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nopantsjack posted:Ah okay, I was under the impression aside from their magic mages were pretty much just people, but then I've never played Mage. The short oversimplification is, the Awakened, the capital-M Mages, are people whose metaphorical third eye has blasted open, and with that rarified inner light, they learn sorcery that draws parts of the symbolic world into a crash-course with the literal, physical world. Their spells are often instinctive and improvised, though they still perform best when they have time to set up the right ritual trappings. But their power progression isn't really Discipline trees. It's more like each dot they amass in a sphere of influence collects a few verbs they can apply to that noun. Meanwhile, regular ol' sorcerers who aren't from the Mage book are ordinary humans with ordinary souls, maybe a little crazy, who've gotten their hands on some individual spell rituals that'll work for most anybody with the right expertise. But where innovating a new spell where none of the old ones fit might take the Awakened some hours of concentration and creativity as long as they've studied the right verbs, for "just a dude with a cursed tome" to achieve the same thing is going to take anywhere from "years of unethical experimentation and human sacrifice" to "ha ha, gently caress you."
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# ¿ Feb 24, 2016 01:17 |
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# ¿ May 11, 2024 14:45 |
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nopantsjack posted:What are the best Merits to give someone who wants to be a vampire pirate? Safe Place and Staff. Pirate's gotta have a ship, ship's gotta have crew. Swarm Form (school of piranha) optional.
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 00:21 |
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GimpInBlack posted:You've got it! The First Tongue vocabulary in Forsaken is definitely something of a barrier to entry. Probably would have been better to keep it to a muinimum and use plain English for most of the rules, in retrospect. That happens in a lot of other places in Werewolf, but I felt like Kuruth was one of the stronger in-world terms. It was a single First Tongue word that was used pretty consistently, so it was memorable enough. Splitting it up into Wasu-Im and Basu-Im muddied that recognition value, making it another category of multiple pseudo-Sumerian terms. Similar to how it's easy to remember the spirit world is called the Hisil, because the text commonly uses a single word rather than breaking it down into different terms for different places in the Shadow Realm, but it's hard to remember what spirits themselves are called in First Tongue, because you have to keep track of which are hursihim, ensihim or diharim, instead of there being a consistently used word that encompasses all of them. Also because every time the text discusses Wasu-Im or Basu-Im, it's wasting yet another precious opportunity to use the phrase Death Rage
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 00:52 |
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nopantsjack posted:E: I'm having a little trouble making the Mekhet PC interesting. The player is a lady who is pretty drat new and unsure around RPGs, she liked the sound of a stealthy vampire so I made her a Mekhet but I'm finding it hard to write anything interesting about them. "You are hard to notice and love gossip" only goes so far. Any ideas? Mekhet and Nosferatu both have Obfuscate, which is the real key to being stealthy. If the Nosferatu are the lurking monster in the dark, terror threatening to crush you, then Mekhet are ghosts and echoes, a presence so thin that you know it only by its deeds. Mekhet are haunting. They see right through you and disappear as if they had never been there. The Beast within the Mekhet is a cold, crawling thing, not the bloodthirsty disaster waiting to crack the Gangrel's shell. It's a thing in the pit of your stomach that makes you suspect that maybe you really did die when you were Embraced, and this is just ragged pieces of you, carrying on by instinct. Mekhet disappear so well they disappear from themselves. Mekhet are for players who enjoy knowing more than the other characters, and harrassing and confounding NPCs who have no hope of figuring out who they really are or what they're really up to. Play up how detached and otherworldly they are. Feed them hints that more is going on than it seems on the surface; they're good for distributing breadcrumbs of plot to the rest of the party. Dream Visions is a fun Merit for that. Maybe give the player latitude to narrate little supernatural omens and SFX that follow her character or punctuate her deeds, using her clan bane as inspiration. Mekhet are the vampires who cause milk to curdle in their presence, around whom shadows warp in the corner of your eye. Or maybe she's not really going for that angle and she just likes being Solid Snake or Batman. That's fine too. Nosferatu might be as good a candidate for that. Remember, clan Nosferatu meant to be more broad than its Masquerade counterpart. Their clan bane isn't necessarily that they're deformed or pitiful or inhuman in appearance. It's that they're uncanny. There's something about their presence, that could just be their carriage or body language or the intensity of their glare, that says "trouble is afoot, this person is not normal."
