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Oh cool, Bloodlines. Does anyone want the rough perspective of what's Going Down around this time? There's some huge shakeups which are canonically going down around this time in the underworld, the world of Mages (which the Tremere were until they sacrificed awesome True Magic for cut-rate blood magic), and, well, everything. Some of these shakeups are actually relevant (Week of Nightmares), others are just cool things that people might want to know for context, because again, I'm a Mage player not a Vamp one and my perspective is basically entirely that of an outsider looking in (and setting vampires on fire with plasma cannon). (Also, amusingly enough, oWoD's Mage is still being supported after all this time).
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Nov 11, 2013 19:25
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gatz posted:That would be a nice set up to the LP and would definitely be featured in the second post. Okay, approximately in this time (1999) in the World of Darkness, the Week of Nightmares was happening. The Week of Nightmares was this huge megacrossover event (like comic ones, and just like comic ones it wasn't terribly well thought out) involving vampires, mages, werewolves, and wraiths. Now, why do I say it wasn't well though out? Normally, the games exist in similar but different settings. If you're playing mage, for example, the vampires are just these pipsqueaks who think they control the mortal world but are covertly doing the Technocracy's bidding, more or less, by hiding evidence of the supernatural (just the way the Union wants it). If you're playing vampire, mages are generally just hedge sorcerers, not these godlike beings of nigh-omnipotent power that they are in their own line. In werewolf, the important thing to remember is that everything is controlled by Captain Planet Villains who are also demons. Of course, you then mashed all the settings together for the Week of Nightmares, which is hilarious. There was a lot of angry fan backlash at this, especially vampire fans. There may still be flamewars to this day. There definitely were when this metaplot thing hugely altered the Mage line. Anyways, in the Week of Nightmares, three really important things happened: 1. There was a Sabbat-Camarilla war that involved mass embraces and mass deaths of new vampires. This woke up an ancient Antediluvian, a ridiculously powerful vampire god. This is mostly a Vampire thing, but it spilled over into Mage. The Sabbat and Camarilla will be explained in more detail through this LP, so don't worry if you're not familiar with the terms yet. 2. Some guys in Wraith nuked a city in the underworld with the ghost of the first nuclear bomb. That city happened to have the "True Black Hand" in it, IIRC (who were a spooky double probationary secret society of vampires who knew the ~truth~ about everything and nobody liked because their book was awful so they got nuked). 3. In Mage, one of the Houses of the Order of Hermes, House Janissary, was exterminated by another mage faction, the Euthanatos. To explain this in more detail, the Order of Hermes were some of the most powerful non-Technocratic mages (the Technocracy being an organization of mages which seeks to impose order and predictability on a fundamentally chaotic world). They have various houses, which specialize in various things. Tremere was once one of their houses, until their, well, vampirism accident. Even to this day, Hermetic mages nurse a huge grudge against the Tremere and seek to burn them down when they can find them. The Janissaries were one of the Hermetic heavy hitters, basically a giant group of magic-wielding commandos. Think, basically, guys like Patrick Galloway from Undying. Gun in one hand, spells with the other. The Euthanatos are a magical faction based on the idea of 'the good death'. Basically, death and life are cyclical, and sometimes for the good of the world as a whole, and the good of one's soul in the next reincarnation, they have to be killed. If you don't get how they work, watch the Wanted movie. That is literally how the Euthanatos see the world (and how they roll). One of their factions, the Golden Chalice, are explicitly magic wielding super commandos. Imagine if Jason Bourne had the powers of a D&D wizard as well. That's what an average member of the Chalice looks like. Both of them are members of the Traditions, the mystics who were opposed to the Technocracy's enforcement of order and predictability on the world. They wanted a world safe for mysticism and wonder, where things could be unknown and accepted as unknown. Unfortunately, the Technocracy took significant issues with some of the things they wanted unknown, like "will I get eaten by a dragon when I get my lunch?" or "will this medicine cure my sick child"? To go on with what actually happened, the Janissaries had been secretly manipulating the Ascension War because their leader thought that the end result of one side or the other winning would have been the total destruction of reality. They used ancient ciphers to encode those messages, with a slight issue. The Jason Bourne references (since the New World Order, one of the Technocratic branches, definitely is Bourne-inspired) might give you a hint. You see, centuries ago, before the Technocracy existed, there was a group of assassin magi called the Ixoi. They thought the Traditions were corrupt and had to be changed. There were people of two minds in that. One of them thought the Traditions were irreparably corrupt and needed to be changed externally, by shooting them a lot. Another thought they could be redeemed from within. The latter group eventually became the Golden Chalice. The former joined the Order of Reason, which would later become the Technocracy, as the Ksirafai. Eventually, some of the Ksirafai started getting cold feet, and they get into a fight with the others who didn't and become House Janissary. The remaining Ksirafai loyal to the Order of Reason eventually became part of the New World Order. Anyways, back to the story, you see, the Janissaries had been using old Ixoi ciphers to communicate their secret conspiracy plans, and one of them was eventually intercepted. That, and the Janissaries setting up some political warfare that ended with a Hermetic archmage being killed, led the Golden Chalice to act. They burned House Janissary and left no survivors. How's that relevant to Bloodlines? Well, it's mostly the fact that the Traditions are now in chaos and the Technocracy do not know what's going on. This may end up having effects on what happens when the more vampire-relevant stuff goes on, but I'll talk about that in another post, this one's getting long.
