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I mean, I always got the impression nVampire was about playing a bad person, whose defining character trait is how they justify living off the blood of others. Everything on top of that is cool, sure, but the core of vampire is being a dead thing pretending to be a person. Draugr are what happens when they can't pretend that any longer. There's a great bit in Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum, from the POV of a youngish vampire, about how he became a vampire because he thought it would help him meet girls, only it turns out it's a bit more than that and when he does meet girls, all he can think about is how nice their neck looks. It's played for comedy of course, but it absolutely points to the core of vampire experience: other humans are now food. You are a corpse that kills so that it can continue to pretend to live. Having fluff that supports that is vital to making vampires vampires, frankly. This doesn't mean 'vampires should be mopey' - hell, I'd argue that moping around is far less likely for an inhuman predator in human form than for a human who can never go outside in daylight again. And most young vampires are clearly pretty good at playing at humanity, especially with the various covenants being dedicated to finding something besides feeding to unlive for. But sometimes the mask should slip, and the single-minded hunting horror be revealed.
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Oct 31, 2017 14:47
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean, I always got the impression nVampire was about playing a bad person, whose defining character trait is how they justify living off the blood of others. Everything on top of that is cool, sure, but the core of vampire is being a dead thing pretending to be a person. NWoD had a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the excesses of the oWoD, which 2E has smoothed out a little. See the "NO YIFFING" clause of Ghost Children in Forsaken ending up far more sexist than intended.
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Oct 31, 2017 15:41
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The idea of a vampire's emotions mostly being imitations of their memories gets scary when you have an example of someone like the above who hasn't led a very happy, interesting or varied life in the first place. Sounds like a decent concept for a serial killer type, obsessing over particular archetypes and getting Quite Upset when the people won't play their parts.
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Oct 31, 2017 15:47
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Valatar posted:One of the weird things about nWoD vampires is a section I remember that basically said, "Oh, and vampires don't have souls, so they can't experience new emotions. They think they are, but are actually just remembering emotions from times when they were alive." Well, that and the, "If your vampire sees another vampire they'll flip their poo poo out like sticking two strange cats in a bag together." rule. And perhaps this is peculiar to my experience, but when I played in cross-splat nWoD games, the players who really didn't get it and just wanted hack'n'slash were emboldened by the idea that vampires aren't really people. For the latter, it's meant to enforce how vampires are territorial predators. But again, it's not really necessary. megane posted:I think Undying does it better. When two vampires meet (whether they know each other or not) their immediate instinct is to figure out which of them is higher on the pecking order. So instead of going nuts and running away, instead you just realize instinctively that this guy is bigger, faster, and cooler than you, and could probably feed you your own shoes if he wanted to, which he very well might. Now, what do you say to him? Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Does anyone actually enjoy that oWOD whiney goth style (and is not a horribly broken person IRL)? On occasion I've read people say that V:tM was about personal horror and that V:tR fucks that up, but this is like when you read somebody saying that in 4e, every class is exactly the same. You can immediately tell that they've never even read the book. Joe Slowboat posted:I quite like the idea that vampire emotion is basically deadened and delusional, because A. Only players really dedicated to playing weird inhuman characters will actually do that at all, and B. It very strongly supports the thematic content of the game. If anything, it encourages you to run the kind of campaign some folks ran late in V:tM's life cycle--where it's taken for granted that you're all world-weary antiheroes, and you're supposed to roleplay that, but the meat of your campaign is a gothy version of Planetary where you're trying to, for example, find where Cappadocius is buried. Engaging with the metaplot instead of the themes. Like imagine if The Godfather and Peaky Blinders were supernatural stories where Michael Corleone and Thomas Shelby do crime stuff because combat trauma made them literally lose their soul. It would serve no purpose whatsoever but to make the protagonist far less interesting. (Literally losing your soul as a metaphor for depression works in Dead Inside for reasons that don't translate well to Vampire.) Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Max Schreck: Dracula hasn't had servants in 400 years and then a man comes to his ancestral home, and he must convince him that he... that he is like the man. He has to feed him, when he himself hasn't eaten food in centuries. Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine? And then he remembers the rest of it. How to prepare a meal, how to make a bed. He remembers his first glory, his armies, his retainers, and what he is reduced to. The loneliest part of the book comes... when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table. "Setting his table" refers to Dracula's embarrassment at having only a small child to feed his women. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Oct 31, 2017 |
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Oct 31, 2017 16:06
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Inescapable Duck posted:The idea of a vampire's emotions mostly being imitations of their memories gets scary when you have an example of someone like the above who hasn't led a very happy, interesting or varied life in the first place. I immediately imagined the episode of It's Always Sunny where Charlie's mom gets cancer and when he tell the gang, Dennis is like "Oh . . . no . . . that's . . . uh, that's a bummer?" and when questioned, he explains that he doesn't really have feelings any more, so he's just trying to go through the motions with a bare minimum of effort for the rest of the gang. but later seasons were also pretty on-the-nose about Dennis being a serial killer in hiding, so your analogy checks out.
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Oct 31, 2017 16:37
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Halloween Jack posted:[...] I still don´t get it. Can you be more explicit?
