Pretty much exactly what Mietze said. Players are going to buy the stats they're allowed to use to make a lasting change around them. If there is no force behind things like social dice, you won't see social characters. You'll see lots of physical characters because people can't opt out of a punch. While there are certainly two sides to the argument, I really wish that games would treat a character's stats as meaningful, even in regard to other characters. Then we'd see more diversity.
You fix a mucked up hard drive only to bring liquids near your computer immediately after?
I salute this 'fear nothing' approach to life you take.
Well, a MU can balance things out too. If one thing over the other starts to get a bit too hefty, you can always incentivize people to make different stuff. It might not attract a huge flock of folks, but you'd at least get some. That way you don't have to outright prevent someone from playing what they want, but you can at least offer shinies to play something -else-.
That being said! Eldritch's Werewolf Numbers are much more balanced, both along Auspice and Tribe:
Rahu: 6
Irraka: 6
Cahalith: 6
Ithaeur: 5
Elodoth: 4
Blood Talon: 3
Bone Shadow: 5
Storm Lord: 4
Hunters in Darkness: 4
Iron Masters: 7
Ghost Wolves: 4 (Most of which is just due to everyone starting out as a Ghost Wolf at First Change)
Is this one of those things that need to go over in whatever the topic was we created for code wars? I'd be interested in knowing what the upsides/downsides are to this version.
See, I'm not sure that I agree that this discipline isn't meant to use the Social Maneuvering rules.
When he wills it, all eyes fall on the vampire and nobody cares what he’s doing. For the rest of the scene, he suffers no penalties to Social rolls from his actions or appearance — even if he’s just beaten another man to death or waved a gun in a crowded nightclub. Given a chance, he can talk his way out of minor criminal offenses and almost any social faux pas. As the center of attention, he adds his Majesty dots to any Presence rolls when talking to people around him. This bonus only applies when talking to people normally, not to other uses of Majesty.
That part seems to pretty clearly indicate that it's used for regular social rolls. It doesn't bypass them. If anything, it reinforces that they need to be used.
But there's also Blood Bonds, too, not just the Majesty discipline Take a look at the very top tier, which mechanically provides:
When taking a Social maneuver against her thrall, the regnant’s impression is always considered perfect (see p. 174). As well, she gains a +3 die penalty on any Social action or Discipline roll against the thrall.
That is absolutely doors. It straight up says social maneuvering, and gives an indication of Impression, which there's no other reason for tracking than the SM rules.
So while I think vampires are pretty awesome, I'm not sure that they work so well on MU's under the new system, because a lot of their powers that aren't 'kill you dead motherfucker' fall under the 'Now Newly Optional' guidelines that OP was short-sighted enough to put in the books without really checking to see what other systems it affects.
If a MU makes it clear that SM is being used, then it's not an issue. If they say it's not, then it's a fairly substantial issue. I've seen many a Daeva bellyaching that they feel like they're getting shafted.
@tragedyjones said:
@derp - You make it abundantly clear that the game will or will not be using Social Maneuvering on Player Characters. If it is, you use the rule on page 193 about how to resolve it with PCs.
Right, but then if the game isn't using social maneuvering, do these things just cease to exist?
@tragedyjones said:
I was just making a dumb joke. And remember, if you ever get in a gunfight, SHIFT! Dalu can dodge bullets.
What discipline confuses you for MU useage though?
Also also. Animalism is totally a combat discipline in clever hands. You can summon hordes of beasts!
Mostly, Majesty, with the occasional Blood Bond. If you read either of them, it augments social rolls and changes Impression levels. But MU's (and some MUers) are pretty notorious for flat-out ignoring social rolls and screaming that the Doors system was never meant to be used by PC's against PCs. (But then again, neither were these disciplines and game systems, etc).
So you have powers that require the use of something that everyone fights tooth and claw to avoid, stating that they weren't meant to be used on PCs and should be resolved through RP, sooo... what about these powers then? Do we just likewise ignore them?
It just seems a dumb line in the sand to draw, and I'm not sure how those powers are supposed to work.
@tragedyjones said:
@Derp said:
@tragedyjones said:
My assessment of Obfuscate as a combat ability was probably tempered by my own Mekhet's complete inability to capitalize even on the opportunity to take advantage of total surprise.
Also, a lot of people in WoD underestimate the lethality of a grapple. I know @lordbelh doesn't, but a lot do.
I have a grappler werewolf. I've never even shifted him out of Hishu.
That's probably a breaking point towards Flesh by now!
Oh, I mean in a fight. I've had him shift outside of a fight before.
