World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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

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Warthur: May 2, 2004

Dave Brookshaw posted:

Scrap them and start over with something not based on 90s club cultures?

This, plus get rid of the ones which seemed to exist (especially in 1st edition) to give someone who really, really didn't want to play a wizard an excuse not to play a wizard in a game about playing a wizard. (I am looking primarily at the Sons of Ether and Virtual Adepts - both of whose schticks are more suited to various types of stale sci-fi than a game about wizards - but I'm also giving side-eye to the Akashics, seeing how their iconic illustration in 1st edition was a goshdarn martial arts fighter despite wuxia having its own rich tradition of badass wizard analogues.)

It always bugged me that 1E Mage did that. 1E Vampire didn't give you the option of playing a vampire who aesthetically speaking has nothing in common with pop cultural or folkloric vampires, 1E werewolf didn't let you opt out of having shapeshifting powers and kinship with wolves. If 1E Mage had gone to press without the Hollow Ones, Sons of Ether or Virtual Adepts, nobody would be saying "Hang on, this game is woefully incomplete because it's missing out entire iconic archetypes of what we consider wizards to be!" because of the lack of goths, steampunk scientists, and Neuromancer-style hackers. (They might be saying it on account of the lack of other magical traditions, but the splats in question do nothing to fill those conceptual gaps.)

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 14:30

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 17:09

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Rand Brittain posted:

I feel like having "wizards" who aren't obviously "magic users" is important, though. I mean, if the Technocracy are going to still exist, why wouldn't the Traditions have technomages?

Well, there's two answers to that:
- If the Technocracy is going to exist, they are the technomages already, by definition a "technomage" is propagating the exact thing the Traditions are opposing.
- If you're doing a radical update of Ascension anyway, do you need the Technocracy? Does it make sense for them to be the antagonist faction when the major IRL antagonists out there include Moon Landing deniers, anti-vaxxers and Flat Earthers among their number?

quote:

I can agree with getting rid of the Hollow Ones and Verbena because they were never good ever, or the Dreamspeakers so they can be replaced with something way less problematic, but crossing out Akashics and Etherites means junking two of the best books in the entire line.

I can see the Akashics being OK with later development away from the "kung fu guy" initial archetype.

Etherites, though? I'm not seeing what benefit there is to having them in a specifically Mage game when you could take the same effort and make a better and more interesting book when you don't weigh it down with the necessity of connecting to the rest of the Mage setting.

A game about steampunk advocates of unfashionable cosmologies rebelling against modern science sounds fun to me! It also doesn't suggest "wizards".

Warthur fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Jun 28, 2019

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 16:05

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Shockeh posted:

Periodic reminder The Technocracy were right, screw The Traditions.

(Said light heartedly with best intentions)

Shall we all assume 10 pages of magechat happens here and move past it?

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 16:14

Warthur: May 2, 2004

LatwPIAT posted:

Yes, but Orphans were a better solution.

Exactly, having them automatically be goths is the sort of poo poo a really shallow, obvious parody of a WoD game would do but lo and behold, only three games deep into the line and already the reality is even more ridiculous than the jokes.

EDIT: Then again, I am the guy who ran a Unknown Armies game where Mak Attax ended up heavily infiltrating the juggalo subculture so maybe I'm not one to talk here.

Warthur fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jun 28, 2019

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 19:27

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Omnicrom posted:

Yeah, but that only makes sense.

My inspiration was realising that "Miracles" is literally the Mak Attax manifesto.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 19:37

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:

I own way too many of the 1e Aberrant books so I'm excited about a version using Storypath-like rules, but god, those stretch goals are really wet farts I can't get excited about :
- Storyteller's Screen
- Comic compilation PDF
- wrasslin'

Strong disagree on the last one, the wrestling supplement was the only bit of the old Aberrant setting I got really into, largely because it didn't remotely take the Aberrant setting seriously and neither did I.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2019 13:25

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Mors Rattus posted:

The union has not called for a boycott, so it's up to individuals here. I believe their reasoning was at this moment it'd hurt creators more than Kickstarter and they don't want that.

That said, you can totally weigh up whether to back a particular project or not based on how the creators have responded to the whole union thing.

For instance, Rowan, Rook & Decard just started the Kickstarter for Heart, a dungeon exploration spinoff of Spire, and they say upfront in the Kickstarter FAQ and risks & rewards section that they've only gone ahead because the union has so far not called for a boycott, but they stand ready to act in the event that the union changes its advice during the funding period, and Greg Stolze and others have signed an open letter more or less saying the same thing; it'll be interesting to see what, if anything, Onyx Path does in this regard.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2019 12:20

Warthur: May 2, 2004

That Old Tree posted:

In this week's Monday Meeting post they mentioned looking into other options, including traditional preorders.

That, however, was in the context of the issue of not being able to run multiple campaigns simultaneously on the same Kickstarter account, which they needed to find a workaround for.

In the comments, Rich says that OP are aware of what's going on and have taken note that the union are currently asking people not to change how they use Kickstarter at the present time. He doesn't, on the other hand, quite go so far as to say OP would actually do something if the union's advice changed.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2019 14:42

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Hopefully someone emailed Onyx Path the union busting PowerPoints Amazon uses internally.

I am wary of backing any kickstarter now, even if the creators are using the lack of call for a boycott.

I think it's worth noting that what we're looking at isn't a lack of a call for a boycott, it's a specific call from the union not to boycott just yet. That's the crucial difference for me.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2019 17:05

Warthur: May 2, 2004

Spector29 posted:

No idea why they wouldn't put this on the KS campaign itself.

