- Location
- Spain
Oh, please. Ramming ship > Cthulthu.
White Wolf's World of Darkness
Oh, please. Ramming ship > Cthulthu.
To be fair to both of you, Cthulhu isn't a deity or a demon or anything like that.
He is just an alien, who happens to be a priest of Azathoth, and has fuck-off powerful telepathy.
Most of the problems come from him not being in control of his power when he isn't awake, and him having "Orange-and-Blue-Morality"/non-human psychology.
...also IIRC the fact that their species reproduces by budding when they get injured...
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
To figure out damage, multiply the ship's velocity in yards per second by its HP (which you calculate as four times the square root of the ship's mass in lbs), divide by 100 and multiply the result by 1d.
Oh wait, wrong system. How does WoD calculate collision damage of a vehicle?
To explain that;
That was Cthulhu while half-awake, their body was conscious but their mind was still in a rem cycle, the boat was pretty much a snooze button.
Also-
-what in the hell did that town do to piss off that many werewolves?
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Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
Uh, the ramming ship did nothing to C'Thulhu. That was literally the point- To show that nothing the explorers could do would have any impact on him at all. The tiny amount of damage caused by ramming C'Thulhu literally repaired itself in moments as the protagonist watched in horror.
C'Thulhu then went back to sleep because the stars were not right, and the annoying little bugs that had jumped in his bed and started crawling over him at the eldritch equivalent of 2 in the morning and woke him were leaving so he did not have to swat them.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
What would it take for you to make your own version? Me and a friend are thinking of running a solo game of Princess, and could use a solid version.
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- They/Them
Go back in the past and kill TheKingRaven, from what I've gathered.
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
The problem is something of the opposite in Princess; concrete stats of the "20 dice in all pools"-kind means that the Queens just auto-win at everything, which doesn't make challenging them a possibility, when in fact sneaking around in the Queen of Storms palace without her seeing you should be allowed on a plot-by-plot basis.
Call of Cthulhu has been critiqued for giving Great Cthulhu game-attributes before, and while I occasionally agree, the statblock for Great Cthulhu, Master of R'lyeh is basically just a very extensive block of "Rules for fighting Cthulhu: You die.". Great Cthulhu has 160 hit points, and when these are depleted he "bursts and dissolved into a disgusting, cloying greenish cloud, then immediately begins to reform.", returning to 160 HP after 10+1d10 minutes. So actually killing Cthulhu is impossible; at best you can buy yourself 20 minutes to run away, which is appropriate given the story Call of Cthulhu.
When you see Cthulhu, investigators roll against SAN, and if they fail, roll against SAN again. On a failure, they go instantly and irrevocably insane. Cthulhu attacks for 22d6 damage, instantly killing anyone who doesn't succeed on a Dodge roll. He eats 1d3 investigators per round, without defence. He has 21 points of armour and regenerates 6 HP per round. He knows PLOT number of spells and has 42 Magic Points to power them.
You could fight Cthulhu with an M1A1 Abrams or something, but the result is going to be 10+1d10 minutes to get as far away as possible, because Cthulhu will win a straight fight in the end. You're down 5 shells, Cthulhu is back to 160 HP and can destroy an Abrams or kill its crew in a single blow. (Range will not save you, Cthulhu can teleport.)
Having read Raven's version some few months ago I'm guessing he must have mellowed out a lot since EarthScorpion left the project. I don't remember seeing a lot of the problems that get brought up when referring to his version of the game. There's still a lack of support for large organizations but I'm fine with that.
Edit: I'm speaking of the 2nd edition material. I've not looked at any 1st edition princess material in any detail.
Edit: I'm speaking of the 2nd edition material. I've not looked at any 1st edition princess material in any detail.
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- Location
- Spain
Vocation pre-gmc works well.
Meh.
Nothing summoning Hastur can't solve.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I think I said this before, but I do want to say that your version of things works better thematically, narratively, and crunchwise: making the Queens into hyper-modern DMPCs is a bad idea both because, as @The Laurent already pointed out, the Lord British Postulate*, and because it means freezing out ideas that would work better in portraying the game's themes and - shock of all shocks - making the game more fun and coherent.
