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Shrecknet posted:It still cant be worse than nWoD Mage corebook, which made the baffling decision to have gold text on silver pages so it is literally physically unreadable at any distance  Sleeper-like typing detected!
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Sep 28, 2019 17:46
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Oct 2, 2019 23:51
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Mulva posted:Ah, but you can only lead someone *towards* Golconda. You can flat out teach people stupid magic tricks. You can’t, though. Setting aside the fact that your one weird trick for defeating the curse of Caine involves learning four or five dot powers in obscure sorcerous disciplines to which access is generally mutually exclusive, the fact that a player has the executive power to spend XP in order to declare their character learns something does not mean that all characters can learn all things, especially when those things are esoteric magic as opposed to, like, Potence. It’s like asking why every villager in Greyhawk doesn’t simply take a level in cleric in order to make use of divine magic’s ability to erase wounds and conjure water. Rules of chargen aren’t rules of physics, and plenty of people simply don’t have the knack, or the time, or the star chart, or whatever else you need to start cherry-picking secret arcane powers. There’s also, obviously, the materialist/game-theoretical reason this isn’t appealing and doesn’t work: if you spend all your energy learning how to subsist off cows and control your temper, you’ll just be at the mercy of someone who’s instead learned to control minds or punch through concrete. Admittedly, your low iron footprint will make you a great subject and unlikely to raise anyone’s ire.
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Oct 12, 2019 00:20
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Mulva posted:When half a dozen to a dozen disparate groups know a thing, it is no longer obscure. As the inevitable march of time went on it seems every group got a form of blood magic, and every fifth group a form of necromancy, and shockingly most of the necromancy groups have ties to the Caps. And none of those listed Disciplines are required, those are just the ones in easy to have books that require the least hoop jumping and do it in the most direct manner to convey the point without getting into the actual esoteric stuff [Things like the Obeah combo are one of those just to show what they are like. Like one day someone found a way to shunt the sun onto their curse, nbd]. Pretending that it's hard to learn Thaum if you want to and then introducing Anarch Thaumaturgy isn't something you get to do. You officially sailed that ship into the sunset. It actually is, though. It actually is hard to get access to blood magic, and harder still to get access to multiple different forms of blood magic practiced by factions that are usually enemies of each other, and harder still to learn any of it at all, let alone to learn multiple forms of it to four or five dots. Most vampires simply can't do that; it's not a matter of them not trying hard enough or not having their priorities in order. Again, a player having the authority to declare that their character does something is different from all characters all technically being able to do something within the story of the game world. This is like the haha everyone in the WoD is a supernatural creature except for one guy who doesn't realize he's earth's last mortal human meme. Yes, that is a cute joke. No, the monsters don't actually outnumber the humans and, no, a preponderance of splatbooks to appeal to setting-curious players isn't actually a referendum on prevalence or ease of something in the story. No, the fact of a game-mechanical framework existing to allow some PCs to do something doesn't mean that, actually, all Cs can do that thing, any more than every Commoner 1 can simply do some quests about town and become a Commoner 1/Sorcerer 1 at will.
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Oct 12, 2019 05:36
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You actually can say it's hard to learn with all the people that know those various things. If a minority of vampires are magicians, and a minority of those magicians are necromancers, and a minority of those necromancers practice a particular path that at mastery allows you to spoof like 20% of being alive, and of the practitioners of that path a minority actually are masters who can do that... that's not because every other vampire in the world is simply stupid or slothful. Not every regular human has the talent for every regular human skill, and you actually and genuinely can just look up books describing how to perform most skills at a competent level. Even if you can teach just about anyone the basics of gymnastics or calculus or painting, you can't teach just about everyone to become a virtuoso world-class master of those things, because while players get to arbitrarily declare that their player characters just happen to have the knack for whatever skill they're buying up such that they can will themselves to become Olympic fencers in a matter of weeks, actual people do not work like that as much as they wish they did. This is completely setting aside the fact that your master plan requires simultaneous use of adept or master-level powers across multiple, sometimes-warring rare subsects or bloodlines that pop up in the game's umpteenth supplement - even if there was a vampire Wikipedia that simply listed the steps required to learn every last Discipline, the idea that every vampire can learn every Discipline to as high as level as they like and simply haven't because they're lazy and ignorant is, itself, lazy and ignorant. This is the same kind of thinking that leads people to conclude that every last person in the world could found a lucrative startup and then retire at 35 if they were simply smart about their finances. The actual truth is that no, they can't. The world isn't the way it is because for some mysterious reason each individual human has failed to bootstrap themselves into their best self.
