Rehabbing WoD, but keeping it's spirit

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Post by Username17 »

BowCrayonTales wrote:I always thought treating disciplines like mage spheres would've been better than giving a fixed power at each level.
Well, I won't come out and support the fixed power per dot model because I think it's terrible. It ends up forcing people to take powers they don't want and also ends up shifting mediocre but thematic powers to extremely high (and therefore expensive) dot levels in disciplines which are simply already crowded with options. I could give examples like how you need five fucking dots of The Snake Inside to naloxone someone's ass, but I suspect everyone here can rage against something along these lines.

But Mage Spheres? Fucking seriously? Those are the worst thing White Wolf ever wrote.

Now I will say that if you are fetishistically attached to demanding that player characters only start with 3 dots of magic powers that your only real options are to go the Werewolf route (where most of the magical powers of the player characters are off-label like crinos form, memory wiping, spirit-talking, and even fucking dimensional gateways without writing anything on your character sheet at all), or the Mage route (where every power dot is ridiculously broad in application and can potentially do pretty much anything subject to getting your MC to make the right o-face). I think that's a given.

However, the real take-home here should be that giving out 3 power dots to assign is a bad idea and should be done away with. Vampires should have unordered powers (or semi-unordered powers, such as having to take something from the 1st list before being allowed something from the second) and be able to have Mist Form without having Bat Form. But they should also just have more powers. I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the only setting I can think of where young vampires are as fucking weak as they are in Masquerade. Even in shit like Daybreakers the Vampires were tough and fast and strong and had heightened senses.

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Post by BoxCrayonTales »

DSMatticus wrote:If you are wondering why that might be totally fucking stupid (and offensive), it is because the vast majority of people alive today (even Christians) do not adhere to an ethical framework which aligns with the seven virtues and seven vices of Catholicism. Do you really think the WoD fanbase as a whole will be receptive to the notion that faith is a virtue?
Did Catholics kill everyone's dogs or something?

People will put their faith in anything. A magic sky fairy, football, internet discussion, militant atheism, whatever. Faith (and religion) is nothing more than the archaic name for the serious business meme.

It's a game and you guys are taking it way too seriously by treating it like a religion unto itself. I feel like I'm arguing with third wave feminists what with all the inane "help! help! I'm being oppressed by a roleplaying game!" I keep seeing thrown around here.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Vampires are only weak in Buffy because Buffy is Buffy. The Slayer just happens to be tougher, faster, and stronger than they are.

Anyway, there are game balance issues with handing out powers. Mist Form is thematic, its also an instant win in a lot of confrontations, so long as your enemies don't have any way to punch mist.

Indeed, the trick of turning to mist flying down a persons airway and just shredding their lungs from the inside is going to kill anyone who needs to breath, which is pretty much everyone except Vampires and Wraiths. And that doesn't even get into shenanigans if you can cast spells while mist.
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Post by Night Goat »

Catholics killed my Gnostic dog for heresy.
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Post by Username17 »

BoxCrayonTales wrote:Did Catholics kill everyone's dogs or something?

People will put their faith in anything. A magic sky fairy, football, internet discussion, militant atheism, whatever. Faith (and religion) is nothing more than the archaic name for the serious business meme.

It's a game and you guys are taking it way too seriously by treating it like a religion unto itself. I feel like I'm arguing with third wave feminists what with all the inane "help! help! I'm being oppressed by a roleplaying game!" I keep seeing thrown around here.
First of all, I do not think you are going to find that you are going to get a lot of people over onto your side on this site by saying that people you disagree with are acting like feminists. Riot-Grrls are awesome. Just a head's up.

But secondly, are you twelve? Because the gambit "Oh yeah?! But you guys are taking this conversation seriously!" is not the kind of win button you seem to think it is. In the real world, when adults are talking, people generally see someone sputtering about how the other team is playing too hard to be a concession of defeat and not an effective means of shaming the other side.

You asked why White Wolf dumping Christian jizz all over everything was insulting and alienating to their audience. We told you. You claimed it didn't really say those things and I quoted page and paragraph where it literally and specifically did. You were wrong. Stop being a little baby about it. It's actually a fairly minor point.

