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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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MJ12 Commando said:
It's a game which is harmed by its association with the World of Darkness where weird spooky stuff happens for no reason because the God Machine should be doing weird spooky stuff for a reason so the protagonists can figure out something is up.
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To be fair, I think you could do a very creepy game where it slowly becomes clear that the God Machine is, in fact, doing weird spooky stuff for no reason at all.

The dawning realization in the players as they realize they are fighting an insurgency against an effectively omnipotent being who is, as far as anyone can tell, functionally insane would make a wonderful horror trope. You know, blind and deaf Azatoth burning at the center of existence and all his angels dancing around him inflicting horrors and terrors on humanity... just because. No divine plan, no intrinsic meaning, nothing you can negotiate with or understand or predict or stop in any meaningful way. World of Darkness as nihilism and absurdism.

Basically turn the game into a Terry Gilliam horror movie.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
There's a lot of potential in Demon about the alien clockwork god and its alien clockwork angels.
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Yes. But that's the thing.

That's potential it stole from Promethean.

Demon takes things which were cool in Promethean and makes them lame through over-exposure, bad mechanics, and missing the point.

In Promethean, you have the Divine Fire. It has themes of weird science, it somehow relates to human inspiration - or maybe human obsession can tap into it - and it never gets explained. There's a giant machine under Detroit in an old abandoned salt mine watched over by a qashmal who says that humanity is something which can be taken from others. There are the two choirs of the qashmalliam - one seems to act to further order while one seems to act to further entropy, but they're equally much of the Divine Fire and neither choir seems to know the other one exists and they never interact with each other and even if they're in each other's presence, they don't notice each other. The Divine Fire seems to have a rule that it can only send one quashmal to do a certain mission, once, and if it fails it can't try again, but it's never explained. Sometimes a qashmal will try to cause a nuclear accident. Sometimes it'll give someone the designs for a new way to cure cancer. Sometimes it'll tell someone it's giving someone the plans for a way to cure cancer, but it doesn't work and it'll ruin the person's career - and the qashmalliam ceases to exist after it completes its mission, so it doesn't even stay for the fallout.

Qashmalliam don't know why they have their missions. They don't know what their missions are for. They just obey the Principle.

"What is the Principle?"

"It is the Principle."

The qashmalliam are a vast system who sometimes help Prometheans and sometimes hurt them and sometimes they help them to make them suffer and sometimes they hurt them to make them learn. The gameline never explains them fully - and in fact gives several contradictory explanations. Maybe the Divine Fire exists outside time and the two choirs are merely travelling in opposite directions through time. Maybe it's a blind, mad, autistic god who does things and then forgets why it does them.

And that is why the Divine Fire is a vastly better God Machine than the GMC God Machine. Because the Divine Fire actually fits in the setting. And its angels can actually pass as angels rather than abiding by an enforced techno-aesthetics - and its demons are just another kind of angel and maybe they're working towards the same goal, or maybe they're how it wars against itself.
 
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EarthScorpion said:
Yes. But that's the thing.

That's potential it stole from Promethean.

Demon takes things which were cool in Promethean and makes them lame through over-exposure, bad mechanics, and missing the point.
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I think it's the opposite way around. Demon has an inherently cool premise and analogy that it weakens because it tries to jam the Promethean connections in and it doesn't work because the Demon God Machine isn't some sort of blind mad god-it's a game that tries too hard to connect itself to the nWoD and the connections are its weakest link.

The God Machine isn't some blind idiot god. It's us. It's society. Hell is fundamentally the utopian rejection of current, modern society and its moral ambiguities and its tiny atrocities and how it's Omelas as not good enough. Demons are fundamentally the people who aren't quite fit for society, they're the outcasts who are stuck part in and part out of it-still dependent on society but yet incapable of truly fitting in, and being punished for it. Even the Integrators-they're the ones who know they're misfits but they try as hard as they might to become part of society on their own terms. It's Paradise Lost reinterpreted with Lucifer being maybe not entirely wrong. You have the misfits, the people who question why society has to be this way, and their varying reactions to it.

And it works because the God Machine's evils are society's evils. It's a massive machine built of Infrastructure and Pawns-but yet there seems to be no Head Honcho. It's all infrastructure all the way down. Let me quote from the book:

Demon: the Descent said:
The God-Machine is neither cruel nor kind. It uses whatever it calculates as necessary force in any situation, with a preference toward subtlety.

