World/Chronicles of Darkness: you turning werewolves into wereterriers

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Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

I still think Fernadno telepathically forcing your character to make them a mouth against your character's will is Very Suspcious

# ¿ Oct 1, 2019 10:33

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 11:35

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Holy smokes you are unpleasant.

More on topic, why would you be interested in playing a character that avoids one of the main core elements of the premise?

I mean the character that most appeals if I was gonna play Vampire myself is an Ordo Dracul dude who is, in fact, trying hard to get around it and other vampiric weaknesses

# ¿ Oct 12, 2019 15:35

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Archonex posted:

The one thing that got me is that aren't Beast's supposed to feed off of fear? I may be mis-remembering it but it seems like they could have gone with a better interpretation of how they do that if so. Of course this means abuse in the current write up, but if you go off of that theory that they're basically to make people afraid of the unknown then it's entirely possible they could have been written to not be so incessantly poo poo.

I mean, there's a difference between Johnny Dragondicks the child-eating monster abusing and terrorizing his way through the neighborhood and some random Beast who gets their fix by scaring people away from that alley where they're 99% liable to get beaten/mugged/raped/eaten alive by whatever is lurking in that area.

that's the Scarecrow Ministry from Changeling. This is one of the many, many problems with Beast: most of the actual seeds of good ideas it have are already covered.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2019 04:11

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Octavo posted:

Mage: the Dirty Version

... What's this?

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 18:13

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

LatwPIAT posted:

There's a significant difference between saying "OK we're adding a new obscure bloodline of vampires-but-Voodoo that you can play if you want to" and "you know those vampires you were already playing? Yeah they're all the Thing and you're hosed, sucks to be you".

Yeah the issue isn't "Vampires but The Thing"

it's "This vampire type, along with anybody else who's managed to learn their signature Discipline, both of which have been out for some time? Yeah, they're the Thing, sucks to be you if you didn't want that"

# ¿ Nov 2, 2019 10:27

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Everyone posted:

Pentex is basically the Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil, except, somehow, even more evil. Bane-possessed "zombies." Those weird demon-dog things. Also, just rooms with Nazi-style experimentation in them to demonstrate just how hosed up Pentex is with a strong vibe of "That dude on the table missing all his skin begging you to kill him to stop the pain, that guy could be you if you gently caress up in here."

Umbrella is, at its core, still trying to make money. In profoundly unethical and/or stupid and self-destructive ways*, but they're trying to make things they can sell for money. Individual members of it might have other motivations, but they're usually just trying to gain personal power or something.

Pentex's goals are specifically to make life worse for everything they touch.

*_{By the time Resident Evil 4 rolls around, Umbrella has folded offscreen because their stock price cratered after all their zombie disasters and they just kinda went bankrupt, hilariously.}

# ¿ Jan 5, 2020 09:59

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

I Am Just a Box posted:

I mean, because he either got kidnapped or signed up for medical experimentation he was presumably thoroughly lied to about, was tortured, broken down both physically and psychologically, and then kept as a slave only because euthanizing him is difficult and his captors can unbox him in order to disrupt the enemy because he panics at the drop of a hat?

He's a moral dilemma. He is hideous, maladjusted, mistrusted, spiritually malformed, potentially dangerous to be around � and an innocent victim of circumstance living in constant fear. The right and sympathetic thing to do is already to rescue him without having to bend the story around landing a previous ally in a Pentex prison. You don't take the moral measure of a person by asking what they'd do for a friend. You do it by asking what they'd do for a stranger.

I mean, if you can't cure him it seems like the right thing to do is euthanize him as painlessly as possible?

# ¿ Jan 6, 2020 02:16

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

He's also not just a vampire, the Arrow is definitely more of a Mage thing.

Yeah, The World is a completely separate issue from him being a vampire.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

He's not Toreador, The World is something much weirder than Celerity and there's a pretty plausible fan theory that it's really Jonathan's stand anyways.

Actually, Part seven has some (very spoily) evdience to the contrary: Non-vampire alternate universe Dio shows up in part 7 and he still has The World as his Stand, Jonathan probably would've had something like Hermit Purple that served to help with his non-Stand powers.

