World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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Warthur: May 2, 2004

Mulva posted:

I mean it seems like the easiest solution is to just gently caress off somewhere the Cam isn't if the Sabbat all left. It's not like there are infinite vampires to go around, if the Sabbat isn't an issue there's now a ton of space that the Cam can't police open for your little experiment in a new way of being stupid and terrible. How is that a fight?

As I understand it, that's where the Second Inquisition comes into the equation - as I understand the details that have come out so far, because of their activities inter-city travel is difficult and vampires are in practice penned into cities where their local power base is capable of keeping them under the 2I's radar. So you don't have the option of just upping stakes and leaving.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2018 11:19

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 06:36

Warthur: May 2, 2004

PHIZ KALIFA posted:

Did they keep Generation?

Gehenna worked in the old world because Generation provided an undeniable mechanistic proof of the diminishing power of the Embrace. Once you start hitting 14th and 15th, it's obvious the end times are around the corner because of how dilute the clan blood becomes. Generation is tied to the Antediluvian, is tied to Gehenna. What even is the apocalypse in a world where Gehenna fails? Why do any of this.

So based on the "Grave War" hints it seems to be suggested that Gehenna is cyclical, and that whoever survives ends up being the new Antediluvians (who can then presumably sire a bunch of new 4th-Gen folk and thus reinvigorate the clan blood).

# ¿ Apr 24, 2018 16:31

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Rand Brittain posted:

Everybody I talked to who knows anything about how Beast got developed seems pretty confident that Matt had surprisingly little to do with it. It was a lot less "Matt developed abuse elementals to express the contents of his tortured psyche" and more "Matt took a nap while a whole bunch of writers who had never worked before created some nasty new monsters, and snored through the bit where the developer was supposed to make this into a playable game."

Apparently the only part of the line that really has his stamp on it is Heroes.

This seems to have been a line that people said a lot after Matt's dodgy past came back to haunt him on RPG.net. Up to that point he was pretty much treated as the Beast auteur and final port of call for definitive answers on the subject.

It's the OPP/White Wolf superstar game designer thing yet again, where developers are rock stars when it serves the publicity for that to be the case and irrelevancies when it's awkward.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 19:01

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Kurieg posted:

How is it reductive and/or boring to assume that a game's lead developer can or even would have any control over the course of a game's development?

Pretty much this. Given RichT's stated preference to let individual teams chart their own courses, if the buck stopped anywhere on Beast, it was with Matt. The fact that Beast ended up the way it ended up meant that Matt looked at what the writers had turned in, individually and in gestalt, and said "OK Rich, call the art folks because this one's ready for prime time". The fact that he didn't apparently demand much in the way of rewrites means little save that the writers managed to hit the points he wanted out of their briefs the first go-around.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 21:40

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Whenever I am tempted to run V:tM, I'm tempted to do it with the V:tR rules (and the translation guide) and just say that Blood Potency is, in fact, how it works, and the whole Generation thing is a big fat lie the Camarilla tell to keep people in line - the theory being that by the time someone's lived long enough to realise it's bullshit, they're benefitting from the big lie as much as those who originally lied to them in the first place.

That takes a big fat dump on the whole Antediluvian thing, but I'm vanishingly unlikely to want to include such stuff in my campaigns anyway. If, on the off-chance, it felt really important to include some really high-Generation-type elders who were more functional than high Blood Potency implies, that's where you handwave at various means they discovered over their extremely long lives to mitigate the effects of high Potency.

# ¿ May 1, 2018 15:56

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Based on what NuWW have said so far and reading between the lines I think the idea is that at Gehenna, yeah, sure, the Antediluvians wake up and kill a bunch of vampires, but what people didn't realise is that they also spawn a bunch of vampires at the same time, effectively injecting a heap of high-Generation blood into the ecosystem. (The hints about the Grave War also suggest that the survivors of each Gehenna cycle end up becoming the Antediluvians of the next one, gaining extreme power and founding new clans before they go into their long slumber.)

