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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2013 14:19:50 GMT -8
I know Changeling and I've read novels like Little, Big and War for the Oaks, but A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest are my earliest and strongest references for faerie stuff. As for vampires, it'll always be Christopher Lee and his Hammer homies! Things don't exist until the PCs interact with them ... I think it's worth reminding GMs from time to time (myself included) that this is arguably true in any RPG. You may have spent countless hours building worlds for your next campaign or devising conflicts for your next session, but until it's spoken at the table it doesn't exist in the game fiction.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2013 16:15:15 GMT -8
I finally caught up to the latest episode after a listening hiatus and I instantly yelled "YES!" when I heard the suggestion to be able to buy your delicious, crunchy, unedited, tangy back log on DVD/CD! Make it happen and for a reasonable price and I'm there!
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HyveMynd
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Dirty hippie, PbtA, Fate, & Cortex Prime <3er
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Post by HyveMynd on Mar 7, 2013 16:46:22 GMT -8
Part of me wants to give the genre and the game another shot, but like you with Savage Worlds that first impression is really hard to get past. If you've been soured by a first impression, then yeah. It can be really hard to get past that. However, the new World of Darkness is a fantastic system. And White Wolf was really smart when they rolled out the new books. There is a single, non "supernatural race" specific core book containing all the basic rules of the system. The other "race" books (Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Changeling, Geist, Promethean, and Hunter) are add-ons that build on the core rules. There is no Vampire stuff in the core nWoD rulebook. You can use the core book to play a paranormal investigators type game, or do something completely non-supernatural. As my group did with the 1960's hard boiled crime story. This also means that if you know how to play basic nWoD, you pretty much know how to play every other game in their line. Smart. It also allows cross overs to work seamlessly. Need a vampire antagonist for your Hunter game? How about having your Mage characters run across a Changeling? Done. No conversion work required. Once you're a murderous cannibal you're not going to win any Nobel Peace Prizes in my book I don't care how much you dislike being a murderous cannibal. If you really have any remorse you'll go and sit your ass in the Sun otherwise your just full of shit. Then you have the whole concept of maintaining one’s humanity. Honestly if the person was a truly good person to begin with the likelihood is that they are even more apt to go nuts from the process because they’ve just become a human predator. They’ve gone from being a good helpful person to someone who literally needs to feed on others to survive. As malifer mentioned those people are far more likely to go off and kill themselves then they are to make a prolonged fight to maintain humanity. I mean for a religious person they are already damned so suicide rather than committing murder would make a hell of a lot more sense. Those who really survive being a vampire for a long period of time are more likely to be psychopaths and sociopaths to begin with, people already on the edge or over it before they get turned. A big part of why I like Vampire: the Requiem is what malifer and tentagil mention above is part of the game's mechanics. All vampire characters have a Humanity score, ranging from 10 to 0. In human terms, 10 would be a saint while 0 would be the worst serial killer imaginable. Every Humanity level has associated "sins" that if indulged in, force the player to make a Humanity check, with failure meaning a loss of Humanity. The "sins" at Humanity 10 are absolutely ridiculous. I forget exactly what they are, but they are nearly impossible to avoid. Things like having selfish thoughts. I remember Humanity 8 best because that's where my PC was. He had to make a Humanity check every time he caused pain to another person (intentionally or otherwise) or did anything worse. It was really hard to maintain a high Humanity score. As it should be. The "sins" at each Humanity level become more and more lax as they go down the scale. At 7 you have to engage in petty theft. At 6 you have to intentionally commit arson or mass property damage. At 5 you have to kill someone. At 3 you have to torture and kill. At 1 you have to do really, really fucked up shit to be asked for a Humanity check. The system reflects the fact that a "good" person who becomes a vampire is either going to fall fast and hard, or really have to work fucking hard to stay good. Plus, when you fail a Humanity check, there's a chance you gain a Derangement. So again, the system reflects what malifer and tentagil bring up about people going crazy trying to deal with being a vampire. It's similar, I think, to the Honor system in L5R. Meaning that it's a roleplaying tool. Our Vampire game had two Humanity 8 PCs and a Humanity 6 PC. The high Humanity PCs tried to avoid violence whenever possible (I shot a guy once, to save my friend, and still hade to make a Humanity check), while the lower Humanity PC could kick in doors and beat information out of people without batting an eye. All that being said, I'm not disagreeing with the vampire as monsters idea. That's fun, and appropriate for certain types of stories. My contention is, no matter what "race" we're talking about, it has to be somewhat human in order to be a protagonist. We need to identify with the protagonists of a story, and we can't do that if they are inhuman monsters. There's a reason Call of Cthulhu isn't told from Cthulhu's point of view.
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Post by malifer on Mar 7, 2013 17:31:01 GMT -8
I think the White Wolf makes nice books.
But the mechanics don't quite reflect what I was thinking.
If you truly have humanity. You'll go all 30 Days of Night and ride off into the Sunrise.
Otherwise you don't have humanity.
There's no struggle. There's no such thing a only a little murder.
However I completely agree with you that a protagonist needs to be human in order for us to relate. So in order to make a game where you play Vampires you have to instill humanity.
And I would say that White Wolf did as good a job as any could have, but it is a big buy in.
It's like watching a time travel movie and being okay that it creates so many paradoxes the entire story in null and void.
Some people will say "damn that was a good movie."
