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Pope Guilty posted:Yes. Werewolves are enormous, they get huge bonus to all physical stats, and they have a huge pile of health levels that rapidly regenerate any non-aggravated damage. And that's just baseline- all werewolves have access to Gifts, which range from "you can shoot your claws at a distance" to "you can make palatable food out of literal trash" to "for the next scene, you can't be harmed by fire". Also, they tend to come in packs of 3-7 or so, and have extensive experience working as a group during a fight. Werewolves led to one of my favorite tabletop exchanges of all time. Player: So how does dominate work on a werewolf anyway? ST: Well, first you take your stamina and fortitude to make a pool. Player: Uh huh... ST: Roll those and subtract from thirty. That is how much aggravated damage you take.
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Apr 29, 2019 07:11
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NikkolasKing posted:Random note: I just did it tonight, in fact. The guy in the booth gets really excited about it but your point is totally valid. A vampire can just chill and have their vitae extracted and will produce no waste. However it's a 1:1 in/out ratio. His best bet would be to have a steady supply of humans, drip-dry them for as long as you can before they die from bed sores and then feed that blood to a vampire, which he then extracts. I *think* you could do that to a staked vampire. They'll reflexively drink in torpor so there wouldn't be a huge amount of risk. Edit: Until someone saves them, removes the stake and tells them what you did
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Apr 29, 2019 07:12
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Vampires consume a point a day, though, no? So there is loss. While humans recover something like a point a day.
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Apr 29, 2019 07:54
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NikkolasKing posted:So are Werewolves in the "regular game" 10 feet tall juggernauts who can rip a vampire apart no problem? Not only are they physically capable of shredding basically any non-elder vampires without breaking a sweat, they are inclined to do so, because vampires "stink of the Wyrm" (werewolf Satan) to them.
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Apr 29, 2019 10:11
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Anything that is undead, which is Vampire no matter what clan or bloodline you are, is wrym corruption to most Werewolves and Must Die for Gaia territory. Pissing them off even further by setting fire to woods or trying to build a parking lot in their territory just makes the entire pack go after you.
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Apr 29, 2019 10:24
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But the werewolves don't for the most part make concerted campaigns to wipe out vamps or anything? If they're aware of the extent of Kindred society...
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Apr 29, 2019 10:38
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Neurosis posted:But the werewolves don't for the most part make concerted campaigns to wipe out vamps or anything? If they're aware of the extent of Kindred society... I've received a crash course in a lot of stuff from lore buffs so I'm no expert but... My impression is vampires are a blip on their radar. The Werewolves' enemy is The Wyrm, a cosmic force of destruction. The Wyrm has active and willing agents with far more influence and power than the vast majority of vampires who are, at best, unwitting pawns of The Wyrm. There is also a spirit world the Werewolves are concerned for and vamps by and large are material realm players only. Any more detail than that and you probably have to ask people who know more than scraps they pick up from wiki and forums. Speaking as somebody who loved Warhammer 40K's Chaos, I am digging The Wyrm and everything I'm learning about Werewolf: The Apocalypse. I highly recommend it. It's just as fascinating as VTM. Also as somebody who had my PC be all in for Caine worship and the like, vampires are wasting their time. Caine and Antediluvians? Chumps! It's all about The Wyrm. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 10:57
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I swallowed the wyrm.
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Apr 29, 2019 11:06
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Werewolves are generally too busy fighting against flouridated water and vaccines (no, really) and angsting over how much they want to commit mass genocide on all humanity, because hey if you forgot, oWolf was explicitly about the "heroism of ecofascism."
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Apr 29, 2019 13:03
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Caros posted:Werewolves led to one of my favorite tabletop exchanges of all time. Who was this scrub ST who thought Stamina could soak aggravated? 
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Apr 29, 2019 13:12
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I've run WoD games for a long time and I've never been able to fully describe how utterly terrifying werewolves are to my PCs. A fun one was when the group of Hunters were unknowingly entering the territory of a "friendly" pack. None of them died but they all blacked out, woke up about a mile away from where they expected and one of them developed a severe derangement in the form of a dog phobia. Dancing around what actually happened was fun because only one of the players kinda knew what that all meant.
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Apr 29, 2019 14:20
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Fuzz posted:Who was this scrub ST who thought Stamina could soak aggravated? It's ok, werewolf storytellers sometimes forget that there are other forms damage than aggravated.
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Apr 29, 2019 15:59
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Aren't oWoD hunters magically immune to stuff like the werewolf fear aura?
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Apr 29, 2019 16:01
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Neurosis posted:But the werewolves don't for the most part make concerted campaigns to wipe out vamps or anything? If they're aware of the extent of Kindred society... Werewolves don’t live in cities, even the suburbs probably couldn’t sustain one, and Vampires know better than to leave their cities and go farm country bumpkin blood because Werewolves will eat them.
