World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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

«‹›6 »

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

RedSnapper posted:

I've got a riddle for you:

My oMage campaign (Nephandi summoning the ghost of Ghenghis Khan in the middle of Warsaw while a powerful Marauder is trying to steal city's landmarks) is about to start in a week or three and the players finally sent me their character concepts:

One Time wizard;
One Entropy wizard;
And TWO loving Time/Entropy wizards;

Question: On a scale from "very" to "JESUS CHRIST" - how hosed am I?

For extra points: I'm still waiting for the fifth player to send me her character. What Sphere or a combination thereof could she take to possibly gently caress me even more?

This is why you discuss character creation as a group. Do your players know that this is what is happening?

If so, and they're doing it anyway, they clearly want a game about time and fate stuff.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2017 18:17

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:18

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

food court bailiff posted:

I'm pretty deadset on running it modern (or maybe a sliiiight throwback like IT-1950s or Stranger Things-1980s), I just suck at running modern games. I don't know why that is, really - I think it's just a little harder to abstract away all of the potential stuff that follows up, for example, some beastie tearing through a McDonalds in the city than it would be to do the same thing with an ogre Kool-Aid-Man-ing through the wall of Ye Olde Inn. I've been to McDonalds, I've been to the city, suddenly there's all these "what-ifs" involved in the back of my mind. Plus, of course, my players are experiencing the same thing, so they usually throw me tons of curveballs. It's sort of a weird paradox where I need to be better prepared than I feel I would be for a D&D game while at the same time needing to improvise way more anyway.

The great thing about modern settings is that you know intuitively how the world actually works. In a fantasy setting, for example, the result of a werewolf slaughtering everyone in the inn could be somewhat contextual. What kind of place is this? Do people know about werewolves? Do werewolves do this often? Do the authorities know how to fight werewolves? What is the cultural context, are there a lot of werewolf superstitions? It's up to the GM to come up with all of the background to figure out how people and organizations react to events.

In the "real world" you know exactly what happens when a werewolf murders a McDonald's, because werewolves don't exist. The police and FBI will say, a bomb went off, or someone shot up the place. It'll be on the news, probably nationally. People will politicize it. There will be memes about it.

The CoD setting works the same way, except that there are people and groups who will be able to guess that something supernatural happened, and those are the people your game is about. Hunters might be after the monster that did it, other werewolves might be tracking down the renegade, some crazy fucker might try to catch the thing and turn it loose on their enemies, whatever.

My advice is to think about what the aftermath looks like more than the event. Most supernatural types are pretty good at covering their tracks, often with built-in mechanics to keep normal people from even acknowledging that something weird happened. Witnesses will be hazy on the details, evidence will conveniently disappear, the cameras won't work right, and so on. So just look at what things look like after the fact, and consider the conclusions a person would draw if they don't believe in monsters, and they want very badly to continue not believing in monsters.

The other thing I would do is, aside from really obvious stuff, throw verisimilitude out the window. It doesn't matter what sort of physical evidence a real crime scene unit would find, it doesn't matter what police procedure is, or what werewolf DNA looks like, or any of that stuff. The only bits that matter are the bits that keep your players engaged and your story going. If you don't want to have the FBI look into the McMassacre then they don't show up and it's local cops only. You don't need to consider every possible angle, just whatever angles you want. If you get called on it, if your players are like "Wait a minute, why isn't the FBI investigating this?" then just say "why indeed" and imply that there's some grand conspiracy at work, because there probably is.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2017 01:43

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

nofather posted:

Silent Hill's otherworld is usually the go-to quickie explanation. Of course it's not just someone's leftover emotions and concepts that are trying to get you, it's also houses and roads and cars.

Ok but how does it relate to circumcision?

# ¿ Oct 20, 2017 03:25

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Big Ghost Head is the character I'm going to play when Wraith 20 comes out.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2017 01:55

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

In most CoD games I want the supernatural population to be really low. Major population centers with a lot of vampires have maybe 100 or so, give or take a few. There will be maybe three or four packs of werewolves in a large city, including Pure. Maybe a few dozen mages,and who knows how many demons because they're all hiding as hard as they can. On the other hand, I kind of like the idea that there are a whole lot of changelings out there. It makes the threat of the Fae a lot more broad and wide-ranging, and lets you have Courts with a large cast of weirdos and Goblin Market scenes like the one in Hellboy 2. And unlike most other splats, Changelings can really just be people trying to deal with their lives. They don't need to eat people, they don't need to Hunt things, they're not addicted to mysteries, they're just people who have been through some weird, bad poo poo and have to deal with it.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2017 18:21

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

It's not great, and everything about nuWW's Vampire so far is bad and stupid including that logo, but it wouldn't even register for most of us if it weren't already on a trash product line.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 18:41

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

If that happened before today, I'm going to put that down as "least surprising celebrity shithead turn of 2017"

EDIT: for certain values of "celebrity"

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 03:32

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Well if everybody doesn't constantly want to gently caress the gods, where are all these scions coming from hmmm? :colbert:

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 16:47

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Yeah, I'm genuinely very excited about new Scion. I love the concept, and I even ran a non-Storyteller Scion-type thing where you could be descended from the gods, a chosen champion of a god, or pretty much whatever. It was real good and I'm glad that is being incorporated in the actual game now.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 17:59

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

cptn_dr posted:

Oh man, if they sell enough tickets (I think they need about 50 more sales), there's going to be a local screening of the WoD documentary.

