World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Hey OP, where'd the far better rules for Mage go from the OP?

e: And XP-based chargen. Real clown town itt

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 17:52

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 06:28

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Crion posted:

I think it's probably more important (or at least more interesting) to give the under-served, underplayed games more materials in exercises like this to try and entice people to try them out. And honestly, there's so much Vampire material out there you can already basically set a game when or wherever you want, so long as you're willing to do the reading on the time period and place in question.

I agree, at least for Promethean. Geist though *holds nose, comically waves hand in front of face*

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 16:04

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

On the other hand, the least charitable definition of any given WtA faction is almost definitely the most accurate one given *gestures to everything about the entire product line from start to finish*.
Unless you want to split hairs about the spiritually-incapable-of-keeping-money-on-hand homeless werewolves with a gift for eating actual literal garbage or the named-for-cannibal-spirit group whose savagery is matched only by their nobility, and how that's just grossly oversimplifying the deep and well-considered lore that all the tribes secretly have. Or maybe in their tribebooks, like the Children of Gaia one.

e: If it's erasing magical blood power Gypsies and the mysterious vampires of the Hidden Orient with completely different cosmological underpinnings then yes, erase away holy poo poo

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 19:42

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Excuse me, I misspoke. Blood purity power Gypsies.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 19:46

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

MalcolmSheppard posted:

Can't see one of the reviews. The other one just gives it a "meh."

Meanwhile, Black Furies got:

Yeah, that sure looks like a cavalcade of awful as any right-thinking person should believe, right?

Sure, Gypsies was bad. It's why the company actively ignored it. On the other hand, the idea that it would be less racist to say that Asian vampires come from the Bible but are too dumb to remember (which is the other option in CWoD) is worth a laugh.

I'm glad you found the good book to match the other bad book, because that completely validates your argument and renders mine moot.

And no, what's worth a laugh is the having-cake-and-eating-it-too idea that the owod cosmology has anything resembling internal consistency and that it's planned for reasons of inclusivity and not left-hand-doesn't-talk-to-right-hand kitchen sink planning that tries to backsolve itself into coherence when people try to wrap up the product lines and sprawl the metaplot. Unless you completely ignore that Judeo-Christianity informs the very first and foundational product line for the entire company, and also Demon: The Fallen, the game of playing fallen demons from the Christian Bible cast out of Paradise alongside Lucifer and that within it attempts to offer an explanation for all the creation myths of all the product lines being correct because of the division of reality caused by the titular Fall.

So yeah. I'd say it's more ok to assume vampires use the same rules everywhere if the entire universe is written in-product as being reconciled together and explained by a Judeo-Christian viewpoint. I mean, it's good enough for the Gaki to still be vampire-vampires and not year-of-anime-vampires. Not that flesh shintai isn't cool and all.

Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Apr 10, 2015

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 20:17

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Effectronica posted:

Hell, why would it be any more racist to have a consistent cosmology that's Judeo-Christian (hypothetical CWOD without Kuei-~~ren~~jin) than one based off of Carl Jung (Unknown Armies)? I've never seen anyone say that the idea of the Invisible Clergy was Euro/Anglocentric, only that certain archetypes were.

Also the funniest part of that specific example is that anybody can be Embraced as a Cainite vampire, but explicitly only people from eastern Asia can come back as Kuei-Jin. Cainite vampirism: truly the big tent party.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 20:33

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

moths posted:

Doesn't that have more to do with culturally/regionally created afterlife models though?

It's both, but the best part about that is that it's being surface-inclusive while being actual-super-racist. It's a win-win! Because on the one hand you get to say that Asians have two souls, but on the other, you can say that people from Japan and China and Korea and Indonesia and the Philippines and anywhere else are just interchangeable Asian. Which is something that hoooooo boy please say this around anyone's grandparents who grew up in any of those countries and report back.

