gatz posted:

I'm not sure what the actual story is behind the embrace of the main character, other than the back of the game's box says "SEDUCED IN A DARK ALLEY ...". It's left up to the player's imagination. Beats me how LaCroix's minions knew about it, but it's worth noting that a good amount of time passed in between when we first see the clock (12:37 AM) and the last time (3:46 AM). So it's not unthinkable that someone could have figured it out and had the time to act on it, somehow.

quote:

Just gently caress this. Firearms are so lovely. If someone wants to prove me wrong, I welcome you to show me.

Feinne posted:

The best part about the fact that the Followers of Set are working so hard as a clan to try and bring old Set back is that I seem to recall every single Gehenna scenario where the Antediluvians are a thing has them getting extremely negative results from their efforts. I'm pretty sure one option is that he basically decides there's no real hope of actually coming back and he calls them all to mass suicide, and in another he shows up and is like 'yeah you all suck fyi' and again most of them die.

LeJackal posted:

This is a nice crossover with the schadenfreude thread, but I recall in my tabletop game the insufferably smug 'Buddhist' working for months to justify buying higher Humanity and scraping together XP for said purchase so he could be ~*better than all of us*~ and be as insufferable in-game as out.

He failed a Humanity check and lost it the first game after his purchase, due to his own stupidity.

LeJackal posted:

This thread.

gatz posted:

Umbilical Lotus posted:

Because, much like the apartment and everything in it, it was probably something LaCroix or his goons found in a dump somewhere.

Also, if this game is set in 2004, then the president would be George H. W. Bush. The guy is definitely some sort of Malkavian hivelord. Sic the thinblood on the President.

Stroop There It Is posted:

Also, it makes sense that vampire NPCs wouldn't give as much of a poo poo about how ugly a Nossie is, since they at least know what the deformed monster in front of them is (and how it's useful to them). I can't remember what happens when you try to talk to essential human NPCs--do they still not react differently? Is that what you meant?

Elfface posted:

Honestly? Gimble is pretty easy, because he's an ordinary human., and they all have one major weakness. If you get your teeth in them, they're paralysed until someone else attacks you.

Transmetropolitan posted:

Since this thread is *temporarily* the main one regarding the game...

I have arrived at Pisha in my save, but something weird happened: I realized there was an option to *not* buddy up with that goddamned flesh-eating monstruosity and I promptly managed to kill her. Besides not getting her artifacts, do I miss on anything else?

Tiggum posted:

Oh my god, you missed the best bit! Before you try to climb the staircase you can explore the ground floor a little bit. Down one corridor you'll find nothing but locked doors, but as you get near the end the girl's voice behind you whispers "He's coming!". You turn around and there's a guy with an axe standing there, but just for a moment before he fades away. Like everything else in this location, it's really well done.

Captain Oblivious posted:

The bulldozer thing, is that only in the Plus Patch? I don't remember anything like that in any of my many, many playthroughs

EphemeralToast posted:

Well, I hate to be a negative nellie but the hotel sequence did not impress me. Pop scares are the absolute laziest form of building tension and this was nothing but. All the elements of the chandelier falling, GET OUT on the wall, etc. are haunted house cliches to the point of making me giggle. And that diary, as has already been pointed out, is ridiculous.

I guess it kind of makes me a jerk to say this when everyone else is talking about how atmospheric and great it is but I honestly don't understand. I realize that it's different when you're the one playing and I'm sure that I would have been startled playing through it, but that's all--startled. Same as if someone came up behind me right now and went BOO in my ear, which isn't terribly atmospheric.

Stroop There It Is posted:

Jumping on the Peace bandwagon.

Right, I think in addition to White Wolf's boner for insane oracles, it is related to assorted worldwide vampire myths that vampires would have to compulsively count grains of rice or what have you. Renfield could possibly be interpreted as a Malkavian ghoul (although VtM-canon Dracula is an Old World Tzimisce elder*).

* Old World Tzimisce predate the formation of the Sabbat and do not have the Vicissitude (fleshcrafting) "infection", and instead have the clan disciplines Auspex, Animalism, and Dominate.

Josef bugman posted:

I want to hear more about Mithras, he sounds spectacular.

Shugojin posted:

Well, if I remember the story correctly, Tzimisce had turned itself into a big immobile thing through fleshcrafting and found it easier to just take over someone else and start over again than try to make a new, mobile form and so may have mind controlled the guy into trying. Still, where Antediluvians are concerned, just knowingly going near one is a big enough mistake

Vicissitude posted:

I have them practically memorized.

Yeah, I've been busy. That's why I haven't been in the thread as much as I probably should. Anyway, onto the Vinculum.

