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The intent of the Chechen Vampire Plot Hook was to be transgressive and to add the weight of a real atrocity to the gameline. At no time did they have any political idea how their awareness raising, if one can call it that, was going to have any effect. Indeed, they didn't even adequately communicate 'this is a real atrocity, we've added vampires.' The execution points to an at best thoughtless, at worst blasé, self-important, and ultimately uncaring approach to real atrocity.
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Sep 27, 2019 00:52
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The issue isn't that V5 exists - there's some perfectly decent posters here that like V5 and have good games of it and enjoy it and that's perfectly valid, even with its history. The issue is the consistent assholes shitposting constantly
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Sep 27, 2019 01:02
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Mors Rattus posted:The issue isn't that V5 exists - there's some perfectly decent posters here that like V5 and have good games of it and enjoy it and that's perfectly valid, even with its history. Yeah, especially since no one else knows how the ignore button works, so I have to constantly see their bullshit quoted.
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Sep 27, 2019 01:05
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Soonmot posted:I'd legit like to hear about actual plays from nonchuds. A friend is playing it and they love the hunger mechanic and predator ATs. Just ban posters who repeatedly post in bad faith. Come on down to the actual play thread. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3743698 There are two really quite good Vampire 5th actual plays. On is Blood on the Thames a Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition podcast featuring a London coterie of a Malkavian painter, a Tremere, a Gangrel and a Nosferatu. https://www.twitch.tv/bloodonthethames https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9i3SeRLTMA https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast...1440609602?mt=2 The second is LA by Night, by Geek and Sundry. This focuses on a coterie of Anarchs struggling verses the Camarilla and other threats like the New Inquisition. https://geekandsundry.com/shows/la-by-night/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vampire-the-masquerade-l-a-by-night/id1468538502
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Sep 27, 2019 01:06
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I tried to watch LA by Night a while back and bounced off it hard. Does it get any better as time goes on? The first couple episodes really felt like "bad larper trying to be SUPER SERIOUS". I've seen a couple of the players on other streams before where they were much, much more engaging, so I don't think its the cast necessarily.
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Sep 27, 2019 01:13
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Desiden posted:I tried to watch LA by Night a while back and bounced off it hard. Does it get any better as time goes on? The first couple episodes really felt like "bad larper trying to be SUPER SERIOUS". I've seen a couple of the players on other streams before where they were much, much more engaging, so I don't think its the cast necessarily. Tricky question to answer. If you didn't like the characters then I think that's it for the podcast. I find LA by Night to be slower and much more drawn out than Blood on the Thames. However, the Storyteller of Blood on the Thames throws more plot hooks at the characters than they can reliably complete (every plot thread is on a timer) so that leads to overall a faster paced and (to my mind) more interesting game as the players scramble to keep up with the walls closing in on them. On the other hand, the coterie for LA by Night all have acting abilities to one degree or another. Notably the Brujah can cry or be emotional at the drop of a dime, and when appropriate it really adds to the story. TLDR: if you didn't like LA by Night initially you likely won't like more of it. Try Blood on the Thames. But give Blood on the Thames an hour to kick in. It starts off a little like Faulty Towers.
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Sep 27, 2019 01:21
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The presence of one annoying Brand Advocate is not a good reason to ban or airlock all discussion of a particular World of Darkness game in this, the World of Darkness thread. I’m interested to hear eventual updates on what goes on with V5, even if they’re about insane fuckups like the Chechnya thing, and would prefer to still have a one-stop-shop for that and custom werewolf lodges or whatever.
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Sep 27, 2019 01:23
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I don't want to WATCH people play, I want to hear stories about peoples games. And by hear, I mean read. Thank you for the links, though!
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Sep 27, 2019 02:26
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Unfortunately my LARP meets monthly so it's a ton of downtime between games. Upside: more time to work on horoscopes!
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Sep 27, 2019 02:40
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silo v5, threadban the associated trolls, nothing more is required i dont like owod myself but let loomer do his thing
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Sep 27, 2019 03:11
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, you barely even have to ban V5 chat; just ban Metapod and there won't be any more V5 chat until he socks again or Dracula manages to start a war with Ukraine. People don't really have much to say about it. This. I am stunned that Metapod is not threadbanned (and also regular banned) after their alter ego Oberst got given the boot for similarly hideous posting.