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Nov 12, 2013 00:46
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Cythereal posted:Why the hell isn't there a Technocracy computer game where you can do stuff like this? Ancient apocalyptic evil horror waking up? Nuke it, then hit it with orbital death rays. It'd pretty much be X-Com, except you'd have to try to pretend to be as subtle as possible (instead of blowing the entire place up). Speaking of the Technocracy, the funniest part of the old World of Darkness is that the Technocracy is still being supported. This is probably because where new Vampire and new Werewolf are generally better games that touch on the same themes as the old games, new Mage is an entirely different beast than old Mage. Similar mechanics, but completely different setting and metaphysics. There have been three new Technocratic Convention books, all dealing with the fallout of all the nuking that went on in the Week of Nightmares. You see, all those nukes hosed up the spirit world something awful, and created the Avatar Storm, which was basically this gigantic barrier that cut off travel from the Earth and the spirit world. Note: In mage, this includes 'outer space'. Of course, like anything that says 'no' to mages, that's more or less just a suggestion. This was a very strongly worded suggestion, though, possibly with a few guns pointed for emphasis. There was a more insidious problem, though. Mages trapped in the now-damaged and seething spirit world (the Umbra) eventually became spirits themselves of a sort, and spirits are kind of wacky. They're definitely insane by human standards. This sort of culminated, in the original metaplot for the oWoD, in Ascension around 2003, which had a few interesting reveals. The Technocracy's leadership, because it had been seen as this invisible hivemind that ordered all the awful things so your hands could stay clean, actually was exactly that. Anyone who tried to use it to order the Technocracy around had to risk being subsumed into the hivemind and becoming some kind of platonic idea of bureaucratic leadership. The Traditions became the Rogue Council, who were a crazy squabbling cabal of dead archmages who were trying to win the Ascension War, that being their entire raison d'etre now. The new books retcon the poo poo out of that. No. Now what happened is that the Technocracy suffered the same fate as the Traditions. Nobody cares about RPG book spoilers because they're not really spoilers, so I'll lay it out straight. The Void Engineers now, the guys in the Technocracy who specialize in being X-Com meets Star Trek, are fighting the Technocracy that was. The Technocrats in the umbra became spirits, and with that lost all sense of human perspective, and seek to impose their extremist no-gray-area ideas of what it means to be a better person and what Ascension means onto humanity whether they like it or not. They call them Threat Null. They're pretty horrible. For example, Iteration X, the craftmasons of the Technocracy, are all about tools enhancing and augmenting human ability. So their warped versions, the Autopolitans, are all Borg-like cyborgs who presumably kidnap people for their assimilation vats. The financiers of the Technocracy, the Syndicate, are now (even more) amoral businessmen who will deal with anyone and anything for absolutely anything. The New World Order, the Technocracy's spies, media specialists, government influence, and assassins? They become bullshit anime/bad conspiracy thriller "conspiracy" types. You know the type. "Oh my plan goes off without a hitch anyways no matter your interference because of [insert totally nonsensical bullshit]." Occasionally (often) they deliver to other members of Threat Null plans, devices, hostages, or whatever that they never asked for and have no idea about. Nevertheless it turns out useful because of [conspiracy bullshit]. The Progenitors, the Technocracy's biomedical wing, are now some sort of universally beautiful universally superhuman hivemind. Individuality is bad! And the Void Engineers that were lost? Nobody knows. That's the scariest part of all. I would totally play a V-COM game where you fight Threat Null, werewolves, and vampires, while maintaining your crew's sanity, your good relations to the rest of the Technocracy, and conserve scarce resources. Also, particle beam cannon the occasional angry vampire elder. (A Gamma-class particle beam does 21 levels, not dice, levels, of lethal Forces damage.  )
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Nov 12, 2013 07:37
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Cythereal posted:Alternatively, he hosed up. And from what I understand of the setting, prompt execution is exactly what loving up leads to. In general, this is pretty much how it works, yes. Vampire: loving up leads to executions. Werewolf: loving up leads to fights to the death with a bigger and meaner werewolf (you will probably lose). Mage: loving up leads to prompt execution if you're lucky or if it was just a minor fuckup. If you make a really big fuckup (treason, become the cosmic embodiment of evil, etc), they have a thing called Gilgul which destroys your very soul. Not only does it kill you, as a person and an identity (your body remains, which they can then reprogram into a loyal servant), it kills every potential future you that will ever exist. But in the end, although their foci are superficially different the games end up dealing with mostly the same thing, IMO. Vampire was more or less a game about sociopolitical neofeudal backstabbing involving serial rapists. There was a lot of rear end in a top hat politics, and in the end there was that core bit of horror in the sense that taking blood by force is basically rape, and because you lost a blood point a day just to move around, and more to use your powers, it was very easy to get in a situation where you'd either have to take blood by force or die... and in that case, it becomes very easy to justify doing a little more. Werewolf was a game where the horror came from realizing that you were almost as evil as the Captain Planet Villains you fought, and for even less reason. Really, the story of Werewolf is basically "and all of this wouldn't have happened if Werewolves had gotten together, stopped for a bit, and thought about their actions. Except they didn't, because they're gigantic evil genocidal assholes." This was, of course, missed by a lot of people who played it as Furry Captain Planet. Mage was a game where what you thought defined reality. You were objectively right, you wanted the best for the world-and in the end... well, Hitler wanted the best for the world, didn't he? It crystallized as a tragedy of good people doing bad things for good causes because of their hubris, and eventually ending in their downfall. Really, in the end all of them are a bit about how idealism gets crushed by cynicism and the need to take the 'easy way' outweighs your moral code, and you slowly keep doing it until you become a monster like what you tried to fight. It's most explicit in Mage, but even in Vampire. Most vampires, I figure, weren't incredibly bad people in life. Just normal, regular people, maybe with some uncomfortable secrets, who got turned into monsters and tried to make the best of it. And this is what you end up getting. Also, this is why I thought Vampire needed a handful of Not Awful elders occasionally (although it might have had that). Having a few people who have managed to keep that nobility makes the fall of the rest even more horrific, because it wasn't inevitable. In the end, in the World of Darkness, it isn't grim and dark and evil because becoming a supernatural makes you Chaotic Evil. It's grim and dark and evil because the good people gave up and took the easy way out.
