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Right, there's two important things to note about Requiem's Bruja. First, because they are a biker gang with like a double-digit number of members, you can accurately and defensibly talk about a typical Bruja's preferred clothing brands and favorite style of music. They're from a particular place and time and are socially close-knit. But second, and more importantly, what the Bruja bloodline actually is is a facility with Vigor and a weakness to hunger frenzy. It's not actually a "biker bloodline", it's a "violent gorging predator bloodline". If a disruptivating tech CEO or devout nun were to get embraced Bruja and then find their bloodline activating as their blood potency rises (unlikely but easily possible, especially for a player character) they would not start taking -2 to their dicepools unless they were wearing a leather jacket and they wouldn't have to roll to resist an opportunity to hold forth on motorcycle maintenance. They would just feel so terribly, terribly hungry, even as an inhuman strength coursed through their limbs. Nephthys posted:As noted above, the rulebooks will typically state outright that Ventrue select from wealthy, accomplished and revered people. The core problem you're having is that they are not a "population" of people. Nobody is born a Ventrue, you have to be intentionally turned into one. In the real world, anyone from any background can be anything. But this is a game about a secret society that has to be incredibly strict about who they induct into vampirism. They don't just turn anyone on a whim. That Brujah neonate would have been selected because she was already the kind of person the clan elders would expect her to be like. Do you think that if a Ventrue were to try to embrace an ugly, nosy, poor person, the embrace would just fail, or produce a Nosferatu instead? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 21:31
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Soonmot posted:This is a bloodline, not a clan, akin to a D&D prestige class if you squint a bit. Bloodlines are typically a few dozen members at most and usually all in the same place. I see, I don't really know much about Requiem so thats an interesting distinction. Ferrinus posted:Do you think that if a Ventrue were to try to embrace an ugly, nosy, poor person, the embrace would just fail, or produce a Nosferatu instead? I don't think a Ventrue would embrace an uncharismatic, uninfluential poor person in the first place. If they did, they'd be a Ventrue naturally. There would have to be some reason they were embraced that makes sense in the context of the clan though or it would just be a bad character imo.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:13
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Nephthys posted:I don't think a Ventrue would embrace an uncharismatic, uninfluential poor person in the first place. If they did, they'd be a Ventrue naturally. There would have to be some reason they were embraced that makes sense in the context of the clan though or it would just be a bad character imo. Okay, so they'd become a Ventrue vampire, with the Ventrue's game traits. Our ugly, nosy, poor person would get to buy Dominate at a discount and, at random, feel the compulsion to boss people around. Where does the compulsion come from? Secondary question: does a mortal CEO randomly take a -2 penalty to their dice rolls until they can get someone to follow one of their orders? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 22:19
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Ferrinus posted:Okay, so they'd become a Ventrue vampire, with the Ventrue's game traits.Our ugly, nosy, poor person would get to buy Dominate at a discount and, at random, feel the compulsion to boss people around. Where does the compulsion come from?
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Apr 23, 2024 22:23
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Nessus posted:Based on observations your second question is a yes Yeah, the writers of V5 would tell me the same, because they haven't read their Mao.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:28
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Nephthys posted:I see, I don't really know much about Requiem so thats an interesting distinction. In game, high blood potency vampires can sometimes mutate their blood so that they gain an extra inclan discipline, sometimes a unique one, and an additional bane. Any childe they sire, or one of their childer sire can, at blood potency 2 become a member of the bloodline and take on those traits as well. Before that, they're a normal member of their parent clan. If they choose not to opt into the bloodline, they stay a normal member of the clan. In the bruja example, they're all gangrels, originally, so they have all the gangrel disciplines and weakness. It's a neat little cleanup to oldschool VtM having 30 million clans, some of whom only have like 3 members, the bloodlines are all offshoots of a major clan instead. Which also plays along with the carcinization theory of vampire evolution in Requiem.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:38
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"They would simply not do the thing that creates the problematic question that I do not want to answer" is not the gotcha you think it is.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:39
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Soonmot posted:It's a neat little cleanup to oldschool VtM having 30 million clans, some of whom only have like 3 members, the bloodlines are all offshoots of a major clan instead. Which also plays along with the carcinization theory of vampire evolution in Requiem. I do love the idea - that is basically text - that if you leave a creature alone long enough that drinks blood you get a Requiem vampire and the clans are basically five examples of parallel evolution which admittedly is a pretty cool origin.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:51
