Stuff Done Right
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This talk made me think of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PVFw4kuG2A
"I propose a one month limit on going steady"
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It'd be easy enough to do.
Run a riff on the Incursion plotline where instead of a pastiche, the Illuminati get the actual Justice League.
And Wonder Woman mops the floor with them singlehandedly. +1 if she snaps Reed Richards across the city like a rubber band.
“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 -
@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
It'd be easy enough to do.
Run a riff on the Incursion plotline where instead of a pastiche, the Illuminati get the actual Justice League.
And Wonder Woman mops the floor with them singlehandedly. +1 if she snaps Reed Richards across the city like a rubber band.
@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
It'd be easy enough to do.
Run a riff on the Incursion plotline where instead of a pastiche, the Illuminati get the actual Justice League.
And Wonder Woman mops the floor with them singlehandedly. +1 if she snaps Reed Richards across the city like a rubber band.
The Great Society pretty much DID wipe the floor with the Illuminati. The only one to really lose was Doctor Spectrum, and that was to BLACK BOLT.
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I suspect people may disagree with me on many points, but, I think LAMUSH handled feeding right.
(I realize we went to bad places later on in our coding of systems, the influence monstrosity I ultimately made was bad, even though it had good intentions-- but don't judge "game over coded" as being meaningful to all systems in a game)
On LA, every "grid square" had a certain blood value, and depending on the square, there was a different difficulty and amount of blood based on how you fed. This meant those who were good at seduction feeding did well in some squares, but not as well in others; and those who mugged / violence fed did well in some, and not as well in others.
The abstraction wasn't perfect. Yet, it created real value for the vampires. It reinforced their theme/playstyles/feedingstyles, and created real value for masters/elders/coteries in seeking to control certain places. We could have done better with it, but LA had a real solid foundation that engaged one of the essential details of "what it means to be a vampire" into the characters lives.
Nowadays, on most games, "feeding" (not just vampire: Geist, Mage, Werewolf, All of it) tends to just slowly regen, and really taking value in land/territory and having this matter to your life doesn't seem to happen as often. I'm not saying it never happens, but I think games lose authenticity when they forget about feeding their power and the importance of it.
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I tend to dislike coded feeding systems, or even having to roll to feed, personally. It's a nice idea, but it tends to ignore outside factors which are pretty huge, and force 'A, B, or C feeding situations' on people.
My current most-played vamp is a Mekhet in GMC/B&S. If I want to "mug" feed, why am I even rolling? All I have to do is obfuscate, walk up to somebody on the street, obfuscate them and feed. If I need to feed more still, do it again. Strength + Brawl (or Streetwise/whatever) doesn't really reflect that accurately, imo. Even Strength + Brawl + Obfu doesn't seem to.
Or if I want to 'seduction' feed, my character has a whopping pool of Presence1+Persuason0. Yet, I can use Auspex1 to go 'who here is most likely to give me what I want', and that should direct me straight to somebody who is drunk enough or horny enough to be an easy meal and not care what I'm rolling. Or I can just drag out a Coterie-mate/ghoul and have them majesty/dominate food.
Or I can just grab an animal somewhere, be it manually or via a coterie-mate with animalism. Do I really need to roll survival when I can obfuscate and walk right up to an animal and snatch it?
There are so many ways for vampires to feed that a coded feeding system seems a little silly. A system just to monitor /amount/ of blood might be interesting, though. Yes, the neighborhood with two clubs in it probably has more available blood than the park.
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I'm curious, how many characters have ties to the blood bank? That seems like a simple way of avoiding this kind of book keeping. LIke have one vampire inventory clerk selling pints at the vampire pub around the corner when the blood bank is closed. Everyone's happy. Just say it's from the discards after the screening processes or something.
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Alright, so those are problems related to implementing Vampire feeding in games.
