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Cryophage posted:Changeling question: Is there a reason everyone takes on cutesy fairy-tale names? Well, you legitimately are a fairy-tale thing and it probably isn't healthy to pretend that that isn't the case, or to pretend that it isn't kind of awesome, because it's not going away. (My favorite Changeling NPC I never got to use was a guy who came back as a rabbit guy, and was so infuriated at being turned into an animal that he spent a lot of effort on not being a rabbit by lifting weights and doing things with his hair to cover up his bunny ears and generally having a needlessly aggressive attitude. He mostly looked like a very weird rabbit.)
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Jun 14, 2015 04:23
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Cryophage posted:At the same time though, Vampires don't go around asking people to call them Vlad Fangman or Sanguine Trenchcoat. Well, no, but they do join clubs named the Ordo Dracul and the Lancea Sanctum, so it's not like they don't obey the naming conventions of their own genre.
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Jun 14, 2015 04:36
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I think that having a separate fairy identity also probably helps changelings keep things compartmentalized.
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Jun 14, 2015 05:37
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The thing I dislike about the Changeling material I've been seeing is mostly that it seems to be tying the game much more closely to the themes of abuse, coping, and recovery, to the point that they become really hard to ignore, whereas in the first edition they were closer to being a subtextual thing that informed the line's treatment of stuff. It feels like this Changeling is going to be a lot harder to use for general urban fantasy adventure.
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Jun 17, 2015 20:08
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Acanthus are also the one path that's getting a major reworking in the second edition, so that they'll be seers and schemers instead of fortune's favorite fools.
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Jun 18, 2015 17:13
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Attorney at Funk posted:Technocracy apologism in 2015. This, I claim, is ideology. I abandoned this battle in despair after M20 announced that you know what, maybe the Traditions do hate light bulbs after all.
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Jun 23, 2015 12:59
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Ferrinus posted:Hell, let them do so. Let them be their own worst stereotypes without exception. Their struggle is still a just one. You don't support the revolution because of how engaged you are with the revolutionaries' personal brands. If I want to play the game, players have to be engaged with the revolutionaries' personal brands, and they were already in large part turning against them before M20 decided to give the Traditions a huge blackwashing.
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Jun 23, 2015 15:38
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I believe it was specifically the paradigms he left out, that is to say, any explanation of how the magic of a given group is supposed to work. (Note: in Ascension this information is kind of crucial)
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Jun 23, 2015 22:24
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Sorry about bringing up Technocracy Chat again, but having genuinely good and idealistic people working for a horrible, hidebound and in some places evil organisation is such a great hook that I really don't understand why people hate it as a direction. People hate it because large numbers of the people talking about it on the internet are largely unable or unwilling to grasp nuance, and will unironically call the organization as a whole the "real heroes." Some of them will even cite the Guide to the Technocracy as their authority on the subject!
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Jun 24, 2015 18:23
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Kavak posted:I haven't read any oWoD supplements in a long time, so is that unreliable 1st person or unreliable 3rd person narratives? Because if it's the latter, it's a really bad idea to trick people into thinking the text is being objective or make them cross reference multiple books to get an idea of what is actually happening in the setting. It uses various combinations of the unreliable first person and a more-or-less objective but obviously slanted third person. I don't actually have a problem with that aspect of the approach; I only minded first-person narrative because it was the 90s and most of the first person narrators were unbearably smug.
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Jun 24, 2015 18:36
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Daeren posted:Well, apparently Sothis Ascends came out in April and I haven't heard anything about that. Was it any good, if anyone in here got it? It's the second-least-bad of all the nMummy books. (The first and only actually good book overall is DC.) The first chapter, about the very first time any mummies ever woke up, is actually really good. The rest is sort of middlling.
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Jun 26, 2015 03:09
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Flavivirus posted:I really enjoyed the writing (and art) in Book of the Deceived, though I haven't seen how good it is in play. I would have called that easily the worst book in the line, both because the writing was serious oWoD-style incomprehensible and because the Deceived are basically "exactly like Arisen except that there's some fiddly little difference in almost every category." Like, seriously, it goes on and on about the personality of the tem-akh and how having them fused with your own mind is such a hellish and unique experience, but the tem-akh can't talk. In practice it's 100% identical to being Arisen. quote:Demon Translation Guide is actually pretty amazing, and I was not expecting to say that about a Translation Guide. The crossover chapter is the one thing I felt was missing from all the previous Translation Guides, since setting's always such an important part of WoD games. I think my favorite mini-settings are the one where the God-Machine is a magical device that summons Fallen Demons and converts them into Descent Demons, and the one where the Descent Demons attempt to colonize Fallen's Hell. I'm interested to hear about this, since each Translation Guide so far has been more "who would actually want this?" than the last, and I'm curious to see what they've learned from that process.
