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Mexcillent posted:You loving dummy. Everyone in the oWoD has two souls. Amenti don't. They've got five!
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Apr 10, 2015 23:12
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If I had to guess I'd say Unchained are exempt so that the overarching Dark Mother mythos can stay separate from the overarching God-Machine mythos. Also demons are all about not being spotted as demons so they don't play nice with the "happy monster family" motif.
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Apr 14, 2015 04:18
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Crion posted:I don't think that alone explains it. Changelings are just as paranoid as Demons -- and their Mask roughly as impenetrable, unless that's been nerfed recently -- but Beasts apparently have no problem with them. Changelings don't actually start to melt if people figure out what they are.
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Apr 14, 2015 05:03
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Basically, the Unchained don't want your soul; they just need to pop it out and toss it away so they can claim everything else. (Incidentally, demon pacts being able to warp reality to just give people what they're pacting for is the one thing I dislike about Descent. That was previously a unique changeling thing, and unlike with changelings it would be more fun to make demons have to work at it.)
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Apr 14, 2015 23:46
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I presume it doesn't remember where you were because Cover isn't just a cover identity but a piece of magical infrastructure that works to protect you from anyone seeing through your disguise.
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Apr 15, 2015 01:06
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Doc Aquatic posted:I got Demon because of the discussion in this thread, and I haven't finished reading it, so maybe this is answered, but can a demon make a deal with multiple people to take the same part of their backgrounds? I'd go with "yes, but it's a compromise the minute somebody notices."
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Apr 15, 2015 18:36
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Yeah, the families are pointless, but they're at least useful inspiration. That makes them miles above the X-splats for Mummy or Geist, which are blatantly there because White Wolf games have X-splats and serve no useful purpose beyond fitting the games to that mold.
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Apr 16, 2015 00:03
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This week's Monday Meeting note says it's in redlines.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:43
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Luminous Obscurity posted:TBH I kind of want to play a Black Fury game where the party has to seal an ancient portal into a realm of pure madness, the dreaded "Gamer's Gate." Or fight an evil worker ant.
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Apr 21, 2015 21:06
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They may have meant "chafed" instead of "chuffed."
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Apr 23, 2015 19:29
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Ferrinus posted:I'm really chuffed that you didn't get my joke. I could not get too close to your point for fear of chafing.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:42
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Crion posted:Interested to see if the trend continues and Mage 2E Thyrsus are explicitly all about being primal, passionate shapeshifters that fight hard and gently caress harder See for yourself!
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Apr 23, 2015 20:09
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It also helps if finding the sex sexy doesn't depend on the reader sharing some very specific fetishes.
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Apr 23, 2015 21:50
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Little_wh0re posted:In my experience of gaming the hard choice tends to be being more moral, not less. There's a difference between hard choices and Hard Choices.
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May 1, 2015 14:25
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Tailfnz posted:Yeah, I have serious doubts about C20 being any good because CtD was simply, at it's core, an unfinished game. I believe it'll take a hell of a lot of effort from OPP to make something decently playable out of it. A part of me kind of hopes they can pull it off, because as I said previously, there are actually a few interesting ideas in the game that can be pretty cool if expanded upon well enough (Chimera, Treasures, even the concept of Banality). If nothing else, the devs for C20 seem to be aware that they're going to have to do a Revised edition instead of trying to throw everything together and make an uncritical celebration of all things Changeling like V20 and W20 did.
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May 18, 2015 19:21
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Dreaming is bad because, basically, it's about growing up and the pains and joys of that, and it was written by people who had not grown up yet and did not have valuable perspectives to share on the subject. Which makes it theoretically pretty good material to return to twenty years later and hopefully wiser.
