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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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pantherasapiens said:
It also kind of happens a lot in fairy-tales, doesn't it? Impoverished tailor slays giant or performs some other massive task, marries princess and gets half the kingdom type of deal.
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Yep. It's for that I have no problems with Heroes being selfish assholes. They fit the archetype rather well. It's a shame they are so badly written (Conquering Heroes is much more nuanced in its portrayal) because they adress that for all our talks of selfless heroism, we totally still expect heroes to be rewarded for their deeds.

Now I agree Beasts are generally awful and deserving to die (Fun fact: The Hunger for Prey explictly works with anything that feels fear so let's say Hedge-Beasts are fair game and a High-Society meal) just like vampires. But it's not incompatible with "Heroes are assholes.

I mean back in Vampire the Masquerade, even your average Camarilla members deserves to die in a fire. That doesn't mean the average inquisitor of the Society of Leopold is a torture happy lunatics.

Sydonai said:
I'd like to mention the earlier version that they didn't decide to use for some reason, where you were born as a Beast for some unexplained reason but could basically live as a normal person because your soul( your Beast) was asleep.
And if it ever woke up, which wasn't a definite thing, you then had a choice between feeding it to keep it quiet and sedated or letting it rampage through the collective subconscious.
....Why didn't the writers go with that version?
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I'm going to precise on this one.

When Beast got out, a fairly large part of the readership took them as minority analogues. Notably because the authors made an effort to have their examples being pretty diverse and the MRA' Hero outlined above.

The different developpers on the book denied it was their intention. Now you can consider they are all lying but WW/OP politics in these sorts of fuck-up has always tended to defend the author's artistic vision so I think they are telling the truth. For me finding out that you are a Beast has always read more as discovering you are a buddying serial killer à la Dexter, or a pedophile.

Sure morally speaking most people would totally urge you to commit suicide ASAP but then all vampires should have greeted the sun the morning after their Embrace. What do you do when you must feed on fear, or let the thing that for all intent and purposes is your soul feed in dreams? Teaching lessons is an obvious cop-out but for me it works because it is so obvious. Like vampires once again going down only on "bad people". It's what most people would do in that situation.


So they changed and made the whole thing ambiguous. You are not the only one to think it doesn't make anything better. Indeed one user who was pretty invested in the reading "Beasts as minorities" described the Devouring as basically describing your characters as being recruited by teh gay and robbing Beasts of any moral ambiguity they might have.


Note any of this doesn't excuse the outright mess that is the book. It was explained basically all freelancers got into the idea the others would write on about how the Beasts were assholes and so none did.
 
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ganonso said:
I'm going to precise on this one.

When Beast got out, a fairly large part of the readership took them as minority analogues. Notably because the authors made an effort to have their examples being pretty diverse and the MRA' Hero outlined above.

The different developpers on the book denied it was their intention. Now you can consider they are all lying but WW/OP politics in these sorts of fuck-up has always tended to defend the author's artistic vision so I think they are telling the truth. For me finding out that you are a Beast has always read more as discovering you are a buddying serial killer à la Dexter, or a pedophile.

Sure morally speaking most people would totally urge you to commit suicide ASAP but then all vampires should have greeted the sun the morning after their Embrace.
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And the books in Vampire never claim that Vampires are good people. In fact, Vampire is pretty much entirely consistent as portraying existence as a vampire as a moral decline and a never ending challenge that lasts until you give up or die.

Vampires don't kill themselves because they don't want to die. But the books don't pretend they're better than the hunters after them.

The same doesn't apply for Beasts, where the books demonise the people who want to murder them and try to justify the fact that Beasts are shitweasels.
 
ganonso said:
For me finding out that you are a Beast has always read more as discovering you are a buddying serial killer à la Dexter, or a pedophile.
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I interpreted it as more like the time where I realized that no, for most other people when they are looking at you they are not imagining what it would be like to cut your face off, or gouge your eyes out, or push burning coals down your throat.
......I have a seriously bad case of intrusive thoughts:cry:, usually involving bodily mutilation.
 
EarthScorpion said:
And the books in Vampire never claim that Vampires are good people. In fact, Vampire is pretty much entirely consistent as portraying existence as a vampire as a moral decline and a never ending challenge that lasts until you give up or die.

Vampires don't kill themselves because they don't want to die. But the books don't pretend they're better than the hunters after them.

The same doesn't apply for Beasts, where the books demonise the people who want to murder them and try to justify the fact that Beasts are shitweasels.
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And that's why I totally agree the corebook is shit.