Though it's still a literal pain for him to do so. There's spending essence involved and excruciating agony. I don't imagine he does it very much at this point.
But back to the point, rar vampires! They're cool(er), even if I don't get how some of the Disciplines are supposed to work in a MU. Still not as broken as Demon! And that's something!
@tragedyjones said:
My assessment of Obfuscate as a combat ability was probably tempered by my own Mekhet's complete inability to capitalize even on the opportunity to take advantage of total surprise.
Also, a lot of people in WoD underestimate the lethality of a grapple. I know @lordbelh doesn't, but a lot do.
I have a grappler werewolf. I've never even shifted him out of Hishu.
@HelloRaptor said:
The fact that right now there's probably half a dozen people immediately thinking about posting with righteous indignation about how cyber-bullying and suicide are never funny and how dare I only really illustrates why I lost interest in posting here.
This. I don't get this at all. Unlike @Sundown, I see a lot of this, and it never fails to boggle the mind. When did we become so obsessed with protecting people's feelings and insistent upon being politically correct in all things? It baffles me.
I was raised by people that honestly couldn't give a damn about my feelings. I was regularly told to suck it the hell up, because the world is a terrible place and someone making me feel bad was like, the very least of the bad things that could possibly happen out there. A world where the callous survivor has a much better chance of making it to old age than the delicate flower. Now, granted, my family is fucking nuts, but they taught me important lessons, and I think I'm now a better person for it. I can handle things with barely a blink that just break down other people for weeks at a time. I might not wanna always, you know, hug it out or whatever, but I function, and I function well. When did this become a bad thing?
I don't play on Reno! 
I really love this idea. No sarcasm or anything like that. I seriously encourage this. While my current character probably wouldn't go in for being a thrall, or probably even trust vampires that much, I'd almost be tempted to make something along those lines in the future.
This could fairly easily be done.
So, think about this -- everything in the universe has some manner of momentum, something carrying it forward in a specific direction, and it resists changes to that. So why can't time be the same way?
Yes, you go back and rewind 30 seconds or so and save the boyfriend from getting shot. 30 seconds later, he's shot by someone else. You undo that, he gets hit by a car the next day, etc, etc, on down the line. Final Destination played with this to some effect. Just because you prevented -one- way of it happening doesn't mean you prevented it from happening.
So why couldn't time travel be the same? Sure, you can go back a bit, and you can make -huuuuge- changes to things, but you always find out that in the end, the exact same things have managed to happen, through whatever sort of events unfold to make them a thing. So time travel is only really useful for getting a new perspective on the past, or learning something that would otherwise be impossible, or testing certain limited changes. Not for anything really big, because no matter what, you come back and find out that time as you knew it is still the same. People who were dead are dead. People who are supposed to be alive resist dying outside their appointed time at any cost. They have the same positions, etc.
@Tirit said:
But when I switched to Evennia, I found Python much easier to learn. Not to mention that the resources to learn Python are significantly easier to find than the hack of language MU Softcode ran on. With Evennia, and Python in general, I've actually have a chance to open a game.
This may be the case. Python absolutely could be easier to learn.
But resources already encoded in python for the games that are extant are going to be slim to none, whereas there are tons and tons of things for MU out there already. Glen Morse's page comes to mind, and has a crapton of things in it. Thenomain has things on his own thing he's shared with all of us. MUX2 comes with SGP. Etc.
I think, like @TNP, that not being able to experiment, add, and freely contribute without a coding overlord approving it and updating it, as well as the lack of customizability, is going to be a thing that keeps this from being a big thing. It'll just be one more fork of a thing that a handful of people use because they prefer that system.
Until you can figure out how to out-of-the-box offer a way for players to run their own things (within certain permission levels for information they should not be touching) you're not going to replace anything, or be the future of anything. You're going to be one more branch of the tree that struggles to hang on there.
Edit to Add: Think of it like this. I've been using notepad for all of my word processing for ages and ages. It doesn't have a lot of features, but it gets the job done.
Someone comes along and tells me about Microsoft Word, and all the bells and whistles and things with it. Except, in their design, they forgot to add a functionality for copying and pasting. To me, it doesn't matter how awesome the new thing is, or how many shinies it can do, if it cannot duplicate something that the previous system has had for what, thirty years?
That's how I feel about Evennia and the things we're taking about. I don't care how cool python is or what it offers, you are telling me that out of the box it cannot replicate something that is currently offered under the system and has been for many, many years.
I don't think I'm the only one who's going to feel that way.