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Jun 26, 2015 15:34
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Yeah, the response to "Beasts are vile and I don't want to play them and I would never allow anyone to play as one in a crossover game" seems to be "working as intended." I have no idea why they decided to make the darkest and most unpleasant splat also be the crossover game.
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Jun 27, 2015 20:48
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Yeah, I'm continuing to not be a fan of the way Lost 2e is turning subtext into text.
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Jul 1, 2015 16:34
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What I always wanted to see to encourage fairy action was something similar to Unknown Armies' method of building charges, where you acquire Glamour by doing weird things like collecting mushrooms or dancing nude under the moon or whatever. The end result would be that changelings who spent a lot of their time doing fairy things would have more mojo and their Clarity would suffer, while others would have less magic but would be mentally more stable. (This would also lead to the Courts sheltering a lot of extremely magical types who aren't really prepared to cope with living in the outside world on their own, but whose powers are incredibly useful to the freehold.)
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Jul 1, 2015 19:24
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Tezzor posted:On the subject of Tradition mages hating lightbulbs from a few pages back: why wouldn't they? Lightbulbs cost money and have to be bought in a store, probably a big box store that treats its employees poorly and which requires time and effort and gasoline to get to. Lightbulbs are fragile and finite by design. They can injure people if they break, or by falling or burning themselves when installing, or while stumbling around looking for a switch. Their parts are mined, they are produced in factories, go in landfills and require electricity, which all means they pollute. The fact that they run on electricity through a wire also means that massive numbers of people must be engaged in dangerous physical labor to keep them working, and they produce waste heat requiring even more pollution to re-cool the room, and they stop working by the millions due to something as stupid as a squirrel standing on a power line. It actually specifically said that they prefer candles to halogen bulbs.
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Jul 7, 2015 02:11
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I'm confused. When did "lawyer Arrow" stop being a concept everybody wanted except the writers and start being something nobody wanted except the writers?
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Jul 8, 2015 19:26
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Flavivirus posted:Apparently they just announced a fourth edition of VtM. I'd be interested to see how they distinguish it from V20 - maybe actually fix the rules? That seems to be the idea—this is a true "new edition" rather than a "nostalgia edition" that was about collecting all things Vampire rather than modernizing the rules or altering the tone. It was possibly inevitable after they realized that Changeling, Hunter, and Mummy all pretty much needed Revised Editions rather than having nostalgia editions to port all their flaws forward untouched.
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Jul 31, 2015 18:55
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I wouldn't really mind a return of metaplot if it was done in a consistent and intelligent way.
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Jul 31, 2015 20:12
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This bit about Ascension is good stuff.
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Aug 17, 2015 03:56
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Pussy Cartel posted:I'm now afraid of what that's going to cost to print and ship, even with the PoD discount backers are getting. Well, W20 and Chuubo are $100 to print premium, and they're about 575 pages, and this is about 125 more. So... more than that, plus shipping! Dang. /me imagines what the deluxe copy is going to weigh.
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Aug 18, 2015 00:53
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If mages are public, are mage executioners really necessary? We have ordinary executioners for that.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:22
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Executing a mage is more complicated but if mages aren't a secret society it just takes, like, wizard policemen or something. It's not something you have to leave up to the one cult out of five that's most willing to handle executions for you.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:33
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I'm not sure how accurate a lot of that summary is.
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Oct 4, 2015 05:47
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The oWoD is full of wacky, over-the-top material, but it's not like it was never intellectually respectable—most of the Revised editions demonstrate what could be done with writers who were willing to work to make the setting into something other than a cartoon. Even the Sons of Ether who got mentioned above got a good tradbook that broadened them out into having a paradigm you could actually discuss and members who did things other than steampunk Science!!!. The problem is that "wacky 90s navel-gazing" is the low-energy state of the oWoD, and without constant effort to push away from it, it all falls back into that state (see M20).
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Oct 30, 2015 02:01
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Lightning Lord posted:Oh and goddamn, if they can actually deliver on the Charles de Lint/Emma Bull promise of Changeling instead of the gigantic car crash we got? That would be amazing. That doesn't even sound like it would be super-difficult. All you really need is to write Dreaming from the perspective of an author who has grown up and knows why it kind of sucks and also why it's great, instead of from the perspective of an author who either refuses to grow up or is really bitter about having to.
