Rehabbing WoD, but keeping it's spirit

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Post by Dean »

Prak wrote:Dean: ...maybe I'm doing that thing where I suck at explaining myself again, but... siding with the force of formless chaotic creation against the forces of stasis and destruction in no way invalidates a game about flipping out and killing shit. It just means you spend most of your time flipping out and killing enemies that either calcify shit or rot it away.
I'm not saying that that angle is inherently wrong. What I am saying is that the conceptual needs of a werewolf game are wayyyy simpler to fit into a universe than you are imagining. If you are making a shared space universe with werewolf PC's you should make all the other pieces fit first and then add the storyline of: You are a Werewolf, are you the baddest dude?
Last edited by Dean on Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Prak »

Yeah, part of the """plan""" for this project is to have a Core Book, which includes the basic system, rules for mortal characters, and templates for stuff like imbued hunters, demon/vampire/mage cultists who have a small number of discrete powers, and hedgemages, and the basic setting (which includes spiels on the major organizations) and probably some basic antagonist writeups that are basically what you'd be able to make in the later books but generalized; then a Vampire book, a Werethings book, a Mage book, and so on.

Dean: I still have yet to finish a single project. I'm kind of still flailing away at figuring out the order of operations.
Last edited by Prak on Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Username17 »

Prak wrote:I'll be the first to say this-- I don't give a shit about Conceptual Space. Even your game where you said "NO. 18 is the number thou shall count, and the number of the counting shall be 18, no more, no less! Overlap is right out!" wound up with discussion of new playable types in a second edition that took the supposed conceptual space out back, bent it over a barrel and crammed half again it's allotment of playable monsters into it's arse.
You're rather missing the point here. Conceptual space limits are different depending on context. A second edition has more conceptual space than a first edition, because people are familiar with the old stuff. Basically, it comes down to chunking. For example, people have little difficulty rattling off the 18 playable creature types in After Sundown, but I've never met anyone who could rattle off the 17 tribes in basic Werwolf without a piece of paper and some prompts. 17 is too long a list to remember all the elements of in one go, while six lists of 3 is not. When you go to a second edition, the old edition material gets chunked together automatically - which means that for old players you've got a separate list to remember for old and new material - people can remember the 7 Camarilla clans (Toreador, Ventrue, Tremere, Brujah, Gangrel, Nosferatu & Malkavian) and they can remember the 6 expansion clans (Giovanni, Ravnos, Setite, Assamite, Lasombra & Tzimisce) because that's two lists.

So if your game was created in a series of stages, like say it had a different Vampire book from its Lycanthropes from its Outsiders book, then it could have a lot more types in it than if it was attempting to get all this information out in a single list. It would be chunked and rechunked automatically. You could have over a dozen flavors of Vampire and you could have over a dozen flavors of Outsiders, because your Fairies and Demons book would be a separate set of lists from your variously arranged lists of Vampire lineages.

Now a couple of caveats: first no one can remember all the flavors of Vampire bloodlines or Thaumaturgy paths. There are fucking wikis about this shit and even now they still aren't complete. The game has been out of print for nearly a dozen years and the people making the wikis haven't successfully remembered all of those bloodlines and shit while they were in a position to do something about it. There is simply a limit to bloat beyond which things get stupid even if you do chunk things up. And secondly: new players have a lot more problems with this chunking thing than experienced players do. Case in point: Feng Shui. The 2nd edition long ass archetypes list is exactly what experienced players asked for and received, but to new players it's basically a brick wall of gibberish.

So bottom line: while there are certainly tricks you can do to expand the conceptual space limits of your game world (chunking, incrementalism, etc.), and White Wolf did harness basically all of them, they still violated conceptual space limits to the point of being profoundly detrimental to the game repeatedly. Werewolf was beyond peoples' give-a-shit threshold on release.

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Post by Prak »

What, I don't get points for rattling off 16 of 17 werewolf tribes without prompts?

More seriously- ok, interesting. And, yeah, I'd be chunking these things.