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 04:30 |
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Kai Tave posted:One of the sample NPCs is (was?) the disembodied astral form of a teenage girl who hunts down and kills Beasts after one broke into her home to teach her some kind of (presumably abusive) lesson, but remember she's the bad guy here and if you don't believe that then you're literally Hitler. In the old draft, she went into her forever coma when a Beast broke into her house to rob her, because she had something he wanted, and that made it his. (That is the actual lead quote for the two-page Collector splash, even post-revision.) In the new draft, she went into her forever coma because some Beast somewhere didn't eat enough abuse, and when that happens their otherkin Beast soul goes off and gives people nightmares. The new draft is like "okay, Melanie's clearly not really the bad guy here, but that probably means that if you listened to her and got her out of coma land she'd stop being a Hero, and maybe she's actually a putative Beast and you can help her find her Beast soul!" Also one of her Willpower-refreshing Anchors is Comatose. She can refresh her Willpower if she backs down from the quest so that she can be more comatose. There's a short paragraph about her Comatose Anchor and it doesn't even try to explain how it works.
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 07:55 |
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nopantsjack posted:and the Gangrel using sherlock powers to identify who in the club had the raddest dog then leaving the club entirely to go Ghoul his great dane and ride back on its back in his Hamster form. That's loving amazing and I insist you make "dude who wants his rad dog back" a recurring antagonist.
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2016 23:55 |
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nopantsjack posted:Just wondering from lore-buffs, instead of handing over the recipe for the wonder drug the players basically told the Ordo Dracul to go gently caress themselves, I figure this is bad for them, how bad? The Ordo tends to favor unscrupulous, opportunistic members with more curiosity than courtesy or ethics. They don't really like to start long, vicious fights, so I imagine one of the Dragons is probably going to wait until the coterie doesn't have its eyes on them and has their hands full with something else (which seems like it won't take long at this rate), and then either try to rob them blind or drive a hard bargain between handing over the drug or making things worse for themselves, whichever seems easier. Basically not a red alert on its own, but a great way to go from bad to worse. If the coterie needs a particular mystic doodad in the future, too, the Ordo are among the vampires most likely to be able to provide or explain it, and they'll delight in holding a grudge when they decide the price for cooperation.
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2016 09:17 |
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If it's to mark NPCs of interest, why hide it from the player characters? Give them normal tattoos (though presumably normally covered up) so that you can use the tattoos as a hook for PCs to notice and capitalize on, but to maintain the sense of mystery and need for context and research, have the tattoos vary from cultist to cultist, based on their accomplishments or role within the cult. It's not like you can get away with strip-searching everyone you encounter to look for tats, so you can still maintain an atmosphere of paranoia if the cult has members in surprising places.
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# ¿ Mar 1, 2016 21:56 |
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Magnusth posted:So, i might be planning to run a mage game on this very forum. Except the core, which books would you concider most important to getting a good mage game out of it? Presuming you mean Awakening and not Ascension: Tome of the Mysteries is pretty much considered essential to flesh out the 1e core. Creative thaumaturgy, some magical practices, and a better description of what supernal sorcery actually looks like and how it works. Astral Realms is really good if you like extradimensional jaunts, metaphorical dream quests, and set pieces too weird, wild and out there to stage in the material realm. You can skip it if you expect to run a game more grounded in the everyday world and travelling in dreams or the world-soul is off the beaten path for you. Intruders: Encounters with the Abyss remains one of the CofD's best antagonist books, and gives a way better view of the flavor and nature of Abyssal manifestations than the 1e core. It provides both good adventure material and good inspiration fodder to spark your own. Other books are generally pretty strong, but I consider those three to have the broadest core utility. Runner-up highlights include the Order books (including Seers of the Throne but excluding the Free Council book), Summoners, the Chronicler's Guide, Imperial Mysteries and Left-Hand Path. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Mar 3, 2016 |
# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 07:29 |
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Idrin posted:What are the repercussions for someone finding out what you are? If one werewolf gets outed do his secret werewolf buddies try and help him out? It tends to depend on what's specifically going on, but it also tends to vary based on what kind of gribbly. Vampires are a bit more likely to shut you out and leave you to fend for yourself, unless they're close enough to you that people discovering your secrets might out them too. Werewolves tend not to care much about members of a rival pack, but if you're a fellow pack member they'll usually stick with you loyally to make sure you remain safe and free. Changelings have more of a communal spirit and are more likely to help each other out of a big jam, while the wizard police tend to step in to clean things up because they fear what your exposure will do to the sleepers around you. Regardless of all that, people in the CofD/nWoD skew toward already kind of suspecting that something is amiss, but preferring to leave it alone and hope that will make it show them the same courtesy. So the response to an isolated supernatural being exposed is going to depend on how predatory and dangerous they seem. Some low-key local sorcerer or changeling brewing mystic remedies for neighbors might end up with locals in the know helping keep their secret. Mind-altering manipulators and blood-drinking undead monsters are more likely to inspire the creation of a cell of hunters, while the rest of the neighbors pretend they haven't noticed but slip the hunters a hand behind the scenes whenever they can. For the cWoD, take those responses and make them more extreme, in both directions. Expect to amaze some people to the extent that they attempt to curry your favor and effectively worship you, while vast conspiracies send clean-up crews to discredit and assassinate you.
