- Location
- Spain
And as everybody knows, the best way to deal with depresion is avoiding psychiatrists!
Or even better, killing them.
White Wolf's World of Darkness
And as everybody knows, the best way to deal with depresion is avoiding psychiatrists!
Or even better, killing them.
Bailey Matutine
(Verified Pooka)
- Location
- Pelican Town
- Pronouns
- They/Them
The only mechanics greatly different from, say, Werewolf, are the ones that manage banality.
A lot of the people who made the original complaints about Changeling were expecting either "look how gloomy I am" or high adventure fantasy.
What they got was a nuanced world where, basically, if you stop smiling you die. It just didn't fit what anyone was looking for. Most of the later complaints took their cues from these earlier complaints.
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm pretty fucking unsympathetic towards a metaphor for depression in which psychiatrists are evil.
Darmani
Cast in the name of Pod, Ye Go Ninty
- Location
- Lansing
Tbf, this was in the shadow of some a grade fuckups by the system. My mom did counseling and was a nurse. She still insisted to avoid us getting bad diagnoses. Its more legal/government mandated stuff was destructive and mental fuckups were navigating on their own. But yeah more Rent-esque "smells like teen spirit" bullshit from white wolf circa the 90s
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
This is the World of Darkness we're talking about - I expect WoD psychiatrists to be even more prone to a Martha Mitchell treatment of Changelings than the real-world counterparts would be if Changelings were real. I'm pretty sure the findings of Rosenhan in WoD are orders of magnitude more disturbing than IRL too.
Bailey Matutine
(Verified Pooka)
- Location
- Pelican Town
- Pronouns
- They/Them
We also know from the fomor book that Pentex owns a LOT of psychiatrists and specifically uses them to install banes in people who are already having problems in their life. That this carried over from Werewolf, the already established system, to Changeling, the newer one, is simply unfortunate.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
You say unfortunate as if the world is real. As if, "Oh, so sad, it's the way things are."
I mean, this is fictional. Nothing said they had to have psychologists treated that way.
Like, it's unfortunate that the plot of 'the real world' included Trump becoming President.
Something that someone CHOOSES to put into a work isn't really unfortunate? If that makes sense?
I mean, this is fictional. Nothing said they had to have psychologists treated that way.
Like, it's unfortunate that the plot of 'the real world' included Trump becoming President.
Something that someone CHOOSES to put into a work isn't really unfortunate? If that makes sense?
Bailey Matutine
(Verified Pooka)
- Location
- Pelican Town
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Except here it's that they made a specific decision that psychologists in World of Darkness are evil before they ever came out with Changeling. What's unfortunate is that they didn't think through the implications and try to find some way to make things work without contradicting themselves, rather than simply going "oh, we said this, it's still true I guess."
- Pronouns
- They/Them
...the entire concept that each game has to perfectly fit into each other is a horribly, horribly stupid one that I'm glad they mostly ditched for nWod.
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Pretending as though just because one gameline did something fuck stupid, the other gamelines have to follow suit is ridiculous. Especially when your subject matter deals with the topic heavily.
Werewolf isn't a game that deals with mental illness significantly, so it's just another dumb throwaway detail in a line already filled with garbage.
Changeling is a game where that shit is central to the plot and themes and I'm not going to give it a break for its fuck stupid exploitative romanticizing of mental illness because there is nothing romantic about wanting to kill yourself. A good psychiatrist will save the lives of dozens of people over their careers and acting like they're out the take the "mystical, magical wonder" out of your life is infuriatingly disconnected from anything resembling the awful, awful reality of actually having a disorder.
Those writers made that choice. It was a stupid choice born out of the worst of White Wolf in a reflexive, non-productive rejection of "the Man" that stems from the entitled bullshit of a group of mayonnaise auteur wannabes desperately seeking the aesthetic of the starving artist and not having a single fucking clue of just how profoundly shitty is it to go hungry for circumstances outside of your control while also wanting to splatter your brains across a fucking pavement out of fatigue towards life.
