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Mendrian posted:Well I mean not to be too blithe buy aren't these literally Aspergers symptoms? Maybe really, really untreated cases of autism, but I never acted like that even at my  iestKurieg posted:To be fair it's basically Necromunda on a smaller geographical scale. Yeah, but there's no mystery of "How did this happen, what happened to the rest of the world, is something bigger going on, etc." in 40K, which is what interests me about the premise.
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Dec 16, 2015 04:57
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It sounds like Nobilis meets Tower of God and I wish it was a published book so I could buy it and read it and publicly dismiss it as unplayable while secretly wishing I had people I could trust to play it with.
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Dec 16, 2015 07:29
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It's definitely a neat premise, either the building tribes or God-building or both, and I might nick it for use in Ironman (make domains into skills, hero powers are miracles) or such. Speaking of, might be doing a game this week, either a Christmas theme I can bullshit up, or "World's Sexiest
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Dec 16, 2015 08:41
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Kavak posted:Maybe really, really untreated cases of autism, but I never acted like that even at my Fair enough; I'm literally ignorant on the topic. I thought I remembered something about 'moral absolutes' or 'zero shades of gray' or something like that but that goes to show what you get for trying to play arm-chair mental health expert based on half-remembered information. I have a deep distaste for systems that center on lie detection. Most of them come back to Henry. His name is not Henry but we'll call him Henry. How Henry Ruined Every Scene I had never played a LARP before. I was no stranger to Vampire; I loved it. I had hopped aboard the Requiem train around 2004 and found a great little local LARP after I switched universities. It was pretty newb friendly and the cast had a good sense of drama and player management. Well, with a couple of exceptions. See some of the players were so entrenched in the scene that they were sort of hard to get rid of. They were good friends with other players. They showed up to every game, religiously. Some were just a little odd or obsessive. But not Henry. Henry was actively poisonous to the game. I didn't know that, at first. I had only ever played table top games up to that point. Over the course of the next several years I would learn that Henry was a terrible player, first in my role as a PC and eventually as an assistant ST. The first thing I learned was that this guy had played almost exactly the same character in several games. The core character was some kind of Eastern European (non-specified) forge-master named (ugh changing names again I guess) Malek. Malek was a father-knows-best character who had a deeply entrenched notion of always doing things the 'right' way. He (claimed that he) had zero self-interest or ulterior motive. He would express rage and disappointment when anyone displayed any kind of duplicity. He was a member of both the Ordo Dracul and the Circle of the Crone which if you aren't familiar with the setting is like being a member of both the NRA and PETA; they aren't intrinsically opposed but they disagree on enough that you'll have a hell of a time at dinner parties. He did not see a conflict with this. When others pointed out the conflict he just stressed that he was basically a perfect transparent tool that should definitely be allowed to learn any kind of magic he could so he could, as he would say out of character often and loudly, 'solve the plot.' I was deeply intimidated by LARPing for the first probably four or five games. It was a blast that left a deep impression on me. On my first game Malek cornered my character. He looked me deep in the eye and demanded to know if 'had anything magic' on me. I don't know if anybody here has played Vampire before but the question sort of threw me for a loop. I didn't consider that I could have anything magic on me. Was my blood magic? I asked him to clarify OOC and he informed me he was using a ritual to see if I was carrying anything magic on me. When I informed him I didn't and didn't think I could be finding any Daggers+1 nearby he seemed satisfied and left me to my devices. This would be the most pleasant interaction we would ever have over the course of our relationship. I forget the circumstances of it exactly but there had come into question whether or not my character was housing a hated member of the Court. I wasn't, but nobody else knew that. There was a lot of pretty fun tension around that ambiguity. Fortunately for me fun tension was not something Henry could abide so he cornered me again and subjected me to a battery of questions backed up by at least three separate checks to verify the truth of every statement I made. The whole thing was pretty exhausting and rife with tedious technicalities. One power allowed to tell if I was being duplicitous; another compelled me to tell the truth. Finally he'd perform a basic 'sense motives' action to ensure his powers corroborated his experience. It was important for him to do this because he felt (he told me this sometimes OOC) that anyone who did any less was 'incompetent'. He couldn't fathom operating on anything less than perfect information. This got out of hand once he started learning about all the squirrely ways vampires can avoid lie detection. A vampire can hypothetically get a friend to erase their own memories of anything bad they did, thus rendering truth detection moot. So Henry had to learn the power (or find someone who already knew it) that could reverse the process. Particularly resistant or powerful vampires could just resist Henry's powers entirely so he had to find ways to make redundant checks or calibrate his powers for maximum effect. So why is this obnoxious in a game about lying and politics? I mean I could see making a character like this work; you're just some paranoid jerkwad who demands nothing less than absolute truth from everybody you interact with. Sure. But Malek was not that. Malek was an incredibly annoying character who needed to know absolutely everything about everything before he'd decide to believe it or not. It required him to pull out this huge bag of tricks to commit to something. And even when he had them he just couldn't understand why someone would want to undermine another character or why his obviously pure intentions weren't worthy of both praise and reward. It was like the whole thing was motivated by a need to be morally superior to everyone else. Once I became an ST I learned how much of a jerk Henry could be, from outright cheating to trying to force the staff to let him get away with stuff through bullying but that's another post.