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# ¿ Mar 11, 2016 19:13 |
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Tulip posted:So one of my friends is starting a DtD game, and I'm making my demon up and was wondering if you guys could help me out some, since there's some mechanical details that I'm still working on. Imagine seems like a pretty natural fit for this character concept. If anything, it might be a little on the nose. Four Minutes Ago is pretty much the premiere "I'm flimsy and defenseless and need an emergency button to smash in one Exploit" choice, but it's hard to justify if you don't take your fourth starting power as an Embed specifically to be its prerequisite. There could be an argument for Living Shadow from Special Message, though, depending on your ST's judgment. Ultimatum is in a similar spirit to The Word, and it's always fun to have pillars of salt up your sleeve as a fallen angel. Demonic form abilities for a monolith: Armored Plates (Modification), Aura Sight, Clairvoyant Sight, Environmental Resistance, or Mind Reading (Technologies), Dataform, Magnesium Flare, Rain of Fire or Voice of the Angel (Processes). Seems like a good demonic form for displays of mysterious power.
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# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 13:45 |
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paradoxGentleman posted:It reads uncomfortably close to an abuse justification simulator. This is the core of the reason why people are actively hostile to Beast, rather than just derisive and flip. mistaya posted:Is Requiem pretty newbie GM friendly? I've been debating running one in PBP for a few weeks, probably going to wait until May once my schedule clears up, but I haven't run any nWoD or played in one that lasted more than a couple pages. My idea was that the city's Prince had just been killed under ~mysterious circumstances~ and the PC's would be working towards solving the murder while trying to get their chosen mentor(s) in line to be the next Prince. Requiem's pretty friendly as far as CoD gamelines go, I'd say. The vampire experience is a little tangled in that their local politics are more in-depth and focused, but it's also relatively "clean" in that there aren't many peripheral phenomena thrown in to further complicate things. You've got vampires and maybe strix. There's enough other stuff through supplements and sidebars that it doesn't feel overly tidy, but not so much that every game ends up considering what the Bale Hounds might be doing over here or whether there are any local Banishers active or so on. You're living with vampires, that's enough problems. Damnation City is a big supplement that's pretty much 100% dedicated to helping the ST build a city for a political game. It's mostly Storytelling advice and fluff rather than mechanical add-ons.
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# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 16:04 |
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NutritiousSnack posted:I think if you need to cause suffering to others to the point of death or extreme trauma to be who are, you are not entitled to be that and if you can't change murder is justified. I do not weep for child eaters. And it's worth specifying that the rules of Beast Club are explicit on this front, they're not just talking about being justified in their dark hunger to annoy people at their government job with lots of intentional red tape: Beast: the Primordial posted:Beasts are monsters. They can’t be otherwise. They must be allowed to hunt, feed, and even kill.
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# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 19:55 |
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Inzombiac posted:That's so weird. I had checked pretty frequently and they only had the pdf. Oh, if you specifically meant how long has the print version been available, February 17th. Got mine. I think they cut down some of the God-Machine Chronicle Introduction for space. Which is understandable, but kind of a shame; the GMC is still complete enough in the new CoD core that I wouldn't expect anyone to buy it standalone anymore, but the extended introduction was really good for explaining concepts that seem to confuse people in straightforward, up-front ways, with good flavor examples. Fly dude who keeps ordering pizzas and doesn't walk to talk to the delivery woman, you will be missed.