Honestly Malcolm, I don't mean to single you out for the sins of The World-Spanning Stereotypes of The Great Cosmopolitan Luminaries of Stone Mountain, Georgia. But holy poo poo dude, if you're going to go to bat and advocate for a brand, you have to realize this one (by which I mean owod specifically, and even more specifically vast swaths of material written in the unwashed 90s) is...really, really not-great, a lot of the time, and no amount of personal involvement in its creation or rose-colored nostalgia is going to make it any less stupid or gross.

Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Apr 10, 2015

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 20:53

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Effectronica posted:

But anyways, why don't we fill the gap in post three with something dumb but conceivably helpful- sources of potential inspiration for games.

I'll start: Hunter - Taxi Driver

The best VtR movie is, of course, Nightcrawler.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 22:13

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Okay Mexcillent.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 22:41

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Okay Mexcillent.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 22:45

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

MonsieurChoc posted:

I like most of the reworked Requiem disciplines, with the notable exception of the Coils of the Dragon.

Don't forget illusion magic Nightmare!

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 02:34

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Daeren posted:

Realtalk my brain actually blocked out Nightmare's rework because I had no idea what you were talking about until I went to go look at Blood and Smoke again.

Your brain was trying to save you and I'm sorry to have ruined it.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 03:57

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Behold my terrible power, mortals. The ability to exert my will against the Fallen World, inflicting devastation on my foes limited only by ST fiat

# ¿ Apr 30, 2015 13:19

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Luminous Obscurity posted:

Welcome to Mage.

Pass

# ¿ Apr 30, 2015 13:21

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Cabbit posted:

Let the record show that Ferrinus is against things that allow people to feel good and, by extension, the concept of joy itself.

If it's the death of fun on one side and you and loose, lumpy wannabestorygamingexceptignoreourcrazyelaboratecombatrules on the other, well. RIP fun

# ¿ May 1, 2015 21:12

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Cabbit posted:

Because I'm picking a hill to die on here, and not just poking fun at Ferrinus.

Who can ever tell itt

# ¿ May 1, 2015 21:15

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

The direct/indirect attack spell distinction just strikes me as something carrying on in the Storytelling System tradition of acting like it's a fluffy story game with loose, freewheeling mechanical interactions until combat begins and suddenly the rules snap into intense granularity. It's just, Mage flirts with both halves of the system is weird ways: wanna turn vibrations into fire and make a guy's throat burn out when he talks? Sure, same dice roll as turning a floor into a Slip 'n Slide. Consequences of throatfire? Well gently caress, better consult your DM ST about the damage expression because flavor-agnostic mechanical limitations would be against the spirit of fun.

Like, yes, getting Ferrinus to talk about Mage is the platonic ideal of being cornered at a party by the guy who's really into brewing in his garage but he's 100% correct here, there's nothing to be lost by saying "ok an effect at this level would do this much or this type, full stop" and then moving on with your session and your day.

# ¿ May 2, 2015 16:20

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

CommissarMega posted:

Just a short question- does the 20th Anniversary edition of V:tM's rules match with the newest nWoD ones? I'm going to try run a game for some mates next week, and while I mostly like the fluff and stuff for the lines, my nostalgia for the video game makes me want to keep the Malkavians, Toreadors etc. Also because part of me want to have the endgame being 'everyone against Ravnos/Tzimisce/Ravnos and Tzimisce's illegitimate Mary Sue daughter' or summat of the sort.

Nope, V20's still oWoD rules top-to-bottom, just with stuff cleaned up and made consistent between all the various versions of disciplines/bloodlines/etc. floating around in splatbooks. BUT the rules are completely self-contained so you could just, run a V20 game straight-up out of the book instead of doing anything with the nWoD/VtR/ Blood and Smoke stuff.

# ¿ May 10, 2015 00:11

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Lightning Lord posted:

A lot of the times I'm compelled to defend oWoD and I do, just on the basis that it's best enjoyed as a superhero horror shared universe. It's basically that little slice of the Marvel universe where Werewolf by Night, Dracula, Blade, Moon Knight and so on hang out.