Do spirits really count against conceptual space though? I've never sat down a prospective Werewolf player, or seen, or been sat down, and told "Ok, here are the twenty ranks of spirits." The conceptual space of spirits is "Ok, everything has a spirit, moving on." People don't care about fire elementals and jaglings and celestines and bane fire spirits and whatever the fuck bane spirit makes Gorehound fomor, they care "Hm, I need to set this thing on fire. Hey, there are lights... lights run on electricity... electricity can ignite things... hey electricity spirits, I'll give you a pile of conductive material if you run around in this thing for a moment." or "Ok... I know the humans use these big metal boxes to get places... and they have to wake it up... um... metal box spirit? Can you, like, wake up? Ok, cool. Can you take me to my pack? Wait- the humans put there hands on here... and I... think? they put their feet on these... Oh, this one makes you go? Thank you Metal Box Spirit. Ok, here we go! ...fuck. Ok, new Metal Box..." Basically, at least in the games of Werewolf I've played, spirits are a tool for getting things done.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Grek »

Step one is to pick a cosmology and stick with it. So we have as our list of planes, from top to bottom:
  • The Supernal Realm, from Mage.
  • Arcadia, from Changeling.
  • Earth, from the real world.
  • The Underworld, from Wraith.
  • The Abyss, from Demon.
  • Oblivion, also from Mage.
These planes are specifically ordered and you have to go through each in order. The Underworld is below the Earth but above the Abyss. You can't go from Earth to the Abyss without passing through the Underworld in between. Any sort of parallel structure is a matter of borders within a plane, not of having separate disjoint planes on the same layer. So you can ascend in one earthly location and end up in the Court of the Winter Fae and ascend in a different spot and end up in the Realm of the White Tailed Deer. But both of those are places in Arcadia and you could in principle travel from one to the other without ever leaving Arcadia.

Moving to a lower plane is easier than moving to a higher plane, and lower planes tend to be worse than higher ones. While supernatural creatures on Earth agree that there is probably something above the Supernal Realm, and something below Oblivion, nobody knows what those places are like because nobody has ever returned from Oblivion with their sanity and memories intact and nobody has ever returned from the Supernal Realm at all. Player characters aren't expected to go to either place during the game, as ascending to the Supernal Realm is the not-to-be-acheived-in-game goal for Mages while falling into Oblivion is the goad for Demons to try to escape their punishment in Hell. Thus mechanics for what happens if you end up there don't need to be provided beyond DM Fiat.

We further have a grand total of four mystical essences that your character can have:
  • Vitality: The Blood Points of a Vampire, the Ka of a Mummy and the supernatural fortitude of a Werewolf. Draws your soul toward Earth.
  • Wonder: The spiritual power found in Changelings, Faeries and Mages as well as the Faith of the Hunter. Draws your soul toward Arcadia.
  • Sorrow: The dark despair that gives rise to Wraiths and causes Torpor in Vampires and Mummies. Draws your soul toward the Underworld.
  • Sin: The result of violating a sacred trust, be it with a God or with Society. Binds Demons to Hell. Draws your soul toward The Abyss.
Death reduces your vitality by one. If you ever end up with a zero for every essence, your soul vanishes off into nirvana/the afterlife and is never heard from again. Supernatural creatures therefore tend to have either a vitality of 2 or more, or very large amounts of Sin, Wonder or Sorrow binding them to this existence. And indeed, your supernatural type defines certain minimums for how much of each essence you have to have in order to have been transformed into that supernatural type in the first place. Demons definitely have a lot of Sin weighing them down; they wouldn't be Demons if they didn't. Wraiths have to have non-zero amounts of Sorrow, or they would be in the Afterlife already instead of kicking around the Underworld and/or haunting people.

Supernatural beings are pretty sure that there are additional magical essences which draw you toward the Supernal Realm (or places greater still) and toward Oblivion (or places even worse), but nobody is exactly sure what those magical essences are, how one acquires them or even who (if anyone) has those essences in them. Supernatural beings desperately want to know more about both, so they can obtain the former and avoid the latter. Most are forced to content themselves with trying to avoid Sin (you can't enter Oblivion without passing through the Abyss, so avoiding the Abyss entirely negates any possibility of falling into Oblivion) and either discovering Wonder (a necessary but insufficient requirement toward Ascension) or accumulating Vitality (which binds you to Earth and makes you exceptionally hard to kill in a permanent way).