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 13:28 |
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Tulul posted:Which ones are Sundered World and Beneath the Skin? The Kickstarter doesn't list any names for the stretch goal add-ons, which I assume those are. The other stretch goal add-ons are Three Kingdoms of Darkness (Changeling/Geist in the war of the three kingdoms), The Wolf and the Raven (Werewolf/Geist among Norse vikings), After the Fall (Demon following the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans), Fallen Blossom (Edo-jidai Hunter), and A Grimm Dark Era (Changeling in 1800s Germany). Beneath the Skin is easily my favorite chapter. The combination of Skinchangers and Unchained doesn't sound like it would mesh thematically, but the material expands on the outskirts of their subject matter to make a subtle tone of the clash between primal and organic forces, and the artificial and alien, without really being about Old World/New World (most of the material focuses prior to the arrival of the conquistadores). More importantly, it's packed with punchy, brief, evocative hooks and ideas that can easily be extracted without having to use the whole package, some even into games that are neither tied to the time nor the place. Thoughtful scorpion nests are my favorite idea in the whole book: sentient cryptid scorpions intentionally cultivated by the God-Machine, which gather into tiny kingdoms of their own, communicate abstract concepts by varying dialects of a tactile gesture language, develop their own religions, wage war against each other, and occasionally organize questing wars to hunt and consume a single mighty human. The God-Machine uses them as unwitting intelligence agents, because they can be eaten to absorb their memories and those of the things they have hunted. That whole idea is fascinating. The Sundered World and To the Strongest don't have that jam-packed dense feel, but they do create a setting that feels like it fits and is part of and illuminates the history of the Chronicles of Darkness, and I love how the existence of the Pangaean gods simultaneously complicates and brings together what the Uratha know of their mythology. So bravo DaveB, you and your writers placed two out of the three really exciting chapters in this book.
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# ¿ Mar 31, 2016 01:18 |
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Nomadic Scholar posted:Wait what's the god machine chronicle, and do I need it to play wod? Ha ha, oh boy. A series of foibles led to this situation confusing a lot of people. The short version is that there's two editions of the nWoD/what is now called the CofD. When they were first putting out the second edition, though, the WoD properties were owned by CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online, and licensed to the writers at Onyx Path, and CCP told them not to call it a second edition, but they were allowed to release the new rules in the form of "chronicle books" that added a signature antagonist to each line. The first "chronicle book" was for the mortals line and was The God Machine Chronicle, because that's what its packaged signature antagonist was called, but for lack of a better name, fans took to calling the second edition rules as a whole the "GMC rules." Demon: the Descent came out next, and contained pretty much the same rules update appendix the GMC book had. Then with the second "chronicle book" for Vampire, at the time titled Blood & Smoke: The Strix Chronicle, they tried including the full rules for the game system, rather than requiring you to reference the World of Darkness Rulebook or the GMC book, and that was successful. Then, CCP's plans exploded, so they went ahead and just started calling it a second edition, going as far as to rebrand the Blood & Smoke book with a new cover as Vampire: the Requiem: Second Edition. Then later CCP sold the WoD properties to Paradox Interactive, and Paradox asked Onyx Path to rebrand the nWoD so that there weren't two Worlds of Darkness. You can now ignore the God-Machine Chronicle book, as most of its contents, both rules and "chronicle book" content, have been folded into the new Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook. Demon: the Descent (which is excellent) and Beast: the Primordial (which is... not) are only available in second edition form, but Demon hasn't been updated to the new standalone-rules format, so you need any version of the base rules (either the 1e World of Darkness Rulebook or any other second edition core) to run it. Vampire and Werewolf have second edition corebooks, with Mage, Promethean and Changeling in various late stages of development, and Hunter, Geist and Mummy being further off in the future. All the Demon supplements, of course, use the second edition rules, as does Mortal Remains, a Hunter supplement with a quick-patch to run Hunter in 2e. Everything else currently available for the nWoD/CofD uses first edition rules.
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# ¿ Mar 31, 2016 01:48 |
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Nomadic Scholar posted:I had been curious as to why a friend was calling demon: the descent Not Fun and just kept saying GMC was garbage. Your friend is crazy, Demon: the Descent is the game where you customize your own crazy boss form and pick powers from things like literalizing puns, turning people into pillars of salt if they disobey your orders, grabbing an injury and throwing it at someone, and staring at someone so they freeze up so hard they pass out or die. I mean, the base 2e rules aren't flawless, and Conditions take a bit to get used to. But Demon is a smart game that still passes the cool test with flying colors.
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# ¿ Mar 31, 2016 02:36 |
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Basic Chunnel posted:What are things you should keep in mind when setting up a Demon game (COD version)? Addendum: if you've played Demon and feel like being a sounding board for a few hypotheticals, let me know. Want to know if my ideas are making sense By all means, please use the thread as a sounding board. Some of the best pages are just when people are working out good stuff going on in their games. A couple sample points to keep in mind for Demon:
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2016 09:12 |
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Rubix Squid posted:The biggest hurdle is coming up with a way to get the ring together. Of you course you could always tell them to cook that up, Which you absolutely should. Do chargen with a sense of what ties the characters together and gets them cooperating. Could be a common goal, mutual interests in protecting X, or sheer naked practicality, but it helps to have a sense of what flavor of Demon game you're running influence who the demons are.