I'm not sure if it'll be a trainwreck worth shelling out $20 for though.

Depending very slightly on where you live, I cannot imagine selling 50 tickets to something like that, especially at 20 bucks a seat.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 21:26

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

I am reminded that one of the things I really liked in old Werewolf was that all the glyphs were drawn like they were made by claws. It's the good kind of 90s WW cheesy.

Kurieg posted:

So what do I get if they replace the "O" in acension with a pentacle?

They won't do that, Brucato would be scared you'd turn the book upside down and become a Nephandus.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2018 00:26

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

This is also an accurate description of when I leave the house.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2018 13:20

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

I would kinda prefer the personal commentary stay in to be honest.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2018 15:55

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Zereth posted:

Well, God-Machine stuff can have weird side effects even when there aren't PCs throwing wrenches in the works. (possibly literally, the God-Machine is very physical.)

It having a comprehensible overall goal would be new, though. To the point it's an open question in Demon society if it even has one, let alone what it is, and they're the people best informed about the God-Machine who aren't Angels still working for it.

I'd argue they know more about it than Angels do, since Angels seldom ask questions about it and If they do, they tend to end up as Demons.

# ¿ May 4, 2018 23:01

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Something that could really use updating and clarification are Ciphers. They're a neat concept, but they really need better mechanics and better integration into what the game is about. As it is, they feel like something that was bolted on at the last minute.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2018 14:23

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

BENGHAZI 2 posted:

Where's deviant

Turn off your monitor.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2018 03:05

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Mors Rattus posted:

You don't diablerize anyone as part of the plot that I can recall so I don't know how you'd be magically raising in Gen.

I was trying to remember if diablerie or even generation even got mentioned in the game.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2018 17:16

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Demons can only lucid dream, because they remember everything perfectly.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2018 10:44

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

It's an awesome game when you're 16 and do not give the tiniest poo poo about any of the things anyone argues about.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2018 00:28

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

How sure are we that Swedracula is out? I'm not entirely confident that they won't come back in a week and say "Now that our failure of a CEO is gone, we're turning absolute control over to Martin Ericsson with lead storyteller Zak S! Make Vampire Great Again!"

# ¿ Nov 16, 2018 21:59

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

My version would be:

Time & Space "Adepts"
Matter & Forces "Hermetics" maybe, or "Craftmasons"
Mind & Life "Akashics" - focused on perfection of mind and body
Death & Fate "Euthanatos"
Spirit & Prime "Dreamspeakers"

# ¿ Dec 4, 2018 18:35

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

nofather posted:

We even have rich people who literally get blood transfusions from young people in order to feel healthy or fit, and they don't have to turn in their Human Card when they get a Black Credit Card.

I disagree.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2018 05:57

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Nessus posted:

I suppose it depends on what you mean by protagonism.

What would make more sense to me is if some of the ~council of nine~ were chopped up and mixed around. The obvious affinity groups I see are:

1. The Order of Hermes, who, like the cheese, stand alone
2. Technomagical dissidents: Given recent events the Virtual Adepts are obviously Technocrats, but there would be room for renegade people using the methodologies and tones of science and technology to accomplish liberating feats of world-changing
3 and 4 would be a sort of dividing line between "semi-orthodox religious thought and practice, writ esoteric and large" (which would include the Chorus, the Akashics, perhaps the Euthanatos) and "actual traditional magic orders rooted in place and so forth" (which would include the Dreamspeakers and Verbena, and perhaps the Euthanatos.)

Really the big problem is that most of these groups don't make a ton of sense if you aren't looking at it from a 90s-rear end cool club where there would be one and only one school of magic Taobuddhist Karate Monks. You could probably do something with the four "types" of Avatar as a loose analogue to the awakening types in nMage though.

I would say that the main goals in modernizing the concept of the traditions would be to

1. Examine each tradition and figure out why it exists, both within mage society and as a game construct.
2. Ruthlessly purge anything that's really stupid
3. Define each tradition as either being single-paradigm or multi-paradigm. As Nessus says, the Order of Hermes has one paradigm and rigidly adheres to it. Newly recruited mages, probably pulled from sleeper occult organizations like OTO, would be indoctrinated and taught how to do things the Hermetic Way. The Sons of Ether (who need a new name) would gladly accept anyone with radical science ideas, and then argue vehemently about them forever. I'm not sure anything but the Hermetics and the Euthanatos would be single-paradigm.
4. Don't make each Tradition specialize in one Sphere. Emphasize that all nine Traditions have the depth and breadth of wisdom to work with any Sphere, and any attempt to match them up is just something the Hermetics wanted to do for their own weird reasons.