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Apr 29, 2019 16:03
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Bust Rodd posted:Werewolves don’t live in cities This is false. There's several tribes that focus on cities including The Very Best Tribe. The Guide to the Anarchs also has a bit about back-country Anarchs that are basically living a Texas Chainsaw Massacre lifestyle, kidnapping stranded hikers and keeping them around to eat as required.
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Apr 29, 2019 16:59
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We need a vampire game about rural bloodsuckers.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:02
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I wouldn't mind a Werewolf game in the spirit of Bloodlines, where it's just you and your boys loving around the deep country and getting into good old brawls.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:05
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If any game could successfully simulate two rival packs of werewolves in a knockdown drag out realmshifting brawl on a moonlight mountaintop in the Adirondacks I’d die a very happy nerd.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:10
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citybeatnik posted:This is false. There's several tribes that focus on cities including The Very Best Tribe. Glass Walkers are p awesome, yeah Fuzz fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 17:23
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wiegieman posted:Aren't oWoD hunters magically immune to stuff like the werewolf fear aura? I read the sourcebook for Werewolf the Apocalypse ages ago. As I recall, at least in that system, the humans immune to the Veil (i.e. unaffected by the werewolf fear aura) are the humans who might become a werewolf hunter. But it's in that order. Being unaffected by the Veil doesn't make you a hunter, but seeing a werewolf shred your friends or family (who maybe were vampires or in cahoots with The Wyrm) without the amnesia of the Veil might make someone go on a silver bullet distribution spree. However, a small percentage of all humans aren't affected by the Veil and are equally likely to end up allies of the werewolves or just a conspiracy loon. That said in the werewolf setting, the hunters are small-H, and not really the magically empowered Hunters like in the Hunter: The Vigil setting. The oWoD settings have this weird shared thread but also a bizarre lack of overlap, so talking about hunters or vampires or etc. in any particular game line when you move to a different one. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but that is my impression. It isn't just the rules/power levels that don't line up. Lassitude fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 19:02
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wiegieman posted:Aren't oWoD hunters magically immune to stuff like the werewolf fear aura? To the fear aura? Yes. To the entirely rational thought "holy gently caress, that thing can shred me into vampire-bits in three seconds flat" not so much.
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Apr 29, 2019 19:24
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Lassitude posted:That said in the werewolf setting, the hunters are small-H, and not really the magically empowered Hunters like in the Hunter: The Vigil setting. The oWoD settings have this weird shared thread but also a bizarre lack of overlap, so talking about hunters or vampires or etc. in any particular game line when you move to a different one. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but that is my impression. It isn't just the rules/power levels that don't line up. This is correct. Where nWoD was set up around the idea of a shared setting, oWoD's lines were all very isolated from each other and clash constantly, and then are just vaguely stapled together anyways.
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Apr 29, 2019 20:36
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A starting Werewolf: the Apocalypse character has better combat bonuses than a starting Vampire: the Masquerade character, but something like the Celerity 5 Potence 5 combat monster that an endgame VtM:B character could easily be should have been able to just fight the werewolf to a standstill, if not straight-up overpower and dismantle it.
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Apr 29, 2019 21:01
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The way my friends explained it to me when I was younger was that the floor for a werewolf is quite a bit higher than it is for vampires, but the ceiling is quite a bit lower. When you run into a vampire with enough potence, celerity, and fortitude (and the generation to use their blood) they can probably kick an equally experienced garou up and down the road. The catch is that some serious Ghostbusters style 'Cats and dogs, living together, Mass Hysteria!" poo poo has to be going down for a vampire Elder to even consider getting anywhere near the kind of places a werewolf pack would be. I always liked that as a good way to explain vampires as city creatures. "Well, about 3000 years ago we tried just living wherever, but these giant fuckoff monster wolves started turning us into Venetian blinds whenever we left the cities unless our grandad followed us around as a babysitter. Then Grandad got hit with the flood and hasn't woken up in millennia. We just don't go out of the cities now."
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Apr 29, 2019 21:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:This is correct. Where nWoD was set up around the idea of a shared setting, oWoD's lines were all very isolated from each other and clash constantly, and then are just vaguely stapled together anyways. This is apparent in the fact that there's no Technocracy propaganda division responsible for the huge uptick in "scientific" magic media (technomages, vampires/werewolves as human mutations/diseases, mythical gods are aliens, etc.) in the last few decades. You'd think there would be and that subsequently at least a few of the other mystical entities in the WoD would look around at the state of things in the late 20th/early 21st century and be like "Hey guys, you feeling a bit, I dunno, smaller lately? Kinda mundane, almost... quantified?"
