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A lot of the better-written, or at least more realism-focused, Vampire books tended to downplay the Caine mythos, largely because it is almost impossible for it to be literally true and most of the vampire legends are ultimately based on unverifiable bullshit from rear end in a top hat elders. So it's kind of unfortunate that all the endings in Gehenna had Caine mythos and literally every weird myth vampires told about the early generations be completely accurate!
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Sep 17, 2019 21:43
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Jenna should be Kickstarting her new companion game to Nobilis, Glitch in November, so I wonder if anybody can be talked into doing a F&F of Nobilis 2e before it starts. (I’d do it myself but people might not find my perspective terribly interesting. )
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Sep 28, 2019 01:22
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Sure, I can arrange that.
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Sep 28, 2019 01:36
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Glitch is kind of an aesthetic follow-up on 2e, although the rules are a big advance on either.
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Sep 28, 2019 01:40
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ZeroCount posted:I prefer 3E to 2E by a fairly vast amount, stuff like Spirit just feels so anaemic compared to what 3E brings to the table 3E is definitely a mechanical improvement over 2E; I just thought if I was going to draw people's attention I'd draw it to the one that's semi-widely agreed to be the most beautiful RPG book ever created.
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Sep 28, 2019 01:48
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Spoiler: Glitch goes back to using "GM" because pound-for-pound, people who are annoyed at cutesy names for the moderator seem to significantly outweigh the people who chuckle.
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Oct 2, 2019 12:55
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Honestly, for an in-progress KS, I feel like linking to the Kickstarter at the end of every post is just polite and a good way to get some free goodwill from the people making it. Unless it's one of those things you review because you hate it and want it to fail, of course, but I don't think many of those get in-progress reviews.
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Oct 7, 2019 14:13
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PurpleXVI posted:They're Lord Entropy(whose description is hilariously edgy. "The touch of Lord Entropy is corruption, and so dark have been his deeds that his hands drip forever with blood." Is just the start of it. Ananda, who doesn't do anything but is real pretty. Ha-Qadosch who always votes for more stuff for himself. And Surolam who always votes for stuff to stay the same. Lord Entropy's the guy to blame for the GOD LAWS which are as follows: Don't fall in love, don't kill innocents, don't take orders from dogs(okay, it's "treat no beast as your lord", but that's basically the same. it's supposed to be an edgy way of going "don't do what humans tell you to do"), don't hide anyone from the god cops, do as your boss tells you, and don't sell out reality to the store-brand Abyssals. Ananda got an expanded description in this edition (as do his Chancel and the ombudsmen), and Surolam gets an expanded description in 3e. The joke is that the upcoming fourth edition will have to complete the quartet by explaining what Ha-Qadosch Berakha is all about. quote:An awful fuckload of words are spent on going: "the world is both as myth would have it and as science would have it at the same time, but no matter what happens in the myth world, it's always happening by-the-scientific-rules in the mundane world, unless a PC-tier or higher god does it, because then it happens in both worlds at once, is patently impossible and probably drives most of humanity immediately insane from having witnessed something supernatural. It's actually a PC-only problem. Imperators don't disrupt prosaic reality because whatever they do is, by definition, the ordinary way of things. 3e gives few more details on this — basically, the engine that runs "prosaic" reality is starting to strain because the science behind everything has gotten so complex and it now has to keep track of every goddamned atom everywhere, so anything that abruptly changes the world by magic may or may not get explained away. Excrucians have their own version of this problem which you might describe as "better" or "worse" depending on your perspective, and which will appear for the first time in Glitch. quote:Also in Nobilis, all cops are evil, this is written two lines before insisting that most cops truly do just want to "serve and protect." I've mentioned before to Jenna that lawyers just giggle bitterly when they see "guilty until proven innocent" presented as a meaningful variation on our legal system. quote:Now, part of the problem with this setting is that Nobilis is, at least as it has been pitched so far, all about protecting Earth from the evil Excrucians that want to melt it all down for their ????? reasons. Except the writing also