So, how does all that apply to werewolves? Once upon a time, there was a clan of humans from Earth who encountered a pack of intelligent, talking wolves from Arcadia. The two groups decided to join together into a single tribe and, as a result their children and their children's children have aspects of both human and wolf in their souls. When these children grew to adults and their souls matured (AKA gaining enough essence) the human shaped children found themselves able to turn into wolves and travel to Arcadia to commune with the spirits there, while the wolf-shaped children found themselves able to turn into humans and descend to the Earth. All was well and good until the primal force of Order in Arcadia noticed this. Enraged at the crossing of species and planar boundaries, it commanded the manifestation of Destruction to end all werewolves and eradicate all evidence of their union. With the primal forces of Order and Destruction aligned against the werewolves, things look grim, but the manifestation of Chaos seems to back them and is willing to help their people recruit allies in the spirit world that they might stand against their doom.

Important things to note from that (extremely abbreviated) backstory:
  • No sex with dogs occurs. No sex is even mentioned. All of the wolf parts in a Werewolf come from intelligent talking wolf-shaped faeries. Maybe they fucked and had kids, maybe it's a faeriewolf godmother thing going on. I'm not taking sides and neither should the game. Let the individual DMs decide which is going to be true at their table.
  • Werewolves that are raised as wolves are generally not raised on Earth. Your little brother is not a dog unless you yourself were a dog at that age. There's no risk of him getting taken in by animal control and having to be rescued from the kennel. There is definitely no setting your cousin up on a hot date with your pet poodle.
  • The supernatural politics of werewolves overlaps with the supernatural politics of the Faerie (who live in Arcadia), the Mages (who draw on Arcadian power and would be very interested in a native guide) and Hunters (whose faith quite possibly empowers one or more of the Big Three the Werewolves are concerned with). It isn't its own thing nobody else cares about.
  • The spirits that control Nature are big, distinct, one of a kind things and not little gnomes living inside every tree and rock. They have limited perspective and cannot pay attention to every single thing that happens on Earth. Significant events might attract their notice, but it is entirely possible (and even probable) that any specific mystery you care about has no spiritual witnesses to it.
Last edited by Grek on Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Prak wrote:What, I don't get points for rattling off 16 of 17 werewolf tribes without prompts?
Nope. Rather proves my point actually.
Prak wrote:More seriously- ok, interesting. And, yeah, I'd be chunking these things.

Do spirits really count against conceptual space though? I've never sat down a prospective Werewolf player, or seen, or been sat down, and told "Ok, here are the twenty ranks of spirits." The conceptual space of spirits is "Ok, everything has a spirit, moving on." People don't care about fire elementals and jaglings and celestines and bane fire spirits and whatever the fuck bane spirit makes Gorehound fomor, they care "Hm, I need to set this thing on fire. Hey, there are lights... lights run on electricity... electricity can ignite things... hey electricity spirits, I'll give you a pile of conductive material if you run around in this thing for a moment." or "Ok... I know the humans use these big metal boxes to get places... and they have to wake it up... um... metal box spirit? Can you, like, wake up? Ok, cool. Can you take me to my pack? Wait- the humans put there hands on here... and I... think? they put their feet on these... Oh, this one makes you go? Thank you Metal Box Spirit. Ok, here we go! ...fuck. Ok, new Metal Box..." Basically, at least in the games of Werewolf I've played, spirits are a tool for getting things done.
What you are describing is a scenario in which not only is the whole spirit world mumbo jumbo way beyond anyone's conceptual space limits to deal with, but it's so obviously way beyond anyone's conceptual space limits to deal with that no one at the table even pretends to try to keep all that shit straight.

I mean honestly, what the hell does an electricity spirit want? What can it do? How powerful is it compared to other spirits in the area, or other spirits in the world? What does it want that conflicts with other spirits in the area? What do other spirits in the area want that it agrees with? What the fucking fuck? You don't have the first fucking clue about any of this shit, because Werewolf's animism plotline so thoroughly overwhelmed your conceptual space limits that you never seriously intended to even fucking try to learn the first fucking thing about how any of it was actually categorized. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I mean, you don't actually know whether electricity spirits would rather conduct through things, persist as potential in capacitors, or short out into light and heat. The most basic possible thing about an electricity spirit's interaction with the narrative, and you have no fucking idea. Now we get to the game mechanics about it, which you of course also don't know. Because Werewolf's animism is so over the line of what could even vaguely be called acceptable in a cooperative storytelling format that even its fans don't bother to even try to approach the problem from any angle.

