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Apr 26, 2024 14:13
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- Mors Rattus
- Oct 25, 2007
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FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018
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quote:So let me preface this by saying that I understand that this won't be changed in 2E. I seem to be one of the few people who feels so strongly against this, that I don't hold even a glimmer of hope that it is something the writers will go back on. That said, I would feel remiss as a consumer and as a member of the NWoD community if I didn't at least express my discontent regarding some of the GMC changes... which I would imagine are by now old hat to most people here.
Put simply, I feel like Sanctity of Merits, along with True Friend as a merit itself, and combined with the Integrity rules that actively encourage players to disagree with perceived incorrect breaking points, all work to create a system that encourages entitled players. If a player throws their True Friend Retainer face first into a firefight, the experience they invested in that relationship should be lost and the friend a rapidly cooling body... yet there is now zero incentive to avoid that. And further, the storyteller now faces a player with three in-rules reasons for indignation, when arguing against why they should have a breaking point and even whether or not their companion dies.
Retainers, mentors, and resources are dispensable now. Born-in traits like eidetic memory are dispensable. The justification that merits represent temporary facets of the character are absurd. Yes, money can be lost, but is my knowledge of fighting styles in martial arts really even slightly more transient than my knowledge of Science as a Skill?
Yeah, yeah, "won't happen with mature players," but if we are relying on ideal people to make our rules systems, then there would never be any conflict at the table for those rules to need to address. As a percentage of the gaming population, players will always be a majority, and thus the raw number of petty, immature, and entitled individuals at the game table as a fraction of the greater population will also tend towards the players side of the table. Having rules that encourages that conflict and apparently disagree with Rule 0 infuriates me.
The answer I always get when I bring this up is that "well, don't play with those rules." The issue is that the longer they are in open circulation as RAW, the more people are introduced to the hobby with the expectations of those rules, and the more players I will likely meet at the table who have the ingrained entitlement of such things.
NWoD was a horror game originally, and still seems to be trying to bill itself as such, so why does it have rules that make any loss other than death mostly irrelevant? Even in the much-maligned Dungeons & Dragons, when you lost EXP it was gone for good.
quote:Sanctity of Merits just means that if you amputate the leg of someone with Parkour, the player gets the xp he spent on Parkour back, as the Merit has been destroyed.
This is absurd though. I don't know parkour any less just because my leg is lost. You could hack off all my limbs and I would still know how to parkour. Just because the information is now useless doesn't mean that it's gone... that I have no longer *experienced* that knowledge or how I gained it.
Yet on the other hand, Resources, a far more transient skill. If I make unwise investments, or my vault is robbed by vampires, the money is gone. As is all the effort that it took to get that money. I can't just turn around and say "Well, too bad about my money, time to have a friend (retainer)." The act of making that friend requires experience and interactions entirely of its own.
TLDR: Things like and including Sanctity of Merits encourages the worst behavior I see at game tables and gives the most argumentative and entitled players a haven in the rules.
XP loss: a key part of horror gaming.
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Dec 28, 2014 00:22
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- Mors Rattus
- Oct 25, 2007
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FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018
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quote:quote:Taking them away for nothing in return is bad form.
I feel that implicit in this statement is the assumption that the story itself is the so-called "nothing." The player gets to experience horror, as the game sells itself to be. Horror is not empowering. If I wanted a game to feel empowered I'd play Exalted, and do when I want that sort of thing.
quote:And now the player feels cheated because she can no longer do that cool thing she wanted to have during character creation, for circumstances maybe beyond her control.
"The player feels cheated" this is exactly what I'm talking about though. A player shouldn't sit down to a horror game and then feel cheated by anything. It's not like I'm arguing against being indignant at a Storyteller who says "you are walking down the street and then get your limbs hacked off by a wandering murder-hobo" with no rolls to oppose, but a blanket rule like this is just treating all Storytellers like petulant children and undermining their much-needed authority as arbiters of the story.
Furthermore, why do you think that the circumstances are being beyond their control? According to this a character who decides to cut their own legs off with a power saw for no reason is entitled to get those merit points back for parkour. A character who decides to invest in a company right before the party kills their vampire CEO is entitled to their resources exp back. Why is it assumed to be Storyteller pettiness when it is exponentially more common for a party to face-check their way through a plot?
It's not *fun* for characters to die, so why does the system allow that? I'm certain that many players have felt cheated out of perfectly good characters by a bad series of rolls or decision, and having a loved character die is never fun, but the system doesn't say they can't die. Why is asking for recognition of such loss on a more granular level any crueler than playing in a system that fundamentally assumes fragile mortals facing down servants of an eldritch digitized god?
quote:losing them by whim of the GM, is not fun.
Again, assuming that Storyteller whimsy is the only reason this might happen.
quote:It's not any more "realistic" in any way.
