World of Darkness (New & Old) - General Discussion Thread

Edit: Oh, that's what you meant. As noted, when people are trying for a specific theme, they can bring that theme across more easily by creating mechanics specifically to suit that theme. If I'm creating a game where the idea is "what happens when the guy who wants to change the world can't", like Genius, it doesn't do me much good to start from "what happens when the guy who wants to change the world can", like Mage or Exalted, and even less to start from "what if you were an undead predator that desperately wishes he was still human", like Vampire. The system is flexible enough that it could be used, but it wouldn't feel right, and the feel of a splat is the entire reason to play it.

edited 8th Mar '12 6:48:59 PM by CountDorku

In Mage: The Awakening your character cannot change the world, because the status quo is enforced by god-like beings who can eat him for breakfast.

When was "you cannot change the world" ever part of mad science fiction? As I seem to recall, most of it deals with the misuse and abuse of science.

That's...not the Mage setting I see. Mages are entirely capable of changing the world. The Seers have been doing it for years! The theme of Mage is that you have to be careful when changing the world. Otherwise you tend to make things suck, see also: the Abyss. As for godlike beings, do you mean the ones you're supposed to fight directly now, when they break in from the Abyss, or the ones you're supposed to fight indirectly, by opposing the schemes of their minions?

As for mad science, well...the single most common plot for a mad scientist goes

1. Come up with revolutionary theory/brilliant invention that could change the world
2. Get laughed at by everyone you talk to
3. Go mad
4. SHOW THEM! SHOW THEM ALL!

In what way is the progress from step 1 to step 2 not "you cannot change the world"?

That doesn't happen to all mad scientists, and shouldn't be mandatory for player characters. It's also not exactly a good fit for the default World of Darkness, which isn't meant to support antics like a crazed lunatic in a giant robot, but things like the Island of Dr. Moreau, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Herbert West: Reanimator or David Cronenberg's The Fly. Subtle stuff.

edited 8th Mar '12 7:32:12 PM by Zenoseiya

But "your dreams come crashing down to earth" is everywhere in mad science horror stories. The heroic ones fall victim to Reed Richards Is Useless. The works of the villainous ones are shunned, and their creations are eventually destroyed by the hero - or they work their way around and destroy the one who created them. Mad scientists get a crap deal, all things considered.

Ah, that's a much better explanation.

Personally I'll believe that hacking an existing game is easier than making a new template AFTER I've seen actually create such a hack. When 'Genius' came out the WW forums were full of big mouthed guys ranting on how you could just use Mage, but I have not seen them make one proper hack that could do what they claimed it could do.

The WW system and template is actually simple enough that making a new template isn't that much more work. I guess if you've played one gameline for so long that you know it inside out it does become easier to just hack that, but then you have invested the time into that.

Someone was working on one last year here and here, but it seems to have petered out. However, the rules were pretty much solid (pattern scouring affects mental attributes and willpower instead of physical attributes and health, gifted scientists cannot enter astral space, etc); the only thing that wasn't fleshed out was Foundations (orders) and Academies (legacies).

I've got this idea where a majority of the Free Council are Gifted Scientists (the rules for these are presented in the Mage Chronicler's Guide), which is part of their philosophical division from the Diamond Orders. A change I'd make is that the Gifted have Paths like Mages do (sans "all the mystical stuff") but refer to these as Foundations, and Legacies are known as Academies (examples include the Zero Coders, Transhuman Adepts, and the Æther Society). However, they have an evil counterpart: The Hegemony; the only good news is that the Hegemony are also enemies of the Seers.

edited 11th Mar '12 4:08:56 PM by Zenoseiya

@Zeno, a while back: you were asking why anyone would bother writing rules when perfectly good ones are already made available by other sources...which, despite my love of ruleset tinkering, is a perfectly legitimate point. Especially in the context of screwing with an existing system (in this case Wo D) instead of just biting the bullet and making your own.

My answer: it's just a different way of solving problems.

When gaming, I as the Storyteller am more apt to just make something up on-the-fly than crack a book, unless I know exactly where in said book to find the answer. Why? Because I get my friends together to roleplay and create stories, not make them wait while I skim through books. If I wanted to do that, I'd go back to college and join a study group.

