World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

DJ Dizzy posted:

5 matter, 5 mind. Its a fairly highpowered game.

A double-rank master is not concerned with the day-to-day affairs of a triad of vampires. Cap your power output via extraneous bullshit like "you cannot have a paradox ever or other mages will kill you" and "is distrusted and sabatogued as a mage by an even more powerful Consilium for palling around with vampires" and even "the vast majority of vampires count as sleepers".

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 17:24

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:40

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Dave Brookshaw posted:

If we do another nWoD game, I kinda want to do a deliberately lower-powered one compared to the others.

What would be the purpose of designing a game with that intent in mind, other than to provide a talking point in a discussion about brand-level game design?

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 19:52

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Well the "right" answer as a mage isn't to turn the air around a player into rock. It's to turn a section of rock into air and then cancel the spell when your opponent steps into it, because it can't be countered.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 23:55

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Ironslave posted:

A Mage with (I think it was) Forces 2 can outright create sunlight.

If your sole criteria for what "balanced" is in nWoD 1E is "they both have targets and they both roll stats to be used" without taking into account things like scale, ease of access, general usability, splat weaknesses/strength, scope of a given power, the evolution of a character sheet, effect vs. time invested, and so on, you're doing a pretty poo poo job of arguing on what balance is.

Sunlight requires Forces Mastery. Corebook, page 176.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 00:02

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

"Browsing all forms of electronic media with their minds" is just a replacement for having a cheap e-reader and a minor non-combat effort. And a significant number of the things you mention are under the same Effect = Damage scale as every other action in the game.

Gerund fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Jun 9, 2015

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 00:09

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

This sort of "turn the air in their lungs into acid" wankery is why I wish there was a writer brave enough to include:

NO MATTER HOW 'CLEVER' YOU ARE WITH SPELLS YOU CAN ONLY DO SUCCESS WORTH OF DAMAGE

as the first sentence of the first paragraph of the spellcasting section. Spend the rest of the paragraph explaining that the Exarchs hate you and its the reason mages hate the Exarchs.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 00:19

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Ironslave posted:

No one plays like that anyway unless they've played a game long enough. And as far as trivilizing similarly-leveled vampires, typically they can't do these things from the other side of the planet (not sure when you'd be THAT far away, just an example of the absurdity of it) by dipping into Space 2.

And if we're talking about similarly-leveled, where this comparison breaks down the most is where they start climbing above 5 in their power stat.

Having the full access of the world's biggest information bank on-tap isn't exactly minor depending on the situation. Moreso if you have two dots in Mind and can divide your focus to perform a number of searches at once.

Space 2 magic is a flat -6 to your roll unless you know the target's True Name, no matter how hard you cast the rest of the sympathy-affecting spells in the game.

My second personal mage suggestion would be to eliminate the sympathy-affecting spells, by the by.

Also "isn't exactly minor depending on the situation" is not exactly a grand pronouncement in a game where Chief Wolftail turns into a 9ft ball of ragefur.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 00:22

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Changeling is my top game. I love Changeling. I would play Changeling in any setting given and am happy to run Changeling games myself.

Werewolf and Mage are heavily dependant on who the ST/HST is before I'd commit to it, but both have good games somewhere in them if you kitbash the right ruleset & setting pairing together. Ironically, I would say that they both work best as a 20-100 player LARP than on the tabletop.

I don't know enough about Demon as I've not had a chance to play it or read it on the toilet. But it seems like a tight tabletop experience with the right group.

Promethean and Mummy are a games that I'd have to be convinced to play. I'm not convinced that there is a group game in there.

Hunter and Vampire goes here. I can never understand what scale they work best in and neither do the people writing or running it.

Geist and Beast need work.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 02:43

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Kurieg posted:

Meeting notes are up

Here's the beast section.

"To everyone out there, don't listen to well-defended and learned critiques until you read it to find the really complex stuff like the child abuser, the child abuser, the child abuser, and the child abuser!"

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 05:30

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

There needs to be some explanation by the company that there is a reason for Onyx Path to ask money for a game gleefully celebrating the act of child abuse other than "it is our fetish".

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 05:47

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Cable posted:

So which beast family represents the primordial fear of a bad game line?

Considering that every single writer from OP has distanced themselves from Beast, I'm gonna go with "the McFarlands".

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 11:53

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Dammit Who? posted:

Yes, I agree. From what other people who've known him longer say it seems very unlikely that McFarland would intend for his work to come across this way.

