Kurieg posted:That the older games used to be really really bad in some areas is a thing that people should be aware of, particularly when they're talking with other people about the game. I didn't get into Werewolf until revised so when people started harping on me for liking a game with neo-nazis or dick-ripping lesbian feminists or toothed volcano vaginas I was reasonably confused. Hmm, actually, I think that a new thread is a good reason to purge all the negativity and apologizing for liking stuff that isn't 100% good and cool.
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Apr 9, 2015 19:11
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Ferrinus posted:It's really not tenable to gauge a game's success based on whether Those People have the right feelings about it. Roleplaying gamers aren't uniquely horrible and it's not on Vampire to morally uplift them. It's really cool that he mentioned people dismissing it as unimportant and overreacting, and- lo, it is dismissed.
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Apr 10, 2015 18:18
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I'm not dismissing it. I'm accusing it of being an exercise in bad faith. There's a difference. Calm down, I wasn't addressing you. But the argument that you're proposing is pretty funny if you want it to be equivalent to Etherwind's argument, which condenses down to "because our society conceives of sex and violence differently when it comes to men and women, 'sexmurder' has a different connotation for men and for women, generally" and "minor infractions, issues, etc. can have a gigantic effect because of the way in which they create the climate people operate under". I don't see anywhere where he says anything about anyone's motives in using it.
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Apr 10, 2015 20:02
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I'm glad you found the good book to match the other bad book, because that completely validates your argument and renders mine moot. Hell, why would it be any more racist to have a consistent cosmology that's Judeo-Christian (hypothetical CWOD without Kuei- Tezzor posted:why do you care what their developmental name for a roleplaying game was Holy poo poo. A glass house- and this dude's throwing stones from it!
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Apr 10, 2015 20:26
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tatankatonk posted:Which Path is which Game of Thrones Character? Trick question, they're all Obrimoi, because Game of Thrones is bad. 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
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Apr 10, 2015 22:09
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Vampire - The Prestige, There Will Be Blood Geist - Casino Royale (1967)
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Apr 10, 2015 22:30
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Mexcillent posted:Seriously, what do you think the Shadow and the Ego in Wraith is? Or do you like all the other dudes who post on this god awful thread just take a tiny bit of setting knowledge and extrapolate then post? Oh, word?
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Apr 10, 2015 22:44
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Mexcillent posted:i'm a cool dude who knows many things about this stupid nerd thing Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Okay Mexcillent.
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Apr 10, 2015 22:49
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I'm hardly the guy standing up for everything (and I wasn't even working for WW in the 90s) but I don't really think of the World of Darkness as a brand because that's never been my job. Gypsies was bad. I think the not-quite-a-swastika symbol and racism in earlier treatments of the Get of Fenris is bad. (Fun fact: A white supremacist tried to kill me in the 90s and I had to get plastic surgery to fix my face, so those kinds of things are for-real triggery for me.) I think lots of stuff was poorly done. But a lot of it wasn't, and the people I worked with weren't bad, shortsighted or ill-educated people. So I think making GBS threads on a whole game line for a handful of clumsy misfires, and saying that anybody who wants to play them with you might be a bad person, is over the top. I, personally, feel that it's really easy to go from "laughing at" to "condemnation of", and agree with you wholeheartedly on that.
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Apr 10, 2015 22:54
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tatankatonk posted:Do LARPers change the kind of characters they play as they get older? Do middle-aged LARPers, aware of their bodies starting to fail them, play middle managers and bureaucrats? Is there a group of 80 year olds somewhere live-action-roleplaying vampire elders, and enlisting the nerdiest of their grandchildren as their neonate henchmen? The founder of the SCA, the biggest LARP group in the world, is 72 years old as of two months ago, but I dunno how active she is.
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Apr 10, 2015 23:11
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Ambi posted:Since it's a new thread, and it was briefly in the 3rd post, can I ask - what is BvD ? A brand of men's underwear.
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Apr 11, 2015 01:00
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Mors Rattus posted:I think it was Damnation City. Which, incidentally, is the exact book where you can see nWoD turning the corner and deciding to stop doing that stuff quite so much, maybe put more thought into the implications of what it does. I wonder if you can pinpoint the exact page. XX.
