Normally, I'm one of those folks up for playing with anyone.
I'm not really playing at the moment, or that would be the case now.
For what it's worth, I'll pop something up here when the status quo changes, though it may be a little while. This is still an improvement over last week's I'm going to finish this <thing I committed to do>, then fuck this ridiculous bag of bullshit state of affairs, and is now thankfully just a factor of current projects taking All The Time and Then Some.
Definitely on the spec list:
Academics.Art History (no school ever took transfer credits in this... )
Academics.Costume History
Computer.Mac
Computer.Photoshop
Crafts.Embroidery
Crafts.Sewing
Crafts.Patternmaking
Crafts.Corsetmaking
Crafts.Costuming
Crafts.Fashion Design
Crafts.Knitting
Crafts.Dye
Crafts.Illustration
Crafts.Watercolor
Crafts.Pen&Ink
Crafts.Drawing
Crafts.Beadwork
Crafts.Weaving
Crafts.Spinning
Crafts.Italian Granny Cooking
Crafts.Home Repair
Occult.Mythology
Occult.New Age Bullshit
Occult.I Have Apparently Seen Every Paranormal Show Ever Why Does This Take Up Space in My Head?
Drive.Nuns to Swear
Drive.Road Trip
Survival.Internet
Animal Ken.Cat Herding
Empathy.I Call Bullshit
Empathy.Patterns of Behavior
Expression.Writing
Expression.Voice Acting
Expression.Acting
Expression.Improv
Intimidation.Bitchslap of Reality
...that'd be about right. 
@Sundown said:
Most of us, if we apped in as ourselves, would be weird and outlandish concepts.
Agreed. The number of crafts specs alone I would need would break the sheet. Meanwhile, I'd be hard-pressed to find four whole skill dots to assign in physicals.
@Cirno, apropos of absolutely nothing whatsoever, are you the dude who once posted on Shang's bb4 about ritualistic zebras?
I only ask because that was the most dazzlingly creative, and yet surreal, post a friend of mine and I had ever seen appear on that board over a period of years. It stood out, is what I'm saying. Not in a 'to be snarked on' way, and not on a 'to be lusted over' way, but just in a 'a lot of creativity went into that scenario' sort of way, for which I can't help but offer some kind of 'well done, whoever posted that, well done'.
It is referenced now and then when people become and remain consistently boring.
Ahem. We now return you to your previously scheduled thread.
I know I'm working on something, which is something I swore I would never, ever do again.
I'm even almost figuring out minor bits of code to make things work, for which I owe @Thenomain a big thanks, due to the stuff he's assembled that makes it easier to learn by observing simply how things are working, and answering questions when there are any.
Wiki-fu prettiness for character pages is one thing. Wiki-fu setup and customization... whole different animal. @Bobotron offered invaluable help there, too.
Between those two things alone, I've learned one hell of a lot -- and while the project may never be more than a pile of practice and puttering, that never ever has eroded considerably. That's really sorta... huge, even if it doesn't sound like much.
In part, I think this forum helped kick off the real sea change. The open exchange of information is, in itself, huge. While web sites have been around for ages with info on them, the interactivity factor for Q&A alone makes a world of difference.
You'd probably want to get a hold of the Core nWoD rulebook and the GMC rules update (free) -- but other than those, which aren't huge issues to get a hold of, you probably wouldn't need anything else for a mortal these days on any 2e game.
Exactly. It's something that needs modding, one way or another, for MUX use.
Yeah, I hate to say it, but 'every werewolf gets multiple free retainers better than any retainer you can buy otherwise' is a bit... balance-borking.
Vampires have a similar mechanic: they could, IC, mass-thrall huge swaths of people on any given grid. Easily. There's definitely benefits to doing just that, too, IC -- but without a mechanic to represent the benefits of it on a MUX, it's troublesome at best.
@Cobaltasaurus said:
Every goddamned week it's fucking plato's allegory of the cave.
And the stories are fucking depressing.
This gives me flashbacks to a high school English class, in which we were told to search for 'whited sepulcher imagery' in all the things after reading... Heart of Darkness, I think? For the remainder of the year.
It was apparently 'required' in some crazed syllabus from somewhere on high.
Even the teacher mocked it -- at the time, and in front of us.
@The_Supremes said:
I was just thanking him for the clarifiction and well wishes, and noting that given his reaction to our concerns that WoD is a product of the 90s and rife with racist themes and problematic cultural appropriation, our game was very likely a poor fit for him, as a player.