basically does its very best to make Earth sound like a shithole not worth saving. All cops are bastards, all religions are bad and promote wars, all human governments are corrupt because Lord Entropy sold them evil magical powers(and thus they're part of the Camorra) or the Excrucians control them. It's like, grats, you take down the Excrucians, that just frees up Lord Entropy to make the world poo poo on a regular basis. The game seems to be missing the elephant in the room which is that most players I can think of would go: "hm, this Lord Entropy fucko seems like an intense jackass, the world isn't really worth saving while he's around" and would definitely do their best to try and dunk on him and his plans, somehow, and the writing so far barely even seems like it acknowledges this as a reasonable or expected goal. This is similar to some of the comments I've seen on the premise of Glitch. Honestly, I don't think Jenna thought it was necessary to explain why people might want to save the world? Or why they might struggle against Lord Entropy's rule? It's kind of obvious. You could probably put a lot of thought into Nobilis' exact position on this, because I don't think Jenna really approached it from the position that the world has to be objectively good for people to want to save it, whether that's because she's a person with a lot of troubles or because she's been watching a lot of Kino's Journey. You'll probably see it even more in Glitch, where the protagonists have given up on ending the world even though they absolutely don't think the world is good. The Nobilis setting is generally one with a lot of exaggerated goods and bads, where angels build beautiful neighborhoods that evildoers cannot touch, and monsters live in schools (or are their principals). Sometimes this comes across a little flat because the basic details were written in the late 90s and show a lot of influence from the White Wolf of that period.
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Oct 8, 2019 16:28
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(A while back there was some discussion about whether Lord Entropy's Estates ought to be changed up a bit, given that he's kind of laser-focused on being the Designated rear end in a top hat while most other Imperators, even terrible ones, tend to have a bit of random weirdness stuck in there like being the Fallen Angel of Tears, Fears, and Dogs. I also sometimes wonder if the Windflower Law really gets used that much given that most GMs aren't really up to running an exciting courtroom drama.)
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Oct 8, 2019 16:31
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, yes, you want to save the world, it's where you keep all your stuff. But the whole "Excrucians ending the world"-thing feels very... distant, like nothing that's likely to happen in any meaningful way tomorrow or next week or even next month. Meanwhile, things are repeatedly pointed out as being megashit garbage dozens of times right now, and the rear end in a top hat responsible for it is, compared to the Excrucians, very much in sight. You know where he lives, you know who works for him, you know his methods. And the book, at least up till this point, does not seem to encourage or acknowledge that the PC's might want to turn Lord Entropy inside out and toss him to a clutch of Aaron's Serpents. Well, it's kind of on a dial? Really, I feel like a lot of this kind of thing is inevitably on a dial, along with things like "how many hunter angels does the God-Machine have in your city? A lot? Maybe none? Are you currently under siege by the Sabbat? Has your Keeper found you yet?" People can totally foment rebellion against Lord Entropy if they want to, but it doesn't have as much focus as the war against the bleak and pretty gods of emptiness.
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Oct 8, 2019 16:56
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hyphz posted:and yea in Chuubo’s the guy got ganked by his own son who is a sample PC. Look, he went away on an important journey, leaving his bloodstained clothes behind in the incinerator. You can't just believe every rumor you hear!
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Oct 8, 2019 17:18
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wiegieman posted:Lord Entropy positively reeks of a bad character the author is too in love with. It is, in fact, canonically impossible to be in love with Lord Entropy. People have done experiments and found that it he is literally immune to erotic attraction.
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Oct 8, 2019 17:31
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I mean, he's an important character in that he's pretty much the only Imperator in 2e who has a defined setting role, where every other Imperator of importance is player-defined.
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Oct 8, 2019 17:49
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Brandon is honestly the creepiest thing in the whole book.
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Oct 9, 2019 13:29
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Having the Offspring's version of the Cipher actually be bad when the demon version is (probably) good has never really made sense to me.
