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Minor correction to above: AIUI, it's a stretch to say Greg Stolze designed Demon: the Fallen. He has prominent credits in the supplement line (where arguably the work of redesigning the game into something playable actually happened), but in the core book he's credited as one of about nine contributing authors. The Designers (listed separately from authors) are listed as Andrew Bates, Ken Cliffe, Michael Lee, Rich Thomas, and Steve Wieck, and the overall line developer was apparently Michael Lee. Small thing I know, but I think it's important to emphasise given that Stolze has a reputation for solid system design which Demon: the Fallen (especially from core), ahahahahaha, doesn't exactly measure up to, and you wouldn't want people to think that it's a Stolze-designed game because I bet that even within the constraints of 2002-vintage Storyteller Stolze could design a much better game by himself given full creative freedom than Demon turned out to be.
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Sep 27, 2019 18:29
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Shrecknet posted:Someone talk me out of starting a nwod reqiuem LARP in Durham because i want to tell better stories
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Oct 2, 2019 12:17
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Gerund posted:Looks like Paradox is getting back into the classic World of Darkness tactic of telling people how they can't profit off of their IP after taking a year off after the international incident and losing the Gangrel name:
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Oct 8, 2019 17:38
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Werewoofles: For the last time, get off the loving furniture.
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Oct 9, 2019 14:07
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In case people missed it when it was raised in the TG as an Industry/TG Chat threads: Zak S has sued Mandy Morbid for exposing what a shitter he is. There's a GoFundMe for her legal fees; if you were as annoyed by Swedracula hiring Zak to make a V5 browser game as I was, maybe send something her way.
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Nov 29, 2019 13:54
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Neonates post especially egregious examples of Elders loving up modern-day norms to the "Please show to the PrimoJim ! ! HA ! ! HA ! !" Facebook group.
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Dec 5, 2019 15:19
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i just hope they cling on for another year or two so they can do Demon 20th Anniversary Edition. Of all the oWoD games which need the love, Demon needs it most.
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Dec 11, 2019 19:14
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I Am Just a Box posted:Unfortunately, my guess is that now that Paradox is in charge of the WoD and rolling out their Fifth Edition as licensing fodder, they won't want to allow any more/new 20th Anniversary Editions because it will distract from whatever hypothetical future plans they have for those lines, extending the wait to after they have worked their way through all the other lines.  I suppose Onyx Path's big hope is that they are at least in touch with a lot of the recent freelancers, and because Paradox have shut down all in-house work they still need bodies to actually do the work of writing their new material. On the other hand, maybe those freelancers could do just as good work with a different publisher with a better pay scale for freelancers.
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Dec 11, 2019 19:28
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Desiden posted:OPP does still seem to have the nWoD stuff and exalted, though I have no idea how the financials of those lines play out in terms of keeping the lights on for a company as such. Plus their owned settings in trinity and scion verse. Chronicles of Darkness feels like it's a real tricky one. In an ideal world OPP would just take full ownership of it, seeing how Paradox seems to have no intention of doing anything with it themselves, but it's so intertwined with oWoD (right down to shared concepts between game lines) despite supposedly being a clean slate that that's a big ask. (Requiem is arguably the major sticking point here, given that it has entire clans in common with Masquerade.)
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Dec 11, 2019 20:55
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Joe Slowboat posted:The new simplified book is a one-off, not a replacement for the Core, as I understand it. So it won't change the production rate of splatbooks. And if Essence and 3E are mutually intelligible that makes it easier to do an edition update without disrupting the splatbook production rate, since anything you make for 3E can be used with Essence.
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Dec 11, 2019 23:51
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Rand Brittain posted:Discarding Exalted's traditional crunchy approach in favor of a totally different game would result in an angry schism comparable to Mage Revised or V5. Doing both is a sensible way to do it, so long as they don't completely drop the ball on the design of Essence. Shadowrun Anarchy was a good idea in principle for very similar reasons, but was horrible in execution.
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Dec 12, 2019 12:14
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neaden posted:Shadowrun Anarchy is pretty hosed up though. The pregens are mostly built under old versions of the rules so have various errors, the Cue system is poorly implemented and most people just drop it, it doesn't have enough background in it for it to be your first shadowrun purchase, the story points are implemented oddly, and a bunch of other issues. I wanted to like it but like most stuff Catalyst does it needed a good editor and another couple months of writing.