So what you'd expect from that is a population crash among vampires too young/inexperienced/weak to hide, and then a swathe of new 4th Generation kids whose sires are too sleepy to supervise them rushing about spawning 5th Genners everywhere until they suss out why the Traditions are a thing.

# ¿ May 1, 2018 16:14

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Given that they have trumpeted a big return to the original vision and made Anarchs vs. Camarilla the main conflict rather than Camarilla vs. Sabbat, this isn't entirely surprising.

(Though my feeling from the interstitial fiction in question is that the cure didn't quite take...)

# ¿ May 1, 2018 17:44

Warthur: May 2, 2004

PHIZ KALIFA posted:

Gotta be hard to be a Camarillan, who officially denies the existence of both Gehenna, the Antes, and the Jyhad itself, in the nights immediately following the rise of the Antedilluvians and the completion of Gehenna.

I kind of imagine it's like the opposite of Harold Camping's church, two Toreadore hanging in a bombed out nightclub, neither acknowledging feeling incredibly slighted that they weren't drawn into the all-consuming maw of their great great great great great great great great great great great great grandsire.

I think the combination of most of Gehenna apparently happening off in the Middle East (the Antediluvians presumably having all been buried in the Fertile Crescent, because where the gently caress else were they going to find a similar population density of food and Dominate-puppets?), and Gehenna not quite being the world-ending thing the Noddist prophecies had made it out to be and more of an end-of-one-cycle-beginning-of-another deal will give the Camarilla plenty of ways to write it off as i) Not Our Problem and ii) Not What The Sabbat Say It Is.

# ¿ May 1, 2018 19:03

Warthur: May 2, 2004

(This does, of course, end up reducing much of the metaplot of the first four editions of the games to "As the Millennium approaches Gehenna cults expecting the end of the world - most prominently the Sabbat - go into overdrive, momentarily overshadowing the Establishment-vs.-Anarch struggle that's been going on for some 600 years, then it sort of fizzles out a few years into the 2000s and the old struggle returns to prominence." In other words, the whole Sabbat-vs.-Camarilla plot arc from 1st edition to the end of Revised was just one big goofy mistake.)

# ¿ May 1, 2018 19:05

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Kurieg posted:

I'm kind of curious as to how they're going to "Whoops NM Lol" the apocalypse the way they're apparently doing to gehenna.

I guess the way to do it is to say "You know how the Garou were sure that the Apocalypse was near because the world as it was in the 1990s/early 2000s just had to represent rock bottom? Turns out things can get way, way worse still before it all totally collapses."

# ¿ May 1, 2018 21:39

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Mors Rattus posted:

e: honestly, 'Cain is a vampire' is a pretty Christian mythological take, too, though prior to Dracula it'd be more commonly 'Cain is an immortal fae thing'.

Prior to Dracula and also explicitly in the core Changeling 1E rulebook, IIRC.

# ¿ May 4, 2018 18:31

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Halloween Jack posted:

I haven't studied it as much as some people, but I don't think you can really reconcile the cosmologies of the different oWoD games.

The closest I've come to being able to do it in my own games is to assume a sort of Gnostic framework within a sort of Buddhist cosmology, where Vampire's Abrahamic God exists, but within the universe, and subject to change and entropy like everything else.

It helps if you assume Ars Magica is part of the cosmology (which I believe was the original plan).

In the Ars Magica cosmology you have the Divine and Infernal Realms opposed to each other, and then the Magic and Fae realms as a sort of orthogonal axis to that. (This is a convenient way of having pagan mythology and Platonist cosmology being both real and not-real for the purposes of the setting at the same time: all those legends happened, but the gods involved weren't the "real gods" but were powerful Faerie entities, and likewise the Platonist conception of the realm of archetypes has actual reality as the Magic Realm.)