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2016 12:01 |
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Loomer posted:EDIT: Is that an illustration from the book? I wasn't expecting a minor Junji Ito work to show up in an Onyx Path book. Not that I'm complaining.
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# ¿ Apr 9, 2016 22:25 |
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Kurieg posted:Well, since I hate myself, and I'm sort of obligated to, I got the Beast fiction anthology. Spoiler waitin' for you in this book, as I recall: the return of World of Darkness: Changing Breeds.
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2016 04:37 |
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Slightly Lions posted:Do we know if it will be a full stand-alone book, or do I need to get God-Machine Chronicle or Chronicles of Darkness Core to play it? All the 2e monster cores since Vampire (in other words, all of them except Demon) have the standalone system included. There tend to be subsystems left out for space here and there (Vampire doesn't have the ephemeral being rules or most of the Fighting Merits, only the CofD core thus far has the clue system and the chase system), but you get what you need to run the game in question.
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# ¿ May 1, 2016 20:19 |
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NGDBSS posted:I've got a rules question concerning Demon/CoD. There are a few mechanics (Ripple or Call Out, for example) which use damage suffered as a variable for some purpose. Should things involving this variable (such as Ripple's extra damage or Call Out's check for Beaten Down) be processed before or after damage reduction from armor and the like? After damage reduction, I'm pretty confident in saying. If you take less damage due to armor, you didn't suffer that extra damage, it was prevented.
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# ¿ May 8, 2016 00:35 |
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Terrorforge posted:Demon question: suborned Infrastructure is "unhooked" from the God-Machine, but how disconnected can it be exactly? If it's something mobile or at least reasonably possible to relocate, like a car or a phone booth, does removing it from its original context destroy its ability to function even as an Aether generator? The connections between elements of infrastructure usually aren't physical trunklines. You can drive an eldritch food cart across state lines and it will probably still work. The linchpin of your suborned infrastructure is more likely some strange element underneath the surface of the workings that you can't remove or allow to be damaged. The suborned car might have a beating heart speared into the middle of its engine block, and if you rip it out and replace it with a regular engine, you've got a working car but not any kind of functional infrastructure. The food cart has brassy heating plates that smell of sulfur and discolor meat. Terrorforge posted:Oh, and I was reading the Chronicles of Darkness book and noticed a bunch of references to a "Fate" trait that isn't actually explained anywhere. Found some discussion noting that it's a scrapped aspect of CofD that managed to stick around in an embarrassingly major way. How was it supposed to work, though? I get the impression that it's meant to give characters an end point other than "eaten by night terrors", but then there's that angel that's vulnerable to people who have recently "fulfilled their Fate". Check page 177, or if you don't see a relevant sidebar there, check your drivethru library for the updated version of the book. They ended up finding it easier, in revisions, to add a summary of the Fate system as an optional add-on to the God-Machine Chronicle material than to excise all the references that persisted. It's like an extra aspiration towards a vaguely defined doom, that modifies how you can benefit from spending Willpower to face or resist your doom.
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# ¿ May 16, 2016 16:37 |
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Zereth posted:Speaking of Hubris and Wisdom, does the book explicitly go into the implications of all mages no longer having Integrity and getting it replaced with Wisdom? A little bit and somewhat indirectly, in that no, not all mages replace Integrity with Wisdom. Some don't quite Awaken properly. They tend to end up as Banishers (though not all Banishers have this condition), because Integrity, unlike Wisdom, experiences supernal phenomena as a traumatic overload. Between that and the example of the Mad, it could be inferred that what the game calls Wisdom, then, might be some property of the Awakened mind and soul that can process and filter the experience of supernal truth without being damaged by the strain, similarly to how seekers in Imperial Mysteries have to filter the direct perception of the Supernal Realms through a metaphorical lustrum, or be obliterated by the experience.
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# ¿ May 18, 2016 04:19 |
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Libertad! posted:What's so bad about Mummy? Nothing on the scale of the wrongness of Beast, but:
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# ¿ May 24, 2016 01:07 |
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Daeren posted:However, if you get it to click, you can basically play the pulp adventures of The Nameless One, on a quest of self-discovery that involves bitch-slapping ancient devourer-gods so hard all their minions go "the gently caress was that!?" at the same time, which is something you can't really say about any of the other games. I'unno, that could be a particularly rocky, especially metal Promethean journey. You're right that there is cool material there in Mummy, and while I couldn't see myself running it and don't expect to end up playing in a game of it, the Arisen and the history of their Nameless Empire have a lot of crossover value. There's a certain kind of frustration you can find in a flawed game that you can't muster for a failed one.