Zereth fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Jan 25, 2020

# ¿ Jan 25, 2020 14:48

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

FirstAidKite posted:

You might want to spoiler that for anyone who has only been following the anime or people still reading through the manga since that's the last battle

oh good point

# ¿ Jan 25, 2020 23:04

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

As somebody who relies on modern medicine to be, you know, functional, and considering things like the anti-vax movement, the whole "Science is the bad guys" really does not sit well with me.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2020 02:56

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Kurieg posted:

Yeah. My problem with the Technocracy is that rather than stating "Bad People Are Using Science To Do Bad Things" the game rather explicitly states "No, the very idea of codifying knowledge is in and of itself an evil", the very existence of science itself is bad within the narrative of mage. And should the trads win all that happens is we replace a dystopian hellscape with dadist hellscape that we're told is a victory because the people who have their name on the front of the book are now the ones with their boot on the neck of the huddled masses.

It's the same reason I hate Bridges era Werewolf because your only provided end goal is reverting humanity to a survival of the fittest subsistence level hunter gatherer society. Also you should probably get rid of all communication more complex than grunts, that's also evil.

I'm pretty sure if the Trads win they immediately dissolve and suddenly they're now at least nine factions fighting each other because they have, like, nothing in common with each other besides a common enemy.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2020 14:50

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Soonmot posted:

Basically, they're government agents who arrest supernatural critters who break the law.

And they have low key psychic powers.

to the best of my understanding, Special Agent Francis York Morgan Call Me York That's What Everyone Calls Me is a prime media example of a VASCU agent

I Am Just a Box posted:

ACAB, but VASCU cops are that special fictional cop who really cares about rights and civil procedures. They're an office of Dale Coopers and Francis York Morgans.

although you really should've used Morgan's full name.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2020 15:13

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Warthur posted:

Arguably, by taking on the job of destroying an evil cult themselves the PCs will *be* Hunters by the end of the arc. Especially if they've decided to devote more time to taking down other threats.

My understanding is that, by refusing to close their eyes and look away, but instead taking up arms, the PCs are already Hunters.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2020 19:19

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Everyone posted:

Beasts... are just rear end in a top hat bullies who mumble about teaching lessons while feeding on others via pain and fear. The should be the darker counterparts to changelings, instilling a healthy fear and respect for the mysteries of the universe that they aren't taken for granted

that's also changelings. see the Scarecrow Ministry

# ¿ Feb 13, 2020 17:02

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Slimnoid posted:

Vampires are also one of the few player-character supernaturals that could be eradicated from the world and create a net positive from their absence.

I think about the only thing Vamps as a whole do that might be "good" for non-vamps in general in nWoD is "keep the Strix focused on them and not other people"?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2020 23:22

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Ferrinus posted:

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.

No, they weren't saying that your blood makes the vampire immortal.

The vampire's blood can stop your aging without giving you that problem with the sun.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2020 21:53

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Archonex posted:

Edit: Also, I almost forgot but even in the base line NWoD there's ways to get literally infinite blood if you have the occult knowledge. Literally any vampire that knows how to access the Underworld can get as much as they want. And the difference between the way they do it (Literally all it requires is to tip your head upwards, hold your mouth open, and wait for a few hours to get all the blood dripping down from on high. Basically, act like a chicken that cannot drown.) and simply putting a bucket out to collect the stuff is just whether or not you have a bucket on hand.

I thought in the nWoD blood stopped being anything other than impure water to vampires within a couple of minutes of leaving the body? Is this mystery underworld blood actually something they can eat or is it like giving a human a "burger" made out of styrofoam?

# ¿ Feb 20, 2020 00:31

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Mors Rattus posted:

My brain refuses to square the circle of 'tiny teenager with a lovely dye job, bad makeup, tons of spiky piercings, a ratty t-shirt, a moldy leather jacket and weeks of not bathing is curiously attractive and looks good, says Brucato.'

Maybe Brucato is thinking of like, the movie version of this, rather than what it'd actually look like?