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Post by erik »

I like what Grek said above and recommend subscribing to his newsletter.

Don't even mention or imply dog sex. It just lowers the tone.

Big spirits are cool. Think spirits in the Avatar cartoon series. Often giant monster creatures mostly concerned with their portfolio and/or region. I've almost always hated mechanics where the DM had to anthropomorphize rocks and trees and such, let alone processes like combustion or conduction. There is no consistency, no way to formulate reasonable expectations for what to expect. Having everything with a spirit just dials it up past 11 and on to approach infinity. Tiny spirits are just asking for trouble and nobody should like them. They are bad and make you a bad person for liking them.
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Post by Chamomile »

The point of animism is to have an "explanation" for the unknown so far past anyone's ability to actually comprehend it that they can never notice discrepancies between it and observed reality. Therefore, it can "explain" anything. Things can be subdivided indefinitely and each subdivision can have its own spirits, and since the actual number of spirits is arbitrarily large, literally any behavior that contradicts previous explanations of spirit behavior can be explained away by introducing more spirits into the equation. It's a race between a skeptic's ability to come up with new questions and a storyteller's ability to create more complex interactions between spirits to answer the question, and so long as the skeptic is coming from a place of pure curiousity rather than scientific analysis, that race favors the storyteller.

It's also something that is basically impossible to meaningfully translate into a game world. As a storyteller in single-author fiction it gives you leeway to have a character who can converse with spirits and those spirits can want anything and be at any level of intelligence and have any degree of a cooperative nature which means any spirit can be anything from a one-paragraph flavor explanation of how the wizard blows up the bad guy's getaway car before he can get inside to an arc-defining obstacle whose power is vast and demands incredibly steep. It's the Unknown Armies problem. Having no idea what to expect next is great news for any story that you don't have influence over and terrible news otherwise.

As a player in a game, having no idea what you're going to get when you try to talk to spirits is very bad. It means anything invested into talking to spirits is basically a gamble on how cooperative you expect a GM to be, and even if the investment is automatic (like connected to level, not that White Wolf games have level but let's pretend) there still are no and can be no expected outcomes for using twelve spirit dice on a lock spirit to get it to unlock itself, because maybe this particular lock spirit really likes being locked or maybe he hates it, stays locked purely out of an overpowering sense of loyalty to his key, and all he needs is for someone to tell him that the key couldn't make it today but totally wants him to get unlocked right now. The only way to know which is the nature of a lock spirit is if you pull out the Oxford English Dictionary and assign a default personality to every single noun in it.

An alternative that has similar mechanics is to have the entire world and collective subconscious of all living beings in it contribute to a single spirit who has one, consistent personality, in which case we're talking about the Force rather than individual spirits for all things. But it can still imbue locks and cars and the electricity running through a lightbulb and not just living things.

It may also be possible to split spirits into a small, manageable, but still universal number of types. I say this may be possible only because it's one of those things where you can't technically prove it's impossible, because it's always possible that you just haven't thought of the perfect combination yet. But really, I can't imagine any set of 5-9 personality types that could be successfully applied to all of the things in such a way that a player could reasonably predict in advance what a spirit wants before he's told the GM he plans on interacting with it.

Re: Chunking, I got into Vampire at its third edition (in fact, after oWoD was over) and had little difficulty keeping track of the 13 vampire types, because even if you're introduced to all of them at once, there is built-in chunking: Camarilla, Sabbat, and Independent. Actually I often have trouble remembering Ravnos, but that more speaks to how completely uninteresting the Ravnos are. If you don't want to give up any of the 17 werewolf tribes, you might try to chunk them up evenly-ish between loyal to Chaos, loyal to Stasis, loyal to Destruction, and independents.
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Post by hyzmarca »