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Apr 11, 2015 02:14
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Mendrian posted:If my understanding of Nordic larps is in any way coherent it seems like they seize on the parts of traditional Masquerade LARPs that people actually enjoyed (being a jerk, being in character, immersive elements) while limiting the parts that nobody liked (rock-paper-scissor, mass combat, other immersion breakers). It has evolved from there to include a whole lot of dramatic techniques designed to reduce the boundaries between player and character and from what I understand is supposed to be a very 'intense' experience. This is in direct contrast to America foam-sword boffing contests that are built on a wide gradient of rules-vs-character or American-style Vampire-LARPs that try to relegate anything more complicated than dialogue to a mechanical abstraction. There's a free overview here: https://nordiclarp.wordpress.com/
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Apr 12, 2015 05:07
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I can't believe there's no one willing to play a game where you ruthlessly slaughter normies with octopus arms and fangs for having entry-tier tastes in anime. TheLovablePlutonis posted:What is Beast again i wasn't following nwod news. It's the game about playing the beast/medusa/the creature from the black lagoon.
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Apr 13, 2015 19:51
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How well could you play a gorgon, in Beast as it stands?
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Apr 14, 2015 04:20
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Mors Rattus posted:Quite well, actually, there's a power that poisons people and, if they die, can turn them to salt/stone. There's also an entire Family based around being monstrously hideous, either appearance-wise or internally, to shock people into silence and fear. Cool, my main goal for Beast: The Unhinged Psychopathing was to be able to replicate the ending of Man of Steel only with hot snake-haired people, so as long as I make sure the villain has no idea how to play sports, this should be good and fine.
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Apr 14, 2015 04:38
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MonsieurChoc posted:That's the thing that really bugs me about Beast, really. Even fi the game ends up good, it just feels like there's a lot of more interesting things Onyx Path could have done before slightly-different-changeling. Like, I can propably brainstorm half a dozen ideas in five minutes: -Where's the personal horror? -Where's the personal horror? -Covered by Mage. -Covered by Werewolf/Beast, unless you've got a compulsive need to see "cyclopean" in your roleplaying game fluff. -Where's the personal horror? -Where's the horror, period? -I'm pretty sure you can be a bug person in this game, or Changeling, or Demon. -Covered by the corebook.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:17
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Honestly, unless one of the devs is sitting on something brilliant, I hope Beast is the last gameline for a bit. I'd like to see them just focus on fleshing out what they have for a little while. I mean, counting Beast, we'll be at ten lines plus the core. Keep in mind that originally only Vampire/Mage/Werewolf got continuing support- the other lines got a limited set of books, and it looks like 2e will feature a similar setup.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:41
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MonsieurChoc posted:All those counters are terrible. I guess I'll give you the bug people one? I mean, I was just throwing random ideas I thought of in under 5 minutes, this wasn't a serious pitch or anything. I will still answer you, though. Okay, but you were talking like they would be gamelines, which in the World of Darkness we live in are about playing the monster. So with that in mind. -Okay, that's covered by corebook and Hunter stuff, all it really needs is a dedicated book or chronicle. -Where's the tension between humanity and monstrosity? It sounds like it would be all-monster all-the-time. -The basic themes of mad-scientist-as-protagonist are covered pretty much entirely by Awakening. -Not really. Werewolf has the whole "family history of being a monster" theme, while Beast looks like it will be able to cover the whole icky fish monster stuff. Unless you want a game about playing a Cthulhu cultist, which goes a ways away from the kind of Gothic horror WoD games try to invoke. -Where's the impetus for the Gothic horror where you have a tension between inhuman desires and basic humanity that exists for all the major templates and most of the minor ones? -Okay.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:57
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MonsieurChoc posted:Well, that's the thing, really. Those things are cool... in the oWoD. They don't really fit with the tone of the nWoD. Shadowy organisation that control everything go very much against the central core of the setting. A mad scientist game more in line with the nWoD would be more about playing people like the original Frankenstein or the Invisible Man: a man who, through his madness, managed to create one or two terrible inventions and use them for their own purposes. Any kind of mad scientist conspiracies would look a lot more like The Cheiron Group or the Ordo Dracul than the Technocracy. Promethean and Demon are almost entirely about the tension between human and monster, because the goal of the Pilgrimage and the day-to-day survival of the Demon depend on being convincingly human. I see mad-scientist-as-protagonist as being about the horrors done out of arrogance and cold distance from the rest of humanity, which is pretty much in line with what Awakening is about. What do you see it as? The Shadow over Innsmouth is only barely body horror. It really consists of genealogical horror once we get past the suspense scenes. Werewolf, meanwhile, is about waking up to discover