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Zombies' Downfall posted:Yeah, this is kind of the way I'm leaning. Flat costs with the simple 2.0 numbers, 1 XP per session and maybe 1-2 more for everyone when the party completes major objectives.
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Aug 13, 2016 23:12
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Is there any kind of Dark Ages community out there, especially the Vampire version? I remember there being some really good books in the Dark Ages setting -- Transylvania by Night, Constantinople by Night, the book dedicated to the Muslim world, etc. -- but it seems the historical supplements to Requiem are mostly brief one-shots that have so far avoided the medieval period.
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Aug 14, 2016 00:48
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MonsieurChoc posted:The 2.0 xp system is perfect if you want every game to turn into Archer or Snatch. Not so much for horror. I found it best to rework the dramatic failure system into a fail forward system. It earns a beat, the thing gets done, but there ends up being a complication. E.G. One of the character uses a tazer on a target to take them down, but don't roll any successes. They escalate it into a dramatic failure: the taser works, but it throws the guys heart out of wack and he'll need medical attention as well.
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Aug 14, 2016 02:12
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An actual interesting question came up on the White Wolf forums. What do you think of soulforging in wraith?
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Aug 14, 2016 06:31
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Beats/conditions are not a perfect solution, since they're an additional layer onto a base system rather than having the game be written around them. But having the game incentivising occasional failure in order to create complications that you later overcome is literally good game design. It's the same thing as having a negative Aspect compelled in Fate. You're encouraged to complicate things and make things worse in the short term in order to win in the long term.
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Aug 14, 2016 08:42
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Loomer posted:An actual interesting question came up on the White Wolf forums. What do you think of soulforging in wraith? It always struck me as a step too far in exaggerating how lovely and gloomy the afterlife is, making it too difficult to sympathize with members of the Hierarchy. It took them from morally compromised to entirely indefensible, but the way the setting was built to enforce the practice by making it the only practical means of having any ghostly infrastructure, it didn't strike me as appealing even as a gross injustice to fight back against.
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Aug 14, 2016 11:44
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It's a pretty integral part of the setting though, I can't really imagine Wraith without it.
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Aug 14, 2016 14:41
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My favorite thing about the Hierarchy is how many of the stories in their own book end with "and then we soulforged the hero into a book or something to keep the truth about how it really went down from getting out". Like, they're the Camarilla or Traditions of their setting and even their own book doesn't try to portray them as anything other than barely the least worst force in the Underworld.
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Aug 14, 2016 14:54
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Pope Guilty posted:My favorite thing about the Hierarchy is how many of the stories in their own book end with "and then we soulforged the hero into a book or something to keep the truth about how it really went down from getting out". Like, they're the Camarilla or Traditions of their setting and even their own book doesn't try to portray them as anything other than barely the least worst force in the Underworld. The Invisibles or the Ivory Kingdoms seem marginally better. Jade is definitely worse though.
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Aug 14, 2016 15:36
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More or less the best you can hope for in Wraith is stumbling on a group of wraiths who stay under the radar, work to get the gently caress out to wherever isn't a hellscape of decay with them, and maybe help out your descendents here and there along the way. Anything larger than a handful or a dozen wraiths seems to turn to poo poo with remarkable speed.
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Aug 14, 2016 15:56
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The best part is how all the end states, be it the end of Wraith or the end of Orpheus, have nothing gained from soulforging. Like it's a practice to maintain an order that is powerless in the face of the *real* threats of the Underworld. They ensured all that misery for all those centuries, and it meant nothing. They could have as easily just sat there motionless and ended up no worse off.
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Aug 14, 2016 21:28
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So Deviant sounds like it might be good, and a necessary palate cleanser after a much worse 'new' line. I think it would work great for that really. Up the sci-fi stuff but let's you keep the weirdness that the X-Men deal with like demon attacks or Dracula trying to seduce someone. Low powered bizzare superheroes is what a lot of WoD and CoD games end up as anyways, this seems like it would do it the best.
