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Nessus posted:Indeed, nothing can be more glorious than to live to kill the Other. There are powerful Requem vampires, as well as... well, let's just say an entire ecology weird poo poo that's related to vampires in one way or another. They're just not omnipresent like they are in Masquerade (because there's no guarantee than any given vampire will go down that path instead of entering torpor, and in fact the latter is far more likely), and their MO tends to be closer to "evolve into a beautiful, horrifying Vitae-based butterfly and gently caress off for parts unknown" more than "plot to gain ever-growing amounts of temporal power." Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 08:24
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Halloween Jack posted:So vampires are mafiosos, werewolves are street gangs, mages are detectives, hunters are vigilantes, demons are spies, Prometheans are homeless. Geists are...Wobblies? Geists are the working-class labor activists to Mage's academic Marxists, with a generous dash of "mystery cult" thrown in for flavor.
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Sep 20, 2019 22:31
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Green Intern posted:Does Geist talk about how utterly bizarre/upsetting it might be for ghosts of various religions to find out that their expected afterlife was also incorrect? I'm not sure they go out of their way to lampshade it, but everything about the Underworld is bizarre and upsetting. Also, a lot of Dead Dominions are more-or-less the result of people continuing their religious beliefs in the Underworld, so you get a weird sort of mix of "yeah this is the afterlife you were expecting, ignore the duct tape and rebar holding it together" and "this is yet another transitional state before the REAL afterlife." e: For example in Geist 2E, Mictlan and the Sainted Kingdom of Prester John are both noted as Dead Dominions, although the Sainted Kingdom collapsed and was eventually replaced with Gehenna, a sort of "you get the Hell you think you deserve" type of deal. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Sep 22, 2019 |
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Sep 21, 2019 20:00
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Halloween Jack posted:Hallelujah, I'm a ghost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_PgNRBdgN0 e: with a touch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP4tZ8p4iwc "If God were a computer, undoubtedly he'd blow up the world." Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Sep 23, 2019 |
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Sep 23, 2019 20:48
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Creating souls is the one thing that even wizards in the ChroD can't do easily. The Divine Fire can, but it mostly uses it to turn Prometheans human, unless tampered with.
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Sep 24, 2019 01:49
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Why not 3E?
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Sep 28, 2019 01:36
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:Apologies if I've missed myriad discussions of this, but as someone who doesn't really follow WoD metaplot and hasn't played NWoD Demon: is there a canonical answer to what the God Machine is? Is it an actual physical machine with incomparable power along the lines of AM from I Have No Mouth, the WoD version of Jehovah, some kind of alien cosmic horror monstrosity, or like just a "spirit" or "consciousness" that doesn't necessarily have a physical form at all? Some gestalt of several of those things? Is my not being able to grasp it the point? Is it like Cain in OWoD, where the canonical answer is "it's whatever the Storyteller needs it to be"? It is, canonically, a literal, physical machine that is so good at manipulating physics and unknown laws of reality that it might as well be supernatural. However, that doesn't mean it didn't use to be something else. For a while there was a plausible theory (and I'm a little biased here as I'm one of the people who put the threads together  ) that it was a Pangaean -- Great Mountain -- who was shattered by Father Wolf in prehistory, and whose remains could plausibly have been trapped on the mortal side of reality when the Gauntlet came down, and then slowly devolved into a purely physical (and scattered) being, but Dave Brookshaw (a prolific writer for various ChroD lines, mainly Mage) has not only confirmed that this is not the case, but that he's genuinely worried that some day a future writer will think that the God-Machine is meant to be Great Mountain.e: speak of the devil, that's him in the post before mine The other major theory, one advanced directly in the Demon sourcebook (and possibly in Demon-adjacent content in Werewolf, I forget) is that the God-Machine is a fully matured Idigam, and all the others are just infant (or aborted) versions of it. Which would explain why Angels are like weird quasi-spirits that are wholly dependent on getting their Essence from a specific source, and why Demons have to make do with leeching off of the God-Machine's waste heat (aether) to power their abilities -- it's basically the same relationship that spirits corrupted by an Idigam force-feeding them Essence have with their master. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Sep 30, 2019 |
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Sep 30, 2019 21:25
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Chronicles of Darkness basically takes the approach that 3.5 D&D fumbled -- have a shitload of character options that do specific, often narrative-oriented things, and serve as a massive toolbox that lets you cobble together whatever weird idea you want to realize, without being totally freeform. The difference is that everybody gets to play instead of just spellcasters, and the toolbox is thematically limited to whatever the particular game line is about. The system could still stand to be significantly cleaned up and a lot of the game lines could use balance passes, but I like that high-crunch games not solely concerned with combat at least exist.
