|
Ferrinus posted:For space fighters, okay, but individuals scrapping? The game is designed so that not-Superman can have a boxing match with the not-SDF-1. I can't guarantee it will do this as well as it does other things, but it was in my head. In typical fights the real in-world values will effectively allow movement across bands, sure. quote:By the by, the special effect of the "Love" social condition is adorable. In general giving ties, alliances, etc. like that mechanical teeth - especially ones that scale with social skills - is a good move. I hate, hate, HATE love being modeled as a social attack. So there's this.
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2015 02:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 20:27 |
|
|
Attorney at Funk posted:Anyone with the wit and will to run Mage is clearly empowered by an Avatar IRL. It's really not that hard. The main things are: 1) Collaborate with the players to do cool things with their Spheres, paradigm and foci. The game has traditionally treated these things as strictures instead of opportunities. While you should apply reasonable limits the main thing you do is help them when they have a half-formed idea. 2) Remind them what Spheres can do. Related to #1, but more general. You remind them they live in a world where people have these capabilities. They can scry on people--but people can scry on them! 3) Counter Spheres with Spheres. The amount of information gathering and general problems solving people can do is prodigious, but the opposition has access to the same abilities, as well as the power to suppress information and throw obstacles of their own in the way. 4) Make the narrative follow the system for Effects. This sidesteps all of the weird physics/silver vs. werewolves/etc. tricks. You want to turn a werewolf into silver? Sure That happens to require Life, Matter, Spirit and enough successes to kill them. You're better off burning them. It's simpler. There are a bunch of other little things, but these are the main ones.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2015 04:29
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, you missed the joke. Oh poo poo, I totally did. In my defence, I am asked how to run Ascension over and over and over and over and over and over again, so I kind of have this response canned.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2015 06:02
|
|
|
Daeren posted:Yeah, entering a fugue state and rattling out a hollow litany of how to make Ascension function when provided with even remotely appropriate stimuli is pretty understandable. I don't think it's hollow. People seriously think that you can't run mystery-focused games, for instance, because they never think that maybe the other side might magick up something to lead them astray. Plus I've been in games with grating "Justify that according to your paradigm" inquisitions that halt play, instead of STs who want to help make cool things happen. MalcolmSheppard fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jun 24, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2015 06:42
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:I'm not sure I agree. The writeup acknowledges that the Vidanti exist but doesn't really go on to explain why someone who forswears violence is exiled while someone who forswears chess is not. In repeating over and over that the Arrow isn't only about fighting it kind of forgets to talk about fighting, like, at all. Learning to shoot lightning just in case is very different from volunteering to be the guy who gets shot at by lightning all the time. The Arrow treats struggle as a broad metaphysical concept, but the order represents the remnant of the supposed Atlantean profession of arms. So you can tease occult insights out of chess, debate or whatever, but theoretically your job is to shoot a designated enemy in the face. Can't do that? Can't be an Arrow.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2015 08:11
|
|
|
The other thing I want to address is gunrunning and other morally dubious things. You'll note that the description never notes any particular duty to help Sleepers, or even be nice to them. There are decent Arrows and lots of debate as to what exactly is "of the Lie" in terms of Sleeper institutions, but the heart of the Arrow is that you're supposed to be ready for everything in the conflict of life, you're supposed to keep your promises and you're supposed to define and adhere to personal virtues. None of these are really compassionate values. In the AA book, "I'm going to kill your entire family" is listed as a valid oath. These are not necessarily nice people. They can be, and they can *serve* nice people (and moderate the orders given them by bad people) but these things aren't required to be a member in good standing. The Vidanti are bad because they're pacifists. The Free Companies are bad because they don't submit to Awakened authority. (The latter have a large number of assholes in them, no doubt, but some of them are probably groups who walked away from oathbound service to a bastard--and they're still bad by AA standards.)