This, though, bothers me. A game-as-polemic where you're here to imagine beating up all the fuckers that the creator of the game personally hates is not really a good look even if I, too, hate the fuckers. Mage, for instance, has a standin for the ruling classes in the Seers of the Throne. Those are some real fuckers, in-game and in real life! But the game isn't about killing Seers, and moreover the game understands why someone would want to be a Seer - wealth and power can salve the conscience pretty well. The honesty about how the ruling classes perpetuate themselves and how the things they actually do are at a remove from their real-life counterparts (you're arranging proposed roadways into Evil Runes, not lobbying for juveniles to be tried at adults) means that people want to run Seer campaigns; these properties also make those campaigns something the game can support without falling apart. All Beast does is throw glaringly unsupported assertions one after another in a desperate attempt to keep people from playing "the wrong kind of Beast game".

Like, okay. Let's take Beast exactly as it seems to have been intended - Beasts are the marginalized, Heroes are extremist zealots who are not mentally ill. Beast has at its core a fundamental ignorance or dishonesty about where extremists come from. As we've all noticed, Heroes are all atomized weirdos radicalized by a single encounter with the supernatural, which they may have never encountered or put any credence in before. If another Hero exists and has a similar obsession, it's basically a coincidence. This is not how extremism works. Guys like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh are referred to as "loners", but the truth is they both had an active ideological support network. McVeigh spent years on the gun show network, spreading his ideas and soaking up new ones. He gave out literature to like-minded friends. He regularly referenced The Turner Diaries. He was tutored in bomb-making by Terry Nichols. Harvard was awash in Ted Kaczynski's brand of anti-technological despair when he attended and taught there. When he encountered the work of French philosopher Jacques Ellul, he was delighted to find someone writing what he already suspected. When he finally published his manifesto, the press and public were shocked by how unremarkable the ideas in it were - not mainstream, but reasonable and a reflection of more common attitudes. As science author Robert Wright put it in TIME magazine, "There's a little bit of the unabomber in most of us."

Extremists don't emerge from a single traumatic incident and don't produce their obsessions ex nihilo, they're grown over a lifetime of soaking in attitudes already present in society. TERFs and MRAs and white nationalists aren't boxes of coincidentally-obsessed loners, they're support structures and lobbying networks who police themselves ideologically. A Slasher can be a lone nut, but a Hero never is.

Beast's misunderstanding of how extremists (and hence, Heroes) work means that it has a hard time portraying them in ways that make sense. Take Melanie, for instance. She's loving awesome. Like the star of some unmade Nightmare on Elm Street spinoff, or a changeling culture hero battling against all odds in Arcadia, she's an inspirational tale for people who've been shat on by the World of Darkness. Nothing she's described as doing sounds anything less than laudable. But she's a Hero, and the text says Heroes are narcissistic and incapable of self-reflection, so she must be bad somehow! This leads to reactions I've already seen over at rpg.net, where people start combing through the rest of her character sheet looking for something they can interpret as evil in order to resolve the text's contradictions. Ah, she has a Specialty of Finding Weaknesses, eh? How unlikely, for a long-term monster hunter! She must have been a real bully before being attacked. What a piece of poo poo 'mean girl', throw her in the garbage with all the rest of the Heroes.

At best, it makes the reader do all the heavy lifting and go through some serious contortions in order for things to make sense. At worst, it's one of the unfortunate tendencies of the more immature wings of the social justice community, where someone is declared Bad by a local authority and there's a brief scramble through their previous output (Tumblr posts, instagrams, whatever) to find things that can be interpreted or misinterpreted as justifying the declaration. If Heroes are bad, I should be able to come to that conclusion without the text constantly and explicitly reminding me so. If I can't, it means something's gone badly wrong.

This is a real good post.

Even abscent the themes of glorified abuse, the text does not justify a Beast's existence other than the random luck of their soul-twinning and a survival instinct. Ubless there is something people have missed, there isn't a society of Beasts that fosters or teaches a young Beast the way of their society and a valid philosophy to live by.

Its also a pretty ugly allegory that the trans-ish splat is inherently abusive to society to the point where their own suicide is a valid reaction.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 14:35

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Flavivirus posted:

From RichT on the Onyx Path forums:

-----

It is not the main criticism that was taken away, it was _a_ criticism, and one I was able to address now. Other concerns are far more tangled and were not something I intended to address on my weekly blog without first going through those issues with Black Hat Matt and other Onyx Path creators.
----

So it looks like a response to the abuse themes is still incoming. I'm not hopeful, but it's something.

