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MalcolmSheppard posted:I admit I'm pretty dismissive of concerns about violence from the person cited in the intro post, because he later wished I would for-real die. But in the interests of moving forward, given that for good reasons and bad it *is* tricky, how would the folks here go about handing the disturbing things about Vampire? Because previous discussions have ended with assertions that it's all going to be stupid and RPGs are an inherently untrustworthy medium. I think that it can all be summed up in trying to bridge the gap between My Gamers and All Gamers. My Gamers might be cool people I've played with for years if not decades, mature adults who can handle the more transgressive and morally grey parts of the game, and can openly communicate about boundaries and tastes without anyone getting pissy or ending friendships. All Gamers are a immature, hate-infested cesspool of (mostly) manchildren who cannot handle the presence of the opposite gender at the gaming table in an entirely nonsexual context, let alone the more complicated issues of intimacy and violation that go along with the vampire mythos. The optimist in me says that if CWoD and (to a lesser extent) NWod are your cup of tea, then learn to play to the maturity level they require and find a gaming group that meets that bar. Note that in many, if not most, cases this means you aren't going to play Vampire the way you (or its creators) meant it to be played because you can't get a group together that's all on the same page. If you can, count your blessings and godspeed. Otherwise, once it becomes apparent what kind of people you're gaming with you might want to downshift to something at the level of maturity everyone can bring to the table. And this is the OPTIMISTIC point of view. The pessimistic one is that ultimately the artistic experiment of the World of Darkness is a failure. What was intended to elevate and expand the hobby was immediately misinterpreted and mishandled as soon as it came into contact with the majority immature children that make it up. RPGs cannot handle mature or disturbing things because the ability to handle that kind of subject matter is lacking in the vast majority of people who play RPGs. Whatever people it attracted from outside the hobby have left, or were never enough to drown out the voices that turned it into superheroes in trenchcoats. As is obvious, I bounce back and forth between these two interpretations pretty frequently. And I say this as someone that read Wraith 2nd Edition way back in the late nineties and thought, "What a fantastic game. I would love to play or run this. I'll never be able to assemble a group that can." Which, as a product meant to be used and not just read, is a somewhat depressing thought.
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Apr 10, 2015 17:36
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MonsieurChoc posted:- The only nWoD game with any gothic aspect in it is Vampire: the Requiem. And Promethean a bit too, I guess. Everything else is free to be any kind of horror it wants to be. Demon isn't gothic at all, for example. As such, this is a completely invalid argument and I can't really argue with it. I mean, it's just completely beside the subject, so I don't have a way of engaging with it. I would go a step farther and say that horror isn't even the top billing of nWoD any more, it's mystery. Horror is just too hard to do well, too contingent upon circumstances at an individual table. Look at the early reactions to Beast, which has the horror as front-and-center as anything since Vampire. Playing an outright antihero is hard, most people don't want to, many of those that do are uncomfortably bad at it. I think it was a smart move to refocus the nWoD in that way, but it really makes Beast the odd man out.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:22
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Denim Avenger posted:There is something about Beast I like, I think there's a way to make the core idea of a being having this bloody and grim calculus of how much damage does he have to do to stop himself from going full monster. How is that materially different than the classic vampire conundrum of "beast I am lest beast I become"? It's literally the same concept. It needs to be more than "gaslighting people versus drinking their blood" to be worth the time and effort. OTOH, many of the arguments being made to why Beasts are horrible protagonists apply equally well to vampires, yet that line runs just fine and is considered entirely playable. Once you've come to terms with the fact that you have to drink blood, and will with an almost certainty take it violently from an unwilling donor at some point in your existence, is there any other moral\acceptable choice than to meet the sun at your next opportunity. If so, then what makes beasts unacceptable but vampires kosher?