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Sep 27, 2019 04:00
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Ferrinus posted:I’m interested to hear eventual updates on what goes on with V5, even if they’re about insane fuckups like the Chechnya thing  to “oh christ what did they do now”; everywhere else is either apologists or assumes you already know what’s up and is five levels of discussion ahead by the time I hear anything.
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Sep 27, 2019 04:29
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:It's all poisoned, and there's no way to salvage what good ideas it does have. At this point it's a matter of damage control, I believe. We can let this keep happening or we can do something about it. I know, for my part, that I and other LGBT people who read this thread are really uncomfortable when VtM comes up and I have to imagine there are others. As a dissenting queer voice, I'm not willing to cede one of my favourite games - warts and all - to the fuckwits and fascists.
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Sep 27, 2019 05:19
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I’m gonna have to side against banning vtm discussion because i like seeing Loomer’s posts E: since apparently it’s important to establish, i am also a lesbian
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Sep 27, 2019 05:59
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Loomer posted:As a dissenting queer voice, I'm not willing to cede one of my favourite games - warts and all - to the fuckwits and fascists. Yeah, one reason I'm on the fence about it is because I know some goons like V5 and they can't all be secret assholes. Whatever happens, I'm against phrasing any thread splitting as quarantining discussion of any particular game (or similar). I'm mostly keen on a fresh OP.
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Sep 27, 2019 06:46
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On the one hand, V5 is bad. On the other hand, V:tES is back.
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Sep 27, 2019 07:29
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Also if you put v5 in its own positive thread shielded from outside criticism, that’s what people coming in from Bloodlines 2 will see. If they come here instead they might be pushed to a better game like VtR2
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Sep 27, 2019 08:01
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I think you have the issue with V5 as a set of rules and metaplot content, which appears to have a lot of cool ideas even if they may not be great, and V5 the cultural product, which caused an international incident, included the Hitler number, blatantly appealed at the actually-real-and-unsettlingly-relevant-to-mainstream-politics neo-Nazi market, and so forth. Maybe a rule that V5 can only be discussed in fully punctuated sentences.
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Sep 27, 2019 08:16
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V5 is the equivalent of a game nuke and it has caused the seventh thread Maelstrom.MonsieurChoc posted:On the one hand, V5 is bad. On the other hand, V:tES is back. Hello there, fellow V:TES player 
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Sep 27, 2019 08:21
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I also don't understand why the view point is "V5 is some kind of magical cursed topic it's impossible to talk about with any nuance at all" and not "there's a group of bad faith posters making GBS threads up the thread about it and maybe they should be dealt with and people should not waste their breath engaging with them instead of hitting the ignore button" Like V5 is being given a lot of power in this conversation for basically no reason, to the point where I suspect the actual issue is that there are people who don't want to talk about it at all and the shitposting is just a convenient thing to pin on it to try and get it booted from the thread because "I just don't want to see people talk about it anymore" is not really a defensible position. Blockhouse fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Sep 27, 2019 |
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Sep 27, 2019 08:52
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Oh hey you want v5 actual plays? It seems to work pretty well mechanically, as long as you ignore the vast majority of the fluff. Our group, set in an OLD british University town consists of: Georgian-era aristocratic University professor, who continues to be a University professor despite being a Nosferatu thanks to Mask of a Thousand Faces, and continued to be broadly socially progressive for his time until he started studying classics in the late 40s and essentially stopped developing. Constantly namedrops dead academics, uses completely the wrong words for everything, just about understands that phones can be mobile and computers exist, etc etc. Uses the Scene Queen hunting style to represent some of this. My character. Young up-and-coming Tremere who was, and still is, a moderately-famous author of supernatural fiction in the broadly Twilight vein, with aaaallll that that implies, and is an absolute wiz with Awe. Malkavian scientist, embraced about 3 months ago, who is deeply interested in all the various 'wtf' moments of becoming Kindred, including, thus far, that ghosts exists, that diablerie can transfer the consciousness/soul?! from the victim to the... well, victim I guess... that mind control is a thing... etc etc. Brjuah anarch (the rest are all cam, for a given value of cam. Every Kindred in the city within a certain radius is) club owner, who's trying to unite the two halves, break down barriers, etc, in that very Brujah way. Malkavian (my favourite character by far) whose Malk Thing