Unless Onyx Path Publications explains why they are asking for money to produce a product that celebrates and justifies child abuse with only the justification of "the abuse of the vulnerable is my soul's fetish", the answer is a base-assumption-level re-write and not pointing at the kickstarter total and saying "Scoreboard".

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 16:18

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I'm not the person to wade into the deep end and declare which splat is comparatively more or less powerful than Changeling. However I will state that Changelings probably get less out of the purchase of their mystic powers on a one-to-one basis and depend more on their non-mystic skills, to the point where the purchase of regular-human stats like Strength and Presence are as equally important as getting to the next clause or rank in a contract or court mantle.

However a 1E Forsaken starting Werewolf is probably equivalent of a starting Changeling with the Ogre seeming.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 23:32

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I'm not being paid to "fix" Beast: the Primordial, nor am I emotionally invested in its success. However if I was guilted / required to run a one-shot game of it at a convention, my first action would be to make child abuse untenable. Be it by creating a Beast society that discourages such a thing, or making the abuse of children not provide much (if any) benefit to the players, or making the decision to abuse children have direct consequences in the creation of Heroes, child abuse will not be celebrated and justified at my table.

Because at no point do I ever want to be in a game where the degrees of shrewdness of a Beast child abuser decides the plot, and I am sickened that a professional company is asking people to pay money for such a thing. The sad joke about this is that- as is typical with Beast- there already is a game in the WoD where the abuse of a younger, less aware, and less powerful cohort is central to the game- however at least Vampire has the class and tact to hide this subtext behind the beastial devouring of blood.

Gerund fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jun 10, 2015

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 16:23

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

spectralent posted:

How far along is Changeling? If I was just going to use 1e Lost how badly will it react to GMC rules?

Not that bad! Changeling already cleaves closely to the mortal power-scope, so a number of the GMC additions are more bang for your buck. You will have to alter the combat powers slightly to be more in-line with the GMC system (skill to defense, weapon rating to damage, not roll). On the other tack, the requirement to set expectations to combat during initiative and using dramatic consequences as a method to gain experience via beats is supet for a game of esxaping from a walking narrative that hates you.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2015 00:44

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

The 2E Court system: I don't hate it, but I don't see the purpose of distilling the structure that did exist into a pile of mechanics. C:tL had a very specific system and then left a few corners for the ST to fill in the details; the new system asks STs to make deep, interesting, and far-reaching decisions on the society of their game in exchange for formalizing the less-detailed sections into plot-laden consequences.

Detailed notes:

Step 1- Building Your Story.
This is very interesting and actually very in-line with the previous edition. There have always been more potential courts than what was in the book (Court of Donkey / Court of Elephant being one of my favorite nuggets). Having strange and alien courts in each freehold makes the changeling fear of packing up and moving that much more real. The rules of court minimums and the fuzzy maximum are very important and core to the setting; the True Fae cannot understand sharing power (and by inference, do not entirely tolerate fair competition or justice) because of the implicit limitations it places on The Ultimate Godmodders. However, creating a new court out of thin air is not for the faint of heart.

My attempt: Seattle as a history of Boom & Bust, a more explicit formation of the Dawn/Dusk or Day/Night arrangement. Lumber, Gold, Shipbuilding, Airplanes, and now Internet/Computers. Bust's hero is Denny, the premiere settler of Seattle who tried to build on land called by the indians Alki- or So-So or lovely land; Boom's hero is Yesler, the late-arrival steam-powered timber man who built his own drat street grid 45 degrees off of the other bastards, just because he could.

Step 2- Building the Bulwark

This is the ritual part, and emphasizing this now makes it stronger later when it gets broken. The passing of the crown or the establishment of borders or the entrustment of are the well-defined methods that also emphasize large-group sharing. The mentioned singular ritual such as storytelling and yearly hunts are... a different take on this sort of sharing, in that they don't involve any sharing whatsoever other than a communal need to succeed at them. It should be mentioned that a ritual needs a failure state to "count", at least. I'm not so happy that the concept of sharing within a freehold isn't as emphasized over the super-objectivist A=A might makes right theme already present in a majority of WoD.