Having the Queens be hip and trendy and up with the latest memes forces the DM, in turn, to portray them that way, which can be a serious headache for some DMs to pull off convincingly, and creates the unique headache of trying to make a character come off as both the girl next door and a godlike entity from before the dawn of history. Inspiring both awe and a sense of familiarity from the same NPC is... well, I'd hesitate to call it impossible, but it would certainly be the kind of thing that firmly cements a storyteller's bonafides for years to come.
Your version of it manages the Queens along the same lines as, well, the Yozis - they're not characters, they're settings. Not only does this make it easier to manage their portrayal and make it properly impressive, it also means that actually running interactions between the party and one of its Queens can take the form of a solo adventure/dream sequence, which is much less of a challenge for the DM.
Further, it helps move the Queens into the firmament of the game, instead of making them essentially just overpowered Princesses. You don't have to ask "why don't the Queens do X or Y to help fight the Darkness" because they're being portrayed as beings that have largely moved beyond interacting with the physical realm. If they are acting against the Darkness, it's on a plane so rarefied that it has no bearing on the actual game, which is perfectly fine, since then it's up to the PCs to be the champions of hope and justice. The players get to have fun (or "fun", depending on the tone of the campaign) being the last vanguard of light in the World of Darkness, instead of having the real heroes looming on the horizon like a bad smell.
* "If you stat it, they will kill it. No exceptions." The name comes from that time a random yahoo managed to punk the invincible in-game avatar of Ultima Online's creator and chief mod. Actually, MMOs have a lot of examples of people killing things that were thought to be unkillable...
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I definitely HAVE said this before, but this argument always feels like memetic hyping of the Great Old Ones.
Eldritch Skies handled Lovecraftian horror much more effectively. You want to fight a Great Old One? Bad move, but with enough firepower and preparation and probably the backing of another hyperspatial force, you might be able to eke out a win and put them out of the picture. They might well be back in a few centuries, but everything you care about will be dead, so who cares?
The horror potential isn't in fears of human extinction at the hands of Nyarlathotep. It's the fact humans are going to either go extinct or vanish into hyperspace, like literally every other species that has or ever will exist in their universe. The laws of base reality ensure that any civilization will eventually collapse, and any species will eventually die out. They nuke themselves, or die of a plague, or fuck their planet up so bad the ecosystem dies and they starve to death, or just stagnate so hard they just... fade away, until there's nothing left but damaged archives and crumbling ruins to mark they ever existed. Entropy fucks everyone, in the end. The only way to escape it is by becoming something that doesn't follow those laws anymore; the stars are littered with those who chose the first option, and the only way to know what happened to the second group is by going to join them.
The only way for mankind to survive, in the long term, would be by forsaking their humanity. Great Cthulhu was once made of common elements and compounds, may even have once been able to grasp human ideas like love and patriotism and the Daily Mail, but it traded all that away for hyperspace, for just the chance to escape the iron cage of physics and psychology and entropy. Worse, it didn't even work properly; Cthulhu feeds on the minds of men because it's stuck halfway between the universe we know and the higher realms, a dimensional wraith harvesting whatever energy it can just to stay solvent. Even if you're down with casting aside your human skin to walk the alien realms of hyperspace, you can still end up locked out of your Promised Land forever, or reduced to carbon atoms smeared across several light-minutes of space.
The horror isn't some big googly monster that causes brain imbalances. It's the knowledge that death is certain, the Great Old Ones aren't, and all you can do is blindly guess which one is better and hope.
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- They/Them
So, to clarify, are there ANY parts of the Banisher mechanics that don't suck? I just bought the book off Amazon (got it delivered for cheap), and I do know already that a lot of the actual mechanics are...questionable. But I don't know how much of them are.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The rotes are a joke and if anyone asks if they can use those character generation rules, you punch them in the face and laugh at them.
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I was not asking what wasn't good...unless the answer is that everything other than that is fine?
- Location
- Denmark
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- She/Her
Not all the rotes are a joke. Unfortunately, you need a fair bit of system knowledge to tell the difference.