While I'm enjoying them, 1s creating botches again because the 20th Anniversary editions are a celebration of the past is pretty boneheaded though.

1s cancelling successes still fits with what you said, it's just, now you're getting that "Moon Knight brutally shatters his legs falling down a fire escape" montage every couple weeks instead of just the once. Which if that's your thing,

# ¿ May 21, 2015 02:05

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Leviathan also doesn't have the albatross of "everything written about Heroes being in the same book" hanging around its neck. If it got a latter-day B&S-style "antagonist we're really trying hard to get excited about but we're just mashing our palms against our inert matter until we grunt out a hundo pages about it" on the wiki it would find itself probably about on par with Beast.

Plus with weirder interactions with the Size rules, I'd imagine?

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 02:09

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Crion posted:

This is the bargain Beast is counting on you to make in order not to write it off.

I'm kind of glad this book is as irredeemable as it is, because instead of trying to salvage any of it my table can just ignore it and its fluff completely. Beasts are such boutique dev-insert characters, as a splat, that you lose literally not a single bit of texture from the nWoD by just pretending this book never happened. That's a success, right? I mean it's a huge, massive failure. But it's also a success.

The most important thing to know about a toolbox is what Not to use for a job. In that respect, Beast is a runaway success of being designed as the future dustiest drill bit in the box.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 16:35

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Beast: the game of strengthening your personal brand such that your detractors are trivially blacklisted and anyone sufficiently engaged becomes an advocate.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 19:07

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Ferrinus posted:

Oh, god. Oh, god, it all finally makes sense.

And, get this, based on the tone of the corebook, you've GOT to love their drat product too.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 19:15

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Rand Brittain posted:

I could honestly respect Beast if it just owned up to the fact that Beasts are just awful. If it was "I'm a monster who makes everyone's lives worse, and everyone wants me dead because of that, but I won't die just to please everybody else. Come at me, bro," I think you could make that work.

Add to this that your presence inspires actual good person heroes to start being more Galahad and less gaston (but who still feel a compulsion to track and murder the beast on the side) and you'd have a legitimately interesting narrative tension built in. You're the worst but you bring out the best.

But that's not what we got. Rip

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 20:35

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

bewilderment posted:

What makes Slashers sympathetic when for the most part they're Literal Horror Movie Villains?

They're neither protagonists or antagonists in Beast.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2015 02:08

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

*writes a sample character that mechanically and demonstrably gets off on psychologically abusing children in her care in tyool 2015* For real though these are the good guys and you should be friends with them, everyone.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2015 02:23

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

If they ever do a Horror Recognition Guide 2, there better be a story where the narrator gets tricked onto a boat, kills the driver while he's muttering about the sweet fruits of the abyss, and when they get back to shore there's a huge crowd of vampires, werewolves, and changelings there waiting to high five them for getting rid of the guy that makes the rest of them look bad.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2015 03:25

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Luminous Obscurity posted:

"And then everyone started clapping."

Bonus points if the boatbeast natters on about Heroes first and the narrator doesn't even bother trying to write down specifics in the after-action report.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2015 03:30

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Punting posted:

You know, beyond all the extremely problematic content, there's another very good reason that Beast fails as a line - it's central premise, that Beasts keep humanity connected to the ~Primordial Dream~, and do so by making people terrified/victimized, is already something that other splats do.

The Lancea Sanctum, the Hunters in Darkness, the Autumn Court/Scarecrow Ministry, etc; every splat already has a group whose schtick is essentially "Humans need to be scared shitless, for their own good."

Beyond being just juvenile trashy garbage, it's loving recycled juvenile trashy garbage. It's a single faction concept trying desperately to shoulder the weight of an entire game-line.

And of those, notably the Hunters in Darkness and Scarecrow Ministry are ostensibly actually scaring people away from far worse poo poo than "guy cosplaying as hook hand killer," like the actual straight up True Fae.