My attempt: The boom/bust dynamic in Seattle is a factor of some outside force rather than an internal discovery since the fall of the Timber barons. The Boom/Bust metaphor brings thoughts of high and low tide, and the burgeoning class conflicts brings in an idea of obvious financial ties. The concept of the PNW potlatch then sparks an idea of each side having to give their current glamour reserves to their rival court in toto, and whomever has the most is the ascendant court; whomever of that court provided the most into the pot becomes that monarch. I don't want this to be yearly, but weekly seems too little... monthly or quarterly would work fine (financial quarters or moon-cycles)... perhaps the current ascendant court declares the deadline of the next potlatch.

Step 3: Creating the Courts

This is where your cute decisions as a storyteller start to immediately affect the players and their style. More courts equals more disparate ideas, and without a strong unifying theme between them you're gonna be stuck with the Courts of Whatever The gently caress I Wanted To Do Anyway. The inclusion of Huntsman and their Approach makes it sound like the Huntsman are the very clear dividing line between the two schizophrenic presentations of True Fae; the kind you kill and fight, and the Keepers in Arcadia that actually to the Durancing. It is what it is, I guess.
The Approach and Yearning are expansions to things mentioned in the corebook- Spring Court and Wyrd, specifically. My issue with the system is that Keepers are so constrained by the system that there is never any reason to ever have to share plot with non-court members. This doesn't represent the over-theme of courts sharing whatsoever! I would probably de-emphasize the rigidity of Approach in general and the lack of True Fae representation versus their Huntsman counterparts.
The mantle bonuses are all sorts of off-kilter. Who the gently caress cares about 9-agains or +1 to defense when +2 to a skill or +1 armor is on the table?

My attempt: Bust ("the Bear") draws from Spite, and is more grungy, flannel, dingy, musical, and proletariat- they are the long-time inhabitants and homeowners. Boom ("the Bull") takes the emotion of Gloating, and is more formal, eyeglasses, clean, intellectual, and aristocratic- they are the recent arrivals that rent and take classes. Bust has to worry about an approach to steal what they have already earned; Boom has to worry about the gravy train getting capped somehow. Bust trains in how to fix things and preserves greenspaces; Boom develops properties and tries to get good grades at school. Bust Rituals involve the slow inclusion of new people by inviting them into your home; Boom rituals involve a frenzied gathering into a communal space for a larger cause like an anime convention. Bust mantle and Boom mantle are tbd, but don't sound THAT difficult to plot out.

Gerund fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Jun 13, 2015

# ¿ Jun 13, 2015 04:05

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

CommissarMega posted:

Same here. Honestly, one of the things that bothered me about 1e was that the True Fae had to come down and get you etc. Now sure, maybe there's one TF here and there who'd like to get their hands dirty, but from what I saw, life in Arcadia as one of the 1% is pretty good;. Why would I want to leave my harem of dragon-winged catgirls to kidnap or take back some dumb mortal when I can get some goon to do it?

The real answer since Equinox Road (for a given concept of "real") is that True Fae need the Changelings to exist because they feed off of the struggle to sustain their sense of self in their realm of omnipotence. A Fued of True Fae is a zero-sum game, so they interact with mortals according to their titles in order to keep them from falling into ennui.

So yeah, the whole Huntsman concept is weird, if it turns out that Huntsman aren't a role/noun-form of True Fae and said True Fae titles aren't unique and worthy of sustaining.

We'll have to see in the book if they deliver or not on the promise of making an improved C:tL, rather than just the GMC-format madlib.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2015 16:23

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Doc Aquatic posted:

I might be mistaken but I get the impression that they didn't in 2e. Like, I've seen a lot of references to people entering the hedge rather than necessarily being taken, so it might be a thing that rather than being kidnapped from earth, a fair number of changelings went places they weren't meant to go and trespassed on the hedge, where they were later found by the gentry.

Considering that the demisplat for Changelings now gets their powers for not leaving the hedge fast enough, you can now justify a game where your Keeper never existed, and your Durance was actually all you talking to yourself in your loneliness. The 2e game doesn't need True Fae to exist anymore if Huntsman replace them outside of Arcadia, and Arcadia doesn't adhere to a ruleset.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2015 18:35

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

ErichZahn posted:

By design, every Changeling won. Having a Seeming requires it.

You'd think, but multiple times in the text it tells you noooooope.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2015 05:09

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I'm totally fine with Onyx Path releasing a bad kitschy game, because I'd rather have that than something in the catalog that qualifies as bad art. Either in the execution or in the original purpose, something made Beast: The Primordial fail on a level that could not be unremarked. Refurbishing the game down a well-trodden path of being a poor a-single-entitlement-from-Changeling simulacrum at least allows it to fail acceptably.