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Dec 16, 2015 09:10
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LARPers are the worst thing, IRL or online. I remember back on the White Wolf Moderated Chat that the largest Werewolf pack in Chicago, the Diamond Dogs I believe they were called, went to a meeting with a vampire or something. PMing the STs, he made a bunch of rolls to have his cronies boobytrap their cars. When the STs told the pack this, they threw a fit and insisted that they had all taken the subway, they had just forgotten to mention it- I'm pretty sure some of their posts directly contradicted this, but that didn't stop them. The STs were basically whined into retconning that poor player's clever plan out of existence.
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Dec 16, 2015 09:38
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Re: evil campaigns, just never sell them as such. Call it a crime campaign, or a "lovely people" campaign, or a "ruthless powermongering" campaign. Just something more specific and mundane than "evil". Seriously. Players who aren't hosed in the head are entirely capable of playing unambiguously bad people without going overboard. Yet the word "evil" itself just conjures up the idea of moral absolutes that leads to characters that are less "complete rear end in a top hat" and more "incarnation of violence and cruelty". Guildencrantz fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Dec 16, 2015 |
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Dec 16, 2015 14:55
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Mendrian posted:the story of "Henry" and "Malek" and why I drank after every game The fact that it took both factions over a year to concoct a scheme to murder his character for what amounts to a pretty cut-and-dry death penalty offense amazes me.
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Dec 16, 2015 15:41
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Mendrian posted:How Henry Ruined Every Scene This wasn't Isles of Darkness, was it?
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Dec 16, 2015 15:55
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Guildencrantz posted:Re: evil campaigns, just never sell them as such. Call it a crime campaign, or a "lovely people" campaign, or a "ruthless powermongering" campaign. Just something more specific and mundane than "evil". I think it's just shorthand from D&D alignments? The expectation of most D&D campaigns is that you're a group of good or neutrally aligned fellows ranging from heroic to mercenary, and usually setting out opposed to some evil force. So the opposite of that is the 'evil campaign'. Though yes the term 'evil' is pretty loaded.
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Dec 16, 2015 16:11
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No, it wasn't, but the fact that this is a common enough description that other people recognize it in their own circles is sadly unsurprising.
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Dec 16, 2015 16:12
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Skellybones posted:I think it's just shorthand from D&D alignments? The expectation of most D&D campaigns is that you're a group of good or neutrally aligned fellows ranging from heroic to mercenary, and usually setting out opposed to some evil force. So the opposite of that is the 'evil campaign'. Though yes the term 'evil' is pretty loaded. D&D is a bad game
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Dec 16, 2015 16:43
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Skellybones posted:I think it's just shorthand from D&D alignments? The expectation of most D&D campaigns is that you're a group of good or neutrally aligned fellows ranging from heroic to mercenary, and usually setting out opposed to some evil force. So the opposite of that is the 'evil campaign'. Though yes the term 'evil' is pretty loaded. You're correct that "evil campaign" is just people aping the alignment spectrum of D&D as a shorthand, but it's still wrong insofar as the D&D alignment system is wrong. Simply branding your campaign/party as evil does nothing to explain their goals and motivations. In much the same way, simply branding your campaign/party as good does nothing to explain their goals and motivations either, which is why the 'murderhobo' problem exists. Why is Bob rifling through random the corpses of dead enemies if they're ostensibly good? You may work for the King of Lightveria, and you may be working against the Dark Lord of Darkness, but just because you've taken sides doesn't necessarily mean that you're supposed to be behaved. Removing that 'good' tag and replacing it with at least 'does not want to die' eliminates the awkwardness, much in the same way that removing the 'evil' tag and replacing it with 'a goal that I am willing to compromise my scruples for' also makes for more believable characters.
