Posts made by Bobotron

@bananerz

You make your policy 'yes, multiple people can use the same PB' and fire the asshole who starts screaming like a petulant child about it. There, problem solved. Holy shit.

@admiral

What's the Vampire sphere landscape like? Requiem 1e is something I'm interested in, and I would love to know if there's actually political interplay incentive, or if the sphere itself is reliant on partying with other spheres (no offense intended).

@a-meowley

Because they straight said on their bboards 'We did not expect this level of turnout for Changeling and Mage' is why. It's not that difficult. Changeling got smashed because people had just come off of the Darkwater reboot and were actively planning character 'transfers' there. Dunno about Mage, but Mage tends to be popular in general, and I'm sure a lot of people went there after the Reach Threeboot thing (since someone said the Reach has petered down on people?)

I'd say it's just timing and realizing 'oh crap, we didn't plan for this initial rush'. I don't get this ascribing maliciousness to a staff decision they had to make to make their game tenable for them.

I'd be fine with it. Authorial intent is a thing. If a character is written to be a specific way, and the person who made that Roster (N)PC chose that PB, they had a reason for it. I don't get this whole 'WAUGH NOT MINE'. Of course it's not yours. It's someone else's creation and they have a vision for that creation that should be followed a bit. If you're choosing to play a roster that you like, you really need to adhere to everything. It'd be like picking Cersei Lannister on a GoT game and picking Summer Glau as a replacement PB (because of COURSE the MU* community loves their Summer Glau). because of X, Y or Z. If you don't want to agree with their authorial intent, don't go with that character.

So I have often wondered what the standard WoD crowd would do if, presented with a WoD-style game, without XP gain. To make up for this, there is a starting competency level that all characters have to distribute... and that's it. No XP, no nothing, just... roleplay. I have seen it done on various themed MU*s like Transformers and such, but don't think I've ever seen a statted supernatural MUSH take this track.

To take the MET Vampire starting dots and scale them up, let's say, for skills: three things at 5, four things at 4, five things at 3, six things at 2 and ten things at 1, as an extremely rough example.

I wonder how this would go over in general.

@thatguythere

So, Ultraman?

@dnvnquinn

Beast suffers from some dissonance though; the original pitch was that they were actively inflicting their horrors on humanity as a sort of pseudo-punishment and to 'teach lessons', and that this infliction eventually created their antagonists, Heroes. This was rolled back in the Beast core, but then it came back in the first Beast supplement, along with a lot of questionable Beast characters and the abuse that they give. It's one of those things that really has to be handled with a mature player because of what goes into it, IMO. It's why I have given it a read and then returned the book to my friend and told her 'Eh, not for me'.

@seamus

What's the goal with it? All you're going to see if a hefty frontload for everyone, except for the people who are going to be like 'Okay, I'm a neonate, so I'll grow into my 750XP organically' and then the eventual insanity that will result from them trying to play that while the rest of the game handles 750 XP monstrosities.

@cobaltasaurus

Short version: I see that the person in the example added a new surname based on their chosen element. Are there positional things that people will have to worry about adding to their names/titles as well?

@kay

The hallmarks of a good and organized staff base.

@cobaltasaurus

This is nice. Very direct and to the point. Are there other cognomen that one would add such as from posiitonals and such? As someone who spent a lot of time digging through how Roman naming conventions worked in relation to paterfamilias, position and station, I found that it was interesting to see how and what people who tack onto their names.

@lithium

How is the Vampire sphere looking? I ave shied away from most of the new games because they use 2e and my knowledge of 2e is extremely lacking, but 1e is old hat for me.

@dies-irae

As someone who is SUPER interested in V5, I'm going to posit a couple of questions...

1. What is 'different' about this XP expenditure system, particularly since we don't know how XP is going to work (unless you have one of the NDA-locked playtest kits?)

2. What will be point of the Stock Market system be? How much do you see players using it to justify the work put into it?

