I thought it was a fun concept. That, and in the cartoon Mother Brain was voiced by the late, great Levi Stubbs.

Well, this thread makes me want to set up a MU*/virtual tabletop space for Atomic Robo RPG shenanigans.

I'd find it more useful to look ahead to either societal changes and events that would affect the vampires, or major intrigues coming to critical moments and fallouts, and play through those periods basically jumping ahead to the next big thing. I think the apporahc would be someone like that Victorian game where you stated the season, and things could be RP'd freely as anytime in that season, until it passed. Instead of moving to the next calendar season every time, you might move to the build up of the critical thing, the big crisis time, and perhaps a denouement, then start thinking about what the next big important time is while doing downtime handling of whatever needs to be tracked as interesting across time.

@DamnitJim said:

Also possible: The God Machine is the DemiUrge.

From wikipeida:

"In the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy, the demiurge (/ˈdɛmiˌɜrdʒ/) is an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted by the Gnostics. Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily the same as the creator figure in the familiar monotheistic sense, because both the demiurge itself plus the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are considered either uncreated and eternal, or the product of some other being, depending on the system."

The God-Machine is God's Machine. His robotic smarthome management system. Except it's run amok.

I like this. A lot.

Right? I hadn't heard of this particular anecdote but it sounds plausible.

Look, there's a kind of player who're basically Storyteller jocks. With them it's all about the things they can do to others, the monsters with big stats they created or the gross things they threw at the PCs. They brag about it, too ("so the spirit had 15 dice and it negates defense, AGGRO! Hahaha!") like it's a mark of pride.

I was lucky enough to not be that familiar with the practice until some time on TR when I was invited to some plots which literally started before +inits were rolled; like, we'd start in front of a house where Things Had Happened (how did we get there? who are the other characters? why is my PC with them?), then the bad guys spot the party and they attack. I think at this point since there's nothing else to take pride in - I mean it's not like it'll get marks for creativity or development - the Storyteller just goes overboard with stats and grossness of guts and innards hanging from walls, or giant bloodshot eyeballs with teeth and whatnot doing the attacking.

So it's possible those people @Coin is talking about add NPC casualties in the same list - which is lazy more than anything. If you're worth your salt at all you don't need to go kill the characters' Best Friend merit NPC if you want to create an emotional impact; instead buckle up and use your keyboard to type things which amount to an NPC of your own who's interesting and cool enough for them to care about them. Give them a sense of purpose, generate ties with the party, create rapport, breathe life into them... then butcher the living fuck out of that fucker. Then enjoy the players' hearts breaking and relish in the taste of their tears.

Or, you know, whatever.

@Bennie
I wondered if this type of thing would be a good use of places; makes me glad I decided to write a workable version for PennMUSH for my game.

@Arkandel said:

@Ganymede I will however say that having staff sphere seems to not have worked. It might be the implementations we've seen and not a problem by design but it's led to staff looking after 'their' turf instead of looking to serve the game's interests as a whole and to spheres ran as islands in multi-sphere games.

This is often a function of expertise. You wouldn't want me weighing in on your Demon, Changeling, Wraith, or Mage requests because I approach all of these with varying levels of incompetence. Vampire I'm pretty solid, Shifter I'm smarter than your average invertebrate but not an expert.

Expertise aside, it's totally reasonable to require book references for things and even without sphere expertise I can look at a request, look at the book reference, and try to sanity check things that may not jive. That at least lightens the load for the experts a little bit and grants me a few points in Sphere Ability: Foo.

Sphere-specific staff is an obvious solution to limited expertise, but it doesn't age well. To survive, a game doing that really needs procedures for handling requests outside of one's realm of expertise.

I just bought FF VI on sale for my iPad. And I'm getting FFT: TWotL for it too. Hurray!

Glitch for President. Or something.

@EmmahSue Meh. Without them the other Traditions will happily live in the Land of No Consequences.

