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Squizzle posted:Ferrinus is a Beast who feeds on internet slapfights. And how many poor fools in this forum have been drawn to be a hero, charging into the thread bragging that nobody rolls dice like Gaston?
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Apr 24, 2015 17:55
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CommissarMega posted:Didn't it have something to do with the power of True Names and such? If you know Winter Harrow's true name is Rob Robertson, then your spells and such are more powerful. I also recall one character in the demo whose Keeper would be summoned if you repeat her True Name three times. At higher levels of Wyrd, some bans and taboos also rely on knowing your True Name. Also, it's a big thing in oath-crafting. If you swear an oath on your true name, there's huge prices on failure. And given that it's possible to bind an oath that someone swore on accident, using your true name seems like a big risk. Even if it's something minor, there's a handle there stuck into what remains of your soul. I could easily imagine being introduced to some spooky high wyrd changeling as "Frank Jones", your actual true name, they offer you some cash to do some apparently simple task, you say "No problem, I'll do it if you pay me", reaching out your hand to shake, they smile and take your hand, saying "Consider it a promise, 'Frank'." Honestly, if/when I get around to actually running Changeling, I'll probably do that as a bit of prelude to establish why the PCs need to use fake fairytale names. Maybe even have the first session be dealing with the repercussions of the accidental oath.
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Jun 15, 2015 20:40
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WereJace posted:Does anyone have any 'absolute must-have' supplements for Changeling: the Lost? I'm prepping to run a WW2 era cloak and dagger sort of thing, if that helps. I think Rites of Spring is probably most useful - it goes into a lot of great detail on oneiromancy (dream magic) and pledge-crafting, as well as really expanding on the thorns and how to do stuff in them. Winter Masques was cool for alternate settings, for going into a lot of detail on how seemings tend to work, and for additional kiths, but I don't know that it was as useful after character creation was done. Autumn Nightmares is a fantastic antagonist book, and great for coming up with cool, creepy ideas for plot and plot hooks. Dancers in the Dusk has a great chapter on dreams, more focused on running stories set in them, and has a bunch of cool stuff for the hedge; it's really the "for STs" equivalent of Rites of Spring. Swords at Dawn has a bunch of stuff on tale crafting, but the rules are a little meh - if you're really familiar with fairy tales and Joseph Campbell you can probably come up with a better system for when people go low clarity and start getting hooked on using fate to turn everything into a myth. My order would probably be: Rites of Spring Autumn Nightmares Dancers in the Dusk Winter Masques Everything Else
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Aug 5, 2015 18:10
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Man, I hope Talecrafting 2.0 is as awesome as I wanted 1.0 to be. The mechanics in Swords at Dawn just left me flat. Yeah, this is why I didn't rate Swords at Dawn in the top 3 - Talecrafting is amazing as a concept, and should be a central element of every Changeling game, but the mechanics as presented are lousy enough that it's better to just make up your own stuff so your players can use the Rule of Three and Training Montages and Mysterious Strangers and all that.
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Aug 6, 2015 20:51
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Pope Guilty posted:The word "Justicariate" rather than just "the Justicars" is a MES thing, right? I never heard the term before I started playing with the MES. It gets used in OWBN too, so maybe not?