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Oct 10, 2019 16:12
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The Abyss is less "fundamentally evil and opposed to life" and more "it turns out when you stick your hand into all possible concepts and realities, the number that can support life as we know it is very small."
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Oct 15, 2019 19:19
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Joe Slowboat posted:Eh, that the Abyss is the set of all possible things not included in the Supernal is the Scelestus Archmaster party line. It’s deceptive. The Abyss is fundamentally antinomian; opposed to all laws and order, but also to ‘chaos’ as generative force. It’s not pre-ordered existence but that which cannot fit into any order; Intruders are basically holes in the world as much as they are alien invaders. I mean, I feel like it being the Scelestus party line doesn't necessarily make it wrong; it just means that the Scelesti are the mages who look at the long line of mages who got burned by dealings with the Abyss in the past and think "I can fit that in my mouth."
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Oct 15, 2019 19:36
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quote:Next: A loving 20-page "example of play," what the hell, that's a small campaign. The Example of Play for Glitch is even bigger! But seriously, the Example of Play was probably the most popular part of the book, and people complained vociferously when the third edition turned out not to have one. I think it's honestly way more useful to do it this way, where you play out an entire sample session, than to block out a single exchange of actions like most smaller samples wind up doing. Some of the older White Wolf books did multiple-page comic book sections but I don't think they tended to be very helpful. quote:Spirit(a catch-all for whatever other magical things we want to do). It's also an insanely powerful defensive stat, so powerful that it almost, sort of, makes up for the fact that it's completely passive. 3e, in recognition of the blandness of this, would eventually replace Spirit with Persona, so that "control over your Estate" wound up split into two powers, one that lets you control your Estate itself, and one that lets you manipulate the properties of the Estate, so that Domain (Fire) commands fire and Persona (Fire) lets you make things more or less fiery. quote:It doesn't help that Hell and Dark are basically the same, except Dark prefers self-destruction to lakes of sulphur, and Light and Heaven are also identical outside of Light being more concerned with structural inequalities and Heaven is more concerned with personal failings. Wild, meanwhile, just breaks down walls and kicks in doors while getting drunk. It would be interesting if you wanted to do 3e after this one and compare some of the differences, since 3e did a lot to make these factions more distinct. In fact, 3e's version of Hell is some of the best bits Jenna's ever done: quote:Hell is always with you. Rand Brittain fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 15:31
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Nessus posted:What does this mean? The latter seems completely and thoroughly covered by the former. Domain lets you set someone on fire; Persona lets you give them a fiery temper.
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Oct 16, 2019 15:41
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PurpleXVI posted:Well play, that sounds very dramatic, but what does "cutting through beauty" actually mean? Congratulations, you've wasted everyone's time with something poorly-defined. Which seques nicely into the second issue, about poor definitions, which is that basically every time the GM rules on something it feels like an extremely hasty off-the-cuff adjudication, only rarely like something founded in listed mechanics (and even when it is, it's not really explained. occasionally a page is referenced, but if anything that's vaguer than anything in the example-of-play). I'm not really sure what ruling you could make on "this weapon can cut through anything, even abstract concepts" that works in all cases. That's something you have to deal with case-by-case — I can't think of an alternative that wouldn't be a lot less entertaining! Although, I can't really think of a good way to slice through beauty abstractly either. More useful at the table is figuring out what happens if somebody slices through the next five minutes. quote:In short, it's not exactly a good use of anyone's time to read this. This is interesting, because the Sample of Play was historically the most popular part of the book and people complained bitterly when 3e didn't have one, to the point that Glitch is going to have a very large one. quote:I confess that I may miss some parts because the rules really love to repeat themselves and cram in large amounts of barely-related fluff and examples in between every two paragraphs of text. I actually think