Posts made by HelloRaptor

@Rook, A++ would read again.

@Arkandel

I know Mages have the kinkiest sex, but are any of them worried about the Abyss during it? No. It should at least be part of the game-play, like it is any other time.

...seriously?

People do shit without worrying about the consequences all the time, in-game and out of it. That is a thing that people do, and frequently.

Also, it's pretty easy to do most magic in ways that the Abyss isn't really a pressing concern. I could get hit by a car, but I still go outside walking, even along stretches with shitty sidewalk coverage. I don't really give it much thought aside from keeping an awareness of my surroundings. I certainly don't worry about it.

@Corruption

There are just too many survivors of such trauma in the hobby to make this kind of RP worthwhile overall.

Rape isn't special in that regard. It's not different than a lot of things that get roleplayed. This has come up before, but rape isn't special, people have suffered all manner of traumatic experiences in their lives. Often life altering ones, resulting in all manner of PTSD or other after effects. Would you like to tell someone who was beaten so badly by their parents or spouse that they ended up in the hospital, that rape rp should get its own special category of consideration because 'it's different' than them being confronted with people around them RPing through a child abuse (or whatever else) story?

The list of terrible things that have happened to people is long and incredibly vile, but WoD has never made any bones about the fact that it does (sorry Sunny) cover all manner of vile story elements, up to, including, and surpassing rape. Do we really need to go over depicted uses of mental domination powers, physical abuse, torture, kidnapping and sexual sadism that have appeared in WoD books over the years? Because we've had this conversation before, and the list is incredibly long and detailed.

As someone who grew up as both a subject of abuse and a witness to far worse as a child, there is some shit I will absolutely not roleplay through, and will take steps to extricate myself if confronted with it, even if it means taking a break for a week or two from a game while my character is conveniently out of town or in a coma after a bad fall or whatever else. But that's on me. I used to be exactly the sort of person who demanded that nobody so much as roleplay certain things around me, up to and including quitting a game or no longer talking to a friend who didn't sympathize as much as I thought she should, and it's one of the few things I'm actually ashamed of when I look back on things.

My experiences and hangups don't excuse telling other people what they can't roleplay, and I generally find the idea that other people think theirs do to be anywhere from unfortunate to unsettling. I find the idea that rape gets its own special treatment where other deep traumas suffered by a significant portion of our population do not, to be at least moderately outrageous.

I sort of agree with @Cirno.

@Arkandel

I don't see why that makes them morons if it makes them uncomfortable for any reason.

I don't care if anyone wants to TS or doesn't, but every time somebody makes a snide "I'm here to role play, not to TS." comment I want to just stab them in the neck.

That's not so bad, Peter Parker's kind of a drag. I was sad to see Superior Spider-Man end.

Why u mad, bro?

It's not like this hasn't happened before:

Give it a few months and we'll be back to normal.

@Pondscum said:

I hate anime smilies. Hate them. It makes me think I'm talking to a pre-pubescent teen that's RP'ing from his/her parent's basement. Don't use them. Don't! >.> (What the hell does that even mean?)

I just got judgemental too!

...anime smilies? What? They're just horizontal emoticons instead of vertical.

It's kind of weird that you'd pick out a handful from the vast list of emoticons and dub them 'anime', when they've been used for what is literally decades, plural, now by people who neither like nor even watch anime. >_<

If >_> or >.> or whatever causes you confusion, I suspect that's a personal failure rather than any lack of clarity. I mean, you can figure out what or means, right? But somehow >.> stumps you? C'mon.

Sure, peeves thread, dislike horizontal emoticons because whatever, but trying to tie an irrational peeve to basement dwelling anime watchers is just kind of a bizarre stretch. Shit, my mother uses ^_^ and the closest she's ever come to anime is Saturday morning cartoons.

If you really want to get into some hand wringing over an invasion of Japanese internet foibles, you'd probably want to shake your fists at this website's use of emoji, ala , while >_> is just a perfectly normal emoticon.

Go home, Newegg, you're drunk.

I use heh if I'm mild to moderately amused, or lol (or some variant) if I'm moderately to greatly amused.

I was unaware there were camps who only used one or the other, or that it even mattered to anyone.

Heh.

@Thenomain

Incidentally, the first episode of "Attack On Titan" is really funny if you MST3k it.