Adding smug condescension to the already holier-than-thou hilarity that is the absurdity of some of the things on the werewolf page?
AND casting aspersions on someone for questioning any of it?
Shit. I wish most games were this honest about the way their staff was going to handle their business.
(In this case, my interpretation is: very poorly, YMMV.)
There is also what TR did: let minor templates take psychic foo.
If immortals are minor templates, there you go. 
I can probably give you some idea of the kind of results you might get.
I was making digital content for about 7 years. Friend of mine was in the copyright/tracking down illegal downloads department, and so I heard some of our stats on that sort of thing. It was for a smaller hobby, I would think, than RPGs, by a considerable margin.
We had about 100-250 illegal downloads for every sale, depending on the product, in a market of about 100k total customers.
So, pretty much... make of that what you will, really. 
I'm pretty sure they know we exist -- or some of them did, way back. I don't know if it's any of the folks that are still around or not. In the early 90s, some of the folks who were in the social circles with employees were M*ers, and I've seen actual conversations about it involving all of the above.
Bear in mind, this is the hazy, muddled recollections of a conversation at a Waffle House from about 20 years ago, but it's how I learned for the first time that M* was a thing, about 2 years or so before I ever logged into one, so it stands out at least vaguely from the haze of WTF that was the college era.
Generally speaking, I don't think they give a crap about us unless we're reproducing the content on the game site/website/etc.. That was the only question I recall being asked even then, really, which is more IP-protection-based than anything else.
The dental work needs to stop making with the ow.
The one crown is.. off-kilter. I think. It occasionally catches oddly and leaves my jaw aching for days, and naturally... it happened again this morning. Cue stabbing pains down the left side of my face until Tuesday, probably. 
Along with zero solid food.
And here I'd been hoping the crowns to replace the teeth cracked by grinding the dang things in my sleep might not suffer the same dire end.
Good luck with that, you wee porcelain bastards. Hope you last until they can replace the chompy-block device.
(It is strangely apt to post this right under your sig, @Cobaltasaurus.)
@HelloRaptor Or for the 80s junkies in the audience, just go full on 'yes that lyric is 'Daleks of god', you did hear that right', with it and forget the rap entirely.
Goddammit. Now it's going to be a youtube 80s video deathspiral of a morning.
@Thenomain said:
Deeper in time. So longer in the Hedge.
And "just because x doesn't mean y"? Eh, I suppose you could say that about a lot but it's not very interesting. I prefer to think of it as: Gentry don't have to worry about that, and the Empathy skill doesn't mean to Gentry what you'd think it means to people. Alien.
Agreed. I think of it more in this context:
The empathy skill for gentry applies to other gentry.
The skill they'd employ to apply to us? Animal Ken.
Not too complicated, really, to wrap the brain around.
That might not be the way it works specifically in game terms -- but it's the analogy I'd draw there. A farmer may have a favorite cow he pats on the head, and a family cat that's a cherished pet, but it doesn't mean he won't send the cow off to slaughter to happily eat it later, or put up with bad behavior from the cat to the extent he might with his own children.
@Arkandel said:
@Wizz Go to Shang and someone has already played that out, only with more ball gags and penis infusions.
And all the dwarves are hermaphrodites, with at least one of them having secretly having been an anime character all along.
@Bennie said:
| If someone wants to play a viking-themed character, why not? Its what they want to do and it doesn't really hurt anything.
It hurts suspension of disbelief.
| If you don't want to deal with that sort of character, don't RP with them.
Not an option when they take over an entire sphere of the game, or more.
| Is a viking really that far afield, all things considered?
Yes, it is.
Then allow me to expand your reality some, @Bennie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbtjJ5P1ZjA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtSOtVZJEFo
This isn't exactly a theme that plenty of people don't have a major interest in in the really real world -- enough of one to adopt aspects of the lifestyle in some fashion. That's really a thing.
That characters in WoD might do the same thing is such an impossibly alien notion? I don't even know where to begin, here.
@Admiral said:
oWoD was about being X, in a world where ABC and D were happening. ABC and D happening narrowed your path a bit and forced you to react to it.
nWoD is about being X. But there's no set ABC and D happening on the side so there's no focus, nothing outside of your own desire to drive your character in any direction.
This depends somewhat on the edition. I picked up the first V:tM1e/softcover right when it hit the shelves, and it didn't have anything like the concept of the Metaplot that emerged much later.
In part, this might have to do with which oWoD approach someone ran across first -- the kind with or without built-in metaplot, or even the concept of one.