What I do hope is that people don't see this as an excuse to suddenly cry out against bad design choices by Onyx Path as if they are somehow equivalent. I wouldn't design the same games if I was paid to design them, but I don't see the purpose in being melodramatic about a writer not writing a game I would enjoy purchasing. Beast is (was) its own beast.

Gerund fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Jun 16, 2015

# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 16:37

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

spectralent posted:

What's morally grey for Changelings? Scarecrow Ministry, maybe, but if you roughly summed up a whole-splat view of changelings it'd probably average towards "We don't want no trouble mister".

Changelings (1e Changelings) are broken to the point where it is more comfortable for them, as a whole, to kill each-other than imprison each-other. A typical (seasonal) freehold is more or less laissez faire towards individual Changelings being horrible people to outsiders and even fellow freeholders, since the cycle of rulership means that everyone has a chance at being higher on the totem pole and get revenge.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 17:30

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Maybe it is just the nature of the previews to emphasize Seemings as a be-all-end-all form of your character, but I preferred my the nWoD Changeling game where your choice of Seeming was not a defining feature of your character and how you interacted with the world on a morality-score level. That the Seemings that have been presented have fallen on the puerile teenage power-fantasy of Romance Novel Sexwolf / Brooding Antihero / Blessed Leader Chosen One / School Shooter is just a consequence of bad writing.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2015 19:34

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Luminous Obscurity posted:

See I think the Clarity mechanics are probably the best thing about these changes. Everything else I'm kind of neutral on, but I feel like the idea of tying Seemings to coping mechanisms (beyond the textbook Stages of Grief thing) is an effective one.

This here:

Yawgmoth posted:

That's how I see it too, and for me at least, it sucks. I liked the subtlety of 1e because it meant you could have abuse/trauma/etc. be a major thread, or it could be a less important thing (and have it be minor for a number of reasons!) or even not a thing at all. It really feels like they're stripping off a ton of previously viable story space in order to shove you into playing the "right way".

In 1e, the purpose of the game wasn't to dwell and require mechanical support for how you suffered. You could play an entire game without ever doing anything but try to Be Your True Self and avoid getting killed by the obvious. The game they are writing is divergent from the 1e game where the Blackbird Bishop entitlement has a bigger purpose in life than waiting for a few game sessions for the changeling to Seeming Blessing their way out of their crazy. All because living in your trauma because you are never better than what was done to you is a "better game" than rewarding self definition and promises to live life with a purpose in the face of trauma.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2015 22:02

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

pospysyl posted:

Well, more mean Indians that don't take kindly to Brucato's particular brand of leftist liberalism. The Traditions advocate a more permissive liberalism, where they can uphold their religious or cultural practices in peace and perpetuity, while Brucato wants full Marxist communism for everyone, whether they like it or not. Even if they reject this kind of revolution, they still need it. They're just held back by false consciousness. Holding on to individual cultural practices as valuable is, to Brucato, misguided at best, actively supporting capitalist hegemony at worst. I do agree, though, that his use of cultural aesthetics for this kind of satire is very ironic and uncomfortable. He enjoys them as aesthetics, but not as fully fledged ways of life, which is troubling.

Its ironic to complain that neoliberal globalist capitalism is Bad, and then tell other people that agree on this that they need to allow for a globalist, non-ideological, commodity-market dependant worldview* to define their lives.

*aka Neoliberalism

# ¿ Jun 23, 2015 19:06

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Poltergrift posted:

Poor wording -- I meant that they don't perceive beasts as sentient people, but as big brainless horned gribblies wearing human disguises.

Which, y'know, the only incorrect part is "brainless." A Beast has moral value on some level, but they don't have the deontological protection of the innocent; if killing them is the best way to prevent widespread harm that is equal to or greater than the harm that they cause by existing, then that's the thing that we are morally obligated to do.

The hypocrisy of Beast, now, is that the rules-as-written require Heroes to be philosophical zombies in order to justify the Beasts as protagonists, yet stated moral failing of Heroes is that they consider BEASTS to be philosophical zombies. This goes hand-in-hand with the submission that Heroes are an allegory against those that refuse to grow, change, and evolve... but I've yet to see a Beast presented that isn't a simple proceduralist repeating the same basic system of abuse to 'teach' the same 'lesson' over & over again.