the constant examples are really helpful to people who are trying to build a character, particularly the examples of characters with each level of each ability. It's useful context (although not quite as important for Nobilis, which has fairly standard god-powers, as it is in a game where you play a weirder character type like the Excrucians.) quote:And this, I gotta say, rankles me a bit. Like what's the harm in the HYPER INTELLECT GUY getting a small hint from the GM if he overlooks something obvious that his character logically wouldn't? As long as it doesn't turn into the GM handing him a fully-fledged plan out of the blue, this one just feels a bit mean-spirited. I don't know that it would break anything if you could do this, but can't Aspect already do a huge whack of things already? quote:Ah yes, the great heroic spirit stymied by a busy phone line. I have to admit, I have not forgotten the bit in my actual game many years ago, when a group of immortal gods were completely stymied by a comedy scene involving an automated help line. Second only to the recent scene in Glitch playtesting where a group of world-killing lords of emptiness (retired), feared by gods and men alike, utterly failed to climb up an icy set of stairs. quote:Realm is specifically being able to control your boss' little pocket dimension. This means you can be real powerful as long as you can hide in there and lure enemies in there, but once you actually leave, Realm is a completely useless stat that serves no purpose. Earlier parts make a big deal of how adventures could be set entirely inside the pocket dimensions, but if that happens then you run into the issue that Realm trumps anything else in terms of usefulness and power, so it's kind of the classic issue of a specialization that's either useless or game-trivializing with little-to-no middle ground. Realm-stuff doesn't fade if it leaves the Realm or anything, so having a bunch of Realm will also let you drop in at home and conjure up pretty much anything you happen to want, or do tricks like bringing injured mortals home for miraculous treatment you couldn't provide elsewhere, so it serves as a kind of resources stat. But yeah, it's kind of limited, which is why it didn't survive the move to 3e. quote:Spirit is a weird combination stat of Magic Resistance, Magic Stealth and how many closely bound mortal servants you're allowed to collect. Since there's no random factor involved in using your magic powers, you basically "bid" a number of miracle points equal to how much Spirit you want to kick through in case anyone supernaturally protected is in the AoE of your miracle, and hope you sacrificed enough to kick through their spirit shield(yes, it has a proper noun name, no, I'm not going to write it out). This, of course, gets a bit odd with regards to the player characters since the GM will always know what their magic resistance is, and I'm not sure whether the GM is just supposed to occasionally low-bid to keep up a pretense of NPC's not being omniscient or what. The writing seems to imply that PC's should not specifically know what they're bidding against. Your magic resistance also helps you resist various snooping ritual magic trying to figure out if you're the one who replaced an entire forest of redwoods with stop signs and similar shenanigans. Spirit is pretty bland and passive, yeah. It tries to make up for this by being a very powerful kind of passive (really it's almost ludicrous), but in the end, it's pretty dull, which is why it, too, got replaced in 3e. quote:Here we're also introduced to the RITES which can be summarized as "rite of mild magic detective work," "rite of magical torture" and "five different rites for Nobilis versions of Diablerie." In general you can just make up new Rites for any "general magical thing you think the Nobilis ought to able to do," but I don't know that that happens very often. wiegieman posted:Yeah, this reeks of stuff that makes me want to stay away from the game. Don't tell me you're all about the narrative freedom of the mythic characters and then go on a tear about how I'm not allowed to leave your walled garden. I mean, it's already a vastly broad ability; it has to have some limitations.
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Nov 9, 2019 19:16
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PurpleXVI posted:The problem with something that ill-defined, where it's really just mashing together two words that sound cool in a dense purple prose way, is that applications essentially turn into interpretation battles. The GM doesn't know what the ability can do, so they can't in any way prepare for it or have interesting responses to it, as the player can make up any level of bullshit. At least most other things in the book are in some way defined and limited so that using those abilities or resources requires thinking and some amount of creativity, not just a dictionary full of adjectives. I'm not really sure what you're saying. How would a "dictionary full of adjectives" help?