Well, except for anything linked to the Travellers. Who are a Banisher group written by someone who I'm almost certain was an Ascension writer who didn't understand the difference between Ascension and Awakening. Between the fact the characters aren't valid characters, the fact that the rotes have stupidity like using Spirit to get into space, and the fact that some of the rotes literally do not understand how nWoD mechanics work - oh, and how little sense the group makes as Banishers - just pretend they don't exist.
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Are you sure this is that stupid? I mean, you need Spirit for literally huge swaths of everything else you do, especially things that have nothing to do with Spirits at all, soooo...
More seriously, noted.
Are you sure this is that stupid? I mean, you need Spirit for literally huge swaths of everything else you do, especially things that have nothing to do with Spirits at all, soooo...
More seriously, noted.
No, not in nWoD. Do you mean the fact you need equal Spirit and Life to affect werewolves, and that's actually something that makes sense when you consider that as per werewolf lore, the Uratha are basically Wolf-Hosts and Hosts are defined by being spirit-flesh hybrids. The same limitation would also be needed for the Azlu and the Beshilu.
Actually, hmm, that'd be an interesting way of doing it. You can affect Werewolves with just Life or just Spirit - but unless you use both, their spirit-flesh nature means that they "heal" the Potency of the spell as if it was Bashing damage. That is to say, it drains Potency at a rate of one per round - and yes, that means that they heal any damage that does even if it was Lethal or Agg. It means that you can get them with short term things, but then they go and T1000 it away.
But seriously, what "literally huge swathes" are you talking about? About the only one I can think of is the silly requirement of Spirit for goetia - and that's fixed by Summoners, which lets you make pure-Mind goetic demons that just can't materialise.
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Well, that and I suppose I might be misremembering? I remember going through the books (corebook, a few others) and seeing a lot of 'also needs Spirit' that had me scratching my head, but that might have just been me reading things wrong, or having assumed it was more common than it seemed.
Edit: In other words, I concede the point and might just have thought it was more common than it was.
Don't actually have anything against Spirit having to be involved to really effect Werewolves, actually. And as far as the limitation goes, I think your proposed houserule actually seems pretty interesting.
...and makes me imagine scenarios where a Mage who doesn't know what the fuck a Werewolf is (or doesn't know what that means in terms of spiritual signifiance and just thinks 'oh, a giant monster' or whatever...admittedly he'd have to be a slightly clueless Mage) tries using Life to tear them apart or something only to realize, "Oh god oh god it's not working!"
And...honestly, at that point they might well die.
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- Location
- Spain
Of course, Nyarlothep is a metaphor of entropy of societal collapse anyway.
Fucker deserved to die, 'slightly clueless mage'? at least be misinformed! s/he is a disservice to the Awakened community!
But this only affects Life magic directed at their pattern, you can still use mind-rape them or use Fate to just make their life hell.
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Admittedly here, as a Werewolf is charging you is not the time to figure out that, "No, I can't use Life magic on them, I better start using Forces magic to...oh wait, oh god, I needed that arm!"
Like, at a certain point, you really should have done your homework before the pop (murder) quiz and if you didn't you become one of those Mages that existed to be a bad example.
Which makes sense. Mages are playing with fire, and all sorts of dangerous things. Getting burned to death by it is no surprise. Mages aren't pyramid-scheme vampires, but it's still not an occupation/identity that assures you'll die happy, in bed, of old age.
And all it takes is one really, really big mistake. And category mistakes seem like they'd qualify. "I thought this was X, but it was Y, so suddenly all of my prep work is shit and I'm dead."
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think Nyarlathotep is just entropy, you know with him being Soul of The Outer Gods and therefore arising with the interaction between matter and energy, represented by Azathoth and space and time represented by Yog-Sothoth.
Legend of Ruina
Growing eyes on the inside
There's a reason three out of five paths have arcana suitable to getting away from your current location with a single spell. The Moros and Thyrsus dodge to Twilight or the Shadow, and the Mastigos just plain goes elsewhere. Meanwhile the Acanthus did his divination earlier and therefore was never there in the first place, leaving the Obrimos behind to bemoan his luck and die horribly.