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Nov 16, 2013 02:55
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Shugojin posted:When I played a Ventrue I actually rarely encountered the vomiting thing, seems it's a pretty low chance or else I got lucky. Amusingly enough, firearms being kinda poo poo in Bloodlines is a reasonable simulation of the actual state of using guns in oWoD. Your starting pistol, a lovely .38 revolver, does approximately 5L damage in the oWoD, which will maybe kill someone if you shoot them three or four times on average. With really low starting stats, you'd be barely grazing and require all those shots. Also, now that gatz has shown us Melissa's character sheet, let me tell you of more differences between this and the tabletop. In the tabletop, your attributes and abilities (skills) are measured from 1-5, where 1 is "below average" and 5 is "edge of human capability". Most character types have a method of getting attributes above 5, with varying benefits (vampires have their powers, werewolves have shapeshifting and spirit-possessed trinkets, mages have the Sphere of Life, which lets you accumulate a lot of successes and run around with Strength 15 or something). Since Melissa isn't a slow-witted weakling, I think this game has somewhat adjusted the progression. Or, if you go with another one of the theories walking around, there may be another explanation for the 1 dot in every starting attribute. If you go by the 'sire was secretly low-gen/Caine was helping you' theory you might have a bunch of hidden attribute/ability dots that aren't shown on the sheet because it'd spoil it. Also, there's only 12 fixed Abilities, which isn't really in oWoD. oWoD has incredible Ability bloat. Some hilarious examples of abilities that are probably fairly useless and only exist for funsies are: Stone Lore Newspeak Style Vamp And this is just off the top of my head for stupid Abilities which bloat the system to no end. I mean, at least something like 'Terrorism' is fairly broadly applicable (you can roll Wits + Terrorism to figure out where to put bombs, Int + Terrorism to plan a raid or figure out how a suicide attack worked, Cha + Terrorism to make demands or else X gets it). EDIT: Whoooops, fixed the spoiler tag. MJ12 fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Nov 17, 2013 |
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Nov 17, 2013 19:50
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Tehan posted:There's an argument to be made about whether or not a vampire drinking someone's blood is actually theft or even selfish, considering that apart from the Giovanni and some of the minor clans it's a good time for whoever's being fed upon and there's no harm done. If someone on the pull goes home with a vampire and wakes up with vague memories of a good time but no solid details, are they any worse off? Since it's all about internal consistency instead of actual morality, as long as the vampire believes it it'd probably work for them, though your ST may vary. The way I'd play it, and the way White Wolf seems to want you to play it, is that taking blood without consent is that it's rape, and thus a pretty low-Humanity crime. On the other hand, like I said, I'm a mage guy whose thing is all about people doing terrible things and trying to justify them after the fact with noble deeds, and when mechanical consequences exist for doing terrible things that might be less fun. I mean I'm playing a Euthanatos in a mage game where he's having to reconcile the fact that he wants to make the world a better place and how has very few tools to do that save murder and terrorism. This concept would be much harder to do in Vampire where he'd end up at Humanity 3 or so pretty much immediately without a Path. :p (As contrasts the mage game I'm in, where a lot of more 'human' characters who commit premeditated murder a lot less are actually less moral than he is).
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Nov 18, 2013 18:03
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Olesh posted:Not to throw out the "it's a game not an accurate simulation of real life" excuse, but five lethal damage dice is pretty respectable against non-supernatural targets. Humans and other mundane, non-vampire/werewolf/etc types can't soak lethal damage anyways. Well it's not so much that it isn't an accurate simulation of real life, it's that it's just kind of amusing that swording people is so much more useful for a lot of fighters than shooting them with bullets, especially because the canonical autofire rules are so bad (you get +10 accuracy, but +2 difficulty, which means you roll basically the same amount of successes with an increased botch chance if you've got a high firearms score). As a mage, you get to appreciate very much just how weak guns are if you're not specifically building to make use of them well and/or get your hands on one of those awesome Technocratic death machines (like the Mjolnir, which does a base damage of 10L, same as a .50 BMG sniper rifle or a really strong guy wielding a super-huge axe, and is a handgun). Of course, if you are a mage, you can adjust the difficulty down to a base 3 (so 3+ on a 10-sided die is a success), and then fight by dumping the entire magazine of a pistol on full-auto into a crowd of enemies, throwing the pistol away, fast-drawing another one, and repeating this multiple times in the same round. Even against vampires this is surprisingly effective-sure, vampires get to soak and treat it as Bashing, but you can very rapidly put enough Bashing to spill over to Lethal and incapacitate them. Also if you're a vampire, the ammunition is clearly white phosphorous/made out of the cleansing sunlight of the Lord/special bullets blessed by Eros which seek out the heart and destroy it, as lust does to all things in the end. Mages + Guns = hilarity.
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Nov 20, 2013 06:33
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A Curvy Goonette posted:So the implication I'm getting from oWoD is that God is real, he is strong, and he did stuff. What's the explanation for the lack of God-derived miracles/powers versus those generated by truth faith? God may be a gigantic jerk who enjoys watching people gently caress up. God may be an Archmage, which means that due to the Gauntlet/Consensus/Technocracy, he can no longer pull off miracles on Earth anymore without eating a ton of paradox. Those are the two most popular explanations.