Back in Ye Olde Tymes^TM, the elders were in charge of their childer. This, for the most part, hasn't changed, but back then it was considered almost mandatory to punish a wayward childe with a blood bond to keep them in line. When the Inquisition started burning across Europe, many Kindred were killed. A lot of them were fledglings, neonates, or even ancillae who were ordered, Dominated, or blood-bonded and compelled to sacrifice themselves to save their elders. As you can imagine, this made a lot of the younger vampires rather upset with their masters. So to strike back, they needed a way to free themselves from the bonds of blood to their sires. Anarch thaumaturges and/or sorcerers found a way to replace an existing blood bond. They called it the Vaulderie, a practice which the Sabbat practices to this very night.

Essentially, the Vaulderie IS a blood bond, though not nearly as potent. Each member of the pack drains their blood (a single BP) into the ritual "chalice" (anything from a jeweled goblet to a fancy beer mug will do). Each, in turn, drinks the mingled blood. The resulting bond is something a pack member feels toward the rest of the pack rather than to a single vampire. This ensured their camaraderie, but the important thing is that it can BREAK an existing blood bond. Young Anarchs used their newfound freedom to tell their sires to gently caress off and left the elders to the bonfires of the church.

Now, a normal blood bond comes in 3 steps. At the first drink, you think about the domitor a lot. At the second, you go out of your way to see/speak/please them. With the third drink, you are completely enthralled and obsessed with your domitor, to the point where your old life is discarded as worthless (unless your domitor thinks otherwise! In which case you'll gladly keep up appearances!). The Vaulderie's effects are much more subtle, graded on a level of 1-10. But even at the uppermost tiers you're not obsessed with a pack member. The ritual instills a profound sense of loyalty to each other. You don't want to do anything you can to make them happy, but you will ensure they survive and thrive among the pack and the Sect at large.

PFlats posted:

Oh I agree, this is far from the worst. But why not throw you into combat right out of the loading screen and let you get smacked right down in-engine, then play the cutscene?

Bloodlines was rushed out the door, right? Because I guess limited programming resources is an acceptable answer.

quote:

It began development in 2001, beset with problems: it was the first third-party game to use Valve’s Source Engine – which was not yet completed – with Troika developing their own AI to run on it, White Wolf andActivision having to vet everything, and a development team smaller than most, and especially small for the scope they were planning.

In 2004, Activision seemed to want the project over. They brought the game out as soon as was legally possible and, in the process, took the sales-killing decision to release it on the same day as Half-Life 2 (due to a contract with Valve not to release it before theirs). The original plan had been to release Bloodlines in the spring in 2005 to avoid competition with Half-Life 2, Halo 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3, yet Bloodlines was condemned to be out-competed and rushed in a release that lead writer Brian Mitsoda said “felt one step up from being sold at a yard sale.”

The notoriously-overambitious developer was left without an assigned producer from Activision for over a year, meaning that the project went off on tangents and was allowed to bloat. The resulting crunch to meet the new release date must have been like receiving a thousand sit-ups via electrical stimulation in a single minute; a kill or cure remedy. David Mullich, the producer, described it as “a very gruelling project,” while Brian Mitsoda said that the “the worst” part of the game had been its “scope [...] burning me out for a couple of months after the project was over.” Although he did add that, as bad as that was, it was on par with “realizing that, for the rest of your career, you probably won’t get to write anything like Bloodlines.”

UrbicaMortis posted:

I find it funny that most of the outfits at least look more protective as they go up but the gangrel just gets different coloured hoodies. We also need pictures of the nosferatu armours. I vaguely remember them getting increasingly gimpy as they went on.

gatz posted:

Okay, we're not going to rat out Mercurio, but suck up to LaCroix. We also are going to run into two other political groups in the upcoming part, and I decided to play it like a Ventrue and


If not just to learn about these groups in their own words and not have them be aggressive towards us.

OAquinas posted:

tremere stuff

Bobbin Threadbare posted:

I thought Caine killed them himself (and most of the third generation) once he realized what his offspring were doing. Either way, he only Embraced three times in total so killing them all isn't such a hard feat.

wiegieman posted:

With very slight modification, this describes all the technocratic conventions.the entire world of darkness

Ephemeron posted:

It's nice for emergency in-combat feeding, I guess.


Who else indeed? Perhaps a certain someone who coincidentally happened to be in the vicinity with a grenade at hand? Putting someone in danger just so you could rescue them and place them firmly in your debt is Vampire Politics 101, after all (as far as I recall, one of the sourcebooks mentions sires deliberately tipping off hunters to the locations of their wayward childer so that they could swoop in and bring them back into the fold).

If you're playing an unmodded game, don't take Blood Boil. Three Blood Strikes in quick succession will kill any human at a lower cost. On a related note, three Blood Salvos will kill all humans in your line of sight.

gatz posted:

Pretty heavy spoilers:
***snip***

DeusExMachinima posted:

"Wanna know how I got this eyeshadow?"

Glazius posted:

Pisha does seem very lucid.

I wonder what we're going to be, after two hundred years.

barcoded posted:

So in terms of the fan theory that the PC is of unusually high generation, where would they fit in among the vampires that we've met so far?