@arkandel

Countdown to lawsuits in 3... 2.... 1....

@thenomain
For me, less that and more I was tired of Tonberry. Suppi-chan was on my brain due to the recent Cardcaptor Sakura sequel series though.

ETA: @Lisse24 I've wondered the same thing sometimes, and I think a lot of it boils down to a lot of players don't find the game as engaging if they're not growing. Which I get, but I wonder if it doesn't hurt a lot of the player vs. ST expectations too.

@haven

@thenomain

It's about the derivation more or less, and whether a similarity can be proven as a 'unique point of similarity'. You can look at VtM and go 'Oh, yes, they took <X> concept from Anne Rice' but you can also look at it and go 'And they did <Y> change/spin on it' with a lot of things. Which ends up pushing it less into the realm of infringement and more into the realm of inspiration and derivation.

The Sacred Core, which links all vampires back to the first vampire Akasha, is obviously the origin of the Generation mechanic; but the Generation mechanic is changed enough that it's derivative of the concept and is not close enough to a 1-for-1 comparative point, and probably wouldn't hold up to scrutiny in that manner in an IP lawsuit. Many of VtM to Anne Rice's comparisons are like that.

This roughly explains why Sony settled out of court; likely there were enough unique points to actually go to court (specifically regarding the Love of Monsters story which is comparable to Underworld's first movie story), and so a prolonged court battle would prevent continued development of the franchise, and so they settled out of court for an undisclosed sum... and you can see in the next set of Underworld movies where they hewed further away from things that could be pointed out as 'unique points of similarity'.

I'm sure Anne Rice could've sued, but there are likely much fewer points of 'unique similarity,' and so it wouldn't have been worth the time to do so. There's also a lot less money to be gotten from an RPG company versus, say, a movie company 'stealing' ideas from VtM. From what I recall, the VtM lawsuit was also pretty flimsy, but the biggest issue was a pretty good comparison to a VtM story The Love of Monsters, as well as a number of terminology and 'setting' choices that, while probably not intentional (like the use of the word 'abomination' used when Viktor is told about the vampire-werewolf hybrid), were enough to go on to actual court.

@thenomain

That's not explicitly how that works TBH. If they'd said 'inspired by VtM by WWGS' then it would've actually been even worse because at that point, they can point more directly to that story and be like 'Yeah, this is essential admittance that we used your ideas and filed off the serial numbers' and there would've been more provable points.

VtM used ideas from Anne Rice in a much more derivative manner, and used them to create their own thing (you can pick out a lot of Anne Rice stuff with a more heavily different gloss in some things, like the Sacred Core into the Generation mechanic; or the Fire Gift or Killing Gift and aspects of Thaumaturgy or the elder power Psychic Assault; shades of the early Sabbat in the Children of Satan). Anne could've sued them, but it'd be a lot of derivative points that would be harder to deal with, and so not worth the time.

But in particular, VtM is different enough from Anne Rice that there's very little points of comparison beyond the superpowers; Anne Rice has never (until Prince Lestat, anyway) had any type of overarching vampire government, the backstory is noticeably different and the specific plot points (which was a big thing in the Paramount lawsuit) were different. There would be less comparable points when you get past the stupid stuff that came up in the WW lawsuit like 'Vampires and werewolves are eternal enemies' and similar stuff.

@thenomain
Interview with the Vampire came out in 1976. And VtM listed The Vampire Chronicles right there in it's inspirational books thing, so... yeah.

@surreality
Underworld was really, really close to a story that was written for WW about a vampire and werewolf and forbidden love. They then just listed everything that was a similarity; it felt like they were throwing darts to see what would stick in court.

Regarding the thread, I feel like it is often a combination of all three. But this swings back around to expectations and putting that forth at the start. But if an ST is all 40k GRIMDERP-type stuff, then... well, you're kinda at the limit of what can be workable if the STs aren't willing to be flexible.

@skew

... and now to see if I can make this work on mine using CentOS.