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Sep 30, 2019 23:46
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Freaking Crumbum posted:does a demon have to know that it's a demon? Mors Rattus's review of Enemy Action should answer this question relatively soon. The answer is "it's not normal, but it's absolutely possible, and the kind of thing that could manifest as a Major Glitch." Freaking Crumbum posted:they fall from being angels and lose almost all of their memory about their old powers and resources and about the god machine, but does the resulting being always 100% know that it's a demon? the fiction makes it sound like every single demon has a perfect idea of why it fell and when, but it seems like you could reasonably play a character that believes, for all intents and purposes, that they are suddenly beginning to manifest hones-to-god super powers following whatever freak accident caused them to fall This specific scenario, however, isn't likely. Angels don't fall by accident. It's a choice. Not always a well-considered choice, but it's not unconscious.
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Oct 1, 2019 02:20
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Dawgstar posted:Do Demons also speak all languages automatically? They speak all languages that anyone speaks as a native language. Dead languages don't work, and at the very least you need a community of native speakers -- adopting a baby and speaking nothing but Aramaic to them all their life isn't good enough, although a whole orphanage might be. Hilariously, this means that Demons can innately speak the First Tongue. Not High Speech, though.
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Oct 1, 2019 03:39
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The Lone Badger posted:So they can't speak Esperanto or Klingon. Esperanto might depend on what year the game is set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers Klingon is probably out, though, yes.
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Oct 1, 2019 03:44
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feedmegin posted:There are still native Aramaic speakers actually! hoist by my own petard that's cool, though!
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Oct 1, 2019 20:32
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The God-Machine also has some fairly consistent high-level goals and motivations: it seeks to preserve the status quo of the nWoD (monsters hidden in the dark, humans keep their heads down, the world keeps spinning), and it wants to recapture Demons and integrate them back into itself. Also, while I can't recall it ever being explicitly stated, pretty much all the fiction relating to the God-Machine suggest that it's constantly growing and expanding (building new Infrastructure.) These are passive goals for the most part, but it's also important to keep in mind that Demons pretty much have to poke the bear to survive. Aether only comes from the God-Machine in the fiction, and in the mechanics you can either get it from Infrastructure or a small, limited burst by potentially exposing yourself. Demons have to live near it, subvert it to get their supernatural energy, and constantly be on guard against it. The God-Machine also responds pretty consistently to threats or setbacks. Its extremely focused on cost-efficiency: you can make it gently caress off from a particular area or project by making it too expensive for the Machine to operate there, and it will just shrug its metaphorical shoulders and do its thing somewhere else, as long as you don't deliberately provoke it. In short, it has a character even if a certain degree of mystery is necessary to its role in the game. That Old Tree posted:While it's up to an individual reader whether they like that sort of poo poo or not, the God-Machine absolutely is similar to the Exarchs in that there's no Canonical Grand Plan that spells the end of the game line, and that's not some ~spooky mystery~ or whatever. There's certainly a lot more science-fantasy whimsy mixed into Infrastructure, but whether it's more season 1 Twin Peaks or season 2 Twin Peaks depends on the table. Another thing to consider here is that both the Exarchs and the God-Machine have basically already won. They don't need to be massively pro-active; the players do.
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Oct 2, 2019 18:57
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PurpleXVI posted:Here's a good question, though, what can the players accomplish by "beating" the God Machine in an area if we assume they're not acting to counter a specific project and just decide to be "pro-active"? Like what is the nature of a section of the Earth without the God Machine's interference? A hotbed of Demons getting too comfortable and messing with each other instead of it. Also, it's likely that the God-Machine is to some extent responsible for averting various supernatural (or even natural) disasters, although it's also likely that some of them were caused by it in the first place, so an area where it's not operating is likely to get "interesting" in all kinds of ways.
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Oct 2, 2019 19:06
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Yeah, the difference there is that the God-Machine is orderly and efficient about turning people into blood slurry and feeding them into the gears and does a better job of concealing it after the fact, not some cynical "actually, throwing it out made things worse" kind of deal.
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Oct 2, 2019 19:19
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JcDent posted:God-Machine keeps the Mercers going, Musk popular and Zucherberg rich (and plausibly humanesque). That's why you want to gently caress it up. Demons are more likely than woofs to fight in their Cover, for one. Also in Wednesday's case it's because they're coyly hinting that he's Odin. Same reason he's named Wednesday and one of his Covers is a talking raven.