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Kurieg posted:"They would simply not do the thing that creates the problematic question that I do not want to answer" is not the gotcha you think it is. I am genuinely nonplussed here. "Oh, dwarves wouldn't even want to study magic. A dwarf wizard strikes me as a bad character, frankly," does not strike me as a remotely defensible position but now I guess we're going to see just how far someone can straight-facedly take it. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 22:52
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Ferrinus posted:Okay, so they'd become a Ventrue vampire, with the Ventrue's game traits. Our ugly, nosy, poor person would get to buy Dominate at a discount and, at random, feel the compulsion to boss people around. Where does the compulsion come from? Again, I don't really care about compulsions as a game mechanic. For the sake of argument though, I believe the lore reason is that since vampirism is a supernatural affliction that already compels you to perform certain actions via "the Beast" that the clans compulsions stem from the same place. They're all just a bit different in what they want you to do. Obviously not. Ferrinus posted:I am genuinely nonplussed here. "Oh, dwarves wouldn't even want to study magic. A dwarf wizard strikes me as a bad character, frankly," does not strike me as a remotely defensible position but now I guess we're going to see just how far someone can straight-facedly take it. You're nonplussed because you seem utterly incapable of separating Clans from race to a bizarre degree. Please stop strawmanning me. 1st edition DnD's take of race was loving stupid and it doesn't even deserve to be discussed. As I've pointed out, Clan has nothing to do with race since it's something that you are chosen for instead of something you're born into. "The Ventrue most often seek childer among the ranks of professionals or the cream of high society" isn't a particularly complex idea to wrap your head around. Thats literally all that I'm saying and I've just posted a rulebook that has a section for each clan saying what kind of people they embrace. I can google other ones if you want?
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Apr 24, 2024 00:00
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Nephthys posted:Again, I don't really care about compulsions as a game mechanic. For the sake of argument though, I believe the lore reason is that since vampirism is a supernatural affliction that already compels you to perform certain actions via "the Beast" that the clans compulsions stem from the same place. They're all just a bit different in what they want you to do. If you don't care about compulsions as a game mechanic, it's a little weird you'd weigh in here at all, since the main point I'm making is that compulsions in and of themselves make V5 more reactionary in general and so more racist in specific than previous editions of Masquerade. The fact that many (but not all, and depending on the clan often not even most) prospective vampires are selected for the embrace according to a commonly-used rubric doesn't really bear on that at all. That was true in VtM Revised, and yet VtM Revised didn't punch left nearly as viciously or as repeatedly as V5 does with its portrayal of the more archetypically political vampire clans. quote:You're nonplussed because you seem utterly incapable of separating Clans from race to a bizarre degree. Please stop strawmanning me. 1st edition DnD's take of race was loving stupid and it doesn't even deserve to be discussed. As I've pointed out, Clan has nothing to do with race since it's something that you are chosen for instead of something you're born into. "The Ventrue most often seek childer among the ranks of professionals or the cream of high society" isn't a particularly complex idea to wrap your head around. Thats literally all that I'm saying and I've just posted a rulebook that has a section for each clan saying what kind of people they embrace. I can google other ones if you want? We agree that 1e D&D's take on race was, shall we say, extremely limiting. But there's two things that you don't seem to be responding to directly: First, Masquerade's vampire clans are shorthands for a vast breadth of really-existing human social divisions. Some of them are obviously or even explicitly racial, like the way the Ravnos default to being vampire Roma or the Banu Haqim or Setites evoke a variey of classic orientalist literary tropes. Some of them stand in for economic class, like the Ventrue. Some of them stand in for political affiliation, like the Brujah, or disability status, like the Malkavians. Some of them are smaller and pettier still, like the gross and nerdy IT club Nosferatu versus the pretentious theater kid Toreador. Second, particularly in America, basically every typifying social division is a proxy for race. What kind of people tend to be rich? What kind of people tend to be politically malcontent? Who gets to do high art? Who gets to be a nerd? Who secretly manipulates society from the shadows, plotting to corrupt the youth? And, perhaps more importantly, what is the underlying mechanism that creates these divisions? Nature or nurture? Inborn compulsion or circumstance? Are the poor, violent rabble responding to their material circumstances, or are they just Like That, genetically, born with low IQ and high time preference? These associations are unavoidable, and they're not even necessarily bad. There's still a lot I don't like about it, but over the course of its development Masquerade passed through the hands of a lot of thoughtful, creative people who worked hard to interrogate the logic of the setting and really spool out how and why it looked the way it did while giving players maximum freedom to reinterpret the setting for themselves. I don't think I'm strawmanning you here or above. It seems more like we're talking past each other or I'm explaining myself poorly or something. The point I'm trying to make is that V5 in specific represents a regression towards the 1E D&D-style race-as-class status quo we both know is bad, when in fact prior editions of the game were quite good at explaining why many Ventrue were rich assholes (one reason is that, just as you say, a great deal of them were hand-picked for being rich assholes by even richer assholes) without trying to turn stereotypes of Ventrue behavior into cosmic law.