Once you grasp that, it's surprisingly easy to peg various WoD games as relying more on one axis or the other. Vampire and Demon both very much work on the Infernal/Divine axis (note how often outright demonic entities show up in Vampire); Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling, on the other hand, tend to sit on the Magic/Faerie axis, with Mages being more to the Magic end, woofles being more to the Faerie end, and Changelings naturally being butt-deep in the Faerie Realm. Hunters more or less pop up anywhere; Wraith doesn't quite fit into any of them but that sort of fits the Wraith underworld as being this weird sort of waystation where people seem to be hanging around with no higher powers taking responsibility for them. (Presumably if you go to one of those far shore afterlife realms it resembles the afterlife you were angling for.)

# ¿ May 4, 2018 18:36

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Halloween Jack posted:

In practice it feels more like the Mage cosmology subsumes everything into it, with Kindred and Garou and their respective mythos just being weird little corners of a kitchen-sink universe that has unicorns and cyborgs innit.

Yeah, the other way to reconcile it is to say that Ars Magica cosmology represents the consensus as it existed in Mythic Europe and the present-day mess is an artifact of the postmodern era making it impossible for any one single worldview to definitively get the upper hand.

Though that would be remarkably clever and insightful for old school White Wolf to set up intentionally.

# ¿ May 4, 2018 18:47

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Rand Brittain posted:

Mage cosmology subsumes everything in the sense that mages put a name to anything, but it doesn't subsume everything in the sense that anything with its own book behaves the way Mage cosmology implies it should.

Each core book represents the distinctive worldview of an Ascended mage, who is able to impose their vision on consensus reality so firmly that Paradox dare not approach.

That or all the other cosmologies are proof that you can get away with a hell of a lot of poo poo so long as you construct a worldview where Paradox doesn't exist.

# ¿ May 4, 2018 22:03

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Kurieg posted:

......So Underworld?

That reminds me: I chortled when I saw that there was an actual clip from Underworld in the World of Darkness documentary trailer. Can anyone who's seen it confirm whether they actually try to take credit for it?

# ¿ Aug 21, 2018 17:59

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Been reading around about V5 and... is it true that there's a bunch of loresheets missing from the print book? Apparently there's a couple dozen pages that are only in the PDF but aren't in the print book and that includes a bunch of loresheets as well as GM advice like "hey, maybe you should kind of be careful about rape themes if your players find the subject matter difficult".

# ¿ Aug 21, 2018 18:01

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Terrorforge posted:

A demon's Cover is unstable because it doesn't have access to standard maintenance procedures and its primary function is to conceal the demon from the God-Machine, neither of which angels have to worry about.

That said, you could easily fiat that a particular angel's maintenance Infrastructure has broken down, which has triggered a kind of "autoimmune" response that causes it's Cover to degrade like a demon's.

Or just make the antagonist a demon. They're close enough for Hunter purposes, especially if it's an Integrator of some sort.

Yeah, the crucial thing to remember is that for the purposes of Demon "Cover" very much relates to how well someone is hidden from the God-Machine and isn't at all a measure of how much other human beings trust that you are who you say you are. You can be a really blatant con artist or spy that all the human beings around you see through, and so long as the underlying idea of your Cover is "Perfectly normal human being who is trying to dupe people but is bad at it" that's not really a ding on your game mechanical Cover.

If human beings are sussing that you're some form of supernatural entity then that's more of a ding to your Cover - though I'd be inclined to rule that if you'd done a good job of pretending to be a type of supernatural entity that the God-Machine is aware of you're doing better. (The "known unknowns" are Part Of The Plan - it's the "unknown unknowns" that the God-Machine gets grumpy about.)

# ¿ Sep 4, 2018 11:30

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Terrorforge posted:

It's the evening of September 21st. Tobias Sj�gren is standing in the pouring rain, cradling a final handful of office knick-knacks. He knows he should shouldn't turn back, but can't help but steal one last look at the company that abandoned him.

