Pathogen: The Infected

Well that was good while it lasted >_<

Does Nwo D have quick start rules? White Wolf has great fluff (lore and world building) but they are plainly needlessly obtrusive with their crunch (clear notarisation on their rules). I had serious difficulty just deciphering the fonts choice.

Can anyone here read cursive?

edited 18th Apr '14 8:32:11 PM by joeyjojo

hashtagsarestupid

Well at least you are here, joey. ;p I can work with that.

The Wo D Storytelling system is really ridiculously simple. Every now and then the book is made avaliable for free on Drive Thru RPG too; I'd be surprised if anyone here who honestly tries had trouble acquiring it.

The basics: You roll a number of 10-sided dice and try to roll 8 or higher. If you ever roll any 10s, you can roll an extra die for each. This gives a nice simple 3.33~ in 10 (ie. 1:3) chance for a success on any one die. To decide how many dice you can roll, you just add up any bonus you bring (eg. attribute + skill + equipment) and subtract any negative modifiers that are affecting the roll (eg. wounded + poor light). Only 1 success is needed on practically any task. (Though you get a "critical success" for going as high as 5.)

Fansplats for the Wo D operate under the Dark Pack agreement, which basically says: do what you want, as long as you do not copy over too many words from official published material and mark that your fansplat requres the original World Of Darkness core rules.

Project Pathogen was a by product of the 'fansplat renaissance' a few years ago, brought about by hugely ambitious fan-projects like Genius: the Transgression (for my money the best Wo D fangame to date, which also gained notoriety on TV Tropes) and its successors (the Tvtropes Wo D page has a full list).

What my feeling is that there is a huge potential in the Wo D system, which is really fun and easily customizable, but both its owners and even fans fail to realize it. See, WW's bane is that it has to keep publishing supplements to make revenue. So the result is that you get these huge-ass, unwieldy power lists that force you to search through several books to find what decribes best what you'd need for your character. On the other hand, games like Genius can give you the keys of the kingdom right of the bat, or even: just let you build your own powers. Because like I said, the Wo D system is amazingly easy is flexible and easy to understand like that. Since everything you can do practically boils down to rolling some extra die, you are never confused about the value of different bonuses compared to each other. Translating everything into exp and back is a breeze.

It should be noted that White Wolf recently became Onyx Path and released a series of semi-reboots for its books, usually referred to as the God-Machine Chronicle Update or GMC (all of the books have ...Chronicle somewhere in their name, and are so far: The God-Machine Chronicle; Demon The Descent; Blood And Smoke - The Stryx Chronicle (vampire rehash); Mortal Remains (hunter rehash). These are more like updated setting/system rules than a new world, that change some core parts of the system, some good some bad, while leave other critiqued parts untouched, so many people like me have a love-hate relationship with them.

Regardless, I currently lean towards using GMC as the basis (Zenoseya (see this thread) will probably abandon me for it). The reason is simple. Under the Dark Pack, I am unable to touch any of the core rules, even though I'd soo like to re tweak them. Since GMC is an "official" update to the core rules, it's the second best thing without forcing me to breah the contract.

You may ask why we don't just convert all of this our/my own system. No constraints for us and everyone in this thread would have easy access right? The question is not as naive as it seems - I could probably do it (like many players, I've secretly been compiling my own system(s) for years). However, Pathogen was never intended as anything more than a Wo D fangame, and carries all kinds of unspoken assumptions within it that result from being created for such a system/world. If I ever tried to made my own independent body horror game (I won't :p), it would probably be very different. (different fluff, mechanics etc. - a lot of things I despise like long power lists would be BAM, gone. I'm a big fan of cinematic realism and player custom-built powers, and bad at writing Wo D-level game fiction, so it'd be more like a toolbox, too.) Also as a fangame we benefit from the support and advice of the Wo D gaming community. A pure homebrew would have to rally its own fans, do its own advertising to make itself noticed - a lot of stuff that you can get as a mere fansplat for free.

Regardless - I too feel a bit at the crossroads with all of this. I definitely want to finish the project, but I also feel like I am capable of working on my own games at this point. (None of those projects have even started up yet, so I may be all talk...Among them, there was an idea for a 8-bit video game RPG (suggested as "Kid Radd:the RPG" by a poster here on these very boards), a new Dungeons and Discourses (a game about dungeon crawling and hardcore philosophy dreamed up by Aaron Diaz and attempted to realize by at least 3 different people by now, but I think I could put an unique spin on it) and a sort heartbreaker (chimera of different RP Gs) wargame combinging ROSE Online/Wo D that I wanted since I was 10. :p)

The problem with Pathogen for me is that it did not start with any specific identity. It was a mix of different types of body horror movies, all thrown together: mechanical, biological, existential; sci-fi and modern. These all coexist in the rules. But we don't know what impression the game is ultimately intended to convey. Some years ago I started to work on a Robot and an Alien Wo D game out of pure frustration, and I immediately know who those guys are, what their goals are, what sort of difficulties they are facing. With Pathogen you have a bit more difficult time with that.