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Aug 15, 2016 22:55
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neaden posted:I think it would work great for that really. Up the sci-fi stuff but let's you keep the weirdness that the X-Men deal with like demon attacks or Dracula trying to seduce someone. Low powered bizzare superheroes is what a lot of WoD and CoD games end up as anyways, this seems like it would do it the best. So you pretty much just want Doom Patrol the Game?
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Aug 15, 2016 23:58
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Senior Scarybagels posted:So you pretty much just want Doom Patrol the Game? I mean, I do.
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Aug 16, 2016 00:35
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Senior Scarybagels posted:So you pretty much just want Doom Patrol the Game? Maybe? I thought Morrison's run on New X-Men was so awful that I've never touched anything else he's done. Guyver X-Men with some Scanners, X-Files, Fringe, and Infamous sounds good though.
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Aug 16, 2016 00:42
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neaden posted:Maybe? I thought Morrison's run on New X-Men was so awful that I've never touched anything else he's done. Guyver X-Men with some Scanners, X-Files, Fringe, and Infamous sounds good though.  I mean its not Guyver X-Men.
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Aug 16, 2016 01:00
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neaden posted:Maybe? I thought Morrison's run on New X-Men was so awful that I've never touched anything else he's done. You have missed so exceptionally little, and I wish I had taken this same path in life.
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Aug 16, 2016 02:45
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This is going to be an interesting thread. "Keeping World of Darkness Dark and Believable: More sexism and racism please"
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Aug 16, 2016 17:45
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Loomer posted:This is going to be an interesting thread. "Keeping World of Darkness Dark and Believable: More sexism and racism please" Nopenopenopenope
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Aug 16, 2016 19:18
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Loomer posted:This is going to be an interesting thread. "Keeping World of Darkness Dark and Believable: More sexism and racism please" that's a lot of loving 
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Aug 16, 2016 19:19
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 in my dark fantasy tabletop game? Who would of thunk it.
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Aug 16, 2016 19:24
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I feel stupider for having read that.
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Aug 16, 2016 19:31
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Loomer posted:This is going to be an interesting thread. "Keeping World of Darkness Dark and Believable: More sexism and racism please"
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Aug 16, 2016 19:33
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The scary thing is that Paradox might actually think so
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Aug 16, 2016 19:41
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Lay on Hands posted:that's a lot of loving
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Aug 16, 2016 19:40
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I'm staying way the gently caress away from that thread because I know, as bad as I think it will be, it will actually be worse.
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Aug 16, 2016 20:35
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My "favorite" part is that the first response, rather than being " What is WRONG with you?" is "Oh, you're foreign? Where are you from?"
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Aug 16, 2016 20:59
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Usually not a good sign when someone uses words like 'deviance' and 'divergent sexuality' to refer to homosexual characters.
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Aug 16, 2016 21:29
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Loomer posted:This is going to be an interesting thread. "Keeping World of Darkness Dark and Believable: More sexism and racism please" The worst thing for me is not how absolutely lovely this person is, but their whole "gee I'm just trying to have an interesting conversation about some positive changes to make to the game!" gimmick as to why the game needs to be all about straight men.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:04
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ProfessorCirno posted:The worst thing for me is not how absolutely lovely this person is, but their whole "gee I'm just trying to have an interesting conversation about some positive changes to make to the game!" gimmick as to why the game needs to be all about straight men. Straight white men, Cirno, you forgot the guy's objection to a black woman with a sword as a Gangrel representative. EDIT: I'll never understand why people feel the need to add revision to historical settings in order to fit their modern perspective of historical events. Yeah, European (and particularly, American) history was not kind to women or people of color, and actual bad things that happened to those groups are often conveniently ignored by the Realism (sic) crowd. But the same people manage to (somehow) project entirely modern perspectives of 'normal' onto those selfsame cultures, glossing over real examples of multiculturalism or nuanced attitudes toward women and homosexuality than is apparent at first blush with history. Which is neither here nor there. Even if we accept that 'real' history was a world entirely 'about' straight white men (I don't) that's not the story the players have to tell. The average example of anything is irrelevant because it should be about the player characters - who should represent things that a player would actually want to play. Ugh. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 22:11
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Latest episode is up http://networkzero.podbean.com/e/network-zero-3/ The Devil You Know Chris, and David discuss Inferno, a book from 1st edition, but that is still filled with lots of excellent ideas for games. We discuss using demons in your games, and suggestions on ways to make use of the book in Chronicles of Darkness 2nd Ed. In the Kirlian Camera segment, they look at the following films; Constantine Rosemary’s Baby The House of the Devil Hellraiser Devil Fallen and more.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:21
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Loomer posted:This is going to be an interesting thread. "Keeping World of Darkness Dark and Believable: More sexism and racism please" And now the thread has vanished into the aether.