Multi-paradigm traditions wouldn't teach a single style of magic, but would be more of a political umbrella for mages who have similar styles so that they can keep up with and remain independent of the Hermetics. The Akashics wouldn't teach a single magic martial art, they would instead accept anyone who practices a magical style focused on physical discipline and mind-over-body concepts. Dreamspeakers would welcome anyone who practices any form of shamanism or animism, and so on. The idea here being that the Traditions aren't trying to reduce every magical or spiritual tradition on earth down into nine muddled ideas, but rather that these are organizations designed for protection and mutual support for people working with similar concepts.

I'd probably fold the Virtual Adepts into the Sons of Ether. Their whole ideology and style seems kind of quaint and dated now that we live in a real life cyberpunk hellscape. They may as well join the rest of the quaint and dated science mages. Then you can bring back the Bahtini.

I think personally I would want to ditch the Celestial Chorus. I think that most magical traditions in the real world have a religious element, and that trying to make a single Tradition that encompasses that idea is both reductionist and redundant. Christianity doesn't really have a magical tradition, the Kabbalah is probably a Hermetic thing, and weird snake handlers might be some kind of Ecstatic thing. I'm not sure what to replace the Chorus with, though, or if it even needs to be replaced at all.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2018 01:55

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

The fix for Etherites is to just say that they do any kind of super-science, and that they're mostly Technocracy defectors. There are a few who use antiquated scientific ideas, but those concepts have mostly died out even within the Tradition and the few people practicing phrenology are the embarrassing old racist grandpas that nobody listens to anyway.

It's interesting, to me, that I heard about phrenology growing up as "goofy old timey science," but I never heard that it was actually wrong so much as it was just lumped in with palm reading as being kind of woo-woo mysticism. I had never made the connection to racism until I saw Django Unchained.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2018 18:47

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

There are years in this world that I might, if offered a chance, want to re-live. 2003 is not one of them.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2019 21:48

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Basic Chunnel posted:

Wolves vs. Vampires battle royale, calling it. If it is the Apocalypse game that�s been �in development� there�s a 99.9% it�s going to make Vampire: Redemption look like Deus Ex

# ¿ Feb 25, 2019 16:53

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

I know this is a monkey's paw situation, but the one thing I would like from a big chronicle book is an actual chronicle I can run rather than a bunch of setting information and plot hooks I have to put together into a story myself. It doesn't look like this has that, so I'm probably going to pass. Also, and this is just my personal feelings, I'm kind of reluctant to give OPP any money until they stop making new material for Beast.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2019 22:42

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Casual Encountess posted:

hello thread are there any good resources for new storytellers for v5 vampire?

This thread in particular is a little cold on v5 because of a bunch of really stupid edgelord nazi dogwhistle bullshit White Wolf/Paradox did while promoting it, including offending an entire foreign government and the global LGBTQ community at the same time. I don't think you're going to get a lot of stuff here. That said, I don't know where people are talking about v5. Maybe RPGnet?

# ¿ Mar 26, 2019 23:13

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Mummy as I experienced it was really weird because it seemed like there was exactly one modern day chronicle you could run, which had a time limit, and then you're done and it's period flashbacks or nothing. That isn't necessarily bad, but it was odd and I would really like to see the process of losing power and gaining memory drawn out a bit more so you could fit more stuff into a modern game with a single group of mummies. As I recall it felt like you'd get maybe a few months of actively doing stuff before you were too weak to function. I'd prefer the arc were more like Promethean, which also has a set end-point to aspire to but it's slower so there's a lot to do before you get there.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2019 19:34

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

PHIZ KALIFA posted:

Does a war-shark have an amphibious war-form? If it does, is it also popping driftwood 100% of the time, like the other poster mentioned? If so, does their boner have like, shark skin or normal human skin?

Because loving a sharkskin boner sounds like the worst kind of punishment.

So incredibly, painfully smooth.

# ¿ May 3, 2019 13:54

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

Gobbeldygook posted:

I had a player play a Body Thief from World of Darkness: Immortals in a game. They're a mortal+ that can steal bodies and supernatural powers. It took my player a very long time to figure out that I was playing it as he could keep people's powers by killing them before they reverted back. So it's a justification for a super-buff sorcerer that could have an insane mish-mash of powers from every splat.

Also you gotta have a mummy in a monster mash.

If your crossover game isn't a mummy, a vampire, a werewolf, a promethean, and some kind of homebrew fish-man I don't know what you're doing

# ¿ Jul 18, 2019 17:01

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:18

Cool Dad: Jun 15, 2007; It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

To be fair if I were a normal wolf who suddenly gained sapience when I matured into an adult, and I found out the world was the way it is in the World of Darkness (or the real world in 2019), I'd be pretty pissed off about my entire situation too

# ¿ Jul 24, 2019 20:15

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

«‹›6 »