Also if you do this.

Spoilers, I guess.

Also, lol'd way too hard at timely Simon & Garfunkel.

@Arkandel

To be more heretical, I never liked alignments in D&D either, so there.

I liked them as they were originally presented in the preview for 4th Edition, likewise heretical as that may sound. The vast majority of people were Unaligned, with behaviors across the spectrum, and only things like Outsiders who embodied particular concepts or ideals, or character classes/individuals strongly linked to those concepts or ideals, got tagged with Law, Chaos, Good, or Evil tags.

It preserved the cosmic weight of alignment without trying to shoehorn Bob the Human Commoner into Evil because the metaphysical tally of his actions ticked over just this side from Neutral. Bob's actions might serve to drip into the cosmic wells of Good or Evil, but Bob himself will likely never have the sort of significance that capital G for Good or E for Evil would describe. Even if Bob were a 20th level Fighter, still probably not. Bob the Paladin, though, as an anointed champion of Good (I can't remember if they also had to be Lawful in 4th or not) gets the alignment tag.

Way less nitpicking over whether or not this particular action was good or evil and whether it was enough to sway alignment and how much does intent matter and blah blah blah. Plus when something detected as Evil, it generally represented some oomph.

...which has nothing to do with anything in this thread except the bit quoted, but whatever. >_>

@Rook
I thought those were just elaborate pictograms to convey their pricing plans.

I am not familiar with Kushiel theme so help would be very welcome in plotting her concept.

I can only assume it involves a lot of standing half naked with your back to other players.

Yeah, it seems like it'd play right into the sense of persecution complex so prevalent on MU*es. I can't imagine it won't get snapped right up.

Honestly, I'm still shocked Demon made it onto a MU*, especially a multi-sphere one, and this sounds like it's actually being designed to work with other spheres.

@Glitch
That's a fairly literal reading of the rules, I suppose, but I'd read that as still referring to the creatures specified: normal humans and animals, spirits of lower rank, etc, rather than supernaturals, higher ranked spirits and such.

To me it seems to be saying that if those lesser creatures are alone (as in individual or a group of lesser types), use Down and Dirty combat resolution, but if they're in a group of more powerful enemies you use normal combat, but those lesser creatures are still at a disadvantage.

The alternative is that it's not at all specific and thus applies to everyone everywhere, and a Rank 5 werewolf in any form is filled with primal fear at a Rank 1 werewolf in gauru, which seems pretty dumb, though I guess it's possible.

Also, reading up more on the forms here, Werewolf 2.0 has done a pretty good job of indicating how they're all useful, and why, yeah.

On the subject of shapeshifting, it doesn't seem like a matter of primal horror at all really. Or at least one that passes quickly.

Werewolf 2.0, page 96:

An Uratha with high Harmony struggles with the change. To say it’s painful is an understatement on the level of saying that the universe is large. The body, mind, and soul shatters and reforms at once. Muscles tear and rebuild themselves. Bones have to find new places to fit. Sure, everything regenerates instantaneously, but every single nerve in the Uratha’s body screams out in agony for those few seconds. She quickly gets used to the sensation, but the first few times, it’s jarring like nothing else, and removes her consciousness from her surroundings.
A balanced-Harmony Uratha feels discomfort, but it’s a natural discomfort, like the first time she invited a lover inside her. **It’s not ideal, but it’s right. **
A low-Harmony Uratha feels no pain. In fact, the change brings with it a warm relief. The spirit-attuned Uratha feels discomfort any time she spends more than a few hours in one form, and every chance she has to shed a long-held form is like a foot rub after a marathon, or a hot bath after a prize fight. She must change shape at least once every scene. She can spend Essence to avoid this shift, as long as she isn’t stressed.

This is all stuff @Alzie mentioned, but I figured the whole quote couldn't hurt. The 'horror of shapeshifting' doesn't really seem like a big focus, especially since at even Harmony 7 where you start the entire shift takes virtually no time at all.

So Beast is basically Otherkin: You Were Right All Along, then? Hrm. >_<

@crusader

And again, having the dalu or urshul safety net does dilute the primal horror of shapeshifting.

You've said this a few times now, and I admit I'm kind of puzzled. I'm not as well versed in Werewolf as most people who've commented in this thread, but is that really even a thing? I mean, outside of for a specific character with a particular Harmony rating, or first changers who are just figuring out what's what?