The continued incongruity of the central story is showing that the piecemeal revision process is not fixing Beast: the Primordial. A puerile revenge fantasy should be more honest to the reader and present the game as a tool for expressing these ideas upfront, rather than hiding behind baroque language and portraying itself as the 'hero of progress'.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 23:22

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Ugh.

One of the major parts I like about Wizened in Changeling: the Lost is how they can have Durances that are about being an ignored blue coat serving the keeper. Another lovely distillation of the Seeming is the exact opposite of what I want from a GMC version of Changeling, but fits right into the modus operandi of this writing team on this product to-date. The repressed and unrewarded furry porn artist is joining the ranks of the loner sexwolf / school shooter / chosen leader / dark antihero / fishmalk rando to me; all because the writing team is pigeon-holing every Seeming via their Clarity rules because they didn't get that a game of self-expression shouldn't be prescriptive.

At this point, I'm expected the new seventh Seeming to be a plant-based anti-corporate hippie to round out the YA-targeted comic book roster.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 16:34

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

double post

# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 16:34

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Tezzor posted:

On the subject of Tradition mages hating lightbulbs from a few pages back: why wouldn't they? Lightbulbs cost money and have to be bought in a store, probably a big box store that treats its employees poorly and which requires time and effort and gasoline to get to. Lightbulbs are fragile and finite by design. They can injure people if they break, or by falling or burning themselves when installing, or while stumbling around looking for a switch. Their parts are mined, they are produced in factories, go in landfills and require electricity, which all means they pollute. The fact that they run on electricity through a wire also means that massive numbers of people must be engaged in dangerous physical labor to keep them working, and they produce waste heat requiring even more pollution to re-cool the room, and they stop working by the millions due to something as stupid as a squirrel standing on a power line.

Or you can just wave your hand and light up a room. That's just as possible and a lot less poisonous and labor-intensive. Don't be so attached to the scraps you've been thrown.

Your argument presumes a level of discrete functionality that doesn't exist with magic.

Why give everyone superpowers when you can replace the resources and time that the lightbulb removes? Why worry about "poison" and "labor" when those entire concepts are much more easily solved than the resulting world of people with the power of at minimum lighting a room with a wave of a hand? And further, why try to go through the hassle of teaching everyone the magic to wave their hand to light up a room when you could more easily invent room-lighting nano-bots that light the room for them?

The war for existence doesn't hinge on light bulbs any more than religious wars hinge on which particular holidays they celebrate.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 03:35

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

It is tubular to see one side of the mouth tell us that the Adamantine Arrow doesn't involve itself with temporal causes and the other side present a Talon as a passionate upholder of the "rule of law" in a modern courtroom.

This, I say, is ideology.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 00:01

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Mors Rattus posted:

Let me put it this way: if, after going and watching Blue Bloods or some other trashy cop show, I decide I want to be Heroic Arrow DA, if my GM told me it was impossible, all DAs are evil, I'd be kind of weirded out and not want to game with that rear end in a top hat.

Would you accept the ST saying that according to the setting information as currently presented, the act of enforcing a temporal ideology (of which the mortal crime and punishment system most definitely is) runs counter to the Adamant Arrow's philosophy post-1945?

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 02:41

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Mors Rattus posted:

I would probably stare at the dude and be like 'okay, so should I go find another table to play my concept at?' Because I really don't understand what the point is at shooting down this idea.

The point is to explain to the writer of the currently-unfinished project that the work he has been paid to do contains a blinkingly obvious paradox.

I'm personally fine with characters going against type at my table, but I don't feel like paying a premium for a product that can't figure out the meaning of its own faction's ethos.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 02:56

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Ferrinus posted:

It's just sad how embarrassed the Arrow writeup is of being about an explicitly martial Order. Balancing checkbooks... is war! Making tweets... is war! It's not actually playing against type to describe an Arrow completely in terms of their literary career, in the same way that it's not actually playing against type to describe a Mystagogue in terms of their fencing style - it's just failing to describe an Arrow straight up. If there actually were proudly non-martial Arrows, that'd point to the Arrow as a whole being a defunct concept - but it's not, because loving throwing down is actually an important thing for someone to be able to do in Mage.

I think the writers are trying to present this idea! The order explicitly goes through a post-WW2 funk and distances itself from Fallen conflicts, reducing their concerns to Awakened politics and- apparently- amoral profit motives and the application of state control over its citizens.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 03:36

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

At least the gun-runner Praetorian requires you to know the previous edition's lore to find an incongruity.