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Oct 12, 2019 06:28
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Mulva posted:It's because the main magic clan actively murders folk that try to learn magic. Same to some degree for the main necromancy clan. Yes, they do. But does this actually mean that anyone can learn magic if they could simply be given the chance? That doesn't follow. If I have ten enemies, and on average one of them will actually be gifted enough to pick up sorcery and not destroy themselves with it, I still won't share it with any of those ten. quote:To be done. To just combat those flaws is a bunch of one and two dot poo poo. Like two dots, you never hunger frenzy again. That issue is solved. You will only freak out and murder someone feeding because you decided to. The path to be done with the flaws of being a vampire exists in their setting. Has for centuries. Will you, though? Will you never hunger frenzy again? Or will you, perhaps, gain a small bonus on a particular hunger frenzy check at the cost of ending up with even less blood in your system and therefore at greater risk of hunger frenzy later? Are you just lying about what these powers do now? quote:No, it's saying people die of diabetic related issues because companies are predatory and grossly inflate the price of insulin. That metaphor doesn't really track because what you were suggesting before is that A) actually in the contemporary world all this knowledge is just floating around out there and there's no reason you shouldn't be able to learn it, even if some of it is like the proprietary discipline of an obscure African bloodline and B) all these vampires should be engaging in decades if not centuries long regimens of study and exercise to learn and use all these powers.
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Oct 12, 2019 06:48
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Mulva posted:Anarch Thaum is literally "Some Tremere join up with the Anarchs and literally everyone starts learning stupid magic tricks". So yes, that actually appears to be the case. Literally everyone, Mulva? Or, is it, in fact, those anarchs who both can find a specific teacher, and want to learn, and are actually able to learn and understand? It's just not true that the existence of powers that any PC can theoretically buy translates into universal and unlimited aptitude on the part of every single extant vampire. Hell, even lots of extant vampires. quote:One dot ritual, requires the tooth of a predator [Which isn't consumed or anything, wear it as a necklace], lasts for an hour, takes a turn to cast. You don't hunger frenzy, period, while it's active. You start to get a little hangry, pop it and go out to hunt. When it's go time you won't flip out and drain someone dry. Unless that's who you are. So actually, you never hunger frenzy provided you cast a magic spell every hour on the hour, and provided that roll doesn't fail (you don't necessarily know whether it succeeded), and provided you don't suffer some kind of mishap that causes you to lose or break the tooth. Assuming this goes well, you still actually need to drink the usual amount of blood and are subject to the other frenzies and all the other problems of vampirism. quote:One dot is decades of study? Total mastery is the work of years and decades and perhaps centuries, depending on how slow you learn, but getting a handle on things is the same amount of dots any given starting character has. If that was a thing vampire society cared about, it is in no way hard. Mortis is the same as Auspex, it's the defining power of an original Clan. *Now* it's rare, but for thousands of years it was as common as anything else. And common to a clan known for it's studious nature and study of the condition of undeath [Which has quite a few survivors in the modern day, something that would be fairly common knowledge because people love dunking on the Giovanni and vampire society has an explicit position for dunking on people]. Ah, now we're haggling over how long one dot takes to get, so I guess we can stop pretending that learning four or five out of multiple powers is feasible. The problem is that one dot may well represent decades or even an unattainable pipe dream for people who don't have the knack, and, separately, the dissembling you're doing here in no way suggests that practical knowledge on how to actually perform Mortis or Necromancy should be at all common or easy to obtain. Yes, Mortis is extremely rare, because almost all the vampires that used to throw it around are dead. And Necromancy's a rare and proprietary form of sorcery practiced by a specific set of lineages. So... no, they're not at all trivial to learn. A dot of Mortis is not equivalent to a dot of Potence here.
