What's That Game's About?
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See, I liked that I could take extra Kiths if I wanted a little extra something. In current Changeling, your Seeming still determines which Contracts you have 'affinity' with, but you aren't flat out -forbidden- from taking any others (aside from the Court Contracts, that is). So... meh to 2E Changeling. Looks more like they're taking -away- possibilities with the shift in Kith/Seeming rather than opening them up.
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@Miss-Demeanor
I find your lack of optimism disengaging.
Alas. -
I have found that the description of Vampire: the Requiem in the 2nd Ed book is a pretty good sales pitch for the game itself, shockingly:
Vampire is a game of visceral drama and personal horror. Vampire is about sex and murder, about power and wild defiance. It’s about urban squalor and the romance of the city. It’s about what’s wrong with you — yes, you — and how that shapes the monster you’ll become. Vampire is also about thrilling action and nail-biting paranoia. It’s about dying young and being a great-looking corpse. It’s about acting out in all of the ways we imagine we would, if only we couldn’t see ourselves in the mirror. Vampire is a game about dead people and it should make you feel alive. (Vampire the Requiem - Blood and Smoke: The Strix Chronicles page 6) -
It is a good pitch. There are some great pitches in the game books and I've actually come across some pretty inspirational quips in MU* wikis. In that way games are absolutely about the ambitious concepts and engaging themes which birthed them.
I don't know if I'm being cynical or pragmatic when I claim though that what games are really about is what people playing them make them out to be. A great RPer will make playing an ice cream vendor compelling; an average or mediocre one will make Kindred, Uratha or the such all seem like superheroes with fangs or extra fur.
To me, it's thus the community which defines a MU; if enough people play Mages as the Awakened rebels that they are, characters whose sudden and growing understanding of what a broken world they're living in their whole lives alienates them and the hybris of molding its remains to their liking is their greatest threat then that is a great paradigm to follow. If it's about how to better combine Rote A, B and C to get more dice in telenukes then nothing written in a book will engage me very much.
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@Thenomain said:
Are they? Hm. A small Social advantage ... mmmnnhhhh. A tiny xp discount. Nnh. I mean. Yeah, I see what you're getting at, but it's ... well, it's this:
Darklings are the Sneaks
Some of the most game-breaking builds have Elementals as the Tanks and Darklings as the Strikers and Wizened as the Healers, and these builds are so easy even I can make them. What you're saying aren't roles, they're ... well, they're options.
Yep.
@Miss-Demeanor said:
The point being, @Wizz, in Changeling, your Seeming does not define what you do, even Kith and Court are really more like suggestions or possibilities than hard and fast roles.
Yep.
@Wizz said:
They have roles they slot into just fine, you just have more options for mechanical refinement, which again, I wasn't arguing.
Bolded for emphasis. I'm not arguing with you guys on this.
Again, what you originally said, and why I originally commented at all, was that you implied Uratha are like Garou, that they are what they do. They're not. They're not conscripts in some giant cosmic war, they're not nationalistic stereotypes,
ChangelingsUratha are baristas and taxi drivers and lost mothers and have to decide, themselves, what they are. Are they monsters? Are they heroes?The games share a lot of themes and I didn't feel like it was fair to extol the depth of one and disregard the other. That was my point when I said this:
nWerewolf-- to me, when it's played well-- definitely dials back on "I am noble monster, I fight evil" and is more "regular dude/dudette who has some bizarre part-time obligations, struggles to find a normal place in society against new and unfamiliar instincts" as well.
Which is what sparked this whole side discussion.
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See, I don't see that from Werewolf. The Werewolf I see has little option but to "be a Werewolf, oh and you can do some other things". The way Changeling is written and presented the option is "to be a person, oh and you're also a mental rape victim with the possibility of magic powers". The focus of the rules and the theme tell us these things, which is why I started this thread.
I see nothing about this in Werewolf to insult, but to explain what it seems to be. I have found nothing in any of the nWerewolf books to say:
regular dude/dudette who has some bizarre part-time obligations
Nothing. Not even the core book, which I believe is the only book that should really matter.
I don't mean this as a bad thing, but as simply how it is. I've also said (perhaps repeatedly? this discussion feels like it's gotten circular more than once) that if you want to not engage the primary theme and setting of a game, go for it, but that you're not really playing that game unless you're using it as the exception to prove the rule.
My brain has tangented from the concept of the "toolkit". I recall when WoD 2.0 (sigh, the original "official" name of the nWoD set) came out, the goal was to let each table create their own game. The stigma of the metaplot was huge and each table was supposed to be its own world with its own conditions and social politics and so forth.