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Nov 23, 2013 07:24
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EphemeralToast posted:If this is set in 2004, why does our computer look like something Strong Bad would use? I'm pretty sure it's set in 1999. The WoD games generally had the books set in the year they were published, and thus Gehenna came in 2001. Furthermore, the news about freak weather in India matches up with the 1999 time, because that's when the Technocracy nuked the poo poo out of Ravnos and pretended it was 'mysterious weather'. DeusExMachinima posted:Oh hell to the yes. I'm sorry, in oWoD demon I can play a fallen angel that's all angry about being imprisoned by God. In nWoD demon I can play a transforming killer robot wearing the skin of men which wants to, and may well be able to, murder God. Also, God is a cold inhuman machine. Both settings have their high and low points, honestly. MJ12 fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Nov 24, 2013 |
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Nov 24, 2013 00:02
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gatz posted:I thought I read that it was set in 2004, but I just tried finding it again and I couldn't. I don't know why you think it's 1999, and I don't know where you get this "freak weather in India" story from. I swear one of the TVs in Bloodlines had something on India. I haven't played it for several years so it might just be bad memory. Anyways, I think it's 1999 because it's supposed to be on the eve of Gehenna/etc happening, which is "canonically" somewhere around the 2000s. It could be just moving the timeline up several years without any real intervening changes though.
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Nov 24, 2013 00:51
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Vicissitude posted:So who's interested in a little character swap? I could do a character swap but I really only have Mage characters  Admittedly it means that when we end up meeting Kuei-Jin I can talk endlessly about how they're totally bullshit. Actually the funny part about Bloodlines is that you directly meet every major splat and a whole bunch of minor ones except the Mages somehow. Admittedly, that does make a bit of sense (it would be ridiculously hard to explain what the gently caress the Technocracy is in a game that's ostensibly about vampires, and a lot of the more recognizable mages like the Hermetics or Verbena really have a Thing against vampires) but it's really the one oversight that you'll notice the most if you go straight from Bloodlines into oWoD proper, at which point you're like "man what the gently caress there are magic-hating science wizards with PLASMA GUNS?"
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Dec 5, 2013 18:11
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DeusExMachinima posted:But I thought we meet/let ourselves get captured by the Technocracy in Chinatown and that one jerk tries to experiment on us? TBF they don't go into detail and I think that's it for this game. I'm fairly sure that's the Society of Leopold or potentially Strike Force Zero.
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Dec 5, 2013 18:33
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Gantolandon posted:It would be really, really hard to properly put magic (OK, magick) in the video game without without just making a scriptfest level where we get hurt mostly in cutscenes. Given that most mages have to at least try and mask their abilities as coincidences, it would be a wasted effort anyway, as the players who don't know oWoD wouldn't know what the gently caress is going on. It's not completely impossible, but it would require a lot of effort - more than a brief cameo would be worth. That's why you end up meeting a Taftani. I mean, they really hate coincidental magic, they think it's Giving In To The Man, so they're always as vulgar as possible. As you might be able to guess, Taftani tend not to live very long.
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Dec 6, 2013 02:34
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Sounds like someone watched The Thing one night and decided to apply it to their game world. It's based on weird Spirit metaphysics. Okay, in Mage there are three kinds of Umbra, which is the spirit world. The Penumbra, the Near Umbra, and the Deep Umbra. The Penumbra is literally the 'shadow of the real world', the Near Umbra is basically space up to Pluto, and the Deep Umbra is everything beyond that. Then there's a few not-quite Spirit worlds, like the Underworld (where the dead are) and the Digital Web (think TRON). Note that surviving the Near Umbra and Deep Umbra generally requires some level of assistance from magic (Spirit 2 or... 4, I think it was?) while the Penumbra requires no special survival stuff. Spacesuits are 'merely' the way the Technocracy explains how the Spirit magic that lets them survive works. However, nowadays, because outer space is a thing, you could survive the Near Umbra merely by wearing a mundane spacesuit. Spirit is an incredibly subjective sphere as well, and this means that two people in the same place at the same time in the same spirit world may see something completely different depending on what they're taught and how they interpret the spirit world. Technocrats and Hermetics have a unified cosmological view (spirits are "aliens" for Technocrats, there are clear hierarchies and relationships for Hermetics) while most of the other traditions are significantly less rigid and inflexible in their view of the spirit world. Of course, the Technocracy doesn't use Spirit because they have special spheres. It uses Dimensional Science, which has its own rules and its own interpretation of the universe. Spirit is stronger the farther you get from industry and human civilization. Conversely, Dimensional Science depends on industry and human civilization. Spirit beckons, binds, and empowers spirits, it awakens them and puts them to sleep. Dimensional Science is essentially entirely focused on two things: 1. Traveling through space 2. Killing the aliens you find in it. For example, Spirit 3 lets you walk the Umbra, summon spirits (but not yet bind them), heal them, or put them to sleep. Dimensional Science 3 lets you also walk the Umbra, but instead of summoning spirits? You get a loving phaser. You can stun, kill, or disintegrate spirits. As a bonus, it also works on people, because the Void Engineers see no difference between spirit-matter and real matter. These are similar spheres that do the same thing, BTW. However, because of how the world is interpreted by the respective paradigms, the VE one behaves entirely differently. A Dreamspeaker looks upon the Umbra and sees a rich universe full of thousands of teeming civilizations, who he can interact with in various methods. A Void Engineer looks upon the Umbra and sees a lot of nasty aliens that he needs to give a faceful of plasma to, XCOM style.
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Dec 7, 2013 08:53
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citybeatnik posted:WELCOME TO MAGE Also, mage is the best game for starting philosophical flamewars between its fans. (The Etherites are also responsible for anti-vaccination hysteria and a bunch of New Age pseudoscience). And yes, it's pretty much exactly how things work. Mages can breathe in space because they think they can. Or maybe they can't because they don't accept it. Or maybe 'space' and the 'Near Umbra' aren't quite the same thing, as the VEs imply, and the Etherites/etc can 'breathe in space' because the difference between space and the Near Umbra is small enough that you can be physically manifest in both realms at once. Mage is also a game where there is often explicitly contradictory canon depending on who's telling you about the canon, and half the fun is figuring out what's real and what's not for the purposes of your mage game.