Now, there are flaws to this approach. It certainly isn't perfect. But it is a way of solving the age-old problem that arises when a player does something and the Storyteller's immediate knowledge of the rules-as-written doesn't cover that situation. The second option is to look up the appropriate rule, which will please some players and irritate others...rather like my answer, which is why I pick like-minded players for the games I run.

To bring this back...certainly, it seems to you that simply using a different ruleset that's already been published instead of wasting a lot of time writing one is a better answer. I can certainly respect that call, and as a Storyteller I've done that very thing. But I can also see the merit in kludging something together and seeing if it works, even if other people have already hit that mark.

Who knows, you might find a better way. DISCLAIMER

One thing I love about White Wolf, and I admit a strength of NWoD versus OWoD, is if someone is inclined it is actually pretty easy to insert new concepts into the universe(s) without having tinker or hack existing stuff. I've written or helped on some minor fan supplements for Wraith The Oblivion and Orpheus back in the day, and fitting new ideas in can be surprisingly easy if you have a good solid concept. Do the templates and writing patterns through the books get a bit monotonous? Sure, but they also provide a good guideline for helping with tone and mechanics.

That said, Zenoseiya, I completely get where you're coming from. Right now, I'm working on a custom God-level character power for my PC in Scion, and it would sure be nice if I could just jury rig from something existing to make sure things were nice and balanced. But no, I have to be all creative to the point where I'm butting my head against a wall because I'm creating something either grossly underpowered, overpowered, or out of character.

And B.J. Zanzibar...wow, that takes me back! Are they active again somewhere? Last I saw, the website hadn't been updated since the early 2000's. And I am extremely disappointed that Fairy: The Cobbling never made it as a game.

edited 10th Mar '12 1:09:40 AM by Doryna

Thank you for explaining my point and providing a good rebuttal.

Likewise.

Moving on, I think the idea of a magical girl game is interesting, but Princess: The Hopeful is too focused on one particular concept as opposed to being open to interpretation. It also suffers from the "mono-myth" problem that plagues Awakening and Forsaken (I'd like to retcon the Atlanteans and Forsaken/Pure as being the demographic equivalent of Orthodox Christianity or Catholicism).

For example, magical girls aren't just limited to Sailor Moon. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed both technically count as being shows about "magical girls." Neither do they need be limited to girls, or teenagers. Limiting examples to anime at the moment, we could draw inspiration from shows like Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective, Bleach, Descendants of Darkness, Yu Yu Hakusho, Devil Hunter Yohko,D.Gray-man, Kingdom Hearts, Puella Magi, Power Rangers, Vampire Knight, or... actually I'm not really familiar with enough to make a decent list (there is actually a World of Darkness: Bleach homebrew). In fact, the first magical girl shows ever made didn't involve violence, but plots more like Touched by an Angel. Perhaps that could be worked in as well?

Anyway, if we want to be really open, we could reduce the theme from "magical girls" to "teenagers and young adults fighting magical criminals/monsters and helping random people solve their personal problems." Maybe even include options for "monster tamers," whose shtick is that they fight the monsters using monsters they've tamed.

However, this "warriors of virtue" shtick needs to be balanced by providing darker elements, but not melodramatic ones. Monster tamers might hold pitfighting tournaments, magical girls/boys might need to purify themselves using the loot dropped by monsters, reapers must struggle against falling prey to their darker natures, everyone must deal with spending lots of time working and being unable to tell their family the truth, etc. Many of the antagonists might also be former humans, in the vein of the Heartless, Nobodies, Akuma, Hollows, Witches, etc. Furthermore, some of these groups might have mentors that gave them the powers, a la Luna, Kyubey, Zordon, Soul Society, Lord Death, Faerie Queene, Genius Locus, etc; who are these guys and what is their true goal?

Since I'm not really that interested in Noun: The Verbing titles, I'd just call this whole thing World of Darkness: Warriors of Virtue. I guess it would sorta be like Exalted (or the Angel/Buffy RPG), but with less obvious Japanese influence and more subtlety.

edited 10th Mar '12 2:26:27 PM by Zenoseiya

I take it you find some flaws then with Senshi: The Merchandising?

My idea is basically an expanded version of Senshi, but Darker and Edgier.