But perhaps I do not even need to overthink that. You see when Adam Thaxton wrote Pathogen, he added a lot of great stuff. About regular Joes stuck with existential horror and anxiety. About realizing zhe horror in the things your life was built on. About horror not played out on the outside, but on the inside. Maybe it's not classic Wo D, but guess what: "classic Wo D" is bullsh*t. Noone, NOT EVEN White Wolf keeps faithful to their own rules; in fact they MUSTN'T in order to be able to innovate. When they gave us "Promethean" they abandoned the idea of social structures for supernatural characters. Recently, "Mummy The Curse" played hell with the seemingly unbreakable order of the power and morality stats. When I wanted to show a home rule hack for detailed combat rules, everyone shouted at me for adding needless complexity to the system; then GMC came out and it did the very same thing. You can't expect not to break some rules and trample on a few toes.

Well that turned into some blog post. I'll try to make my next post more Pathogen-relevant. (Another small complaint: the TV Tropes forum format seem to be ill fit to long discussions (anything long I post ends up looking ugly and stretches the page), another reason I've been hesitant to post long discussions. But it does have great community. That makes it worth a little pain.)

edited 19th May '14 4:59:44 AM by Vree

Yeah I agree with you there on Pathogen not quite having an identity.

Vree: That's a damn good run down of the nwod rules. That actually helps a lot.

hashtagsarestupid

Yeah, pretty much - when I wrote it, I was trying to cover the body horror stuff with a really broad brush, and the problem with body horror is that is usually gets played off as very psychological, despite the gore present in the genre, and there is so much goddamn variety.

Originally, I had been working on using them as a loosely defined antagonist faction related to a bioterrorism project, but then, one of my players approached me with intent to play one of the damn things, so I started trying to bang out something that worked as a hotfix. I really do like the idea of someday working it out into a larger, more cohesive splat, and definitely throwing it up in there with the God Machine rules update - Infected are actually pretty weak as written because I tend to design very conservatively.

I think nowadays I'd give them a mutation form as a matter of course, a few powers to pick using it, and then give them some powers with very diseasey-sounding names that work like unfolding trees - one dot in this leads to either this two dot or this two dot, with rules for combining them or taking only one or the other - so you have a nested hierachy of power design, then possibly just using vector and philosophy as the splat axes.

If that guard used to be an adventurer like me, we have to leave this town right the hell now.

Whoo... welcome back. Whenever I think this thread is dead some one brings it back again. It's like smallpox

I don't know why but I really like the idea of the players being disease carriers trying to hide from ethnically questionable medical authorities trying to hunt them down because the clear and present risk they pose to the entire human race. That's some really good Black-and-Grey Morality right there.

edited 14th Jul '14 6:55:31 AM by joeyjojo

hashtagsarestupid

The vast majority of the "fansplat renaissance" generally suffered from being written by too many people at once or having really clunky rules. The few that didn't usually predated the renaissance by several years.

edited 16th Jul '14 4:37:49 PM by Zenoseiya

Museum Vrolik

Just leaving the name here...

Ew...

With contagion panic in the states and Halloween full swing, I think this is an appropriate time for thread Nerco don't you?

hashtagsarestupid

It's true.

After going through the God-Machine rules, I like conditions and tilts a lot. One of the things I had been thinking about is revisiting Pathogen with the idea that powers branched off each other, like everything is connected to a tree, and where you start on the tree is related to how you initially caught it, then spreading out from there. I guess that'd make the chart of hierarchies look more like a game of Chinese checkers rather than a tree of life, but I'd still like to figure out some way to make that work. Like having a generalized "basal" power that gets more specific is you develop it.

If that guard used to be an adventurer like me, we have to leave this town right the hell now.

Oh cool that there's still life!

Not versed in god machine what we're you thinking of for 'basal' rules? Maybe have you stain go thematically with your vector. Blood or insect powers if you're bite by a bug, gastro big eater power if you got it from soiled food, caught it sexually?... Well you get the idea.

edited 12th Nov '14 3:36:41 AM by joeyjojo

hashtagsarestupid

The downside of going GMC is of course, is that it is more confusing to use two books. However, according to the Dark Pact agreement, we are not allowed to reprint more than 1000 words from the original material.

Thread Necro: Infected will be making it in to The Hurt Locker as a minor template. FAN ASCENSION VICTORY

If that guard used to be an adventurer like me, we have to leave this town right the hell now.

Not sure if anyone else has done this or not, but I've come up with a new Vector(!);

The Starved

A piece of mouldy cheese, a slice of stale bread, a portion of rotten meat, a dash of out-of-date milk. All eatable sources of food that are less than preferable. Pathogenic microorganisms, however, find such things to be reproductive havens.

Those of the Starved most frequently share tales of, be it from necessity, an idiotic dare or otherwise, eating something that they, in hindsight, REALLY shouldn't have. They most frequently suffer extreme hunger pangs, being driven to devour all available organic and/or eatable matter in their immediate vicinity. The most likely way to become one is to consume something the Starved in question made, or has already partially eaten.

Primary Subversion: Flesh

We are all mad. Some just don’t show it as much as others.