Posts made by darksabrz

I never really could get into Game of Thrones -- I have zero interest in the show itself, and really, by the time I got through the third book (which was the last one I bothered to read), it all kind of blurred together and kept having the same pattern of violence, sex and death. It might be more "realistic" for characters to die, but when you reach a point where only the interesting characters die and the crappy characters are generally the ones he keeps around... bleh.

Note that I say "generally": by the end of the third book, the only characters I had any interest in following was Daenerys and Arya, and maybe Bran. The rest of the characters could pretty much die in a fire... and stay dead, this time.

@Coin It's just a shame that Secrets of the Covenants is looking to be at least August before it comes out (at least, that's what @tragedyjones was telling us at Reno) -- they've been extremely slow about getting 2.0 Vampire out more.

I confess, though, I have certain... thoughts about playing a Dead Wolf (and while I have a way to potentially see it happen at Reno -- I could PM you for details), I'd be very interested to see how you give Dead Wolves the 2.0 treatment.

@Bobotron I wish I could read the entire series, but the local library is missing them. Probably the only way I'll be able to do so is to try and collect the entire series myself.

@Coin said:

@Arkandel said:

And some staff just have a specific kind of game in mind. If you have (what you consider) a great idea for a Vampire sphere with its politics and metaplot, you might not want to dilute that by adding Werewolf on top of it.

And sometimes, your idea is incorporating how the politics of vampire deal with the existence of and co-habitation with werewolves.

Oh, that sounds interesting... especially depending on your intended setting. But, that's the Dead Wolf Gangrel-lover in me talking there -- while Reno features the foundation for that, it's mitigated by Werewolf being pretty slow right now because of no 2.0 rules being out just yet for it.

I may have to keep an eye out for your game, Coin, if only because Demon seems pretty cool (just from reading the introduction), and I do enjoy Vampire -- it would be nice to, for once, be able to come in at the ground floor with a Vampire in a new game and, to a degree, having a "sky's the limit" mentality on your ambitions.

So, question to you all.

EA Publishers Sale is going on at XBox Live Marketplace. Dragon Age: Origins is $4.49, Dragon Age II is $3.99. Mind, I haven't really gotten into DA:I yet because Skyrim bit me, but should I consider getting them both, to as to have "the full story", such as it is?

@Ganymede Funny you should put it that way -- just from reading the first couple of pages of the Introduction (I nabbed the PDF), I came away with, "This is like The Matrix for nWoD." I'm definitely gonna keep reading on it now.

@Bobotron Well, if you still have your Reno character about, or want to bring Paul back around (especially since we're starting to work on some Vampire-centric plot at the moment), I'm Charley there (Dead Wolf Gangrel vampire) and Poker (staff-alt).

@Bobotron Holy crap... we've got some history. I had several characters on BW Transmetals, including Electra (a Transmythic blue dragon), Nightshade/Whitewind (a "Doublespy" Fuzor in the basic vein of Punch/Counterpunch), and I was even Optimus Primal at one point (though I can't remember when). Had several different characters at H&V, was at Millennium Heroes (the second Beyond Superman, Jonny Kent, and was effectively headstaff there for nearly a year as Tal Rasha), and several characters at 2k5 (up through my Galvatron stint in 2007, after which I hadn't really bothered with the place).

It's a shame your Transformers: Generations MUSH never got to take off -- I had a fun Headmaster concept that I was gonna play with, using the Machination as the means behind how the character became a Headmaster. It's good to see you around again, though.

Humor me for a moment: could someone describe Demon: The Descent to me in layman's terms? I may look through the PDF for more details, but I'm curious as to the basics... and I won't really have any frame of reference, as I never played Possessed.

Sadly, I haven't watched much anime... but what little I've seen of Bio-Booster Armor Guyver was decent. Definitely better than the first live-action movie (well, both of them, really, but the second live-action flick was light-years better than the first one, IMO). It's fairly violent as well (and God help you if you watch the Out of Control OVA -- mostly for the hentai-ish scene where Valcuria bonds with the damaged Guyver II unit).

@Ganymede Most of them did, yes. Wrathful Judgment is probably the only one I recall offhand that didn't require LOS, but you did have to have something of personal significance to the target (like a lock of hair, for instance -- can't remember if a photograph was kosher for it as well) -- then, you could do it pretty much anywhere. Of course, Wrathful Judgment was limited by the fact that, for every level of agg damage you were able to deal, the caster had to spend a Willpower point, so even base 5 successes, the caster is down 5 Willpower.

@Huzuruth Betcha @tragedyjones leaps at the chance to be one of those two players.

Ahh, fitness. God knows, I do plenty of walking -- work is about 25 minutes away on foot, so I spend upwards of an hour getting in exercise that way.

@Alzie I'm assuming they're using the differentiated dice pools for Themes -- at least, my Gorgon Ventrue Crone concept is built with that in mind (which, for the Creation theme, really works out because I plan for her to be a sculptress).

However, I'm just about positive that Patient won't work with Blood Sorcery -- I believe it's specifically in regards to mundane actions, not anything overtly supernatural. And knowing TR, if Patient were to work on supernatural dice pools, it would immediately be HR'ed so that it wouldn't work.

@Sanguine I've been wondering where you'd gotten to. I was sad CielosMUX didn't seem to get off the ground.

I wasn't trying to say Elsa took over for Moritz; if anything, what I meant was that she seemed to be doing everything in her power, IC and OOC, to make sure that her position as Prince was so unassailable that it wasn't funny. She was, in effect, making sure that what had led to Moritz's downfall was not going to lead to hers. It was the fact that she did so through OOC means as well as IC that discouraged the people that did try to stick it out and figure out what the heck they were supposed to do.