# ¿ Mar 19, 2020 16:45

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Joe Slowboat posted:

The Oracles, if they exist, are some of humanity's greatest patrons in the cosmos.

The God-Machine makes angels to do a job then abandons them or digests them or repurposes them. I do not think it can be said to love, cherish, or even treat with any degree of concern for their welfare, its biomechanical angels.

Hell it's not even clear if the God-Machine has emotions. It may not be capable of loving (or hating) anything.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2020 04:19

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Joe Slowboat posted:

It's a reasonable modern frame on the relationship between humanity and the gods in some stories; plenty of deities have received sacrifice and worship in exchange for not visiting their wrath on the people. Exalted doesn't claim to precisely recreate the world as understood by bronze age people, or the elaboration of empire involved in the setting would look very different as well. Exalted treats the economics of the bronze age as fundamentally driven by exploitation, and generalizes that to a critique of the societies it depicts (where they're bronze age as opposed to Dying Earth, Conan-esque fantasy world, etc).

I mean, it's also the case that exploitation, reverence, and mutualism can all coexist. Ahlat, God of Southern War, is a great example (and one of the classic Exalted NPC gods).

Ahlat is a war god, a god of cattle, and a very competent social climber. He has waxed in power over the centuries, and has hugely shaped the society of Harborhead to one that fits his ideals: Constant cattle-raiding war defines the region. However, Ahlat also wants his people to have self-determination, power, wealth, and martial glory - not just because that will expand his own influence, but because he sees them as his people. For their part, the Harborhead peoples revere Ahlat, and they genuinely want the same things he wants for them (speaking broadly; individuals will differ). Ahlat is absolutely exploitative, in that in the final calculation he has shaped an entire society to the model of his power and priorities, to the point that Harborhead's ability to throw off foreign colonization has been hampered by their dedication to internal ritual warfare and cattle raiding - but he's also their god.

Compare that to Ishtar, and I wouldn't consider it unfavorable; Ahlat may be understood in an idiom of exploitation, but if Ishtar is understood to exist as a discrete entity, the dual knowledge of 'what she loves she destroys' and her power over people, with the immense festivals and adoration given to ameliorate her... that's also exploitative, in the same way that any monarch is exploitative. Exploitation doesn't mean there isn't real religious feeling, or the god doesn't represent the culture's goals and ideals, it's just not framing those in the (fictional) culture's own terms.

E: Put another way - how is 'propitiation' different from 'exploitation' other than one focusing on the actions of the people, and the other on the actions of the god? Exploitation is a simple fact of historical (and present!) modes of economic and social control. That Exalted also frames gods in that light isn't maltheism, it's just extending the critique.

Put like this, Exalted mostly seems to just put in an answer for "why do the gods want this stuff?"

# ¿ Apr 5, 2020 07:41

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

I was under the impression that being a Masquerade vampire was about being under the boot of your elders, whose power level you can never even hope to reach except by doing a very, very bad thing that will, rightfully, get you declared "Wanted: Extremely Dead" if you're discovered to have done it?

# ¿ Apr 29, 2020 18:36

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

I think extremely high blood potency vampires also get weird and gribbly in CoD, but most vampires prefer being able to feed easily and will go have a big nap to lower their BP occasionally.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2020 19:28

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

The God-Machine is an unknowable cosmic evil, but it's also very explicitly a material one. It is, at the end of the day, just a really big machine. It isn't the fundament of reality, it isn't actually God, it has no metaphysical significance -- it's just very powerful, and very firmly established.

With enough explosives in the right places, you can absolutely kill the God-Machine.

Easier said than done, of course.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2020 19:47

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Nessus posted:

I don't get why people give a poo poo. If you like the music and so do a lot of other people, isn't that great? It means you had a great experience and as frosting on top, you have a common point of contact with strangers. It's like keeping up in passing with football so you can make idle conversation.