What's a better way to do it? Not doing it is a way but not necessarily the optimal one, since it makes Merits like Herd irrelevant and takes away the thematic importance of having access to better domain you can use as feeding grounds.
How would you do it?
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That would depend. Are we talking about vampire by itself in a game or vampire as part of a multisphere game?
In a mutlisphere games I would lean towards the honor system, that way you can avoid having to come up wiht systems to deal with each critters need for fuel.
If it was vampire only i would likely steal Kingsmouth's feeding system where spaces had a blood pool and if oyu wnet over it it could trigger trouble and beleive you could investigate who feed in what terretory. Keeps theme strong, and cna provide plotlines as well. Yes it does add a bit of bookkeeping but well RPG have a fair ammount on inheirent bookkeeping already. -
@Tempest said:
I tend to dislike coded feeding systems, or even having to roll to feed, personally.
This is completely a lack of understanding in what a feeding roll brings to a game. Vampires have all sorts of ways of going about feeding and none of them are perfect. The roll is to see if there's a problem. If the kid who's just drunk enough to give you what you want has a stalker werewolf girlfriend, for example. Limiting to 'seduction or violence' could probably be improved on, but don't think that having a clever way to feed ought to take the place of a feeding roll.
The point of doing a roll is to see if your character runs into snags regardless of how they're going about feeding.Because they're a vampire and feeding is not foolproof. Eating people is sort of a theme of the game and all, and even with animals something could go wrong. Someone could be out in the woods, etc. Again, point of the roll.
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@Tempest said:
I tend to dislike coded feeding systems, or even having to roll to feed, personally. It's a nice idea, but it tends to ignore outside factors which are pretty huge, and force 'A, B, or C feeding situations' on people.
The thing is, that makes vampires perfect predators -- and while they are good predators, they aren't perfect. It also completely removes all tension from the game when it comes to vampires being vampires, and removes the value of things like Herd and having prime clubbing real estate be 'your' feeding ground.
If you don't have feeding, and if you don't have feeding be possibly dangerous or problematic, then you aren't playing Vampire, IMHO. You're playing a superhero game where everyone is allergic to sunlight.
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If you don't have feeding, and if you don't have feeding be possibly dangerous or problematic, then you aren't playing Vampire, IMHO.
You're not playing one game of Vampire, certainly, but while you're playing that game of Vampire there are other games of Vampire that you're not playing.
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For myself, I find feeding minutiae to be both mind-numbingly hateful, and super important for Vampire. I have suffered with this in LARP a lot, and it's something I'm fighting with on TheatreMUSH.
In general though, most people find the minutiae really tedious, I tend to find.
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@Bobotron said:
For myself, I find feeding minutiae to be both mind-numbingly hateful, and super important for Vampire. I have suffered with this in LARP a lot, and it's something I'm fighting with on TheatreMUSH.
In general though, most people find the minutiae really tedious, I tend to find.
Does it have to be mind numbingly hateful? Every few days, +travel <code>; +hunt <type>. You get X blood. That location has less blood. Done.
I think there needs to be a lot more tedium before it gets mind numbing or hateful, really.
I did enjoy running hunting botch scenes, and with GMC VTR giving them a beat to encourage it, I'd love to play that. Every time my hunting failed I'd be all GIMMIE A BEAT and RUN ME OVER WITH A CAR (or whatever the botch ends up being).
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Under, "Stuff Done Right," seems right to me.
This Forum doesn't allow posts over 32kb. In 2015.
How exactly do I post a 30 minute or less log of insansity from a MU?
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@permabern
The size limits of posts are just set at the forum default, which, until you mentioned it, I hadn't realized was 32kb. Storage isn't really an issue, but on the other hand, that's a ridiculous amount of text in one post. Maybe use http://pastebin.com or something and post a link? -
@permabern said:
This Forum doesn't allow posts over 32kb. In 2015.
How exactly do I post a 30 minute or less log of insansity from a MU?For the love of Cthulhu, please don't post a 100k log here.