Because pissing off Luke Crane may cause problems for OPP's projects down the line? ("Hm, maybe I should start applying that 'no new project until you've fulfilled your previous one' rule more consistently...")

(If Luke Crane is pro-Kickstarter United then I begrudgingly retract the above joke. But I don't see much evidence of that.)

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 19:02

Warthur: May 2, 2004

This is the sort of poo poo I love when players choose to develop it in LARPs (and which I dig deploying in them from time to time myself), godspeed Shreknet.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2019 18:37

Warthur: May 2, 2004

GNU Order posted:

Relegating V5 to the dumpster before the players guide is even out is kinda betraying any objective opinion tho.

Why? Beast is clearly terrible on the face of it just from its core book. And if the core book for an RPG is a turd then any supplements which come after are, at best, wastes of time and energy spent polishing that turd, because if your core book is terrible then your game line has problems which can't be solved short of a second edition.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2019 17:45

Warthur: May 2, 2004

TheNamedSavior posted:

Expect for beast...they should just throw that poo poo away already!

Still amazed that they made "buy the PDF of the Beast core book for cheap" a stretch goal on the Deviant Kickstarter. Aside from how lovely and pointless a stretch goal that is (would anyone have not backed if the stretch goal had simply not been there? I don't think so), why would OPP bother to remind people that the game line exists at all? I'd have thought at this stage they'd have issued informal instructions that We Do Not Mention That Game Line In Other Books and left the thing to rot on the vine.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2019 11:08

Warthur: May 2, 2004

I'd understand if it were physical copies - like, they have to get rid of them somehow, outright destroying books makes people feel icky for all sorts of good reasons, selling them to well-informed CoD fans who are probably well aware of the controversies is probably better than selling them to people who have no idea what they're getting into.

But... it's PDFs. There's, to my knowledge, no ongoing cost involved in keeping the PDF in stock at DTRPG (though the space Beast takes up on OPP's hard drives is space which could be taken up with a product of higher creative merit and commercial value, like, for example, an empty PDF that fills up the space in question with blank pages). There's no need to get it off the shelves.

And what's the best-case scenario here? Folk give Beast a second chance and the product line suddenly becomes profitable? At this point, OPP probably don't want Beast to suddenly find an audience because that means they have to think about supporting it again and the entire controversy gets raked up yet again. If anything, keeping it available is like having a live landmine just sat in the middle of the office floor, waiting for someone to eventually step on it and set it off again; as long as the thing exists and is offered for sale it's going to be an albatross around their neck and they'll get poo poo on for selling it, because why would you sell such a lovely product if you didn't like being covered in poo poo?

They probably only keep it available for the sake of the long tail, and I bet the long tail on Beast is so small that if they pulled the product tomorrow and announced that the product line was cancelled, the lost revenue would be instantly made up by people swinging by and buying stuff who didn't feel like they could before. (Yes, I am arguing that a brief sales spike from pulling Beast would likely bring in more money than Beast would if it were left on DTRPG until the end of time).

Dave Brookshaw posted:

I haven't backed the last couple, but I believe the minor "add a discount to old games, building up until they all have one" milestones are standard.

Beast isn't a standard CoD line though, it's a running sore on OPP's reputation which will likely never heal up. Treating it like it's just like any of the other game lines is, at best, patronisingly overgenerous.

EDIT: Also "hey, we'll give you a chance to give us money for a product which has no manufacturing or shipping costs to us" is one hell of a non-prize.

Warthur fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Sep 26, 2019

# ¿ Sep 26, 2019 12:10

Warthur: May 2, 2004

For OWoD I like having both the 1st editions and 20th anniversary editions to hand - the 1st editions because they tended to offer the loudest, clearest, most distinctive statement of the game's core ideas and themes, before the accretion disc of metaplot developments and designers second-guessing the games' original intent and whatnot obscured that, the 20th anniversary editions because they tend to offer actually functional versions of the games in question with a deep well of resources to draw on.

(Mage is a bit of an exception due to the 20th anniversary having Phil's opinions all over it and going fairly prescriptive about how spellcasting's meant to work, but I just go with 1st edition style spellcasting with Mage and not worry about whether a) it's true to Real Occultism because Real Occultism has about twice as many definitions as there are Real Occultists or b) whether it's remotely balanced because I don't do crossover anyway and I find the more Mage ends up resembling an absurd shitstorm the more fun I have with it.)

In terms of the thread, add my name to the "the problem isn't V5, the problem is posters who consistently poo poo the thread up" pile. A nice fresh OP will be a good idea, but the new thread will get soiled quickly if actual moderation isn't applied to the bad faith brigade.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2019 11:16

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 17:09

Warthur: May 2, 2004

I Am Just a Box posted:

Yes, Beast is a type of changeling. Beast is the Seeming for changelings who emerge from the Durance with the traits of wild or domesticated animals, often having spent their time in Faerie as mere beasts to populate the Gentry's glades or serve them as hunting hounds.

So that's another point against Beast: the Primordial: stole a major preexisting splat title that fit better where it was already.

My favourite (by which I mean the most frustrating and rage-inducing, for me) case of Chronicles of Darkness terminology confusion is that in Mage a Rote is a spell you know particularly well and get particular benefits on rolling on, and a Rote roll is a type of die roll for a task you're particularly good at, and they work loving differently.

This is one of the reasons why I don't do crossover: when you get game jargon overlap even within a single splat's interactions with the core rules, including other splats in your game just makes it even more of a nightmare. In a game with a sufficient range of different splat presents, having an ordinary English-language conversation which doesn't have some inadvertent in-game meaning becomes near-impossible.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2019 10:22

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

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