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Oct 12, 2019 07:21
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Mulva posted:They call themselves the Digital Draculas and openly say "Hey we'll teach you Technomancy and rituals!". And then they do, to anyone that wants it. Everyone that wants to, and can find the people who teach it, and can find the time - but then you’re still being willfully misleading, firstly because there’s plenty of flavor about the anarch sorcery mentors having their own rivalries and secrets and quirks and secondly because having a willing teacher isn’t the same as ability to learn. “Anyone at all can do magic if they only knew how” is not actually a well-supported claim, unless you mistake the rules for PC advancement for the rules of physics. quote:Are you hungry? It failed. No? It worked. And it's "Every hour you at risk". How many of those are there? Not like it's hard to store blood, knowing this ritual presupposes something: You can use ritual magic. Store some blood you moron, what's the point of knowing blood magic if you don't use it? Ah, I love the thing where putative system masters have an encyclopedic knowledge of only the rules convenient for them. When you fail a roll to cast a ritual it goes wrong in unpredictable ways, such as, and this is iirc the first example, appearing to have worked until it backfires or shuts down at just the wrong moment down the line. So, no, you are not free of hunger frenzy by casting Blood Rush. You have a lower than average chance of frenzying but are, every hour, literally rolling the dice on something as bad or worse happening to you - ESPECIALLY if you’re some kind of Int 2 Occult 1 dilettante who’s just learned it as part of a mandatory vocational program implementer by a new Baron who’s got some very progressive ideas. Now, there’s an implicit criticism you’re making here that I agree with - for someone with a high dicepool, Blood Rush is too good. It should have an actual drawback, like consuming a blood point to generate the effect or actually causing frenzy if used on consecutive hours since your Beast realizes it isn’t actually filling its belly or something. I blame it coming from a later supplement for being so out of the box convenient. But, rules as written, does it blow this whole hunger frenzy thing out of the water and point to a trivial way to revolutionize all of vampiric existence? No, that’s stupid hyperbole. quote:Why, because you're losing the argument? Being done is the end of a road, but it's not like the start of the road is without benefits. I won't pretend that any giving neonate could know all this after a five year crash course. That's silly. Anyone could build towards it though, and knowing it is there is it's own comfort. quote:You've yet to establish it is a knack, or to what degree it is. You just say it and move on like that's an argument, whereas the setting seems to think it takes root all over the world all the time with the slightest opportunity. Again, this is wrong. Anyone could daydream about building towards it. But, even if for some ridiculous reason the world’s last Child of Osiris knocked on their door desperate to pass on their mystic secrets, time and will aren’t actually the only things separating every last person from world-class mastery of every single skill. Your average person has no hope of mastering the violin, let alone of mastering an esoteric magical practice. quote:Now. A thousand years ago not so much. And even now there are still the Harbingers, and the Samedi. And unrelateds like the Nagaraja [Who if not with the Tal'Mahe'Ra are known for being mercenary]. And the fact that maybe not everyone called "Giovanni" is quite so Giovanni as they might like. What I’m hearing is that all these magical disciplines are, in fact, rare and esoteric. Absolutely mind-boggling that “b-b-but the ancients used these mysterious powers all the time!” is supposed to convince anyone that they’re freely available in the modern day. Guys I figured out the perfect plan! Step one, discover the actual physical site of Atlantis, quote:It's the Ordu Dracul mindset in the oWoD setting. What's weird about it? You are a horrific occult abomination, are you telling me nobody ever went "Can I do something about this?". They all just went "Guess I have to slam my dick in the door of all these horrific biblical curses til the end of time or go full tilt into Golconda, there is absolutely zero middle ground". Ah, suddenly you’ve moderated your stance. Are you telling me that NOBODY ever tried to mitigate their curse with magic, Ferrinus? That NOBODY can EVER do this??? Well, yes, given that your plan in full is to become a dual-classed Salubri/Tremere Antitrib with a level dip into the Cappadocian prestige path, but if we ignore that for a minute and just talk about learning a spot of thaumaturgy, “nobody”, “somebody”, and “everybody” are different words with different meanings. Obviously SOME mystically-inclined vampires devote their lives to personal transfiguration and ascetism. But can everyone? Can everyone even if, somehow, all the spellbooks required could simply be checked out of the local library? No. The Ordo Dracul is a great example here because it’s not ACTUALLY true that everyone can learn the Coils. Every PC can, for the same reason that every PC might secretly be the next Einstein or Bolt or Da Vinci. But can every vampire? No, many simply destroy themselves trying (hence (some of) the rigorous gatekeeping and secrecy), because this poo poo is actually incredibly hard.