It means you're old now.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2020 21:30

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Lurks With Wolves posted:

I will admit that this thread does have a bias against V5. A bias that mostly exists because it started with Martin Ericsson making a bunch of edgy promises about how it's going to tackle modern issues and then hired noted harasser/pants-shitter Zak S to make a promotional game and handled ISIS refugees in a hamhanded way in a preview adventure and caused a literal international incident when the second book called an actual organized effort to kill gay people a vampiric smokescreen.

Don't forget that its main defenders in this thread are Metapod and Oberst, who showed up out of nowhere one day to be contrary assholes and do nothing but defend it. That's certainly not helping its image.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2020 19:12

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

mysterious frankie posted:

Both have nothing to do with the nazi dress up guy, right?

Which nazi dress up guy?

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 05:44

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

mysterious frankie posted:

That�s the guy. I didn�t remember the name and I don�t know the full story, just that there was at least one international incident and literal 1488 references under his watch.

Yeah V5 was his baby.

EDIT: wait Keurig covered this already how did I miss those posts :psyduck:

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 06:24

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Tulip posted:

Huh, I was wondering why Beasts were "completely unaffected by Disquiet." Not even Mummies are unaffected by Disquiet!

I think Disquet hits a Demon's cover but not them.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2020 08:08

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Kurieg posted:

Except in a competently written game heroes would be the street level, knowable antagonist and there'd be something bigger and like, actually villainous behind it. You know, like the Dark Mother is the bigger, villainous face behind the street level Beasts oh wait

In Vampire are the street level villains "you, the vampires" and the bigger thing the Strix?

# ¿ Jul 20, 2020 18:28

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Edge cases aside what happens if you try to use the Gift somewhere other than the US that isn't divided up by states?

# ¿ Jul 23, 2020 07:08

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

bewilderment posted:

Just have people recognise that Pierce Deception is a thing and accommodate it.

I had an NPC who as their signature always-on spell had a 'Mask Truthiness' spell because they wanted people to evaluate all their statements on their own merits instead of gut feeling. So they would be able to say "The sky is green", "I am nonexistent", "this sentence is false" and "I'm currently speaking a sentence" and it would all read as truth-neutral.

If you want to keep clashes being something the mage knows is happening, this seems like a good way to do it, actually. If somebody's running a defense against it, it has to clash before it can try to evaluate the truth of the statement. So if a clash happens and you don't win, all you know is that they have an effect that blocks the spell.

EDIT: Also if you're using it on another mage, they now know you're snooping at them because they also know that their spell is Clashing

# ¿ Sep 22, 2020 11:14

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

NikkolasKing posted:

Not to derail current talk but I just wanted to add something to my earlier comment about accusations of the Old World of Darkness being "too Judao-Christian' which I'll just change to 'too Christian" since a lot of the replies in here were fair enough.

"Judeo-Christian" isn't really a thing. The actual religions are too different.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2020 22:41

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Tulip posted:

I've never heard "Judeo-Christian" used to imply that they're the same religion. It's pretty much always used as a term to describe the historical-political dialectic between Judaism & Christianity in Europe, although at least as often it means "Christians who have a particularly odd focus on the Old Testament."

It's still worth being very critical of because the real payload of the term is that Christianity/Europe has meaningful dialogue with Judaism, to the exclusion of Islam (and other religions but especially Islam) as being part of the European cultural and historical tradition. Has as much to do with Christians thinking that having read the Old Testament means they understand Judaism as it does with the political project to excise Islamic philosophy and history from the Western canon.

NikkolasKing posted:

Anyway, in a history of American religion course I listened to, they said the term was first created in I think the 70s to form a conservative religious alliance against things like abortion and feminism.

Yeah, I meant that it's usually used to imply that judaism and christianity agree on things in general, when they, uh, kinda very much do not. Also to exclude islam, yes.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2020 23:42

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Scaling XP costs work fine if you want to encourage spreading things around instead of buying your sixth point of Shoot Slightly Better, unless you have, say, flat cost chargen and scaling in-game XP, you gotta commit to one or the other or you get those perverse incentives.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2020 00:15

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

ritorix posted:

The V5 Companion errata adds a rule to let players 'take half' (count half their dice pool as a success) instead of rolling. Basically to avoid hunger complications from messy crits/failures. They had an interesting designer comment along with this new rule, that V5 was run this way during the playtests but it never got formalized into the core book.