is that for the first ten years or so of his existence he firmly believed he was still human, just Super hosed Up. We've managed to find a way to tone that down to 'he's aware he's a vampire unless he gets bestial failure' at this point though. His dog H A T E D him. And he was haunted. Still is, I suppose. Highlights so far have been solving the haunting, including designing a ghost phone, and a trip into London to try to find out why no-one had stopped Brexit (turns out the Inquisition were using it as cover to hunt vampires) which led, among other things, to a heist of the Tower of London which was currently occupied by Inquisition types experiementing on Kindred, and the phrase 'come with me if you want to unlive'. It is honestly the funniest game of anything I've ever been in, between my incredibly out of touch academic, Andy Is Not A Vampire, a very new vampire scientist who can eat dead blood and carries around a bunch of blood bags most of the time, the author using awe and the crying damsel in distress act to great effect, and the Brujah just despairing of everyone whilst beating all the faces, plus university and broader politics, etc etc etc.... It's been geuninely hilarious, and we all keep having to remind ourselves that this is a Serious Game For Serious People. That's not to say we haven't had serious moments, the whole Andy Is Not A Vampire plot has had some absolutely heart-wrenching times, and all of London was a survival horror masterpiece, which has involved us emptying London of most of its remaining Kindred and dumping them into our own town. That was last session, the consequences are next session... And I really, really, really enjoy it. But that's not to say that 5e is inherently a good system, especially as I don't have any experience with any of the other versions, not to mention that basically everything within this could have been trivially framed in another system. And it definitely has some questionable fluff and even more questionable designers. But whether or not 5e is a good game, which is absolutely up for debate, it's definitely possible to play good games in 5e.
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Sep 27, 2019 09:03
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Again, White Wolf is dead. They fired everyone and turned it into an internal brand name. It's not going to develop anything. It's not going to publish anything. All the people involved in the terrible setting ideas are gone, a statement we can make fairly accurately because literally everyone is gone. V5 was the vanity project of one guy at Paradox, and they didn't give a poo poo because they could make back every single dime he spent there by releasing a single video game. Seriously if they made "Europa Universalis but Vampire" I'm pretty sure they could buy out 99% of all active roleplaying game publishers. The only thing that could possibly happen for them to give a poo poo about White Wolf was it causing so much horrific press they were forced to actually acknowledge it existed. As it turns out it managed that feat with shocking efficiency, so they destroyed it. Utterly. Now a different company will publish Vampire and new people will develop it, and all you really have is a basic system and whatever setting ideas people decide to use moving forward. Whatever V5 would have become if it didn't shoot itself in the dick is over. It's probably effectively V6 at this point, even if they aren't going to rebrand this early. Granted they've gone longer than 1st edition did before moving to 2nd, so hey. Honestly that'd be what I do. Just say gently caress it and new edition it. You can keep the rules, they are neat enough and workable. Take whatever errata input you've gotten, tweak them a little, and just new fluff the thing. Combine it with whatever material you are currently working on and drop it all at once. Core and Clan book and whatever else you have. Blammo, new push to wipe out old mistakes, and you literally never have to mention V5 again. As I brought up, all you have at this point is the Anarch and Cam books, and the most meaningful thing they did is destroy the company that made them, thus making them somewhat irrelevant.
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Sep 27, 2019 09:08
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Did it really take them less than three years to release Vampire 2E? There was 1/2/R/20th/ right? They must have been cranking those books out. No wonder a lot of them are pretty bad!
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Sep 27, 2019 09:13
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.....heh, did it take them less than three years? Vampire was 1991. Second Edition was 1992. Werewolf and Mage both had new editions around 2 years, as did all the rest for that matter. Now you are looking at like 6 to 5 years for the revised editions of those books, so it wasn't quite constant turn over, the original "NEW EDITION TIME!" was real real fast for second though.
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Sep 27, 2019 09:32
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Nessus posted:Did it really take them less than three years to release Vampire 2E? There was 1/2/R/20th/ Early White Wolf was less a supplement treadmill and more a relentless sprint towards ever changing goal lines. Partly because the first edition stuff is really rough, both thematically and mechanically. This, of course, does nothing to shut up the people who screech about first edition supremacy over on the OPP forums.
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Sep 27, 2019 09:44
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First edition oWoD was kinda a play test for the inevitable second Ed’s. I remember it getting to the point that Brucato had to write an “Ascension 2e, already?” defence in the magazine.