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2015 10:24
|
|
|
tatankatonk posted:The Adamantine Arrow literally, non-metaphorically, fights the enemies of the Diamond Orders. What my reading presupposes is...maybe they don't? They do, but while they want everyone to theoretically be able to pull a trigger/get their stab on they recognize that some folks will always be better at it than others. Some folks will be better at procuring arms, and some will be better at extracting favours from Sleeper organizations. Some folks will just be better pure occultists and metaphysicians, which has tangible benefits in Mage. Every Marine a rifleman, but the IT guy probably adheres to different values of "rifleman" than someone with dedicated infantry training. Ideally, every Arrow would be skilled at all aspects of warfare. The gunrunner satisfies the straightforward role of getting guns into Arrow hands. As for the prosecutor, he might be someone with a metaphysical focus, but he might just be handy for the same reason organized crime would find it handy to have a prosecutor in their pocket. Either of them could have had their jobs before Awakening, and have simply elected to keep them, though approach them with new perspectives and goals.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2015 22:33
|
|
|
Kibner posted:Speaking of layout, what tool(s) do you guys use for that? The only ones I am familiar with is LaTeX and its family. Adobe. Many printers, especially in PoD, won't give anything else the time of day. Note that layout and art direction are done by different folks than the writer/developer team, though the developer does back and forths with Chaney or whoever else is doing art and layout.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2015 20:34
|
|
|
Grim posted:A rapist / some other terrible person going free sounds like a real consequence if you are invested in making the world a better place? The Arrow doesn't give a poo poo about making the world a better place except according to criteria that are unfathomable to the average person. Individual AA members act according to their conscience and groups probably have various projects going, but yeah, they're not paladins or anything. As an organization they do not especially care about you or "society."
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2015 13:18
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:They totally care about "society", because "society" is a machine constructed by the Exarchs. Properly speaking, "evil" Arrows might look like a remorseless mercenary who's 100% in it for the challenge and doesn't even bother to find out who it is he's killing, but a character that actually acknowledges/is in good standing with the Order and the Pentacle would be like, Neo machine gunning down the lobby guards or the "murderhobo" that stalks the nightmares of every rpg.net poster. The Lie allegedly creates the conditions that organize society in a certain way, but the AA doesn't believe, as an Order, that changing those conditions are necessarily its job. Some of them might believe it is, but some might believe in an entirely pragmatic relationship with society, or as an object against which to test oneself, but not to change, really. If a certain element has an unambiguous proximate cause handed down from the Throne, sure, go fix that. Otherwise? You have to understand that most of these people aren't ready to be unplugged. That said, the average AA member, or mage of any stripe, is only slightly more ruthless than an ordinary person, and isn't indifferent, but this is a personal approach or one set by caucus, not Order policy. MalcolmSheppard fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jul 10, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2015 17:11
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:So basically that dumb Heinlein quote about specialization being for insects is the Arrow ideal? It's dumb when you're not a wizard. If you're a wizard, why not be good at everything? In any event, it's really Miyamoto Musashi: Miyamoto Musashi posted:When I apply the principle of strategy to the ways of different arts and crafts, I no longer have need for a teacher in any domain. Musashi's own application of this was back and forth. He was a pretty good artist. He claimed his methods could be scaled up to general strategy, but he never did particularly well at battles.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2015 07:33
|
|
|
moths posted:I'm surprised there isn't a WoD game based on being a writer, director, (or game designer?) based on how frequently those occupations get involved with the supernatural in horror. Yeah, but consider the source.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2015 18:27