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Apr 24, 2024 00:38
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Would it be accurate, or maybe just more productive, to describe it as an objection to essentialism in general? Which is characteristic of racism but not exactly the same thing.
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Apr 24, 2024 00:43
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I mean, it's sort of a both/and, these things grow out of and recreate each other. The more an edition of Masquerade breathes down your neck and forces you to stay in your quadrant of the prep/goth jock/nerd graph, the less incidental all its race stuff gets.
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Apr 24, 2024 01:01
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Nephthys posted:Not sure if I found the right thing but it seems just as stereotyped at Masquerade. Gangral are savages that hang out in the woods, Ventrue are bluebloods and Brujah are hotheads. Folks have already covered a lot of the ground I would in response, including the bloodline thing (I think the 1e corebook bloodlines were a pretty terrible and clumsy sop towards Masquerade veterans that failed to be faithful either to what appealed about the Masquerade clans or to what Requiem's bloodlines are actually good for narratively, and you basically never see Requiem fans talking about the Bruja except in this context). I find it immensely hard to swallow that even a self-selected population of Ventrue is not going to suffer major drift over the course of generations of Embrace, like the idea of maintaining the integrity of their clan identity matters more to almost all of these individual Ventrue vampires than what they need at the moment, individuals they may have fallen in love with, accidents that happen, Embraces that were intended to be temporarily weaponized but resulted in childer that outlived expectations, etc. But I'd also like to note here: I said the Requiem clanbooks. Requiem had a rocky start with its first few books especially and the First Edition book's portrayal of the setting looks pretty different from where it ended up a few years later. You'll find no argument from me that the original corebook cleaved closer to stereotypes and a less nuanced approach of how the circumstances a person is put in shape their behavior.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:01
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The Requiem corebook even had "Malkovians" each of whom was stuck with a permanent "derangement"! The blue book/VtR derangement list was seasoned with a few entries that were basically just hangups or personality traits like "suspicion" but it still did the DSM-as-rules-appendix thing that I'm glad 2E jettisoned.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:07
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So, I have three points. On Malkavians - bluntly, I get uncomfortable every time the conversation veers into 'the clan of madness is a bad idea' territory. I can't speak for other people but the experience of a sudden, violently imposed mental illness is profoundly relatable to me, as is experiencing it as a curse that denies you joy. When we get to the territory of 'oh, it should just be well-rounded characters' being applied to it and not, for consistency's sake, the Ventrue - I get uncomfortable. The experience of mental illness and madness as a source of horror is real for good reason, and while I can agree that its a topic that needs to be handled with considerable care, I don't think or particularly like the idea that we should do away with the clan defined by a life-shattering spite-curse of madness simply because 'oh anyone can be mad'. Sometimes madness is painfully defining in its own right. Second, on whether or not your character becomes a type of guy - this is kind of... inherent to Vampire, so its a surprise to see people asserting to the contrary. Every single Vampire is, from day one, in the process of becoming an ancient hosed up vampire, shedding their humanity and converging on certain inhuman traits and tendencies. Every Vampire character is always and already an engagement with the concept of personality transformation and eventual loss in response to the Blood's overriding influence, whether deeply or only in passing. To fight this process requires investment and effort. The only difference in what I've suggested is that the type of guy should vary more, rather than less. Third, on my specific suggestion. I didn't think the ridiculous 'biblical evopsych' critique needed to be addressed but since Ferrinus won't drop it, I will. It has no relationship to what was advanced. This critique proposes that the only way to execute the idea is to root it in the personalities of the Antediluvian responsible. The actual suggestion was ambivalent on that note - it might as readily have applied to them rather than stemming from them, in which case you get the bonus dose of 'Noddism has made fundamentally erroneous assumptions'. Beyond this to clarify my suggestion, two points seem to have been missed. The first is that I mentioned diversifying the range of possible compulsions out. You do not become One Specific Guy, but winnow down into a hoary old elder whose behaviours are influenced by the substrain of the blood in their veins. These remain broadly variable within a range of expressions and because we're tying it to generation and BP, your average Neonate is just a regular person with a weak form of the Flaw and maybe a tiny little twitch in the back of their head from time to time. Thus, your starter characters sidestep the 'oh could there be a non-raging brujah? would they embrace such a person??' issue entirely with 'yes, but let's see how long it lasts'. The second is that the concept is positioned, just like the existing personality loss dynamic, as being part of a struggle. It is not in fact 'now you have