You can argue all you want that it isn't fun, but to assert that my experience in martial arts being a soluble resource is as realistic as it being a nearly permanent facet of my character defies every experience I have ever had regarding learning and knowledge.
quote:cheating players of their points
I really get the feeling that you fundamentally mistrust Storytellers, which certainly comes out in the GMC rules that I so dislike for exactly that reason.
To be clear, I am not categorically opposed to returning experience for merits, but I will oppose to my last irate breath having it not be an optional sidebar and instead dedicating nearly a page to it directly before the merits themselves... and further the mention of it being a mere chapter (unit of time, not literal chapter in the book) between merit reshuffling is just a comically small amount of time.
No, really, a key part.
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Dec 28, 2014 00:24
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- Mors Rattus
- Oct 25, 2007
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FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018
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quote:quote:The "You really want to play Exalted if you don't want to feel completely helpless and have your stats be completely vulnerable at a whim" is disingenuous, at best.
That's a complete and painfully stretched misinterpretation of what I said, nor did I say anything about another person's preferences. I explicitly stated that if I wanted to feel empowered, I would play Exalted, using that as an easy touchstone for a game that plays heavily with empowerment and is published by this same company.
If you so take offense to my preferences, or a drawn comparison to implied difference of themes between the two I will amend my statement to the bland and innocuous "If I want to feel empowered, then I won't play a horror game, which NWoD bills itself to be; thus I will not play NWoD at those times, or any other game based on themes of horror. And furthermore, I take issue with changes to a horror game that seem to actively discourage elements of risk and loss within the mechanics as well as the story."
quote:[...]whim[...]cheated[...][ripped off[etc...]
Once more with the language of "whim," "nebulous reasons," "ripped off," yet apparently you don't think that the assumption of an almost Fae-like madness on the part of most Storytellers to warrant this rule isn't treating them like children. Fair enough, I don't know many children that require codified rules to not make their friends' lives miserable.
quote:Yeah, okay. If you have a character who cuts their own legs off with a power saw just to rearrange Merit dots, then I'll listen. Otherwise, it's a really absurd argument not made in good faith and not something I'll bother with.
I did say no reason. At least hacking one's legs off for the exp would be a reason. More to the point though, players make downright ridiculous mistakes with predictable consistency.
The jokes of parties throwing themselves to their immanently preventable demises has been played out to the point of triteness, but exists for a reason. I've been in the party when another player stubbornly insisted on talking to the police at a checkpoint despite being a known and wanted fugitive, and against all the warnings from the GM or cries of despair from the other players. I've GMed mages that willfully ripped the Veil despite anguished warnings in and out of character. I've been on both sides of the table and even done such things myself in the heat of a moment on occasion... and I wish to be so blessed as anyone who can claim that doesn't happen at their tables.
Should such blind, heedless stupidity really be rewarded by the system? It is certainly rewarded, with the rules for critical failures granting beats, the rules for condition resolution granting beats, and sanctity of merits, and a character walks out from throwing their true friend to the wolves with more exp than they went in. Don't get me wrong, I love the rules for exp gain in GMC, amusingly enough, but with sanctity of merits it's all carrot and not even the token sliver of a stick to incentivize prudent play.
quote:It can be fun for characters to die. It can be dramatic, it can be heroic or tragic or just, or sometimes all at once. But it's usually something that comes with a certain level of expectation. If your character goes out and shoots up a police station, then dies in a dramatic shootout with the police, that's one thing. If you are killed by random drive-by violence or a plane crashing on you, that's not roleplaying. That's not choice. It's not a consequence that follows from character decisions, and it's not something for which most social contracts account.
And it can be fun for a character to be maimed, crippled, and broken by their experiences. It can be an amazing moment of character development for a blinded sniper to struggle to readjust to their new life... and from a mechanics perspective, I think it really feels like a less meaningful loss if, in the downtime between a single Chapter, that sniper gains a bevvy of other merits as a lifetime of accumulated knowledge vanishes into the ether.
Why do you assume that merit loss is random? You keep using words to describe Storytellers that really give the impression that they are fickle monsters that the players need to be protected against. At no point have I given an example of a random occurrence, or implied that I'm whining about GMs being unable to wrench away their players fun or merits with the cruel and petty vicissitudes of a Greek god... any GM that would do that before this change will do it anyway, and no attempts to write a system where that isn't possible will work.
quote:The game isn't real life.
Please don't argue on the merits of realism and then turn around and deny any realism at all. Either pick one or the other. Either it's meant to be realistic and my point stands, or it's meant to be abstract as you are explicating here and then fine, we're arguing tomatoes and oranges, but as I tend to be one who desires some level of realism in my rules, this is something that I dislike on those grounds alone.
quote:You're trading away the weight placed upon that ability by game rules due to a situation negating said ability. You can't use the ability anymore, effectively negating all points placed into it.