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Partly because King isn't a major influence on the World of Darkness, but mainly that the WoD is, at heart, about empowerment. Usually that's of the supernatural sort. The 2004 World of Darkness is a big shift in that it supports disempowering, mundane human-level horror at all. It's still not the core focus, though. We wrote support for it in Mage Revised and certain fans poo poo their pants. Vampire 1st is about losing your Humanity. 2nd starts out that way and drifts away. Revised comes back. Werewolf is about fighting losing battles where all victories just delay the inevitable, but it doesn't home in on that until Revised. Mage is about what happens after the imposition of a dystopia in 1st, but that loosens to the high action of 2nd before settling into Revised. It really depends on where in those lines you look. But never mind: No matter what, however, folks will default to adventure game assumptions at many tables. I mean I know lots of NWoD partisans think they're super-mature hot poo poo compared to their predecessors, but you're the group that bought two books called Armory, and it wasn't to explore the disempowering tragedy of violence. It's because you wanted more guns and moves for your dudes. MalcolmSheppard fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Aug 25, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2015 18:39
|
|
|
Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I wish I'd read the copies of oVampire/Werewolf/Mage that you've got hidden on your shelf, but you must've bought them at the store that insists that supporting one line over another necessarily requires wanting and buying all the supplements for it. Well you see, I read them before I read about them on the Internet.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2015 18:48
|
|
|
The funny thing is that I played in a great Project: Twilight game, and it was obvious to everyone at the time (1997?) that Project: Twilight was the WoD X-Files. I'm not sure how that's empowering, especially since the typical scenario in the chronicle was piecing together supernaturally driven crimes and then learning enough to know there's nothing you can ever do to stop them. The one incident that stands out in my mind was tracking down some murderers in rural BC, thinking we almost caught them, not having our stories match up, and then discovering under hypnosis that we were all casually swatted aside by enormous wolf-things and trembled in terror when they got their last victim. Anyway, you know what's a great WoD movie? Network (the 1976 film). Finally saw it start to finish last night.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2015 18:57
|
|
|
Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Weirdly I did too, but I didn't pick up on any of the "actually well-written and maturely executed" subtext in decades past. Both lines have great bits and both lines have groaners. CWoD's virtue and curse is how wide a range of topics you can find covered in 20-odd years of material. NWoD's good and bad thing is the degree to which the lines are managed to present a common tone. So you've got one line where the signature characters look like they're out of a crazy comic book, and one line where the signature characters wear hoodies and look vaguely annoyed 20% of the time.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2015 19:05
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:That swipe seems a bit needless. Keep in mind: <---------- Wrote significant chunks of Armory Reloaded. I don't blame folks for wanting that stuff at all. I like action and run action-heavy games. One of the great things about long form play is that you can shift tone over time, and the game is ultimately about whatever recurs the strongest.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2015 19:11
|
|
|
Like I said, I'm the guy who suggested, among other things, that "monster hunting Judo team" be a hook in one of those books. I still think it's a great idea. Remember, an exceptional success is Ippon.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2015 19:17
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:The two Thaumaturgy boosk were actually pretty loving great, Page XX aside. One of the issues you get when you design to support a theme or flavour is that sometimes not every idea is really good for five dots (or in other games, however many levels) of stuff. so for Thaumaturgy you've got some powers which are sort of filler. Then again, the opposite, which is to design a power and shove it into a theme (which is basically what you do every time you cast a spell in Mage: The Ascension) doesn't necessarily work much better.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2015 19:45
|
|
|
I depends on whether you mean public as in Magic Best Buy, or public as in organized crime. We know there's an actual Mafia(s) and see media portraying it with various degrees of accuracy, but few of us will ever notice its influence or really know how it operates. It's entirely possible to have a scenario where people superficially accept magic but the Sleeping Curse still operates, so few people have first hand knowledge of what sorcerers do because magic doesn't work well around them or they forget about it. Sleeper authorities probably rely on wizards loyal to the state for deep cover operations and no-knock, Fate-obscured raids against criminals. In this scenario, the Free Council are probably split between punks and Sleeper loyalists, the Guardians determine who gets Made, the Silver Ladder fracture between community representatives and internal management, the Adamantine Arrow provide enforcers and the Mysterium are knowledge mercenaries. Meanwhile the Seer Ministries play bigger geopolitical games completely integrated into the Sleeper system, and may provide the bulk of law enforcement and state magical power in exchange for cop-like privilege and a percentage that makes their enterprises too big to fail.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2015 09:57