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May 19, 2015 03:32
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The Technocracy was a lot of different stuff at different times. In 1e they were basically Reality Police and it wasn't even completely sure that they were human. In 2e they were an Orwellian conspiracy to control human thought that had grown completely out of control itself, to the point that nobody knew who was actually in charge and anybody who asked would have the fact noted on their disciplinary record. Revised tried to make them more playable and focused more on the people at the bottom who just wanted a world that didn't have all these vampires and werewolves running around. Different people like different versions of the organization.The Guide to the Technocracy, the biggest and most canonical book for a long period, was a 2e book. The Revised versions of their splatbooks only got one (mostly dull) book published before the line ended, but the revival of the classic WoD resulted in the other four getting published in the last few years. I don't really prefer their take on the Union but they're extremely high-quality supplements. "Anti-science" stuff tends to come in via the association with other games, where the Technocracy is equivalent to the Weaver in Werewolf and is thus associated with Stasis and, in Changeling terms, Banality. These references never really fit into Mage all that well. At any rate, the game contains plenty of heroic and fanciful scientists, like the Sons of Ether and the Virtual Adepts. Meanwhile, M20 is a very pretty book aside from some questionable art choices, but it seems to be taking a really hard ant-Traditions tack, to the point that the Hollow Ones and a bunch of the Crafts have gotten together to make their own Traditions with blackjack, and hookers.
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May 20, 2015 21:49
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Swagger Dagger posted:Isn't this mostly because, as far as the metaplot is concerned, basically everyone in a leadership position of the Traditions get killed in the early oughts and all that's left is the Rogue Council that people aren't sure if they should trust or not? The metaplot is basically all optional, and there's a bunch of boxes saying things like "Maybe Doissetep exploded? Or maybe it didn't! It's all up to you!" The new metaplot additions are also theoretically optional, although even if you don't use them the book is still organized around the idea that the Crafts all joined the Disparate Alliance.
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May 20, 2015 22:56
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I'm sort of in awe to see that somebody thought the Traditions were in need of some extra shades of grey. Did they miss the way the entire discourse online has turned more or less completely against them in the past ten years? I mean, seriously, I've spent a lot of time explaining that the Traditions don't hate electricity, and I'm not looking forward to those conversations now that M20 has decided that they mostly do.
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May 21, 2015 02:31
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The Technocracy would like to stand for science, and people are often fooled into thinking they do, but they are ultimately an anti-science group in that they try to avoid doing actual science and try to prevent other people from doing any either.
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May 21, 2015 04:25
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I find the Nephandi pretty annoying, because in a game about how we're tragically divided by ideology they're a bunch of card-carrying villains who are designed to be purely dedicated to the service of evil. I've come around to the view that it's irresponsible to present characters who are unworthy of empathy, but Nephandi are actually constructed so that feeling empathy for them is a dangerous trap.
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May 21, 2015 04:32
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There's always Middle-Earth. The other six wizards probably outweigh Saruman.
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May 22, 2015 02:02
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I could guess at "Lair book," "wacky supernatural encounters book," or a "supernatural pathways and assorted hijinx" book.
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Jun 3, 2015 02:41
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Also "I want to play a Solar only I don't like the color yellow."
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Jun 3, 2015 16:58
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Ferrinus posted:Was he the guy that correctly identified Gilgamesh as an inferior, now-obsolete precursor to Homestuck? He was the guy who claimed that "[S] Descend" was more epic than any actual epic poetry, yes.
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Jun 3, 2015 17:10
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Demons always fall willfully. An angel that "glitched out" would be an exile and not Unchained.
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Jun 3, 2015 18:14
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I could honestly respect Beast if it just owned up to the fact that Beasts are just awful. If it was "I'm a monster who makes everyone's lives worse, and everyone wants me dead because of that, but I won't die just to please everybody else. Come at me, bro," I think you could make that work.