As to Genius, my interest has been piqued enough to try it out. I've noticed that there's a noticeable disconnect between how the game is written and how it is played. The netbook is sad and angsty, while people play it like over-the-top comicbook superheroes.

Now, this isn't enough to completely dissuade me from trying it out, but the only critical reviews of the game I've been able to find haven't been blindly optimistic. I'm no stranger to this, as Pathogen (which I've been working with) was subject to a rather scathing review. I know people are probably going to slam me out of hand for this, but how accurate are these statements?

• Itay K: Where some factions in Mt A use discredited scientific theories (most notable are the Sons of Ether, who cleave to the veracity of their eponymous hypothesis), Genius: the Transgression embraces this trope fully: P Cs are "mad scientists" who perform miracles (so by definition are not scientists) that must conform to a personal, twisted, view of how the world works. The main antagonists are Geniuses who conform to major discredited Natural Philosophy theories - Ether, Phlogiston, Lamarckian and Lysenkoist biology, Orgone Energy, Psionics, Nazi Science, Christian Science, even Alchemy. So not only is there a pseudo-scientific explanation for every "magical" effect, it's also a major plot point. For anyone interested in Science History and the Philosophy of Science, the game manual is a very enjoyable read.
• Malcolm Sheppard: As for Genius itself, it really shows how fan work can do some cool, valuable stuff that wouldn't work for other things. He's ripped some neat things from a couple of corners of Ascension and hooked them up to an original-ish concept. Good splats, good ideas. Fiction is not fantastic, but not horrible (cut back on ellipses!). I haven't seen a homebrew I liked this much since a Zombie O Wo D game ages ago.
  • Yeah, it could benefit from fewer sour grapes about the Wo D. Man, those systems need some serious paring and streamlining too. I suspect that part of the fun isn't necessary from play at the table, but fooling around with character and power builds — RPG Net has a lot of folks who are into builds and prep over playing RP Gs. It could also explore ways in which it could do stuff that really can't be done in the Wo D editorial line. I wouldn't mind cutting down some of the in-game rationales for things and replacing them with multiple options, some of which could break the setting.
• Frank Trollman: Genius is like someone having turned the Sons of Aether from oWoD and made a whole game out of it. That's weird, and incredibly specific, but there's nothing inherently wrong about that. The problems are mostly one of a lack of perspective. Where the designer has incredibly random ideas about what is "powergaming". So if you shoot a death ray at a city and wipe it off the map, that is good clean fun; but if you make a smaller death ray and shoot it at a person, and just that one person dies, that is powergaming cheating that needs to be stopped at all costs.
  • Fundamentally, Genius can't quite come to a decision about what people can and cannot do. So it suffers from "infinite possibility syndrome". First of all, power discrepancies between players are very large, secondly power discrepancies between Genius players and characters of any other splat are very large, and thirdly no one can agree on what benchmarks - if any - the game should have.

edited 12th Mar '12 2:52:43 PM by Zenoseiya

It's not as if Genius is the only game that has this huge gulf between how it's described and how it's usually played. I seem to recall hearing that most people ran Mage The Ascension as a straightforward superhero game.

Pathogen is not a good comparison because apart from a wonderful core idea, Pathogen was only a draft. Short, blatantly lifting powers from Vampire, without a unique core mechanic or a finished major splat all which is no surprise because Pathogen was a work in progress, it hardly started to bloom into something worthy yet.

Actually I don't believe Genius was intended to be angsty. That option was probably added because hey, it's Wo D, but with inspirations like 'Girl Genius' or even 'Bob the Angry Flower', it pretty clearly was intended to be light hearted.

On the comments:

I see that once again these guys just can't tear themselves away from Mage. Seriously hat's up with that?

- "Not enough science!" - oh cry me a river. This is STILL Wo D and not a simulationist RPG. There are games that can do that but the Wo D will never be that game. At least this fangame promotes thinking that you could call scientific and the occassional reference to real world stuff, instead of the usual Science Is Bad + Art Major Physics that is so characteristic of the Wo D.

It is true that Geniuses are incredibly powerful and gameworld breaking. Even a starting character group, if everyone picks the right stats and you have the right party (there's hardly anything you can't do if enough Geniuses cooperate). I think if you play Genius you need to accept that this sort of irresponsibly destroying the universe on Monday, patching it up with time travel on Tuesday, levelling London with a robot army on Wednesday all for fun kind of play is actually the intended mood.