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:Now apply that logic to vampire poo poo and a population that makes your parents who can barely work a web browser look like software engineers... Just a funny aside here: I worked in computer literacy and one of the interesting things is that for the most part, competence sort of peaks among people who came of age around the time Windows became ubiquitous because the experienced the transition to omnipresent GUIs and have some idea that a computer is not literally doing the thing the pictures of its processes are doing. Earlier than that you have people who learned just enough to do their jobs, if anything (ex: I have a relative who can program mainframes in Job Control Language but not maintain a Windows 7 machine). Later than that and you have the face-value problem where kids learn the most efficient way of performing individual tasks through a UI but lack any sort of general knowledge. Old and young alike don't know how to manually enter URLs, for example. I can easily imagine an enterprising Nos spewing free apps that monkey with your camera whenever you attach certain keywords or various types of metadata, perhaps tuned to the local political situation so that videos around disputed areas and Elysiums either look lousy or never get uploaded (except to the Nos' servers). When one gets exposed for funny permissions, s/he just kicks another one out.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2015 06:03
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:Charon was revealed to be a random soldier from an early Etruscan Kingdom in Ends of Empire. The Angel Charon from Demon: the Fallen is a completely separate character with the same name. Yeah, Demon: The Fallen sure said a bunch of stuff people working on every other game ignored. I love ya Greg Stolze, but mages aren't filled with dead angel juice. EDIT: That came off as snarky. Demon's definite tone was integral to that game, so it sort of had to go down like that, but by the Revised era we'd moved away from games making solid assertions about one another. That's why "Vampires have static stuff and shattered avatars and that's all you need to know," was deprecated. MalcolmSheppard fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Oct 5, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2015 05:56
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:I'm still kind of awestruck at Geist organizations being cults. "Hey, if you want to work with some other Sin-Eaters, you should come up with an elaborate religion and convert to it" doesn't inspire "hey, I want to play this!" like it was meant to. Yeah, I blew it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2015 06:08
|
|
|
Shockeh posted:The alternative is you just be a bit 'Gaiman' about it - There's no reason why all these things can't be true, at once. They just are, and their ability to all be true at the same time despite being apparently contradictory is why they're ineffable, and you're not. Demon does some stuff like that in its prehistory, and I presented that as an option in Mage's Ascension book. I mean really, we're talking about a bunch of unreliable narration though in Mage of course, that unreliable narrative *is* reality.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2015 18:04
|
|
|
Luminous Obscurity posted:Crisis on Infinite Draculas will finally be a reality. Something like this was kicked around to reboot the WoD in the first place (there are even some hooks for it in a few books) but nope: NWoD instead. That was the right choice.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2015 14:18
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:Really? I thought you had to be a reincarnated person with a special Avatar in order to awaken. Every human being has an Avatar, and they all probably reincarnate and even oscillate between Sleeping and Awakened states. Most people are Sleepers, so they only "magic" they can do is enforce the Consensus. In Ascension, becoming a mage isn't an innate or accidentally-triggered state, but an achievement. Theoretically, anybody can do it, but nobody really knows how to make it happen reliably. You probably have a better chance if you study under a mage, but it may well be that your Avatar subtly got you to apprentice yourself. So anyone could be a person whose Avatar has been through a dozen Awakened lives, but just hasn't got around to it this time. It's pretty strongly implied that an Avatar that's Awakened before will tend to Awaken again, however. Nobody knows whether your Avatar is your true self, some emergent quality of being human, or something that's hitched along for the ride with humans. Anyway, the Avatar