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Dec 7, 2013 09:18
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Siegkrow posted:Okay, Illuminate me, please. What is the power difference between Vampires and Werewolves? I know that at the very least, a single Werewolf is vastly stronger than your average 13 gen vamp. Werewolves are... interesting. They're basically super-commandos from hell, because of their ability to easily jump into the Umbra, where most foes can't chase them (Mages can Umbra-walk but it's often vulgar and gets paradox, vampires generally have no access to abilities to get to the umbra). In fact, all of their abilities are pretty much obviously intended to compliment their incredible commando abilities. They have innate and quite rapid health regeneration, the ability to throw down a lot of extra actions very fast (and Rage can be replenished fairly quickly), and a lot of sources of aggravated damage. Furthermore, they soak all forms of damage with their full Stamina, which ranges from 'high' to 'literally sky high', and can get a bunch of Gifts for additional soak and damage, plus (relatively) easy access to fun magic weapons and trinkets which add even more. Straight up comparisons between were extra actions and vamp ones don't quite work because fights in oWoD can get incredibly lethal, and the werewolf has higher init (so attacks first), deals aggravated damage (can't heal), and is probably putting out a ton more damage. To say nothing of the more broken changing breeds, such as the were-cheetahs (+5 Dexterity! Access to Mage: the Ascension talismans!) and the were-bears (does having the ability to pump up to 15 soak in a turn plus health regen mean anything? Because it should.)
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Dec 13, 2013 10:25
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Cythereal posted:Unless you exploit the mages' signature weakness: their own pride. That whole "we can win every time, we're OP since we can alter reality with our mind" mentality is both common and not conducive to long life. As antagonists, I've always viewed mages as the ones you really have to outsmart - they have more potential power than just about anything else in the World of Darkness, but the human mind wielding that power is as dumb, short-sighted, and arrogant as any other human mind if not more so due to overconfidence in the power it wields. All the arcane power in the world won't save a mage from simply getting hit by a bus while crossing the street. The thing is, the enemy of mages is almost always other mages, and those other mages are capable of making killer cyborgs which can beat rear end in ways Werewolves would give their left nut to possess. As a non-mage, you're best served avoiding mages, because only the really dumb or really weak ones are liable to be beaten in ways you have easy access to unless you want to get entangled in mage politics, and the really dumb ones tend to get themselves killed fairly quickly, while the really weak ones tend to have patrons who might get aggravated at your poking at their favorite students.
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Dec 14, 2013 16:59
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Cythereal posted:The only World of Darkness I play is nHunter, and with my players Task Force: Valkyrie treats mages like any other supernatural. If they endanger innocent people or threaten national security, Valkyrie can kick their teeth in until they stop misbehaving and has tools to make that easier. The thing is, like all gamelines, Hunter is biased (gamelines are generally biased towards their splat in general). It's just as easy for hunters to lose sight of how they stack up on the totem pole, as it is for mages to forget that they are (sort-of) mortal. The bonus that nHunter has is that humans, and human technology, are legitimately capable of evening the odds against the supernatural a little bit. Also, nDemons. Demons respect the hell out of humans, and are also basically impossible for witch hunters to find unless the God Machine is literally telling them exactly where to look and how. As a bonus, if you find them, and if you threaten them enough, the Unchained can Go Loud and will almost certainly at that point ruin your poo poo, because you have to survive a scene with a demon that suddenly unlocked all the magical powers its subsplat can use and has powerstat 10 for a scene, plus is fully healed and charged. This doesn't hold as much in the oWoD. As I said, it's perfectly legitimate for a starting Technocrat to have physicals equivalent to the mortal maximum, with minimal paradox, the ability to soak lethal and aggravated damage naturally, a bunch of innate armor, and twice as many health levels as the mortal, for a very low paradox cost. This is above and beyond the skills and magic he or she can have, which stacks the odds further in his direction, and the backgrounds he or she can have, which let him or her do exactly that. It's just as likely that you're going to be the one run over by a car, that you never saw coming ever. And unlike the Technocrat, you aren't walking away from that on your own power with maybe a minor paradox backlash to suffer for it. Do not gently caress with the Technocracy unless you're a mage. Actually, even if you are a mage, don't gently caress with the Technocracy unless you have very good reason to. Hunters fare the absolute worst, especially the ones without superpowers of any sort, because they're dependent on mundane infrastructure, which Technocrats can very easily suborn. There's a reason in oWoD the CIA/NSA/etc witch-hunter divisions are basically 100% manned by mages who are actually playing them, since mages in oWoD are totally undetectable to any sort of non-supernatural searching (and hard to find even with supernatural powers). MJ12 fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 01:49
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Cythereal posted:Alternatively, anti-tank weapons can deal with demons. I'm not sure this is such a good idea. They give examples of how Exploits (Demon "gently caress it I'm going overt" magic) work, and one of the things about Exploits is that you can create them out of whole cloth, and it's encouraged. They're explicitly labeled as 'sample Exploits' in the rules preview, after all. One of the exploits, for example, is Animate. As an instant action that costs 1 Aether (Demons have 100 at powerstat 10) they can roll a minimum of 11 dice to hack any equipment you have. Your guns? Your anti-tank weapons? They all become the demon's bitches. Demons in nWoD are possibly beyond Mage-tier broken. It comes with being the cross between Lucifer, Michael Thorton, and a T-800, after all. The background being that Angels are autonomous technomagical robot servants to the God-Machine, which is some kind of powerful magical super-entity which enforces the status quo and its own long-term plans. Angels are its equivalent of Predator drones or Terminators, doing tasks for it which it is too large to meaningfully interact with. Sometimes, Angels learn more than their mission, or go rogue. These Angels discard most of their power to hide in human flesh, and are called Demons. The thing is, the demon 'balance' is that the God-Machine wants to hunt them down, and its agents are ridiculous high-power killing machines that it mass produces (again, Angels). Demon powers are generally ridiculous, demon forms are almost as ridiculous as werewolf war-forms, and if a demon is in serious threat they can burn their current identity (a "Cover") and gain literally god mode (small g) where they can throw down with anything short of an archmage or very elder vampire. The main use of humans versus demons is to force them to act out of character to their Cover, because that makes it easier for the God-Machine's hunter/killers to find them. Cover, after all, goes down whenever you act grossly out of character. A mild-mannered accountant suddenly busting out the martial arts skills of an action hero is basically a compromise roll every time they're in a fight. Possibly as much as literally every turn they're using it, which adds up. quote:I'm well aware that Hunter: the Vigil is biased towards its own line. It's the line my players and I enjoy, and we have the most fun when cleverness and tech can find even the most elusive supernatural, and even the most resilient of them can be brought low by the right plan and the right hardware - and when Task Force Valkyrie has a budget of "yes," there are tools in the armory to gently caress up anything that doesn't have a credible claim to godhood... and R&D is working on that. Then again, I portray a Valkyrie that offers free psychiatric care and counseling to changeling freeholds that accept Valkyrie's offer, and has a working relationship with most prometheans within the United States, complete with protocols and manuals for agents dealing with disquiet and wasteland. It's a more action-y kind of game than I think the game makers intended, and a heck of a lot more optimistic and light-hearted, but it's fun and that's what these games in the end exist for. Well, that sounds pretty awesome. Definitely not canon, but awesome nonetheless.