The God-Machine has biases toward self-preservation, secrecy, and the maintenance of the status quo.

Never reveal the God-Machine's decisions or opinions to the players. Let them discover its intent through its projects, the same way everyone does.

The God-Machine is slow to react but implacable when roused.

The God-Machine doesn't think like a human, doesn't show any emotions, and doesn't get frustrated.

The God-Machine thinks of people as roles and only very rarely as individuals.

The God-Machine never speaks, not even to angels.

The God-Machine is not a discrete being. You can't go somewhere and look at "the God-Machine."
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The God Machine is the State. Demon isn't a Cold War espionage game. It's a game about stateless outcasts and their relation to The State, utopian dreamers who by their suggestions of utopianism become dangerous to it. The people who are separated from the State, and by their separation can see how deeply it intrudes into everything you do. The book comes very very close to explicitly stating it a bunch of times.

As terrible as the God-Machine is, many demons suspect that it's necessary for human civilization — either because it does do some good with the bad, or because it's so deeply embedded into reality that tearing it out causes greater injury.
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And I think the leakage of the Blind Idiot God and the Promethean Divine Fire and the other nWoD stuff is detrimental to both, because it's a game about the literal all-powerful state and the horror elements should be the horror people feel at... Da'esh doing something bad, or Guanatanamo Bay, or how the Iraq Invasion was cocked up. Perfectly mundane, comprehensible Bad Things happening because the state fucked up, or because the state thought something else was more important, or because the state was weak.

EarthScorpion said:
No, it also is bad game design - at least as I see it. Put bluntly, it increases ST workload and forces them to keep a lot more information in-memory. People don't have perfect memory and people are playing the game, so forcing people to try to emulate people with perfect memory makes everything much more difficult all around to very little gain.

Games should be designed to minimise that kind of intrusive GM workload increases. This puts it in for no good reason - and actively works against the genre, because spy stories have the vagueness of memory as an important thing quite often. Just another trait of how Demon really wasn't designed for easy GMing, quite apart from the bad advice it gives on how to run spy stories (as @Eukie has mentioned).
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I think you're looking at it from the perspective of "I should be able to directly quote everything" which I think is technically a valid way of using it, but practically speaking most players and STs won't be seeing it that way. It means if you remember a fact, you don't ever have to go "I remember this, but does my character do so?" and there's a fairly large number of potential plot hooks because you can have any Demon remember that five different people mentioned this one product and this seems weird when there's no real commonality between them, is this a mysterious Plot Hook? (Yes).

I mean, there's no reason you can't do the first-and the book really should point out that both players and STs should take it easy about eidetic memory-but I think that it's not that much work if everyone goes in with the idea that it's the second mode of using it.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
I think you're looking at it from the perspective of "I should be able to directly quote everything" which I think is technically a valid way of using it, but practically speaking most players and STs won't be seeing it that way. It means if you remember a fact, you don't ever have to go "I remember this, but does my character do so?" and there's a fairly large number of potential plot hooks because you can have any Demon remember that five different people mentioned this one product and this seems weird when there's no real commonality between them, is this a mysterious Plot Hook? (Yes).

I mean, there's no reason you can't do the first-and the book really should point out that both players and STs should take it easy about eidetic memory-but I think that it's not that much work if everyone goes in with the idea that it's the second mode of using it.
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Then even if we charitably give it that much (I don't, because I'm not inclined to be charitable towards people who think there's 'no such thing as game balance' although the shoddy failure to make something like that clear is entirely in line with the general quality of Demon), it's still a poor idea.

Providing plot hooks and remembering things that no human player playing once a week should remember is precisely what the existing "Roll Int + Composure, or Int + Applicable Skill" mechanic for memory is for. This is the nWoD - you only need one success to succeed on a roll. The standard memory mechanic does exactly what is needed, and even better gives it an "earned" thing so players feel that they're getting plot hooks because of things that the character did, rather than having them handed to them.

To put it another way, why the fuck should your Demon who's dump-statted the Attributes involved in memory get to auto-remember everything?

(And that's before we get into the problems caused by perfect memory and the knock-on effects, like the capacity to effectively ignore skill limitations by remembering things that you didn't pay the XP for the skill - and if you don't want them to do things like that, well you shouldn't have given them perfect memory)

I can entirely believe that Demon's designers went "Hey, they should have perfect memory because, like, they're machine-angels and machines are good at remembering things! And, like, that way they can remember random details!". However, given their other design decisions and general lack of good thought and shoddy implementation, I don't see why we can assume the ramifications or the consequences or how it actually worked in play were at all thought out.
 