Storm in Revised consisted of mostly Sleeping Avatars and a few Awakened that were ripped apart by various cascading disasters and prevented from reincarnating. Mages got hit by the Storm because their Avatars are Awakened and violently reacted to competitive intrusion from another Avatar. Sleepers didn't because their Avatars are Asleep and passive. It's sort of like if you lived in an ultramodern house with lots of glass surfaces, and an intruder crept in. If you're asleep he hangs out, eats your food and watches Netflix. If you're awake you grab that rear end in a top hat and smash him through layers of glass before hurling him off your balcony. Unfortunately, in this analogy "you" are your Avatar and that cool house is your Pattern. In Judgment (the ToJ scenario I wrote) Sleepers tended to Awaken because eventually somebody rummaging through your poo poo in your house wakes you up. It created a vital disturbance. If I remember correctly, I had to cut a bit describing a Seeking when you've got an Avatar shard in you: an inner journey that gets interrupted by this foreign element that the representations of your Avatar are immediately hostile to. You know, like when Uncle Grandpa showed up in Steven Universe. In that example I'm the Avatar and change the channel because that was terrible, Jesus Christ Cartoon Network.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2015 06:27
|
|
|
Obligatum VII posted:Guardians in your hedges with sniper rifles. The Guardians tend to be twitchy like that. Demons, eh? Nowadays we call some of what were called "demons" in Mage goetia. You might cast a spell that locks up the Wrath of an entity real tight so nothing goes wrong, but it'd be a tricky sort of spell. Minor Wisdom sin. Creating one whole cloth is safer and probably what was intended, but also a pretty elaborate thing, since creating a consciousness requires Mastery before you add whatever capabilities make it an effective guardian. The other things that might be called demons are Supernal entities from Pandemonium, which are called "Demons" with a capital D, but you don't get to customize them. Riskier. Moderate Wisdom sin, assuming you find a way to make it be obedient. The last thing would be a Lower Depths akathartos from a "hell," usually defined as a place with malformed moral constituents, and given some treatment in Inferno. That's an incredibly bad idea, and a serious sin. I suppose you could go crossover and try to employ a demon from D:TD. Magical compulsion would be a bad idea. making a deal with one? Good luck?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2015 04:57
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:The word "Justicariate" rather than just "the Justicars" is a MES thing, right? I never heard the term before I started playing with the MES. That was a term on the Shared Universe, the group I was in during the 90s. One Justicar each still, though.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2015 10:37
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:When was this big collapse? Early 2000's? There were multiple declines in the TTRPG market starting in 1993. One oft-quoted factoids was that in 1993 Mayfair's Underground was considered a mediocre seller at 15,000 copies. Card games are popularly thought to have cannibalized a significant segment of the hobby not necessarily directly, but by being the preferred shelf-liner for retailers. A second decline for certain *types* of games occurred from 2000-2003 due to the glut of D20 games, and after that, stresses created by poor sellers and obsolescence generated by D&D 3.5 burst the D20 bubble. These were not the only causes, and the severe decline of hobby game retail occurred for other reasons. Wizards itself closed all 80 of its retail stores. So when people try to compare how V:TM would do now compared to then, you have to work through the fact that each edition existed in a very different industry than the one before it. In the mid-90s MET LARP had probably reached its peak, and MET games as a whole were perhaps the third most popular game after V:TM, according to folks I know who worked on them. When Vampire: The Dark Ages was being prepped for release, there was some thought of developing it as a direct challenge to Dungeons and Dragons. There had been a few periods where White Wolf stuff outsold AD&D, because AD&D was in a state of serious decline. (Some of that mission's DNA remains, it paladin-like grail vampires and elder labyrinth complexes, along with erratic fantasy-oriented stuff that suited Rein-Hagen's preference for a mythic Europe general fantasy setting.) Grey book Laws of the Night was perhaps one of the few successful introductory RPGs, and perhaps the most successful non-D&D intro games ever, unless there are still people who play Pokemon Jr. The rules were rough and not exactly suited for the hyper-competitive organized play of the Cam/MES, but unlike later versions of the rules, they were not written assuming you were a Cam/MES or OWbN member, and stuck to the elemental setup of V:TM by default without integrating deep background. I'd say half of my current group plays RPGs because of the grey book -- and they