Viveca (my Dead Wolf@HM) lost pretty much her entire Vampire coterie because of this sort of thing. Elsa's Mage alt sought out one of them specifically, blew his Masq, the works -- all because she wanted the Mage alt to be a Vitae junkie, from what I understood of the situation. Afterwards, she tried again with another member of the coterie, who turned her down. At that point, my coterie went public to the Praxis IC, warning the rest of the Vampires that there was a Mage who was hunting them because she wanted her Vitae fix. At that point, Elsa went ballistic OOC, railing that they didn't know her alt was a Mage (debatable, but I don't recall if there was actually any proof -- we did, at least, know she was a supernatural entity of some kind), Then turned around ICly and summarily removed one or two of the coterie who had positions within the government and "fired" them. By then, there was some talk about trying to do something about Elsa, but it went nowhere due to OOC issues -- specifically, the players didn't trust staff to either not blab to Paprika what was in the wind, or worse that Paprika herself would snoop on the job and read it herself. Virtually the entire coterie decided to just freeze and leave instead.

About a year or so later, there was someone who apparently brought in several players with her (can't recall the name, only that at one point early on, she asked if she could "share" being Scarlett's regnant with me -- Scarlett being Luna's ghoul -- and was disappointed when Luna said no). She and others tried to breathe some life back into the sphere (maybe went about it the wrong way, but they did try), and the result: they all left because Elsa used the rather nebulous phrasing to justify giving that character a permanent -5 to all actions for the rest of their existence (unless they could have gotten the scrap of cloth that both of them made the blood oath for the Oath to Kalfou that she used, and by then it was established fact that such a thing would never occur). It didn't help when the staff who got involved in that blindly supported Elsa... made all the worse by the fact that they decided in their own self-interest because their alts were also part of Elsa's inner circle.

It was stuff like that which was why the Vampire sphere died completely at that point. Between being Prince, having a staff-alt and being good friends with several other staff-alts who were also her IC friends, people gave up because it was clear there would never be a fair shake of trying to remove her from power, especially since doing so through NPC means was explicitly banned (which made the fact that she was hiding her knowledge of Kindred Vodoun from Luna laughable, since then Luna would have been unable to do anything -- when your sole Axesworn gives every indication of being more loyal to her coterie-mate than to her covenant, there was nothing that could be done, particularly to a character who's far more mentally-inclined than martially-inclined, and really, who would have followed the neonate in a potential coup bid?).

@Chime That would have required her to listen, and I know she certainly wasn't going to listen to me -- and she wasn't even bothering to try and listen to anyone else. She and I had discussions before about how the government setup was a turnoff to everyone who came in expecting something akin to... what was actually written in the book. It didn't help that she basically implemented aspects of a book that was explicitly mentioned as not being used for Haunted Memories (Damnation City) as part of her government setup.

My OOC disagreement with her over it got pulled into her ICly deciding that my Dead Wolf had to jump through additional hoops to obtain her "Citizenship", and then she had the gall to get OOCly pissed at me when I ICly responded with "Fine, I refuse to pursue this any longer" because I'd been waiting two months at that point, while other people were getting approved inside twenty-four hours. And I wasn't the only one who decided that Citizenship wasn't worth getting, because she wasn't interested in applying her "law", much less dealing with players who weren't part of her clique.

As it was, like Miss Demeanor alluded to, what was the point of trying to do anything at the end? Elsa was unwilling to accept that her IC and OOC actions were what pushed most of the Vampire sphere to TR in the first place, and the sheer number of players who weren't willing to try and do anything because everyone knew Elsa lacked any sort of ethics when it came to dealing with jobs that might affect her in some way (the Moritz example is a prime one, given all the "rerolls" she made Xenobia's player do under the pretense that Zombie and I were too lenient, while then turning around and making certain that Moritz and company survived what happened with nary a scratch -- and then gave Moritz and Helmut 12xp to replace Retainers (each had lost a level 3 Retainer, knew they had because they'd been informed, and then blatantly lied about it and got away with it).

@Miss-Demeanor We did. Several times, as it turns out, because VASpider and Shaft were at the forefront of arguing the point and refused to accept "NO!" the first two or three times we said it.

@EmmahSue You didn't kill the sphere. The Consulate was a good idea, and it certainly got some good RP from my end, especially in those times when Luna disagreed with some of the early decisions (like letting Moritz stay when he likely should have been called as the target of a blood hunt, but that's me). What killed the sphere was when Elsa decided to take over as Prince and then treat it as the sphere's endgame, and had enough staff clout (despite me fighting it every step of the way staff-side) to make sure she was never overthrown.

As I put it to some other people recently when reminiscing, she basically did everything she could to avoid what happened to Moritz (who she bent over backwards to make sure didn't die from the destruction of his villa staff-side, over our protests -- but, I think that's why staff removed her as Vampire TL, because they knew she'd played major favorites with her main RP clique).

@Miss-Demeanor Small favor. The problems I faced were inherent in the fact that, at one point on Haunted Memories, it was being argued that Carthian Law could work throughout the entire Praxis because, when the Consulate came into power in the wake of Moritz's abdication of the throne following an assassination attempt (and I'll be nice and say nothing further on that front), the Consulate was -- at least in large part -- the brainchild of the Carthians (I think Laibah was the one who really pushed for the Consulate in the wake of Moritz's abdication, but EmmahSue can correct me if I'm wrong on that). In essence, the Praxis would potentially be considered Carthian domain. However, it wound up not working out that way.

@Ganymede Like Carthian Law. I swear to God, Carthian Law as originally written was the bane of my existence as a staffer, because it was well and truly broken as-written.