They could have treated these issues in a productive, healthy, respectful manner. They did not. Fuck 'em.
Old Changeling is garbage and I'm happy it's forgotten in the dumpster of history where it belongs.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
I'm going to get back to the Seers series, I finally thought of a decent Praetorian idea, but I'm currently sidetracked with something else that will go in this thread. So I'll have to get back to that a little later.
In other news, apparently they just released a chapter of something that's antagonists for Hunters based off of Beasts.
...I assume it's like Beeeests? Just like Chongelings and Mayges and Vimpires all oppose Hunters?
In other news, apparently they just released a chapter of something that's antagonists for Hunters based off of Beasts.
...I assume it's like Beeeests? Just like Chongelings and Mayges and Vimpires all oppose Hunters?
Hadn't had the chance to use them as antagonists yet but I had suspected as much. They do that dark mirror thing very well. They're also very good at weaseling their way into the power structures of other splats.
ganonso
Compulsive Quest Starter
- Location
- PACA France
My players especially liked the Lair and the fact most Beasts are intelligent enough to invoke their Lair into reality, and then retreat to their core Chamber while ambushing the hunters along the way and trying to bury the party under maluses. When a werewolf shifts into Gauru you know you are in with a straight fight. With a Beast the final fight can be a real hunt.
Also the Primordial Dream with the Chambers is nice to figure Misty Silent Hill or the Fog World of Persona 4
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
While I could see that as a metaphor for depression, it's kind of weird one. It's a very particular form of depression and not the common one. The most common experience people share about depression is not that they have to keep themselves happy and engaged, or the mindless tedium of the world will grind them down. There's no furiously pretending that everything is bright. When people talk about depression, it's usually in terms of not being able to be happy - there's no pretending that everything is bright, because the spectre of depression has already closed the curtains.
(Besides, we know what a World of Darkness game about depression looks like. It's called Wraith: the Oblivion and is so dark and emotionally draining as to be basically unplayable.)
- Location
- Spain
Heh.
In my experience, people without medical knowledge tend to recomend "going out/See the sun/Do something you like/wharever" as a cure for depresion.
Of, course, as anybody that actually studies it knows, they got it backwards. Depresion (Well, the Endogen kind) isn't cause because you lack sun or you are practicing hobbies or wharever, it's that you are physically unable to enjoy them. Your brain doesn't let you.
(That's why a common sympton is just to stay all day in bed, doing nothing. You just lack the energy to get up).
Pretending that you can just force yourself to be happy to defeat a depresion is akin to saying a man with a broken leg that he could walk if he only tries hard enough.
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That's not actually true. In the case of seasonal affective disorder and when it's winter-recurrent (as it is for most people with SAD), going outside and getting sunlight does help, at least for the less severe cases. Sunlight and exercise does work for this particular class of depressive disorder - it seems to be linked to delays in the circadian rhythms and sunlight and daytime exercise seems to help to reset them.
So the problem here is really more that it does help with one specific seasonal-related depressive disorder, but doesn't help for other kinds.
(this doesn't excuse Changeling: the Dreaming)
- Location
- Spain
IIrc that's why i pointed to the endogenmorph form.
Like, they are cases where forcing yourself to do things is a valid treatment, but alas, that doesn't really apply in most cases.
It's the one that I have, so forgive me for taking this a little personally.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/They
This seems less like a depression and more like existential angst. But, like, escapism is very explicitly the thing you're NOT supposed to do to deal with that.
(Also oMage can be made to cover that niche pretty well, and oChangeling does it really poorly)
...Bullshit. They also made a specific decision that God existed in the World of Darkness, then came out with Mage: the Ascension and Werewolf: the Apocalypse, both games which can only work if you assume that Christian mythology is incorrect from base principles. There is no rule in the oWoD that if it was written before, it is now sacrosanct. In fact, the oWoD is generally best thought of as multiple alternate universes with name congruence. Vampires are top dog, and God exists and all that, in Vampire. Reality is consensus, and all supernatural creatures are some form of hedge mage, in Mage. The Triat rule all, and Wyrm-taint matters mostly in Werewolf. That's why the game has generally very loose crossover rules and never considered crossovers to be a major part of the setting.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
Fortunately, for some reason 'Existential angst' was not the name that this particular emotional disorder got labeled with. This is good, because it means that people with depression at very least don't get told off for being 'angsty' whiners in addition to everything else.