Man apropos of literally nothing but I was randomly thinking today (scary I know) and I feel like oWerewolf would have been a very different gameline if all Pentex Banes had pipes like these.




(No I will not apologize 8[ )
 
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EarthScorpion said:
Then even if we charitably give it that much (I don't, because I'm not inclined to be charitable towards people who think there's 'no such thing as game balance' although the shoddy failure to make something like that clear is entirely in line with the general quality of Demon), it's still a poor idea.

Providing plot hooks and remembering things that no human player playing once a week should remember is precisely what the existing "Roll Int + Composure, or Int + Applicable Skill" mechanic for memory is for. This is the nWoD - you only need one success to succeed on a roll. The standard memory mechanic does exactly what is needed, and even better gives it an "earned" thing so players feel that they're getting plot hooks because of things that the character did, rather than having them handed to them.

To put it another way, why the fuck should your Demon who's dump-statted the Attributes involved in memory get to auto-remember everything?

(And that's before we get into the problems caused by perfect memory and the knock-on effects, like the capacity to effectively ignore skill limitations by remembering things that you didn't pay the XP for the skill - and if you don't want them to do things like that, well you shouldn't have given them perfect memory)

I can entirely believe that Demon's designers went "Hey, they should have perfect memory because, like, they're machine-angels and machines are good at remembering things! And, like, that way they can remember random details!". However, given their other design decisions and general lack of good thought and shoddy implementation, I don't see why we can assume the ramifications or the consequences or how it actually worked in play were at all thought out.
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Actually, double-checking, the interpretation you and @Joebobjoe are using for Eidetic Memory isn't encouraged by the text-the merit says:

"Your character recalls events and details with pinpoint accuracy. You do not have to make rolls for your character to remember past experiences. When making Intelligence + Composure (or relevant Skill) rolls to recall minute facts from swaths of information, take a +2 bonus." Nothing in the mechanics of the Demon eidetic memory imply that you need to keep a record of every little thing that's said and done. It just means that if you go "wait a minute, didn't you say X back when?" the Storyteller doesn't go "does your character remember? Roll for it" and you get a reasonable (+2, I mean, that's fairly decent) bonus to the exact roll you're saying to use when you're sifting for small details.

Demon's design problems generally come from the Embeds and Exploits. Both in power level and how they interact with the "you can critically fail any roll you want," when some of the failure states are inherently desirable. Their core framework is reasonably workable.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
"Your character recalls events and details with pinpoint accuracy. You do not have to make rolls for your character to remember past experiences. When making Intelligence + Composure (or relevant Skill) rolls to recall minute facts from swaths of information, take a +2 bonus." Nothing in the mechanics of the Demon eidetic memory imply that you need to keep a record of every little thing that's said and done. It just means that if you go "wait a minute, didn't you say X back when?" the Storyteller doesn't go "does your character remember? Roll for it" and you get a reasonable (+2, I mean, that's fairly decent) bonus to the exact roll you're saying to use when you're sifting for small details.
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The likely reason for this is because prior to GMC, eidetic memory was literally, "you remember everything, you require no roll to recall anything at any time."

I can't remember if they rewrote it in GMC off the top of my head.
 
@The Laurent thank you for revealing the existence of this thread to me via your "what are you viewing" thing. It's worth it for the huge traditions vs technocracy debate on it's own.
The Laurent said:
A question: if 5 successes is an exceptional success, should 10 successes come with its own epic soundtrack? Or 15?
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It should certainly have some pretty long term effects. Yet another reason to be jealous of our fetch, I guess.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Both in power level and how they interact with the "you can critically fail any roll you want," when some of the failure states are inherently desirable. Their core framework is reasonably workable.
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Yeah, though to be fair, any ST that allowed you to get away with that is a bad ST. Botch results should very much be 'suggestions' rather then 'strict guidelines.'

Though even with that, there are some questionable critical failures.
 
TheLastOne said:
Yeah, though to be fair, any ST that allowed you to get away with that is a bad ST. Botch results should very much be 'suggestions' rather then 'strict guidelines.'
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If the ST needs to step in and override the rules when they're used as-written, I'd say it wasn't a very good rule in the first place. (Though I believe the voluntary Dramatic Failure rules say you can only do it once per scene... or that you can only get the 0.2 XP once per scene. I don't remember which.)
 