If I were doing animism I'd probably limit it to actual animals. Because every rock having a spirit is problematic, but your werewolf being Mowgli from the Jungle Book is pretty cool.
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Post by Username17 »

Grek wrote:Step one is to pick a cosmology and stick with it. So we have as our list of planes, from top to bottom:
  • The Supernal Realm, from Mage.
  • Arcadia, from Changeling.
  • Earth, from the real world.
  • The Underworld, from Wraith.
  • The Abyss, from Demon.
  • Oblivion, also from Mage.
These planes are specifically ordered and you have to go through each in order. The Underworld is below the Earth but above the Abyss. You can't go from Earth to the Abyss without passing through the Underworld in between. Any sort of parallel structure is a matter of borders within a plane, not of having separate disjoint planes on the same layer. So you can ascend in one earthly location and end up in the Court of the Winter Fae and ascend in a different spot and end up in the Realm of the White Tailed Deer. But both of those are places in Arcadia and you could in principle travel from one to the other without ever leaving Arcadia.
Well, the supernal world and oblivion aren't really places that you visit so much as a thing you get cryptic visions about from time to time. Further, you have a pretty serious problem on your hands if you want the Abyss to be literally in the same direction as the Underworld. It means there is an amount of sin and vitality you can have that result in you being neither alive nor pulled bodily into hell but merely dead. That's dumb, but easily solvable by having the things that energies pull you towards be their own dimensional direction. The Abyss can go ahead and be closer to Earth than the Underworld is, but you still want and need things to direct travel from time to time. Having the "wages of sin" literally be "death" is just too frickin weird.

And of course, your going to want and need to IP scrub these places at some point. So really, your ideal looks like this:
FTFY wrote:[*]Arcadia, from Changeling. Maya: the Dreamlands
[*]Earth, from the real world. Earth: the Mortal World
[*]The Underworld, from Wraith. Mictlan: the Gloom
[*]The Abyss, from Demon. Limbo: the Dark Reflection
...which I may in fact have seen somewhere before.

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Post by Occluded Sun »

I'm not sure it's really possible for one dog (or one entity taking the form of a dog) to rape another (dog, or entity, or whatever).

Female dogs go into heat, triggering all the males around them to want to mate with them. They perhaps struggle among themselves, then the winner mates with the female.

I've never heard of a female dog in heat turning down a prospective suitor (who was a dog) or a functioning male refusing to mate with a fertile female.
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Post by virgil »

Occluded Sun, *please* do not go down this path. Just drop it, nod, and never bring up (let alone debate) the subject again.
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Post by TheFlatline »

virgil wrote:Occluded Sun, *please* do not go down this path. Just drop it, nod, and never bring up (let alone debate) the subject again.
At least he proved my first point.
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Post by Prak »

Spirits other than totems and actual "people" you could have meaningful conversations with who are like unto gods in WtA are essentially a plot device. They are used to pull tricks like setting shit on fire when you don't have a lighter or flamethrower, starting a car without the keys, opening locks, etc. Essentially they mean you can always enter a social encounter to affect the material world however you want/need, and are also how Werewolf magic works. You want a sword that does aggro damage? You summon up a war/pain spirit and tell it "get in the fucking sword." Alternatively, you find them floating around by going to ancient notorious battle sites or places where people were in a lot of pain. You probably don't want pain spirits from Auschwitz. Want a bowl that is always full of water/autofills with water with an expenditure of (magic stat point)? Go find a water spirit, and tell it to get in the fucking bowl. That was seriously "The First Werewolf Magic Item."

Seriously, Animism doesn't take a lot of conceptual space. You tell people "the world is animistic, so there are a bunch of different fucking spirits. You can talk to them and affect the material world by convincing them to do stuff, it's easier to get them to do stuff that is in their nature. So making a boulder suddenly move is going to be very hard, because boulders don't just roll around. Also, you bind them into shit to make magic swag." and if they can't wrap their heads around that, then you have them start as a member of the 80% of auspices that don't fuck around with spirits.