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Dec 13, 2019 23:02
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That Old Tree posted:Brucato seriously needs to stick solely to churning out his most Kirby-esque extradimensional fantasies, with a stern editor tapping their foot behind him the whole time, and let literally any other experienced WoDhand do all the other poo poo like making a nostalgia product for a game line he kind of hates the premise of. Well, put it this way. I am 100% down with X-card mechanics and trigger warnings and content warnings and everything else the Chuds decry as effete snowflakery. It is no skin off my nose if a product has a robust trigger warning at the front, and it might save someone with more skin in the game from being confronted with triggering content, so why not, right? The extent to which Brucato constantly disclaims the content of the book is astonishing and deeply irritating. It's like he flat-out doesn't trust people not to read the (multiple pages long!) disclaimer he put at the front, or for that matter a disclaimer he put in the book mere pages ago, but has to restate it all over again multiple times, along with a reminder that you aren't using this to make Nephandi PCs are you? Because that would be naughty and bad and make Uncle Satyros sad. Also he has an entire sidebar about "cartoonish evil" vs "realistic evil" and then claims he's serving up the latter despite the fact that it's a book about, you know, cosmic hellraisers out to destroy the multiverse with the help of Cthulhu.
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Jan 30, 2020 17:56
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Mors Rattus posted:He literally doesn't. Before Book of the Fallen, at least one M20 book had a sidebar about how Nephandi would not and would never be playable because portraying that degree of evil would affect your real life self. It reminds me, in fact, of the reason why Exorcist II turned into such a debacle: John Boorman hated the concept of The Exorcist and had previously turned down the director's job on the original, so when they gave the sequel to him he just did his own thing and clearly resented having to tie it into the original to the extent that he did. Except here WW have the licensing oversight to stop Brucato from doing that, so he just turns in the work but whines constantly about having to deal with the subject matter.
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Jan 30, 2020 18:25
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Octavo posted:I don't think this is a particularly helpful way to look at the game. The core of the Traditions v Technocracy conflict is more like the fight over the Dakota access pipeline in which agents of a state and corporate alliance seized resources from a marginalized cultural group, whereas consensus reality is just a conceit to help players imagine that allegedly eternal truths like capitalism might be social constructs. If you can pretend physics is up for grabs, maybe economics and social hierarchies are too. Hard disagree. Consensus reality isn't a figleaf over a "what if", it's a core principle of the game which enforces a swathe of its mechanics and which players are more or less directly invited to engage with and think about in terms of an actual metaphysic, rather than a justification for questioning supposed facts of life. Also, if you follow that metaphor far enough, the implications of consensus reality are monstrous. If any other political system aside from neoliberal capitalism is equally workable and valid, and there aren't any constraints on that, then fascism is just as workable and valid as any other system. By its very nature consensus reality can't declare a subset of worldviews to be beyond the pale because there is no solid ground to build on, unless you insist on the Purple Paradigm being that - at which point Precambrian's complaints are dead on the money.
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Jan 30, 2020 20:08
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VASCU I think most people can get behind as heroes because even taking ACAB into account, the social function of "investigate murder and stop people who get off on murdering from murdering" is probably the least contentious function of the police, which is probably why so much police procedural fiction focuses on it. Even the most radical restructuring of society which largely or entirely eliminates the need for conventional police will likely need murder detectives.
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Jan 31, 2020 09:04
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Morpheus posted:They do mention it in Hunter: the Vigil, do they not? I read it a little while ago and could swear it was in there. 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.
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Feb 6, 2020 22:45
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Some buddies and I started a new Changeling:tL campaign and wow, the 2nd edition rules really do shine. I like how the contracts are pitched such that Changelings are generally quite powerful at their schtick, but their powers aren't so wide-ranging as to give rise to decision paralysis (a la Mage).
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Feb 11, 2020 23:21
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I Am Just a Box posted:Has your group been getting much out of the oneiromancy/hedgespinning rules? Those, and to a much lesser extent some of the example Clarity attacks, are the only things that really felt off for me in Second Edition, with how expensive it is to buy shifts. (Well, that and the new ephemeral entities that explicitly don't have a Twilight Form despite their immateriality, and that of the Helldiver and one of the Shield Contracts, works almost exactly like having a fae "phase" of Twilight. But that's a real nitpicky nerd issue.) I Am Just a Box posted:I haven't had problems with smaller PoD hardbacks. Even the CofD 2e corebooks, while you can still tell the difference, I wouldn't really call flimsy or fragile.
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Feb 13, 2020 07:55
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I will say it before and say it again: Beasts are an awful concept for a splat. Some of that Dragon: the Dragoning stuff and the other toes it steps on, sure, though they may work better as distinct splats or members of existing splats. But not only does nobody sensible want Beasts, nobody asked for Beasts in the first place. If you looked at the game line pre-Beast and were asked what the thematic gaps were and where you see a potential new splat fitting, you would never propose something like Beast. If Supernal Magic wiped the concept of Beast out of our minds tomorrow, nobody would feel that something was missing.
