hyzmarca wrote:Humans have made artificial suns, though. They're called hydrogen bombs.
Vampires in The Strain are specifically weak against nuclear weapons because it is a close approximation to the power of God.
Oh, that's actually really good and also complementary with the tongue-in-cheek theme I was going for.
List of things which evoke a divine quality:
-Apocalyptic woe
-Enforcement of nonsense protocol, to the point of misery
-????
name_here wrote:Honestly, once you're talking nuclear weapons, if it matters that something supernatural but not incorporeal is specifically vulnerable to them you have left the power level covered by AS.
You can be within the influence of a nuclear detonation without being killed by it.
This dude is only alive because he's not a vampire.
Prak wrote:In modern supernatural hunter fiction, however, going back to Dr. Van Helsing in Dracula, the knowledgable hunter of monsters carries at least a suitcase full of known methods for detecting and dispatching said monsters.
I wanted to remark that these are strong arguments and I agree.
As it pertains to Frank's response, I'd like to point out that since movies have already depicted personal armories to the point of cliché, it is unlikely that anybody needs one described to them; thus, even though the shorthand is more spectacular when it's visual, it still works perfectly well when it's only conceptual. It can make the very same indications about a character with a description as short as "a rack of weapons, a box of talismans, and an array of jars and bottles with aging labels."
But I think that misses the core of Frank's implicit point, which I believe is that even though those armories are depicted, they are never employed exhaustively, because their narrative purpose ends before the confrontations begin. Heroes actually end up using a much smaller number of iconic weapons. Thus, there isn't a literary utility in articulating the relevance of any weapons beyond the primary set.
The chief criticism I have of that is that a large and diverse collection of meaningful tools is a very commonly appreciated variety of treasure. There's a significant sense of fantasy fulfillment in saying that your character has one, but it's predicated on there actually being a wide variety of tools that are nominally useful for something.
Make no mistake, it would be dumb to itemize lists of weird shit that your character has on him for the purpose of fighting the edge cases. In general, I think a character's capacity to produce an obscure weakness of
any variety should be a consolidated circumstance that is either true or not depending on whether or not they have access to a storehouse at that particular moment, or if they had been specifically expecting to fight the person with the weakness since before they arrived.
So these are the cases in which a special weakness is relevant:
-Somebody has one of an unknown nature. Their opponent either pushes through the disadvantage or breaks off to do research.
-Somebody has one of a known nature, but either their appearance comes as a surprise, or their opponent was just not materially prepared for war. Their opponent either pushes through the disadvantage, breaks off to procure the weakness, or indicates how he can reasonably get his hands on it in that scene.
-Somebody has one of a known nature. Their opponent knows of either their presence in this locality, or their affiliation with an enemy group in this locality. Their opponent is also on the warpath and ready to kill some fuckers. Their opponent, thus, brought some kryptonite.
-A player has one. It pleases him to articulate it, as an ersatz form of masturbation.
-Conceptually,
somebody in the universe has one, even if they never show up in this game. A player is nonetheless self-satisfied with the understanding that his fortress contains a vault with the conceptual foe's conceptual weakness.
I think it's worth it.