Posts made by Bennie

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.

I was always partial to Splat, because it came from Splatbooks, which sort-of developed the same time as Convention Books, Tribe Books, Clan Books, and so on became the White Wolf thing.

It is curious where Spheres developed. It seemed to happen somewhere between quitting all the oWoD games and returning to nWoD much later. Magically there it was.

It takes like three seconds or less to cut the BS I write in purely for my lulls and to read an actual point: Will abuses in the system be pre-defined with a rewrite of the system given, or will we have to wait six months after the game opens to see these clarifications? Will minor, arguably repetitious actions, that affect a minor number of people for 4 xp a week be allowed, or will they become about Staff hovering and having to resort to telling people no, repeatedly? And what happens when the threshold differs between Staff? What if one sort of minor submission is permissible to one Staffer, but not the other? An argument can be made that you're gearing up on multiple fronts for unappealing Staff-Player moments.

Nobody likes to read the files, see nothing wrong with the ideas they have in those files, only to do their thing, repeat it, and then get told 2 different responses by 2 different Staff. Or worse, to pit one Staff vs. the other over it. So maybe circling the system could be addressed before you open the game? Is there any chance? Or will we have to wait 6 months to see it addressed?

I keep seeing this over and over: Being super active, doing tons of shit. Who's definition of shit? Who's definition of active? Are the people paired in twos with a partner with goals like "Fuck Lola again" and online every day in a private bedroom going to be the ones pulling ahead, turning in all those beats and the dramatic failures at Stamina + Socialize for being a bad lay going to be earning as much as the people who are running plots for others or being organization important?

The disenfranchisement isn't just "I won't catch up to dose guyz." The disenfranchisement is when someone's circle jerking the system for unlimited private growth with zero interaction with the wider game, pulling ahead but never being jeopardized in that process, gaining ground because of devotion to turn ins without compromising their character to achieve, only to turn around finally and stomp across everyone's table, kicking everyone's sushi every which way, impervious to everyone's bullets and claws.

One word: Trailer.

I enjoyed Mark Lynas, Six Degrees. It's a book about the systems we rely on changing by the end of the century due to climate change. It presents a lot of the current scientific papers in a readable, digestible way. It isn't alarmist, but for a gamer, is like a great manual on the types of things we can emphasize in a game meant to portray the world as darker and more dangerous. It's pretty freakin' dark by the 4th degree of C that changes, let alone the horror of 5C or 6C.

I also enjoyed Susan Casey, Devil's Teeth. It's a book about Great White Shark research in the Farallon Islands and the author's quest to learn more about these mysterious monsters of the coasts and our primordial fear and fascination with them.

Speaking of paper. I don't know what it is. If the book isn't on my shelf, I don't want it. All these bindle kidget reader whackadoodle whatevers. I spend far too much time starring at a monitor as it is, let alone starring at one for my recreation's recreation. I'm glad we have like a dozen used bookstores around here and several libraries.

My 2 cents:

The story should be about people. A lot of players who play with supernatural Endowments and psychic abilities and thaumaturgy want the story to become about their phenomena. It's about their hellfire and demon wings and ability to make the air cold. These should be, at best, and even in Second Sight were described as, doing what you normally could do, but with an alternative capability.

I can put my ear to the door and hear what's going on inside, but you clairvoyantly do the same thing, and she uses technology to accomplish yet the same feat. Different strokes, for different folks, but the story should be the same, the Storyteller tells you what is going on inside, given success.

All things being equal, no single element of the game should trump any other element, so surviving whether by pikes, guns, traps, staying out of reach, walling yourself off, running, convincing someone to do the fighting for you, or psychically throwing zombies away, should accomplish the same goal: to not get bit, to not get scratched, to not contract an illness and die, and rise again. To find water, and shelter, and food.

Working together should bring about things like infrastructure, and that should be a game unto itself. The casual player should be able to log in and have fun, but the canny player should be able to find other like-minded players and create something of value to them. Enough people working on it, can make the local water plant produce clean water, just the same as digging a well, or tracking a fresh spring down. Enough people on it, can make electricity by wind power, pedal power, solar power, water power, etc. The casuals should be able to get by without doing any of the above, just not reaping better benefits in the process. (E.g., they can have gear, just not the best gear in the game.)

The true story is in whether any given faction tries to take from others - that's what makes it survival horror. Do people sacrifice one another, so they can escape. Do people hold up traits like character, honor, decency, and try to avoid barbarity. Are the rules for doing so any better than what the barbarians are doing? E.g., is the ex-lawman's willingness to execute people at the end of his guns in the name of justice any different than the cannibal gang willing to eat their neighbors for a good meal. Your Morality system should be a central emphasis for both casual and hardcore players.