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Feb 13, 2020 17:41
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When you think about it they even fail at their billed purpose of crossover splat. They don't get on with Demons, and so fail the basic test of "can fit into a party containing any other splat" that you'd expect a functional crossover splat to meet, and Onyx Path had to do Contagion Chronicle to get some form of crossover support out there in the end.
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Feb 13, 2020 17:55
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Reading the M20 Book of the Fallen is sure a trip when you have just been reminded of Beast's existence. Phil being all "Goddamnit, only a really terrible rear end in a top hat would publish a game about being a full-on abuser and proud of it!" takes on a new angle then.
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Feb 14, 2020 12:41
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Everyone posted:
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Feb 14, 2020 21:26
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Vavrek posted:I like this idea for understanding or not understanding a splat. Do you have any ideas what those other movies are, or are you just going off a vague impression?
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Feb 15, 2020 00:15
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EimiYoshikawa posted:I mean, obviously Twin Peaks has nothing to do with Changeling The Lost. Nothing! When we were planning the campaign I an currently playing in I decided to be a jazz musician (because 1920s) which immediately made me think "got taught to play in Durance to provide creepy background music for his Keeper's bit of Arcadia", and then the other big Twin Peaks fan among the players decided that during their characters' Durance the character was turned into a raven, so we've declared it canon that where our Keeper comes from the birds sing a pretty song and there's always music in the air. Usually this sort of media shout out would be massively tonally inappropriate but so far it seems to be Changeling working as intended.
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Feb 15, 2020 14:18
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On "why aren't Demons very much like pop cultural demons?" question, I think it'd be really hard to do that in Chronicles of Darkness. I mean, like it or not, pop cultural demons require a setting where pop cultural Christianity is, if not true/the whole truth, at least contains enough of the truth that there's a place called Hell and it stinks of brimstone and its inhabitants look like metal album cover monsters and want to get your soul. If they aren't rebels against something resembling pop cultural Christianity's God, they at the very least represent some form of ideological opposition to whatever your setting has in God's place as the source of benevolence. The problem is that the Chronicles setup doesn't really support this brilliantly. Oh, there's things out there that are superficially similar to that, but the full blown Paradise Lost schtick most people would think of in terms of a demons-as-PCs game just isn't quite there, and to get it you would need to tread on the toes of a bunch of other splats - and the Chronicles have been developed with an eye to do that less than OWoD did. (Remember in OWoD something resembling pop cultural Christianity was broadly true for Demon and, to a lesser extent, Vampire, was basically impossible to reconcile with the metaphysic and ethos of Werewolf, and in Mage its truth fluctuated depending on how well the Celestial Chorus were doing at influencing consensus reality.) Bear in mind also that D:tD came out after the revival of the OWoD with the 20th Anniversary lines, meaning that - at least at the time - the prospect of a Demon: the Fallen 20th line was not out of the question, so there was good reason to make a clear and distinctive difference between D:tD and D:tF. So there's all sorts of good reasons to deliberately steer away from pop-culture demons for the purpose of D:tD, even if this means they don't feel very "demony". (Particularly since if you want pop cultural demons, the Demon Translation Guide does a pretty good job of letting you play D:tF with fixed game mechanics from D:tD.)
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Feb 15, 2020 21:34
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Vavrek posted:I mostly meant movie recs about nWoD Demon, as I have something of a handle on most of the others. (Not so much Geist, admittedly.) "Minimally familiar" meant something like "I know it's not oWoD Demon and I think it's where the whole God Machine thing started." Thanks, though.
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Feb 15, 2020 21:36
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Jhet posted:In the 1e era new world of darkness there was also a blue book supplement, Inferno. That already dealt with the demons and Faustian pacts and things like that. It was only an okay book and while I don’t remember if you could actually play the demons, I do remember it not being a good fit for the rest of the world at the time. One thing I do somewhat miss from the 1E era was the briefer, slimmer blue books like that and the psychics supplement and the like, which seemed to be good testbeds for what would and wouldn't work in the framework of NWoD/CoD. I mean, a better testbed would be a fully supported workshopping and playtesting process, but not even Wizards of the Coast do that for their RPGs any more (if they ever did).