... isn't the point of a playtest to test the rules?

# ¿ Apr 9, 2021 08:29

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

I mean, can you meaningfully reveal "Hunters" as a whole? At all? They're a bunch of separate groups.

And the consequences vary. A group of unaffiliated street-level ones getting "Revealed" just means they're up on arson charges.

Like... can you expose VASCU? "The FBI has a secret division of psychics!!"

And some of them you can't expose without also exposing what they're hunting. Like the one which has mosnter parts grafted on.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2021 10:43

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Loomer posted:

'GURPS is a tool of the weaver'.

Pardon?

# ¿ Jul 11, 2021 18:11

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Dawgstar posted:

Although of course the favorite is still Aberrant and the sputtering outrage of "You want to play THE AVENGERS?"

And then had a couple of groups that were basically that. But no yo ucan't play them. Shut up.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2021 19:53

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Obligatum VII posted:

so, a thought, or series of thoughts, invaded my head recently and the dread specter of magechat took grip of me, so here is my rambling bit of non-sense cosmological speculation for nMage:

When the exarchs ascended, they did not merely take control of existing symbols, they broke the ability for any other symbols to exist. Not on purpose, but bit suited them just fine that it happened. This created a stagnant world locked in pseudo-stasis, ensuring that the only rulebook in play was the one they already won with; whose rules allowed a winner to remain such perpetually. The options to get up and go play a different game or to even houserule the existing one were removed.

Quasi-relatedly, the way mages view symbols, supernal or otherwise, is flawed. Symbols lack meaning without a context in which to exist, they are void of meaning until actively observed; like a quantum state being resolved. There is no "supernal truth" because the supernal is still just symbols, granted meaning by the context in which they exist, truth cannot exist in the symbols alone. The symbols are part of a larger system that truly comprises what might be viewed as "truth". Following from this, the notion of supernal truth is itself a trap created by a broken reality and/or devised by the exarchs, because it fundamentally reinforces the context in which they were already the winners and will always remain the winners. In conclusion: the Free Council is right but not for the reasons most of them likely think, the Fallen World is incredibly important because it is the context in which the symbols are existing; it is not a shadow cast on the wall, it is the symbols and the space between the symbols, and the interpretation of the symbols (and all the things that don't seem to fit neatly into supernal categorization are because they derive from non-supernal symbols and/or are so transformed by context that trying to view them through only a lens of supernal symbology falls apart). The problem is not that it fell, because that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how it changed state, it is that it became largely static. You could even tie this into the God Machine and say that it was once the process by which reality as we know it integrated new symbols and broke incredibly badly when that stopped being possible.

This is entirely me bullshitting and there's not really anything in the text to support it, but also nothing that really shuts down the notions either.

I mean, the last few decades, computers, the internet, and ubiquitous smartphones have massively changed the way humans communicate and consume media and stuff. How does that fit in with the "the nature of the 'fallen' world is stasis" thing?

# ¿ Oct 23, 2021 07:25

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 11:35

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:

Geist: Leaving aside the fact that the 1e>2e shift for this one is fundamentally "hey we gave you stuff to do and a reason to play the game beyond 'we put out this book' ", they took a power setup whose 1e was all over the place and tried to standardize things some. It's mostly a success, except that it is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the worst culprit of Condition-ization in all of CoD 2e. Tracking your powers in terms of "Applies ___ Condition <printed elsewhere in this book>" but then having the actual power ranks be "As <Condition> but now ___" just reads too clever by half, and ends up over-complicating how to read and learn most of what your characters can do. I won't even get into the ghost-aura deal you have going on, because: hey it's all Conditions only applicable to this one specific thing! Hope you like tracking those instead of just being told what they do up front!

How many of those powers apply Condition that's only used by that power?

# ¿ Nov 17, 2021 02:45

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > World/Chronicles of Darkness: you turning werewolves into wereterriers

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