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Jun 3, 2015 18:37
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OK, all of that makes sense. So if what you really want to write, then, is Persecuted: The Othering, you have to find a core game activity which can be portrayed as harm- or victim-less, yet provokes self-righteous asshats to come hunt you down. In other words, what's the World of Darkness fantasy metaphor for sex and fetish work? I like to think I'm at least as creative as the average bear, but I'm having a hard time coming up with something. The shortest possible path between the two points would make it so somehow the beasts' victims are better off for being, well, the victims. I don't see that working. Not unless you slam down hard on the mythic story aspect and reposition beasts as having the ability to, in essence, see a person's fate and destiny and knowing how they have to be hosed with to get what they want most. The tragedy comes from knowing that in order for Alice to end up marrying her true love, she has to go through a harrowing experience of being nearly mugged and hunted for sport in an underpass so she can join the support group and one day meet Bob. They are editors of the Cosmic Story, but can only be editors by being dicks. kaynorr fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 19:23
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Night10194 posted:I mean, it works for the Slashers. Not really, in the sense that no one considers Slashers to be a viable PC type. If you do, then you are WAY out on the edge of gaming convention. You do you, but I don't expect that kind of playstyle to have even remotely broad appeal. At least, done in a way that isn't kind of repugnant. Spiderfist Island posted:#2 is pretty close to my idea on how to make Beast not lovely: a player isn't a Beast, but one day a Beast appears in the character's subconscious like a spiritual cancer. The game would then be an allegory about being in a cancer support group, self-loathing at perceived physical and mental weakness, and the hope of someday being in remission. This is a very interesting concept, particularly in the sense that it goes counter to a lot of conventional rules about your how to deal with your inner demons. Here I'm thinking not so much of cancer but things like substance abuse or mental illness. You DON'T fight your personal beast with nothing but stoicism, abstinence, and sheer will. The straight and narrow will kill you because everyone short of a literal saint can't handle the withdrawal process. You have to give your beast room to run, but keep it on a leash so you can learn about it and fight smart. It's close to the conceptual space of Changeling because it's also about trauma and a support system, but diverges in the sense of there is no meaningful external actor to blame. No one did this to you - there are only varying levels of You Did It To Yourself or It Just Happened. Bad things happen to good people, and good people do bad things and yet are still good. That seems like a worthwhile concept to explore in the metaphor of the World of Darkness, and uses metaphor to talk about the ridiculous, unreasonable standards that fanatics on all sides hold themselves and the world to. kaynorr fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 20:33
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MonsieurChoc posted:It's weird how much people love Aberrant because it's easily the least interesting of the three settings. That kind of superhero setting has been done multiple times, and I don't see how Aberrant does it particularly better than them. I always (and may yet, if the timing works out) wanted to run an Aberrant game that takes the premise of superhero = celebrity and work it from the reverse end that the book does. Start the timeline with Our 1999 and the world is populated with Our Celebrities. The Fireman becomes Sully Sullenberger, Nadia Martinez (the lady with the amazing vocal powers) is Christina Aguilera, the guy who invents the OpNet is Elon Musk, etc. I think I had it mapped to Colin Powell as Caestus Pax but couldn't find someone for Divis Mal. Basically, the same people become celebrities as in the real world, but because they are novas instead of whatever twist of fate actually happened. All the Continuum games work well as metamedia/media commentaries, but you have to push much harder down on them than the initial text. As another example, Trinity is a game in the style of a future cop TV show in a universe that has the exact future cop TV show it is emulating.
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Jun 18, 2015 22:24
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Prison Warden posted:So we had our little character creation/game setup pow-wow thing for Mage yesterday. The character concepts that got brought up were a Mastigos Guardian of the Veil private detective who knows krav maga, a Obrimos scientist who upon Awakening got filled with Divine Purpose and became a war-wizard and a literal ninja Mastigos Silver Ladder, so I didn't really need to ask whether they wanted a more action focused game or something a bit more cerebral or complentative. Clearly what this group needs is to be playing Unknown Armies instead.
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Aug 11, 2015 20:53
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I'm kind of surprised I'm saying this, but I find myself sympathizing with those lament the passing of Gothic-Punk. This isn't to say that you can have Vampire without Gothic Punk, as Requiem showed. But aesthetics are part of the experience and I don't think it's necessarily true that all RPGs must be set in the Always Evolving Now. Embrace the 90s as gently caress of it, and just say that Masquerade is by default set in the world of bulky cellphones, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and mournfully watching down on the city in your trenchcoat while it rains. View it as what it is, a snapshot of a point in time, but one that is worth engaging on those merits just as much as, say, 1930s Call of Cthulhu.