I buy that. I do. I was excited about it back then. But a few things happened.
First: White Wolf's business model relies on pushing out books at a certain rate. This is probably true of all full-time RPG companies. What I saw filling the books reversed this promise. X-Axis group is A, B, and C.
"Toolkit", I would counter myself by saying. Well, yeah, but no, Armory was a toolkit. Spelling out the history of a bloodline from day 1 and who's currently leading it and so forth ... is not. It's deep, and it's entertaining, and it fills the pages, but it takes the butterfly of freedom that toolkits are meant to be about and pins it down.
"Father Wolf" is not a toolkit element, but honestly I don't mind because it answers the "what is a Werewolf" question. A toolkit that's too open is not useful, and I've complained about Changeling similarly.
Secondly: Take the above and throw about 50 strangers into the mix. Someone above mentioned it, but you can't really afford to explain every detail of what the game is about if the books didn't already say it.
I mean, we're back and forth enough about it that I'd be tempted to say that Werewolf is about ... nothing. When Basic D&D, the blue box, can be more certain about what it's about than the fifth version of a single game line, that's horrible.
(Werewolf, Werewolf 2nd Ed, Werewolf Revised, Werewolf 2.0, Werewolf Chronicles.)
And sure, it's a bonus, too. Part of the draw of Changeling is that it's not about anything, but it's also it's largest weakness. A Werewolf can say, "Hey, let's go fuck up some spirits, because that's one of the things that gets us power and power's awesome." What can a Changeling say? "Hey, you want to go fuck up Arcadia?" What, are you mad?! "Okay, the Goblin Market?" Stop it; you're insane. "Want to hang out at the mall and drop pennies on people until the security guards chase us out, so we can get some power pool points and mess with them tomorrow?" Okay.
I don't believe Werewolf is a game about nothing. If's a game about something, then all the characters in it are geared to do that something. A Werewolf is a Werewolf. And for Mu*s, that's a good place to be.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
One of the coolest things you can do with Werewolf is to play up and emphasize the redneck inbreeding factor. No other game has that (with the possible exception of Vampire with ghoul families even though that dynamic is pretty different) since in every other splat characters are pretty much on their own. They got abducted, they Awakened, they were Embraced, they died, but it's not hereditary with entire generations' worth of tradition and folklore behind it. You can do family in Werewolf in ways you can't in any of the WoD's other spheres.
That possibility of a closed tight-lipped community where you are known by name or reputation is something I always liked about the splat. It has some issues (I won't mention Renown :p) which make it a bitch to implement on a MU* though - you pretty much need a pack and a Storyteller. On table-top it's a kickass game though since by definition you got both baked in.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Wizz said:
Fairest are the Faces. Ogres are the Muscle. Darklings are the Sneaks. Wizened are the Crafters.
This is true from a certain perspective. I looked at them as:
The Ogres are The Abused. The Fairest are The Cherished. The Wizened are The Enslaved. The Darklings are The Forgotten. The Beasts are The Hunted. The Elementals are The Crafted.
This is still very, very different from the roles in Werewolf. Werewolf is D&D, WoD-style.
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@Coin I have no reason to be optimistic. I've seen nothing from GMC/2E that's interested me in the least, let alone enough to leave nwod behind. No different from still playing 3.5/Pathfinder for D&D, to me. The newest edition has given me nothing new that I like and has taken away much of what I enjoyed from the previous edition.
@Arkandel See, now THAT I would be interested in playing. A Werewolf sphere where everyone is a member of some huge extended family, small packs springing up here and there... possibly somewhere out in the mountains.
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@Arkandel Thankfully, stuff like that got left behind with oWoD.
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What I would like to see is tighter theme control. No, your werewolf is not a fucking viking. No, your vampire is not a fucking viking, ignorant of the modern world, unless they're a thousand years old and have been in a dungeon for 800 years of that.
Unfortunately, I can't complain that people shouldn't play irritating, dirt-humping Acolyte pseudo-primitives. I can say that I had my fill of them on HM, but the covenant's geared that way, so.
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn -
I've always been partial to the modern neb-primitive thing. I love the Pure and Werewolf artwork that shows people wearing bones and skulls and other craziness. But I agree, calling yourself a viking, or anything else, it kind of seems lazy. Were you too lazy to look up any of the modern movements or revitalization of these sorts of cultures? Are you just excited about cable TV or what you bought on Blu Ray? We have a lot of 'invasions' on games. Anime Invasion, Viking Invasion, Urban Invasion, and so on. Something comes out and you get a slew of characters mimicking it.