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# ¿ May 24, 2016 01:25 |
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dr_ether posted:Yup. I am really not a fan of the variable TNs. It felt wrong given how CofD is built, and seemed to be done in order to ring fence Mummy from the rest. Definitely wrong given how CofD is built, but nah, I think it's just peculiar to Mummy because Mummy's power mechanics guy, a veteran of Exalted and the classic World of Darkness, thought it was a neat trick nobody else was doing, and didn't see that there was a pretty good reason nobody else was doing it. That thing I said about Mummy having a lot of rules that mistake complication and exception cases for detail and depth, I don't think that's entirely his doing, but it definitely has a certain familiar ring to it to a weary Exalted reader.
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# ¿ May 24, 2016 02:31 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yay!!! My group finally agreed to play Demon! There's a good rule of thumb for this one! All the big titled Monster: the Premise books that use the first edition rules require the World of Darkness Rulebook for a full rule set. All the big titled Monster: the Premise books that use the second edition rules stand alone and don't require any other book. There's also a good reason you might be unclear on this, because Demon is the one exception. Demon uses the second edition rules but was made before Vampire 2e set the format for the 2e corebooks, and has an appendix with the second edition core rules in a patch format to supplement the first edition core. So to run Demon, you need either the first edition World of Darkness Rulebook or any one other second edition corebook, including the Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook or any second edition monster core. The God-Machine Chronicle doesn't count; it presented the second edition rules as a patch the same way Demon itself does. However, the Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook does reprint most of the material from the God-Machine Chronicle that isn't in Demon already. Hope your group enjoys Demon! It's a really strong game with a really strong corebook, weird edition patching confusion aside.
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# ¿ May 24, 2016 18:41 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:Am I complete idiot or is intentionally taking a dramatic failure on some of the Demon embeds and exploits a really good idea? The dev comment on this question basically boiled down to "if the dramatic failure effect would actually be helpful then the Storyteller should improvise something else, but finding a dramatic failure effect potentially useful is a great justification for inventing a new Embed or Exploit to accomplish just that by reversing the principles you've already mastered." I think going loud should work out in play easier than you think. Remember, a demon can only maintain a number of full Covers at once equal to their Primum. The Cipher will allow demons to climb their first dot or two pretty quickly compared to other monster splats, but that's still an entire human soul or a few patched-together relationships for each go, with only one or two you can keep in reserve at a time if you want to still have a Cover to return to after you're done going loud.
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# ¿ May 26, 2016 00:13 |
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Okay, I have to ask: Is there anyone in this thread who cannot figure out the answer to this in their head? On the fly in a game? Absolutely not. I could manage an uncertain guess that 5 dice at target 7 is probably more successful, but damned if I could tell you how many dice a target shift from 8 to 7 is equivalent to off the top of my head, or at what dice pool sizes the shift begins to devalue or appreciate. And this is after playing in a years-long Exalted game with characters who regularly used target-shifting powers. It still doesn't soak in or become familiar. I bet if I sat down and took the time to work it out I could figure it, but not fast enough to avoid seriously disrupting a game.
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# ¿ May 26, 2016 05:56 |
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FrostyPox posted:I, uh, am still relatively new to WoD stuff, and I know that quite a lot of the stuff is Supreme Edgelord territory, but, dare I ask, what's the deal with this nuked gypsy clan? The death of Vampire: the Masquerade's Clan Ravnos bridged the line's earlier-nineties exoticism and facile racism of some white dudes in Georgia writing about vampires and the line's later-nineties bombast and excess soaked into the metaplot. Clan Ravnos, as originally presented, was pretty much the stereotype of the nomadic gypsy thief and con-man, with a Discipline that conjured illusions and a clan weakness of compulsive criminality and vice. ("Gypsy" in turn being an offensive slur for an oppressed European ethnic group; if you've ever referred to having been gypped by somebody, you accidentally said the equivalent of saying they Jewed you. The preferred term is Roma.) Then there was a big metaplot event where the ancient progenitor of Clan Ravnos awoke, and a big Dragonball Z crossover battle to prevent the ancient from causing mass disasters ensued, culminating in the antagonists from Mage dropping an enchanted nuclear strike and focusing sunlight with orbital mirrors, and sympathetic damage from the shock of their progenitor dying decimated Clan Ravnos. This is all separate from the book World of Darkness: Gypsies, which was literally about the Roma themselves rather than special Roma vampires, and gave them a stat to measure their Blood Purity and ancestral magic stealing powers. All of this was before my time so I'm sure I got a few of the details off. Point being: some of the oldest oWoD stuff is dire.