left midway through Revised. It's difficult to figure out how popular organized LARP is now. MES doesn't provide a straightforward way of finding out how many active chapters play. OWbN is much easier, with 146 games. BNS' game finder lists 154. There are overlaps and dead games, and games that are the same people in multiple things, so my gut says we're talking about a sub 300, even sub-200 number worldwide. OWbN games seem to most often have 10-19 per. Maybe there are 4000-odd MET LARPers out there still? I know that in Canada, the days of multiple competing games with 40+ players (as happened in Toronto and Montreal) are goooonnnne, and my intuition is that the remainder, which BNS serves with rules tuned for what they want, are hardcore competitive organized players. So the question that is probably before the new White Wolf now is how to turn those people into a set of brand ambassadors for folks who don't want to read 500+ pages to master how to be mean to each other. V20, which was always designed as a comprehensive tribute to the game as a whole, with some minor cleanup on the side, which along with the other 20ths have outperformed their expectations even though like them, they're really for the initiated. But even though I'd love to boost that poo poo all day long, I'm also not sure what it means, because of course there are people who will buy the book and never interact with a fan community. But even if we've got a comparable number of tabletop fans, that's something for White Wolf to work with though again, that means producing a game these fans will not only want to run with themselves, but introduce to other people, and that someone can pick off of a shelf and at least partly figure out, so that these people get in line for all the other, bigger media, and say nice things about it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2015 05:40
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:It was a functional game, but the first printing of rules was a mess, some of which was fixed in the second printing. The real issues with Rage was that it just had wording issues all over the place, appallingly bad balance, and though it rarely had timing issues (most cards just took effect "when you played them") when it did it was a mess. But the game itself played very fast and was fun and simple when it functioned properly. Unfortunately it had other issues like horrifically bad card distribution. I just sold off my Rage cards this year, and though I had over 1500 cards from one expansion, I was still about 20 cards short of a set. From what I've heard from a fairly reliable source, the main downfall of the Rage card game was losing a major retailer due to objections over card content. That's not to say Rage would still be around, but it would have probably aged out gracefully instead of being poleaxed. The scale of the mid-90s CCG industry was always an aberration. An old friend of mine won money at an international Mechwarrior tournament back then, for God's sakes.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2015 05:55
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:Without books in stores, how do you get new people in? With game cafes and bars, right now. The main barrier to jumping on that trend is the half-deserved rep RPG players have for being thieves and lovely tippers.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2015 06:01
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, the rights to Rage were sold off to Five Rings Publishing Group, who published it as Rage Across Las Vegas. As mentioned, it was incompatible with earlier sets - I particularly hated that you were now penalized for mixing tribes, as they brought in factional mechanics similar to Legend of the Five Rings. Yeah. When Rage lost its major retailer it was kicked thataway to have the last juice wringed from it, and of course it was used as part of a scheme that accelerated the collapse of the B-tier CCG market.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2015 20:17
|
|
|
Kavak posted:Who was that retailer, anyway? I'm afraid I can't say due to the manner in which I came by the information. It was not hobby trade retailer.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2015 07:24
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:Motherfuckers. they are going to ruin this. Nah, Martin's a fan of Promethean. Honestly, there's no way you make this move without considering options like shuttering things. It would be irresponsible not to. As for WoD, the original developed an international following while there was still the traffic to get local editions out. NWoD/CofD never really had the chance to do that. In any event, the name change makes sense because NWoD ended up not being the sort of direct successor originally envisioned, CWoD came out, and it created a bit of brand confusion. I know there are a few jackasses out there screaming "Victory! Vindication!" because of a branding shift, but dumb people are everywhere. It's interesting to see references to European LARP. MET is also its own nostalgia product and as I said, now largely impenetrable to outsiders. The European scene has a ton of diversity and lessons to teach, and best of all, it seems the folks at WW know it well. Over in North America "Nordic" often has sort of this Very-Serious-Hope-To-Write-A-Paper broken telephone cult of middle class respectability going on, but the folks in the actual Nordic scene are pretty interested in traditional RPGs these days.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2015 07:38
