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Just wanted to say, holy crap that is a great OP.
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Oct 1, 2019 12:16
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Yeah how would any given vampire even learn these things exist in the first place? Also depending on who you ask you literally cannot learn some paths without instruction so who's teaching you?
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Oct 12, 2019 06:43
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I think the thing I dislike about hunger dice is the subtle play difference vs "classic" hunger. In "classic" hunger systems (both Requiem and Masquerade used similar systems) hunger is a known factor you can attempt to control and will probably fail to. Frenzy occurs when you're hungry, in the presence of some stimulus, and fail a specific frenzy roll. I like this, because if you're playing a "good" character you basically have to manage all three of those factors and if you can, you can master hunger. You'll probably fail spectacularly.
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Nov 28, 2019 08:47
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I don't think anybody has an issue with a hunger/frenzy mechanic, because vampire has always had that, just the specific implementation of hunger dice. I prefer the all or nothing nature of frenzy/blood pool because my roleplaying is forcibly arrested less. Passing the rear end in a top hat bar and being told I have to now roleplay something spicy because the dice say it's spicy time isn't for me. With frenzy you have highly destructive boughts of desperation which still amounts to struggling with the Beast without the pencil snapping of hunger dice. This is a personal preference.
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Nov 28, 2019 16:55
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Dross posted:Mechanics are always a “forcible arrest” of your roleplay. Sometimes the dice say your cool ninja wall run double stab fails and you have to deal with the consequences of that too. Do you flip the table when that happens? I mean, you do you man. Personal preference. It's been so loving long since I played Masquerade that I fully admit I don't remember how hunger works except that it uses a Self Control check. Requiem, on the other hand - the average player can, at best, start the evening with 9 blood and they get 'hungry' at like 4. This gives you a leeway of 5 blood under ideal circumstances. Hunger checks happen in the presence of blood, smell, sight, or taste, and you can still make them if you've got blood to spare, they're just easier. Having played Requiem with lots of players who have tried to play 'good' characters, it is not something that is 'never a threat' since I've watched smart and well-meaning characters fall down the Humanity ladder with very little effort. It isn't a non-issue, but it is an 'event'; when the Beast takes over, it's Frenzy, and that allows you, the players, to otherize the activity. The sort of... for lack of a better term, micro-aggression that hunger dice facilitate just isn't for me, it doesn't feel like grappling with a supernatural force so much as dealing with a serious anger mood disorder. That just isn't fun for me. I can see how it would be fun for others. I've been playing vampire for like 20 years, I know what I like and I am perfectly comfortable with the themes of Vampire, I just specifically don't like this thing.
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Nov 28, 2019 21:12
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Yeah the short answer is: either you don't write powers that strip away free will, or you include langauge in the game that lets people know coercion is a thing and provide them with tools to mediate, both at session zero and in-play, when content has walked over a line. Like Majesty/Presence and Dominate have powers that can be used for rape. You can either acknowledge this and try to address it in both the text and content of the game, or you alter how those powers work. What you defianately don't do is get on Twitter and argue about what counts as rape.
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Dec 12, 2019 06:01
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There are a number of problems with Malkavians as presented, including but not limited to: * Being the clan What Who is Crazy means other clans can't just be crazy without being weird about it. * The 'Madness' espoused by Malks is distinctly Victorian, meaning zero nuance. They've got a little better about this, but not much. * Both in the fiction and in play this often seems to manifest as writers and players trying to one up each other in the most new and unique deramgement they can think of which always has some obnoxious 'twist.' * Game can no longer decide if standard human anxiety or depression qualifies as a Malkavian situation. I think it's technically legal but I've never seen it. So this results in, "can I play a Malk who 'just' has intrusive, unwanted thoughts, should I, and how does one even play a character who has a mental condition that is not played up for dramatic effect?" I honestly have no idea.