Which is funny because there was a way to make the whole thing less creepy. Make the emphasis on the fact Beasts can feed on supernatural creatures (they can in RAW but that's not what you get from the text), more pronounced. You have a moral alternative to being simply a jerk: Go against vampires, mad changelings, cultists and the likes... Yes they will actually put up a fight and have the means to kill you and so it's easier to prey on mortals but you have a choice.

It also reduces Beast other problems: You have nothing to do. If a member of the Brood is hungering for forbidden knowledge, you have at least plot hooks writing themselves.

Or give the Beasts the ability to feed on dreamers of their own free will. Yes you give them a night of horrible nightmares but people get them all the time. That's certainly better than acting like a jerkass in the waking world? Until you reduce a poor sap to 0 Willpower because you visited them a few nights in a row.

But the biggest fix IMHO is to ham up the narrative point. You are born to die against the Hero. That's your role in the universe. This is how the story ends. You are here to teach a lesson alright. By your death you prove humanity can overcome any obstacle, that no place is beyond our reach, that we replace the old barbaric law by written codes. The powers you get? They are there to hammer the point.

So what do you do knowing that? Do you enjoy yourself awaiting for the one who will slay you? Do you try to game the system and becomes one of the accepted monsters (Like the Furies by instance, totally feared and monstrous but part of the justice system)? Do you try to turn the whole thing on its head? How do you even begin to do that?
 
Sydonai said:
Unrelated to Beast.

I really want Genius to be good and work well but...yeah:sad:.
So if you were to add "Mad Scientists" into Chronicles of Darkness, maybe as an NPC-only thing since Mad Science can get really nuts really quickly, how would you go about doing it?
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Genius already had a decent blueprint before it decided to plaster a bunch of Sons of Ether bullshit all over.

Geniuses are insane. Their "Insight" is a progressive degeneration in their brain's ability to make logical connections between events, so they end up thinking that chemtrails are real and the government uses license plates to influence immigration policies. When they try to explain their inventions and the normals don't understand, that's because their "explanation" is just Time Cube ranting with no connection to sanity whatsoever, because they are insane.

What makes them supernatural is that sometimes, that ongoing breakdown accidentally spits out something useful and suddenly they have this idea for combining harvested rat brains and Apple II circuit boards to record and collate peoples' dreams - but even then, the actual useful part is being drowned in an ocean of pareidolia gone wrong, so they can't find a way to keep the rat brains from going bad and the connectors keep making the circuit boards leak toxic gas and they need to put newspaper over all the windows & remove all internal light sources because the Dream Analyzer needs very specific light levels to produce meaningful data (which is still going to be about 30% gibberish by volume). Assuming, of course, that the rat-brain-and-circuitry assemblage ever gets off the ground, because it's entirely possible the Genius will just end up with a pile of rotting animal neurons and melted circuitry and it all goes in the dumpster just like their last five ideas for an invention.

Even the most successful Genius is going to be way more Herbert West or Crawford Tillinghast than Tony Stark - a tiny nugget of actual super-science surrounded by psychosis and collateral damage. Even at their absolute best, your inventions are grimy and fucked-up and fraught with issues, all poised on a razor's edge between functionality and disaster.

The themes are about being a creator who is their own biggest obstacle, the fear of having others see you as a fraud and a failure, having your talents desert you when you need them the most, the life-consuming need to do this thing but not being able to actually pull it off, and the fight against letting subjective opinions and alternative facts chew away at the foundation of your sanity until one day you've metamorphosed into Kanye West, talking about how you and Trump are "pure dragon energy" and slavery was totally a choice.
 
Sydonai said:
Unrelated to Beast.

I really want Genius to be good and work well but...yeah.
So if you were to add "Mad Scientists" into Chronicles of Darkness, maybe as an NPC-only thing since Mad Science can get really nuts really quickly, how would you go about doing it?
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I guess you'd have to start with the themes and imagery you want? Like... when I think of Mad Science, I think of people tampering with things they shouldn't and accidentallying everything within a hundred mile radius if their work is going right; wild-haired, wild-eyed people with incredibly firm convictions that they've seized upon a particular way the world works that nobody else understands - the biologist for whom lightning really does animate corpses, or something.

I would think that their technology would work a little like, hm. Like corollaries sprouting from a central axiom, and the further along the axiom they go, the more convoluted their logic can get and be applied to their tech? Like you start with Electricity Brings Life and at low levels it's super mundane-looking because what you have is very similar to pacemakers or things like shooting people with tasers to "wake their immune system up" or whatever. And then they buy a few more dots of Inspiration and suddenly they're prowling graveyards with massive Teslamobiles raising a zombie army. This is all very very rough, of course!
GardenerBriareus said:
The themes are about being a creator who is their own biggest obstacle, the fear of having others see you as a fraud and a failure, having your talents desert you when you need them the most, the life-consuming need to do this thing but not being able to actually pull it off, and the fight against letting subjective opinions and alternative facts chew away at the foundation of your sanity until one day you've metamorphosed into Kanye West, talking about how you and Trump are "pure dragon energy" and slavery was totally a choice.
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...now I'm super curious. How would you represent that, mechanically speaking?
 
pantherasapiens said:
...now I'm super curious. How would you represent that, mechanically speaking?
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Stupidly high difficulty checks? Possibly your current willpower adding a modifier to said difficulty?