Is 'shapeshifting = primal horror' even a thing for werewolves, or just something you think should be a thing? A quick glance through Werewolf didn't find me any answers one way or another.

Edit: No sarcasm/mockery here, I'm interested in the answer.

@Crusader

Contrary to how HR presented it, I actually didn't attempt to prove anything I said, based merely on headstaff experience anywhere. I've been around too long to see the dead end that is, and I think HR only resorted to it out of reflex.

I used headstaff for emphalulz, but you've mentioned your staffing and game running experience with folks numerous times. You're trying to emphasize that you have experience and aren't just theorycrafting this shit, but in trying to defend your idea you've maybe repeated yourself more than you think. Or maybe it just feels that way.

Which I find especially amusing, since you think removing the Shadow from Werewolf would make it more combatty, when the Shadow pretty much only exists to set up owod style battles with monsters worse than werewolves.

The Shadow isn't much different than the material world as far as plot and story goes: Most of the things you come into conflict with don't like you very much, and may well devolve into combat unless you take pains to find another way to deal with it.

I might have chosen a bad title

Knowing is half the battle. I know I've said this before, but I can't really emphasize enough that the WoD is set up the way it is so that you can run all manner of shit. I don't actually think the game you're describing is a bad one (though one I'm personally even less interested in than W:tF, since I do like the mythology, spiritualism, and auspice/tribe stuff), but I do very much think that what you seem to want out of Werewolf: The Fallen is not really the game most of the people I know who love Werewolf are playing, nor what Werewolf is written as.

Lycanthrope: The Wolfman, or whatever you want to call it, is not a bad thing to want to play. From a strictly werewolf-horror perspective, it's certainly more true to 'werewolf' source material than W:tF is. I just don't think that's a compelling argument to make in saying that W:tF is designed poorly, because it's the way it is on purpose.

When left with only hishu or urhan forms, they have to time when to go battle form, because then they have 6-8 turns to do what needs to be done.

If they can't resolve the situation in the next 6-8 turns, then they're potentially fucked.

If your players can't resolve a combat in 6-8 turns regardless of their forms, you must run some really, really long combats. O_O

With Urshul and Dalu (especially Dalu) it's more a matter of building up fighting merits and methodically taking apart the opposition. Without Dalu, I noticed that players rarely took any fighting merits, beyond the firearms one, for use in hishu.

Yes, imposing game mechanics to push players into the choices you want them to make seems awesome. What was that about Auspices again?

I really hated the elaborate 2-3 hour combat scenes with the Dalu Rahus pulling out every obscure fighting style merit, Kung Fu or Krav Maga (complete with punch daggers of course), from the Armory pdfs.

There's so much wrong with this. I mean, it certainly emphasizes what you want to emphasize, I guess, which is werewolves only ever being able to fight as werewolves but god damn.

It also, strangely enough, seemed to make the auspices more equal. With more time spent in social situations, the Elodoth and Cahalith had more to do.

It sounds like your groups are weirdly binary. Do half the players just sit out of any given encounter? Oh shit, combat, Elodoth and Cahalith better sit it out? Social times, park the Rahu in the corner? That's just... what?

Werewolves of any stripe have ways of contributing to both combat and social scenes, the only thing that should change is who has the spotlight in terms of being a badass at whatever they're doing. If that isn't the case, the problem isn't Werewolf, it's those players. The Storyteller is responsible for creating plots that will involve opportunities for both (and other) types of scenes. The same holds for spirit stuff, really.

When the players took gauru before, it was almost as if they were admitting defeat, as dalu/urshul couldn't cut it.

Yeah, it's almost as if they were playing Werewolf: The Forsaken, where assuming gauru form is supposed to be your last resort, for several reasons. Again, this is a feature, not a bug.

Pretty much.

You'd be hard pressed to limit it to only nine design flaws in Changing Breeds, though.

Spam:

@Crusader

It's interesting that people are so attached to certain things. The Shadow is not as core to the werewolf thematic experience, as fire is to a vampire, or ghost is to a geist.

The bit you quoted was not specifically about the Shadow. You leading with it was simply the most glaring example of what I was talking about. The removal of Auspices and Tribes as anything meaningful, cutting out forms, virtually everything on your list are symptoms of the same because your arguments for all of them amount to someone wanting to play Twilight-style vampires because when was the last time you really saw sunlight present an actual threat, motivator, or its absence as any kind of real loss to vampire PCs?