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Apr 29, 2019 21:26
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According to the Book of Nod, vampires literally invented cities so it's a far-reaching duality. It's also worth noting that werewolves are basically a loosely organised army where fighting is part of their basic existence, not like vampires who can mostly subsist through manipulating other people into doing their bidding without seeing action for years. Basically, every werewolf Sept is already a PC group ready for action, while vampires cooperating on that level are rarer. McSpanky posted:This is apparent in the fact that there's no Technocracy propaganda division responsible for the huge uptick in "scientific" magic media (technomages, vampires/werewolves as human mutations/diseases, mythical gods are aliens, etc.) in the last few decades. You'd think there would be and that subsequently at least a few of the other mystical entities in the WoD would look around at the state of things in the late 20th/early 21st century and be like "Hey guys, you feeling a bit, I dunno, smaller lately? Kinda mundane, almost... quantified?" Pentex (the megaconglomerate controlled by Wyrm-worshippers that is the main "human" antagonist of werewolves) publishes a lot of anti-werewolf genre stories, like the zombie craze a few years back in our own world. That must make for a weird pop culture. YaketySass fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 21:27
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YaketySass posted:According to the Book of Nod, vampires literally invented cities so it's a far-reaching duality. This is something I've always wondered about tabletop WoD (which I've never played myself): What are good in-game justifications for your typical coterie to get going? The old D&D cliché of "you are all sitting in a bar when suddenly [whatever]" seems hardly applicable to vampires, and I have a hard time believing that a prince or primogen would suddenly start to send out a random assortment of neonates from different clans onto missions.
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Apr 29, 2019 21:33
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System Metternich posted:I have a hard time believing that a prince or primogen would suddenly start to send out a random assortment of neonates from different clans onto missions. They do though, the Prince's role on the meta side of things is to be the biggest designated quest giver. Kindred are all about currying favors and younger vampires are near the bottom feeder of that whole ecosystem.
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Apr 29, 2019 21:37
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ProfessorCirno posted:This is correct. Where nWoD was set up around the idea of a shared setting, oWoD's lines were all very isolated from each other and clash constantly, and then are just vaguely stapled together anyways. i always understood it more as the universe was technically shared, with the contradictions reflecting the limited understanding each group has of the world outside of their corner of the supernatural, itself a reflection of the fact that mixed oWoD parties were never supposed to be a thing Werewolves conflate "Hunters" with "hunters" because, relative to them, there's very little difference in power between the imbued and any human who would otherwise be immune to the veil. Imbued humans are not particularly strong, a point the Hunter book emphasizes over and over and over again. They might question why the silver sword this human being is swinging around is on fire, but it's more likely a werewolf would tie it up to some sort of wyrm taint than assume there's a whole new class of supernatural being they weren't previously aware of. I imagine most Vampires who are "in the know" about The Imbued probably assumed they were just ghouls being mislead en masse in the Jyhad which isn't far from the truth when you consider that H:tR Hunters are secretly tied to the Kuei-Jin
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Apr 29, 2019 21:46
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System Metternich posted:This is something I've always wondered about tabletop WoD (which I've never played myself): What are good in-game justifications for your typical coterie to get going? The old D&D cliché of "you are all sitting in a bar when suddenly [whatever]" seems hardly applicable to vampires, and I have a hard time believing that a prince or primogen would suddenly start to send out a random assortment of neonates from different clans onto missions. "The prince gathered you together and told you to do a thing." One of the reasons oVamp as a tabletop game got kind of a bad rep as it went on is because of how the entire thing was basically structured around forever doing bitch work, and the longer the game went on, the more stratified it all was and the less you could actually flex out of it. It was a big thing in 90's tabletop games in general, really: huge settings with huge metaplots and absolutely no room for, uh, players.
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Apr 29, 2019 22:16
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System Metternich posted:This is something I've always wondered about tabletop WoD (which I've never played myself): What are good in-game justifications for your typical coterie to get going? The old D&D cliché of "you are all sitting in a bar when suddenly [whatever]" seems hardly applicable to vampires, and I have a hard time believing that a prince or primogen would suddenly start to send out a random assortment of neonates from different clans onto missions. The most common one I’ve seen is “everyone of the PCs need something from the same important person at the same time.”
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Apr 29, 2019 22:19
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Yeah, a fairly powerful vampire can generally whoop on a fairly powerful werewolf. The problem comes in that werewolves hunt in packs, and are terrifyingly fanatical, where vampires tend to be relatively solitary and more concerned about self-preservation.
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Apr 29, 2019 22:21
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Vampires can also in theory live forever, so they really won't like getting in unnecessary troubles and retreat if they can help it. Werewolves know for a fact that a glorious death against the forces of the Wyrm is their best case scenario.