I think regional issues are super important to the overall story. Who is checking on the local nuclear reactor? Is the pressure in the damn upriver going to eventually be a problem? Is there any kind of fallout from burning cities, burning states, such that weather becomes a factor. Was there enough widespread destruction that nuclear winter happens? It isn't just about finding a place to grow crops. That works if you are distant enough from civil engineering that you aren't in a situation where the things we have - that we never consider - that protect us from man-made dooms like floods don't, unmanned, become catastrophes. If the collapse of civilization is fast enough, has no warning, then a lot of systems are left unchecked. Not everyone turns the light off and walks out with a secured facility. And I don't know about you, but I sure don't know how to turn off a freakin' nuclear reactor.

This isn't even mentioning things like blizzards, hurricanes, tornados, pick your region, and the like, which now can come upon us without warnings we had in the past. Can you tell if the sea is rising for some reason fast enough to make escape from coastal regions possible?

The average person likes to believe they are pretty capable, but when the chips are down, the people who know how to swap out a part on an engine, or even the difference between types of engines, know the difference between something poisonous and safe to eat, know how to check water's safety, know how to start a fire unassisted, know how to keep smoke from signaling others that you're there, know how to live in the wild without power bars and mountain bikes, know how to survive in cold or hot conditions for really real and not with their REI purchases, know how to conserve and make choices like what's more perishable and what's more collectable. They're few and far between, and not every PC will have the Streetwise, Survival, Investigation, or Academics and Science to know. Even ranch hands and farmers don't necessarily know what you think they should. Every skill should count, from Larceny to hide your food, to Politics, to sense if the new Mayor is in fact a cannibal, and the Merits that you allow should be extensions of them. Again, the casual player can ignore nearly everything, but the hardcore player should be enjoying the process of wielding what they have traded their Experience for, and reaping the failures of what they're not covered for.

Finally, I highly suggest creating an actual inventory system so that people can play that mini game of collecting things. These give tangible benefits already within the system, like bonuses to rolls in Skills. By making everything have uses, from a bar you swing at something's head, to the rounds in a gun, to the number of times a door to your hideout can stand an assault, you can obtain something and have to re-obtain it, meaning that the benefits are constantly wanted while the casual player simply goes without them.

Walking Dead!

It seems rare that you ever see a (n)WOD game that has just 1 sphere - I can't speak for other styles of games. The question I posit is: do we make these games with many/most/every sphere just to get player numbers? Is there room for a human only game? A werewolf only game? Vampire?

Is it true that 'not enough players would log in' if your game didn't support this sphere, or that? Plenty of people seem to love Promethean, but I don't see any Promethean games running around. For that matter, I never saw, a Wraith the Oblivion game, and that game woulda been gold (ok maybe not).

So what is it? What would be the criteria if you wanted the perfect less-is-more set-up. Games are out there. But, this is the Mildly Constructive pit. What would your fantasy set-up be?

I've never understood the delayed spending.

If I make a new character, and that character is a Master, I always feel like someone's shoved a corn husk down my face as I try to explain, no I am not making an Apprentice, I am making a Master. And never get why the Master is off the table, but it's ok to make yet another Apprentice.

I've had Apprentices. I don't want another Apprentice. I have this here XP, it says I can make a Master, what's the holdup?

What is 'ahead'? To me ahead is having your established buildings, equipment you've fashioned, contacts and connections, not your 5 dots in... whatever. People must disagree with me because they want ahead to be you having 25 Gifts, vs. you having a position, an infrastructure you've developed, and a lay of the land you are a part of. To me that is what is ahead. Not that you can cartwheel and fart at the same time. That isn't being ahead. That's just being special.

I've always wondered about this. If a game gives you, by design, the material to use to create something, why is it 'unbalanced' to make that something. Why is there an artificial forcing of a square peg into a round hole at the CG point to 'keep people down' at some NOOB ISH (autocorrect is pissing me off) level that isn't supported by what you are giving them to start with?

Here, the actual painted lanes end quite a distance before the cross walks and corners, as do the availability of parking (if any). So when you go to turn right, there's nothing painted that suggests you should be doing anything unusual besides turning right.

Call me a terrible driver. But I'm trying to figure out how I'm ever going to turn left, or right, without somehow passing through one of these bike lanes...