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Oct 2, 2019 19:55
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Mors Rattus posted:e: like, the running thing through the line is that monsters think they're hidden, and they're really only hidden on sufferance. Humans pretend they don't exist because it's way easier if you do that than if you recognize that this city has a vampire problem, as long as they aren't targeting you. But then, like, a band of hunters show up, and suddenly the old lady opens her door as the local hunters walk by, tosses them a handgun and then goes back to pretending monsters aren't real and didn't nearly kill her when she was a kid, because they're going to go make monsters not real for her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxigS-AZUps
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Oct 2, 2019 21:46
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also I strongly favor the interpretation of Mage wherein the Exarchs were originally human, and still to some extent think like human beings instead of being 100% subsumed into the eternal mindless essence of oppression or whatever because then they're just the current elite riding a (very large, supernaturally rienforced) cultural trend, rather than some kind of statement about what anything or anyone is inherently e: it also sets the most optimistic stage for "if they could do it once, we could do it again"
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Oct 2, 2019 21:48
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Mr. Prokosch posted:Is the God Machine supposed to be literally everywhere? Like if I head down to Maleolap or Yap and my only contact with the outside world is a monthly Copra boat does the GM have a tentacle eye in my coconut tree? It's extremely widespread, but there are places where (due to Demonic activity or just because of something about the place itself) it has less or no real presence. It doesn't require modern technology or urban sprawl to function, but there's some evidence that the God-Machine has gently shaped our technological development to go in ways that help it or are more compatible with its functioning.
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Oct 2, 2019 22:38
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PurpleXVI posted:I feel like the characterization of the Angels is a bit inconsistent. In some cases they feel like machines that are popped out to do their mission, then recycled when it's done, with no real internal life or emotions except when they start to grow close to a Fall. But then you've got ones like Isaac which suggests that the Angels have enough built-in emotion to be capable of fanboying for one of their own number and are regularly kept around long enough, and have enough personality, that they swap rumours and stories with each other. Angels get more like people the longer they pretend to be people. If they get comfy enough in that role, they have a very strong tendency to Fall. This is part of why the God-Machine routinely deconstructs angels and builds new ones from the parts rather than keep using the same one indefinitely -- but with occasional exceptions for very unique or expensive functions.
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Oct 3, 2019 19:44
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PurpleXVI posted:Does nDemon have any support for playing Exiles? Or only actual demons? Because the Exiles seem interesting as sort of a mirror to Prometheans, they're at risk of becoming more human, and want to desperately not be, while Prometheans are at risk of becoming inhuman and wish to become more human. They wouldn't necessarily make good characters, since NPC powers are extremely limited and general compared to PC abilities, but there are enough rules you could do it, strictly speaking.
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Oct 5, 2019 03:54
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Nessus posted:I don't know about y'all but very rarely have I been a renegade piece of unthinkably powerful computer equipment or whatever, piecing together things out of stuff I half-stole half-cribbed from others - ah, poo poo, there it is, I figured out the sadbrains analogy at the root of Demon, god dammit. You joke, but as a high-functioning autistic person who's uncomfortably familiar with masking, Demon is surprisingly relatable. Nessus posted:Anyway, Demon doesn't really have many pop-culture things to use as touchstones, even approximately or vaguely. Control Person of Interest The Matrix Atomic Blonde Southern Reach Trilogy (more "mortals dealing with God-Machine" but still on-point) this Panic at the Disco music video there's probably a bunch of anime that goes to the right aesthetic too but i'd have to dig to find / remember it Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Oct 5, 2019 |
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Oct 5, 2019 17:05
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Halloween Jack posted:They're loving stupid from first principles. Why do a bunch of cults and corporations and spookshows have a common loving vocabulary? Why is it always broken Greco-Latin? Throw it the gently caress out. This is why Demon's Proper Nouns are the best: they're literally common English words that describe the thing they mean, just with some special added significance.
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Oct 6, 2019 18:38
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I love the idea of evil scientists referring to everything in pointedly outdated Darwinist terms but yeah, ultimately I think usability has to trump flavor sometimes, at least for stuff that also functions as the players' introduction to the material and as extra-diegetic narration or rules text.
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Oct 7, 2019 00:18
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Insect spirits are uniquely horrifying and monstrous in a way that no other spirit is for Reasons. Among other things, they ate Chicago.