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Mar 1, 2016 01:02
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Simian_Prime posted:An important distinction is that most of the aberrant behavior portrayed in The Invisibles is the work of the *antagonists*, rather than Brucato's take of "here's what players should do!" Uh.....I'm pretty sure that the Invisibles are intentionally portrayed as aberrant just as much as the Outer Church, just in a "positive" way. kaynorr fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 23:47
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MC Smoke Sensei posted:What do you guys think would be some cool spin-offs for plot ideas? I have some, but if you have cool freaking ideas, I'd like to hear them! I'll provide internet gold for them! Getting the basics that any cabal needs/wants can fill a few sessions and can serve as an excellent tutorial into just how much mages can skip over material needs/wants and go directly to summoning unlimited numbers of shotguns. The initial checklist can look something like
Within a few sessions they could be financially independent, relatively secure in their surroundings (not realizing that security has a whole new meaning now that they are Awakened), and basically living the Good Life In The Lie. Take notes on how they set up all these mundane support systems - there will probably be one or two bad choices that a later antagonist can discover and exploit. It's also worth mentioning that the default assumption of the book is that starting PCs have not just Awakened but been snapped up by an Order at least long enough to have received some sort of mentoring, training, and set of default social connections. Your folks are starting out without those things which is just fine - I did the same thing in my Mage game and it created no problems. Given the auspicious nature of their Awakening, once they show up on the radar it's natural for various cabals or independent power players to seek them out - Orders can compete fiercely for new blood, and if the new blood is even more special and shiny than average than they may be in a good bargaining position. The most important thing for an open-ended startup like this is to let both the players and characters feel the freedom of their circumstances and pay attention to what they grab on to and given them more of it. It sounds like all of the characters have good personal agendas so that's a solid dstar.
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May 23, 2016 17:26
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Fate is a good choice for someone who is (or wants to look) reckless, as it enables you to take risks that you really, Really shouldn't and usually come out OK. Also good if the athlete-scholar wants to branch out into team sports where it's astonishingly easy to mask the ability to nudge a ball into a goal.
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Aug 25, 2016 16:43
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Covok posted:I'm strangely feeling like Scion 2e is closer to what Exalted should have been to a degree. I mean, they're both about being demi-gods in action stories. Scion just lacks the wuxia. Eh, that feels like pretty much the extent of the similarities. Scion appears to be shooting for something with significantly less mechanical crunch (splitting the distance between WoD/CoD and Exalted) and a very different feel in terms of world building.
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Oct 26, 2016 22:01
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Xinder posted:I don't know if there is really a best Dark Era. Your best bet is honestly to skim through them all and see what appeals to you most. Most of them are really good, providing you want to pick up what they're putting down. The best Dark Era is the one you or your players give a poo poo about. I'd give them a list of all of them you're interested in running, with the supernatural context stripped out, and see which one they bite down on. Unless you want to make it your mission to make History Come Alive, there are few things as boring as a historical setting you don't give a poo poo about.
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Feb 12, 2018 17:37
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In lieu of proper Mage chat, let's do another classic derail: group Beats. I'm starting an online V:tR 2E game shortly (will be looking for players shortly) and I'm struggling with whether or not to implement group Beats. I understand the primary arguments for it: unevenness is character progression/power, spotlight time, etc. What I'm stuck on is two things - first being that Beats are a good measure of how much spotlight a players is getting, such that a player who is low on Beats needs more spotlight time and that's what really needs to be addressed (assuming everyone wants roughly the same amount of spotlight time, which is a basis for my game). The second is that Beats serve as a really good incentive for the player to screw the character over, which is an important mechanic in a horror game. Let's assume the first problem can be handled by just tracking condition resolution and trying to keep it even that way, that leaves the second problem. I don't want to hand out Willpower because that steps on the toes of the Virtue/Vice system. I'd want to find some other (preferably player-facing as opposed to character-facing) incentive to resolve conditions to the detriment of the character. Anyone have anything that worked well in their game?