Martin is staring at him from the window with wry smile. Behind him, barely visible, is one of the early posters.

But the logo is wrong. It has become a jagged, uneven thing, draped in stylized barbs and covered in dripping blood. It's practically unreadable, but Tobias doesn't have to read to understand what it says:

BLACK DOG

Hey, hey mama said the way you game
Gonna get real weird, won't nevah be the same...
Ah ah child way ya shake them dice
Let me write a book about some edgy vice...
Hey babe let's wreck the World o' D
Let's take a poo poo on the whole IP...
Oh yeah, oh yeah ah, ah, ah ah
Oh yeah, oh yeah ah, ah, ah ah
Oh yeah, oh yeah ah, ah, ah ah
Oh yeah, oh yeah ah, ah, ah ah...

# ¿ Sep 21, 2018 15:00

Warthur: May 2, 2004

ritorix posted:

I picked up BJD during the sale, it's a pretty neat book. Christof from Redemption shows up in the Carthage story. That one was a fun read though its been years since I played Redemption.

How is BJD if you're the sort of gamer who has little to no investment in actually keeping up with metaplot and just wants to run your own stories in your own city? Is there stuff that can be usefully strip-mined (and if so, how much) or is it too married to canon?

# ¿ Sep 21, 2018 15:03

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Kurieg posted:

Here's the door Swedracula, hope you don't trip and cut yourself on your EDGE.

Yeeep. The bit which you didn't bold but seems to be the most direct slam on Swedracula is "We should have identified this either during the creative process or in editing", because those'd be the bits where he had the oversight as vision guy.

I'm particularly interested to note that they have delayed the print run on the books. As well as giving them a chance to ditch the Chechnya crap, that'll also mean they have the opportunity to reduce the numbers on the print run - I would not be surprised if they only printed enough books to make the pre-orders, let the current run of V5 core books sell out without reprinting it, and then let OPP do V6 right.

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Fingers crossed this puts H20 back to being a possibility, honestly.

My feeling is "this, but Demon20", because good golly Demon: the Fallen was a line full of of potential which desperately needs a tidied up version with a comprehensive system revision.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2018 19:03

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Hm. Occurs to me that the new Chicago By Night Kickstarter is still going with 12 days to go - which means that if the plan is to salt the earth, do V6, and pretend V5 never happened, the door's still open to cancel the Kickstarter because no backer pledges have been taken. The only cost to OPP would be the time and energy put into promoting the current Kickstarter, and whatever's already gone on the supplement - and they could recycle great gobs of it for a V6 version anyway, so it's not even wholly wasted resources - and a Kickstarter for V6 with Chicago By Night V6 Edition as a stretch goal would probably rack in way more money than the supplement Kickstarter would have.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2018 19:13

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Ferrinus posted:

Assuming that �V6� is Requiem, absolutely. They just need to make Chronicles the official WoD product.

I mean, there'd be crying. But you could probably brush aside a lot of the crying if you did "The Masquerade" as a big fat setting book for Requiem presenting the CWoD setting as a big fat worked example of how to apply the Requiem system, and maybe a support line for that.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2018 21:52

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Pope Guilty posted:

I favor the Paranoia XP model of "Fifth Edition never happened and mentioning it is treason, Citizen!"

But seriously is V20 really in need of revision or replacement? The V20 supplements have been fine.

The core book is lousy from a perspective of getting new people into the game. Aside from the form factor of being a big fat bullet-stopping tome, it was developed specifically as a nostalgia project for existing fans and is therefore written accordingly.

This is great in terms of sheer value for money, because it means it's just dropping with information. But if you wanted to make V20 the canonical edition and wanted it to generate new players, not just pander to the existing audience, you would need a kinder, gentler onramp. Shouldn't be impossible, but it would be a bit of a bump in the road.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2018 22:54

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Digital Osmosis posted:

I guess what I'm saying is: recurring characters - good. Linked adventure paths - can be good. Needing to buy supplements to understand the ever changing status quo of the setting - bad because it fundamentally doesn't interact with the players' agency.