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Jun 3, 2015 20:15
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I don't think Malcolm is going to come out against his colleague's work as angrily as people want him to, and I don't think trying to talk him into it will be productive.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:07
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I don't think reading Beast as a queer text (or not) really gets to the roots of the problem people are having with the text, so I don't know that it's helpful to bring it up in this context. The root of the issue is that, from a neutral standpoint, Beasts and Heroes are both pretty bad, and Beasts are almost invariably worse, both because they prey on everybody (not just Beasts) and because they unquestionably start the aggressions between themselves and their Heroes. However, the authorial voice pretty obviously regards the Beasts as sympathetic, and it will either play them up as cool predators or ignore the horror of what they're doing more or less interchangeably. At the same time, the authorial voice pretty obviously loathes the Heroes, to the point where I can almost see the drops of spittle on the pages of the book that talk about them. The author is so clearly in the tank for the nightmare-beasts and against the people who rise up to fight them, so determined to make Heroes unworthy of even a scrap of empathy, that we keep seeing readers rejecting the text and regarding Heroes as the sympathetic party. Requiem and Awakening, for example, are both very self-aware about what their protagonists are. Vampires are alluring predators who are ultimately slaves to their hunger. Mages are occult seekers who should know better, but mostly don't. I don't get that feel from Primordial. I don't get the feeling that the authors thought that Beasts should try to be "better," or that they should be anything but even more beastly than they already are. It feels like the text is working out some old grudge that I don't share, and reading it makes me very uncomfortable.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:19
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pospysyl posted:Speaking for myself, I don't have any moral outrage about Beast. It's Lord Raziere that has a problem with playing characters that do bad things, and like you said, doing bad things in fiction is what makes outgroups in fiction cool and likeable. Eating a man in fiction is cool! There have been a ton of WoD gamelines about outgroups that separate themselves from mainstream society through violence. Beast does a ton of stuff that Promethean does, including Hero generation through nightmares. In Promethean 1e, those mobs could be presented as justified, since the Promethean really is making things worse in that town if he stays there. Yeah, this is about where I stand. If I wanted to be flip, I'd summarize the issue by saying that Beast wants us to be very clear about how anybody who dislikes a Beast must have a tiny penis.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:36
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SunAndSpring posted:This book fails on so many loving levels that I feel legitimately concerned for the people that got it funded. Did people even read the loving PDF before they threw in money? Either answer is disappointing. Well, Mummy kept pretty much every aspect of the game secret until the final release, to a degree that makes Exalted Third Edition look like open development, so that pretty much tells you how much Kickstarter funding you can get purely based on OPP's reputation.
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Jun 8, 2015 01:48
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When you get right down to it, Beasts' carefully-constructed compatibility with every splat does pretty much make them better matches for the evil versions of those splats than the good ones, doesn't it?
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Jun 8, 2015 03:52
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Yeah, splats with quadratic power progression will inevitably outpace splats with linear progression. That's not even counting things like how mages can do most of their stuff at range.
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Jun 8, 2015 23:43
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The oWoD had an ongoing problem where enemy factions would morph into becoming playable over time until games lost their premises and degenerated into a giant sandbox filled with chargen options.
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Jun 12, 2015 03:24
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Kai Tave posted:I admit I'm not really sure how one follows the other, here. Basically, dealing with things that would try to subvert the organization and put itself on top of the Kindred.
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Jun 12, 2015 03:48
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Tezzor posted:It's give to be harder than they think to remove the "beasts are like marginalized groups and heroes are like crazy bigots" angle because it's the only thing holding up the "beasts are the good guys" angle Based on Matt's comments, it seems like he thinks "Beasts are monstrous" is the more important tent pole to keep. I feel like this is going to be really hard to fit with the idea that Beast is crossover-friendly.
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Jun 12, 2015 19:08
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My main concern is that having fae creatures actively and competently hunting changelings is going to cut back on the fairy tale adventure aspect—I feel like it would be a lot harder to justify building a Hollow that wasn't intensely fortified with Huntsmen about.
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Jun 13, 2015 03:12
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Kavak posted:I think because it mostly worked with the Strix, they're convinced it's needed everywhere. While Werewolf actually benefits from having the idigam fleshed out (There's plenty of other poo poo for the Uratha to fight if you don't like them), Prometheans don't need the alchemists they're trying to shoehorn in and the Huntsmen are looking way too prominent. Wonder if they've got anything planned for Geist? Geists probably actually do need it. Changelings don't need as much to answer the "what do I do with it" question because you can fill in any gaps with "fairy tale stuff goes here."
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Jun 13, 2015 05:53
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Yeah, ultimately I don't feel like Lost needed a huge refocusing of its premise, just a more exciting set of mechanics, and it feels like they're making some of these changes just for the sake of doing something new.
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Jun 13, 2015 16:45
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Counterpoint: 2E Seemings are miles better than the old Courts/Stage of Grief parallel and free up Courts to be the "What now?" that they had wanted to be in 1E. I would file that under "mechanically more exciting."
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Jun 13, 2015 16:58
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