to be Ted the Hunting Vampire, lol, lmao', but rather, 'if you choose to become Ted by obeying the blood, you'll get better at Hunting as a trade off for losing yourself'. Making it both scale and expand into a range of possibilities means that while you can generally predict that a Brujah elder is liable to have a particularly vicious temper, you won't know what sets it off or even how it manifests - or, for that matter, if they're part of the parallel class that have avoided the intensification of the blood's screaming in their ears by cultivating a path. This, then, is the same as the existing model, with the key difference being that it may not just be Frenzy or whatever V5's version is - it may be the urge to embody power over you over a period of months, to eat your flesh, to compel you to understand their viewpoint through long-winded internet debate, etc, etc. The crux of the idea is to take that flaw and expand it out in to a range of related behaviours that the blood begins to scream about, the same way its already screaming about being hungry all the time.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:23
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I love Requiem Bloodlines, but the only corebook one I actually use is the Morbus.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:59
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Loomer posted:So, I have three points. Who remembers this guy? Or maybe these guys, I feel like there were two or three interchangeably annoying posters with this same fixation and cadence: Metapod posted:Sounds like y'alls issue with malks is the people you played with are unimaginative and bad at roleplaying. There's nothing wrong with the mentally ill getting some representation with a vampire clan. Broadly, the fact that anyone can be mad, and furthermore that whether someone is mad is itself historically contingent and socially constructed (we've all heard of drapetomania, right?) mean that it does in fact come off real bad to treat the mentally ill ("mentally" "ill") as basically a parallel species mutually exclusive to the people who are culturally sophisticated, or politically malcontent, or conspiratorial, or, uh, middle eastern, or-- It's particularly egregious because like half the clans have weaknesses which are de facto mental illnesses in their own right. Like, here's my next few Malkavian concepts: guy who hyperfixates on his favorite form of art. Guy with trouble regulating his temper. Guy who refuses to feed on anyone who doesn't fit a certain profile. Guy with kleptomania. Guy who is Italian. I think I'm forgetting a few but you get the idea. This is why a version of the Malkavians that's actually about maddening prophecy could be good; the version of Malkavians we have never will be. quote:Second, on whether or not your character becomes a type of guy - this is kind of... inherent to Vampire, so its a surprise to see people asserting to the contrary. Every single Vampire is, from day one, in the process of becoming an ancient hosed up vampire, shedding their humanity and converging on certain inhuman traits and tendencies. Every Vampire character is always and already an engagement with the concept of personality transformation and eventual loss in response to the Blood's overriding influence, whether deeply or only in passing. To fight this process requires investment and effort. The only difference in what I've suggested is that the type of guy should vary more, rather than less. Vampires tending to become hosed-up (little?) guys is very different from vampires tending to converge into specific types of guys, to use modern parlance. It would in fact be very reasonable to expect the exact opposite of what you describe: that, starting from basically matching templates, two vampires each given a thousand years to develop and evolve might become completely unrecognizable as exponents of the same phenomenon! When you attempt to mandate (whether by making players roll saving throws against it or denying players power unless they opt-in) pretty complex, top-level behaviors and personality traits (embodying power, say, or converting people to your point of view), you are narrowing breadth and flattening depth. Brujah elders being liable to have particularly vicious tempers has been true in every single edition of VtM. Brujah elders being liable to kill people for being pretentious is much more specific and much less believable, and is the part where you start fantasizing about evopsych being real, whether your ultimate excuse for why every single member of some lineage ends up proving right some extremely specific stereotype about themselves can be blamed on "antedeluvians" or "substrains" or whatever thaumobabble you most prefer. "It's in their very nature" is a good answer to the question of why a vampire drinks blood or eats flesh. It's a very bad answer to the question of why a vampire craves power or proselytizes an ideology. The latter traps you inside a TvTropes article of stock characters robotically acting out their gimmicks at each other. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 03:44
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I dunno, man. If you're going to dismiss my experience of mental illness like that I don't really have an interest in discussing things with you further.
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Apr 24, 2024 04:11
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I'm not dismissing your experience of mental illness, I'm disagreeing with your artistic and game design decisions (but I repeat myself). Many experiences and identities are violently imposed on people, but that doesn't mean they're all good fits for character classes in a vampire game.
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Apr 24, 2024 04:22
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Mate, you decided to dig up Metapod to dunk on me with. Pull the other one.