On my not knowing the exact specifics of WtA spirits, I'm sorry I didn't get around to reading Axis Mundi after my WtA group went tits up.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Username17 »

Prak, think about what you're saying. Just think about it. You are saying that using animism you can do "stuff" that you don't actually know the limits or parameters of by having "social encounters" with creatures that you don't know how powerful they are, what they want, what kind of personalities they have, or even what exactly it is that they are called. And then, having explained that the animism section of the game has so thoroughly overwhelmed your own conceptual space limits that you can't be bothered to remember the procedures, results, or classification system of that part of the game, that conceptual space limits don't matter.

By your own admission you have never, will never, and can never use that portion of use that portion of the game as written, because the conceptual space requirements of it are simply too overwhelming for you to seriously entertain the idea that it was a thing you could try to do. Instead you opt for a "system" which is complete mother-may-I based on literally absolutely nothing at all because you haven't the foggiest idea what the actual capabilities or personalities or wants or needs of any of these spirits are supposed to be. So you have a total free-form roleplaying session where the MC makes up some NPCs on the fly, you have a surreal conversation with them, and then the MC ad hocs some magical realism result?

That is not a functioning system. That is what happens to role playing games when they do not have a functioning system. You are describing a game design fail state and calling it good.

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Post by Night Goat »

I like the idea of big things having spirits - then you don't have them everywhere, but things like mountains and major bodies of water should definitely have them. Rocks and grains of sand wouldn't have spirits, because they're just pieces of mountains that have become separated from them, like dead cells. I'd also consider having man-made objects gain spirits after a hundred years - your house probably won't be full of them, but something like a castle or a samurai's sword would have its own spirit.
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Post by Prak »

Frank: I guess I'm getting caught in the trap of "of course this will work, I'd run it right. ...wait, I'm not going to be running every single game of this... (hopefully)." I guess it's part of that whole "Storyteller sucks" thing where most of the rules people remember amount to cargoculting

Night Goat: that's probably manageable. I would want there to be something like elemental spirits, but that doesn't require that every spark and blade of grass has it's own distinct spirit, it just means that you have elementals in the game and you can call them up. Tech spirits were an intriguing part of the game metaplot, but still don't require every computer and car and such to have it's own spirit. I'll think it over.
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FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Prak, you're in some serious AW territory right now. Ass pull systems appeal to MCs solely because they have the luxury of having something be so just because they decided it is so and because they're not out of the game when they do something dumb. Players, on the other hand, actually have to decide whether something makes sense for their character to do. You don't just need a process that allows the GM to eventually spit out something that sounds like a vaguely plausible result for the action in question. You also need things to be consistent enough that players don't feel like they're just blindly throwing shit at the wall when they decide which type of spirits they should be talking to about the murder/mcguffin/costume ball. In general, outcomes should probably be more consistent and predictable than things actually are in real life or else you'll have players lock up or mentally check out when it comes time to make a decision. Full on animism is really bad for avoiding clusterfucks because it posits a world where you may end up having to keep secrets from your kitchen appliances.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Wed Oct 29, 2014 10:40 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Grek »