Also, I mentioned months back HITMark: the Chaingunning, the roll-playing game of storyteller horror at 'wait wait you can do that'?
Let's consider for a moment how to build the TPK-800 for funsies.
HITMarks, you see, are built like mage characters except with mandatory flaws that they get no benefit from. They get Soulless, which gives them 21 base freebie points and locks them out of sphere magic, and Vulnerable to Paradox, which gives them a mandatory paradox dice pool of 5d. Their mental attributes are capped at 3. They get Construct as an automatic flaw. They also gain no XP, because apparenly having a plasma cannon at chargen is that OP? Notice that this paradox dice pool is fixed. Ergo, there's no reason not to do something horrifyingly bullshit. Like stack Exomuscle and Exoskeleton.
I think you're seeing where I'm going with this. So the first thing we do is take our attributes, 7/5/3. We assign them physical primary, mental secondary, social tertiary. We then immediately use the Diminished Attribute flaw, which can explicitly take you over flaw point limits, to blow all our points of physical attributes on freebie points at +3 freebie points per dot. That's another 21 freebie points (for a total of 44, because Construct is a 2 pt flaw) we have. Yes, this means we have baseline 1/1/1 physicals. We then blow all our Social attributes on another +9 freebie points. No, it's not going to matter once we become MORE MACHINE THAN MAN. Note that you're allowed to take another Flaw after using Diminished Attribute. Guess what flaw we're taking? We're taking Mayfly Curse. This gives us a roughly 1 year lifespan normally, and +10 freebie points. Don't worry, we have the technology to ignore this. So right now we have 63 freebie points.
We assign the rest normally, then assign our abilities, 13/9/5, in things which are fite related.
Then we get to backgrounds. We immediately take Enhancements 10 (because it's technically possible and why the fuck wouldn't we do it), blowing it on 30 points worth of augmentations, which include skeletal reinforcement, +6 Dexterity, 4 dice of countermagic, and an Enlightenment 8 implant plasma cannon. We take 10 permanent paradox because our paradox pool is always 5 no matter what so lol. Then we take some Devices. Exomuscle and Exoskeleton, obviously, because this is the TPK-800 and fuck you that's why. We also take Nanotech Integration as a Device. Notice because Nanotech Integration suppresses all aging, we no longer care about our Mayfly Curse, and we get +3 stamina and combat regen to boot. The total cost of this is all 7 background points, 13 freebie points for the Enhancement, 14 freebie points for the exomuscle and exoskeleton, and 10 freebie points for nanotech enhancement. This is 37 of our 63 freebie points spent. So right now we have Strength 1+6 (7), Dexterity 1+7 (8), Stamina 1+9 (10), and a health level track of -0 x 14/-1 x 2/-2 x 2/-5 x 1/Incapacitated. We also have 10 dice of soak and 7 dice of innate countermagic. And a plasma cannon.
And we still have 26 freebie points left. Obviously we want to buy up two fite skills (Brawl and Firearms, for example) to 5 (-8 fp). That's 18 freebie points left. You can use this to customize your MINIATURE GIANT DEATH ROBOT however you want. You should also practice dodging IRL, because your ST will probably literally throw the book at you.
E: What I would suggest is using the Wonder rules, the vague ones, to make an Arete 5 Wonder. That allows the Wonder to have 5 different magical abilities at Arete 5. We're going to have a Super Wired Reflexes, because extra actions are king, running Golden Gunman (Forces 2/Time 3), some Forces 2 movement enhancer, and probably a Forces 1/Time 2 difficulty reducer. You can then shove two random powers on it.
And you still have 8 freebie points left.