that you're actually a monster, descended from a monster that disguised itself as human, and now you're part of monster society. The fact that it's kicking rad spirit-hunting rather than kicking rad undersea adventures is just a gloss for these purposes. Pretty much all of the gamelines are supposed to derive horror from the actions of the characters- vampires feeding, woofs hunting, mages granting consciousness to their oven just because they don't wanna bother with the timer, changelings being twisted remnants of a person, hunters being violent psychopaths, prometheans lashing out after the thirtieth mob with pitchforks and torches, geists having no reason to exist, mummies destroying memory and twisting people's lives in service to undying masters, demons killing people to strengthen their disguise... Sure, there's horror from other sources, but the corebook is the only one where there aren't explicit reasons why your character would do horrifying things.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:00
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MonsieurChoc posted:So how is it different? How is one version ok and not another? ????? What are you talking about? I said that the proposal wouldn't have that tension. quote:That's a really really reductionist of both what Awakening is about and what the horror interpretaion of Mad Scientists is. If you don't want to present your interpretation, that's okay.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:15
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MonsieurChoc posted:Well, that's the thing, isn't it? There isn't an interpretation or anything else yet. What I did was post half a dozen random ideas I thoguht could be more interesting than beast. They cannot, by their very natur,e stand up to scrutiny: there is nothing there yet. Any question you ask of me can be answered the same way: "If I was actually doing it, I'd address that". Furthermore, it seems to me as if most of your questions turn around a somewhat reductionist view of the nWoD where everything must fit within the narrow framework established by Vampire: the Requiem, which I disagree with. I don't see Demon as being about the tension between Man and Monster at all. Neither is Hunter, for that matter. What about your interpretation of mad-scientist-as-protagonist, which you said is much less restrictive than the one I propose. Demon is absolutely about the tension between man and monster, it does it in a more interesting way where being more human requires you to do inhumane things to people, but being morally righteous puts you in constant risk of death. Hunter is, going by the rules and examples in the fiction, about the long slow slide from being an ordinary human being to being a serial killer, which you can theoretically arrest, but which is only really escaped through death or abandoning the Vigil.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:35
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Ferrinus posted:I bet that's also a lovely, watered-down Awakening, except at the same time it's a lovely, distilled Dreaming. i have never made it more than a few pages in, but it looks like it's almost all the latter
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Apr 14, 2015 19:41
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MonsieurChoc posted:Well, ok, let's talk about Mad Science. Do you know what the meaning of the word "hubris" is?
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Apr 14, 2015 19:48
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MonsieurChoc posted:That's not what I'm saying, though. I was simply saying that Mage is not a game of Mad Science. Like, that's it. I'm not trying to define what Mage is. I'm not trying to defend Genius or say that OPP should make it's own Mad Science game right loving now. Here's how this whole thing has been going: Neither Mage nor your proposed game have anything much to do with hubris. The basis for horror for Awakening is by default existentialist, and it's hard to see how a protagonist-mad scientist game would be very different. Unless you're thinking of a game spent playing the villain and inevitably losing.
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Apr 14, 2015 20:16
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whydirt posted:My only direct contact with WoD was a short Vampire game in the mid-90s, but I've been skimming this thread out of curiosity. The God-Machine thing from Demon sounds cool, can someone give me a short blurb about it and/or that particular game? The God-Machine is an enormous structure underlying our world, that performs mostly inscrutable but horrifying or disturbing actions, like having cults perform eighteen murders in front of four menhirs that are then brought together to summon one of its servants to cause antifreeze spills at every Speedway in Hartford, Connecticut. It manifests throughout the world, hidden away everywhere, tended by human servants and its biomechanical angels, some of whom discover free will and fall.
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Apr 14, 2015 20:26
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ErichZahn posted:It's Sailor Moon in the WoD, so oHunter, with heavy adds from oChangeling and nWerewolf. You mean watered-down Sailor Moon.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:32
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Sailor Moon is essentially the story of a group of Seer Archmages fighting mages of the Diamond, Abyssal intrusions, and eventually defeating an Archmage serving the Oracles.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:53
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whydirt posted:How do Demon soul bargains work? Are they just getting your soul after you die or the ability to hide in you while you live or something else? What can they offer humans to make such a deal? They kill you and take your identity. What you get out of it is painless death. So there's a real incentive for Demons to monkey's paw the early bargains that just involve sharing identity and drive someone to suicidal ideation.