I however will not be able to accept the buy in and just be annoyed for two hours wishing I'd watched a different Bruce Willis time travel movie.
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Post by ayslyn on Mar 7, 2013 22:14:50 GMT -8
The human psyche is a remarkably freakishly complex thing. Trying to say that X person will react in Y manner to Z stimuli is, at best, a foolish exercise. Everyone processes things differently.
But, ignoring that major fact, you're ignoring suspension of disbelief. The argument from these stories is not that a human being will easily make the transition from human to bipedal leech. The argument is that IF they could, then here is an idea of what that might look like.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Mar 7, 2013 22:15:22 GMT -8
So, the discussion is tabled.... Attachments:
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Post by ayslyn on Mar 7, 2013 23:17:22 GMT -8
If you truly have humanity. You'll go all 30 Days of Night and ride off into the Sunrise. Otherwise you don't have humanity. That's not even remotely true. Just because you still want to live doesn't mean you're humanity vanishes. Real people do horrifying things to survive, sometimes. That doesn't make them inhuman.
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Post by malifer on Mar 8, 2013 12:37:28 GMT -8
If you truly have humanity. You'll go all 30 Days of Night and ride off into the Sunrise. Otherwise you don't have humanity. That's not even remotely true. Just because you still want to live doesn't mean you're humanity vanishes. Real people do horrifying things to survive, sometimes. That doesn't make them inhuman. But it does kind of nullify the "struggle". It just becomes hypocritical. It's like watching reality television. None of the "actors" try to be the shallow, callous morons they are. Now I'm not saying to you can't play Reality TV the Rpg, but I don't like it. Which was all I was saying about vampires. I find the "goody two shoes" ones to be lame. Understandably the "Alive" people that ate their dead co-passangers to survive in the mountains are still human, but their fucked up about it and not trying to pretend like they should continue eating people on a daily basis.
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D.T. Pints
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Post by D.T. Pints on Mar 8, 2013 14:42:04 GMT -8
WWBPD ? (What would Brad Pitt Do?) that's my go to Vampire RP technique for being plagued by internal strife about leeching off the living.
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Post by malifer on Mar 8, 2013 17:16:36 GMT -8
WWBPD ? (What would Brad Pitt Do?) that's my go to Vampire RP technique for being plagued by internal strife about leeching off the living. lol
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Post by stork on Mar 8, 2013 19:02:32 GMT -8
Hmmmmmm I Dunno........Im still leaning towards the whole Kate Bekinsale angle. Dangerous, troubled, addicted immortals with tortured pasts......and hot...... And you cant tell me that Bill Nighy didn't make the consummate evil vampire
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Post by Kainguru on Mar 8, 2013 19:18:02 GMT -8
He'd look remorseful, suck down a couple of rats, and at the first opportunity drink some unfortunate dry provided he could justify it . . . Then threaten a journalist with his scary vampy powers . . . At least he didn't twinkle. Aaron
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Post by inflatus on Mar 8, 2013 19:37:07 GMT -8
Hmmmmmm I Dunno........Im still leaning towards the whole Kate Bekinsale angle. Dangerous, troubled, addicted immortals with tortured pasts......and hot...... And you cant tell me that Bill Nighy didn't make the consummate evil vampire See. A kindred spirit. Kate is very much doable. Oh and a great vampire.
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Post by ayslyn on Mar 8, 2013 22:05:07 GMT -8
That's not even remotely true. Just because you still want to live doesn't mean you're humanity vanishes. Real people do horrifying things to survive, sometimes. That doesn't make them inhuman. But it does kind of nullify the "struggle". It just becomes hypocritical. It's like watching reality television. None of the "actors" try to be the shallow, callous morons they are. Now I'm not saying to you can't play Reality TV the Rpg, but I don't like it. Which was all I was saying about vampires. I find the "goody two shoes" ones to be lame. Understandably the "Alive" people that ate their dead co-passangers to survive in the mountains are still human, but their fucked up about it and not trying to pretend like they should continue eating people on a daily basis. Poppycock. The people who resorted to cannibalism didn't eat people afterwards because they no longer had to make that choice. For a vampire they're still in the mountains. They feed or they die. You're suggesting that the survivors weren't human because they ate people while that was their alternative to wasting away.
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Post by Kainguru on Mar 8, 2013 22:52:47 GMT -8
But it does kind of nullify the "struggle". It just becomes hypocritical. It's like watching reality television. None of the "actors" try to be the shallow, callous morons they are. Now I'm not saying to you can't play Reality TV the Rpg, but I don't like it. Which was all I was saying about vampires. I find the "goody two shoes" ones to be lame. Understandably the "Alive" people that ate their dead co-passangers to survive in the mountains are still human, but their fucked up about it and not trying to pretend like they should continue eating people on a daily basis. Poppycock. The people who resorted to cannibalism didn't eat people afterwards because they no longer had to make that choice. For a vampire they're still in the mountains. They feed or they die. You're suggesting that the survivors weren't human because they ate people while that was their alternative to wasting away. I'll add one thing to this: BBC 'Being Human' series 1 to 4. It's drama not reality TV and the vampire protagonists (both incarnations) are battling to 'be human' (along with a werewolf and a ghost) . . . It's comedy, drama, pathos and frequently a grubby mirror held up to humanity as 'being human' can be quite as monstrous in itself ( as demonstrated in the current and final series) Aaron
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