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Oct 12, 2019 15:23
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Octavo posted:Onyx Path experimented with simple NPC rules in the Chronicles of Darkness 2e core with listed dicepools for actions rather than fully statted out with attributes, skills, and powers that reference rules elsewhere in the book, but in everything published afterwards, including Deviant, NPCs are built the same way player characters are. That goes back to the 1e corebook, I'm pretty sure.
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Oct 23, 2019 02:43
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True Blood MIGHT work, but only because vampires would be consuming the stolen life-force of the workers slaved to and exploited by the massive industrial process such a product would require.
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Oct 23, 2019 16:07
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Archonex posted:True Blood is entirely doable in both settings. The problem is what happens when your average Nah, no one will care. It'll just get folded into the already-open secret that we're ruled by an international cabal of satanic pedophiles IRL. The discourse, and more importantly the global mode of production, will smoothly absorb and adapt itself to public vampires.
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Oct 23, 2019 19:55
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Archonex posted:Yeah, that's possible. I feel like having actual no poo poo carnivores that need to feed off of humans would make for one hell of a scapegoat though. And that's when they aren't actually mucking things up. Because you know that the Invictus or Lance wouldn't be able to resist going with the whole "I am superior to you, bow to me mortals!" shtick they're so fond of. Plus you gotta factor in corporations like Cheiron. Which would absolutely be up for farming vampires for their blood or whatever for (insert horribly illegal experimental product here). The bourgeoise already exist. Vampires would simply not be a big deal unless they challenged the ruling order, which they don’t, because they mostly reproduce and represent it. I’m much more interested in whether a “True Blood” product could work on the individual level - like, whether it could satiate a vampire. And the answer, clearly, is that it only could if producing a bottle of the stuff was as physically and metaphysically draining to the worker(s) involved as actually being bitten and fed on. Fortunately, under our mode of production, it is, so maybe we CAN bottle human life-force and sell it to the kindred but we certainly won’t be reducing the harm the kindred do or curing the kindred curse thereby.
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Oct 24, 2019 03:28
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Loomer posted:This is only the case if the curse is fuelled by abstract suffering rather than the direct symbolic repetition of the first murder. But... stealing someone else's life force to sustain your own power over them is in no way a symbolic repetition of the first murder.
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Oct 24, 2019 07:19
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Loomer posted:Stealing someone else's blood for the purpose, however, is. Caine's crime is twofold - there is the shedding of blood first, and the refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing second. The nightly repetition of feeding symbolically reproduces both misdeeds in a way that capitalism, apt bloodsucking vampire metaphors aside, doesn't. Every act of feeding requires the physical violation of a body and the outpouring of blood (the murder, and in the case of the less satisfying vitae of animals, the sacrifice that God spurns), born out of a refusal to accept one's wrongdoing and face the consequences (the shamelessness). You've already been corrected on the animal thing, but the difference between shedding and consuming blood can't be discarded here. A vampire wouldn't feel regenerated if they just brained someone with a jawbone and strolled off whistling. They have to take something from you, and, moreover, they have to keep taking that thing from you and your peers, and keep at least some of you alive so they can do it over and over. The blood is the life; it's not just a way of keeping score.