Yep. Metaplot which expects people at home to actually keep up with it is lovely and horrible and is generally part of 1990s game design's failure to understand that the game designer/publisher is not actually a participant at the gaming table, and that people are more interested in the characters and stories they and their buddies are brewing at home than stuff which gets imposed on them from the top down.

I think the best metaplot-like stuff is material which gradually reveals or introduces new poo poo going on in the setting (if the Requiem Clanbooks concentrate on revealing hot secrets about the Clans in question, as it sounds like is the case, then that'd be a good example of that), rather than stuff which changes or (even worse) shuts down existing setting elements.

Saying "The Pizza War's over now, the Domino Directorate won" shuts down a whole angle which people could have based their games around. (Sure, they could still, but odds are new material coming out for your game is going to be based on the assumption that the Domino Directorate won the Pizza War, and the more time goes by and the more the "canon" setting diverges from your home game the less useful new products are.) It's subtracting something from the setting and making it less game-worthy. (The worst example of this is 2E AD&D-era Dark Sun, where the first version of the boxed set establishes all these cool plots, and then all of the stuff players could conceivably do in the setting more or less got resolved in novels, so the 2nd edition boxed set ended up flailing around looking for something for players to do. I'm a big believer in game settings taking the Harn approach of saying "We present a snapshot of the setting as of a particular date, speculating about what happens after that is left to the individual campaign", because that removes the temptation to resolve stuff and end up with a setting which has been half-"solved" already.)

Saying "The Pizza War has taken a shocking twist when it turns out that the Domino Directorate are actually aliens from the Moon" is bad for similar reasons, particularly since if you make that sort of sudden alteration then even a campaign which was deliberately trying to stick to the canon setting (because its participants have this weird, inexplicable, perverse enjoyment of metaplots) likely now clashes with the canon setting because all sorts of poo poo went down based on the assumption that the Domino Directorate are human beings like anyone else, and now that's contradicted.

Saying "Disaffected drop-outs from the Pizza War have splintered off from the major factions and have established a pasta-based commune on the Moon", though? That I'm cool with, because you're not resolving an angle which people could base their campaigns around, you're not contradicting anything already established about the Pizza War (so long as all of the pasta commune members are newly-described NPCs and you aren't having a major Pizza War figure drop out to make pasta on the Moon), and you've added a new thing with its own opportunities and possibilities.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2018 12:19

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Currently playing in a M:tAw 2nd edition set in the Victorian period, and you'd think that'd be prime for peak Theosophy but it hasn't been our experience so far.

(Victorian M:tAw works real smooth, actually. We're using the Seers of the Throne as backers of the worst atrocities of European colonialism, but also dipping into the idea of a whole swathe of the other mage factions having somewhat paternalistic ideas as to how to liberate the world, with the Free Council being an uneasy alliance between genuinely progressive advocates of the marginalised on the one hand and the sort of anarchists who think spiking people's drinks with psychedelics is an awesome way to Freak Teh Mundanes. It helps that we're steering into the idea that Mages are pretty much inherently hubristic assholes, including our PCs, so our recurring theme is how people's bids to reshape the world in their personal vision inevitably becomes a thing of horror if it's done without consideration for the effect on others.)

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 18:12

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Mors Rattus posted:

That's cool

At this point I just wanted to point out that the driving element of the entire Silver Ladder is literally the mantra of a dude from Pumaman

Pu-ma-man, he'll take on the Exarchs...

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 19:07

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Cardiovorax posted:

That's a legitimate way to look at it as well, but I find the entire "democratized solipsism" conceit interesting and find the challenge of overcoming your own inner demons more engaging for a game about mystic enlightenment than overcoming the cabal of ten-thousand-year old rear end in a top hat mega-wizards. I guess in large part it's because so much of the entire rest of the oWoD is basically just "humanity is the helpless cattle that exists only for the superior supernatural master races to look even more awesome in comparison" and Ascension basically says "nuts to that, you're loving amazing, own it."