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Jun 18, 2018 20:01
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Yawgmoth posted:If you really need to give something out, give them a condition. The one that lets them upgrade a roll's Dfail/fail/success/Xsuccess by one step seems fairly appropriate. I like that. I think I'll probably end up putting it up to the players to decide, and offering this as a thing if they don't want individual beats.
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Jun 18, 2018 20:12
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Want to play some Vampire over the internets? In my wildest dreams, this will be the tabletop equivalent of the kind of sandbox Vampire game we all want Paradox to make.
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Jun 19, 2018 18:33
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Millions of dead cattle ghosts just making a giant mooing hole in the underworld that deforms the rest of the setting around it And lets not forget the giant mounts, millions upon millions of pounds, of spectral ribeye.
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Jun 27, 2018 17:24
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Captain Monkey posted:The Traditions taking over would amount to a return to a time when the Garou dominated the world and kept people down. A select group of superpowered mystics who can rewrite reality surrounded by ignorant dirt farmers who are cowed and credulous enough to not cause them problems with paradox is the end goal of the Traditions, from the Dreamspeakers to the Sons of Ether. Talking about any sort of theoretical new edition of oMage, I don't think that has to be (and probably shouldn't be, if you want sympathetic Traditions) the end point. Looking back at how oMage has evolved, and where the real world is now, I think the best pitch for the Traditions is that they represent a synthesis of paradigm that is non-exclusive. The most important element of the Traditions as a faction is that they are inclusive, kung-fu magic alongside faith healing alongside hacking the Gibson. That should be the headline - they don't necessarily understand why all of those things work together but they absolutely do, and they have hundreds of years of a failed guerrilla struggle to suggest that somehow it works. That's the vision they should be carrying forward - you can have whatever paradigm speaks to your lived experiences and be empowered by it, so long as ye harm none. The Order of Reason didn't go off the rails when they started rationalizing things, they went off the rails when they decided no other sandcastle could stand but their own. That you can believe something to be true, and do magick by it, while existing alongside someone else's powerful but different belief is probably a good place to start. It's a paradox, but it's an interesting one and makes the whole thing playable at a dramatic level.
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Oct 30, 2018 17:06
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Mors Rattus posted:Again: some of the things that paradigm empowers are explicitly awful and should not be tolerated. I agree - part of the conflict is prosecuting a very mundane struggle to make the movement itself live up to its ideals while simultaneously fighting a metaphysical war about those same ideals.
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Oct 30, 2018 18:09
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Dawgstar posted:I've toyed with transplanting BP to VRev. Something to take the sails out of Generation as a the S+ Background trait. I really wish there was some way to keep Generation as an in-game thing without the aforementioned balance problem. The concept that you're trapped in (at best) the middle of an immortal hierarchy that you can never, ever climb the ranks in without committing Soul Murder is one of the more thematic elements of Masquerade. Blood Potency gives you that nice cyclical power structure which is great on its own, but there is something to be said for "I have to eat poo poo from this guy Literally Forever because he's older than me".
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Nov 9, 2018 18:38
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I think a lot of this boils down to whether or not you're looking for a horror experience in Chronicles of Darkness. Horror gaming tends to be very author stance because competence and success, generally speaking, have to occur extremely sparingly in order to maintain the mood. Experts excelling at the top of their game don't make for good horror - there's no sense of helplessness, no foreboding, no dread of what's happening that You Just Can't Stop. The option to take a dramatic failure forces conscious consideration of the question, "Do I want things to get worse, darker, more desperate and dire?" Horror play is all about leaning into those things, and while most of that is always in the hands of the GM I think it's a nice complement to let a player vote, during play, to push the narrative that way. I get that people here really seem to hate incentivizing mechanics for, well, as far as I can tell anything. Everyone has had too many encounters with tiresome grogs and every solid rule is just another argument waiting to happen and we're all sick of it. I generally tend to see mechanics like this as tools to guide communication by providing structure for the conversation, because sometimes "just talk about it with your GM" doesn't necessarily work and it doesn't mean that either side is some sort of failure of a roleplayer. Now all that said, there is a huge gap between the way people have played CoD\WoD games, the way they've mechanically written, and the way they've been pitched. That's part of what that awful Ron Edwards quote is harping on. But in this case I think they've actually got something where mechanics reinforces the developer's stated intent to facilitate a horror experience, and that not a bad thing. I don't see how it's a knock on the quality of the product that in this case it does what it says on the tin, even if lots of people aren't using it that way. If I run superheroes in Call of Cthulhu (including the Sanity system), I'm gonna get some weird mechanic/tone interactions but I should expect that.