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Oct 24, 2019 17:32
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Loomer posted:No one is proposing ignoring the difference. The symbolic re-enactment of the murder is, however, a necessary precondition for the consumption of the blood to take place - without the act of shedding the blood, the blood is not available to consume. Actually, you'd probably be the best person to ask - is there a blood magic or discipline anywhere in V:tM for more abstract "energy vampire" style feeding, albeit which still inflicts lethal damage? Like, you fill up your blood pool but your victim just greys and withers rather than bleeds? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 05:23
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Loomer posted:Unfortunately my knowledge is mostly limited to the demographics, history and politics. I only ever bother with the mechanics for specific builds for games so my level of actual system mastery is a bit wonky. The only discipline that does it is Valeren from DAV20, from a quick google, as a 5-dot power. Path of Blood is sometimes depicted as leaving empty husks but still involves a very direct bleeding. I vaguely recall a ritual that does something similar. I don't think there's anything else that allows the more abstract style in what I've read, though I do vaguely recall a sidebar in some KoTE content that suggested ways cainites could try and learn to do it, but as a very optional rule. Yeah, it looks like some variant of Valeren 5 can allow a vampire to subsist on breath rather than blood - which means among other things that ceasing to spill blood doesn't actually break the curse. Although, if it were up to me, I'd have just swapped that with something else since every last vampire absolutely having to extract something's blood from its body to survive scans much better.
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Oct 25, 2019 07:06
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Vampires aren't dead. They're undead. Most people who end up as vampires go through an interstitial phase in which they are actually corpses, but that's clearly not compulsory.
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Nov 2, 2019 21:23
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The way my gaming group ended up dealing with the Predator's Taint mechanics from Vampire 1E was to decide that unless you were in exceptional circumstances, failing the frenzy check meant your character acted out or lost their composure briefly in a way that could raise suspicion or cause embarrassment (maybe to the tune of few lost dice on social rolls, ST's call) but not instantly turn a dialogue scene into a fight scene. As in, you meet another vampire, you fail your Resolve + Composure roll, and the result is that you loom forward and bare your fangs at them or lean back and hiss like a cornered cat before getting a hold of yourself. So, I bet Hunger would be a lot more palatable if A) the effects scaled to the number of hunger dice (or hunger dice showing 1s/10s) such that they started out mostly cosmetic and only became devastating threats to your stats as your Hunger level got higher, and B) the book was clear that the actual narrative impact of the hunger effect was supposed to roughly match the impact of the roll itself, so an idle Int check to see if you remember a name is never going to be able to do as much damage as an attack roll in a fight even if you somehow roll nothing but red 10s on the Int check.
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Nov 28, 2019 20:20
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MonsieurChoc posted:Look, say what you will about 2E, but having generic 3-4 dice charms is better than having a bajillion that just give slightly different bonuses. I do not care at all about having a charm that adds 2 dices and one that lowers the Target Number (also don't play with Target Numebrs did you learn nothing!?) I actually have the opposite takeaway, which is that the insane proliferation of seemingly-redundant Charms is actually totally fine (they're less redundant than they look!) but that the basic systems are pointlessly baroque and inconsistent with each other. Streamlining those systems would necessarily take away a little Charm design space but we can all learn to live with that.
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Dec 12, 2019 04:35
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MonsieurChoc posted:I don't want to spend fifteen minutes every time I take an action to choose which of the many many charms I want to use to slightly modify my dice roll. This doesn't actually happen because (except for Crafts, where it's the whole game) any given single skill is going to have its excellency and some kind of qualitative/multiplicative booster and that's it. Sometimes there'll be some kind of situational second dice trick you can layer onto the first, but if you're a Melee fighter for example you've basically got your excellency, your reroll 1s, and a success+dice bonus that has a chance of going off only when you full-excellency. The other 30 or 40-odd charms all do more concrete stuff like adding damage or making a counterattack or making a weird, special kind of counterattack or making a bunch of extra attacks that mean your turn takes six years to resolve. Some abilities don't even have the equivalent of the reroll-1s dice trick that Melee boasts, and (again, unless you're doing Craft) you never actually get a guy who rerolls 1s and 6s and doubles 9s and adds a non-charm success for every third 10 and... This is probably by design, since dice tricks tend to be mutually synergistic and anyone who gets to layer them on top of each other gets too good at hitting defenses or winning rolloffs. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Dec 12, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 07:22
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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. This allowed you to more or less play the VtMB malk/pop culture “crazy person” who speaks in portentous nonsense without having to deal with the actual derangement rules or otherwise make light of real mental illness.