Eukie said:
If the ST needs to step in and override the rules when they're used as-written, I'd say it wasn't a very good rule in the first place. (Though I believe the voluntary Dramatic Failure rules say you can only do it once per scene... or that you can only get the 0.2 XP once per scene. I don't remember which.)
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Eh, I'm pretty sure that is the rules as written, that the botch results are just examples. Though that just makes some of them really BAD examples, and if you're reading it that way, some lazy ST is also.
 
So, I started my very first quest thread, based off of the Classic World of Darkness setting, specifically Dark Ages: Vampire. Check it out if anyone's interested.
 
So some people have been complaining about how the quiescence affects hunters. What do you guys think of the matter?

For those in the dark, mortals who witness obvious supernal magic suffer an immediate breaking point and at the end of the scene they forget that any supernal magic took place. They rationalize what they see and completely forget what they can't rationalize.
 
I think that the people in that thread need to remember that despite whatever else they may believe, or what they do in their own games, the nWoD is not written with the assumption of crossover.
I could say more, but Revlid said it best in this very thread:
nHunter - as a game where you hunt supernaturals - is the only gameline that necessitates "crossover", and you know how it does that? By completely ignoring the actual gamelines it's supposedly involved with. In part this is to offer Hunter Storytellers greater freedom, as an extension of the nWoD's toolbox attitude - maybe werewolves are infectious? Maybe they're demon-possessed dogs? Maybe they're fascist ecowarriors? - and in part it's because running trying to run NPC monsters with the full range of options and powers and detail given to player characters is generally a bad idea, and in part it's because actual genuine witch-hunts against the Mages presented in Mage: The Awakening ends with the pitchfork-armed mortals in question finding their livers spontaneously combusting last Tuesday
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I also feel rather uncharitable towards those that argue for Hunter's ability to bypass the Sleeping Curse through "hard work and guts", mostly because to me it stinks of the tendecy I've discovered in WW/OP's fans to make Mages "be wrong", just because, or to interpret their gameline into the worst possible light[1].

[1] Even among Mage fans the Diamond order seems to suffer the same thing, in comparison to the Free Council, which doesn't help my now rather rooted dislike for the Libertines. It's also wierd, because it's not like their Orderbook lies on the fact that the Atlantean orders have some pretty big flaws.
 
BlueBiscuit said:
I think that the people in that thread need to remember that despite whatever else they may believe, or what they do in their own games, the nWoD is not written with the assumption of crossover.
I could say more, but Revlid said it best in this very thread:


I also feel rather uncharitable towards those that argue for Hunter's ability to bypass the Sleeping Curse through "hard work and guts", mostly because to me it stinks of the tendecy I've discovered in WW/OP's fans to make Mages "be wrong", just because, or to interpret their gameline into the worst possible light[1].

[1] Even among Mage fans the Diamond order seems to suffer the same thing, in comparison to the Free Council, which doesn't help my now rather rooted dislike for the Libertines. It's also wierd, because it's not like their Orderbook lies on the fact that the Atlantean orders have some pretty big flaws.
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"Be wrong" how?
 
The Laurent said:
"Be wrong" how?
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This goes back to a lot of arguments I have seen while going through the archives of the old WW forums and old rpg.net threads.
Basically, as I understand it, a lot of Mage fans wrote a lot of words trying to tie together and connect the other gamelines to Mage's cosmological understanding of the World of Darkness. It basically boiled down to Vampires/Ghost→Stygia, Changelings→Arcadia, Uratha/Spirits→Primal Wild and so on.

Somewhat understandably, the fans of the other gamelines didn't really like this for the most part, and either ignored it - which was the smart thing to do - or ignited massive debates over it, but at some point the perception of the issue apparently shifted from "the fans of the Mage gameline are making statements on my preferred splat that I don't like" to "the Mage gameline is making statements on my splat that I don't like".[1]

This created the attitude I mentioned, where people looked for anything in the books to show how the silly Awakened get everything wrong, as a reaction to the percieved overbearingness of the Mage cosmology, when in reality I can count on one hand the times Mage makes the kind of statements it's accused of doing, and I'd have fingers left.