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Post by Chamomile »

hyzmarca wrote:Vampires are only weak in Buffy because Buffy is Buffy. The Slayer just happens to be tougher, faster, and stronger than they are.
Not so. By season 2, Giles has grown into taking on the odd vampire mook without much trouble, and a season after that Xander can stake mook vampires with only a little difficulty. Now, granted, Giles and Xander both have a certain degree of experience and training (it isn't clear how much of Xander's military training is retained over time, but it's certainly plausible that his hand-to-hand skills would remain in pretty good shape seeing as how he has little chance to forget them), but they're not all that much more competent than, say, a biker thug or a cop. Vampires are only scary to completely helpless bystanders. Anyone with a modicum of combat capability can hold their own against them.
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Post by BoxCrayonTales »

FrankTrollman wrote:You asked why White Wolf dumping Christian jizz all over everything was insulting and alienating to their audience. We told you.
The gaming den may be alienated by this, but every other community I came across were not likewise offended. I've never once seen an Asatru or Hindu player call the mechanic blasphemous. Certainly there are mechanistic things to dislike about the system (vague, simplistic, useless), but from what I've seen most of the audience did not consider it a religious problem.

I can get behind the GMC revisions to the mechanic, but even then I would still limit choices to the original fourteen simply because 1) other mechanics that rely on virtue/vice don't work without a common point of reference, and 2) without that common point of reference the GMC books include stupid, strange, nonsensical or context-free virtues/vices like "joyous," "sensitive," "wistful," "gleeful," "furious," "fascinated," "cunning," "complacent," "efficiency," "destruction," "cold," "perfect," "distracted," "contrary," "afraid," "gullible," "depressed," "crazy," and other things that are either rehashes of the original fourteen, random emotional states, random personality traits, random words picked from the dictionary or thesaurus, and so on.

In any case, I strongly agree that we should be never using this mechanic or any similar mechanics in the efforts here.
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Post by Blicero »

hyzmarca wrote: Vampires are only weak in Buffy because Buffy is Buffy. The Slayer just happens to be tougher, faster, and stronger than they are.
As an addendum to what Chamomile said, don't forget the bit in Season 2 where Spike is beating up Buffy, and then Buffy's mom shows up. And that prompts him to retreat. And Spike is supposed to be one of the baddest vampires around.
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Post by Prak »

BoxCrayonTales wrote:
DSMatticus wrote:If you are wondering why that might be totally fucking stupid (and offensive), it is because the vast majority of people alive today (even Christians) do not adhere to an ethical framework which aligns with the seven virtues and seven vices of Catholicism. Do you really think the WoD fanbase as a whole will be receptive to the notion that faith is a virtue?
Did Catholics kill everyone's dogs or something?
Well... they did, when I was still christian, tell me that my dog was dead, no soul to meet me in heaven, so... when you believe in an afterlife, that's pretty close.
It's a game and you guys are taking it way too seriously by treating it like a religion unto itself. I feel like I'm arguing with third wave feminists what with all the inane "help! help! I'm being oppressed by a roleplaying game!" I keep seeing thrown around here.
No, we're saying it's a game, so it shouldn't be in the business of proselytizing, unless that's the entire point of the game and thus we can avoid it entirely on the principle of not being interested in a shitty game system preaching at us, or go into it aware of what it's doing and deal with it/troll it as we will.
The gaming den may be alienated by this, but every other community I came across were not likewise offended. I've never once seen an Asatru or Hindu player call the mechanic blasphemous. Certainly there are mechanistic things to dislike about the system (vague, simplistic, useless), but from what I've seen most of the audience did not consider it a religious problem.
I'm pretty sure that if anyone called it blasphemous, they meant blasphemous to christianity, because WW is just that kind of special where they can fap to a religion and get it entirely wrong. We don't consider it blasphemous to atheism/satanism/whathaveyou, we consider it offensive to have catholicock crammed down our throats.
I can get behind the GMC revisions to the mechanic, but even then I would still limit choices to the original fourteen simply because 1) other mechanics that rely on virtue/vice don't work without a common point of reference, and 2) without that common point of reference the GMC books include stupid, strange, nonsensical or context-free virtues/vices like "joyous," "sensitive," "wistful," "gleeful," "furious," "fascinated," "cunning," "complacent," "efficiency," "destruction," "cold," "perfect," "distracted," "contrary," "afraid," "gullible," "depressed," "crazy," and other things that are either rehashes of the original fourteen, random emotional states, random personality traits, random words picked from the dictionary or thesaurus, and so on.
That is literally what OWoD had for its Willpower recharge mechanic: "Pick one of these adjectives. When you act in accordance, regain a willpower point."
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Post by Username17 »

BoxCrayonTails wrote:The gaming den may be alienated by this, but every other community I came across were not likewise offended. I've never once seen an Asatru or Hindu player call the mechanic blasphemous. Certainly there are mechanistic things to dislike about the system (vague, simplistic, useless), but from what I've seen most of the audience did not consider it a religious problem.
This is a really bad argument on a number of levels. First of all, I don't care whether people consider the book blasphemous, my contention is that the book is exclusionary to people outside the authors' culture group. Secondly, the general point that you having personally not heard an argument before doesn't make that argument not true; the plural of anecdote is not data.