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Aug 16, 2016 23:47
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Mendrian posted:Which is neither here nor there. Even if we accept that 'real' history was a world entirely 'about' straight white men (I don't) that's not the story the players have to tell. The average example of anything is irrelevant because it should be about the player characters - who should represent things that a player would actually want to play. Yeah this kind of thing has always been bizarre to me because the entire point of most RPGs is that the player characters are special people with unique agency. This is most apparent in D&D and D&D-derived fantasy games, which both grant the player characters superhuman abilities and stress that the nature of "adventurers" is to be set apart from the average person if only by virtue of whatever wanderlust and insanity leads you to take up that career, but it's true of basically any game. Who has a more interesting story to tell than the only female knight in the land? Who has more of a reason to run away and fall in with vampires or whatever than an LGBT kid in an abusive home? Who's more likely to attract the attention of bizarre supernatural powers than the outsider or other? It's astounding how stupid the argument is when you think about it for even half a second. If anything it makes sense for minorities to be over-represented as PCs and antagonists in most games. EDIT: And yeah, you're also right that there's a bizarrely obsessive adherence to wanting to force the PCs to deal with the consequences of racism or sexism even in stories that aren't really about that. The point of a loving game is to have fun, and if your players don't think interacting with the Klan is fun, you should probably ask yourself why you're forcing them to. Baku fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 23:53
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Zombies' Downfall posted:Yeah this kind of thing has always been bizarre to me because the entire point of most RPGs is that the player characters are special people with unique agency. This is most apparent in D&D and D&D-derived fantasy games, which both grant the player characters superhuman abilities and stress that the nature of "adventurers" is to be set apart from the average person if only by virtue of whatever wanderlust and insanity leads you to take up that career, but it's true of basically any game. gently caress, that's how WW got its start, really. Wanting to play all the loser and rejects and the people ignored.
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Aug 17, 2016 02:20
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Mendrian posted:Straight white men, Cirno, you forgot the guy's objection to a black woman with a sword as a Gangrel representative. These people rarely read history, and when they do, it's usually popular history which is a strong redoubt even now of the Great Man hypothesis and other outdated models of history. In that thread the example was given of how the Ahrimanes are bad and lame because they have no problem with trans people, and vikings hate that! It's a great illustration of this kind of bullshit because it's an utterly baseless claim without modern attitudes of 'people don't like trans people in the past' backing it. Meanwhile, we know approximately dick about how vikings actually felt about transgender people. All we know is that they weren't down with homosexuality, but that was more because it was perceived to make you more inclined towards being a follower and not a strong leader. Actually being gay is on ambiguous territory depending on how you like to gently caress since it was considered 'unmanly' to get hosed up the rear end - but so was wearing your hair wrong or not wearing enough silk or casting certain types of magic - but if you aren't a man, like a transwoman isn't, it no longer applies to you, or at worst, it does but no one gives a gently caress since you've surrendered any concern with your perceived manliness. The same term for 'a passive homosexual' was also declared to happen to everyone as a natural consequence of getting old to boot, so it goes far beyond 'ew gay sex' and into cultural notions of virility and strength. So, not only do we not know if vikings hate it, but any possible basis for them hating it is based on a misconception about homosexuality in the viking world. (Incidentally, even speaking of homosexuality in it is a bit of a misnomer. The rigid dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality is a fairly modern creation, and outside of a few ancient cultures, up until about the 1700s you see a lot of gay poo poo being accepted as just a part of life, and even after it's still very common but in slow decline until the dichotomy is firmly established in the late 1800s. So that's another strike against 'vikings didn't like The Gays, therefore they don't like trans people' as a theory.) Meanwhile, Norse literature features plenty of shieldmaidens and women living as men, Odin fairly regularly goes 'gently caress your gender boundaries' and learns secret women's business or becomes a woman, and Loki... Well, Loki's a whole kettle of fish on his own. There's even a solid theory that there was a class of transvestite Norse priests. But no, vikings don't like transpeople because... ???. Therefore, the Ahrimane are bad because they don't hate transpeople.