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Dec 16, 2015 17:01
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To clarify on the earlier question, I'm no a trained psychologist or therapist, but autism-spectrum disorders seem to be a part of my family history, and this sort of behavior seems different from what I'm familiar with. I mean, sure, it could be related; my dad, for instance, views morality through an extremely polarized lens. Do good or be evil; there isn't much grey area, and he believes absolutely in rational actor theory. Life experience has forced him to modify his theory to take into account extenuating circumstances and emotional states, but he has an odd way of characterizing these as environmental factors, and still believes every decision, no matter how split-second or how drug-addled, is absolutely rational and reflective of the whole philosophy of the person making the decision. How this relates in his own mind to his 'decision' to break down into a crying, screaming temper-tantrum when too many people are talking over each other at once I was never able to determine; it can be a difficult philosophy to get along with, obviously. That said, my brother doesn't seem to have that polarized world-view in spite of his own difficulties with crowds or social interaction, and most of the people I've met with that very specific 'belief is reality/fiction means lies' mind-set were still very out-going and social, they just clashed with nearly everyone they interacted with, which my brother and dad wouldn't have been able to handle and still remain gregarious. The problem remains that I don't know how to characterize that attitude, or whether it is truly something that has any clinical study or is just some oddly specific fringe-case belief system I've just had the misfortune of running into. Like, I guess it could be a feature of a personality disorder, consistent with the mental gymnastics and sheer perseverance in the face of opposition. Or it could be some rider to the kind of magical thinking and distorted perspective you see in schizophrenia or some related disease. Or, you know, it could just be some weird isolated motherfuckers reading the wrong drat literature in adolescence. I just don't know, and it's loving weird.
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Dec 16, 2015 17:14
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The goodies won the culture war. For some reason being evil is seen as a bad thing!
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Dec 16, 2015 17:15
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Shady Amish Terror posted:The problem remains that I don't know how to characterize that attitude, or whether it is truly something that has any clinical study or is just some oddly specific fringe-case belief system I've just had the misfortune of running into. Like, I guess it could be a feature of a personality disorder, consistent with the mental gymnastics and sheer perseverance in the face of opposition. Or it could be some rider to the kind of magical thinking and distorted perspective you see in schizophrenia or some related disease. Or, you know, it could just be some weird isolated motherfuckers reading the wrong drat literature in adolescence. I just don't know, and it's loving weird. The guy that left our group who was like this self-labelled himself a sociopath, including claiming (and being proud of) he can't empathize with others because lol logic. I think we spent a good half-hour trying to explain to him why one shouldn't be proud of that fact. He also had some weird beliefs like charismatic people are automatically dangerous because they mind-control people ("Look at hitler!") - you can imagine the hell of someone playing a character with high charisma around this guy.
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Dec 16, 2015 17:42
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the_steve posted:Agreed. It seems like a setting I really want to play, and the only thing really loving it are the folks in charge, and Justin. I want to throw out a caution around this kind of thinking, since while it makes a lot of sense to think that this is a cool-as-hell setting being ruined by the folks in charge, it's a lot harder than it initially seems to disentangle the setting from the people in charge - specifically from Eva, and her understanding of what a good setting needs. What do I mean by that? Find out in hosed Up Hell Building: Pt VIII wherein we talk about the Primordium, and the conclusion of the game. When last we saw the Primordium, Alexander had just merged with him. As a result, the Primordium acquired Alexander's domains and also became a sapient - if still extremely violent and destructive - being. The Highwaymen all immediately became a raving explosion cult that served the Primordium and sought to destroy all lies, Rem was diagnosed with the infinite incurable anguish that apparently happens any time someone kills a god, and Alexander's one remaining divine friend, Lily - played by Liz - started crying and making everything about her whenever possible. The gods tried to hold a quick trial to determine whether Rem should be punished for killing Alexander, and pretty much every time someone tried to vouch for Rem by pointing out how incredibly dangerous and violent Alexander had been, the following happened: 1) Lily would start crying and insisting that Alexander was really a good person because he was nice to her and you just didn't know him well enough and you were all being unfair and mean 2) Lily's mother - also played by Liz - would shout something like "You're hurting my daughter! Stop this at once!" 3) Another god would gently offer to take Lily somewhere else while people were presenting this part of the evidence 4) Lily would sob and sniff and say that no, she was okay, she should really be here, she'd be okay from now on That happened maybe 3-4 times. On the minus side, it was as unbearable as it sounds, but on the plus side, it effectively set the stage for what would define the game going forward: incredibly long, labored, and fruitless debates on how to solve seemingly intractable problems while trying to avoid the ever-expanding potholes of angst around everyone. See, while the Primordium was just an incoherent rage monster in a box that blew up parts of the building, the PCs were mostly on board with the idea of "kill the Primordium, get yourself a king". Sure, there were some scattered objections - Ben's nameless death god thought monarchies were dumb as hell and wanted to avoid creating a pantheon king if at all possible, and a few gods who knew about the Primordium's tragic angsty backstory were a little uneasy about killing him - but killing the Primordium was presented as a core objective of the game once the gods showed up, and most PCs weren't in a mood to argue. Now that the Primordium was actively talking to the rest of the building, and now that he presented as a tragic, abused child, a lot of the PCs were understandably leery about pursuing the team objective of "keep beating down this traumatized kid". The PCs even agreed to hear the Primordium out and listen to his demands, the chief of which turned out to be "keep my little brother safe". It turned out he had a brother named Angel who had been subjected to the same infinite childhood torture as him, and who was being held on a sort of divine life support just outside the hosed Up Hell Building by the government personnel running the project. Whereas the Primordium had grown into a god of destruction and desolation and gunpowder and all that good stuff, Angel had grown into a god of comfort and salvation and hope. So, alright, this seemed like a reasonable request - we can still kill off the Primordium and stop the constant earthquakes and explosions and death in the building, but let's save his much nicer little brother. It turns out, however, that this is a hosed up game where infinitely bad things happen all the time and you've just got to deal with it. Angel was a sweet and innocent and all-loving being, sure, but it turned out he was also an extremely powerful "psuchephage", or soul-eater, much like Alexander had been gradually turning into. Nobody killed by the Primordium had ever shown up in the underworld, and it turned out that's because Angel had been eating all their souls in an attempt to give them paradise within himself (related: it turns out that the domains of "paradise" and "salvation" inherently make you a soul-eater in this setting). So if the PCs freed Angel, they had every reason to believe that, sooner or later, he'd do what all soul-eaters inevitably do and start trying to bring bring paradise to the rest of the pantheon by eating them. Moreover, Angel's heart domain was "The Prime Domain" - comfort, solace, the assurance that your cries for help into the void have been heard. Sounds nice, but due to some immutable backstory/setting fuckery, Ben's death god had a heart that was a shadow version of it. If he ever became aware that another god had the real version of his heart, he'd apparently immediately implode. So while everyone was discussing what to do with Angel, there were constant awkward sitcom mentions of "that... you know, that THING we can't tell the death god about", right in front of the death god. If they freed Angel, it'd presumably get exponentially worse to try and have them co-exist without the one instantly causing the other's death. So despite all the well-meaning instincts to just be nice to the traumatized kids for once, the setting apparently demanded that helping ease their pain would result in an equal or greater amount of pain somewhere else. Knowing all of this, the majority of the PCs vote against freeing Angel, but one PC, Sarah, is particularly adamant about it. She's got the support of Lily and a couple other gods played by GMs, and she grinds an entire session to a halt by delivering an incredibly long and guilt-tripping speech in tandem with Lily about how it's everyone's moral responsibility to free Angel because the poor kid has suffered enough. Sarah's god also has some augury powers that give her ready access to secrets, so she makes liberal use of telling the rest of the party just enough information to make her side of the issue look good while refusing to give clarify anything they ask. She also, of course, aggressively tries to recruit the death god to her side of the issue, while withholding the fact that siding with her might literally kill him. With most of the PCs on one side of the issue and the rest of the PCs plus most of the NPCs on the other, the session just sorta ends when everyone's out of time or energy, and there's no resolution on what to do with Angel. The obvious question here is "How the hell does something like that happen?" Surely there would be some mechanism in place to break that kind of gridlock. In fact, a few of the PCs on the "let's not free Angel" side were considering short-circuiting the argument and saving everyone from soul-eating by just assassinating Angel while he was being restrained by the hosed Up Hell Building project. Those plans never went forward, though, partly because they didn't want to antagonize other PCs so directly, and partly because of how Eva always frames issues like this. See, Eva loves providing these preposterously bleak "moral choices" where you either murder a kind-hearted, traumatized child or you let that child eat everyone's soul, but she also makes sure there's always a secret "better way" that the PCs can choose. Of course, all "better ways" except for the one she's specifically thinking of will not work and will probably result in the PC(s) in question being punished, and she makes sure to never give any clues about what that "better way" is. So not only are the PCs being hit by the emotional pressure of making such an awful choice, but they're also being implicitly told that they could avoid the awful choice if only they were as smart as Eva. The game never recovered from that standstill. I proposed to the GMs that Peter could kill the Primordium himself in a cheap shot, reveal his true colors to the remaining PCs