To be fair, a) there's at least one variety of mage in nMage which is overtly and explicitly about overcoming one's inner demons (I would know, I'm currently playing one) and b) an entirely viable reading of the setting is that the rear end in a top hat mega-wizards' main stooges are very much folk in thrall to their inner demons (greed and power in particular), and c) the Exarchs aren't so much a cabal of evil wizards sat around a table doing the Illuminati thing and more people who managed to turn themselves into abstract platonic ideals, the nature of which may well have been informed by said inner demons. So it's not like that challenge is absent from nMage.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 20:12

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Dave Brookshaw posted:

Is this the point where we spin into the stage of nMage Chat that's about how Ascension portrays the Awakened as the best version of humanity, who could solve the universe if only they could work together, and Awakening portrays the Awakened as dangerous obsessives who get other people killed a lot?

Now I'm remembering our latest Mage game where someone tried to magically con Fate into thinking that some people had already died (in order to fool an ancient curse into unravelling itself) and accepted a dramatic failure, unleashing magical forces which caused the people in question to *actually* die...

# ¿ Nov 30, 2018 23:28

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Tollymain posted:

im not looking for anything to be explained perfectly, i just want to know what explanations nonmage splats might come up with at mage-level :v

I suspect it's rare enough for nonmage splats to get that level of insight that there aren't enough data points to really come up with any blanket statements of "this is what (splat) sees at that level". Really, it makes far more sense to ask "what would this particular individual see if they got that far?" and spin stories out of that.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2018 05:31

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Loomer posted:

I always forget that at least 2,000 Changelings served on both sides of the American Civil War.

Oh, Suzanna, eschew Banality!
I'm a racist ex-Arcadian
And I fight for slavery...

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 17:39

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Kurieg posted:

Except for the moon landing, that's okay.

But video games? Nope! gently caress those! Evil as sin!

I liked how one of their examples of extreme banality in C20 was an MMORPG. Because, you know, WoW never inspired people to get creative and imaginative and think a lot about elves and pixies and dragons (that being the form of creativity which is non-banal, as opposed to all the creative endeavours which don't involve those but are totally banal anyway because the writers in question don't like them). It's like being shackled to CCP gave Onyx Path a traumatic hatred of the medium.

I also raged when I saw that they considered baking shows to be banal, because a) gently caress you, baking is creativity and b) double gently caress you, I remember the euphoria back when an observant Muslim woman who wore a headscarf won the Great British Bake-off and the right-wing tabloids lost their tiny little minds, if you're saying that's an event which increases banality then you're trash.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 17:45

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Mendrian posted:

Honeslty I'd probably do like this:

*Remove banality as the Thing Wut Makes Changelings Rare. Find some other way to make Changelings a dying species if you must preserve that.

*Have banality warp or alter Changelings. It is not permanent, but a sliding scale.

*Don't make banality a sort of hypermundane radiation that radiates from mundane things; instead, make it a symbol of the personal changeling's surrender of freedom. About how they feel about stuff, not that all stoplights give out 1.1 units of mundanity.

Did a review of C20 a while back when I thought about this and came to the conclusion that if you just take off some of the limits on how effective popping back into the Dreaming is when it comes to dealing with Banality that's a fairly elegant way to deal with it. (In rules as written you get your permanent dots back when you enter the Dreaming; if you just remove that then boom, there's your management method back there.)

The upshot of this was:

- The accomplishment of some quests needs to be boosted a little or altered, because doing a major quest to deal with permanent banality is now not so hot.

- You end up with characters who end up being more freedom to be capricious and cruel, due to their morality scale being easier to fiddle. Depending on your take on fairies this might be completely loving terrible and an absolutely abhorrent misrepresentation of the pwecious pwecious mystical fae folk... or 100% metal badass and exactly what you want anyway.