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Feb 8, 2019 22:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Incentivizing mechanics are fine, they just have to be for things you want players to do, instead of a situation where even the defenders of the system can name half a dozen completely incoherent (within the narrative) things that the XP system encourages you to do and their advice is "just don't do that, and slap your players down if they try!" I still don't see the problem then. I want my players taking Dramatic Failures as a way of signaling to me, "This could be more hosed up, and I want it to be more hosed up. Please turn the screw a little more." If I don't see a way where a Dramatic Failure escalates things in either the short-term or the long-term, I tell them the option isn't available. If I had a player who took every Dramatic Failure possible and went from Prince of the City to bloodhunted in the course of an evening, great! That is literally what they were asking for! That is an entirely valid arc for a chapter and entirely in keeping with the mood of the CoD.
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Feb 8, 2019 22:34
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Ferrinus posted:That would be true if it were just a rule that a player could elect, at any time, to turn a failure into a dramatic failure. But, under the current rules, your player might be signaling one or both of two things: A) I want my character to get into trouble and B) I want XP. In some cases, they might actually be unhappy and annoyed that their character's increasingly inconvenienced and the story's becoming increasingly convoluted (as might you be, if it's bogging things down with problems and details you didn't really care to turn into the focus of the session), but, well, they got the XP. Given that it's very clear and unambiguous what that Experience is costing you at the moment of the decision, I don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who is unhappy when they keep hitting the button that shocks them while it produces a treat. You do the thing, you get the consequence. Risk/reward mechanisms aren't for everyone (partially because the part of brain tasked with handling those decisions is such a little stinker), but from a design perspective they're extremely appropriate in a genre which includes numerous stories about people sacrificing things for power and said power was of surprisingly little help of getting them out of the hole they dug.
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Feb 8, 2019 23:55
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Ferrinus posted:Well, no. But then, when your players end up unhappy, should anyone have sympathy for you, who actually sat them down and attached the electrodes to their wrists? It's all well and good to take a steely-eyed, conservative stance replete with They Knew What They Were Signing Up Fors and Shouldn't Of Been Standing Theres, but it doesn't really fly when we're discussing whether a system should include certain rules rather than how a player should interact with rules that just mandatorily exist for some reason. Part of a horror game is that you literally (metaphorically) want the electrodes on your wrists because that's where the emotional charge comes from! It's a genre convention that I don't think you're grokking in the context of the mechanic we're discussing. Ferrinus posted:Either way, this really gives the lie to your "well, my player is asking for trouble so it's okay" stance from before - now it turns out that sometimes, players just deserve to have the game go a way they don't like because of their bad choices! This entirely misses the player/character divide which stands out in horror. The game is going exactly the way the player wants, in the sense of added complications and desperation. It may not be how the character wants things to go, but author stance is pretty much required for horror gaming or you're going to have a bad time. If what you're looking for is the player's emotional track and beats to follow the character's, horror is not going to work because you're going to feel lovely and powerless much of the time - that's fine, there a huge number of games that cater to that experience! In wanting to be a horror game, Chronicles of Darkness is shooting for a different kind of experience where the character is going to have some real, real bad days and a certain amount of distance is necessary between the two for it to work. Dramatic Failure Beats reinforces that nicely.
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Feb 9, 2019 00:51
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If you have the impulse to salvage Beast, go track down the fangame Leviathan: The Tempest, which I think is the closest thematically and actually doesn't start from a place of complete dysfunction. It has the same core conceit, "I'm a bad monster and I'm OK with it" from Vampire but goes in different directions.
kaynorr fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Feb 14, 2019 |
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Feb 14, 2019 23:16
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For anyone who wants to get deep(er) into practical applications of vampchat, my Vampire: the Requiem chronicle is looking for a replacement player. Please peruse the game's thread to get a sense of what we're about and if you want to jump in.
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May 15, 2019 18:17
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