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ArchWizard posted:A female Ventrue named Melissa. I'm okay with this as long as you're Ventrue. I remember playing as Christof Trustfundsman the Vampire College Republican and it was goddamn hilarious to do when I went through this game. Ventrue for life, yo.
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Nov 11, 2013 01:42
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I've always gotten the impression that the Paths are fancy ways to get around the fact that humanity is extremely inconvenient and uncomfortable for vampires. Like, take that Noddist stuff. 'You might be a soul-sucking monster who exists as a bane on humanity as punishment for the first murder but that's totally not evil I swear. Because reasons.' It just feels like it weakens the central conceit of the setting, which is that for all they tell themselves they're superior and can do what they want, there's this erosion of humanity from acting that way has a real consequence and actually makes them more of an insane monster and eventually leads to their destruction. Having a bunch of ways to control the Beast by being a jackass feels like it weakens it a lot.
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Nov 19, 2013 06:23
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I used guns my first playthrough because gently caress if Christof Trustfundsman the Ventrue was actually going to touch the peasants circumstance demanded he kill. It sucked in the beginning but by the end I was slaughtering everything and everyone with pinpoint accurate automatic fire. And I was even playing a terrible clan for it and never even bothered putting points in my Disciplines, just advancing my mundane 'human' stats and barely using powers.
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Nov 25, 2013 20:27
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I actually find the lore of the oWOD to be really boring because, as someone said, at the bottom of any mystery is usually the stupidest possible answer or another ridiculous NPC. One reason Bloodlines is good is because it stands on its own two feet: You learn enough about the setting organically while playing to keep up with what's going on, and you're exposed to a bunch of interesting characters in the process. Meanwhile, you go from a terrified peon being sent out to die to one of the most valuable operatives in the city. You actually have some agency within the setting and get to accomplish and learn things, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for most of White Wolf's own writing.
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Dec 6, 2013 22:21
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Cythereal posted:Except Hunters. The only WoD stuff I've ever done is nHunter, and some of the endowments they can get - especially for Task Force: VALKYRIE - are very nasty. And as I understand it, oHunters were all but toothless. They were. I played Hunter: The Reckoning once, and while we accomplished some crazy poo poo a lot of it was via our GM altering the rules somewhat to make us less hopelessly screwed. In most cases, all a Hunter really got back then was the ability to see the supernatural. The Edges didn't really qualify you to go toe to toe with any of it and you had human level durability, no way to take extra actions, and unless you were a melee based Avenger (which had its own problems, because for as badass as Cleave could be you were still going toe to toe with a oWoD monster as a human) you really didn't have any good fighting options beyond 'pray a shotgun is enough' or some form of trickery. We only got as far as we did in our big final confrontation with a coterie of vamps because we had a Judge with True Faith, and we stole a fire truck, then had her bless the water. I have no idea if that actually should have worked, according to oWoD lore, but it was one of the funniest moments of my gaming career, watching vamps melt away like a firehose was a flamethrower on steroids.
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Dec 13, 2013 20:34
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The sad part is, like most of White Wolf's stuff, there was a really cool idea at the base of Hunter: The Reckoning. The idea that these arrogant bastards have called you livestock forever and grown complacent that they control the world and can hide whatever atrocities they feel like committing, totally unaccountable to the humans they treat like slaves, and that suddenly you can see them, you have a few edges to even the odds in your desperate struggle, and you and your friends need to teach these arrogant bastards the meaning of fear. This is a cool setup for a desperate and very angry game, where the chances are pretty high you'll get yourself killed but you might flip the checkers table on the supernaturals in the process. It's just that, as has often felt like the case, from a mechanical standpoint you can't even surprise these things, usually, let alone ambush them or destroy them. They take six actions, do enough damage to one-shot each hunter on the team, have supernatural senses, etc. It kind of puts the lie to the whole 'We can't risk being spotted, they outnumber us' setting conceit in general.
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Dec 13, 2013 20:49
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Which helps us get at one of the other problems of White Wolf games. They had no conception that rules actually affected tone, storytelling, and narrative as long as you were going to involve rules and dice. It always felt like every WW system I ever played was just kinda hacked and patched together without any idea of whether or not the mechanics actually served the narrative at all, which is a really loving important part of RPG design. As to vampire fiction, I know we all 'know' Dracula, but the original book by Bram Stoker is really loving good. If you've never actually read it, I'd strongly recommend it.
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Dec 13, 2013 22:27
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Josef bugman posted:Its more ethically compromised than X-com (the newer games, from what I have seen of the earlier ones... not so much!) Hey, man, if that farm didn't want to be reduced to rubble and flame such that it resembles Mordor, it shouldn't have had Sectoids inside it. Ain't nothin' unethical about that.
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Dec 13, 2013 23:22
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Gantolandon posted:
Just going to chime in that that sounds like one hell of a fun time, at least.
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Jan 3, 2014 03:48
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Plus, meanwhile, the Anarchs still pretty much follow all the Camarilla rules. They're less an anarchist movement and more of 'gently caress you vampire dad'. Which is understandable, mind, vampire dad is a jerk.
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Feb 15, 2014 17:43
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In fairness, pretty much every clever vampire killing strategy in the fluff has a tendency to fail in gameplay, as we discovered to our chagrin in Hunter: The Reckoning. Just bless a firetruck full of water with someone with True Faith and go to town with the hose, it's the only way to be sure with the little bastards. Screw being clever, they'll just be immune to it or take 8 turns to your one or whatever.
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Feb 15, 2014 19:14
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gatz posted:
If I recall properly, I think that's one of the points of the Dark Ages setting in WoD, though. That the vampires are openly flaunting their powers and have outbred their food supply and so there are a bunch of twitchy, obvious predators dancing ever closer to when they eventually set the humans off, the humans unite, beat the piss out of them, and force them into the Masquerade.
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Mar 12, 2014 01:24
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To be fair, there were also around a million vampires you had to fight your way through in Redemption, so I don't think the developers really thought things out. How could all of those vampires have been up and around? There's not enough blood to go around.
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Hasn't literally every splatbook/gameline claimed Jesus at some point or another in oWoD?
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Mar 13, 2014 07:12
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Admittedly, if I was Jesus and I was gonna ask someone to fix Cain (and have a shot at success) I'd go with a Malk, too. It's completely impossible and insane, so it's kind of their territory.
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Mar 14, 2014 05:37
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Talk the poor bastard down.
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Jun 3, 2014 19:11
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Ally
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Aug 20, 2014 16:51
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These guys would be vastly improved if they were actual Jiangshi and had to hop everywhere because of the rigor-mortise.
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Nov 19, 2014 20:22
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double nine posted:"How's my favorite weapon dealer? What's that? You lost your blood donor? Well, I need an anti-tank rifle, you know what I'm saying? I knew we could get an understanding." He's like, the one person in all of the city you can honestly trust. That's worth almost anything in VtM.
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Jan 6, 2015 09:25
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Stroth posted:I'll save you some time: It's inconsistently portrayed. oWoD in a nutshell.
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Feb 22, 2015 08:06
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