I see a lot of negativity on these kinds of boards a lot. Complaining about ST's. Complaining about the way people play their characters. Just a lot of bitching, when the real point of this whole exercise is to have fun.

So to that end, I'm making a thread about concepts you would like to see someone else play. Characters that you would love to interact with, and there's just nobody there to play them.

I'll start, to give an example: a witch doktor. This guy speaks, and makes deals with the spirits -- which you can never quite tell if he's using that term like he's referring to dead people or animistic spirits, and whenever someone presses him for a straight answer on this he flips his shit at them -- and in turn makes such deals with you. You come to his little shack or hovel or whatever, and in exchange for what you want, he sets some terms. The terms usually seem pretty arbitrary, and he won't renegotiate with you. You either take the deal or you don't, and that's it.

My "inspiration" for this, if you want to be lofty and call it that, is Child's Play and The Booth At The End.

A second example, to drive the point of the thread home: a gun nut conspiracy theorist. This man isn't necessarily evil, but he definitely is crazy. He also has way too many guns for his own good, and seems quite knowledgeable on their use and function. You'd prefer not to deal with him, but he has a habit of bailing you out of dangerous situations. You blow off all his theories but whenever you look into them, they always appear factually correct... is he onto something?

Let's hear your ideas. This could be fun.

The President would have to be an NPC. If you don't do this, then everyone is going to be super metagaming just to get that position, even for a few moments. And then when they do they'll get bored pretty quickly and log out.

@ThatGuyThere Yeah exactly. Like conspiracy theorists in real life, they might be "onto something" but they're never going to get the straight dope on the matter. On the other hand, he can be useful to a party or as an in game ally because he has guns, guns out the wazoo. And it's really not an implausible character since I know a few of these guys in real life.

@mietze I can see your point about how all character concepts can be done poorly but I don't think that really diminishes the importance of concept. If your character has a stupid concept, or in a lot of cases, no real concept at all, then the best performance of said stupid/non-concept is going to still be boring and unfun.

Also, part of why people roleplay is to be something they're not, typically something extraordinary. I actually think a degree of special snowflake shit is necessary in order to be fun, but that your delivery on said special snowflake shit is also necessary. This isn't to say that we should all go out and make Mary Sues to the max, but there's got to be something there. Your character has to be able to, you know, do something, not just talk. And these actions don't necessarily have to be combat, they just have to be something that not everyone can do, i.e., something special.

@mietze No, of course not. You can't expect people to be The Best at anything, especially right out the gate. That said, I think it's really worth putting in the effort as a player to coming up with a skillset that is at least somewhat unique, but still makes sense. While not everyone can be a Yakuza senpai in DC, you definitely don't want to make your dude cookie cutter, either.

That's easier said than done, though, because most people who play this kind of RPG also probably consume a lot of fiction (books, movies, television, etc) and so are entirely used to all the tropes, and anything you come up with may already be done to death before you even start.

@mietze Not to be overly rude, but I kind of hope to bring this topic back on track to its intended purpose; listing cool concept ideas that you want someone else to pick up on.

@hedgehog Well, in White Wolf's defense, it is meant to be a mish-mash of all kinds of different lore loosely pertaining to whatever splat in question. That said, I agree. They took too many liberties in some cases.

@hedgehog Yeah, that shit's a non-sequitur. And unfortunately, it's a non-sequitur that wasn't even that fun. I mean, at least when they added animism to Werewolf it just kinda "worked." This, well, doesn't.

@ThatGuyThere

they were putting in a Starbucks

I laughed out loud, for real.

@Arkandel I mean, my main objection here in this thread is that we aren't talking about downvotes, but instead about everything else. I'm going to have to weigh in on @Bug-In-A-Jar's side and say that we should probably do away with voting because it creates a lot of drama, as we have seen in this very thread.

@ThatGuyThere

they were putting in a Starbucks

I laughed out loud, for real.

@ThatGuyThere Entirely fair. I just had this image in my head of this little punk ass little bitch declaring MUHAHAHA, ALL YOUR SANCTUM ARE BELONG TO ME and somehow not getting rekt on the spot.

@ThatGuyThere Why didn't they just kill him when he villain revealed? All those deeds don't mean shit in HP town.

@Ganymede said in The State of the Chronicles of Darkness:

@Rick-Sanchez said in The State of the Chronicles of Darkness:

Well, like I said, the bar for scrutiny is spending more than a minute with someone. So yes. I would scrutinize my date, probably before the making out part.

I prefer to deny the past rather than accept the present.

#ShitLawyersSay

@Arkandel Well, like I said, the bar for scrutiny is spending more than a minute with someone. So yes. I would scrutinize my date, probably before the making out part.

@Coin I mean, I guess you could argue that cops have no particular interest in knowing whether or not they're dealing with criminals, but I think it's a reach.

At the very least, players getting uppity about this are plainly in the wrong. It's not OOC to use cheap, useful abilities regularly. It's not "metagaming."

"I do this with everybody" is a pretty legitimate excuse for something that takes three seconds. If I could do this, I might do it on the checkout line at the grocery store while I'm in line. Considering the outright paranoia that is justified in all of WoD, but especially Mage, an argument could be made that this would be the default behavior.

@Coin A Mage knowing if something supernatural is up with someone, even if it's ambiguous exactly what, is very valuable. It would be comparable to being a cop who can see "CRIMIINAL" tattooed on criminals' foreheads if he squints his eyes at them. I imagine any smart cop would be squinting at everybody he meets, perhaps even not while on duty.

@Coin said in The State of the Chronicles of Darkness:

@Rick-Sanchez said in The State of the Chronicles of Darkness:

@Arkandel Thing is, Mage allowed you to do a lot of things that were probably not the best idea. Like scrutiny. You can give basically everyone you meet the hairy eyeball to determine if they're a supernatural or not. The amount of time it takes -- about three seconds -- is negligible. If you aren't doing this, you're stupid. But if you acted on this, they called it "icon twinking" or whatever, when in reality it's just "good habits."

Inaccurate. Scrutiny takes a long time. You can glance at someone with mage Sight and if they have some weird shit going on on the surface, sure; but as far as actually scrutinizing them, it took a lot longer. It's just that people don't read the book and also think you can someone get away with staring at someone for a full minute without the person going "hey, what do you want?"

The book explicitly states that this is a form of "scrutiny." It takes one success to notice something is up. It's "Extended" but 1 roll = 1 turn = 3 seconds.

In conclusion, you can tell someone is supernatural in some capacity in one turn. It's highly impractical to not do this if you plan on spending more than one minute interacting with this person.

@Arkandel Thing is, Mage allowed you to do a lot of things that were probably not the best idea. Like scrutiny. You can give basically everyone you meet the hairy eyeball to determine if they're a supernatural or not. The amount of time it takes -- about three seconds -- is negligible. If you aren't doing this, you're stupid. But if you acted on this, they called it "icon twinking" or whatever, when in reality it's just "good habits."

The game was just full of common sense solutions to all kinds of problems that totally broke theme. You didn't even have to be that creative about it. I mean, all the splats had some of that going on, but Mage was the worst about it.

@Coin Maybe something could be written with the Dada engine to generate pseudorandom descriptions for them. Though it'd be pretty hard to keep it coherent and not loltastic non-sequiturs.