who hadn't yet figured out that he was bad news, and set himself as an obvious evil tyrant to the rest of the pantheon. That way, they could move the metaphysical apparatus of the setting forward without having all this blood on their hands. They thought it was worth a shot, but by the time they were ready to implement it, PC interest had withered and the GMs gracefully put the game on "indefinite hiatus". I want to back up a bit here, though, because there's another major lever of control that ties closely into the "There's one secret perfect solution and gently caress you if you don't find it" lever: the setting. Countless times throughout the game, one PC or another had a reaction of "That's really hosed up and I'm not sure I want to deal with that", to which the response was usually a variant of "Yeah, well, that's the setting." Because there was so much Stuff in this building, the PCs consistently got the impression that it was this incredibly well thought out, living, breathing ecosystem, and each part of it depended on each other part. So if they felt this specific aspect of the setting was over-the-line bullshit, or that it made the game less enjoyable for whatever reason, that was tough poo poo. It was, after all, a necessary part of the ecosystem. Which was, of course, total bullshit. Let's look at the idea of a Primordium: the working definition that the PCs had throughout the campaign was "an ancient being of destruction and evil that threatens the world, and that a member of this nascent pantheon must rise up against and defeat in order to claim the title of King of the Gods and lead his or her pantheon into adulthood". That's fairly specific, and if you compare it against existing mythologies, there are some where it fits well, some where it fits if you tilt your head and squint, and there are some where it doesn't really fit at all. But Eva insisted that not only did every pantheon from the myths of our own world exist in this setting, but they also all had their own Primordium. So as an example, in Greek myth, you've got Uranus who was a Primordium defeated by Cronus, who became King and not a Primordium and got overthrown by Zeus, who then became King and defeated another Primordium in Typhon even though he was already King, and then Python is another Primordium even though he got killed by Apollo who is not a King. The Abrahamic God is a soul-eater who ate his Primordium, Satan, before spitting him back out. I have no idea what the gently caress the Primordium in Buddhism is supposed to be. It goes on like that. But even though this poo poo falls apart under the barest scrutiny, it was incredibly important because citing all those examples let Eva say "See? That's just the way it is - if you want to be an adult pantheon, you'll have to kill your Primordium. Everyone else did!" As far as I can tell, Eva had wanted to put her PCs through constant emotional wringers from the beginning, and the setting details that appeared to give rise to those wringers were really just backsolved to answer the question of "How can I gently caress 'em up?" Obviously I don't need a setting to be 100% internally consistent, because trying to model complex things like economies and social structures in your elfgame can lead to major headaches. But when you leave parts of your setting up to simplification and abstraction, then holy God, make sure those abstractions are in service of your players having an enjoyable experience, not in service of putting them through one soul-crushing scenario after another. So when folks say this sounds like a cool setting that's being ruined by Eva... no, it's really not. It's a setting full of cool ideas, sure, but it's also fundamentally a setting that Eva created, with everything that entails. It's also a mechanical system that Eva created, which, haha, gently caress. That's it's own post. Tune in tomorrow for Pt IX, where Ben explains the Twilight Zone Random Mechanical Fuckery Power Hour, with a brief forward from myself on the time I tried in vain to build a character sheet for Peter.
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Dec 16, 2015 19:15
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Part Nine? Man, the hosed-up hell building is the cat-piss that just keeps on giving.
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Dec 16, 2015 19:44
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Part Nine? Man, the hosed-up hell building is the cat-piss that just keeps on giving. It's a Christmas miracle.  Rampant catpiss aside, it is legit fascinating to read.
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Dec 16, 2015 19:46
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Part Nine? Man, the hosed-up hell building is the cat-piss that just keeps on giving. Is this going to be the 12 days of catpiss!?
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Dec 16, 2015 20:28
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1 hosed up hell building and a dragon god going meeeltyyy.
Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Dec 16, 2015 |
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Dec 16, 2015 20:49
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Josef bugman posted:1 hosed up hell building. 2 ripped out eyes
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Dec 16, 2015 20:53
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Senerio posted:2 ripped out eyes 3 rape jokes
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Dec 16, 2015 21:31
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Captain Bravo posted:3 rape jokes 4 tortured orphans
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Dec 16, 2015 21:31
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Kavak posted:I really don't care about the god war stuff, but I love the closed-off apartment block full of tribes idea. Yeah, it sounds like a promising idea that went off the rails pretty quickly. I sympathize with the initial frustration that people thought they'd be playing an inhabitant of the complex only to get stuck playing something else entirely.