For the second part, either simply have it being only via Roleplay, or maybe risking humanity loss whenever your creation fails, because you weren't insane enough to do it right and that simply won't do?
 
… Why did they give Mage: The Awakening the name "Mage" in the first place?

Like, I know why technically, but I think that it should have tried to separate itself further from Mage: The Ascension because they're two very different games.
 
LSkullD said:
… Why did they give Mage: The Awakening the name "Mage" in the first place?

Like, I know why technically, but I think that it should have tried to separate itself further from Mage: The Ascension because they're two very different games.
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Yep.

See, Awakening is a game about gnostic magi, while Ascension is about post-modern reality warpers.

Alas, the lack of a time machine means we can't go back and correct things, but there's one game which better fits in with the name "Mage" and it ain't Ascension.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Yep.

See, Awakening is a game about gnostic magi, while Ascension is about post-modern reality warpers.

Alas, the lack of a time machine means we can't go back and correct things, but there's one game which better fits in with the name "Mage" and it ain't Ascension.
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... Promethean?

Also, they're more or less different takes on the idea of what it means to be a Mage, but they're pretty radically different takes.
 
Renu said:
Stupidly high difficulty checks? Possibly your current willpower adding a modifier to said difficulty?

For the second part, either simply have it being only via Roleplay, or maybe risking humanity loss whenever your creation fails, because you weren't insane enough to do it right and that simply won't do?
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Hmm. No, I don't think you should be less able to produce your Super Murderbot 9000 the more of a mad scientist you get, but your second point might tie into it; taking on ever-more-severe dissociation from sanity to power your mad science? So literally Mad Science, because you have to be super insane to do your thing.
 
pantherasapiens said:
Hmm. No, I don't think you should be less able to produce your Super Murderbot 9000 the more of a mad scientist you get, but your second point might tie into it; taking on ever-more-severe dissociation from sanity to power your mad science? So literally Mad Science, because you have to be super insane to do your thing.
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And at higher power they can make other people mad to fuel their "Science"?
Maybe even as completely passive effect, like a Promethean's Wasteland.
 
Sydonai said:
And at higher power they can make other people mad to fuel their "Science"?
Maybe even as completely passive effect, like a Promethean's Wasteland.
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Hm. That's something you could repurpose the Beholden system for. Mad Scientists need their minions, after all; but I wouldn't like to make it a passive area effect. It might be something that came about through the, hmmm... people see your Weird Science, and while most of them will react with distaste/ disbelief/ etc., some of them might be convinced and fall under your sway?

> "BEHOLD MY TRANSMOGRIFIER."
> a mob arises, bearing torches and pitchforks
> plucky young lady arises, barring the mob. "No! He's just misunderstood!"
> minion get
 
He's talking about Awakening.

He compared the two 'Mage' lines, concluded that only one of them was really about 'Mages', and then said which one wasn't.
 
pantherasapiens said:
Hmm. No, I don't think you should be less able to produce your Super Murderbot 9000 the more of a mad scientist you get, but your second point might tie into it; taking on ever-more-severe dissociation from sanity to power your mad science? So literally Mad Science, because you have to be super insane to do your thing.
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Well, maybe an inverse rate, then, but given what the themes apparently are, self-sabotage is a very important aspect.
 
pantherasapiens said:
...now I'm super curious. How would you represent that, mechanically speaking?
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Sydonai said:
And at higher power they can make other people mad to fuel their "Science"?
Maybe even as completely passive effect, like a Promethean's Wasteland.
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There's already the bones of a good system in Genius itself - just make it so that you can lower the difficulty to make something in exchange for having its side effects be super nasty to people who aren't you.

You want that cold fusion reactor? Go ahead, make it easy on yourself, get closer to your vision, and what does it matter if every epileptic within three square miles suffers permanent brain damage every time it turns on? Who cares if your Dream Analyzer aggravates schizophrenia in the neighborhoods it's aimed at?

Not you. The machine works and you're right and all those faceless fucking sheep who laughed at you are less than nothing compared to the sweet, beautiful feeling of your work, the Great Work.

Make it so that the path to "success" (at least by Genius standards) is easiest when you make other people pay the price of progress.