But the vastly more important issue is one which crops up surprisingly frequently when discussing nWoD and 4th edition D&D: these games were failures. They had two orders of magnitude less players than the games they were revisions of. For every fan of the new edition, there were ninety nine fans of the previous edition who for whatever reason decided to give the new edition a pass. Everyone who can really get into the specifics of how the edition is good or bad is just a rounding error on nothing - virtually the entire demographic of fans "just don't like it" or whatever. Probably very few of those people can give you intelligible views on why the edition isn't for them, it just didn't grab them or they saw no reason to switch or whatever.

So yeah, nWoD is culturally chauvinistic and dismissive of the ethical views of the vast majority of the people on Earth. I'm absolutely positive that that contributed in some small way to the vast majority of potential fans deciding that nWoD just wasn't for them.

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Post by Ice9 »

Also, it's not like the Vices/Virtues are such great choices that it's worth even irritating people to keep them.
* Nobody remembers the virtues. They don't have as much traction as the vices, and several of them are too similar.
* Some of the vices are bad from a gameplay perspective. Sloth means you stay home and don't go on the adventure. Lust and Gluttony often have to be contrived to produce the kind of problematic situation that WP recharge requires.
* The virtues are even worse. Prudence and Temperance are separate, and both of them are supposed to produce situations where you make a major sacrifice for them? Hope is even worse, usually.
* The degree of fucked-up situation the examples imply is way out of line for the actual benefit - like "fuck over your entire team (and maybe yourself) to get 1 WP back". On the other hand, if you allow it for non-self-screwing acts, many of them are really easy to recharge with.
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Post by Whipstitch »

It doesn't have much traction as a mnemonic device either because even White Wolf couldn't give enough shits about Chastity and Temperance to argue for them remaining separate full-fledged virtues. The Sins are easier to remember but I'd still bet you hard cash that plenty of people would forget that that Envy and Greed are both members if it weren't for the fact that "Seven" is right there in the title.
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Post by BoxCrayonTales »

Prak wrote:No, we're saying it's a game, so it shouldn't be in the business of proselytizing,
But it's not proselytizing. It is, oddly enough, ironic: the authors dress up in token Christian themes what is an incredibly anti-Christian game. I've seen the writers say things like "I cannot accept that a benevolent God could exist in the World of Darkness." Then when God (or the "god-machine") does show up, he's a blind idiot serving the role of big bad evil guy (and couldn't be more embarrassing for it).
Prak wrote:That is literally what OWoD had for its Willpower recharge mechanic: "Pick one of these adjectives. When you act in accordance, regain a willpower point."
I never said I liked oWoD. The nature/demeanor mechanic is half-useless (what is the point of demeanor?) and somewhat paranoid.
FrankTrollman wrote:my contention is that the book is exclusionary to people outside the authors' culture group. Secondly, the general point that you having personally not heard an argument before doesn't make that argument not true; the plural of anecdote is not data.
The other cultures you're claiming were being excluded never complained that the game was excluding them or otherwise offensive. Japanese players complained about the Burakumin because that's an actual ethnic slur, but they didn't complain the Christian virtues/vices were excluding them. Many times I've seen people actually ask whether the virtue/vice system was exclusionary/offensive for being Christian and the response has unanimously been "it isn't a religious problem."