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# ¿ May 29, 2016 00:08 |
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FrostyPox posted:Ahhhh, I see. I've encountered a handful of old grogs grumbling about how nWoD RUINED EVERYTHING (tm) but I rather like what I've seen of it so far. oWoD seems all right and I'd like to get all the oWoD books just to have them for reference and maybe even play them once in a while but I really liked what I've seen (which basically consists of a bit of new Vampire and Mage, and I own Promethean and have read about new Demon). I'm not sure why they'd pick oWoD for video games and LARPs, perhaps to appease grogs? oWoD (or really, Vampire: the Masquerade in particular) was a bit of a phenomenon for its time among tabletop RPGs, probably having enjoyed the second biggest boom behind, obviously, Dungeons & Dragons making it into toy stores in the eighties. It kind of lucked into the right timing to draw a bunch of people into tabletop roleplaying who weren't interested in elves and dwarves looting dungeons, and there are a lot of people with nostalgia for the days when they played Vampire (or Werewolf, or Mage) together. Nostalgia can be powerful in marketing. Partially, Paradox intends to capitalize on this demographic, and partially, Paradox has staff who are members of this demographic. The sprawling bombast of metaplot and stocked up decades' worth of NPC lore also, while awkward to juggle in a tabletop context, are well suited to leveraging in other media like video games. I mean, yes, CofD née nWoD is enjoying a good renaissance among hobbyists now with Onyx Path's better, non-Beast work. But Vampire: the Masquerade was big enough in its time to market five licensed video games, a WWE wrestler, and a television series. Not all of those were good or successful, but it's not surprising they're after the property that already has a mass media footprint.
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# ¿ May 29, 2016 01:11 |
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FrostyPox posted:So onto a better topic, I'm interested in Demon: the Descent and Mummy: the Curse. Which do you think would be easier to run as a relative newbie who has never GMed any game ever before? I don't know a lot about either but the whole "technological monstermen undercover and sneaking around" in Demon sounds cool and from what I understand, Mummy starts your characters as high Supernatural stat, low morality, and as the game progresses this inverts so you end up high morality but technically weaker than when you started. How does that play out? Demon is pretty well designed for accessibility in the structure of its stories. It breaks down the antagonistic God-Machine into constituent parts, its discrete projects, and then breaks those down into their core elements: the material people, places and things that are the infrastructure carrying it out, the ritualistic requirements of time and circumstance the God-Machine needs to enact which are the occult matrix, the practical output sought that the occult matrix will bring into effect, and the linchpins that present hidden but conspicuous failure points for the players to seek out. (The one thing I think the book's explanation is missing would be giving a name to the tell, the surreal eccentricities that show up in God-Machine infrastructure because form needs to match some strange occult function, which add atmosphere and signal the presence of a plot hook for players.) The Unchained template itself, while interesting and unique, still fits pretty comfortably in the average game's play structure. Mummy... is not accessible. It leaves a lot of work up to the Storyteller to figure out what drives an individual game: the characters' pasts and histories, their actions in previous death cycles, the first purposes a mummy's cult is inclined to awaken them to carry out, the final purposes the Judges demand of the mummy and why, even a lot of the cosmology. Especially if you work from the corebook alone, a lot of significant setting elements are introduced without enough detail to particularly know what the book is suggesting you do with them. Promethean gives you an intuitive story archetype, but one that suffers from being wide open and demanding you do a lot of filling in the blanks. Mummy doesn't really fill the blanks in for you much more than that, but it doesn't very well communicate the archetype it's meant for either, beyond repeatedly having to steal back holy relics and avenge disturbance of your tomb.
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# ¿ May 30, 2016 05:26 |
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FrostyPox posted:that sounds cool and good. You mean like spy movie heists/sabatoge? Cuz if so, hell yeah! The Splintered City: Seattle supplement, which I remember liking pretty well, has a passage on the Apocalypse Vault, a heavily guarded warehouse of spatial containment relics. The God-Machine uses it to store failed timelines: a biological weapon outbreak here, a cataclysmic earthquake there. It immediately goes on to discuss how the obvious thing to do with this plot hook is to run a heist story and then use the end of the world as a trump card at the bargaining table.