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Apr 24, 2024 04:25
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Anyway attempt to move on from the topic here's a insane fan theory I found : https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/general-world-of-darkness-discussion-thread.914481/post-100802287 Tldr: Turns out that the pre history WOD isn't Exalted. It loving mega man. Ghost Armor 1337 fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 04:26
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Loomer posted:Mate, you decided to dig up Metapod to dunk on me with. Pull the other one. Well, I did that because, while I certainly like you better than Metapod and actually believe that you were being sincere, I still have the same probem with your post as I did with him. Like, it's strictly true that the Malkavians stand as representation for the (people who are classified by a sufficiently powerful faction within society to be) mentally ill. But we then need to ask ourselves what Malkavians represent the (another tedious, overqualifying parenthetical) mentally ill as, and whether that's better than the representation that the mentally ill would receive in a Vampire game that has the Toreador, and the Brujah, and the Ravnos, and the Ventrue, and the Tzimisce, and the Tremere, but not the Malkavians. After all, both a VtM with Malkavians and a VtM without would necessarily contain vampires who are some kind of mad, both as a necessary consequence of the vagaries of being a vampire at all and as a bunch of specific clan curses that all affect the thoughts and/or emotions of their members in concrete ways. But it's only the VtM with Malkavians that treats the mad as a fundamentally different order of being sharply delineated from the implicitly-by-contrast normal people, whose particular divergence from the norm is totally immutable and life-defining, and so on. Now, for sure, mental illness can feel like an immutable and life-defining curse that irretrievably severs you from the rest of society, so it's not like I can't understand why the Malkavians would have resonance even for people who aren't trying to slap you around with a large trout or roleplay as the dang Joker. But that's not the same as them being a good addition to the game, especially as compared to takes on the mad prophet concept that don't start with picking a "derangement" from a list.
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Apr 24, 2024 04:48
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Mate, you're still doing it, so I'm going to be really clear: I have no interest in discussing this further with you while you are insistently speaking over my experience of mental illness and why I find the Malkavians interesting, instead treating it as an argument about 'representation' and engaging with it as such. If you want me to actually engage with you, try reading my posts and answering them instead of tilting at a strawman.
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Apr 24, 2024 04:58
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Ghost Armor 1337 posted:Anyway attempt to move on from the topic here's a insane fan theory I found : Fun fact, most of this works just as well with Nier.
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Apr 24, 2024 05:13
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Nessus posted:Hilarious! If I have a cent for a setting where everyone is actually be a robot and actual humans are extinct . Then I have two cents. It's not a lot but weird that it happened twice. Ghost Armor 1337 fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 05:21
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Loomer posted:Mate, you're still doing it, so I'm going to be really clear: I have no interest in discussing this further with you while you are insistently speaking over my experience of mental illness and why I find the Malkavians interesting, instead treating it as an argument about 'representation' and engaging with it as such. If you want me to actually engage with you, try reading my posts and answering them instead of tilting at a strawman. I'm pretty sure I have understood and acknowledged why you find the Malkavians interesting, to the point of closely paraphrasing you at the end of my own last post. But I have also explained the problems with the exact specifics that appeal to you, the ones that aren't compatible with "just give OCD to a Ventrue" or "who is sane, really?" There's not really a point in having some kind of arm-wrestling match over whether I'm more uncomfortable with Malkavians being in the game than you are uncomfortable with their being not in the game, so I guess you need to decide for yourself whether I'm trying to mire you in debate fallacies or actually mean what I've been saying.
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Apr 24, 2024 05:33
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Ferrinus posted:If you don't care about compulsions as a game mechanic, it's a little weird you'd weigh in here at all, since the main point I'm making is that compulsions in and of themselves make V5 more reactionary in general and so more racist in specific than previous editions of Masquerade. The fact that many (but not all, and depending on the clan often not even most) prospective vampires are selected for the embrace according to a commonly-used rubric doesn't really bear on that at all. That was true in VtM Revised, and yet VtM Revised didn't punch left nearly as viciously or as repeatedly as V5 does with its portrayal of the more archetypically political vampire clans. I'm weighing in to clear up the misunderstanding that clan = race and to explain that your concept that "clan archetypes are just stereotypes that don't actually apply" isn't correct. How compulsions mechanically affect players isn't interesting to me, but I'll still object to trying to suggest a racial element. They are a way to have a player be supernaturally effected by their curse, but since clans aren't racial there is no racist element. It isn't "as a dwarf you are innately bad at magic so your spell fails", it's "you have a monster inside of you thats forcing you to act in a certain way without you even knowing it". Ferrinus posted:We agree that 1e D&D's take on race was, shall we say, extremely limiting. But there's two things that you don't seem to be responding to directly: Indeed, but social divisions are not racial