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Dec 17, 2019 05:40
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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. Oh yeah I've posted them in this thread before but if people want (roughly 1eish but probably 2e-compatible) mechanics for this: https://the-act-of-hubris.obsidianportal.com/wikis/malkavia-and-lucidity This is based on some other years-old house rules but you can basically read "edge" as equipment bonus, "intimacy" as touchstone and "crisis of conscience" as breaking point. We also had willpower points grant something akin to the rote action rule, so you might want to just staple that or some other dice-quality-improver onto Cobweb to give it more kick.
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Dec 18, 2019 08:31
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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. I assume this will also be your defense of the 5E retread of WoD: Gypsies.
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Dec 18, 2019 20:12
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Metapod posted:It's not even about being "enlightened" if a person is role playing a caricature of a mentally ill person that's on the person not the game's description of a malk. Just like if a person decides to role play a caricature of a gang member for a brujah they will probably do some real hosed up cringey poo poo but that's not of the fault of the games description of brujah it's the player is bad at roleplaying. Unless of course that was the point of the character he/she made. Nonetheless if you're playing with someone who is playing as a caricature of a mentally ill person maybe talk to them about that because that's on them not the game itself. The problem with offensive media isn't that I'm worried that it will turn my friends into bigots.
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Dec 19, 2019 21:35
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Loomer posted:two thousand year old Tremere vampire Okay hang on-
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Dec 22, 2019 17:51
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Rand Brittain is 100% correct about the flaws of M20. By attempting to position the Technocracy and Traditions as moral equals (while putting forward some kind of shiny new traditions-without-the-bad-parts Mary Sue faction) it completely jettisons the basic conflict that made Mage: the Ascension interesting at all. The point is this: it is imperative that the Traditions, with all their flaws and foibles and historical mistakes, destroy the Technocracy, as that's the only way to create a just world. Octavo is correct that the consensus is properly read as the effect of ideology on social systems. It stands for the belief that someone who commits a crime has to go to jail, that someone who doesn't work hard enough has to live a life of misery, etc. It's not about aesthetics or the gravitational constant. Of all the wrong posts about this I've decided to respond to this one because I have a pithy way to do it: LatwPIAT posted:If people are going to make declarations about what the Technocracy is, I really strongly recommend adopting the following practices: https://twitter.com/nickconfessore/status/1222164928146087938
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Feb 1, 2020 06:17
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Has improved from what, V20? I guess, but it still has a bunch of holes in it (weak or weirdly-balanced disciplines, chargen disparity, poorly explained systems and power effects) and is stapled to an awful setting. I can see the appeal in hijacking elements of V5 from a Chronicles game but not so much in playing it straight.
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Feb 1, 2020 06:38
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I don't really know that hunger dice and the attendant systems are an unalloyed good. It's nice to have a smoother and more gradual way to attach a dwindling blood pool to loss of self control, but the bestial failure/messy critical stuff can be very jarring in the wrong way, and having to roll to see how many MP your powers cost every time you use them is really clunky. You could've achieved similar effects by, say, making a vampire unable to fill their Vitae pool past their Humanity rating without killing someone in the process.
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Feb 1, 2020 07:03
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And Loresheets are from Weapons of the Gods, Touchstones from VtR 2E...