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Oct 8, 2019 22:31
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Drakli posted:So, is the Abyss basically like The Nothing from Neverending Story where it's a semi-sentient void, or more like the Dungeon Dimensions from Discworld or Yog-Sothoth from Lovecraft where it's crammed with Things Which Cannot Exist in our reality? Closer to the latter, but both are good inspirations. There are two major differences to keep in mind: Lovecraft's cosmology supposes a universe where the horrifying alien gods are the original and ultimate powers in the universe, representing the true nature of reality, and second, humanity is an insignificant speck by comparison to them and all we can do is keep our heads down and hope they don't notice us. By comparison, the Abyss is specifically anti-real, more like a cancer of reality than its origin. And, even more importantly, the Abyss was created by human beings tampering with the nature of reality. Mage doesn't posit a primordial nothingness from which we came and which always threatens to crush us from the outside; it posits a wound or a gap between two parts of reality that were meant to be together and which cause horrible problems by being apart. This is both way more optimistic than Lovecraft's understanding of reality, while also positioning Abyssal entities (however powerful and dangerous they may be) as much more subversive, parasitic, and evolving. They aren't the eternal, unknowable other -- rather, they're the embodiment of all the worst possible answers we could give to the questions "why does existing hurt so much" and "what should we do about it?"
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Oct 15, 2019 20:27
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OvermanXAN posted:So how do the Abyss and the Idigam from Werewolf connect, since those are also impossible entities that shouldn't and/or can't be? I'm not sure a canon answer to this exists (or, if it does, whether it's ever been explicitly stated in player-facing material instead of just hidden away in some internal setting bible) but Idigam are probably not Abyssal. There are (at least seemingly) only a finite number of Idigam in existence, all of whom were either imprisoned on the moon by Father Wolf or who hid themselves and went dormant for thousands of years until they were sure he was gone. If they were Abyssal, you would expect new ones to be leaking out all the time. They're much less interested than the average Abyssal entity in erasing reality and replacing it with a new version -- Idigam love reality as it exists and nearly every NPC Idigam statted up is motivated by some kind of curiosity about or desire for things that exist rather than by the urge to destroy them, and in particular, formless Idigam feel a nearly irresistible urge to coalesce around an existing concept or thing in order to anchor themselves. Abyssal entities also tend to be tied more to the Astral rather than to the Shadow (the spirit realm). This is not to say that cross-pollination is impossible or that a spirit couldn't be somehow corrupted by Abyssal influences, but it does make it unlikely that Idigam are directly spawned from the Abyss. Finally, existing lore about the Idigam hints (however inconclusively) that they're either alien spirits from outside the order established by Luna and Helios, or that they're somehow related to the mysterious absence of Humanity spirits and represent concepts and resonances that didn't yet exist or had no meaning at the time of their creation.
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Oct 15, 2019 20:37
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By comparison one of my favorite personal theories about the nWoD is that True Fae are a branch of especially successful Abyssal infiltrators, given their tremendous narcissism, their tenuous hold on existence held together by bargains and theatrical performances that will literally kill them if they break a promise or fall out of character, their desire to transform human beings into playthings and reflections of their own reality, and their power over dreams. e: and also the fact that they're not really people at all, so much as collections of living stories, which is similar to how some Abyssal entities are portrayed (most notably The Prince of 100,000 Leaves, a living alternate history that wants to overwrite ours). Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 20:43
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Gerund posted:So does the accumulation of new titles and need for Wyrd-fueled opposition, and the suggested need for reality to exist by their continuing creation of Changelings, represent a way in which the Abyssal nihilism has been perverted to being locked into the current reality wherein changelings can escape to? It depends on whether the True Fae have an "endgame" beyond just continuing to exist, which for meta-game reasons is something it's unlikely for the game line to ever answer. If they do, then there isn't necessarily a perversion in the first place. If they don't, then there are a lot of interesting ways to potentially answer that question -- maybe they've already succeeded; there's nothing to say that successive generations of Abyssal Intruders all have the same goals, so maybe any of them that actually realize their desires become co-opted into the status quo and necessarily become more static and passive. Or maybe, given that a True Fae who is stripped of all their titles (but manages to avoid being outright erased from existence) usually leaves a person-like core behind means that they're not themselves the Intruders, but merely the hosts and/or beneficiaries of an Intruder whose actual self is something grander but even less tangible. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 21:40
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I like the idea of having a setting where all magic is exclusively based on summoning some kind of entity that knows how to solve whatever problem you're facing, and being a wizard is halfway between being a switchboard operator and being in the mafia.
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Oct 16, 2019 21:30
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I mean Nobilis is almost by definition a game where exploring how you do things is the point, not whether you can do them.