Getting angry at Western media for having Christian influences is foolish and dismisses how Western society functions for non-Christians. A Buddhist and a secular humanist would both see nothing wrong with the list of vices. Christianity does not have a monopoly on morality: the greatest minds of classical antiquity keep going on about it.
FrankTrollman wrote:But the vastly more important issue is one which crops up surprisingly frequently when discussing nWoD and 4th edition D&D: these games were failures. They had two orders of magnitude less players than the games they were revisions of. For every fan of the new edition, there were ninety nine fans of the previous edition who for whatever reason decided to give the new edition a pass.
Do you have evidence nWoD was a commercial failure? Because sporadic interviews with White Wolf staff indicated that nWoD was made because oWoD sales were falling and the marketing department wanted the ToJ to be made so that the nWoD could rake in new sales (the truth was that this was symptomatic of the RPG industry in general, but they couldn't have known that at the time). White Wolf was a business who did things for business reasons. nWoD is even still being supported by former White Wolf staff, who founded their own company after CCP bought and dissolved them based on a failed MMO deal, and has recently gotten a second edition. I've seen multiple nWoD books in the same RPG bestseller lists and those books continue to sell today. If oWoD has been revived and was superior, why would the company continue to support nWoD and profit from that?
Ice9 wrote:Also, it's not like the Vices/Virtues are such great choices that it's worth even irritating people to keep them.
I cannot agree more. Everywhere I've seen people saying this. "Christianity isn't the problem! The mechanic is actively detrimental by itself!" GMC tried to rectify to that and many thought it did a good job. I don't see the point of the mechanic itself absent context.
Last edited by BoxCrayonTales on Thu Nov 13, 2014 11:07 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Look, BoxCrayonTales, the only context in which Abrahamic religions and especially Christianity is acceptable for a game that relies on hodgepodge latitudinarian folk practices is if it's explicitly demoted in importance. Here are Christianity's big things when it comes to other worldviews, even secular ones like Marxism or evolution:

[*] If you worship any other religion, you'll go to hell.
[*] To stop you from going to hell, you'll be harassed nonstop in dozens of big and small ways until you repent.
[*] Also, every other religion except ours is made of fail and lies and nothing they claim is true. There's no use importing or studying or synthesizing those folk practices with Christianity because you're just letting Satan in.
[*] On the off chance that a non-Christianity worldview does something of worth (magic, science, cool stories) then what you're actually experience is the super-secret work of our Satan figure and you'll burn in hell for associating with it. Sorry, but Greek Mythology? Hinduism? Hoodoo? That's all Satan, baby!

Saying that this religion is true to some extent already puts your game on incredibly thin ice. Once you elevate any aspect of its worldview above other religions or irreligions your audience is completely justified in thinking that you're about to pull an evangelizing Christian con-job because that's how Christianity fucking operates when it's confronted with other worldviews.

If you frame a game's morality in terms of a Christian worldview, no matter how superficially or benignly you do you, you immediately peg peoples' BS meter. Moreso than explicitly framing your game's morality in terms of Buddhism, Satanism, or even Objectivism.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Thu Nov 13, 2014 11:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Prak »

Box, are you even familiar with the christian god? What part of that figure is benevolent?
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Post by Username17 »

BoxCrayonTails wrote:Do you have evidence nWoD was a commercial failure?
Yes. White Wolf used to put a bizarre boast on their website about how many total books they had ever sold. They updated it regularly from the late nineties until about 2 years after nWoD dropped. It was a stupid piece of marketing to play up how they had sold millions of books, but of course they were adding up apples and oranges and even multiple editions of the same apple to get there. A book of Clanbook Setite Revised was a book, and a brand new shelfbreaker Exalted core book was a book as well.

But here's the thing: the internet has a memory, and so you could go back and look at what those press releases had in them in years prior and get approximate values of books sold over a period. It wasn't perfect or anything, since they were updated irregularly and only told you the last million or half million milestone that got passed. And of course, they didn't distinguish between a 32 page softcover "book" and a 300 page hardcover book. But it was something. It was enough that we could tell that shortly after nWoD came out, sales dropped to almost nothing. Because the number of millions of total books wasn't going up very fast.

A while after people noticed that you could do that, White Wolf stopped making the claim altogether, but it's still fairly iron clad. nWoD sold less copies than oWoD did. By a lot.

We can go into more interpretive issues like the fact that White Wolf went out of business and got sold to an Icelandic videogame company that had more money than sense. But really, White Wolf is simply one of the few gaming companies that inadvertently gave out sales over time data and it's simply demonstrably and demonstratedly true that nWoD sales were shit.
BoxCrayonTales wrote:nWoD is even still being supported by former White Wolf staff, who founded their own company after CCP bought and dissolved them based on a failed MMO deal, and has recently gotten a second edition. I've seen multiple nWoD books in the same RPG bestseller lists and those books continue to sell today. If oWoD has been revived and was superior, why would the company continue to support nWoD and profit from that?
Uh... what?

OK, maybe you don't understand how small and bullshit Onyx Path Publishing actually is. It is one dude. His name is Richard Thomas and he is a former White Wolf creative director. He doesn't actually publish things. He leases the intellectual property to old White Wolf titles back from the Icelandic videogame company that owns them, and then he puts up kickstarters to slap together shovelware pdfs with cheap or free (or even negative cost) labor, and then pumps those pdfs through a print on demand outfit exactly like a vanity press. That's it. That's all there is.