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Nov 9, 2019 21:17
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megane posted:You're not wrong, but this is basically the exact reason I dislike Nobilis (and pretty much all "god games"). By this logic, the God of Cutting can do literally anything as long as the person playing him can bully the GM into admitting that you could theoretically, in some distant metaphorical sense, maybe use the word "cut" in a description of it. Can the God of Cutting cut atomic nuclei in half and blow stuff up with nuclear fission? Can you cut flaws out of an object to repair it? How about cutting through red tape to get bureaucracy done? Can he cut away somebody's luck, or memory, or dislike of him? I guess I'm supposed to go "whoa yeah that's awesome" to all of these, but it just sounds like bland omnipotence to me. Defining what characters can and can't do gives them personality and structure, not to mention limiting the amount of stupid "I can choreograph a ballet with Cutting, right" arguments. Maybe you can't do that and still have a game where characters feel like gods, I dunno. I just don't want to play that game. Pretty much all of these sound like either something you could absolutely do and it would be fine (nuclear fission isn't really that impressive in Nobilis) or something that would have interesting consequences (it's perfectly okay to ask a player exactly what they think is going to be left after they've cut all the flaws out of something — possibly nothing). The Sample of Play revolves around three characters, one of whom does in fact have the "cut through anything" power, and I can't really think of a moment where he could have just sliced away all their problems in the way you suggest.
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Nov 10, 2019 04:46
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megane posted:I dunno, I haven't read it, so I can't say. But does anyone in it actually do this sort of wacky metaphorical boundary-pushing? Does the cutting guy try to cut a day in half, or the regret out of someone's heart? No. The main big trick he does with it is to crawl out onto the nose of their plummeting jet and slice open the ocean, opening a rent big enough to give the plane room to pull out of its dive.
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Nov 10, 2019 06:38
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PurpleXVI posted:He could cut the "danger" out of a situation, What would that even mean? What would it look like if you did it? You can't do a miracle if you don't know what you're actually trying to do. quote:he could cut their enemies out of existence, Regrettably, they are immortal. quote:he could cut wounds out of himself, This gets brought up at some point, possibly in a different book — cutting wounds out of yourself, or deleting them with Excrucian power, will erase the actual wound, so you stop bleeding or having no legs or whatever, but it won't restore your health levels, which exist on another level of the mechanics. It might work on a mortal, who doesn't really operate on two levels. quote:he could cut the distance between the plane and its destination, There's a Local range limitation on that Gift. quote:he could cut the momentum out of the plane and its passengers so they come to a perfect halt with no problems on the runway. This would probably have worked to prevent the plane from crashing if he had thought about it, but he didn't actually want the plane to stop, he wanted it to get to DC, where he needed to be. quote:Shooting a gun does some very specific things and has some very explicit drawbacks and limitations. This is nothing at all like "you can do anything you can cram the verb 'cut' into as long as you like and have your hand free to do the cutting with." I think you're running into a problem because you're assuming that Marsiglio can do any miracle that his player can say out loud, but in fact he's limited to doing things that actually make sense. It's very easy to cut someone's head off (if they can't stop you), only slightly harder to slice through their will to resist you, and slightly trickier to cut through red tape. Cutting through "the danger in this situation" doesn't make sense even in a mythic environment without doing a lot more digging to establish exactly what you mean.
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Nov 10, 2019 07:29
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PurpleXVI posted:What does "cutting sunlight" or "cutting beauty" mean? Those are the specific examples in the book. They could mean several things! My point is that the player has to know exactly what they mean if they want to do it. It doesn't become the HG's job to invent the metaphysics behind slicing danger out of things in her campaign just because the player used "cut" in a sentence, is what I'm trying to say.