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Sep 27, 2019 09:58
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Loomer posted:Early White Wolf was less a supplement treadmill and more a relentless sprint towards ever changing goal lines. Partly because the first edition stuff is really rough, both thematically and mechanically. Dave Brookshaw posted:First edition oWoD was kinda a play test for the inevitable second Ed’s. I remember it getting to the point that Brucato had to write an “Ascension 2e, already?” defence in the magazine. It was also an opportunity to significantly clean up the layout for the first three lines, which was Not Great for Mage and Werewolf and just outright atrocious for Vampire 1st. Something from first edition Vampire that was actually kind of cool—in theory—was the story threaded throughout the book by way of bits of art with narrative captions. The execution, of course, was a bit lacking:    quote:This, of course, does nothing to shut up the people who screech about first edition supremacy over on the OPP forums. I remember a while ago trawling through first edition stuff just to see how different it was and…it really wasn't a respectable distance more serious or truly personal horror-focused than any of the other editions. Hell, I'd say Vampire Revised, at least the core book anyway, was the most "serious" edition ever made.
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Sep 27, 2019 10:13
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Revised: A multitude of ways to lose your humanity through the slow, grinding horror of your innately predatory existence - if you survive that long 1st: LOUIS PASTEUR MADE ME A VAMPIRE AND NOW I'M A SUPERHERO
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Sep 27, 2019 11:04
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For OWoD I like having both the 1st editions and 20th anniversary editions to hand - the 1st editions because they tended to offer the loudest, clearest, most distinctive statement of the game's core ideas and themes, before the accretion disc of metaplot developments and designers second-guessing the games' original intent and whatnot obscured that, the 20th anniversary editions because they tend to offer actually functional versions of the games in question with a deep well of resources to draw on. (Mage is a bit of an exception due to the 20th anniversary having Phil's opinions all over it and going fairly prescriptive about how spellcasting's meant to work, but I just go with 1st edition style spellcasting with Mage and not worry about whether a) it's true to Real Occultism because Real Occultism has about twice as many definitions as there are Real Occultists or b) whether it's remotely balanced because I don't do crossover anyway and I find the more Mage ends up resembling an absurd shitstorm the more fun I have with it.) In terms of the thread, add my name to the "the problem isn't V5, the problem is posters who consistently poo poo the thread up" pile. A nice fresh OP will be a good idea, but the new thread will get soiled quickly if actual moderation isn't applied to the bad faith brigade.
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Sep 27, 2019 11:16
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That Old Tree posted:I remember a while ago trawling through first edition stuff just to see how different it was and…it really wasn't a respectable distance more serious or truly personal horror-focused than any of the other editions. Hell, I'd say Vampire Revised, at least the core book anyway, was the most "serious" edition ever made. I think some of that comes from Justin's notion of 'vampire as metaphor for addict.'
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Sep 27, 2019 13:12
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Oh yeah also while we were arguing Paradox released a schedule for their con in Berlin, which will feature a World of Darkness panel, which feels as good a time as any for announcements like Werewolf V5. https://twitter.com/VtM_Bloodlines/status/1177296782784679936
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Sep 27, 2019 13:40
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The World of Darkness is not a lifestyle and if you say it is I will mock you.
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Sep 27, 2019 13:59
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Wait, did they literally just put in a stealth announcement for a Switch/PC game called Coteries of New York, or was that known?
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Sep 27, 2019 14:07
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Loomer posted:The World of Darkness is not a lifestyle and if you say it is I will mock you. Did we ever get global mummy stats from your project?