Onyx Path isn't a company. It's not a publishing house. It's an Intellectual Property holding LLC that licenses the trademarks of abandonware titles to get literally thousands (or in some cases only hundreds) of suckers to pay for shovelware put together by fans to be printed up by someone else. Since it's all funded by kickstarter BS, any and all of White Wolf's old imprints including new and old WoD and Exalted and Scion and whatever the fuck will all eventually get trotted out to see if there are enough idiots willing to throw money at them in the vain hope that their beloved game won't die. Even though their game is already dead, and the people writing new material are basically no different from themselves, and in some cases actually are themselves because Onyx Path will let you write shit into these travesties if you pay them money. For reals.

White Wolf is dead, and the fact that there are a few vultures fucking that corpse doesn't mean anything. There was a period when CCP tried to keep them alive with cash injections to try to keep people interested in White Wolf projects as viral advertising for their proposed MMO - but when that project died in development hell the fact that White Wolf hadn't had a hit on their hands in nearly a decade was enough to pull the plug. The company ended there, and the plaintive wails of White Wolf fanboys that Onyx Path is still carrying the torch are fucking hilarious in addition to being factually wrong.

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Post by DSMatticus »

BoxCrayonTales wrote:People will put their faith in anything. A magic sky fairy, football, internet discussion, militant atheism, whatever. Faith (and religion) is nothing more than the archaic name for the serious business meme.
You do not not know what faith is. Faith does not mean "warm, fuzzy feelings about an idea," it means "belief without reason." That means every single one of your examples except magic sky fairies is gibberish. Atheism is, of course, the rejection of beliefs without reason. Football and internet discussion are just things that happen, and I have no idea what "belief without reason" would even fucking mean when applied to those concepts. "I believe in football!" What?

When someone asserts without evidence that they are being visited in the night by anal-probing aliens, ultimately that is a statement they are making with the conviction of a non-religious faith. Unsurprisingly, the fact that it is a non-religious form of faith does not automatically make it appealing to all those people who think faith is stupid.
BoxCrayonTales wrote:It's a game and you guys are taking it way too seriously by treating it like a religion unto itself. I feel like I'm arguing with third wave feminists what with all the inane "help! help! I'm being oppressed by a roleplaying game!" I keep seeing thrown around here.
If you think feminist is an insult this forum probably isn't for you. See, we (mostly) aren't bigoted shitbags. Why do we have a bunch of low post count users who are turning out to be creepy anti-feminist scumsuckers? How did we attract these assholes, and how can we stop attracting them?

But please, by all means, continue mocking third-wave feminism for being a bunch of whine-about-nothings while access to abortion within the United States is in sharp decline. It's not like sexual autonomy is in fact the core division within the feminist community which gave rise to third-wave feminism, and it's certainly not like women's sexual autonomy is currently under attack. Oh wait, both of those things are actually true. Well, fuck. I guess that means you've been hoodwinked into being blindly cynical of feminism by the exact same sexist fuckstains who are trying to deprive women of their rights to sexual autonomy. Isn't that embarrassing for you.
Last edited by DSMatticus on Thu Nov 13, 2014 11:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Whipstitch »

BoxCrayonTales wrote: Getting angry at Western media for having Christian influences is foolish and dismisses how Western society functions for non-Christians. A Buddhist and a secular humanist would both see nothing wrong with the list of vices. Christianity does not have a monopoly on morality: the greatest minds of classical antiquity keep going on about it.
I'm a secular humanist and I still think the list of vices is pretty dumb. The fact that Christians don't have a monopoly on these things is exactly why people are repeatedly calling what nWoD did a missed opportunity to go in another direction. I honestly don't even know what your problem is anymore. The beginning and end of your position seems to be that you're offended that we care enough to talk badly about something you yourself don't even like very much. It's kinda puzzling.