divisions. The clans that were clear racial analogues like the Ravnos have been thankfully revised to remove that element so that now Clan exists solely as character archetypes for players to select. As you say, they now exist as basic tropes for players to pick up and then play around with when creating their characters. Nothing more sinister than that. I would still object to the concept that all forms of archetypes are innately racially coded. I think that's a bad faith view on the concept and it begs the question of how any concept of a clan could exist that isn't racially coded in your view. However it seems that we have reached an understanding on the topic of clans being formed of like-minded individuals in the majority. I have no objection to you disliking that this edition is more heavy-handed in how it enforces this, if thats how you feel. I Am Just a Box posted:I find it immensely hard to swallow that even a self-selected population of Ventrue is not going to suffer major drift over the course of generations of Embrace, like the idea of maintaining the integrity of their clan identity matters more to almost all of these individual Ventrue vampires than what they need at the moment, individuals they may have fallen in love with, accidents that happen, Embraces that were intended to be temporarily weaponized but resulted in childer that outlived expectations, etc The guides makes it clear that clans do change over time to adapt to the changing circumstances but still adher to the basic principles that the clan is based around. Like for instance "As new professions and new forms of power arise, the Ventrue bring them into the clan. The rise of the computer industry, for instance, has prompted a wave of tech-sector childer." So in the 1400's they would be embracing dukes and barons but now they are embracing modern forms of power. Different strokes but still the same priciple. I believe V5 is also making it clear that all clans are having to adapt and change to survive. Exceptions would no doubt happen as well, but as a very small minority that has led to little change until the modern era. I would argue that a major part of the game is intended that players will come up against elders with entrenched positions and ways of operating and trying to subvert them. Loomer posted:On Malkavians - bluntly, I get uncomfortable every time the conversation veers into 'the clan of madness is a bad idea' territory. I can't speak for other people but the experience of a sudden, violently imposed mental illness is profoundly relatable to me, as is experiencing it as a curse that denies you joy. When we get to the territory of 'oh, it should just be well-rounded characters' being applied to it and not, for consistency's sake, the Ventrue - I get uncomfortable. The experience of mental illness and madness as a source of horror is real for good reason, and while I can agree that its a topic that needs to be handled with considerable care, I don't think or particularly like the idea that we should do away with the clan defined by a life-shattering spite-curse of madness simply because 'oh anyone can be mad'. Sometimes madness is painfully defining in its own right. I agree, Malkavians are a really cool clan when played well.
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Apr 24, 2024 09:54
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Loomer posted:Mate, you decided to dig up Metapod to dunk on me with. Pull the other one. No one in this thread is engaging in the type of bad faith posting that metapod and the other guy were. Comparing Loomer to them was incredibly lovely, Ferrinus.
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Apr 24, 2024 14:12
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Nephthys posted:I'm weighing in to clear up the misunderstanding that clan = race and to explain that your concept that "clan archetypes are just stereotypes that don't actually apply" isn't correct. How compulsions mechanically affect players isn't interesting to me, but I'll still object to trying to suggest a racial element. They are a way to have a player be supernaturally effected by their curse, but since clans aren't racial there is no racist element. It isn't "as a dwarf you are innately bad at magic so your spell fails", it's "you have a monster inside of you thats forcing you to act in a certain way without you even knowing it". Well, I'll answer the second thing second, but it's absolutely still true that clan archetypes are just stereotypes that don't actually apply. That is to say, in every edition but 5th, Brujah did not have a monster inside of them forcing them to act rebellious. Some Brujah acted rebellious sometimes because of their contingent historical circumstances, but things could have gone differently; perhaps Carthage could have stood fast, and Clan Brujah could have found itself at the head rather than the periphery of the Camarilla, and now the typical modern vampire city has a physically unbeatable and socially undeniable Brujah prince who cruelly bullies and orders around the Ventrue flunkies she just used as proxies to keep mortals in line. Turks have historically brewed a lot of coffee, and there's nothing really wrong with that, and there are a lot of examples of it, but it'd be really weird to argue that no they all do that and if you proposed that one didn't that'd be a bad character. quote:Indeed, but social divisions are not racial divisions. The clans that were clear racial analogues like the Ravnos have been thankfully revised to remove that element so that now Clan exists solely as character archetypes for players to select. As you say, they now exist as basic tropes for players to pick up and then play around with when creating their characters. Nothing more sinister than that. I don't know where you're getting "bad faith" from here. I think I've explained why I believe what I believe pretty elaborately at this point, and you haven't really responded except to say that you don't like it. You can probably dig up a lot of literature about how exactly the social divisions I mentioned above, down even to ones like jock vs. nerd, are racially coded in Western society and media. Just like, in D&D, there didn't used to be a difference between "class" and "race", there is not, in Vampire, a difference between "archetypes" in your words and, uh, "highly historically and politically charged really-existing social divisions" in mine. But also, all