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Sep 27, 2019 14:16
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:You are, and I say this will all sincerity and reverence, the only person in this thread that I feel this statement would carry weight from. They're somewhere in the big general writeup I did, but not terribly well differentiated as Mummy was a total mess. It probably has the least actually useable demographic information of any game line, partly due to the drastic changes between editions and partly because the books spent far more time establishing the world than actually showing it in action - there's multiple splats without a single character identifiable as belonging to them in MummyRev, for instance. EDIT: While I'm at it, as a general status update on the project, it's pretty much finished except for a few novels that I'm slowly chewing through and a final clean-up of extraneous notes. My thinking is that I'll either get it done next year (which is my last year before I start full-time pursuit of my doctorate degree) or release it as-is at Christmas 2020, both the raw data and the extras. Those are the statistical analysis I've already done, the vampiric lineage charts, the corporate structure and influence charts, and the biggest timesink in actually finishing it, the timeline - for which I've actually been doing a second/third/sometimes fourth pass over a lot of content to make it as comprehensive (excluding useless notes like 'so-and-so the minor NPC was born this year') as possible, cross-referenced against every other book and certain real life events where there are interesting parallels or plot possibilities. The big gaps in coverage is post-Revised content and fomori (I just didn't bother counting those). There's some limited incorporation of V20 etc content but I made the call about two years ago to stick to the initial run so it could actually end, as that was when V5 was moving ahead and the treadmill of 20th anniversary products was fully underway. I was faced with the prospect of there being an additional five years of content to trawl through, with the high risk of it ballooning out to more as I've become increasingly busy with real work over the years the project has been running, so I had to cut it off. But once the raw data is out there in a set format, it should be easy enough for the community to update it - the task is way smaller with just 20th anniversary and V5 stuff than tackling the original run. It'll even be relatively easy if people want to tackle the bits of data I didn't include consistently, like avatar types, since there's now a comprehensive list of every mage ever recorded, their sourcebook, etc. Loomer fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Sep 27, 2019 |
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Sep 27, 2019 14:18
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Mors Rattus posted:Wait, did they literally just put in a stealth announcement for a Switch/PC game called Coteries of New York, or was that known? It's had a Steam Page for a few months. Initially looked like some kind of Visual Novel+ style (which I am into), but very scant on details so I'm curious where it ends up mechanics-wise.
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Sep 27, 2019 14:25
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thespaceinvader posted:My character. That rules how much trouble has been being a famous author given your character
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Sep 27, 2019 14:44
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Loomer posted:Early White Wolf was less a supplement treadmill and more a relentless sprint towards ever changing goal lines. Partly because the first edition stuff is really rough, both thematically and mechanically. This, of course, does nothing to shut up the people who screech about first edition supremacy over on the OPP forums. Yeah, a lot of the treadmill stuff started at the end of 2nd, beginning of Revised because the RPG industry fundamentally changed in terms of distribution. All the companies went that path because it was the only way to stay in the distribution catalogs because if you didn't have something 1 month, they might drop you. EDIT: Drivethru and Kickstarter are probably two of the biggest revolutions in the industry because it broke companies away from being at the mercy of a shrinking number of distributors. Game store distributors in the US are probably one of the worst, monopolistic industries that people don't really know about unless they've talked with store owners or worked in the industry themselves. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Sep 27, 2019 |
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Sep 27, 2019 14:54
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Angry Lobster posted:V5 is the equivalent of a game nuke and it has caused the seventh thread Maelstrom. How do you do, fellow Jyhad shufflers.
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Sep 27, 2019 15:03
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Okay, working on a new OP, should have it up in an hour. What links do yall want me to include in the OP? I got one of those articles on the Chechen incident, I'll include a link to some of Loomers work, the What Can Everyone Do file that was shared. Does anyone have a compiled breakdown of the Beast controversy? Or should I just link the Fatal and Friends? Here's what I got for rules: Here are the rules: 1) Don't post in bad faith. Later on I'll be talking about the controversy of Vampire 5th. The game is tainted by some behind the scenes poo poo that is really gross and literally caused an international incident. Feel free to talk about your games, the mechanics, and what you like/dislike about it, but don't come in here like some keyboard fash dickhead whatabouting and gaslighting. 2) Be mindful of your content. Keep that racist, queerphobic, misogynistic posting over on reddit, buddy. Ironic racism is still racism. The old WoD games are 90's af and include A LOT of really bad stereotypes, so when you discuss them, be respectful towards the queer, non-white, and non-male posters here, myself included. 3) No edition wars. We really haven't really needed this until a couple of bad faith posters came in to poo poo up the thread with their hot takes on 5th edition, but there you have it. The best edition is the one you and your pals have the most fun with. Talk about what you like and dislike about them, but don't attack other posters for their preferences. EDIT: Anything special folks want me to add for the oWoD stuff, I'm pretty much just gonna C&P the info from this OP for that section. Soonmot fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Sep 27, 2019 |
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Sep 27, 2019 15:05
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