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Nov 10, 2019 04:27
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wiegieman posted:Hit points are a binary metric. Either you're fine (whether that be at 100 hp or 1 hp) or you're in negatives bleeding out, which doesn't map to the idea of a desperate swordfight. Systems like 7th sea use Flesh Wounds and Dramatic Wounds to track damage, and systems like Fate use the stress tracks to track minor cuts and bruises and Consequences to track damage that matters. Being a binary metric is one of the best things about hit points, and one of the rare points where early D&D prioritized good gameplay over an attempt to simulate reality or fiction.
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Nov 30, 2019 05:22
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, there are also a few different considerations, such as the fact that you can actually do intellectual/social challenges around the gaming table, while if you want to do a physical challenge safely you may have need of a padded arena, some foam weapons, a track or acrobatic stage, etc. It's a false dilemma. I would 100% allow a player with a high STR roll to say "I smash the puzzle" and proceed as if it were solved (or better yet, set up the puzzle to be a Towers of Hanoi type of situation where the discs are made of solid granite and you have the choice of muscling through OR using an elaborate pulley system -- and if the player solves the puzzle they get to just describe how their character did it). Similarly, spellcasters use mental attributes within the highly mechanical combat system all the time. e: mind you I also tend to just not use IRL puzzles because they slow things to a crawl and unless you're really creative they turn the session into each player playing solo, but just on principle, the above isn't really a problem unless you make it one Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 05:34
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Or put another way: it's not about character INT and player cleverness being interchangeable. It's about roleplaying games being exercises in narrative creativity, and benefiting because you're good at that is as natural and appropriate as doing better in combat because you're better at the tactical minigame. e: or whatever other skills you want to test, including puzzle-solving, arm-wrestling, etc. what matters there is that you all agree it's worth rewarding and how it's weighted relative to other skills, not what it gets substituted for in the game. if the fighter's player solved a really hard puzzle it's perfectly legitimate for the in-game narrative impact to have nothing to do with the character's intelligence, for instance. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 05:48
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PurpleXVI posted:"you come across an inn run by a gelatinous cube and her husband, an iron golem. their clanking iron cube children play in the yard out front." finally, an explanation for Modrons more plausible than "the gods of logic and order are also completely bugfuck insane"
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Dec 6, 2019 10:51
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Nessus posted:That makes sense. My interior mental map mostly came out of Tolkien and while that is its own kettle of fish it is not the same as the standard D&D meta-conception. The "D&D image of things" is really its own sort of numinous thing, isn't it? Tolkien's elves should basically be understood as human beings without Original Sin (although they can be and frequently are huge loving assholes entirely of their own volition), and make zero sense outside of an extremely Catholic context. D&D isn't that context.
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Dec 11, 2019 05:30
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Are you saying that Fëanor may have, perhaps, not done nothing wrong? And that the War of Teleri Aggression might have been some kind of unprovoked and unjustified brutal massacre of his Teleri kin, a kinslaying if you will? There are some interesting parallels between Feanor and Adam (in terms of him basically casting himself out of Eden, committing a horrible crime that he passed on to his sons, and his soul existing in a Hell-like state awaiting his personal redemption in the final battle against Morgoth at the end of the world) but exactly how, when, and whether this applies depends on the Second Prophecy of Mandos, which Christopher Tolkien claims his father abandoned. Meanwhile, I find it hard to read this part: 90s Cringe Rock posted:But yeah, they're kind of humans except their fëar and hröar are properly in-tune, making them superhuman immortals who only started dying because of Melkor marring the world. as anything but "elves are capable of volitional evil, but either don't or barely have concupiscence."
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Dec 11, 2019 10:32
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Zereth posted:if magic didn't work there how did the d&d characters get there i don't remember what they are but I 100% guarantee that detailed rules for the interaction between Gate and Antimagic Field exist in AD&D, which should be close enough to "spelljammer helm" and "non-magical setting" to kludge
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Dec 12, 2019 08:33
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You guys are crazy. Literally nothing on the player-facing side of a tactical combat TRPG should have as low as a 50% chance to succeed. The big brain move wouldn't have been giving wizards to-hit rolls, it would have been removing them from fighters. 
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Dec 19, 2019 22:02
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Midjack posted:Why are the Dragonlance metallic dragons so paralyzed by the threat of something happening to their eggs? Having your kids held hostage definitely is terrible, but is there something else like “no more eggs ever”? dragon sex is traumatic for everything in a 10-mile radius, including the dragons
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Dec 28, 2019 03:43
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