While you can probably come up with anectdotal evidence, it's pretty clear that others can do the same for why your claims about Werewolf are pretty much nonsense.

That said, you're missing the point of the quoted bit, which is that you're getting the negative reaction you are because you're presenting this as "Werewolf 2.0's Nine Design Flaws And How I Would Fix Them." which is pretty fucking trollacious when what you really mean is "How To Play American Werewolf In London In WoD." The point was that someone could create a list of 'hacks' to turn Vampire: The Requiem into Twilight in the same sweeping ways you've done here, and if they titled it "Vampire 2.0's Nine Design Flaws And How I Would Fix Them." instead of "How To Play Twilight In WoD."

What's your attachment to Auspices? The Pure don't have them, and I found the lack of Auspices made pack forming easier and more natural. People gravitated to what they wanted to do and not what they felt like they had to. Auspices were only included as a way to make chargen easier for some people, and function like classes. I've only had a chance to see Pure packs form on a mush a couple times, but both times seemed less stressful without deciding who got stuck as the Elodoth, etc.

It's almost as if your anectdotal evidence were not representative of everyone's experiences. Huh. I wonder how that happens.

Auspieces were not only included as a way to make chargen easier for some people. They are a heavily thematic element that ties werewolves to the moon. While it's true that in nwod WW insisted on a dreadfully mechanical homogeneity between its races and their base type (Clan, Auspice, Path, etc), Auspices predate that uniformity. Fighting against or finding harmony with your Auspice, both internally and in the views and expectations of others, is part of being one of the Forsaken. That isn't a bug, it's a feature, and you presenting "Well the Pure don't have them and it's fine." as an argument only further emphasizes that you not only don't get, but were never really interested in getting or playing Werewolf: The Forsaken.

And for the umpteenth time, that's fucking fine. You don't have to get it, or want to get it, or want to play it. But for the love of god, stop getting your panties in a bunch over people objecting to you presenting your ideas as hacks on how to 'fix Werewolf: The Forsaken' and just move on with the fact that what you want to do is build your own Werewolf game that bears only the most superficial resemblance to it. You're not 'fixing' anything, you're not creating 'hacks' to make it a better game, you're trying to create something wholly different, but which also includes people who are lycanthropes.

Notice that earlier while you chose to talk about 'fire' being a more thematic threat to vampires, you were replying to me talking about 'sunlight'. You could strip out the effects sunlight has on vampires completely and odds are it would have absolutely zero effect on the day to day roleplay that takes place on most MU*'s as far as that being a problem for vampires go. It's always night time for vampires IC. At worst you would expand their ability to roleplay with non-vampires. As a 'hack' you could say that they lose the ability to pump their attributes, or use blood to heal, and have lessened access to their Disciplines (-3, minimum 1, maybe) during the day. Vampires have the at night reputation of myth because they prefer not to go out during the day because they're weaker.

You could do this pretty easily, without even disrupting how things work on a MU*, it would be better for players, fit with several 'modern vampire fiction' stories more or less. Outside of roleplaying about how much they miss watching the sun rise or whatever other bullshit vampires wax poetic about, it serves virtually no purpose except to enforce a theme on people playing vampire.

Which is entirely the fucking point.

If you do that, you're taking a big step away from Vampire: The Requiem. If you strip Auspices of their meaning, make them labels applied to behavior instead of roles set down by ties to the spirit of the moon, you're taking a big step away from Werewolf: The Forsaken. Getting rid of spirits entirely, when the spirit mythology of why werewolves exist and why they're the Forsaken in the first place, and a chunk of what their entire purpose is, is another big step. Almost every one of your nine 'hacks' is another step, and what you're left with is not Werewolf.

You want to play Lycanthrope: The Wolfman. Saying it's a 'fix' for mistakes made in Werewolf: The Forsaken is like saying a car is a fix for a motorcycle's 'design flaw' of not including room for four people. What you want is something completely different, even if they both fall under the umbrella of 'vehicles' or 'machines with wheels' and 'travel on roads'.