Beasts just do it for the goodtummyfeel.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2015 21:53

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

If you want a game line where ferrinus is ok with and in fact demands splat power disparity, look to Exalted, where the entire setting conceit is predicated upon a forever slightly better Solar contingent vs justifiably weaker and more numerous Dragonblooded etc. It can happen and make sense when your setting is going for that story from the ground up.
Meanwhile Beast is just "you can't like balance a game man. The difference between explanation and excuse.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 20:12

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

paradoxGentleman posted:

See, discussion like this makes me want to check out Mage even less.

Thank god you're here Soonmot, people almost went a page on-topic about Mage without someone's pissy whinging

Here's how you can tell Mage is written with the idea of balance in mind, at least in theory, while Beast's are 100% the MMcF "whatever man just feel the heart of the dice" poo poo: If Mage's mechanics were written like Beast it would make the Arcana read more like Geist Keys mixed with Scion's stat-scale write-ups. But it isn't, because it at least pretends that you don't need to explicitly state Unlimited Numbers to convey unlimited potential.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 00:47

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Yawgmoth posted:

I did this for my mage game that used the piecemeal rules of 2e from the blog posts and it worked amazingly because suddenly my players weren't googling for immediately fatal poisons and reactive materials to skirt the damage rules, it was just "your Matter spell turns some of his shirt into NaOH for [potency] lethal" or "your Life spell makes a swarm of tarantula hawks that sting him for X bashing and give him a -[factor] penalty to actions because 4/4 Schmidt pain scale."

Honestly I think it's a silly thing not to do, really. The people who cry about "but muh creativity " aren't people I'd want to be around at all, let alone play with.

Also if your creativity is limited by the number of damage dice you're going to be able to roll for a given attack, it kind of feels like you're missing the forest and trees all in one go, you know?

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 01:44

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Pope Guilty posted:

I really want to play Geist, but a better Geist with a more developed setting and a reworked power set.

I want to play Geist where the designers just watched the movie Young Adult over and over until they got the feeling of Coming Back Wrong to a World That Doesn't Need You right.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 02:24

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Dave Brookshaw posted:

Really? loving time zones! No one tells me anything.

To be fair, if the entire book was written with the quality of thought and an eye towards coherent design that your sections (or at least, the parts that sound like they were yours?) were, we wouldn't be having this "yeah gently caress this" discussion in the first place, probably. Since that's a scenario with far more silver lining than cloud.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 13:24

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Brutal Casting

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 19:04

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Dave Brookshaw posted:

So one of the amusing things about this meme, is that Brutal Casting doesn't actually exist. I didn't like it in the first draft of Mage's Merits, so I deleted it in the redlines.

And not a single one of you knows what it was supposed to do. Only David Hill and I do.

That you killed it and are glad to see it dead only reinforces my feeling that you're one of the best ones.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 21:44

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

LatwPIAT posted:

Unreliable narrators are a pretty lovely way of trying to convey setting information; I can understand taking things literally because the alternative is to second-guess the only authority one has on what was actually intended. The GURPS Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage books may not be the best way to play the old World of Darkness, but I find them very convenient because they're straightforward and clear in their descriptions (with Mage, as straightforward and clear as they can be. Even the traditionally factual tone of GURPS throws up its hands when it comes to explaining oMage).

Unreliable third person narration is ideal when you want to write badly and then have a one-step process for walking back any sort of commitment to your own work, though.

Which is probably why it comes up so much in talking about things like owod and beast.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 18:41

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Okay, now tell us what Brutal Casting was.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 23:39

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

paradoxGentleman posted:

The fact that you are picking Dungeon World, a game that while not perfect is decently serviceable, as a negative example is not helping your case.

Wasnt your sole contribution to the Mage discussion noting how many posts were made in it

# ¿ Jul 9, 2015 20:07

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 06:28

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

paradoxGentleman posted:

Yes, because I have never read anything related to Mage and was bemused to see it create once again such heated discussion. What's wrong with that?

Enough, actually. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3718298

# ¿ Jul 9, 2015 20:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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