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:I think the reasons the nWoD isn't as well known are more related to the very different markets. If the Better WoD (it's the new name now) had had the old one's marketing, it would be just as popular if not more. Requiem had a For Dummies mass market paperback, a bunch of launch events and other stuff. The size and composition of the RPG market had radically changed between the 90s and 00s. Comparisons are pretty useless.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2015 23:27
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:I don't have access to Facebook to confirm this, but apparently MR°H just "announced" that I am zombie is a plagiarization of an older game from the seventies that he found in a Wisconsin warehouse and as penance is starting a kickstarter to get the original game published in pdf form. I do believe this is following a tradition established by Encounter Critical. The Kicksnarker G+ group lost its poo poo over it, though, and that was hilarious.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2016 07:59
|
|
|
Brother Entropy posted:"CoD was less popular so we'll never make a non tg media push for it" seems like he's kinda getting cause and effect backwards. The original World of Darkness lines were released under market conditions that could never be matched by Chronicles of Darkness, even when it was NWoD. CofD/NWoD was released during a period of collapse for the TTRPG industry triggered by D&D 3.5 and the D20 glut. It's not an insult to say it's less popular. WW could have released metaplot-reset versions of the WoD lines or new editions or whatever and they wouldn't have done any better. But deserved or not, that difference in popularity does impact the ability to spin it off, simply because fewer people know of one than the other.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2016 22:36
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:I'm more inclined to blame the ttrpg collapse on the rise of graphical MMOs culminating with World of Warcraft rather than any affect D&D had. Really there were D&D only players and players who wanted to play anything but. I'm talking about a specific set of events running from 2003-2005 or so that are well known to anyone who was in the industry at the time, not a set of abstract ideas about What Happened to RPGs, Man. An enormous glut of D20 releases used the original design protocol, which required dependence on the 3.0 PHB. In 2003 WotC released D&D 3.5. This was much, much earlier than anticipated. It immediately made page references and certain systems obsolete for hundreds of products, many of which were filling the majority of RPG shelf space at brick and mortar retailers. This made many products impossible to move and triggered a general sense of skepticism for the original D20 business model. Stores stopped ordering them. Retailers who couldn't get rid of their products often went out of business. In the meantime, Wizards closed their retail chain and multiple distributors/fulfillment houses such as Osseum Entertainment went out of business.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2016 05:51
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:Very interesting. Were you involved with brick-and-mortar retailers or distributors? In various capacities, with local retailers and publishers, and I was in contact with a printer that handled orders from WW and GoO.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2016 08:49
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 20:27 |
|
|
Grim posted:The Tremere thing is more pointing out that people just fuckin' love them, not commentary on how interesting they actually are This reminds me. I was talking to another designer about how V:TM might be redesigned and he was like, "Get rid of the Tremere," but I explained that you can't, because folks like them too much. Especially LARPers, where Tremere organizational stuff highly motivates players, especially if they're lil' heel-clickers to begin with. This brings me back to what works for Vampire that can be taken from Nordic LARP. WW's stereotype was to produce these enormous books that folks would read and STs would interpret and release bits of through play. The College of Wizardry LARP isn't really "light." There's an enormous book full of spells and lore. The difference is that this is explicitly player-facing material. There's no double talk about knowledge, because the book exists in the world. Lots of WoD stuff could be used that way, and was written to support it, but wasn't explicitly released this way. Tremere have an advantage in that they have more player-facing lore to guide what they do and provide a sense of purpose.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2016 09:01
|
|