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Oct 31, 2017 16:45
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Mr.Misfit posted:I still don´t get it. Can you be more explicit?
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Oct 31, 2017 16:54
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Not quite -- the scene Schreck was referring to happens a while after Harker's first arrival at the castle. Dracula, chapter III posted:I had hardly come to this conclusion when I heard the great door below shut, and knew that the Count had returned. He did not come at once into the library, so I went cautiously to my own room and found him making the bed. This was odd, but only confirmed what I had all along thought—that there were no servants in the house. When later I saw him through the chink of the hinges of the door laying the table in the dining-room, I was assured of it; for if he does himself all these menial offices, surely it is proof that there is no one else to do them.
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Oct 31, 2017 17:01
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Come to think of it the old man in Cronenberg's Eastern promises is a definite stand in for a vampire.
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Oct 31, 2017 17:01
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Aw, drat it!
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Oct 31, 2017 17:04
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Kavak posted:NWoD had a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the excesses of the oWoD, which 2E has smoothed out a little. See the "NO YIFFING" clause of Ghost Children in Forsaken ending up far more sexist than intended. Removing the unihar was easily one of the best 2e decisions.
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Oct 31, 2017 17:42
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Yeah, the litany and the unihar just makes it all the more obvious and forbidden, and therefore a desireable plotline. As it was with the Metis. In 2e it's just "no wolves, please. Otherwise we don't care."
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Oct 31, 2017 17:45
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I always assumed Metis were an explanation for why werewolves don't just breed a werewolf army, or why the world isn't ruled by a werewolf army already. The Evil Ghost Wolf Baby things...I don't know.
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Oct 31, 2017 17:51
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"Werewolves have to interbreed with wolf-bloods/humans because pregnancies don't work well with mothers who change shape all the time" would be another way to do it. Besides, spirit cops don't usually get maternity leave.
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Oct 31, 2017 18:07
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I always liked that in the oWoD Kinfolk book it was just explicit that even the nicest werewolves are kinda lovely family members to have for most people, that's really all you need.
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Oct 31, 2017 18:24
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I never played any WoD but I read oWoDs Mage and Technocracy books in 2012, followed by the nWoD mage book and just started hating how bland the new background felt. OWoD: something I can't wrap my head around, but friggin cool NWoD: oh, it's just new age hippie bullshit Then again, TLE can't go two chapters without tripping on their own dick and invalidating their own setting, so I guess nWoD has that going for it. Seriously, if I met the designer of TLE, I'd just let out a long and tortured WHYYY [did you think any of this poo poo was a good idea] In an unrelated question, can is the Forge (of Heartbreaker articles fame) a decent resource to read? Mainly I want to find out if I'm a Narativist or a Simulationist.
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Oct 31, 2017 19:08
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The designer of TLE deserves nothing less than a reenactment of Lowtax's Why? Why?! Whaaaaaay?! Moment in Doom house. And the designer is restrained in place.
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Oct 31, 2017 19:17
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sexpig by night posted:I always liked that in the oWoD Kinfolk book it was just explicit that even the nicest werewolves are kinda lovely family members to have for most people, that's really all you need. 
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Oct 31, 2017 19:22
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Goddamn, they must know the most incurious carpenter ever. "yet another kitchen cabinet repair? I'll be there tomorrow."
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Oct 31, 2017 19:29
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Goddamn, they must know the most incurious carpenter ever. I don't know, that sounds like a great way to put the kids through college.
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Oct 31, 2017 19:49
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JcDent posted:Then again, TLE can't go two chapters without tripping on their own dick and invalidating their own setting, so I guess nWoD has that going for it. Good news, we still have one more setting invalidating thing to cover. This one is so obvious that the game ecen includes an aside noting that this invalidates the setting. No joke the last 4 setting invalidations are closer together in page count than the list of soul order avilities and the rules for buying those abilities.
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Oct 31, 2017 19:53
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You should just post the full list of invalidations at the end. Though nothing takes the cake like "this setting? Yeah, it's kinda unimportant in its own universe" I still don't get it how how Hells are alloved to exist in the domain of the creator of the reality Ahura Mazda is the worst god.
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Oct 31, 2017 20:22
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Your writing style is good, but TLE is such a mess that it's hard to come to grips with. I mean, setting aside the cosmology, I cannot visualize what a typical scene in Eden looks like. Based on the art, I'm imagining some Second Life/Worlds.com mess where a red, horned, pointy-tailed devil is standing next to a giant talking paperclip, and over here is a gun-toting furry and a Gundam. I've begun to think that, alongside time travel, having some kind of parallel world (overworld/underworld/astral/Umbra/whatever) is a quick route to having your setting become a big gunky kitchen sink if you don't manage it very, very carefully. Particularly for the Dark Modern Urban Fantasy genre that the WoD inspired. It's impossible to ground your setting in the grubby realities of a modern city if the PCs can spend all of their time flying their rocketship past the griffon ranch on their way to fight some aliens.