Let's consider for a moment how to build the TPK-800 for funsies.
HITMarks, you see, are built like mage characters except with mandatory flaws that they get no benefit from. They get Soulless, which gives them 21 base freebie points and locks them out of sphere magic, and Vulnerable to Paradox, which gives them a mandatory paradox dice pool of 5d. Their mental attributes are capped at 3. They get Construct as an automatic flaw. They also gain no XP, because apparenly having a plasma cannon at chargen is that OP? Notice that this paradox dice pool is fixed. Ergo, there's no reason not to do something horrifyingly bullshit. Like stack Exomuscle and Exoskeleton.
I think you're seeing where I'm going with this. So the first thing we do is take our attributes, 7/5/3. We assign them physical primary, mental secondary, social tertiary. We then immediately use the Diminished Attribute flaw, which can explicitly take you over flaw point limits, to blow all our points of physical attributes on freebie points at +3 freebie points per dot. That's another 21 freebie points (for a total of 44, because Construct is a 2 pt flaw) we have. Yes, this means we have baseline 1/1/1 physicals. We then blow all our Social attributes on another +9 freebie points. No, it's not going to matter once we become MORE MACHINE THAN MAN. Note that you're allowed to take another Flaw after using Diminished Attribute. Guess what flaw we're taking? We're taking Mayfly Curse. This gives us a roughly 1 year lifespan normally, and +10 freebie points. Don't worry, we have the technology to ignore this. So right now we have 63 freebie points.
We assign the rest normally, then assign our abilities, 13/9/5, in things which are fite related.
Then we get to backgrounds. We immediately take Enhancements 10 (because it's technically possible and why the fuck wouldn't we do it), blowing it on 30 points worth of augmentations, which include skeletal reinforcement, +6 Dexterity, 4 dice of countermagic, and an Enlightenment 8 implant plasma cannon. We take 10 permanent paradox because our paradox pool is always 5 no matter what so lol. Then we take some Devices. Exomuscle and Exoskeleton, obviously, because this is the TPK-800 and fuck you that's why. We also take Nanotech Integration as a Device. Notice because Nanotech Integration suppresses all aging, we no longer care about our Mayfly Curse, and we get +3 stamina and combat regen to boot. The total cost of this is all 7 background points, 13 freebie points for the Enhancement, 14 freebie points for the exomuscle and exoskeleton, and 10 freebie points for nanotech enhancement. This is 37 of our 63 freebie points spent. So right now we have Strength 1+6 (7), Dexterity 1+7 (8), Stamina 1+9 (10), and a health level track of -0 x 14/-1 x 2/-2 x 2/-5 x 1/Incapacitated. We also have 10 dice of soak and 7 dice of innate countermagic. And a plasma cannon.
And we still have 26 freebie points left. Obviously we want to buy up two fite skills (Brawl and Firearms, for example) to 5 (-8 fp). That's 18 freebie points left. You can use this to customize your MINIATURE GIANT DEATH ROBOT however you want. You should also practice dodging IRL, because your ST will probably literally throw the book at you.
E: What I would suggest is using the Wonder rules, the vague ones, to make an Arete 5 Wonder. That allows the Wonder to have 5 different magical abilities at Arete 5. We're going to have a Super Wired Reflexes, because extra actions are king, running Golden Gunman (Forces 2/Time 3), some Forces 2 movement enhancer, and probably a Forces 1/Time 2 difficulty reducer. You can then shove two random powers on it.
And you still have 8 freebie points left.
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- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/They
But, like Eukie mentioned, what he's describing is not analogous to the usual symptoms of clinical depression. I'm sure that some depressed people act that way, but it's not inherent to the disorder, and many people who are not depressed also act the same way.
Wraith, on the other hand, is inherently tied to the symptoms of clinical depression, so i'm confident about calling it "a game about depression". Changeling, OTOH, tends to alternate between "growing up sucks", "ugh the modern world doesn't have ~WONDER~", and "distract yourself from your impending and inevitable doom", none of which inherently have anything to do with depression
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