once let it roar at them from the wron side of sixty five million years of death.
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Feb 23, 2015 23:32
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