@Arkandel said:

@Groth I don't know that I like an implementation where one person screwing up could cripple a number of people for that long. It might be more realistic but from a gameplay point of view... a month?

Especially since it could happen by mistake (typo!) or someone could be a newbie to the system or... whatever.

Another scenario: I log on when your coterie is not around, go to your neighbohood and drink to my character's dark heart content. Yummy, and now your pool is depleted for weeks.

A single -1 penalty is hardly crippling. However if you want to deliberately cripple a rivals blood pool by repeatedly draining it for the stacking penalty you can certainly do that. However they can also investigate who drained their blood pool and pay you a visit.

@Thenomain If WoD for Larp is Mind's Eye Theatre, would WoD for Mush be called Event Horizon?

@Bobotron I steal so much I don't even know where I originally found it any more.

@Arkandel said:

Unless consent is required at every level, including losing contested but non-lethal/permanently changing rolls, a player could still try to push those things through. Hell, look at Shang, it happens there routinely right?

Sure does. Staff-approved too. That was how I was removed without consent, without even a simple heads-up OOCly. I could write a lot about it and why that game is truly toxic but that's just rehashing what everyone here already knows.

I can tell you from experience that it's ultimately up to the staff to make sure consent and non-consent 'works'. @Arkandel, your notion to keep rules simple such as 'don't be a dick' is spot on. Or, as I used for my online community:

Any kind of behavior that threatens the welcoming, cohesive and coherent mentality and atmosphere of the community will be dealt with according to severity of the disruption. Repeated behaviors that attempt again will result in expulsion.

There. That's it. "Don't be a dick" put down in nice firm 'legalese'. Human nature manifests itself in different details for eons. Attempting to catalog those details is futile and creates loopholes: "but it's not in the list of stuff I can't do!" That means the only defense a player has is their action was not illegal to express under the current listed regulations. However, it's clear the root: willful "antagonization" of the community. Transparency allows players to decide if that is the case. It's looking at the bigger picture to the result not so much the actions themselves.

This is why most registration schemes/plans on games fail. We talked about this in other threads, but they are just too easily defeated.

You cannot have registration of any sort, in my opinion, and provide any meaningful level of anonymity. And I can say this because of the sheer amount of asshat staffers that we all know and love that are the most abusive of 'protected identity'.

Well there you go.

Unrelated to the Conditions discussion, but someone leaked a Beast playtest document on the 4chans.

Reading it now, will post more later.

@Coin said:

@Rook

This is a misconception, though. For example, in nWoD 1e, raising a Skill or Attribute got you diminishing returns, because each dot cost more than the one before. So having lots of mid-level stats (and thus becoming a true Jack-of-all-Trades, Master-of-None) was a lot cheaper and easier than being the master of a bunch of them.

No, in nWoD 2e, it costs you the same.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but the latter certainly doesn't favor the jack-of-all-trades type more.

Agreed. My best PC ever in nWoD 1e was a vampire with all 3's in attributes and a rich helping of 2's and 3's with a few 4's and 5's thrown in on various skills. He was scary because he looked like he could do anything if you didn't see his dice and only the successes because he succeeded at most anything. On top of that he was a PK monster which use to make me laugh when someone would try to kill my PC with their all maxed out combat stats and then would get smashed with a combo of smart tactics, discipline use and an understanding of mechanics.

I'm curious to see how 2e plays out all around and am very excited for it.

I tried all available apps for Android. Not worth it. Besides, I usually logged in for the novelty. (Oh wow! MU*ing all mobile and stuff!)

I usually chatted in channels since I only use mobile when I'm out and about. Don't have the mental focus to actually go IC when I'm not home or somewhere less, 'outsidey'.

@Spitfire
Also, with all the stuff that's only like, a teensy-bit left mechanically (things that say, do damage, you'd have to assign a base rating rather than just rely on success, or look at how Rites/Gifts function a little more if you need to convert over Lodge gifts or oddities), most things should be roughly mechanically compatible, sometimes with a little work -- and fluff is, as always, as compatible as you need it to be for your world.