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Dec 6, 2015 05:54
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Mendrian posted:You'd basically just look like someone whose feelings shift and change wildly which I think is p.good roleplaying if you ask me. Having played a Malkavian for like 14 years at this point, this is a big part of how you do it. There's a thing called "lateral thinking", which is basically making a left turn in your chain of logic without any warning and assuming everyone will just follow you. The secret I've found for portraying it is have a couple of basic assumptions which are at best partially correct, then have them be assumed unalterable truths. Go straight from initial assumptions to your conclusions without ever mentioning them - consider them as fundamental as our assumptions that gravity will continue to work, or that when someone snarls they're angry. Act as though those assumptions are true, and everyone knows about them and has them. Think about how your character will react if someone directly challenges one - confused, angry, politely dismissive? Figure out a couple before you start game. If something comes up a couple of times, add it as a new unchangeable assumption. For reference, a few of my long-time Malkavian's basic assumptions:
Another good technique to add in to the difficulty following your character's logic chains is rapid disorganized changing of topics - switch from the plot to a movie that it reminded you of and back to the plot, without ever actually providing any of the standard conversational tags to show you are intending to switch topics. Next bit of advice: Give plot suggestions to the STs. Good ones. Ask them if they can take your idea, alter it so it doesn't go exactly as you think, then run it, and if you can have your character mention it in the middle of a rant before it happens. When you do, don't place any special importance on it - you don't want to run up to the Prince and say "I know what's going to happen", you want the person you were talking with to realize after the fact that you knew what was going to happen before it happened. Also make up other things you didn't talk about with the STs - maybe they'll adopt them later, maybe your character is wrong. And try to avoid describing them literally or directly- don't say "Joe is going to run into a human at the 7/11 who recognizes him from when he was alive", say "they're around, they're all around, just BREATHING, and they recognized him, you know? They KNEW him, from before, and there by the 7/11 they knew him. (laugh) (on to the next topic, like what book you're reading or a movie you saw)". As a Malkavian, part of your character's role is helping the STs in laying out puzzle pieces for other people to connect. Really, the main thing to me is to figure out what particular mental issue you want to portray, research it a lot, and portray it respectfully. You are portraying someone with an incurable mental illness. It should not be played for laughs. Even when you do something funny or silly or zany, there should be a deep, personal tragedy behind the veil. This is a game of personal horror, after all.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:29
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Pope Guilty posted:I brought this up once OOC and was told that since human beings sometimes dress in old timey clothes and carry swords it's no big deal if vampires do it. The SF game has a gangrel elder who shows up in a chain hauberk with an axe. Only IC sadly, OOC he's wearing jeans and a wifebeater. When my smarmy anarch neonate commented on beo-wolf over there, someone tried to argue it was San Francisco and people pretty much wear whatever. But no, Mr. elder apologist, even in San Francisco there are not a lot of dudes running around on Muni looking like they got kicked out of the furry remake of Lord of the Rings. I mean, if it was Folsom weekend and it was an assless hauberk, maybe. The rest of the year, not so much. I can only imagine the reactions in the less deranged parts of the country.
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Jul 11, 2016 20:43
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Loomer posted:Hah. You joke but I'm doing some actual gematria for the compiled book of nod thing. That is awesome in a very nerdy way. Do you plan to share it at all, or is it just a personal thing?
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Sep 6, 2016 20:28
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Loomer posted:...gematria... Mods, can we get Loomer namechanged to Beckett please?
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Sep 9, 2016 18:01
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Hey guys, there was an interview with Swedish Dracula on the future of the World of Darkness. http://keepontheheathlands.com/2016/09/30/the-future-of-darkness-an-interview-with-white-wolf-publishing/ Some definite positives; he talked about including supernaturals from places other than europe, and doing so with less prejudice and rose tinted goggles. Someone I have not heard of (Dhaunae De Vir) said "...when exploring dark topics, everyone should be free to choose what experiences and what level of intensity they want to be exposed to and participate in. If some topics are not interesting or if the subject matter is too harsh, there should always be the possibility to opt-out. I want to clarify when I say “too harsh”, I don’t necessarily mean rape. We are role-players, and our imagination is vast and ever-growing." Martin also said in response to the larp drama from the Grand Masquerade "What we did our best to message at The Grand Masquerade was that even though our world is dark and mirrors all kinds of really heavy topics it is important that when larping or participating in any our products, that people do it on the level they think is ok and safe for them. We are also absolutely behind the fan groups playing our games in a way that fits their individual preferences." Of course, on the downside, Swedish Dracula referenced "the lure of heroic fascism in Werewolf," and the two books he explicitly called out as needing to be updated and republished were ”Shoah: Charnel Houses of Europe” and ”Gypsies” (though in fairness he added that it "Should be called something like 'Opre Roma!' "), which makes me really nervous. He also concluded with "Army of the Abandoned; the time has come to rise! Blood and Souls!", which based on my larping experience I can only assume was shouted loudly, while wearing a cloak, in a train station parking lot or empty mall food court.
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Sep 30, 2016 18:12
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White Wolf survey, here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HT8GSSP Takes 15-20 minutes.
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Dec 23, 2016 20:23
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Quand enragerez-vous?, maybe? Quand aurez-vous la rage? (So you can steal https://youtu.be/M1WmyfjDIJc which is a fantastic song for the genre.)
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Jan 21, 2017 03:30
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Kurieg posted:Trip report from the Conquering Heroes review. Heroes are evil because they "Cannot accept that Beasts have Primacy in the world." Reason heroes are bad: Don't like Poochie, aren't willing to look for and hang out with Poochie
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Jan 21, 2017 19:23
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Archonex posted:Yeah, that's the real ancient mystery to uncover here. Who are you guys hanging out with that Atlantis is a tired concept? And then proposing as a solution Lemuria, which definitely does not have any new age baggage as the home of Blavatsky's pure Aryan Tibetan Yeti Astronauts.