Also, promoting a Eurocentric worldview in your mechanics is frankly a waste of time in many ways when you're already a Westerner writing for a Western audience, because that shit's going to leak in whether or not you give it a privileged position in your rules. It's like prattling on about the physical characteristics of humans in D&D--half the advantage to playing one is that you don't need to explain much about it anyway. It's dissenting options that actually benefit from being name checked.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Fri Nov 14, 2014 12:03 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by TiaC »

DSMatticus wrote:
BoxCrayonTales wrote:People will put their faith in anything. A magic sky fairy, football, internet discussion, militant atheism, whatever. Faith (and religion) is nothing more than the archaic name for the serious business meme.
You do not not know what faith is. Faith does not mean "warm, fuzzy feelings about an idea," it means "belief without reason." That means every single one of your examples except magic sky fairies is gibberish. Atheism is, of course, the rejection of beliefs without reason. Football and internet discussion are just things that happen, and I have no idea what "belief without reason" would even fucking mean when applied to those concepts. "I believe in football!" What?
In the words of Stephan Colbert: "I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states"

I think it would look something like that.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Blicero wrote:
hyzmarca wrote: Vampires are only weak in Buffy because Buffy is Buffy. The Slayer just happens to be tougher, faster, and stronger than they are.
As an addendum to what Chamomile said, don't forget the bit in Season 2 where Spike is beating up Buffy, and then Buffy's mom shows up. And that prompts him to retreat. And Spike is supposed to be one of the baddest vampires around.
That wasn't because he was afraid of her. That was more that Spike has mom issues. Also that was back when the vampires where at least putting some effort into maintaining a masquerade.

Mommy issues should be a thing. Catholic vices, less so.

I'll say it again, Onyx Path had a good idea with the switch from Morality to Integrity, and subjective "breaking points" instead of objective sins.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

BoxCrayonTales wrote:Did Catholics kill everyone's dogs or something?.

cats, actually
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Post by TiaC »

Josh_Kablack wrote:
BoxCrayonTales wrote:Did Catholics kill everyone's dogs or something?.

cats, actually
That site is a horrible mash-up of tinfoil-hattery.
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

Ok, I only addressed one point of your's, Box.

Nature/Demeanor- Demeanor served almost the exact same purpose that Alignment does in D&D, it was a roleplaying guide. It helped you think about how your character acts, as opposed to how they actually are. For example, my actual nature is generally charitable and good natured. I like helping people (but then I think everyone does because it flips a little switch in their brain that lets them feel better about themselves). The way I actually act is very curmudgeonly. So in OWoD, I would get willpower back when I bought a meal for a homeless guy, or helped a friend in a bind or the like. That doesn't change the fact that even my close friends would tell you I'm an asshole.

But, ok, let's say we were to use something like Virtues/Vices. Let's say I'm using VV, but with a system that works and my own little spin. I'll call it Gratifications and Torments. Once per session, you can gain a willpower point for falling victim your Torment, your personal failing. Once per chapter, you can refill your willpower by acting in accordance with your gratification and reinforcing your nature.

Gratifications
Vitality
No one can be certain of a post-life reward. There may be ghostly realms, but they are things of ego-destroying torment. As such, it is wiser to make the most of your life (or unlife) on Earth, rather than making investments in a return you have no guarantee of. The first time in a Chapter you make things better for those around you here and now, rather than trying to win brownie points towards a post-life reward, refill your Willpower.

Indulgence
It is within the nature of every living (and many unliving) creatures to pursue certain things--food, security, shelter, companionship, and so on. Many would, however, try to tell you that these drives are unnatural, something to be ashamed of. The first time in a Chapter that you indulge in these desires to the betterment of all involved, refill your Willpower.

Wisdom
Many things in the world exist to deceive you or lead you into deceiving yourself. Advertising tells you to buy things you don't need, everyone in a business dealing tries to secure a better return for themselves than for the person they're dealing with, often through making the other believe they're getting a better return than they are, and entire philosophies and cultures have been built upon deceiving the little people to better control them. The first time in a Chapter you see through a deception that would hinder or harm you and your group, and act with the wisdom of recognizing that deception, refill your Willpower (you should probably tell your ST that you recognized what's really going on so they don't think you fell for it, if you're going to go along with the lead of the deceiver).

Equity
Despite efforts to the contrary on the part of more recent philosophies, the natural inclination is to repay people in treatment in kind to that they give. Eye for and eye and tooth for tooth may make the whole world blind and toothless, but turning the other cheek just creates a controlling population and a blind and toothless subservient status. The first time in a Chapter you repay a character the treatment they have paid you in a plot-important manner (the rude hotdog vender, or the waitress who gives you free fries don't count, but the scheming Giovanni who tries to paint your group as blackhearted traitors, or the werewolf who pretends to be a friend to later kill you and take your fangs as trophies do, however), refill your Willpower.

Humility
There are those who believe they are the highest form of life on the planet, and treat those who are not like themselves in some meaningful way as inferior, fair game for whatever they wish to do. The humble person realizes that they are the same decaying organic matter (ok, or similar crumbling inorganic matter) as every other life on the planet. The first time in a Chapter you reject the temptation to think you are inherently better than another, or remind them they are not inherently better than others, refill your Willpower.