If I had a vote, I'll be honest. Demon: The Descent would be most interesting to me in a 1950s-1960s Cold War setting that had Agencies of Demons imbedded in mundane agencies like the CIA, FBI, and armed services of the period, in a war-torn place like East Berlin, or the Eastern Bloc. This is apocalyptic. This is where a lot of the apocalyptic imagery we discovered in Sci Fi came from, honestly. Ravaged places, rampant homelessness, famine, disease, mud, broken families, bullets whizzing outside your walls.

Even as early as 2 years after World War II, the character's Agencies solidify into the organizations we saw rise. Infrastructure is being rampantly worked on in the rebuilding of post-war governments. The space race, espionage, nuclear arms racing, Soviet power consolidation gives you more than enough fertile ground. Plus you have style, you have panache. Look at what the Incredibles and James Bond does with the time period. What comics did. The World of Darkness is just as fertile and interesting as much of the media we enjoy about the period.

And again, it's pretty frightening as a period, to pick your way through the ruble, and not know if your meeting is going to involve being shot by enemy forces you're trying to hide from. Add Angels and their own Agencies.

@Bobotron catching up with the old characters isn't the issue, or at least not the most obvious one. The old characters being so entrenched as to never cycle back into noobs is the perceived problem imo. That they're invincible, or can't be fought, or can 1-shot you, or any of a laundry list of other 'those guys sux' arguments.

A lot of these aren't the XP. They're "Staff protects those guys" arguments. They're "Those guys cheat and will say my attempt is broken/incorrect/not approved" arguments. They're "going to never put themselves in danger and hoard the power and not do anything with it" arguments. There's just this massive list of complaints people seem to have over anyone who has more XP.

But the issue isn't the XP. The issue is, is only noobs recycling into new noobs, or is there any kind of chance for the entrenched minority to lose their place and start over too?

And even that isn't really what we're talking about, which is rollover.

You have to break it down:

1. What do I get when I have to start a new character? Nothing? Something? Something more for having had unspent XP previously? A portion of my previously spent XP?
2. Does everyone get the same opportunity? Is the opportunity selective to only people who have been PK'd? Only available when you die in a plot? Do people who have a stale character get the same benefit, or are they the odd man out?
3. Does the game have limits? Is there a limit to the amount of unspent XP you can have? Is there a limit to the amount of spent XP you can have? Is unspent XP a part of you, as a player? Is unspent XP smoke that disappears when you change characters?
4. Is the game's difficulty such that someone starting new (or over) would be behind? Are you in jeopardy in the most basic storytelling component of the game until a certain amount of XP is reached? Does everyone have to go through this learning curve each time they make an alt?
5. Is your playgroup varied? Will playing with your friends be made difficult because your XP is not on the level of their XP? Will you be forced to find new friends? Are your friendships being detrimentally impacted with changes in PCs?

@darksabrz Ironically, if you use characters like the werewolves and vampires from The Matrix trilogy (the henchmen), you can use 2e Ghouls, 2e Wolfblooded, 2e Revenants, etc., (not actual 2e Werewolves and Vampires) for a lot of the cultist characters involved in various Agencies. Rather than sticking to just Demon characters.

@Thenomain I sometimes wonder if they had just put in a cap each year if the rocketship wouldn't have felt so stratospheric.

@Admiral That's one of the source materials, actually. It says the world being set in enemy controlled territory is accurate, and the renegade programs demonstrate a lot of Incarnation and Agenda archetypes. And Embeds are visually designed after the Matrix fight sequences.

The God-Machine clearly states several things, and repeats them. They're easy when you get into a groove to look for them:

1. Infrastructure requires an Angel or a human to create it, maintain it, alter it, or shut it down (on purpose).

2. Typically, Infrastructure is folded into cities, crammed between floors of buildings for example. This is not always the case. If you read the historical setting material, Infrastructure can be folded into anything, inside the tent of a migrant culture, into the barge at a river crossing. Any sign of civilization can have Infrastructure. So logically you could fold it into: the engine block of a Jeep, into a train car, into the International Space Station, into Satellites, and before man settled into spaces, Angels could have been folding it into things we take for granted today as signs of civilization such as oil fields, coal mines, iron deposits, and so forth. It doesn't explicitly take a man. Man has become the labor force, just by population density, and therefore the God-Machine has spread with civilization. That doesn't mean the God-Machine wasn't spreading before man spread so far. It just means the God-Machine had to rely more on Angels for the work force.