It all comes down to the Approval and the Staffer who does so. A lot of games are fearful of approaching new players to their game for a conversation about their concept. So the concepts slide into home plate, one after the other.
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@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
What I would like to see is tighter theme control. No, your werewolf is not a fucking viking. No, your vampire is not a fucking viking, ignorant of the modern world, unless they're a thousand years old and have been in a dungeon for 800 years of that.
Although some background checks are mandatory there's a line between ensuring hilarity doesn't make its way to your grid and outright alienating people with your-way-or-the-highway.
You don't really need to go thousands of years back for anachronism - pick a peasant from the 1910's who got Embraced and he runs the chance of being truly alienated by all these little things people tap all the damn time. And if you forbid that what about that Elder who's acting like a sulky lovesick 19 year old (only it's not really an act) about his hot ghoul with a hot PB? Are they to be controlled too?
As for Werewolves, think about how modern culture might have influenced them. If your PC has been watching enough movies they might act like they think is expected of them - there is a precedent of sorts in that actual RL members of organized crime started talking and even dressing like they saw on films after the 30's.
I'm not advocating any of the aforementioned examples is right, just that you can still pull off and justify a reasonable concept which looks wrong, so trying to control too much can get the opposite result of what you might want.
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Yes. No hot people ever. Air conditioning for all!
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takes this to the Bitching thread
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@Bennie said:
It all comes down to the Approval and the Staffer who does so. A lot of games are fearful of approaching new players to their game for a conversation about their concept. So the concepts slide into home plate, one after the other.
What? This statement is nonsense.
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@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
What I would like to see is tighter theme control. No, your werewolf is not a fucking viking. No, your vampire is not a fucking viking, ignorant of the modern world, unless they're a thousand years old and have been in a dungeon for 800 years of that.
Unfortunately, I can't complain that people shouldn't play irritating, dirt-humping Acolyte pseudo-primitives. I can say that I had my fill of them on HM, but the covenant's geared that way, so.
Meh. If someone wants to play a viking-themed character, why not? Its what they want to do and it doesn't really hurt anything. Someone sees a cable tv show and gets inspired to play a character based on what they saw. At least they sorta have a direction.
No different than biker/gang concepts and the ever present Sons of Anarchy PBs. If you don't want to deal with that sort of character, don't RP with them. Their idea of fun doesn't have to follow someone else's. Its a game with werewolves, vampires and faeries. Is a viking really that far afield, all things considered?
“It takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf.”
― Nenia Campbell, Horrorscape -
@Sunny said:
@Bennie said:
It all comes down to the Approval and the Staffer who does so. A lot of games are fearful of approaching new players to their game for a conversation about their concept. So the concepts slide into home plate, one after the other.
What? This statement is nonsense.
Yeah, literally the only place I've ever played where someone basically failed to say anything about my concept was TR. I tend not to play bonkers concepts anyway but I've gotten constructive feedback and concerns, regardless of how it may hurt my fee fees, on every game I've apped into.
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@Creepy said:
@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
What I would like to see is tighter theme control. No, your werewolf is not a fucking viking. No, your vampire is not a fucking viking, ignorant of the modern world, unless they're a thousand years old and have been in a dungeon for 800 years of that.
Unfortunately, I can't complain that people shouldn't play irritating, dirt-humping Acolyte pseudo-primitives. I can say that I had my fill of them on HM, but the covenant's geared that way, so.
Meh. If someone wants to play a viking-themed character, why not? Its what they want to do and it doesn't really hurt anything. Someone sees a cable tv show and gets inspired to play a character based on what they saw. At least they sorta have a direction.
No different than biker/gang concepts and the ever present Sons of Anarchy PBs. If you don't want to deal with that sort of character, don't RP with them. Their idea of fun doesn't have to follow someone else's. Its a game with werewolves, vampires and faeries. Is a viking really that far afield, all things considered?
Yeah, I mean, playing a meatwall dumbfuck viking is the themeatic jam of the Get of Fenris. There are plenty of players that opt do more intelligent things with Get werewolves and kinfolk but the bedrock theme of Get of Fenris is a reductive, meatloaf for brains, glass cannon Sven, who like to hit the fuck out of things, if you can't come up with anything else at all.
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@Miss-Demeanor said:
See, I liked that I could take extra Kiths if I wanted a little extra something.
<snip>
So... meh to 2E Changeling. Looks more like they're taking -away- possibilities with the shift in Kith/Seeming rather than opening them up.Agreed. While I'm interested to see how it plays out, the Dual Kith thing seemed to open up a whole world of variation that was kind of fun, if I could get past the victim origin story in Changeling.