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Apr 29, 2019 22:25
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So I think Bloodlines having one of its first quests be the haunted hotel was a stroke of genius. Not only is the level itself quite good, t he devs had some guts to start their power fantasy game with a level designed to make you feel utterly powerless. It's something I've noticed as I delve into WtA. I didn't hear poo poo about the Umbra in Bloodlines or when people were giving me the crash course in VtM. Are vampires purely material creatures? Are they disinterested or unable to learn more about the spiritual world like werewolves, mages and others can? Maybe they have some sort of weakness to spiritual things?
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Apr 29, 2019 23:07
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It's arguable the part in the haunted hotel where fake sunlight appears and Goldfrapp starts playing was you going on an impromptu trip through the Penumbra. It's a very disconcerting experience for a vampire. Vampires aren't as connected to the Umbra because their soul is shackled in the afterlife away from their body; and because traveling through the Umbra is a difficult task even for a mortal sorcerer. Werewolf can do it because they're not fully humans - they are themselves spirits, born of Gaia, the big cheese spirit of the Earth, and she grants them their own magic. Mages can do it if they have dots in the Spirit Sphere - and Mages are conceptually much more powerful than Vampires.
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Apr 29, 2019 23:29
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The Tremere were iirc mortal mages who done hosed up and got vampirized
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Apr 29, 2019 23:35
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They did get immortality out of the whole affair, but in every other aspect they got a raw deal.
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Apr 29, 2019 23:36
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Tremere's only reason for seeking out vampirism is because of traditional Hermetic magic was weakening AKA their longevity potions they drank to last centuries were failing, and the best choice for Immortality at that point was Vampirism. They ate a clan (and fell for Saulot's trap to eradicate his clan) just to find magic power that didn't rely on the Consensus.
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Apr 29, 2019 23:50
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NikkolasKing posted:It's something I've noticed as I delve into WtA. I didn't hear poo poo about the Umbra in Bloodlines or when people were giving me the crash course in VtM. Are vampires purely material creatures? Are they disinterested or unable to learn more about the spiritual world like werewolves, mages and others can? Sort of. My recollection of WoD cosmology is that there's: The Material Plane (Earth) The Underworld/Dark Umbra - At the "heart" of this is the Abyss, the realm of primal oblivion, which is the Big Bad of Wraith. The Gauntlet (Shields Earth from others) Middle Umbra - long list of trippy, spiritual realms - Faerie/Mage/Werewolf stuff happens here. Deep Umbra - Short list of really trippy/scary realms. Some of the Mage Big Bads and The Wyrm (Big Bad of Werewolf) are here. You're right that most vampires don't have anything to do off of the Material plane, and most probably aren't even aware that there is an 'Umbra.' Cappodocians/Giovanni can communicate with or enslave ghosts in the Underworld, and powerful Cappodocians can cross between Earth and the Underworld. The Lasombra signature shadow power taps into the Abyss, but I think they're largely supposed to not realize the metaphysical aspect of that. The Lasombra antediluvian did/does, and before Gehenna dwells inside the Abyss and uses every activation of Obtenebration to spy on Earth. Edit- Forgot a couple. The Baali worship the Malfeans I think, who are demonic entities in the Underworld. There's also some Vampires in the corporate hierarchy of Pentex (corporate Wyrm) who probably have an idea of the big picture. Finally, in the Wraith doomsday, oblivion was personified by an entity trying to destroy everything, and there was some hint that it might actually be Set, who the Followers always regarded as an actual God of darkness and destruction and not merely a 3rd generation vampire. So yeah, it's mostly Earth, occasionally the Underworld for vampires. Avasculous fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 23:50
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Crabtree posted:Tremere's only reason for seeking out vampirism is because of traditional Hermetic magic was weakening AKA their longevity potions they drank to last centuries were failing, and the best choice for Immortality at that point was Vampirism. They ate a clan (and fell for Saulot's trap to eradicate his clan) just to find magic power that didn't rely on the Consensus. Minor quibble - they used Tzimisce blood to turn Tremere (the individual mage)'s inner circle into the first generation of Tremere (the clan) and the Tzimisce are still very much around and want them dead for the offense. The clan they did almost exterminate (and whose Antediluvian founder Tremere diablerized) is the Salubri, which were basically the Healer class out of the lot and never had much fight in them. My favorite part about the Umbra is that it maps onto the physical universe: the Penumbra is Earth up to the Moon, then you get the Solar System with each planet having its own Umbral counterpart like some sort of DnD elemental plane, and then you have the Deep Umbra which is everything outside and is straight-up lovecraftian bullshit.
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Apr 29, 2019 23:58
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