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Feb 15, 2017 17:10
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I'm a Prince of Clan Generic, in the Pyrenees.
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Mar 15, 2017 22:05
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Nystral posted:In the 90s on IRC there were rumors of a house with a regular multi-day 24/7 game running based out of Chicago. But lol it was the 90s and on IRC and on a "free form" vampire channel. So yeah... Nerdiest punkrock house in the world.
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Apr 17, 2017 20:09
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Loomer posted:The current world tensions between Islam and the west are in truth just the mortal facet of the Gehenna Wars I look forward to seeing Zak S and Swedracula's sensitive handling of this topic. (Credit Where Credit is Due: Making sure KotE 2: Wuxia Boogaloo isn't written by white dudes from rural Georgia is a definite step forward, and Ken Hite has written some amazing stuff with Suppressed Transmission.)
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May 12, 2017 20:20
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:I think Swedracula's antics are hitting their bottom line tbh. Speaking purely personally, this is it for me. I've played WW games for 22 years now. I've run them for 20. I created a LARP in the 90s which is still running every other week. I'm HST for another LARP right now. I have several shelves of White Wolf games I've bought over the years, and more on PDF. And with everything in the last year or so, I'm just done. Beast was a shambles. It's accidentally a game about how gay or transgender folks are monsters who destroy everything around them. Swedracula is desperately moving back to the 90s, and doing a great job reminding me how far our culture has come in the last 20 years. The new edition he's working on intends to have the "struggle with islam" be a vampiric plot. In response to MES banning rape as a plot element, their spokesman Shane deFreest poo poo talked them in the keynote, saying stuff along the lines of "if you don't want rape in your games maybe white wolf is not for you". White Wolf hired Zak S, who outs trans folks, to write a game including a transwoman who lures straight men into sexual encounters, rapes or kills them, and named that transwoman after one of his trans critics. They published a draft with random encounter tables for gay nightclubs and nightclub tragedies on the anniversary of the Pulse massacre. They published a draft with the immigrants as thieves and isis agents posing as syrian refugees. They apologized for those things by saying people who were offended just weren't mature enough to get it. I haven't been buying anything from White Wolf for a year or so, I'm planning on stepping down from running the game I run, and I'm just - losing interest. Some of this was always there in the old material, but it's getting emphasized again, and it's really removing any desire to buy or support or run or play. Maybe I'll find that desire again some time in the future, but you know, I'm American. I have to deal with regressive conservative edgelords ruining everything around them and making fun of "PC Culture" and "Social Justice" more than I want to in my day to day life. I can spend my free time playing things that aren't lovely.
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Jul 14, 2017 18:36
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Mors Rattus posted:It should be noted again that Onyx Path has no control over what Swedracula does, or indeed any association with him and his antics beyond licensing Chronicles. Yeah. And every time I try to argue that to myself, I just - I dunno. Beast is on OP, the rest is not their fault, it's just that everything White Wolf is doing is really killing off my desire to keep spending time and money on anything that even remotely reminds me of them.
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Jul 14, 2017 18:44
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MC Smoke Sensei posted:Can I quote part of this from this post? I won't use your username or anything, this is just organized well, and I'd like to use it as part of explaining why I, too, am frustrated with Swedracula and the attitude he's stirring up. Fine by me.
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Jul 14, 2017 20:08
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Speaking of LARP and terrible decisions, By Night Studios had to cancel their planned Tampa by Night event, stating: "Effective immediately, By Night Studios is canceling Tampa by Night. It is our duty to provide an environment that is safe for and tolerant of all people; regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic. When we encounter anything less--when we feel that we cannot guarantee the safety and security of our guests--we feel that we owe it to our community, our partners, our sponsors, and ourselves to change course immediately. We deeply regret the inconvenience this causes to those planning to attend the event, but in this instance we feel it is the responsible thing to do. We will be issuing refunds in the order we received ticket purchases on a rolling basis, to be completed by 9/30 at the latest. Please contact info@bynightstudios.com for individual assistance" Turns out the nightclub at which they were planning on holding the event (the Castle) has been having problems with nazis. There's a performer who likes to incorporate SS gear into her outfits, and she has a following of skinheads who show up in Nazi uniforms, and they've started intimidating and harassing other customers, as nazis will do. So, when the servers at the nightclub started refusing to serve Nazis, they got fired, a Facebook flamewar started, and BNS, to their credit, decided it was best to just cancel the event rather than holding a vampire LARP at a Nazi BDSM club.