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Feb 15, 2020 23:52
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Nessus posted:Probably the easiest way to lean into this without it being all about how YOU KNOW JESUS? WELL HE SUCKED! would be to cast the PC demons as being part of a disinherited component of some kind of invisible/hidden society of entities - perhaps even ones who had hid amongst mortals or otherwise dwelt among them. There had been a war and the current hegemony is some angel-looking motherfuckers, supported by other groups to some extent, whose members or portions of whose communities chose to join the colonizers' side.
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Feb 16, 2020 11:41
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Nessus posted:It seems like a demons/angels game would be a place where you could include a teeny but explicit link to the Supernal, if I understand the cosmology right.
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Feb 16, 2020 13:40
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The problem vampires have isn't so much consent as it is informed consent. Withhold the information about what you need it for, and the consent is instantly questionable at best when it's given and much more likely to be withheld. Lie, and you've obtained consent under false pretences, and once you're on that slippery slope suddenly it's much easier to violate consent in more fundamental ways and eventually, when you've made a habit of doing so, stop caring about consent altogether. Tell the truth, and you've broken the Masquerade. Which I would argue would be necessary for vampires to have any sort of life or freedom, because even if they are behaving perfectly ethically and are not creepy predators at all... their blood makes you immortal. Their. Blood. Makes. You. Immortal. That makes Vitae the most valuable resource on Earth, and you can bet that even in a hypothetical world where vampires treated humans perfectly decently, you could not say the same about human responses to vampires once that little bit of information is on the playing field.
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Feb 17, 2020 10:03
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Archonex posted:This doesn't really fly with me. It assumes that everyone is going to look at their blood and say "Okay, yeah, I need some of this!". It removes altruism from the equation and is quite frankly odd given how your average person looks at the world.
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Feb 18, 2020 10:33
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Archonex posted:This is the same logic that says that nothing good that could be abused by bad people should be done ever. Nah, it's the logic that says "Ok, now imagine that happening in a world where people like Trump not only exist but thrive. What happens then?" Bad people can be expected to abuse good things. That doesn't necessarily mean good things are impossible, but it does mean that if you don't consider the ways bad people will abuse them, you're being either naive (if the thought of bad people abusing it never occurred to you) or negligent (if you foresaw the abuse but didn't care to consider how to confront and stop it).
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Feb 18, 2020 11:09
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Nessus posted:Leaving aside the moral center of the universe and our rightful liege-lord, I believe that your construction here places an additional, explicit burden upon those who are already conscientious, which in my pragmatic experience will tend to lead to paralysis, indecision, and guilt, because you are essentially centering the blame for various actions away from the people who execute those actions, and instead putting it upon the conscientious. Those who are not conscientious will, of course, not give a poo poo, and will proceed as they will. Let's say I build an orphanage. That's a good thing! Regardless of whatever happens next, I'm still the dude who built the orphanage and claiming like I didn't would be daft. Except I built the orphanage without smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, a sprinkler system, fire escapes... oops. Now, maybe I was just naive there - I just incompetently designed an orphanage because although my heart was in the right place I have no business actually designing a building. If a fire happens and the orphans burn my ignorance definitely contributed to that, but you might come down on the side that I was still morally in the right to build the orphanage in the first place, I was just naive and overconfident and working outside my area of competence. On the other hand, if it turned out I knew full well about the risks of fire in such a building and I go ahead and build it that way anyhow because it's easier - then I'm being negligent. If a fire happens and orphans die then it's ridiculous to say I don't bear part of the blame, even if the fire was set by a third party, because when made aware of a foreseeable risk I made no effort to take appropriate precautions. Sure, the blame primarily lies with the arsonist. But are you actually going to say that no blame lies with me at all? Not even a little? Now take a situation where we know there's bad actors in society. We are not imagining a utopia where all the inconvenient people who don't agree with your vision for the utopia have been re-educated into supporting it or whatever. We are imagining a world largely like the real world, only worse because it's the WoD/CoD setting, and we know drat well that there's lovely people out there. Yes, they bear the primary blame for their actions and that blame should always be centred for them. But the difference between a well-meaning idiot - or, worse, someone who's doing superficially good things in a slipshot, negligent fashion - and someone who is actually going to make a difference in the world is that the person who's going to make a difference in the world takes the bad actors' actions into account. You are not necessarily a morally bad person for not doing so if you fail to do that - but you are pragmatically less effective at best if you don't do it, and again, there comes a point where negligence is so flagrant that actually some of the blame does sit with you, because due diligence is in fact a thing and you ostentatiously shat the bed on it. I mean, maybe these factors will lead to paralysis, indecision, and guilt on the part of people who try to do good things. But if the moral good to be accomplished isn't enough to outweigh your paralysis, indecision, and guilt, evidently you weren't that passionate about doing good to begin with.