When I read "never again would the Arrow bind itself to temporal ideas" and especially "abandon the millenia-long practice of championing sleeper societies", and then get presented the platonic example Arrow as a State Attorney- the epitome of a champion of a society's laws- with zero justifications, I know that the writing team is lacking a sound internal vision of what they want to deliver.

Gerund fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jul 8, 2015

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 16:38

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I don't have any issue with Adamantine Arrow Lawyers in a vacuum, and don't need the character changed to be satisfied. Its a silly one-off spawn of a cheap freelancer. You'll never run into one "in the wild" because they'd be fired from their job the minute they got lost in the Astral for a week or shot by a Banisher.

But having the line about temporal values and sleeper championship needs work and either alteration or redefinition, because I'm seeing in this very thread people going nuts trying to make that mean something else, from "only border wars count" to "the order is does not believe anything because everything is temporal", all just to justify a silly meme of a State Prosecutor as the leadoff example of an Arrow.

Gerund fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jul 10, 2015

# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 01:17

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

The type of city-map you're running depends on how granular you are with your setting. My rule of thumb is that if you ever care what building is next door to the bar / garage / hospital, its easier to pull a real city street and evolve from there. Most games aren't going to be defined on a block-by-block level, so you can easily get away with using Liberty City or San Andreas as long as your players also played a recent GTA.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 20:18

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Ocanthus posted:

Re-reading some of the current Adamantine Arrow stuff, it seems like the Adamant Way, the core philosophy of the Order gives a lot of leeway of how each member chooses a conflict or way to live so long as they're also physically able to carry out the duties protecting Mage society. Hell, the Third Phalanx right from the wiki gives an example:

The First Phalanx even homes right in on it, that any conflict can be used to find Supernal truths that empower them in their fight with whatever is thrown against the Pentacle.

Now maybe 2E is trying to get away from those, but I didn't really see any indication of that. Nothing in the sample characters say that just because one is a lawyer they aren't going to throw down with the Seers if he needs to, or that the morally iffy gun-runner won't oppose the Seers in his actions. Both define their conflict in their own ways but cleave to the core of the Arrow by always fighting something.

There is no appeal in the Adamantine Arrow if you must depreciate the definition of conflict to include actions that are completely risk-adverse. Fighting an urge to be a lazy piece of poo poo and jacking off all afternoon is just as serious a conflict as coming into work and doing a good job, if the only thing you are risking is either a temporary setback to your goals or a failure of a temporal value like "upholding the law".

And on the tack of the State Prosecutor being a "good" Arrow (irrespective of how riskless his conflict is) the Adamant Way, as I recall the 3rd Phalanx, demands a willingness to sacrifice your comfort and even your life in service to an ideal and to not become stuck into a temporal position where you will have to compromise your deontological ethics. An Arrow that defines themselves as a role in sleeper society is not a good Arrow and is a better forum-argument meme than a lead-off example in a product.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2015 00:34

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Down With People posted:

What Order is Judge Judy in?

If you define her conflict as her against the gridlock on the highway, she makes a great Adamantine Arrow! She can even think about switching lanes with terms usually used in battle formations to make it extra conflicty, which makes her even more Arrow.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2015 03:59

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Once again, the development order document doesn't deign to describe their example characters in Sleeper occupational terms to satisfy a forum meme, and is better for it; perhaps the writers are learning from their mistakes.

I don't see what makes any part of the Egrogore merit specific to the Mysterium other than a made-up fictional justification. Even the Eidetic Memory merit is restricted to Order Lore- which has nothing to do with being good at academics or exploration- and the second dot, if I read it correctly, is the sort of anti-disguise tool that would be universally enjoyed in a game system where almost every single aspect of reality is hackable.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2015 21:39

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:40

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

LatwPIAT posted:

I'm not a huge fan of some of the decisions and systems made in nWoD 2.0 over nWoD, but it would be really loving great to play oWoD games with easily comprehensible dice mechanics, a crossover-compatible base system, and editors who understand that writing up the exact effects of every single dice roll and ability in a consistent "Cost/Pool/Dramatic Failure/Failure/Success/Exceptional Success"-pattern with clear headings is a good thing.

You're asking a lot from a 1099 company. It's like asking an Uber driver to fix your car.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2015 03:21

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