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Dec 15, 2013 02:51
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Feinne posted:Yeah, OWoD Demon was pretty well thought out so it's not a surprise they wanted to do something with the idea again. And they seem to have done something pretty cool and out there, I kind of want to get the book on them now. There is actually a full-text kickstarter preview that's 99% complete. This was linked on their Kickstarter, so it's not  or anything.http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/demon-the-descent-prestige-edition https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7FqViticwNueVdxTmVNTjE0MTQ/edit Disclaimer: It's got some somewhat serious balance issues at first glance, especially since God-Machine has broken quite a few things about nWoD, but in and of itself it seems to hold together very well thematically. It is, however, not a really great horror game-it's far more Bourne than Bram Stoker.
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Dec 15, 2013 09:11
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You should make peace. Because why not?
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Jan 8, 2014 03:00
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Malkavians also have an uncanny ability to recognize one another, which is related to how Malkav literally turned into a psychic network that connects all his progeny when someone tried to kill him. Tapping into the Malkavian network is an alternate discipline Malkavians get which can offer useful insights into their current situation. The Malkavian Madness Network is also implied in Mage to be connected to the Digital Web, which is basically the spirit world version of the internet and the spirit world of information, which may also further justify Malkavian insight-you're literally connected to the mountain of Correspondence that represents information, Mt. Qaf, which the Digital Web is built on. Basically, the Malkavian Network impinges on and can access the primordial, ideal state of information, so even if nobody should know what gives the Malkavian the flash of insight, sometimes they can just pluck it out of pure information.
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Jan 8, 2014 06:13
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Ensign Expendable posted:Wait, Malkavians are connected to the internet 24/7? Well, the spirit world that grew out of computers and the internet becoming a thing/underlies the internet, to be more precise. But I'm sure it's filled with the spirits of cute cat pictures, porn, and idiots making bad arguments on forums.
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Jan 8, 2014 06:30
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quote:Hunters: humans who hunt vampires. Most are half-cocked yokels who also say they've been abducted by UFOs. The real hunters are trained by secret societies, holy orders of the church that have existed since the Middle Ages. Fear them. Let's talk about Tung and his Hunters, because those are cool too. There are a whole bunch of Hunter types in existence in the World of Darkness. Most of them have ties to other, higher powers, which is part of the reason they're so scary. There are, of course, the type seen in Hunter: The Reckoning, the Imbued. Those are guys who have been given edges against the supernatural to fight the supernatural. If you believe wacky oWoD ~metaplot~, they are basically the broken-up bits of Solar Exalted ground up and given to a ton of people, which explains why they generally glow gold while doing this kind of bullshit and why they're so weak (the last time they tried giving people god-killing superweapons to make things right, the world kind of got hosed). They could be, and are, dangerous, but they die like any other mortal and it's very easy to get overconfident. Then you have the church-like groups who hunt vampires, as he mentioned. I don't recall too much about them, but they can Religion so hard they hurt vampires, which is pretty awesome. Some of them are also Celestial Choristers (who are basically a pan-religious monotheist magical tradition), which means some of them have True Magic and will gently caress your poo poo up real hard. It is very, very hard to tell between the two. There are mundane witch-hunters too. However, here the church isn't very good at this, because it is basically impossible to figure out True Magic if you aren't already a mage. Even those who are have difficulties finding true magic users, which is why the Technocracy hasn't kicked everyone's rear end. There are guys in the NSA who think an organization (read: The Technocracy) have infiltrated government and also hunt mages. They are basically completely taken over by Technocrats and Virtual Adepts. That's the problem with mundane witch-hunting (versus vampire hunting). Werewolves have their own hunters. A corporation called DNA tries to capture them for study to provide new advancements in medical science, there's another one (CyberSolutions, I believe) that deploys cyborg shock troops, Pentex funds and hires werewolf hunters, and werewolves generally have it out for the Technocracy so the Technocrats often have it out for them. Finally, there are two special groups who are largely Asian, because ~Asia~. SF0 and the Shih. The Shih are kung-fu rear end-kicker monks who exist to maintain a balance between humans and the supernatural. They have this old mandate from heaven and ridiculous kung-fu which lets them do things like jack their physical attributes sky-high, take multiple actions, punch people for aggravated damage, set supernatural things on holy fire, and other Fun Things. They're basically wandering face-kickers. SF0 is Supernatural X-COM, backed by a shadowy multinational Council (read: The Technocracy). They have things like powered armor, cyborg augmentation, psychic powers, and a broad license to kill. They also have no idea what they're facing, are the pawns of the Technocracy which is more than willing to throw them at threats that outmatch them because their own agents are far more valuable ("sure, we could send a HITMark, but a HITMark is expensive and SF0 Rookies aren't"), and most of the world doesn't respect SF0 at all. Not like the rest of their anti-supernatural units are much better (again, the NSA anti-supernatural types are basically 100% run in a shadowy war between Traditionalists and Technocrats). But, you can get a fist that adds +5 to your strength to punching and has a vibroblade on it. So SF0 is awesome like that.