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Feb 18, 2020 12:31
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Nessus posted:So does pragmatism or passion determine whether or not the orphanages are built here? This seems to be about creating a situation immune to criticism. There is no such thing possible. To wind the conversation back to the point, this whole thing came out of the thought experiment of whether vampires existing openly and feeding on a 100% consent basis would be a workable solution and coming to the conclusion "Not in today's society, bad actors would wreck poo poo almost immediately". Creating a situation immune to criticism makes for a bad game, of course, because then there's nothing to play for. But it also means that "vampires should just reveal themselves and feed by consent" isn't the moral no-brainer it's made out to be because of the easily foreseen and highly catastrophic consequences that would follow. How you get from a society where mass awareness of the existence of vampires and the properties of vampire blood doesn't lead to the instant commodification of vampire blood and associated utter disasters is a difficult question. Some social changes it makes sense to advocate for immediately, some social chances would be instantaneously exploited by bad actors unless we do prerequisite work to make sure they don't have the power to do that before pushing ahead. "A difficult question" doesn't mean that change shouldn't be sought or worked towards! But blithely saying "You shouldn't acknowledge the difficulties because that's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" is the output of a brokebrained robot who doesn't understand risk management and is >< this close to going on my block list, you dense motherfucker.
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Feb 18, 2020 14:59
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CottonWolf posted:Do we know why there was never a DtF 20? Did Onyx Path just think it wouldn't make enough money?
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Feb 18, 2020 19:45
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Nessus posted:My guess is that it was meant to be Topical and Relevant while not recognizing that VASCU was the mythical FBI. Perhaps they felt that their audience wouldn't buy the idea of heroic PCs who work for Trump? Even though the extent to which any federal employee can be said to work for the President is not cut and dried.
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Mar 5, 2020 10:04
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More general thoughts on Hunter: I had a big red flag moment early on when it seemed like they were putting a lot of emphasis on the Vigil as an in-character concept with genuine currency among Hunters of wildly different groups, even those who wouldn't plausibly have that much contact with each other, rather than an OOC metaphor. Having an IC thing called, say, the Masquerade in Vampire: the Masquerade makes sense when there is a cohesive subculture of vampires who are, if not unified, at least talk to each other enough to make some ideas and bits of terminology common among them. It doesn't make sense to me that CoD-style Hunters would necessarily have the same sort of subculture, especially when you're talking lower-Tier groups who aren't necessarily aware that there's other Hunter group sin the world. If nothing else, if Hunters are talking enough to come up with a common jargon and set of ideas about the nature of what it is that they do, such that the idea of the Vigil as a philosophy becomes commonplace, then they're surely talking enough to get widespread co-ordination of their efforts. (Smooth, seamless co-operation? Not necessarily. But they should be co-operating against stuff which most Hunters can agree is a threat. I can imagine a Hunter faction saying "Wait, no, Mages aren't monsters, they're human beings like us who happen to have special knowledge we can use in the fight against the real monsters", I can see little reason for anyone who could reasonably be called a Hunter to tolerate the existence of Vampires or Beasts.) At which point the setting is a) more locked down in its specifics than I like my CoD stuff to be and b) not scary and isolating enough. tl;dr: As far as I am concerned, Hunters should feel like they are carrying a lonely little light through the darkness, and have little hope of outside aid to accomplish their poo poo. Having a Hunter subculture where different Hunters of different groups talk to each other breaks that - but the lack of such a subculture makes a lot of the book's discussion of the Vigil stop making sense.
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Mar 5, 2020 16:37
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Mulva posted:Like I legitimately do not know what you can do with a new private security group that you couldn't do with VASCU, and conversely I don't know how you'd do the majority of the things VASCU did with a private security group. The badge is, thematically, a big deal. It makes you more explicitly a force of Order ["But the actual FBI is kind of lovely and terrible a lot of the time." you might say. Yes, this is what we call inherent conflict and it's a great thing to have built in to a concept.] and it makes what you are doing have a different meaning. In a sense a rando picking up a shotgun and jumping a vampire is easy. You don't have to build off that, it doesn't have to be anything more than some person trying to make sense of a senseless world. Badge McCourtcase trying to put the cuffs on mechanical Satan and read them their Miranda rights is explicitly trying to say "You are not senseless, you are not beyond justice, you are not special" to things that, manifestly, actually are those things.
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Mar 6, 2020 15:20
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moths posted:Why wouldn't OWoD Jesus have True Faith in, uh, himself? 
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Mar 6, 2020 15:25
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