FrankTrollman wrote:Well, the supernal world and oblivion aren't really places that you visit so much as a thing you get cryptic visions about from time to time.
You also get various characters who come from (or at least are thought to come from) those places. Mostly these are antagonists, but you occasionally get Fallen Angels as Demon characters and Redemption-seeking Nephandi as Mage characters. They key is that people don't know how to go to those places, not that nobody ever comes from them.
Further, you have a pretty serious problem on your hands if you want the Abyss to be literally in the same direction as the Underworld. It means there is an amount of sin and vitality you can have that result in you being neither alive nor pulled bodily into hell but merely dead.
This can't actually happen if you're a soul starting on Earth. In order to go to the Abyss, you first have to pass through the Underworld. If your Sorrow is less than your Vitality, that step never occurs and you wander the Earth as a ghost or some sort of undead creature. If your Sorrow is equal to your Vitality, then upon reaching the Underworld you have a three way tie between Sin, Sorrow and Vitality, meaning that you go down to hell the next time you're disincorporated. You only sink down into the Underworld and stay there if your Sorrow is greater than both your Vitality and Sin - aka you're a Wraith of some sort.
FTFY wrote:[*]Arcadia, from Changeling. Maya: the Dreamlands
[*]Earth, from the real world. Earth: the Mortal World
[*]The Underworld, from Wraith. Mictlan: the Gloom
[*]The Abyss, from Demon. Limbo: the Dark Reflection
...which I may in fact have seen somewhere before.
Except not. Arcadia does not have sentient evil plants or giant marauding animal monsters. The Underworld contains fewer zombies than Earth. The Abyss has no special entrapping property that the other planes lack and contains no faeries - those are all in Arcadia. And you can't go to the Abyss without going into the Underworld, which is completely at odds with the fact that in After Sundown there's specifically a power that sends people straight to hell when you use it.
Speaking of Wraith, our short list for ghosts is something like:
  • Poltergeist: Someone died, but had enough will to live (Vitality>Sorrow) that they refused to move on. Now they knock around the Earth, haunting places and intent on living as much of a life as is possible for a ghost.
  • Wraith: Someone died, but had unfinished business or deep seated regrets (Sorrow of 3+) and refused to move on until those were dealt with. Now they seek a way to manifest in the mortal world and put things right.
  • Damned: Someone died, but ended up falling all the way down into the Abyss (Sin≥Sorrow≥Vitality) as a tormented soul. Now they want a second chance at life so that they can make up for their crimes and escape Hell.
  • Mummy: Someone died, but was so magical or so widely worshiped (Wonder>Sorrow and Vitality) that they ascended up into Arcadia instead of descending down into the Underworld and dwell there as a wandering spirit.
  • Revenant: Someone died, but had enough faith, hope, honor, justice or love in them to perfectly balance out all the despair dragging them down (Wonder=Sorrow). Now thy persist on Earth, still fighting for what's right.
Last edited by Grek on Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Rather than specifically avoiding discussion of 'dog rape' - whatever that means - perhaps it would be more practical to simply avoid bringing sexuality into the game's themes?

Touching on the topic in a sophisticated way that doesn't induce silliness in the people reading the materials is awfully hard, and really doesn't provide much benefit. How often have you encountered RPG discussion of elf mating patterns or dwarven sexuality? That sort of thing results in people treating the game as a joke.

Hell, perhaps most animals are sensitive enough to detect that there's something 'off' about shapeshifters and refuse to remain in their presence, much less mate with them. It's only humans that are oblivious enough to not distinguish a humanoform werebeing from a normal human.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Rocks having spirits can mean four things.

1)Rocks have a presence in the spirit world.

2)You can soulstab a rock.

3)Rocks are spiritually "alive" (whatever that means)

4)Rocks are people.

They all have different implications for the game.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Yeah, to be fair, you can cut off a lot of the bullshit I was talking about by forcing them to live in the negaverse where they know fuck all about what's going on in your bedroom. The above conversation is still one you absolutely have to have though.
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Post by Prak »

OS, use the site search function to learn what we mean by dogrape. We will not be rehashing the topic here.
Last edited by Prak on Thu Oct 30, 2014 7:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Username17 »

Grek wrote:You also get various characters who come from (or at least are thought to come from) those places. Mostly these are antagonists, but you occasionally get Fallen Angels as Demon characters and Redemption-seeking Nephandi as Mage characters. They key is that people don't know how to go to those places, not that nobody ever comes from them.
But Nephandi don't go to or come from Oblivion. They work for Oblivion, but they get their souls reworked in regular old Hell. Specters work for Oblivion as well, but they actually just sit around in the Underworld having visions of Oblivion until they join Team Evil.

About the only thing I can think of in World of Darkness which was ever suggested as possibly coming from Oblivion was Grandmother. And that was a stupid plotline that never went anywhere and was centered on Orpheus. But I repeat myself.

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Post by Grek »

That is a specific and intentional change from the Mage cosmology. And I feel that it's a required one. Nephandi are supposed to have been driven mad by descending into a "Caul" dimension full of endless torture that drives people to puppy-kicking, torture-addicted, penis-knife-wearing insanity. Given that we don't want the Demons player characters to be required to come the same faction as Maelmoth Skullfucker, Demons (or, at least, the playable Demons) need to come from a hell dimension that is bad but not but as bad as the place Nephandi come from. Which means that there has to the the hell that Demons come from, and then the hell that is even worse.
Last edited by Grek on Thu Oct 30, 2014 10:12 am, edited 2 times in total.
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