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Dec 16, 2019 15:06
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That's basically the issue though. Malkavians can't both be "vampires with real world mental illnesses" and "vampires cursed by God with madness." The two ideas are fundamentally incompatible. Vampires cursed with anxiety feels low rent and if you try to go well, it's super anxiety it feels insulting. If its supposed to be a curse, have it be a very specific thing with prescribed effects. It's fine if other vampires percieve this to be "madness" but express it in a specific way. The Network was an attempt to do this but it also existed alongside mealy mouthed "well some Malkavians just wash their hands a lot" stuff. ...or have some stuff about how to handle mental illness seriously and how that might manifest at the table. After all most people who struggle with mental illness actually expend a lot of effort trying to appear perfectly fine and most of that struggle is internal, not visible, stuff. You could do that too. But not both.
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Dec 16, 2019 20:51
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Right but "meta gimmick Malk funtime" is only slightly better than fishmalk. Like nobody wants to play a Malk who constantly wonders if he's a good person or not, and has good days and bad days, and sometimes doesn't bother to get out of bed but that's the reality of mental illness. I'm not sure that's actually a good idea for a clan but they should probably craft something both more fun and more specific.
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Dec 17, 2019 01:31
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Well, not exactly. It's worth noting that in real life mental illness (along with disability) were commonly thought of as "a curse from God" prior to the medicalization of disability. It's not impossible to combine the two, people did it for hundreds of years. It just really doesn't solve the problem at all -- it's like making a clan of all-women vampires who suffer from actual, literal hysteria. The reason why I say they're incompatible is that historically those people were wrong. The Victorian belief that 'madness' is a fairly generic and reductive trait, is typified by Bedlam and padded cells and screaming and wailing at phantoms - is basically just, like, wrong in every way. Vampire, being a horror game, leans heavily on that kind of symbolism to drive home their idea of what 'madness' is. So calling upon and wrapping up 'Curse from God' with 'Insanity' is the offensive, Victorian reductive perspective, so you can't have that and authentic mental illness present in the same game. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Anyways if I were trying to "fix" Malks (and wasn't allowed to throw out literally all other VtM lore in order to specifically make a careful, issue-sensitive game about vampirism and mental illness, which would be really loving hard as it is) I'd probably ditch the mental illness angle entirely and instead lean in really hard on the idea of Malkavians as prophets, along with some kind of mechanical restriction or drawback to disincentivize telling anyone about their prophecies directly. This I can get behind. Just throw out the whole idea of Malkavians having 'derangements' (or whatever shorthand you want to use for mental illness) and instead give them actual insight that they don't actually want and go from there. The clan is already like halfway there, you just need to jettison the parts that don't work with that framework.
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Dec 17, 2019 03:32
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Ferrinus posted:The best Malkavians are the ones my nWoD group homebrewed up whose “Malkavia” was specifically a kind of conceptual synaesthesia that made it difficult to describe things or communicate normally but which a special bloodline discipline could eventually allow you to control, benefit from, and even inflict on other people. Yeah this is basically the perfect compromise. If I was doing oWoD Malks from the ground up I would give them a sort of shared hallucination/communication problem as well, which makes perfect sense with the lore, without all the bad parts of, 'describe your gimmicky and offensive take on mental illness!'
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Dec 17, 2019 06:59
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01011001 posted:Thrall? Still sucks, but it beats ghoul if you care enough to be nice to them. "Ward".
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Dec 23, 2019 03:29
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Joe Slowboat posted:"Ward" implies someone you protect and have responsibility for specifically, I don't know that it makes sense to use it to describe the metaphysical class of 'people who gain powers from drinking vampire blood.' I mean, in the sense of 'my ghoul' or 'the Elder's ghoul' it totally works, as long as they don't have any non-ghoul wards. It's essentailly a euphemism, which vampire society adores. "I'm not enslaving a tool; I'm empowering and protecting this mortal with my supernatural grace." It is not a realsitic term. No realistic term would be anything but insulting.
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Dec 23, 2019 03:39
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I'm like 15 pages into this survey and I haven't been asked a single question about TTRPGs other than that I know they exist, this survey sucks. Can we maybe organize a voting situation where we subtly nudge WoD towards a full impact MOBA style game with Twitch broadcast endorsed by Monster because I feel like that's what they're asking about.