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Aug 17, 2016 03:31
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Not to mention the relatively recent revelation that a number of Viking graves containing women were once thought to be men because they were buried with arms and armor.
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Aug 17, 2016 03:51
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They still aren't sure if those are weapons they used or status symbols, but yeah, they definitely add to the picture that there was more going on around gender roles and people's lives than was recorded.
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Aug 17, 2016 03:54
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If I can't play Thor in a wedding dress, then I don't want to play a Viking.
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Aug 17, 2016 07:49
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Mendrian posted:Which is neither here nor there. Even if we accept that 'real' history was a world entirely 'about' straight white men (I don't) that's not the story the players have to tell. The average example of anything is irrelevant because it should be about the player characters - who should represent things that a player would actually want to play. My favorite take on this was in relation to "realism" in fantasy games and went something like this: "Yes, it's true that most people in medieval Europe weren't black. But if anything it's more true that most people in medieval Europe weren't kings, wizards or precocious orphans destined to save the land from the Dark Lord Nigulban, and I don't see you complaining about any of that poo poo." Loomer posted:(Incidentally, even speaking of homosexuality in it is a bit of a misnomer. The rigid dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality is a fairly modern creation, and outside of a few ancient cultures, up until about the 1700s you see a lot of gay poo poo being accepted as just a part of life, and even after it's still very common but in slow decline until the dichotomy is firmly established in the late 1800s. So that's another strike against 'vikings didn't like The Gays, therefore they don't like trans people' as a theory.) This is probably my biggest bugbear in this context; the assumption that not only has every human society that ever existed had the exact same opinions about lgbt+ people, they've had the exact same ideas about what an lgbt+ person is. A major reason that it's so hard to speculate about, say, what the vikings thought about trans people is that we have no idea if they even thought of "trans people" as a thing that existed. There were almost certainly individuals we would classify as trans today, but there's no telling if they were thought of as an identity unto themselves, as several completely different identities, as the same thing as being gay or just as that weird thing Gunnar does. Incidentally, this is an area where you have to be really wary of historians reading way too much (or way too little) into the source material. For example, one piece of evidence for the idea that the ancient Norse stigmatized passive but not active homosexuality is a passage from the Poetic Edda where Sinfjötli is having a contest of insults with King Gudmund and says something along the lines of "Yeah, I hosed you and you're having my wolf-babies." Which to me seems a lot like noticing a 13-year-old on Xbox Live saying he's going to "gently caress me" and concluding that it's completely socially acceptable for American adolescents to engage in man-man anal sex as long as they're the one doing the dicking. (Using this line as evidence is actually particularly disingenuous because Sinfjötli spends the two preceding stanzas calling Gudmund a "witch" and "a woman false", so it's pretty clear that he's just capping off a sequence of "haha you're a woman" insults, not saying "I made sweet love to your hairy man-rear end". And for anyone who's wondering, it's specifically wolf-babies because Gudmund's previous insult was claiming that Sigfjötli is a werewolf, making "I got you pregnant with wolf babies" the ancient Norse equivalent of replying to "You're ugly limp-dicked loser" with "Your mom wasn't complaining last night.") Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 14:42
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We can state pretty definitively that race wasn't viewed anywhere near the way modern people see it, though. Much less to do with skin color than location of birth, for example, and of course religion. (The Vikings notably were quite liberal in race, intermarrying among basically everyone they met, including the Turks. Varangian Guard and all that.)
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Aug 17, 2016 14:51
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