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Dec 16, 2015 21:42
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quote:1) Lily would start crying and insisting that Alexander was really a good person because he was nice to her and you just didn't know him well enough and you were all being unfair and mean Who approved THIS
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Dec 16, 2015 22:22
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Golden Bee posted:Who approved THIS To reiterate, someone who really really wanted the game to end with the player characters bringing about the apocalypse and feeling bad about it.
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Dec 16, 2015 22:30
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Kobold eBooks posted:4 tortured orphans
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Dec 16, 2015 22:37
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How Henry Ruined Every Scene Part 2 So from the previous story you might get the impression that Malek was 'merely' a condescending jerk who rolled his eyes at other characters and ground games to a halt by using every special power he could to affirm his rightness. This is true, but it's not where it ends. Henry was also a shameless cheater. In Requiem LARP, you shuffle ten cards (labeled 1-10) and draw one. You add some numbers to it, compare it to difficulty, and that's it. Most people keep the ten cards on their person. You shuffle the whole thing. Then you let your opponent or an ST pick a card to ensure at least some degree of randomization. Not Henry. When I became an ST he became the focus of my one of my anti-cheating campaigns. Henry always seemed to pull a curious number of 9s and 10s unless a check was completely meaningless. If it was he'd draw a 1 or 2, give a fake huff, and just kind of have an 'aw jeez guys, guess it doesn't matter' kind of attitude toward the whole thing. How do I know he was cheating? Because, as I said, he was shameless. I think he tried to hide it behind pretty typical nerd poo poo. "I draw a 10 by force of will" bullshit. What he did was keep his cards to himself, never let anyone touch them (they were 'lucky' of course) and drew a card sometimes before anyone even asked him to. One time I wandered into a scene (as an ST) and saw him with 10 cards laid out on a table, which he had insisted that he had 'preshuffled' When we asked for initiative he of course pulled the ten out of the little pile. When I asked him to pull one of mine he looked like I had slaughtered a goat in front of him. "But I already pulled a card!" he whined. Another way he liked to cheat was by willful misinterpretation of the rules. He had a power - a very basic, inexpensive power, I might add - that could turn a small object invisible. The purpose of this power is to hide objects in plain sight. Well, here's the rabbit hole we went down. Can you make a rug invisible? Sure, of course you can. If you can make a rug invisible, can you make car mat invisible? Well that seems logical. If you can make a car mat invisible, what about a car seat? And so on. The endgame of this was him trying to argue that an entire bike or suit of armor was invisible while tearing rear end down the street, which is clearly not the intent - but every time somebody tried to curtail a power or tell him no you'd end up in a 45 minute argument about all prior rulings like you were dealing with a loving legal precedent. This wasn't the only power he abused - he would try to test to limits of every power he had and could site chapter and verse about which STs allowed him to get away with what. This story eventually ends with him being unable to tell why pissing off two opposing superpowers is a bad idea and then freaking out with a revenge character that nearly broke the furniture IRL but that's another post.
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Dec 16, 2015 22:43
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By superpowers do you mean supernatural big dudes or did he have both the US and China gunning for him?
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Dec 16, 2015 23:09
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The short version is that he was a member of both the Ordo Dracul and the Circle of the Crone, two Requiem factions which, as Mendrian noted, are generally opposed philosophically but not necessarily outright at war. I won't step on Mendrian's toes on this one, but for a long time this status held for a number of reasons until eventually word got around to the authorities in both covenants and pretty much everyone was out for his blood. The fact that he was clueless as to why two opposed major factions in the city were pissed at him for dipping from both of their closely guarded magical secrets remains one of the greatest mysteries about this dude, topped only by "why was he playing Vampire in the first place" and "why did anyone put up with him." E: I should add that this is the same dude who was referenced in an earlier post, playing a Unicorn Lawyer with a giant invisible oar in a Changeling LARP. He showed up to the college campus that housed the game with an actual oar as a prop, and is the dude referenced here. PantsOptional fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Dec 16, 2015 |
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Dec 16, 2015 23:18
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I think the fact that he hosed up being a goddamn Unicorn Lawyer speaks volumes about him.
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Dec 17, 2015 01:54
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I might be confusing my WoD games here, but wouldn't an invisible oar in changeling quickly become a very visible oar to most characters?