Not to harp on the Shadow aspect specifically, just using it as an example of how this could have gone:

You: Spiritual aspects aren't really relevant to what I want from playing Lycanthrope: The Wolfman, so we'll strip all of that out and make accomodations for where it intersects with the system. I'd like to make a game about the visceral struggle between feral instinct and humanity, not SPIRIT COPS.

Everyone Else: Interesting, tell us more.

Instead you went:

You: Werewolf: The Forsaken makes a bunch of mistakes, like all the stupid spirit stuff that nobody cares about, and auspices and tribes are really dumb and/or unrealistic, also LOL NATIVE AMERICAN STUFF. Here's how you fix all of that if you want to play Werewolf: The Forsaken the way it should really be played. Also this is what I do for tabletop but it's totally a fix for all the MU* problems.

Everyone Else: What the fuck? That's not even... what? O_O

You: You guys just don't get it! White Wolf writers! Chronicles! I WAS HEADSTAFF BEFORE YHWH MADE IT COOL!

Nobody gives two fucks if you want to make a game that isn't Werewolf: The Forsaken, but uses bibs and bobs from Werewolf for its mechanics. But even someone like me, who dislikes Werewolf, thinks your presentation and assertion that you're just 'fixing' things is absolute shit.

I'd like you to be honest with yourself, Raptor. And consider this for a moment in a serious voice, and not a jokey voice.

In all of your time playing, have you ever thought that staff really handled a pack's totem spirits, territory, Renown (oh, the various shitstorms about Renown) or Morality checks particularly well? Or has it mostly been either ignored, arbitrary or often disputed?

Yeah, back when sphere staff were actually responsible for and took time to run plots and stories for their spheres. Not morality checks (or their owod equivalents) quite so much, but that's a larger system issue.

But like Sunny, I know you're only here because of the Detroit thread.

For reference, I don't give a fuck about the Detroit thread or whatever it is you're yammering on about, and I'm also tired of watching you repeat yourself over and over about how some shit was in a mini-semi-official-online-only-chronicle-pdf and thus we should totally not mock you for thinking it's a good idea. There's a bunch of alternate-reality style suggestions for the game lines, some officially published, some semi-official pdf things, and guess what? Some of them are absolute shit that would not at all support what people are interested in. I think there's one for vampire where all vampires are just roaming packs of violent blood hungry monsters, but to most people that's not Vampire: The Requiem.

It's funny how those that disagree with me seem to eventually preface their posts with 'I don't care about werewolf'. Okay, so why are you even here? How are you even invested in storytelling or running a werewolf sphere for the majority of people who aren't knowledgeable veterans?

I may not like to play werewolf, but I've enjoyed playing with werewolves, even staffed for them at one time or another.

That's the first paragraph of the introduction. The Shadow and spirits aren't even mentioned.

I guess griping about the Shadow stuff isn't as played out as you claimed, enh? Maybe the whole problem here is that you only read the first paragraph of any given section? I can see how you'd get to where you are from that. If you keep reading the introduction, you'll find under 'Duality and Edges' (the second bolded title under 'THEMES' after The Wolf Must Hunt), you find another of those pesky paragraphs you have so much trouble with:

W2.0, pg8:
You’re born to the world of Flesh, the world of meat and stone. You’re an inheritor of the world of Spirit, a land of animism and ephemera. The two don’t mix — at least, they really shouldn’t. Flesh should cleave to flesh, and spirit should cleave to spirit. If only it were that easy. Humans cross to the Shadow by accident or stolen knowledge. Spirits cross to the physical world to bolster their power or hide from other spirits. You can step between both worlds, so you can return your prey to its proper place.

Gee, right there in the introduction, under themes, it mentions the Shadow and spirits.

So before you claim that people claim that you are taking the game in a non-nwod werewolf direction...You should really read the nwod werewolf 2.0 book.

But its not WoD.

To be clear, that's not what I said, though perhaps you meant it's not WoD Werewolf.

The core wod setting is generic enough that it could be home to all manner of crazy shit, and as a jumping off point you could tack on whatever you liked, even stripped down, soulless versions of other game lines. So what he's presenting would work just fine as a using-wod-setting-and-mechanics-to-play-WEREWOLVES-BUT-REALLY or whatever.

It's just got nothing to do with nwod werewolf, and it's not because you're creating 'hacks' to fix 'design flaws', and everything to do with just wanting to play another game entirely that happens to include things that will be called werewolves.