In any kind of event that would disrupt access to an easily herded human labor force, such as a zombie virus outbreak, the God-Machine's plans can continue, even in spite of zombies. First, zombie herds can be just as responsible for the creation of new Infrastructure as they can be responsible for its abandonment. The clearing of a building of human life (a zombie outbreak occupies the building) may have just as much to do with the plans of the God-Machine as occupying that building with humans that are unwittingly maintaining or building Infrastructure. Zombies can be cogs too. Not every human who is a cog knows what they are doing. Memories get erased, altered, people get hollowed out, show up dead elsewhere, etc. Zombies aren't necessarily incapable of directed action, either. So subjecting a zombie to a command and having it pull a lever repeatedly could serve the exact same purpose as any God-Machine-touched human doing the same job.

Covers would be harder to maintain in any world win which the God-Machine had more Angels active, and more eyes on a smaller population. One use of Embeds on a zombie attack, rather than guns or pikes, could spell disaster for Covers. So the smaller the human population (and the fewer zombies around to hide amongst), the more difficult it is to pretend you aren't a Demon. A funny alternative would be to allow zombie Covers. If a herd were to swarm, hiding amongst them as one of them, until they passed, would be hilarious. The opposite of this is Angels and similar hiding among the zombies, too. Fair is fair.

At the end of the day, the Cold War operated in war-torn places with survival in question just as often as it did in a downtown city center with brush passes. And the God-Machines Infrastructure existed before major cities and population centers, as easily as it can exist 'today'. If you keep those two items in mind, the question of Covers just becomes about scarcity and creativity.

Finally, there is more to play in a Demon game than just a Demon. There are a whole plethora of subs if you pick up Heirs to Hell. Stigmatics, Latents, Activated Latents, Orphans...

@ThatOneDude said:

It made hanging out in a coffee shop interesting when something would happen plot wise out of no where inside the shop itself or out front that the characters could jump into if they wanted to.

I am putting emphasis on out front if they wanted to. This can either be great, or incredibly poor taste. I have this strange pet-p over hogging. I find it poor taste when things are going along unimpeded and suddenly everything has to stop and the light has to shine away from what you were enjoying to what someone else thinks is enjoyable. In other words, the Staffmember who appears in a puff of virtual smoke and declares something astonishing will happen right now, like an overly theatrical stage magician, makes me want to chuck whatever I can get my hands on nearby.

I just don't find it cool, or appreciated. when I've gone to trouble - for example - to get my european friend into some RP. I tend to plot out a lot of RP, too.. I line my ducks in a row. I need to talk to you, and you, and you, and you, and for this IC information to transfer from A to B. It sounds like a job when I type it out like that, but there are times when you need there to be tangible conversation behind what is taking place in the game world. A lot of my RP centers around that tangible transferring.

So when a Staffmember appears suddenly and sidetracks my day's efforts, and dumps a shoot-out into the bar, I've lost my window. Not only that, suddenly I am reminded that RP in public really just equals endangerment. Be prepared every time you go outside, you might get shot at! It makes me wary. I stop going out into public as often. I start focusing on private Scenes. I do less and less where people are playing. This can have wide-ranging effects, especially when you are in a position of leadership down the line.

I have always wanted some kind of installed system to signal Staff that, should enough people in a location, public or private, want something to happen, Staff can take a quick look at their gaming that night and see where the desire really is. Just an easy communicator: +wantstaffrp

I think there is a time and place for what Staff are hoping to achieve when they dive-bomb a location, I just think the means are not always considerate. Worse, I'm the prig when I say, no, we only had 45m today to RP, and you're interfering, get out. Worse even still, I hate when there is a fight over the situation. I've had a Staff member literally say, "Well if you don't like it, get out." I've had other Staff members say, "Too bad, you're staying, and that's that." I've literally encountered Staff who have a side agenda of being disruptive just to be disruptive.

Since most games don't have an actual alert system for Staff to know when a group of players are shifting from "We want to do our thing" to "We wouldn't mind being in the thick of something", an easy way to make things open so that people can decide on their participation is to make an announcement ahead of time This would work better, imo: At Chez Panisse tomorrow, something will happen! Come have lunch and see what all the fuss is about! This is especially good for people who like to plan their activities. They know when, where, and can be ready appropriately with materials and their gaming hat on.

Alternatively, making something happen nearby, so that people can split the group would work alright, if there are a decent number of folks present, this way something can continue (like Sid and Lizzy breaking up), but something new can take place for the rest of the people present: *Outside of Chez Panisse, something is happening! Come out, should you wish to interrupt your lunch! * It works out the same, people know a when (now), where (outside), and can get their gaming hat on (albeit quickly).

TL:DR
A head's up is nice. Being able to opt out is nicer. Being able to opt out without losing the RP you actually intended to have (that Staff have no idea you worked so hard to schedule) is nicer still. Being able to say no without having the Staff member be offended, and being allowed to finish what you were doing, is the nicest.