[1]Which is kind of funny, seeing how it's Hunter the one gameline that, if you assume crossover with the other Main Splats (you shouldn't), says things like "Werewolves can be stopped from shifting using the right pattern of light", or that thing that drained vitae from Kindred, but with a "light adjustment", could drain fuel from any splats, as if Pyros, Essence, Mana and Glamour were all the same thing, really.
 
Also Beast - Beast makes that kind of "you're all just a part of our cosmology" a lot, with the caveat that Beasts are almost certainly wrong about it.

It's a combination of people mistaking Awakening for Ascension (where characters did routinely interpret everything into their worldview) rather than realizing that mages encountering things they can't explain is how they earn Arcane Experience. Also, Hunter is one of the last outposts of a certain hardcore group of Genius: The Transgression fans; Genius was designed to be anti-Mage from the start.

It's occasionally frustrating, but eh. People who actually play Mage - or Hunter! - outnumber the hell out of them.
 
How does the mask work regarding the True Fae in Changeling? Do the Fae have a mask similar to those of changelings, or are they just shapeshifters who assume human form. If the latter are there any non-magical means of telling them from perfectly ordinary humans?

Also, because I haven't been able to find it, what are the mechanical benefits for a changeling merging with their fetch?
 
Hydroplatypus said:
How does the mask work regarding the True Fae in Changeling? Do the Fae have a mask similar to those of changelings, or are they just shapeshifters who assume human form. If the latter are there any non-magical means of telling them from perfectly ordinary humans?

Also, because I haven't been able to find it, what are the mechanical benefits for a changeling merging with their fetch?
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IIRC both of these were answered in Autumn Nightmares. The True Fae have the Mask, but the details differ. Fetch-merged Changelings get bonuses to taking on their former fetches' role and dealing with its memories, and...possibly some other benefit. It's hard to recall.

EDIT: Found Autumn Nightmares. If it is in there, I'll tell you

EDIT2: These are the traits of the Gentry according to AN, and the benefits for Fetch-merging. Other sourcebooks may have alternate rules for the former, but I can only find AN at the minute. And I like it, so there.

The Gentry's shapeshifting powers are curtailed in the mortal world; instead of changing form at will they possess a Mask and a Mien like a Changeling, but the details are a bit different:
  • Their Masks are usually more eerie than that of a Changeling, having unnatural height, odd eye colours, an elongated tongue or other similar deformations. Not enough to make an onlooker go "Oh shit that isn't human", but enough to stand out and unnerve people. They take penalties when interacting with humans because of this. Changelings cannot see through a True Fae's Mask like they can with one another-they have to make an opposed roll in an effort to pierce it, or spend one Glamour to see through it for a turn. The Fae can turn their Mask on and off at will, and can modify it to look different. These differences exist because whereas a Changeling's Mask shows off their old and still extant humanity, the Fae were inhuman from the start. They build their Masks whole-cloth, and wear them only for conveniences sake.
  • The difference between a True Fae's Mien and Mask can be far greater than that of a Changeling's. When they drop the Mask they appear in all their supernatural glory, whatever that might entail. Each Fae has at least three supernatural powers attached to its true form, and which can only be used when they have revealed themselves. These can be chosen from the Kith blessings, but there's also a bunch more described in the book (or you could make your own).
About the Fetch: Merging requires you to fully understand the Fetch and upon completing the process (a long, roleplay heavy affair) your character immediately regains a point of Clarity and gains the memories of their Fetch's life, which basically lets you slot back into your old life with far less problems. The latter is more ST fiat than something which has specific systems.

(for the more vicious characters, there's also a bunch of merits which can only be gained by killing your Fetch. Each requires a different form of murder. Pretty creepy honestly, but it makes some sense.)

Anyway, this is all from Chapters 2 and 3 of Autumn Nightmares, which is a pretty cool antagonists book. Grab it if you can find it.
 
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Forgot to mention: A True Fae's Mien has a mental effect on normal humans, somewhat akin to Lunacy or Disbelief; they tend not to remember the Fae properly after the dust has cleared. They may respond rationally at the time, or they might break like a Lovecraft protagonist; the book vaguely proclaims that low Willpower is indicative of the latter.
 
nWoD/Changeling the Lost question: are Devourers (Autumn Nightmares p. 107) capped at Wyrd 10(because as it stands, Devourer can eat 3-9 changelings and reach Wyrd 10 and then what?) If not, how would you count Wyrd ratings +10??
 
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