Then, you accelerate the slippery slope by making it so that you can permanently mutilate your mind to run a psychological tap into the Insight boiling your brains, letting you accomplish certain creations (or avoid certain types of drawback) more easily in exchange for a self-inflicted severe derangement that hopelessly warps how you perceive reality. Boost your ability to make miracle cures by permanently surrendering your ability to hear the word "vaccine" without ranting about The Autism and mercuric chloride and getting thrown out of any clinic you go to because you now think that all vaccines are literally cancer in a syringe and need to be destroyed. Get really good at designing machines that help you predict business ventures by carving "Greed Is Good" into your psyche with a goddamn power drill, so you become Crackpot Andrew Ryan sneering at people who donate to charity and calling the homeless parasites while you build super-Bitcoin and remind people to Google Ron Paul.

By giving your "Insight" (the magical psychological condition that started this whole mess) clear channels to flow along, you can better exploit it. Sure, you cripple your ability to behave like a sane human being and not a delusional asshole, but it's a fair price to pay for the work. Anything is a fair price, really. Friends, family, finances, even your soul (if you can just find a buyer, or failing that, a working blueprint for an Essence-electricity reactor to shove it in). The work is all there is.

The work is all you are.


pantherasapiens said:
I would think that their technology would work a little like, hm. Like corollaries sprouting from a central axiom, and the further along the axiom they go, the more convoluted their logic can get and be applied to their tech? Like you start with Electricity Brings Life and at low levels it's super mundane-looking because what you have is very similar to pacemakers or things like shooting people with tasers to "wake their immune system up" or whatever. And then they buy a few more dots of Inspiration and suddenly they're prowling graveyards with massive Teslamobiles raising a zombie army. This is all very very rough, of course!
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This feeds into the paradigm I'm building, by the way. Your inventions have nothing to do with sane human activity, so a quick-and-easy way to juice your inventing is to let it corrode away at the set of basic assumptions and social conventions that help humans be human.

It might be as simple as making it so that for every pseudo-Principle you add to your inventing repertoire, you have to either pay a bunch of XP (or do some other big inconvenient thing)... or add a negative pseudo-Principle that warps your perception of the world, creating the same carrot-and-stick synergy that Infernal Exalts are driven by.

Sure, you can start developing impossibly effective ECT therapies and vitality-boosting electroshock belts (no baking soda required!) without having to fuck yourself up that much, but by the time you get to the point where you can make your creature live? You've either spent most of your life slowly, painfully clawing your way up the mad science ladder, or you've done it in a quarter the time by letting the insanity valve stay open, and now you're a Stalinist goldbug who mails in 300-page diatribes to the Department of Energy on the superiority of Direct Current over Alternating Current and corresponds with Peter Thiel on the rejuvenative properties of orphan blood.
 
LSkullD said:
… Why did they give Mage: The Awakening the name "Mage" in the first place?

Like, I know why technically, but I think that it should have tried to separate itself further from Mage: The Ascension because they're two very different games.
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To put it simply, the initial idea of NWoD/CoD were meant to take the OWoD/CWoD games, strip them down to their core ideas, and then go in different directions with them. Both Mages, when distilled, are about people transcending the illusion of their worlds. From there, they go down different paths. So pick your poison based on what you find more interesting (or homebrew combinations, which is what my group did for several of the other games).
 
Wi'se said:
To put it simply, the initial idea of NWoD/CoD were meant to take the OWoD/CWoD games, strip them down to their core ideas, and then go in different directions with them. Both Mages, when distilled, are about people transcending the illusion of their worlds. From there, they go down different paths. So pick your poison based on what you find more interesting (or homebrew combinations, which is what my group did for several of the other games).
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So what are the different paths of the two Vampire games? I'm no expert at either but from my point of view, Requiem is Masquerade with smaller organizations, subspecies, and no universal mythology. It seems to me that it's more of a reboot than anything else.
 
Deltax18 said:
So what are the different paths of the two Vampire games? I'm no expert at either but from my point of view, Requiem is Masquerade with smaller organizations, subspecies, and no universal mythology. It seems to me that it's more of a reboot than anything else.
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In Requiem there are no grand, all-consuming conspiracies. No basically omnipotent Elder Vampires. Things like that.
 
Deltax18 said:
So what are the different paths of the two Vampire games? I'm no expert at either but from my point of view, Requiem is Masquerade with smaller organizations, subspecies, and no universal mythology. It seems to me that it's more of a reboot than anything else.
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Like @Conjured Blade said, it's more localized without the conspiracies and overarching mythos that Masquerade had. At the same time, unlike the lines that followed, Requiem was so much like its predecessor that we felt what was the point of switching, especially since we could buy Masquerade books on the cheap; Requiem's were often too far out of our price range when we were kids.
 
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