@Zeno the rpg.net guys could probably give you more advice on this. They've got a thread all dedicated to Genius.

edited 11th Mar '12 6:37:45 PM by Vree

Genius doesn't sound anywhere near appropriate for a standard World of Darkness chronicle. Why is it being marketed as a World of Darkness spin-off as opposed to its own game? The author would be better off stripping all the White Wolf IP and selling it.

The game doesn't promote scientific thinking. The powers work entirely on Art Major Physics, which is the entire point of the game, which to me really defeats the whole purpose. The Geniuses aren't scientists, they're mages on steroids with a thin veneer of scientific justification. Even the concept of wonders breaking down when exposed to normal people is the same as magic items breaking down when normal people interact with them. You keep saying this isn't like Mage and that Mage can't cover scientists, but I fail to understand. Why not?

Is there any truth to the claims about clunky rules? I have to say that the page count is excessive, being twice the length of the official rulebooks.

How does it not promote scientific thinking? It specifically points out that the technology is Art Major Physics, and that the non-replicability is why Geniuses can't do regular science. It also mentions that there are Geniuses who extract information on what does work on normal physics in their inventions (as opposed to what's powered by Mania) and then research that.

It also promotes the most important part of scientific thinking - keeping an open mind. The good Geniuses are the ones who know they don't have all the answers, and that their theorems are models of reality rather than Ultimate Truth. The bad ones are the ones who are 100% sure they're right about everything. This is the keystone of the scientific method.

(As another note, twice? Seriously? It's about 500 pages, and the Mage The Awakening core is about 400. Even given that there's more art in Mage, that's still significantly less than "twice".)

edited 12th Mar '12 12:13:44 AM by CountDorku

You, thinking about it, I don't think I've played a single WW game where I or someone else hasn't changed one of the major mechanics in some way. I think Orpheus has come the closest to no changes, but everything else...no playing as other peoples Shadows in Wraith (the ST handled it), no Roads in Dark Ages, no Fate in Demon, no Fatebinding in Scion...they're all cool ideas, and I'm sure someone somewhere has used them, but the groups I've played with have been both pretty casual and putting emphasis on story and streamlined play over mechanics.

Well, either that or making really terrible jokes about stupid things they've done. Something like that.

Look if you wanna open up the Mage VS Genius discussion again there was plenty of that on the WW forums. All of it nonsense. If you like Mage, play Mage. But there is no point to insist that everyone should play Mage.

Genius is easier to learn and handier. The mood is different, the antagonists are different, the mechanics are different, the whole "just like Mage" argument is stupid.

Sure, genius tools break down when people interact with them. Just like Prometheans have a magical barrier that prevents that people interact with them. And how werewolves have a magical aura when normal people see them. And how a Changeling's Mask hides their magic ZOMG JUST LIKE MAGE. It's the Wo D where The Masquerade and Stauts Quo Is God is given, so every magical effect has a handy plot device to unravel it when it comes into contact with the "real world".

Honestly I can't believe that I'm having this discussion again.

Oh yeah I was supposed to give an opinion on the mechanics. Um, can't really do that. Like I said rpg.net. They are the ones who spend the most time playing this. I barely tried so I wouldn't know.

edited 12th Mar '12 4:34:49 AM by Vree

That's what I said. The game explicitly states that what Geniuses do is pseudoscience.

My mistake. It's about twice as long as the core rulebook, and 1/3rd longer than all the fatsplats except Mage.

My failure to understand your answers to my questions does not mean I'm trying to force a viewpoint on anyone (the very idea is laughable).

EDIT: Since you're convinced this is some sort of anti-Genius argument, I'm going to drop the subject to avoid a flame war.

edited 12th Mar '12 7:50:55 AM by Zenoseiya

Let's focus on the official products. What I would like to criticize is that Werewolf and Mage are too reliant on a "mono-myth," in contrast to the other games, which offer questions about the origins of the splats.