the way up to 5th edition, Vampire has absolutely not stopped doing clans with clear ethnic, national, or racial analogues and 5th is often worse about it than 20th or Revised was. Ravnos in fifth start taking aggravated damage if they fail to be sufficiently nomadic, remember, whereas in 20th each one just had some kind of compulsive behavior that it was up to the player to choose. And this is a problem that's always going to dog VtM because it bases its clans off real-world societal rather than fictional vampiric archetypes. Now, obviously, we can turn this lens on Requiem, too. What kind of associations would someone make about the stupid, bestial Gangrel as compared to the dispassionately intellectual Ventrue? But both by being extremely broad and by focusing on how the different kinds of vampire function as monsters rather than using that exact same category to also assign social positions and political leanings, VtR mostly steps over the puddles that VtM likes to fall face-first into. Soonmot posted:No one in this thread is engaging in the type of bad faith posting that metapod and the other guy were. Comparing Loomer to them was incredibly lovely, Ferrinus. Well, that's exactly why I was so shocked by the parallel. Obviously, I don't think Loomer was posting in bad faith. I do, however, think he was inadvertently raising the same defense, and one that doesn't hold up. To be clear, I take that defense seriously, because representation is good and we should want it in art like Vampire. There's a lot of left-wing dismissal of representation as desirable because, of course, our bourgeois dictators love to make sure it's people of color who are pushing the "drone strike" button, but it was actually pretty important for the leadership of the Kirghiz SSR to be drawn from its own people. There's good reason that I think the very first edition of Masquerade defaulted to she/her pronouns when referring to player characters and that the first edition of Exalted to featured a Black lady on the cover and so on. But there are a lot of ways to do that and a lot of separate concerns to have as you do. Edit: Honestly, I should be citing a bunch more matching Metapod posts at the people who telling me like, what, you think it's bad for the vampires of the same lineage to resemble each other?? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 17:13
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:it's kind of funny to me that even if you streamline Malkavians down to "they perceive things other people don't, but perceive so intensely that sometimes it overwhelms them, and consequently they come off as really weird and struggle to communicate clearly" you've basically just gone from The Mental Illness Clan to the Autistic Clan Sorry, no, this really rubs me the wrong way. Obviously I can't speak for All Autistic People, but for me, I'm still working with the plain old six senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, proprioception. I personally don't know of any Autistic people who have documented examples of extra senses. And 'it hurts to drink from the firehose' is true for everybody, not only Autistic people. And many Autistic people have no problems communicating clearly, thank you.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:20
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I think what we're seeing there is the operative difference between Vampire and Beast, where two pieces of fiction both evoke something from the real world, but one of them does it loosely in way that invites you to see yourself in it if it happens to match your experience of something, while the other does it in a ham-fisted and top-down way where it just grabs you by the collar and yells X stands for Y, do you GET it??? And that means if you don't like X you also don't like Y!!! Which is to say that overwhelming, hyperacute perception that brings both insight and social/physical difficulties is how some people perceive or experience autism, but not all people, but that's okay because the version of Malkavians suggested by their V5 clan compulsion is not actually an attempt to write The Autistic Clan, and thereby pigeonhole autistic people, in the way that the version of Malkavians suggested by their V5 clan bane is an attempt to write The Mentally Ill Clan and pigeonhole people socially designated as mentally ill.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:52
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I actually want to talk about this a little more, first by expounding on an aside I made in an earlier post that sort of got lost in the shuffle of my intemperate point-scoring: Malkavians aside, there is in fact a classic Vampire clan which is characterized by heightened to the point of extrasensory perception, a differing experience of time, and the tendency to obsess and hyperfixate on objects of interest to the point that they can even forget to feed or take care of themselves. ...I refer, of course, to the Toreador! This is probably old news to some people, but I certainly wouldn't have realized even a few years ago that the so-called Degenerates' clan powers and flaws could, in combination, be read as a representation of (how some people experience) autism. But, the more the entire spectrum that autism manifests on is widely understood, and the farther away we get away from extremely gendered and racialized stereotypes of autistic people exclusively being nerdy white guys with poor social skills, the more ability we have to locate ourselves and/or each other in pieces of art like Vampire. On the other hand! Here's one of my favorite little pieces of writing, by actor Wallace Shawn: quote:I came to a phrase that I’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism,” “the fetishism of commodities.” I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change. What is this but one man's experience of Malkavia? He saw something, some hidden truth immanent in the very structure of the world, and it was so powerful as to overwhelm all his thinking, it was suddenly everywhere, he couldn't help but view everything through a new lens... at least until the Dementation power that someone used on him wore off. So the beauty of a certain kind of open-ended game design is that it invites us to see ourselves reflected within it, without attempting to describe people to themselves or foreclose on the possibility that things, and we ourselves, could be different.