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Jan 21, 2014 17:39
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mortons stork posted:It's very naive as that information, like all info in the WoD, must be worth something. Why someone would tell that to a Nosferatu, of all people, for free, is beyond me. Melissa was a Virtual Adept before her Embrace, duh. Information wants to be free.
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Jan 21, 2014 20:11
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Cathulhu posted:I'm thinking of them more like Saint's Row's activities. All of these sounds like stuff the Boss would do. If you ever manage to get the hidden 6-star alert the Technocracy orbital lasers you. Game over.
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Feb 9, 2014 11:59
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"Stroop There It Is posted:
She might just have high willpower. The average human has a willpower of 3. Exceptional people can go up to 10, which is like .1% of the population. At that point you are ridiculously resistant to Dominate.
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Feb 13, 2014 19:26
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Kill Boris. Because there's no guarantee he won't double-cross you later, whereas at least Venus doesn't seem to have the power to do so. Of course, he might come after you, but that's just more blood points isn't it? He totally isn't working for the Syndicate, right?
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Feb 16, 2014 11:48
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gatz posted:What's "the Syndicate"? The Syndicate are the financial and economic arm of the Technocracy. All the Technocratic factions have some form of imperialistic or controlling tendencies: Iteration X represents technological control via military force of arms, Progenitors represent biochemical control (drugs, medicines, things you literally need or you die), the NWO represents governmental control, the Void Engineers represent imperialism (control via discovery and conquest), and the Syndicate are control via economics. They're one of the subtle, rather than overt Technocracy arms, seeking to get rich, take over the world economies, and generally promoting capitalism because apparently they tried communism and humanity didn't like it (and then Soviet Russia collapsed from paradox). Again, another Mage detail that Vampire implicitly doesn't accept, because of what you noted in "Vampire Communism" where apparently the Anarchs had influence over the USSR. The Syndicate come in three types: The types who do the science work (economists), the types who run the Technocratic shadow economy and the real ones (financiers), and the legbreakers (enforcers). There's also Special Projects, which are basically completely taken over by evil demons so we don't talk about them much. Their magic takes the form of obscure market adjustments, borrowed gadgetry, and the best (X) money can buy. One of their procedures (spells), for example, temporarily boosts physical attributes by getting a really good personal trainer. Internally, the Syndicate are primarily there to influence what research gets passed on to normal folks and what stays in the Technocracy, what gets funded and what doesn't, and finally, managing the Technocratic shadow economy. As you can guess, being the guys with money makes them a lot of friends and a lot of enemies. Note that the Technocratic shadow economy is huge. Even after losing all their off-world assets in the Avatar Storm, the Void Engineers manage to run 6 Qui La Machinae space battleships. As a note, each Qui La Machinae costs approximately 8 billion dollars. As comparison, the most expensive naval warships in existence, the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, cost 4.5 billion apiece. The Technocracy had way more of these before the Week of Nightmares cut them off from their offworld assets. We're talking an internal shadow economy for one fifth of the Technocracy that basically has the budget of the Department of Defense. Camarilla eat your heart out. Should Boris be working for the Syndicate, he probably works through so many layers of cutouts he doesn't even know. Mages are fantastically rare, so the Technocracy prefers to work via sympathizers who don't actually know who they're working for. They might think it's the Mafia, or the government, or something else entirely. One thing mages are very good at is hiding their tracks and being subtle.
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Feb 17, 2014 06:04
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Ensign Expendable posted:Oh my god, the Syndicate did Bitcoins. No, credit cards and checks and the modern financial system. Bitcoins are totally a VA lolbertarian information wants to be free thing, while the Syndicate sees finances, fundamentally, not as something to make more of because gently caress you got mine, but because it's a method of power and control. It can be used for good ends or bad, but the Technocracy fundamentally is control. The good ones use it well to provide freedom from horrible things and want and fear. The bad ones use it to get more power. The Traditions, coincidentally, are freedom to (wonder, live how you want, get eaten by a dragon, starve, make beautiful things, discover your own way, wallow in your own poo poo because none of this magic works unless you're hardcore enough).
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Feb 17, 2014 19:26
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NewMars posted:Ars Magica once was a WoD thing and the Tremere were supposed to be the same group in both. Not sure which line came first though, but I'd bet it was Vampire. It was Ars Magica-Vampire-Werewolf-Mage, IIRC.
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Feb 24, 2014 01:35
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xanthan posted:So wait, someone mentioned stats up to 0 before, is that unique to things like True Faith and Humanity and if not why are you only shown stats up to 5 on the sheet? Humans can have a few stats at 10, Willpower, True Faith (rare), and Humanity (only relevant for V:tM purposes, the other lines don't use it). Every one of the big three splats has their ways of getting superhuman attributes. Mages can get superhuman physical attributes via the sphere of Life, and mental attributes with the sphere of Mind. Werewolves have totems, which can give bonus attribute dots, plus their own war-forms, which give lots of bonuses to physical attributes: A Garou in warform has +4/1/3 Strength/Dexterity/Stamina, for example, which is just this side of insane. For lesser splats, Mummies can use artifacts and Alchemy to boost attributes up to 8, which also give them special abilities per attribute boosted. Demons have their Apocalyptic forms, which are like slightly weaker versions of Garou warforms. I don't know about Wraiths, Changelings, or Hunters, but gently caress Changelings and Wraith really isn't about getting high stats to beat people in the face with.