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Sep 1, 2017 00:10
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:I played (very briefly) in a LARP once where Natchitoches, Louisiana was actually a major metropolis on par with Atlanta or Houston. It makes me wonder how many tiny-rear end burgs in the MET WoD have been turned into giant cities for the benefit of the sad, sad people who LARP there. Ask me about LARPing in SF and getting told that PCs in Amador County, CA, had invested enough influences to make the county seat of Jackson (population 4000) a larger and more prosperous city than the entire bay area.
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Sep 7, 2017 18:13
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One problem you run into in very long running LARPs is the question of high end PvP becoming EvP. Basically, someone gets 400 points, they're going to be annoying to kill. Aegis, Majesty, Fleetness, Puissance, a couple of fetishes or whatever, and it gets tough to kill someone before they fair escape, even if you have 3 or 4 guys with 400 points. But then there's nowhere to really go up from there. Your traits and disciplines are maxed. Meanwhile, people with Thaum or Necromancy in clan can keep getting more and more stuff to up their max traits, to give them new one-shot kill powers or things to cancel Aegis and Majesty. Once you've got a group of people at 600, the Tremere is vastly more powerful than all the other Camarilla people. So, what do those other Camarilla people do? They either have to accept that the Tremere run things and can kill them at will, or they have to do other things. Often, "doing other things" means getting elders to kill the Tremere. You do a bunch of IC and OOC politics and get a Justicar or two or three to kill them. Get a conclave called, get them put on trial and rig the trial. The other option for "doing other things" basically involves getting thaum/necro yourself, going infernal, or otherwise getting access to some other power source. So, if you're a hardcore PvP guy, you go infernal, go Setite Apostate and get Setite Sorcery and cut a deal with the Giovanni to get Necromancy, and then you can keep up with the Tremere until they start making up their own rituals because "they're wizards and wizards can do that". If you're not a hardcore PvP guy, you get in good with the coordinators in charge of the clans or the sect, and get your PC in good with their NPC, and then have their NPC kill them with elder powers. Either way, the Tremere, and the people who are at 400, complain, because they're upset you're using cheesy non-genre powers, or because they're upset you're using OOC politics to get NPCs to kill PCs. I don't really know what the solution is, other than not minding when NPCs kill PCs, because political shenanigans and getting your elder sugardaddy to inflict consequences is totally genre. It's just the OOC aspects of it that get sketchy.
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Oct 13, 2017 20:11
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Bring back grognards.txt, put it in lf, unban hpapylef and make him mod
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Oct 23, 2017 17:19
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Ars Magica tends to go in one of two directions. 1: Storyteller tries to run realistic plot. This ends with standing in the local university library explaining to someone that you're not working on a graduate thesis, just researching the price of salt in 13th century burgundy in your spare time. 2: Storyteller doesn't try to run a realistic plot. This ends with running Against the Giants, and the PCs, upon hearing that there's a giant-sized anvil in the first room, spend the entire rest of the session trying to figure out how to get a single block of that much solid iron back to their chantry. Most gaming sessions consist primarily of the one classics major laughing at everyone trying to pronounce vis.
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Dec 12, 2017 18:05
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I Am Just a Box posted:As somebody who's never gone near the LARP scene, I've got to ask what the latter was about or meant. It's a long-rear end video. Resources is a background for how much monetary income you have. People were asking (satirically) if female characters got 70% less money from dots of Resources since we're going with the super historically accurate misogyny and racism.
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Jan 11, 2018 23:11
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Basic Chunnel posted:You’re going to rage in it. The question is when when you need that last bit of strength on the climb to pass Armstrong
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Feb 8, 2018 17:53
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Warthur posted:Likewise, UFO aliens are a gap, but don't really fit the more supernatural than science fiction underpinnings of the setting. UFOs are actually very thoroughly Changeling. Strange, otherworldly creatures abducting humans for weird experimentation, strange patterns on the ground which might be gateways to other worlds, etc etc.