Gratitude
Those who deny the benefit of others' aid are doomed to be forsaken in their next time of need. Whether you have been aided by magic, comrades, or even the apparatus of the government, a rational person recognizes that the one is no where near as strong or as capable as one aided by others. The first time in a Chapter you recognize that you have been aided by an outside force, and show gratitude for that, often by repaying the favour in some way, refill your Willpower.

Custodianship
The World of Darkness tarnishes much that it touches. One cannot become an adult without losing the innocence of childhood and becoming aware of the realities of the world they live in, and the ability to do such is probably the only true thing that separates sapience from non-sapience. As such, it is the responsibility of the sapient and immature to protect the innocence of the non-sapient and immature until they need to face the realities of the World of Darkness and take charge of their own destiny. The first time in a Chapter you protect children or mundane animals from those who harm them physically, mentally or emotionally, refill your Willpower.

Torments
Deception
This is not deceiving others, this is being deceived. The world is full of those who deceive you so that you buy into their scheme, buy their product, give them the shirt off your back without realizing it. Often when you fall prey to deception, you feel good about helping someone, or getting a new thing, or finding a seeming solution to your problems, but it quickly turns to ash. The first time in a Scene you are deceived, regain a Willpower point.

Pretension
It's normal to want to be a bigshot, to feel powerful, to be the one people turn to. However, in this world, there are those who will make you feel like you are, who will get you to puff out your chest, and give promises of your personal ability, with nothing to back it up. When you posture like this, you feel good, you feel as powerful as you say you are, but it won't be too long before you try to cash that bad check. The first time in a Scene that you lead others to believe you are more powerful/influential/capable than you really are, regain a Willpower point.

Solipsism
All too frequently, people believe everyone is identical to them, that everyone knows what they know, and believes as they do. It makes it easier to come up with solutions to problems when you only consider your own viewpoint, but to do so is to do a great disservice to everyone involved. When you forget that others have different experiences, other concerns, other perspectives, the ease with which you can generate ideas and solve problems takes a lot of stress out of such, before people point out that you're not taking their needs into account. The first time in a scene that you act only considering your own needs, regain a Willpower point.

Conformity
There is no shortage of people who will tell you how to live your life. Companies tell you what to wear, what to eat, what music to listen to, what causes to support. Politicians tell you to just trust them, and the world will turn out all right. News pundits tell you what to be afraid of. The people around you tell you to be like they are. Authorities tell you to go along to get along. It really makes things much easier when you don't fight against others, but eventually you'll find a point where you disagree. The first time in a Scene that you go along with the wishes or goals of others, regain a Willpower point.

Obsequience
Like Conformity, obsequence is doing as you're told. Whereas Conformity is doing as your peers do, however, obsequience is doing as you are told to do by authority or some other power which is not doing such itself. Whether it is your sire laying down rules for you he need not follow himself, the law telling you to not do things that the lawmakers do, or companies saying it's different for them, there is no shortage or hypocrites trying to tell you what to do. And it's natural to want to obey and make them happy, but that happiness is shortlived as it only makes them happy. The first time in a Scene that you do as you are told by someone in authority over you, regain a Willpower point.

Faith
Faith is a shortcut for reason, and an attractive one at that. It can be deeply tempting to simply believe that things will work out, or that there is some higher power that will make things right, or that you can make a difference by doing nothing. A key thing to remember about faith is that it is belief without reason. It can be very pleasing to simply have faith, and not examine deeper. The first time in a Scene you take things at face value, or espouse belief in something without evidence or reason, regain a Willpower point.

Self-deceit
It can be easy to believe you are right, that you cannot possibly be wrong, that what you're doing is exactly what needs to be done. But there often comes a point where you discover your way maybe wasn't so perfect, that you've made a mistake and need to backpeddle and fix it. The first time in a Scene that you harm your own efforts through actions you willingly took, regain a Willpower point.