- As you say, you need to replace Banality as the big thing what causes problems for Changelings. Luckily, C20's got the Thallain right there to be big bads for the Changelings to fight, so you can probably do something with that.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 17:51

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Kurieg posted:

The MMO thing was absolutely a snipe at CCP, and while currently WoW is banal as poo poo(to the point that I haven't even logged in in weeks, cause i'm waiting for them to put out content next week) it was not always the case.

Consider RP servers, consider the mass of art and fiction MMO players produce about their characters. Sure, the thing itself may be a skinner box. But being able to inspire creativity and meaningful human interactions out of a skinner box? Opposite of Banality, major victory.

You could run an entire Changeling adventure around trying to shape the online culture of an MMO in a positive direction.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 18:48

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Rand Brittain posted:

I know the author of the Banality section was super-mad because they were very careful to make Banality not about science, or law, or <insert job the writer particularly doesn't like>, and to remove all the problems that the concept had in previous editions � only then all the other sections still talk about Banality like it's caused by math teachers, because the dev was asleep at the wheel.

The thing which seems to pop up most regularly and most widely throughout C20 core is that criticism and criticism of art was Banality. I guess someone was upset by a F&F post about one of their books or something when they wrote that part.

EDIT: Of course, it occurs to me that the very act of deciding that something is Banal or not Banal is, in and of itself, a form of criticism.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 18:50

Warthur: May 2, 2004

I can roll with that. The critic who's unable to see the good in anything is naturally going to find themselves surrounded by banality. The critic who can find the good even in things they generally passionately dislike is still able to see the wonder in the world. The former's been savaged by banality, the latter's brushed it off like it's a light dusting of rain.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 18:55

Warthur: May 2, 2004

xanthan posted:

So Jake English would be the least banal critic ever? He does love all movies.

That's not criticism, that's white noise.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 19:44

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Mors Rattus posted:

Frankly? I�m pretty sure they called it Head Storyteller. Same job description and responsibilities as far as I can tell.

Yeah, I was going to say that Ericsson seemed to be doing most of the stuff that this Brand Manager would be doing.

I think this is part of the process of gently replacing/sidelining him, in fact, since it seems like more or less all of his duties are going to be either subsumed by or directly supervised by the brand manager.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2018 13:06

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Ironslave posted:

For the life of me I still cannot understand why they didn't try to onboard Obsidian for a WoD PC game.

Possibly they did but it fell through. It's not like either of them were going to put out a press release saying "Well, we were going to make this game, but we couldn't work out a business arrangement which made sense for both of us so the project's shelved for the time being".

# ¿ Dec 13, 2018 17:14

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Also, it absolutely doesn't need to be center-stage all the time. Changeling is perfectly capable of being fairy swashbuckling adventures, Court political intrigue, or less deeply personal urban horror as needed, with the heavy stuff reserved for major turns in the campaign.

As I understand it 2nd edition makes it easier to do this because it emphasises that your keepers and your time in Arcadia wasn't necessarily a matter of full-on torture and abuse for the entire thing, and better teases out that idea that it might have taken the form of, say, getting stuck on a shelf like a doll and forgotten about for a subjective century or two, or whatever, and that Keepers aren't basically "Cenobites with fairy wings and glitter" but can come in a range of styles, not all of which is "All abuse all the time". Not yet read the thing so I may be wrong.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2018 18:56

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 06:36

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Basic Chunnel posted:

Who

UK company, did Achtung! Cthulhu and a bunch of licensed games based on their in-house 2D20 system (Conan and Star Trek being big names), occasionally will sneakily hire GMS as a freelancer and try to keep it quiet by crediting him as "Michael Brophy".

They did the printing and distribution for V5 so them managing more of the line makes sense. Onyx Path getting the job would have been cool, but they simply don't have the printing and distribution connections that Modiphius do.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2018 18:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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