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Apr 24, 2018 02:00
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Is it possible control KotE Jiangshi by slapping one of those spell talismans on their forehead, like in the Mr. Vampire movies? IIRC aren't jiangshi just kuei-jin in frenzy or something? Wrong incorrectly used Hong Kong Movie word. Jiangshi were the Yin-imbalanced Kuei-jin whose sunlight burns rotted their flesh permanently so they looked like zombies. Chih-mei were the 0 dharma Kuei-jin stuck in frenzy, though unlike Kindred Wassail they could be brought out of it by magic rites and taught a dharma (probably by slapping a spell talisman on their forehead like in movies), or could just spontaneously chill out and be on Humanity, or just spontaneously chill out and make up their own Dharma based on a virtue, in which case you're called Kanbujian, which White Wolf said meant "unable to see" when it actually means "invisible".
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Apr 30, 2018 18:10
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Gerund posted:The guy's been laughed out of most LARP scenes in the NW for giving teenage girls liquor poisoning, I would like to hear more about this.
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Aug 10, 2018 03:24
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Gerund posted:I've had it for a week and its thin in some places (entitlements, pledges, kiths) while filling out holes in others (trods, bedlam). Haven't had time to go through all the contracts and I'm confused how Elemental seeming benefits work when taught to non-Elementals- do you choose a set element at the time of being taught, is it always your teacher's type, or is it free-for-all? Agreed, pledges in particular could have used some serious fleshing out. It seems like they removed the vast majority of the mechanical benefits from pledges, which is a shame - there's nothing about using them to grant or obtain backgrounds, or make dream pacts, or any of the benefits of fealty. Now they have a handful of minor benefits, a list of sample consequences for breaking your word, and nothing further.
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Aug 14, 2018 22:29
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I've got a very long-running Malkavian in one of the national organizations. The short version of how he gets played most of the time is to take someone with bad ptsd from abuse during the accounting, then run basically everything through a filter of Joseph Campbell and Frazer's The Golden Bough. Treat everything as if it works on fairy tale logic because it's a lot easier than coping with how hosed up things really are. My character design goals were basically "people who actually have mental illness are not a walking comedy routine and are able to have agency in their life on a day to day basis", "totally ignore all plot I don't want to be involved in and all national characters I don't want to talk to", and "if a strong narrative choice / bad decision presents itself, go all in because that's fun." It helps that I spent a bit telling fortunes on the street in the 90s so I'm decent at spouting ambiguously worded prophecies which are almost bound to happen. It also helps to have a lot of STing experience so I can present one simple solution to a plot which ends up being way cooler than whatever the ST originally had planned, so they often go for it. It's been a lot of fun to play, though I periodically have people who know my primarily through the character talk as though I'm a malkavian OOC, which is super awkward. There are also a lot of really bad Malkavian players out there. With Malkavian players it's split pretty evenly between the awesome roleplayers and the weirdos you want to avoid. On the plus side, that's better than Tremere or Ventrue, who are 90% people creating an escapist power fantasy in which everyone has to respect them.
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Nov 13, 2018 22:51
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Loomer posted:No, section 5. "It is legal in the Camarilla for Princes to blood hunt Justicars. " As someone who's played a lot of OWBN over the years, what is legal and what will get you dead as all hell have significant overlap, particularly when it comes to PCs who think they're a bigshot in Ohio trying to pick fights with big setting NPCs. And yeah, they never were the same organization, though MES at one point tried to force OWBN to join with a threat of a lawsuit.
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Nov 26, 2018 23:02
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Dawgstar posted:The KotE book Shadow War teaches the same thing! This remained very true in larp. The Kuei-Jin get (comparatively) easy access to lots of weird stuff that really only high point tremere get, but all their powers cost a lot of xp so you have to focus what you can do. You can get some great combos like ranged touch staking (jade shintai 5, internalize 3), but it takes 8 ranks in disciplines and way more chi and set up time than a Ravnos spends to just do the same thing with horrid reality. If you go for physical combat your shadow soul is going to end up out most fights and you have to choose between winning on ties or getting cheap multiple actions. You can put out scary damage for two rounds, then you’re dry. The thing they excel at is some great investigative powers which kindred can only match with thaum rituals, and the ability to see and talk to basically everything in the setting, plus your main book saying everybody likes you. Really though, their biggest weakness in a larp is the same the Giovanni get- there being only one or two of you and being outside the politics system in a game which is primarily about politics. You’re setting yourself up as a side character with a weird uncommon skill set nobody has any reason to trust, and unless you’re very charismatic out of game (and let’s be honest, you’re a nerd at a larp, you’re probably not), you’re going to get very regularly sidelined.
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Mar 24, 2019 18:29
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