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Feb 1, 2020 07:40
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ElNarez posted:I feel like treating hunger as a blood pool or MP is a pretty strong misunderstanding of the mechanics. You aren't limited in how often you can use your powers, and a failed Hunger check does not stop you from using a power. Rather, using some powers comes with a risk of adding a Hunger die to the pool, adding the risk of bestial failure and messy crit to every subsequent skill check, and, past 4 Hunger, risk of Frenzy, and the game is about managing that risk, knowing that the only option that completely removes it is killing someone. Oberst posted:Yeah this risk management system is so so incredibly good and increases tension Yes, you are very much limited in your use of your powers. The innovation is that instead of some of your powers costing 0 blood and some of your powers costing 1 blood as compared against your pool of 10 blood points, almost all of your powers cost 1d2-1 blood points out of your pool of 5. You can't just keep spamming Disciplines once Hunger caps out because you're out of juice. Same poo poo! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Feb 1, 2020 |
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Feb 1, 2020 18:42
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ElNarez posted:Most of the one dot powers are free, and, for the rare few that aren't, you get to reroll the Rouse check if you're at Blood Potency 1, which is the default for non-thinbloods. Also you can still use powers at Hunger 5, but you have to roll for Frenzy whenever you see blood, taste blood, or fail a Rouse check. It's not a dead stop, it's just a whole lot of added risk. Yeah, and there are a bunch of free powers in every other edition of Vampire. The high-BP reroll is just the stochastic equivalent of having a higher blood pool; it means that some of your powers, instead of costing 0 or 1d2-1 or 2d2-2 (right? iirc there are a few "rouse the blood twice" costs at the higher levels), now cost 2d2-3 (min. 0). And I'm pretty sure you're wrong about the end of your post; I just looked it up and if your Hunger is 5 you cannot willingly rouse the blood (and risk frenzy if some external thing forces you to rouse the blood, presumably like seeing someone bleed in front of you or whatever). It'd be interesting if your power was effectively unlimited and you could just rouse forever even at 5 at the risk of frenzy. However, I also think it'd be worse, because it would turn blood from a material to a psychological need on vampires' parts and strip away or at least dramatically attenuate the economic aspects of vampirism and vampire society. The fact that vampires really do need us, and aren't just keeping score or entertaining or soothing themselves through us, has been an important part of all WW/OPP vampire games. (For an example of a predatory monster that really is all about the psychology, see Beast)
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Feb 1, 2020 19:23
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ElNarez posted:I'm fully willing to admit I misread a rule, and considering everything else, including the metaphorical aspect, I do think I have. However, I do think that, because the process involves a random variable, the question underpinning the use of a skill isn't "can I afford to do it?", as it would be in the blood pool system, but "can I deal with the added hunger if I go through with it and the rouse check fails?", which you can get a lot more tension out of, and which leads to more dramatic outcomes. It's obfuscation in the service of creating a more interesting play situation, which I believe is a net good. You're asking if you can afford to do it either way. There's always a gamble implicit in spending a blood point in Vampire because those blood points are also health levels and you generally need to spend blood to make blood, as it were, so any decision you make to conserve or expend blood in the moment might be saving or losing you blood in the long term, and that turns on both your future decisions, other players' (ST included) future decisions, whether rolls go your way, whatever. Spending your fifth blood point and going down to four ("hungry") in Requiem was a big gamble in lots of situations. Would it get more interesting if you flipped a coin each time you spent Vitae to see if that Vitae actually stayed in your pool? I guess it'd make you more inclined to gamble, and therefore more inclined to get into trouble because you were hoping the coin flip would go your way but it didn't, but if you actually are concerned with these things such that you're aware of the probabilities and consequences and playing with them in mind, I think the 50% chance to use a power for free actually reduces rather than increases the tension. Also I think it's more likely to annoy you than to create drama, because it's like, come on, I crashed through three walls without any consequence but somehow it's this fourth one that costs me? The fact that any coin you flip doesn't care about how many coins you flipped before it is actually a downside here. One thing I do think V5 does well, as I posted before, is create a continuum of consequences for being hungry between "nothing" and "fall into wassail", but it's nothing you couldn't duplicate in original Masquerade or Requiem by simply noting certain hunger levels and their softer consequences right on the blood track on the character sheet. Hell, you could literally track both Vitae and Hunger in order to avoid clumsy "Your Blood Potency minus your current Vitae plus five" or w/e phrasing.