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Oct 30, 2015 02:09
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Mendrian posted:I think the disconnect arises because Beasts (seem to) justify themselves as being staightforward in-the-right. Vampire ethics are transparent. There are all different kinds of vampires from guys and gals who try to be normal and get really depressed when they hurt people all the way to Belial's Brood who embrace sociopathy as the road to mental health. I think vampires skew 'evil' as a result (they hurt people to survive) but the game continually acknowledges that you don't get to claim moral immunity just because you're forced to be abusive to the kine. You see the diversity right there in the sample characters, the covenants, and even scrawled into the Humanity rules. I don't even know if it has to do with ethics much, exactly. As the wise thaumaturge said, "good and evil are subjective, but being a dick cannot be allowed." I don't find Beasts intolerable because they're evil (although they pretty much all are); I find them intolerable even as fictional protagonists because they're dicks, and they're smug about it. (Also because everything in the book and the author commentary on the book seems to indicate that the author backs them up in the view that they're justified.)
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Nov 12, 2015 04:40
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Pope Guilty posted:What happens if a demon doors a soul contract with a supernatural? Anything special? They step into their life but they don't get any of the supernatural powers.
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Dec 3, 2015 00:04
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Mendrian posted:Which sounds about as fun as you'd imagine. Well, you can always try impersonating them using Embeds and chutzpah and coming up with reasons not to use any really unsubtle magic.
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Dec 3, 2015 02:17
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Tezzor posted:isn't the entire reason the Traditions including the Virtual Adepts exist at all as discrete entities is that they believe in politics, groups and taking a side, and that they capital-B Believe in different things Of all the infuriating things about the old World of Darkness, the most infuriating to me is the way that a lot of the people writing for Ascension were determined to deny the premises of the game they were writing for.
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Dec 11, 2015 18:32
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If anyone asks, it's "Sea of Dirac."
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Dec 12, 2015 22:58
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LatwPIAT posted:I can walk into a brick-and-mortar store, pick up a book that looks interesting, leaf through the entire thing to get an idea of the production values, and buy it because I kinda wanted to spend some money and I feel bad about going to hobby stores and not buying anything. A visited an RPG store and walked out with a copy of The Masks of Nyarlathothep that I wasn't even planning to buy because they had it in stock, I could get it right then and there, and if I didn't I'd have to wait weeks to get it. And, hey, I needed something to read on the 2-hour bus trip home. I, on the other hand, can't, because there's no such store without making a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I feel like the shift to PoD has much less to do with the convenience of digital storefronts and a lot more to do with the fact that the non-digital storefronts are sinking.
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Dec 13, 2015 19:51
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Sampatrick posted:If I want to get into World of Darkness should I pick up CofD stuff or should I start picking up WoD20 stuff? You'd better pick a specific game line to get into first, really.
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Dec 14, 2015 05:56
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quote:Yeah this is huge. It's also important to note that the Clans don't just hit on identity archetypes, they specifically target sources of ostracism. Crazy, artist, biker. I guess the Tremere represent people who lock themselves in a closet to study for midterms for the rest of eternity. I think that struck a pretty deep cord with people, particularly in the 90s, when we were all still under the illusion that we were all being alone and unique until social media turned that whole thing upside down. I, too, know the pain of being shunned for being an Eastern European aristocrat who can't stop going on about the artistry inherent in rearranging people so their bones are on the outside.
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Dec 15, 2015 17:53
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I'm honestly still kind of waiting for a rundown on just how much the final version changed; I think most of the people who would have really wanted to tear into it didn't back and thus don't have copies yet.
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Dec 22, 2015 23:58
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The God-Machine is a terrifying combination of terrifyingly omniscient and terrifyingly dumb.
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Dec 31, 2015 23:10
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Got my link to Dreams of Avarice. So far, it looks to be one of the better books for Mummy.
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Jan 7, 2016 01:46
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I don't think Matt saw either of the two "sides" of Beast as being the right one; I think he saw them as being the two poles of otherness the game was built on top of. You're the "beast" because you're a giant fuckoff monster with horns and teef wike dis, and the "beast" because you're the outcast that people other. The problem seems to have come in when most of the writers assumed that the second, sympathetic part of beasthood was assumed by the reader, or was going to be implicit somewhere else, and wrote most of the book about how wretchedly awful, sadistic, and narcissistic Beasts are, and completely miscalculated how the audience was going to receive this.
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Feb 10, 2016 00:25
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nrook posted:Ah, so that's why he's running for president. Aw, man.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:16
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Yeah, the problem with Mummy: the Resurrection was that a) it basically demands that you play in the modern Middle East, b) it's deceptive about this fact so that you won't figure it out without reading it, and c) it doesn't really provide even a fraction of the support random American nerds would need to do this without being super disrespectful.
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Feb 18, 2016 16:39
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