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Jan 31, 2020 19:18
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:See, I felt like they were pushing respondents towards more actual play streams, more in-person events, and maybe like, a Hearthstone-alike based on VtES? At least based on the sub-questions I got. I mean you're interpretation is more reasonable and less knee-jerk than mine so you're probably right but I got asked 3 separate questions about my feelings on microtransactions. I got asked which streams I watch before I was asked anything relevant about the WoD brand. It's just a very 'how do I use this brand' survey rather than, 'what do you like about WoD' survey and as a I fan my first response is gently caress this, I'm not your product.
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Jan 31, 2020 19:36
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Hoo boy look at all those ignored posts.
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Jan 31, 2020 23:08
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I am increasingly convinced that the threadshitting that happens almost like clockwork in this thread is some kind of weird viral marketing campaign.
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Feb 1, 2020 09:23
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"Can I afford to spend the blood now and risk a frenzy check later" is basically how the blood pool system works. "Should I do a supernatural thing for short term gain at the risk of being a monster later" is the same system in both situations and their implementation is fairly nuanced. When people talk about 'hey I like hunger dice, at least', I mean, that's fair - but I hardly think that's a thing you can balance a whole edition on, given that realistically they both describe the same mechanical situation. Hunger dice are less predictable, I suppose, but not by a huge margin, and the tension in most vampire games comes from the situation that prompted the cost-benefit analysis in the first place and not the system itself.
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Feb 1, 2020 19:59
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"Vampires are obviously monsters" and "playing Vampire should and must be an exploration of grotesque monstrosity" are both premises we can challenge but I think most people ITT are more prepared to challenge the latter rather than the former. If it is utterly impossible to play a good vampire, being a bad vampire is dull, because it isn't a choice. Drinking blood from fawning, willing doners is obviously less bad than taking blood from the unwilling or murdering for blood. I hope this clears things up. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Feb 18, 2020 |
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Feb 18, 2020 20:25
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Froghammer posted:I'm not sure what Metapod's endgoal of arguing that all vampires are inherently inhuman monsters that should be put to death is? Like, a game that a bunch of people enjoy playing assumes that there's some value in at least trying to live ethically even though it's hard and ultimately futile. Should we stop? Should no one play Vampire? Why are you arguing this? It's either straight trolling or to convince the thread the correct way to play Vampire is being 'that guy' in every group who pushes the boundaries of good taste by "exploring evil."
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Feb 18, 2020 22:28
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Playing vampires as strict monsters who lick blood off their fingers and purr over the bodies of their victims is honestly just so boring. Leaving aside the fact that it's gross, and also leaving aside the fact that it's basically reading the various in-universe justifications for vampiric monstrosity as ooc gaming advice - there's just no depth to it. Like I can write grossout fiction and keep it in a box under my bed, I don't need other people to practice it on. Once you buy the belief that humans don't matter the whole game gets way less three dimensional. I think vampires - even very old vampires - are really great at compartmentalizing. They aren't evil, they're doing what they have to in order to survive, not like *those* heathen assholes over there who play with their food etc etc. I think most vampires are probably a mixed bag, protecting those things they care about and rationalizing or being haunted by their worst behaviors. It's probably safe to say most vampires are a net bad for the world, but even a regular human serial killer is undebtably worse than your average neonate or ancilla.
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Feb 18, 2020 23:33
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Exalted 2e was just... obsessed with its own writing. It kept trying to play mindblowers with each new revalation and all it did was make interesting things less interesting. Like the discussion of each demon being part of a demon one level above it was cool. Trying to break down the sprititual physics of this in 2e was less so. Saying that the procollapse world was more advanced than the present was fine; trying to clarify exactly how far advanced, less so, and on. Basically any time the writers examined the setting too closely it got stupider. My favorite example of this are the in-setting mechanisms for exaltation. Its just so so stupid when you break it down in detail. It works fine in abstract so keep it abstract!
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Feb 28, 2020 02:41
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I would say either make your game centered around Second Sight or just poach Mage stuff (let them buy Rotes, for instance around a certain theme but not use capital M 'magic') just to save yourself the hassel of coming up with stuff on your own. Also Hunter is a good chassis for this, add stuff on top of that.
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Mar 2, 2020 01:42
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I always find it interesting that WoD games keep trying to boil physical combat down to a single roll but seem to be finding new ways to bloat social interaction.
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Mar 14, 2020 01:26
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