Fair enough, but this abstracts characters so dramatically away from the points on their sheets that I then fail to see why to bother with merits as a function at all. At that point, why not just expand the uses of skills to include those covered by merits?
quote:Getting to use those points elsewhere makes sense from a player standpoint, a storytelling standpoint and a fairness standpoint.
Saying it's so doesn't actually make it so. If you genuinely feel like it makes sense from anything more than a fairness standpoint, I'm interested in hearing the how and the why... as it is, it feel like you've only made regular assertions about fairness and "fun," to which my response is that life isn't fair and neither is supernatural horror. Are the True Fae fair? Are the Exarchs? Is the Godmachine? Even their weakest servants against mere mortals can break their very beings open and reshape their selfhoods like so much grey putty. That's "fair" and "fun" but losing an exp as a consequence of story events is not?
quote:But your complaints really resemble those made by a lot of "Viking hat" GMs who hate "player entitlement," the latter being anything that gives players an ability to actually affect the narrative beyond the reactionary. Storytelling games are not like that. Players are not reactionary participants in a GM's carefully crafted game world. They are equal in helping direct the story, even if they're not called "Storytellers." The ability to affect the game on a narrative level doesn't in any way challenge a GM's "authority," and despite being the person who handles the rules and direction of a particular campaign, a Storyteller doesn't have any more "authority" over the game than any other player.
Well, I do enjoy a little pillaging from a longboat in my spare time, but the opportunities have grown slimmer since the advent of fortified coastal cities, and really became nonexistent around the time of unified nation-states. There's no need to be so hard on a poor little viking, the salty tears of my players are all I have to remind me of the seas.
More seriously though, way to make it personal. ...but since it seems like you've taken it there, as stated before, I am a player as regularly as I am a Storyteller, and my issue with Sanctity of Merits extends to both sides of the table. As a player I find it condescending and pandering to the most risk-averse and argumentative habits in players as a species, and I feel like it undermines Storyteller authority to the detriment of games... which I care about however I sit.
Honestly, I find it to be the smallest issue when I'm GMing because anyone who is a player in my games either appreciates my style enough to accept me houseruling it away, or agrees with me in my disgruntlement with it. Though really, as I stated in my first post, I wouldn't care in the least if this was a sidebar entitled "optional rule: sanctity of merits." I take issue with the front-and-center treatment of it as ironclad RAW that it was given in GMC, and I feel like that in particular points to a general trend of Storyteller distrust within the rules change as a whole... though I do find the "swap out merits each Chapter" to be silly no matter how you slice it.
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quote:How about you simply house rule away Sanctity of Merits for your campaign (though if players protest that, don't be surprised about it dissolving) instead of complaining here knowing perfectly nothing will change in that regard?
See:
quote:The answer I always get when I bring this up is that "well, don't play with those rules." The issue is that the longer they are in open circulation as RAW, the more people are introduced to the hobby with the expectations of those rules, and the more players I will likely meet at the table who have the ingrained entitlement of such things.
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quote:[...]but they need to work on it. Make them work on it. poo poo just doesn't magically plop into your lap (or mine or anyones).[...]
Except for the very clear line that merits are reshuffled between Chapter breaks... not exactly "working for it."
quote:Your dislike of the rule seems to me to ultimately stem from a feeling that it eliminates a certain degree of risk. The only thing you, as a player. can really lose is your character sheet. Anything else is only a temporary loss as you'll be refunded the experience for the thing you "lost". I think that is as it should be. The horror should come from the narrative, the fear of your character losing her legs, not from the mechanics, the fear of you losing the experience you invested into the Parkour Merit.
Mechanics and narrative are not separate though. Take two well-known examples - Halo and Eve Online. Halo has fast, easy violence and immediate respawns at no cost. meanwhile, Spreadsheets in Space has permanent loss and slow, methodical hunting. Try to roleplay a cavalier no-care-in-the-world fighter in each and which one is easier? Which game almost encourages that archetype with its very mechanics?
Likewise, it's possible to run a game of high societal social intrigue using RAW Dungeons and Dragons, but it's far easier with a game that has the mechanics to helpfully support that theme.
If this system was billed as other than a horror system, I would care very little... but the apparent mechanical theme of minimizing risk and loss really conflicts with why I play horror games to begin with and undermines any disempowering themes the storyteller endeavors to present.
No, really, guys, if you can't lose your invested XP, where's the horror?
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Dec 28, 2014 00:28
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- Mors Rattus
- Oct 25, 2007
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FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018
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Monte "Timmy feats" Cook?
(And, in doing so, completely understanding what the Timmy demographic actually is for Magic. Magic designs for Spike, who likes powerful and versatile tools to demonstrate mastery of the game rules, Timmy, who likes poo poo that is cool, and Johnny, who likes to be creative and come up with, often, unlikely but powerful combos. They also explicitly design so that Timmy can have fun without making awful decks, because everyone likes winning.)
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Jan 24, 2015 00:29
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Dec 8, 2014 17:13