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Apr 14, 2015 23:43
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Thinking about it, there's no reason for a Sailor Moon fangame because Sailor Moon is the story of a plucky Pylon of Seers who face Abyssal manifestations, Libertines, and finally face down a Silver Ladder Archmage. Or maybe they're Ochemata.
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Apr 15, 2015 03:37
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Xelkelvos posted:What would that make Madoka Magica then? (In case you don't know and spoilers for the series They're girls granted a single wish in exchange for getting special powers that run off of their positive emotions and having to hunt fallen versions of other girls like them. Overuse of the powers and a buildup of negative emotions causes them to fall and become the monsters they are hunting) bewilderment posted:Hunters that hunt Slashers. Yeah, pretty much.
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Apr 15, 2015 12:41
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Mendrian posted:Promethean is a game you can win, yes, but (IMHO) it had poorly implemented group mechanics out of the box and was best played as some kind of solo adventure game. Also it told you roughly what a milestone was but not fantastic advice on how to achieve them (as a player) or how to conceive them (as an ST). Man, there's a substantial segment of people that think Geist is the best nWoD game and that like nWoD fangames. Support doesn't mean much.
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Apr 21, 2015 00:36
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The Conspiracies, minus the one from the Werewoof book and the Ascending Ones, are all great and thematic. There's something of a disconnect with the Compacts, more.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:16
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Night10194 posted:Is New Hunter about as bleak as the original? I remember in the Original it was pretty clear that the Messengers weren't up to anything good either, most of your powers really didn't work very well, most of the supernatural enemies were nearly invincible and had 4 turns to your 1, and there was a strong implication you might just be schizophrenic. nHunter's sample antagonists are 1 white-hat, 2 innocents, 1 grey-hat, and 1 outright villain. The system is set up so that the best way to avoid complete insanity is to remake yourself into a psychopathic but functional serial killer.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:23
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Ormi posted:Powerful shadowy organizations pulling experienced monster hunters into their employ is cool. I like Cheiron, and I think TF:V and The Ascending Ones would work as that with minor tweaking. The general idea behind Conspiracies is sound, but they're too disconnected from the other tiers, I only remember throwaway lines about how they started off "just like you!" in the distant past, if that. They kind of revise the "why" of the Vigil. Malleus isn't about playing a Hunter who discovers and practices her Vigil on her own terms as it is about playing an Endowed agent of the Catholic Church. And they're all kind of like that. Compacts are more about the "how", and still feel organically connected to tier one even if some of them get left out in the cold in terms of support for what they do. Man, the Conspiracies are all about shucking off the idea that you're an ordinary human defending other humans, except the one that's all about couriering between monsters and the one that's about being Spirit-Claimed. Like, when you think about what VASCU is really testing for, it's drat disturbing.
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Apr 21, 2015 22:09
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PantsOptional posted:Wait, what is VASCU testing for if not psychic potential? Teleinformatics began as a program for better profiling of slashers. Testing for the Wintergreen Process tests how well you can think like a slasher. Which is heavily implied throughout the VASCU section.
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Apr 21, 2015 22:36
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Yeah, keep in mind that the supplemental splats only really work most of the time when their targets are a major part of the game. Some of them can be generalized all right, but most can't.
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Apr 21, 2015 23:58
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The people who have a power stat that implies being sedentary are the ones that should be going out and exploring.
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Apr 22, 2015 20:51
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ErichZahn posted:Lair is an extra dimensional space in the Astral that's also inside you. Like, I'm pretty sure going out to gather experience/feelings/spiritual constructs for Lair-building is to Beast what filling a Cipher is to Demon. Lair could be slang for "power levels" and you could read it with a scouter and it still would be ridiculous that the explorer splat has the sort of terminology that implies being sedentary
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Apr 22, 2015 21:50
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Ferrinus posted:Prime al monsters have nothing to do with exploration or randomly meddling with other, realer monsters. There's literally other text in the book describing the actual solving of mysteries as "rude". poo poo, explore the _____ could describe the goals of anyone (sin-eaters explore the dark corners of the underworld where they feel more at home anyway!). And, wait. Exploring somewhere you feel more at home? "Plays well in crossovers" apparently means "has no objectives that might conflict with the rest of the party". And poo poo, you can easily think of enough things that could motivate creatures like Beasts that it's ridiculous we have nothing better than "creep on other splats" and "beat up fedoramen".
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Apr 22, 2015 23:05
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