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Feb 1, 2020 20:02
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Metapod posted:The device that you used to post this has caused more real world human suffering than any tabletop game has ever caused Right, but since global capitalism entrenches and exploits hierarchies of race, gender, and so on in order to sustain and strengthen itself, if you decide to turn a blind eye to misogyny and homophobia you are in a very real sense helping the pillage of the third world to continue unabated.
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Feb 1, 2020 20:05
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Five Eyes posted:VtR 2e is the truth and the light except that I wish the physical disciplines fit the design mold for the other disciplines better. One dot rarely seems worth it, while four or more is too much investment for marginal payoff. They shine at about ~3 dots, which makes me wish they either fit the "ladder" mold (from Rose Bailey's design document) or weren't dot-rated as such - you just "have Vigor" or you don't, and having Vigor gives you such-and-such benefits which are a clear improvement over mortal Strength. I wrote out a hypothetical along these lines like... two or three threads ago? I didn't finish polishing them into fully usable, balanced powers but they were something like: * Add your Presence to your Strength for all purposes ** Superjumps or similar "burst" athletic feats *** Ignore your Intelligence in Durability or Armor when barehanded **** Nigh-unbreakable grip and posture relevant to grappling, standing your ground, holding stuff up, etc ***** Superheroic feats like flipping trucks over or stomping craters into city streets but they have to be messily destructive Resilience 5 would be something like "you only mark one point of damage down even if you're hit by a train or crushed under a building or something but you have to spend your next turn slowly reconstituting yourself from mush"
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Feb 1, 2020 22:38
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GNU Order posted:Nobody in here likes Metapod but buying the Vampire the Masquerade V5 rulebook and playing the game doesn't, even incidentally, assist in the stealing of native land and resources in the third world It does, incidentally, assist in that because discrimination on the basis of race and gender is helpful to the capitalist order. If someone uses a slur or something and then is like "hey, what's the big deal, it's not like I'm starving African orphans here!", their defense is invalid. They are in fact helping that very practice to continue by buying into and reinforcing its ideological underpinnings. If they opposed imperialism they would also oppose racism and homophobia and so on because these things all tie together.
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Feb 2, 2020 03:03
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Oberst posted:Nah, they're monsters who fool themselves. Humans eat animals just like Farmer. Eating from other people with consent is just being a monster with extra steps Humans also donate their labour-power to each other all the time.
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Feb 14, 2020 20:27
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I really liked WoD: Inferno for the way it made "demon" a sort of cosmic archetype with certain broadly consistent traits (nefarious or at least rebellious, knows all languages, can lie undetectably, makes pacts) that almost every kind of immaterial entity had the potential of becoming. Also, it is obviously not unethical to request or receive blood donations. I have no idea what the person is on about. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Feb 17, 2020 |
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Feb 17, 2020 07:09
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The bourgeoise already exist. Vampires are small-time. If the amount of human misery that all vampires cause, collectively, amounts to even a whole percentage point of the total I'd be shocked. Also, your blood doesn't make them immortal. They're already immortal. Your blood just lets them wake up and heal from injury. Immortality just means that, post-Masquerade, the actual rulers of the world are going to make sure to either turn themselves into or enslave vampires. None of this bears on the fact that, under a sane mode of production, people unfortunate enough to be afflicted with vampirism could just appeal to the welfare state for a weekly donation or whatever.
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Feb 17, 2020 12:36
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:yeah, especially if it gives Megagasms and access to the ruling elite. just look at how quick the petit bourgoise sold out the proletariat.
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Feb 17, 2020 15:24
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Metapod posted:That's an abusive relationship op That is not an abusive relationship. People donate their time and energy, i.e. their labor-power, i.e. their life-force for the sake of their friends and relatives and neighbors all the time. Often they suffer in the process of doing so. Taking care of a sick friend or aging parent is a legitimate drain on your reserves and yet it is also your moral obligation by most standards.
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Feb 17, 2020 18:02
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