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Mar 2, 2014 03:02
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J.theYellow posted:The White Wolf Wikia has plenty of background on the Nagaraja, if anyone still wants to know. Ooh, let's talk about the Euthanatos. The Euthanatos are great, because they range from really terribly done to pretty cool. In First Edition Mage, the Euthanatos were basically treated as creepy death obsessed serial killers who went around killing people for fairly arbitrary reasons. Second Edition and Revised removed that, and changed them into weapons of fate. Kill one man to save a thousand, drat themselves for a greater good, etc. In both cases, the Euthanatos thing is the "good death", killing people who deserve it and destroying the corrupt to rebuild it anew. It's just that the definition of that changed significantly over time. The Nagaraja are definitely first edition Euthanatos to the max, because Second Ed and Revised made 'removing yourself from the wheel of reincarnation', like vampires, one of the worst sins the Euthanatos consider. They also think that destruction for the sake of destruction is horrible, and if you kill, you should have a reason, preferably a really good reason other than "they were shooting at me". The Chakravanti are one of the sects of the Euthanatos, guys who see this idea of aiding people to a good fate via the Indian lens of karma. There's a bunch of other sects, like the Knights of Radymanthis, who are Greek, the Aided, who are Celtic, and Yggdrasil's Keepers, who have a touch of Norse mythology. The most dangerous people in the Euthanatos are the Golden Chalice, who are basically Call of Duty protagonists given magic ("Ramirez! Take out that battleship with your tactical knife!"). Of course, this is a really long-winded way of saying "you know the Wanted movie? The one which had literally no actual relation to the comics but was legitimately better for it? That's Euthanatos: the Movie. Go watch it."
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Mar 10, 2014 18:20
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double nine posted:I've never understood what those bags of "elder vitae" were supposed to be. Blood packs and blue blood packs are somewhat understandable. But elder vitae? Did someone drain a vampire elder and sell the blood on ebay? It can happen, but it's generally only done by mages. You see, vampire blood can be used to make magical artifacts. So if you're a couple of greedy badasses, you can, in fact, murder an elder and his retinue and turn them into delicious tass. Considering that Grout's mansion has an item that seems to be associated with the Verbena and his studies of vampirism, he may have associations with mages on either side. Favors for favors and all that.
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Mar 11, 2014 16:05
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double nine posted:Thing is, once you've found a bloodpack type, like blue blood but also elder vitae, it becomes available for purchase at the blood bank (and maybe mercurio? Not sure). In other words, Vandal has the resources to get these packs regularly - you can buy as many as you have cash on your character. I assume that's a gameplay conceit so you don't just hoard your elder bloodpacks because they're irreplaceable.
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Mar 11, 2014 16:40
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A Curvy Goonette posted:So what're the paradox rules for mages fighting vampires? I assume the vampires know enough about the real workings of the world to not induce paradox if a mage throws a fireball but who knows. Supernatural creatures, such as vampires, werewolves, and etc. do not count as witnesses for magic, which means you're casting at a lower difficulty than normally. In general, a prepared mage is something you do not want to face as... well, anything that isn't another comparably prepared mage.
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Mar 12, 2014 20:31
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steinrokkan posted:Does the lore have government agencies dedicated to whitewashing evidence of supernatural phenomena, something like the Syndicate in X-Files? It's not really the government which does this. The Camarilla have government pawns which help to do this, and the Technocracy does this, and generally quite effectively (since they can literally make evidence up and disappear). You see, if people don't believe in the supernatural, a lot of supernatural creatures weaken. The ones which don't, Bygones, end up requiring Quintessence to survive. The reason why vampires and werewolves can still exist is unknown. My favorite theory was that vampires are actually Bygones-Vampires just adapted to their situation by evolving the ability to drain Quintessence from living subjects (humans). This actually fits the mechanics. A Bygone needs 1 Quintessence a day or else they fade away. A Blood Point converts to 1 Quintessence. Guess how much Blood a vampire needs to wake up? As for Werewolves, Delirium's explanation would imply that the existence and fear of werewolves has been directly implanted into what makes a human human, which means that belief in them can't be eradicated.
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Mar 18, 2014 23:18
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citybeatnik posted:System changes include: M20 is apparently doing something to talismans, i.e. giving us actual legitimate rules for them that aren't "um, make something up, I guess?" Which is probably the most extreme rules change in any 20th edition thing ever.
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Apr 17, 2014 17:45
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citybeatnik posted:I'm less than thrilled with M20 because 1) one of the developers behind it is full out whacko and 2) the "official" artwork for the Etherites changed them from "mad scientist surrounded by tesla coils" to "some random steampunk gal in a corset, we guess...?". I've gotten used to literally lighting everything I don't like about oWoD on fire and making my own setting from the ashes, so I'm pretty stoked as long as the rules sort of work. I guess this is Stockholm Syndrome? (And we're getting Technocracy 20th Ed. That's probably going to be awesome!)
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Apr 17, 2014 18:19
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Shugojin posted:Malks are all connected to something called the Madness Network which both makes them insane and gives them insight. OWoD I don't know what the reasons for it giving information no one should know were, but NWoD it's thought to be a direct connection to literally all the information in the universe. I mentioned its Mage explanation a while back. Basically, the Madness Network impinges on Mount Qaf (the realm of Correspondence) and thus also the realm of knowledge that the Batini (basically Middle Eastern subtle philosopher-manipulators) originally protected. Mount Qaf was later subsumed into the Digital Web by the Technocratic Union, which is now also the realm of Correspondence but is also a shadowy reflection of The Internet. This not only explains why Malkavians are all crazy (wouldn't you be, if you had the spirit version of 4chan beamed into your head?) but also how they know everything.
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Jun 22, 2014 21:49
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