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Oct 31, 2017 20:32
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Young Freud posted:
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Oct 31, 2017 20:37
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Mors Rattus posted:Both the 'deadened emotions' thing and the 'flip out and kill each other on sight' thing got dropped from nVampire 2e entirely, as a note. Selachian posted:Not quite -- the scene Schreck was referring to happens a while after Harker's first arrival at the castle.
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Oct 31, 2017 20:48
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Does anyone actually enjoy that oWOD whiney goth style (and is not a horribly broken person IRL)? I like black clothes. 
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Oct 31, 2017 20:51
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Halloween Jack posted:Your writing style is good, but TLE is such a mess that it's hard to come to grips with. I mean, setting aside the cosmology, I cannot visualize what a typical scene in Eden looks like. Based on the art, I'm imagining some Second Life/Worlds.com mess where a red, horned, pointy-tailed devil is standing next to a giant talking paperclip, and over here is a gun-toting furry and a Gundam. The way I understand it is like you described. Its the human world with everything, good and bad, taken to its excess, but just people can look however they want. Hell, people logged into the omikoshi appear in Eden in pixalated form with their names floating above their head so it is almost literally secondlife. Each realm is basically on cliche clone stamped until its an entire continent of nothing but that and then stuffed with advertising down to having the israel palestine analog have that Blimp from blade runner that promotes the offwold colonies. And it really is exactly like the human world without any real differences other than some people can fly. Eden absolutely have strip clubs somehow because a dessicated dragon corpse and a four armed guntoting cyborg ninja can have sex based on the games rules.
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Oct 31, 2017 20:57
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Still very much Second Life.
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Oct 31, 2017 21:12
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JcDent posted:Still very much Second Life. It may have worse combat mechanics than Second Life, a game with no combat mechanics but well get there.
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Oct 31, 2017 21:17
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It bothered me, so let me point out that in real life an omikoshi is a portable shrine carried around during Japanese festivals, usually by a sizeable team of people (who shout "wasshoi" to keep time). Why was this word used to refer to some sort of virtual reality simulation of a different virtual reality? Uhh, well, you see, e: maybe the Sanhedrin know
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Oct 31, 2017 22:02
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So what you're saying is that this really should have just been a Digital Devil Saga RPG.
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Oct 31, 2017 22:32
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wdarkk posted:So what you're saying is that this really should have just been a Digital Devil Saga RPG.
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Oct 31, 2017 22:33
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Does anyone actually enjoy that oWOD whiney goth style (and is not a horribly broken person IRL)? 'Enjoy' as in 'am amused by', yes. I could never play it straight, but I'd have fun with an over the top gothy vampire.
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Oct 31, 2017 23:20
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I mean, 'woe is me I am one of the sexy secret masters of the world rife with superpowers and incredible wealth' is more grist for 'oWoD is the most white middle class setting imaginable' theory Halloween Jack has.
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Oct 31, 2017 23:24
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Halloween Jack posted:Your writing style is good, but TLE is such a mess that it's hard to come to grips with. I mean, setting aside the cosmology, I cannot visualize what a typical scene in Eden looks like. Based on the art, I'm imagining some Second Life/Worlds.com mess where a red, horned, pointy-tailed devil is standing next to a giant talking paperclip, and over here is a gun-toting furry and a Gundam. Seriously I have no loving CLUE what even this game is. Even for the 1990s/2000s "What do you DO in this game" trend, this is just BAFFLING.
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Oct 31, 2017 23:42
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Maxwell Lord posted:Seriously I have no loving CLUE what even this game is. Even for the 1990s/2000s "What do you DO in this game" trend, this is just BAFFLING. I think the intent is 'you fight the man through generic acts of rebellion that awaken people to the Truths of the World', but they managed to screw that up at every step of the way leaving no real reason to do much of anything.
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Oct 31, 2017 23:57
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Maxwell Lord posted:Seriously I have no loving CLUE what even this game is. Even for the 1990s/2000s "What do you DO in this game" trend, this is just BAFFLING. I forgot one of the rules in the game but remember how you had to pick to side with either Ahura Mazda or GODHEAD? That can be changed at anytime at the director’s discretion, and is mechanically encouraged if you use a specific type of ability or is an outcome if you use that trick of falling from Eden to return to Earth. Thats right, what side your character fights for can be changed with no player input or a bad draw from the deck.
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Oct 31, 2017 23:57
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You know, one of the reasons SMT works is because your hero is always the cosmic lynchpin whose decisions are going to decide the outcome of whatever apocalyptic change they face in the world. You kind of have to make the players a big deal, cosmically, even if they have to work their way up, to pull that off.
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Nov 1, 2017 00:01
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Night10194 posted:You know, one of the reasons SMT works is because your hero is always the cosmic lynchpin whose decisions are going to decide the outcome of whatever apocalyptic change they face in the world. DDS coming up does remind me of how it has one of the best justifications for player power in the series, namely that your party and especially Serph are Sera's Original Character, Do Not Steal versions of people.
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Nov 1, 2017 01:01
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Nessus posted:The real comedy would be if this game predates DDS and is in fact the inspiration for it. It does, by about 3 years.
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Nov 1, 2017 01:03
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