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Dec 17, 2015 02:16
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Buddha is the Primordium of Buddhism, because you're supposed to kill him if you meet him. Duh. Edit: Jesus Christ, he was Oar-Wielding Unicorn Lawyer?! Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Dec 17, 2015 |
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Dec 17, 2015 03:29
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Bieeardo posted:Edit: Jesus Christ, he was Oar-Wielding Unicorn Lawyer?! When you say it like that, it sounds like a cartoon I'd want to watch, but only when I'm drunk.
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Dec 17, 2015 03:50
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PantsOptional posted:When you say it like that, it sounds like a cartoon I'd want to watch, but only when I'm drunk. Yeah, that's a story that needs to be told now.
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Dec 17, 2015 03:56
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goatface posted:I might be confusing my WoD games here, but wouldn't an invisible oar in changeling quickly become a very visible oar to most characters? Chimerical (make-believe) matter, of which Changelings, their gear, and the monsters under the bed were composed, wasn't explained all that well in the original corebook... which easily leads to dumb shenanigans with people like this. Regarding the Building from Hell, it strikes me that rolling your own wouldn't be too difficult. Come up with an internally consistent metaphysic, some background information on why the hell the thing was built, and start the PCs off as fledgling gods. Borrow some civilizations from the Starlost, or the Paradise Towers serial from the old Doctor Who... or from something with a slightly less silly pedigree, and Bob's your uncle.
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Dec 17, 2015 06:36
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Shady Amish Terror posted:To clarify on the earlier question, I'm no a trained psychologist or therapist, but autism-spectrum disorders seem to be a part of my family history, and this sort of behavior seems different from what I'm familiar with. I mean, sure, it could be related; my dad, for instance, views morality through an extremely polarized lens. Do good or be evil; there isn't much grey area, and he believes absolutely in rational actor theory. Life experience has forced him to modify his theory to take into account extenuating circumstances and emotional states, but he has an odd way of characterizing these as environmental factors, and still believes every decision, no matter how split-second or how drug-addled, is absolutely rational and reflective of the whole philosophy of the person making the decision. How this relates in his own mind to his 'decision' to break down into a crying, screaming temper-tantrum when too many people are talking over each other at once I was never able to determine; it can be a difficult philosophy to get along with, obviously. Black and white thinking (aka. all-or-nothing thinking) is called splitting in psychology. Almost everyone's brain grows out of it but a few people don't. It's also one of the things used to diagnose people with borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder. Not enough information to tell if this Justin feller is BPD, but there's a 110% chance he's a splitter.
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Dec 17, 2015 09:08
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Corvinus posted:Not enough information to tell if this Justin feller is BPD, but there's a 110% chance he's a splitter. 110% doesn't work like that, thus your entire post is a damnable lie and you are Evil.
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Dec 17, 2015 12:04
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So I'm going to finish up my Henry story and I can let Pants tell the Changeling story, if he wants. It is a shorter but no less unhappy tale. How Henry Ruins Every Scene, Part 3 By now it's been established that Henry was playing a condescending rear end in a top hat and was also a cheater, but he was also a massive time sponge. I took over one of the game's major factions mid-stream; the Ordo Dracul. The Ordo devoted itself to the scholarly pursuits of vampirism which included any and all esoteric study. The previous ST in charge of the Ordo hadn't really done anything with it. The PCs didn't feel any real benefit to being in the faction and there was no unified identity. So I decided to throw them a bone (and they were the largest faction at the time). I decided to hold a Caucus. The Ordo Caucus is basically just a big gathering of Ordo from a given city (or, since we were in a small city, I decided to run it as a regional thing). It was almost entirely conducted via email and the point was to let the PCs choose various lectures to attend. I'd write up the lecture with at least one usable nugget of occult lore that was directly applicable to game. Then I'd give them an opportunity to discuss their findings with each other or NPCs. Henry was as previously discussed a member of both the Ordo Dracul and the Circle of the Crone. The two factions did not get along. The Circle hated the Ordo because the Circle considered the vampire-condition to be a sacred thing. The idea of putting it under the microscope was either henious or blasphemous depending on who you asked. The Ordo hated the Circle because the Circle hoarded its occult knowledge and had a lot of very badwrong opinions (from their perspective) on being a vampire. Henry had taken some but very few pains to keep the fact that he was double-dealing a secret. Unfortunately for him a different PC found out and had leaked the information to the Ordo's leadership prior to the Caucus. Things came to a head when Malek asked to speak to that leadership on unrelated matters. The local leader confronted Malek and explained that the double-dealing would not stand. OOC I had resolved to give him three options. I didn't want to just exile or kill him because I thought that would be unfair to Henry - the previous STs had been cool with the whole thing and I think he had an honest misunderstanding about it. So his choices were: give up all ability to study further in the Ordo Dracul but maintain the status quo; leave the Ordo (presumably to join the Circle full-time); or denounce the Circle and teach the Ordo leadership whatever magic ritual secrets he'd learned from the Circle. Also the fact that another PC was responsible for the leak made me feel like the whole thing should have some gravitas; I wasn't just arbitrarily screwing him for my own enjoyment. He... did not take this well. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, first IC and then OOC. He made many impassioned arguments to the leadership of both Covenants about why can't we all just get along, which only served to alienate him further. I had two extremely drawn out conversations with him via email to explain exactly what his options were and he didn't like any of them. It came out that he had originally wanted to learn magic from all three of the major magic sects for the purposes of plot solving and he just couldn't understand why anyone - particularly other PCs - would ever stand in his way. I'm glossing this over for brevity but I want to be clear that this became a major focus of the game for months because he couldn't just make a god damned decision. Eventually the Circle leadership caught wind of it too and just outright exiled him, unless he atoned and denounced the Ordo. At this point Henry decided to 'sit out' of game. He would show up and then passive aggressively sit on a bench near the out-of-game room for hours while his last remaining ally in the city tried to argue with various leaders to get Malek un-exiled. On the ST side of things we really just wanted him to make a choice; and I think we told him that straight forwardly on a bunch of occasions but he refused to accept that there wasn't some third option that would allow him to come back into the fold with nothing changed. The Ordo leadership had given him a time limit and as that limit approached all the vampires that Malek had crossed started to get antsy. Once it became clear that the Prince wasn't interested in protecting a vampire who wasn't even staying in his city (the bench was supposed to represent some nebulous place outside of the city proper) they formed a short lived cross-faction mob to hunt him down. Since he'd spurned both of his sects and also the city's leadership, nobody even tried to stop them. He was found and killed almost moments after the aforementioned time limit was met. That would have been the end. Henry was convinced his character's knowledge was the only glue holding the city together and to spite everyone who had failed to protect him he made a revenge character; he'd made a Daeva who was... how do I put this bluntly... well, I'll just say I think he actually wrote the word 'retard' on his character sheet (or something close to it). This was a character meant to make people suffer. He would storm into rooms, use Majesty (supernatural power that makes people love you) just to make them uncomfortable and then demand they do something embarrassing before walking out. He wandered into one scene that another ST was running and kicked/tossed a chair (a real chair, IRL, at a college campus) in their general direction before literally storming out in a huff. I can't remember if that character was also killed or if Henry just never showed up again. Really the worst part of interacting with Henry was the incredibly insipid questions he would ask us as STs, trying to root around for answers that he wanted. Everything he did had to be 'in the right' because the idea of acting on impulse or for the sake a character's motivations didn't make any sense for him. He actively disliked players who brought in characters that made things unstable because to him the whole city should just be a big machine that churned together to solve each plot-related problems as they arose. I have email threads still buried in my inbox that go pages and pages and pages of us arguing in circles as he tried to get me to answer exactly how auras worked or why an NPC didn't like him (leaving aside the fact that it's not really the job of an ST to tell you OOC why an NPC doesn't like your character). I drank so much liquor because of that game and his character in particular. EDIT: Ah I remember now why he had sat on that bench for months; the Prince had caught wind of all the trouble he was in and just straight up told him to get the hell out of town for a while, until the matter was resolved. So that's a third party who just wanted him to make a god damned choice and he still refused, on the grounds that the city absolutely needed someone who had access to all the special magic powers and hey why aren't you guys helping me come on. DOUBLE EDIT: Also the Prince was played by a PC at the time. In fact, only the Ordo side of the equation really had NPC involvement. I think the Circle may have had an NPC who was the most livid about the whole debacle but the whole Covenant was pretty pissed. Most of this was either initiated or sustained by PC involvement so in a way it was the best thing Henry had ever done for the game. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Dec 17, 2015 |
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Dec 17, 2015 12:34
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Kavak posted:LARPers are the worst thing, IRL or online. I remember back on the White Wolf Moderated Chat that the largest Werewolf pack in Chicago, the Diamond Dogs I believe they were called, I can get behind some Metal Gear Solid LARP.
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Dec 17, 2015 12:39
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