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# ¿ May 30, 2016 06:09 |
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Mendrian posted:I like to think with things like the Masquerade, there's very little chance of vampires being collectively outed. I think that's what vampires are scared of, sure, but someone releases a video of two vampires slugging it out in Manhattan most viewers are going to discount it as a movie set or a viral ad campaign they don't quite understand (is this for Twix?). The problem is that it galvanizes just enough people - usually the wrong kind of people - to make life uncomfortable for vampires. It puts a few zealous and brave people on an obsessive collusion course with vampire-kind. The second edition of Requiem puts a nice touch on this. Outside of its context as one of the hoary old Traditions inherited by vampire culture from the Roman Camarilla, "the Masquerade" is no longer a term for the collective ignorance of humanity. (As Mors says, in the CofD humanity isn't collectively ignorant, but collectively feigns ignorance for its own comfort.) Vampires as a whole don't have a Masquerade. Individual vampires have Masquerades, because that's what's actually relevant and dangerous. Your Masquerade is your effort to avoid the people around you twigging on that something about you, personally, is unnatural and dangerous, because videos of dead men moving jittery fast on Youtube Netzo affiliates won't motivate people to take up torches and stakes, but if the rumors about that advisory contractor management fawns over get too prevalent and too wild, some of the braver dudes down at the docks are going to get interested enough to sniff around. And come time to act, their neighbors are going to whistle and look the other way. There's no need for arson charges, officer, something must have just caught fire in there. These things happen.
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# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 16:23 |
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FrostyPox posted:Isn't there a term for when the author asserts that something is good when it's objectively and obviously bad, but no, it's good because I'm the author and I say it's good? "Show, don't tell?" Or rather its failed opposite, tell, don't show.
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# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 23:55 |
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Libertad! posted:Would getting the 1e versions of said games within the month be risky/a waste? Get Changeling. Changeling: the Lost first edition has an excellent corebook with a lot of strong flavor that quickly draws out what's cool about changelings and Faerie, how versatile the things of Faerie and changed by Faerie are, and what life is like for individual changelings. (The same quality is the number one thing I love about Demon: the Descent. As much as it has a lot of other cool things going for it, the way the corebook hits on all points is key to making it such a good game.) I have mixed feelings about the large volumes of material previewed for Changeling 2e so far. There are some good ideas (the altered Contract structure, sealings, changelings' new intrinsic ability to escape bonds), some bad ones (the long and comparatively narrowing shadow cast by the new Seemings over every character, 2e's unnecessary habit of reskinning Virtue and Vice for almost everybody), and a lot of stuff that feels changed just for the sake of added detail without actually adding much to play. It remains to be seen how the flavor text will come out, but it seems unlikely so far to match the bar set by the 1e core. At the very least, the 1e core set a pretty high bar to match in general, so I think even if you end up with two edition cores, you'll get something good out of having the first edition book. Geist, on the other hand, had a pretty mediocre core and pretty lacking mechanics. Wait for a second edition; it'll definitely be a good while until one comes out, but a second edition still has a chance to majorly improve on and realize Geist as a game of its own.
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# ¿ Jun 5, 2016 19:56 |
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Rand Brittain posted:It's not really using the word "abuse" that's the problem so much as baking your response to abuse into the mechanics so that you have to actively work around it if you just want to run a game of modern fantasy that isn't really so much about those elements. Yeah, that's my major concern with the 2e Seemings. They seem relatively narrow definitions of the response to the Durance to begin with, and the mechanical importance of their curses and blessings feels magnified to the point of being conspicuous. Changeling is a game about survivors of traumatic experiences, but it's also got dangerous tricksters, charming yet ominous encounters, and a good balance of whimsy, severity, and groundedness. The overhaul of Contracts seemed enough to me to give definition to one's Seeming identity, but the impact on Clarity as implemented seems distracting. Not to mention, baking the response to the durance into the Clarity rules, frozen in the form of an unchanging Seeming, paints changelings in general as stalled or stunted in their response to the durance. 1e Changeling encompassed characters who may have been fundamentally changed by their durance, but had grown since the initial trauma and wore their mien as a history of where they came from rather than as old and persistent wounds. It's an odd move for a game that occasionally fights to distinguish itself as being about survivors rather than victims.
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# ¿ Jun 5, 2016 22:12 |
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# ¿ May 11, 2024 14:45 |
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Zikan posted:much like the free council Second edition Free Councillors are actually pretty good. Mostly because they would be more interested in the people on the left, not the first edition Free Councillor dude on the right. The guy with the dotted vest and sandals thinks this Best Buy missionary is hilarious. This is the funniest thing he's heard all year.
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2016 22:46 |