Now, Box, if you can see why these are bad (though I'd be ok with using them in a game...) maybe you can see why the Virtue/Vice model is bad. The Gratifications try to encourage one to work in the interest of the group, or at least not at cross purposes, and the Torments are actually super easy to get and don't require hyperspecific, and often squicky, contrivances. Yes, this means you basically get one free Willpower point each scene. Merry Christmas.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
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Post by Chamomile »

DSMatticus wrote:Why do we have a bunch of low post count users who are turning out to be creepy anti-feminist scumsuckers? How did we attract these assholes, and how can we stop attracting them?
You actually answered your own question in another thread over in MPSIMS:
Clickbait pop-feminism is quickly turning into the prominent caricature social conservatives have wanted for decades, and it's becoming incredibly harmful to the movement as a whole.
Except in that clickbait pop-feminism has, let me assure you, been an absurd caricature for years. Jezebel was basically always atrocious and I have been rolling my eyes at people who link it for a long time, because even going back to 2011-ish or so, people who link Jezebel are almost universally either trying to tar all feminism with that brush or else actually crazy enough to agree with Jezebel. These parasites have been burning through decades' worth of public goodwill in just a few years, and what we're seeing now is the tipping point where people are fed up with it - and quite unfortunately, the tactic of hiding behind a facade of feminism in order to get away with terrible things is still working, in that people are getting fed up with feminism and not clickbait.
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Post by BoxCrayonTales »

Whipstitch wrote:The fact that Christians don't have a monopoly on these things is exactly why people are repeatedly calling what nWoD did a missed opportunity to go in another direction. I honestly don't even know what your problem is anymore. The beginning and end of your position seems to be that you're offended that we care enough to talk badly about something you yourself don't even like very much. It's kinda puzzling.
My position is that while the virtue/vice system was implemented poorly due to a combination of vagueness, simplicity and uselessness, its use of the cardinal and theological virtues and the seven deadly sins specifically was not a terrible idea in and of itself. Yes, there are many alternatives, the Western influence is redundant, and so on, but those are matters of taste. Limiting the list to fourteen makes it easy to design other mechanics that rely on it, but I suppose without those derived mechanics there is no reason to have this mechanic to begin with. It's like making a sandwich out of tinfoil and then putting ketchup and mustard on it: the ketchup and mustard are the V/V list while the tinfoil is the mechanical implementation. You could've replaced the virtues and vices with any other list and they still would've been just as vague, simplistic and useless as before.

I have the same problem with the Morality mechanic (and the equally odious Integrity successor). The name gives a bad impression: simply using "conscience" instead would've avoided a lot of problems down the line. The hierarchy was very, very poorly contextualized, but all things considered it was generically humanistic rather than Christian specifically. The derangements gave even worse impressions than the name and the degeneration mechanic behaves the exact opposite to psychology in real life (where regret over misdeeds drives people crazy, not callousness). The end result was that (and this technically a gross exaggeration) characters could become schizophrenic by stealing a candybar. However, the original intention of the mechanic to very, very loosely model how people react to acting against their conscience is not itself a terrible idea, but the implementation was horrible and RPGs are meant to be crime fantasy and not morality plays.
Prak wrote:Now, Box, if you can see why these are bad (though I'd be ok with using them in a game...) maybe you can see why the Virtue/Vice model is bad. The Gratifications try to encourage one to work in the interest of the group, or at least not at cross purposes, and the Torments are actually super easy to get and don't require hyperspecific, and often squicky, contrivances. Yes, this means you basically get one free Willpower point each scene. Merry Christmas.
I wouldn't use the V/V system if given a clean slate, but I don't understand what you're saying here. I genuinely don't see anything wrong. In idea, if not implementation (awesome implementation by the way!), how is this different from how V/V was intended to work in a perfect world? Furthermore, what stops you from applying this implementation to the original V/V list? Ignoring how they were actually implemented in the nWoD rulebook, judging by the lists of synonyms therein, the original fourteen are a lot more flexible than one would think at first glance: Charity/Compassion/Mercy, Faith/Belief/Conviction/Humility/Loyalty, Fortitude/Courage/Integrity/Mettle/Stoicism, Hope/Dreamer/Optimist/Utopian, Justice/Condemnatory/Righteous, Prudence/Patience/Vigilance, Temperance/Chastity/Even-Temperament/Frugality; Envy/Covetousness/Jealousy/Paranoia, Gluttony/Addictive Personality/Conspicuous Consumer/Epicurean, Greed/Avarice/Parsimony, Lust/Lasciviousness/Impatience/Impetuousness, Pride/Arrogance/Ego Complex/Vanity, Wrath/Antisocial Tendencies/Hotheadedness/Poor Anger Management/Sadism. These aren't fourteen separate concepts, these are many more concepts forced into fourteen categories. Again, I'm not interested in actually using them here, I just wanted to see if you could apply your flavorful yet succinct writing and good grasp of implementation to do a better job than White Wolf did.
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