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Apr 24, 2024 19:58
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TheCenturion posted:Sorry, no, this really rubs me the wrong way. I'm autistic. I'm also not suggesting the commonality is extra senses -- that's the magical / vampire part -- but rather the experience of not being able to easily tune out or regulate the intensity of the senses you do have. As for communication, while I'm well aware that framing it as a one-sided deficit is misleading verging on offensive, I have far too much experience with autistic-allistic communication going wrong to write off the characterization altogether.  e: also that post was about 50/50 between an ironic "i feel seen" and "that isn't really BETTER" to begin with; if the impression is inaccurate in popularly misunderstood ways, that if anything supports what i'm saying. Ferrinus posted:Which is to say that overwhelming, hyperacute perception that brings both insight and social/physical difficulties is how some people perceive or experience autism, but not all people, but that's okay because the version of Malkavians suggested by their V5 clan compulsion is not actually an attempt to write The Autistic Clan, and thereby pigeonhole autistic people, in the way that the version of Malkavians suggested by their V5 clan bane is an attempt to write The Mentally Ill Clan and pigeonhole people socially designated as mentally ill. This is a fair assessment, yeah. I also very much had Glitch in the back of my mind here, which evokes a number of different fraught and interrelated real-life concepts (disability, chronic fatigue, cult deprogramming, etc.) while very deftly avoiding the pitfall of being a direct metaphor for any of those. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 21:51
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Not going to lie, part of my enjoyment of playing Malkavians is the fact that at least in the drat game world the weird bundle of ADHD, OCD, and BPD that makes up my brain at least *works* thematically. And the Ravnos Bane is less "punishing you for being insufficently nomadic" thematically and more "Zapathasura's dying agony and hatred towards those that survived is chasing after its descendents like It Follows". So yeah, with Loomer on this. And, as usual, they do a better job articulating it all than i do. Unrelated V5 question. Is there any actual risk to an Oblivion user always having Oblivion's Sight on? You run the risk of Stains on Rouse checks but the power itself is passive. It doesn't involve you actually getting more sensitive to light as with Heightened Senses. The only real drawback seems to be that ghosts or gribblies that can be picked up by it might get pissed off. Just curious, is all. My Lasombra toxic masculinity elemental has it and i was toying around with some ideas for Mask v Mein. My take on it is he runs the risk of being like that dude from 13 Ghosts who shouts out "i HATE it when they do that!" while our ST thinks there should be some real danger involved with prodding the negative-zone.
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Apr 25, 2024 00:15
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I mean, ultimately the setup for why everybody who gets bitten falls into one of the Thirteen Cinematic Dracula Archetypes or "Draculatypes" does not actually make sense as a rational system that can be applied at scale. This is also true of questions like "okay, so how much blood do all these vampires need?".
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Apr 25, 2024 00:22
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citybeatnik posted:Not going to lie, part of my enjoyment of playing Malkavians is the fact that at least in the drat game world the weird bundle of ADHD, OCD, and BPD that makes up my brain at least *works* thematically. And the Ravnos Bane is less "punishing you for being insufficently nomadic" thematically and more "Zapathasura's dying agony and hatred towards those that survived is chasing after its descendents like It Follows". Well, the dude in 13 Ghosts also got killed by the ghosts, so if your ST is being fun, sure, you can use the power without much issue, except when occasionally there *is* an issue because you side-eyed a ghostie of some kind. Basically if I was your ST, I'd let you run with your idea, but I'd also warn you once then drop a spectral problem in your lap at a dramatically appropriate time.... When you least expect it 
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Apr 25, 2024 00:41
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citybeatnik posted:And the Ravnos Bane is less "punishing you for being insufficently nomadic" thematically and more "Zapathasura's dying agony and hatred towards those that survived is chasing after its descendents like It Follows". This is the biblical evopsych I'm talking about. Oh, yeah, these guys are cursed to forever be nomads for perfectly logical in-character reasons, we swear! You see, back in the misty past of the Week of Nightmares,
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Apr 25, 2024 01:24
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Shut the gently caress up ferrinus
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Apr 25, 2024 02:06
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citybeatnik posted:And the Ravnos Bane is less "punishing you for being insufficently nomadic" thematically and more "Zapathasura's dying agony and hatred towards those that survived is chasing after its descendents like It Follows". I'm a little confused here, because I read Loomer's post as arguing against that: "[ridiculous 'biblical evopsych' critique] proposes that the only way to execute [banes promoting a particular character mindset] is to root it in the personalities of the Antediluvian responsible. The actual suggestion was ambivalent on that note - it might as readily have applied to them rather than stemming from them, in which case you get the bonus dose of 'Noddism has made fundamentally erroneous assumptions'." And, not to put too fine a point on this, but Zapathasura causing the curse to spite his descendants is barely a stones throw from some Wandering Jew trash. If that's your defense for the mechanic's inclusion, then its hard for me not to think that Ferrinus has a point. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 02:43
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