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Nov 10, 2019 07:39
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hyphz posted:There’s also I think a bit where it mentions that Domain: Cutting wouldn’t necessarily let you cut everything. The actual example is that Domain: Toads doesn’t let you turn someone into a toad, because since they start as a non-toad human they are outside your Estate and not subject to your Domain Miracles. Yeah, in 2e you couldn't do this, the closest you could do was smush a lot of the toad-nature into someone so they become fairly toady without actually changing shape. 3e eliminated Spirit and mixed it with some of Domain to make Persona, which is all about manipulating the Estate-nature rather than actual bits of your Estate, so that you can totally give someone a proper toading. A lot of this is because 2e relied on 'you can't miracle other Nobles directly'. Once 3e introduced a health system that let you take damage from a toading without actually immediately losing your sapience or opposable thumbs, a lot of design space opened up.
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Nov 13, 2019 00:21
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Particularly since it amounts to "is effectively unable to understand simple concepts even after having them explained."
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Nov 18, 2019 02:57
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“Quite” can be used to mean “not very” in the same way that “bless your heart” can be used to mean “gently caress you.” “Oh, yes, she’s quite pretty, I suppose...”
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Nov 20, 2019 16:22
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It always confuses me when people try to describe Nobilis as "rules-light," because it isn't, like, at all.
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Nov 25, 2019 19:12
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I don't think Nobilis and Scion are aiming for remotely the same things.
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Nov 25, 2019 19:17
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I found the patisserie thing confusing because apparently the employees are all imprisoned in the shop to the point that nobody can make a grocery run, which seems irrational even for aelfir.
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Dec 1, 2019 19:05
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Mors Rattus posted:Side note, had the Rapt received any real attention before this? I can barely remember that they were a thing. Left-Hand Path had them, but even in the 2e corebook they were the Mad until it became clear that saying "we know this is a bit insensitive" doesn't give you the clear to do it anyway.
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Mar 12, 2020 19:44
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Tylana posted:drat, these NPC write-ups remind me I actually liked nWoD Mage. And that I had no idea what Nimbus or Attainments are. Your Nimbus is basically the weird aura that mages have, like "when I do magic there's a sound of spooky choruses chanting Latin." 2e expands this a bit so that your Nimbus starts to spread out a bit if you're careless with your magic you get stuff like your family members starting to randomly say ominous things in Latin. Attainments are the powers you get from Legacies. They're basically spells you've engraved into your soul so that they no longer have any of the drawbacks of spells, especially Paradox.
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Mar 13, 2020 19:07
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Talking about rear end in a top hat mages makes me want to mention how much I appreciate the way Awakening successfully threads the needle of "being written under the assumption that mages are a kind of monster" without actually trying to hammer it into the reader that you're bad and should feel bad the way oWoD games frequently did. In fact it never really tells you that at all, which is a mark of subtlety that often gets missed.
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Mar 14, 2020 20:16
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unseenlibrarian posted:...You know, in retrospect given the way Dragonblooded writing plays with "The Dragonblooded empire is matriarchal the same way modern society is patriarchal, complete with microagressions and unecessarily gendered words and etc," it really -should- be "Dragonblooded are all called Princesses of the Earth regardless" Usually Exalted avoids using the word "princess" in the same way it avoids using "wizard" and "tavern," and uses "prince" to describe what other settings would call a "king."
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Mar 24, 2020 21:06
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Yeah, Invincible Sword Princess is a fan meme, and the Princess Magnificent with Lips Like Coral is part of the Abyssal milieu that gets to use gothic fantasy tropes.
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Mar 24, 2020 22:55
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The Lone Badger posted:If every spell cast is Hubris, shouldn't you turn into a Rapt pretty quickly? You don't have to befoul every spell you cast. Also, the serious Scelestus will wind up becoming something even worse than Enraptured. A lot worse, actually!
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Mar 26, 2020 23:46
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Froghammer posted:...worse than the 9 foot tall woman with melting skin? A lot worse!
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Mar 27, 2020 01:46
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I told you it was worse. Incidentally, qlippoth being unsavable is new. Before they were just savable enough to make you want to try.
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Apr 3, 2020 00:43
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I could be persuaded to be interested in "I used to be super racist and the rhetoric other hunters use about supernatural creatures is distressingly familiar."
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Apr 10, 2020 01:28
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