Here's a comparison:

• Vampires have competing religions with their own creation myths, just like humans.
• Werewolves are all the descendants of Father Wolf and the spirit of the Moon, expected to prevent spirits from crossing into the material world and to stop humans who produce excessive emotions/sensations/experiences, and the ones who don't are either runaways or monsters.
• Mages are the inheritors of the lost legacy of Atlantis, despite Atlantis having enemies who were also mages.
• Prometheans just appeared, and don't really know the why of it.
• Changelings were kidnapped by the Fair Folk, who fulfill many different folktales at once.
• Hunters are ordinary or once-ordinary people who observe, hunt, or try to redeem supernatural monsters for their own reasons.
• Geists are really, really old ghosts (?) who want to experience sensation, so they make bargains with dying people to inhabit their bodies.

Secrets of the Ruined Temple goes to great lengths to explain that the Atlantis myth is this really complex time-travel paradox thingy, but doesn't provide any insight into the "barbarian" mages. Blasphemies provides alternate creation myths, but doesn't provide any guidelines for evangelism or ideological warfare.

Just to clarify (because it is really confusing unless you've read the book), geists are considered closer to spirits than ghosts. You are correct in that they were once ghosts (e.g. the soul of dead mortals), but these ghosts have been reshaped by their existence the Underworld, becoming so far removed from their mortal identity they represent ideas or archetypes more than people they once were.

I hope I didn't sound too snappish. Truth is, for me and many others Genius WAS an entry point and I probably wouldn't have cared about the rest of the Wo D otherwise. I was always repulsed before that because of the angst and the unmanageable power lists and the fangame found a way to get rid of that and make the game for people like me acceptable. So Genius for us was a success that fulfilled its purpose as a gameline. () And as a (very) amateur game maker I can attest that there are several reasons why someone would do a supplement rather than an original game. Maybe you just want interest and players and find something more mainstream easier to sell, and you realize that you do not need to re invent the wheel just to run a game that you like. But maybe you also feel that a system would be capable of much more than how the developers have been using it and want to experiment with new angles and explore more possibilities, or conquer more audiences. I mean, I didn't use to think that the Storytelling system was much good before new gamelines came out that showed me that. Maybe one of the official games can do that for some, but trying new directions and adding fresh blood and pushing something beyond its usual limits is just as valid game developing work as trying to build something from scratch entirely with your own hands. Indie games have their niche, and there is glory in doing something that is just yours or trying to start something big, and ask any developer or artist or anyone with some proficiency at their job and they'll surely have their own little ideas and side or pet projects, but most of the time they'll be happy to work on something that someone else had created. And that is all fine because the most solid things aren't born from one person's work but through cooperation, often decades of marketing and testing (as with Vampire, D&D, Magic and the like). I can't think of a way to un-Wo Dize Genius without stripping it of at least 50% of the content, and I really really apologize for snapping but it kind of sounds like an insult when you ignore the work on that other 50% content, kinda like telling a teacher that he only has that job because he couldn't have made it into research. I mean I do remember stuff like the Leviathan: The Tempest guys trying to guess how size (which is really clunky in the Wo D) can be made work and figuring out how to balance their splat against other splats and making that work. Even I as I've been trying to write Pathogen run into many small rules in the Storytelling system that frankly just annoy me. And when that happens, you DO consider if you wouldn't be better off just changing them and make your own system. And maybe one day I -will- make an adaptation for Pathogen to a system I made (though right now I don't even have much time for the original as it is). But right now that's not the undertaking that we've started.

I hope that sounded like an explanation to your question and not just a rant because that first one was what I intended. xD

It's an interesting thing, most Wo D players I've known stick very strictly to one, maybe two ganmelines. I think the Werewolf revamp was welcome (Father Wolf/Luna and the Pure do provide you with a bit of framework that is nevertheless not too limiting). Nobody much liked Atlantis of course.

I don't have a problem with Atlantis; it makes a lot of thematic sense from an occult perspective, even if it's just a rip-off of that old French RPG Nephilim. I just dislike the fact that all modern mages claim descent from Atlantis, when the book states that Atlantis had magical wars with non-Atlantean mages. What happened to all those other mages? Why are all mages forced to join the Diamond Orders or the Seers?

The same goes for Werewolf. Why are all werewolves forced to join the Forsaken or the Pure? What about werewolves with other worldviews? Do they exist?

I'd prefer a political system closer to that presented in Vampire and Hunter (which is an expansion of Vampire's system).