Rehabbing WoD, but keeping it's spirit

[BoxCrayonTales]

And if your game is about blowing away intelligent face-eating monsters, that works. WoD, however, posits that you play the intelligent face-eating monsters, and thus the better source material is things like Paradise Lost, Hellboy, and seriously Metalocalypse.

I would make a distinction between demons suitable for PC use and those suitable only as NPCs. Note: When I say "evil" below, I mean in the humanistic moral sense.

PC-suitable demons are those with an approximation of human psychology (generally because they're stuck in human bodies). They are capable of doing things other than furthering the cause of evil. They can aspire to overthrow the godhead for lofty philosophical reasons, they can become tempters and punishers of sinners, they can try to become angels through good deeds, and so on. If they become too emo or jerks or whatever they become evil NPCs.

NPC-only demons are irredeemably evil monsters with no ounce of humanity. They exist to satisfy themselves to the detriment of others, whether as ravenous monsters or cunning lawyers. They tempt, they steal, they lie, etc. These are the demons as generally thought of by most people: generic evil spirits. The traditional evil demons of myth are the antagonists of the demon splat.

I suppose some groups might want to play as irredeemably evil monsters who go around callously manipulating people and making bad stuff happen, but I don't think we need to put any more than a sidebar of detail into that.

Does that sound agreeable?

[Prak]

Not really, no

[BoxCrayonTales]

Not really, no

What I suggested is the exact same setup as Demon: The Fallen, except with the Raveners made NPCs and the Lancea Sanctum added as a PC faction. Demon: The Fallen already had the same setup as Vampire: The Masquerade (which was itself ripped off from Nightlife, but no one remembers that).

Do you want demons as PCs? Do you feel they're too similar to vampires? How do you intend to distinguish them?

[Prak]

For this rehab of WoD, while I like DtF, I'm not sold that it needs to include Demons. And my point was that the characters you're splitting off into NPC status are the sort of characters explicitly supported by the headliner Storyteller game

Demon the Fallen was a game that was about EITHER trying to get the band back together to take the fight back to Heaven, while embroiled in shitty politics because White Wolf, OR running around fighting bigger, badder demons. Effectively, it was about being a vampire and a werewolf.

[Username17]

I am aware of those sources. D&D based its depiction of devils and demons around them.

What you're saying we should do is more or less write a duplicate of D&D's Fiendish Codex that details dozens of demon lords and their domains and various other things tangential to them. We're writing all that because we expect it to come up in adventures often enough to justify it. We expect PCs to play politics with demons and survive.

If I wanted that, I would play D&D. If I wanted to play "summon ridiculous-looking demons to do random weird shit for me" I would play Nephilim, which has a summoning system designed to do just that.

This is a ridiculous argument and you've completely lost the plot if you're making it. We're talking about World of Darkness, where the basic conceit is that monsters in general are subdivided into political and taxonomic groups and there are various monsters who are powerful in a magical and political sense that lead and oppose various groups. That's seriously the central conceit of the entire setting.

Is it too "Dungeons & Dragons" to split pretty vampires from nosferatu? Is it too "Dungeons & Dragons" to split werewolves from weretigers? Is it too "Dungeons & Dragons" to have fifteen different classes of wizard? Of course not! Because having a myriad of flavors of monsters who all have slightly different power sets as well as different political groups and leaders is absolutely fundamental to the World of Darkness experience.

Basically, you're drawing a line that for some reason or another we shouldn't treat the Demons like they were a World of Darkness splat at all, and replace them with boring antagonists that have uninteresting motivations. And indeed, you are the person demanding the D&D treatment. In D&D, Demons and Vampires are "Always Chaotic Evil" and that's the end of it - while in World of Darkness the monsters are the protagonists and have motivations and political differences and hang out in urban environments pursuing goals and making alliances and friendships.

---

I should point out that actually I don't even like Demon the Fallen and think it's cosmology and its aggressively Christian wankery were pretty bad. But there are lots of Infernalists of various flavors in World of Darkness and I take it as given that if you were going to do a World of Darkness reboot that you'd end up with a lot of teams who were on Team Demon. And at least all but one of them should be more interesting than killfuck soulshitter. Because you only need one of those, and they might not even be infernalists.

-Username17

[Occluded Sun]

I think it's difficult taking Frank Trollman's ideas about preserving the flavor of the WoD seriously when he simply doesn't 'get' the Mage line.

Okay, no one's going to force you to play it... but you can't exactly offer helpful suggestions about it, either.

Mage is about humanity getting so engrossed in a RPG that it's forgotten the difference between reality and the game... and a few players who remember enough to be able to cheat by changing some dice rolls occasionally.

[hyzmarca]

Old Ones
-"They Changed it now it sucks."
The Old Ones predate the current universe. The Old Ones do not like the current universe. . Their ultimate goal is to destroy the current universe and replace it with a revival of their own. Their ability to do this is limited because they're trapped in Oblivion. They have to work through agents and to this end they sponsor the Nephandi and related groups.

Demons
-"This place is a prison. I'm its warden."
Many cultures have conceptions of places where the wicked are punished. All of them are right. Every hell exists. Demon is a collective term for the natural and naturalized citizens of the Hells. Some are tempters of men who seek to fill their cages. Others are just doing their jobs. Still others want to overthrow the system and install something better.

Yes, that is a big conceptual space, but we only care about the hells that we're directly interacting with and we're probably only interacting with them if they'[re culturally appropriate for the characters. So you only have to worry about Chinese Hell if you're playing as a Kuei-jin. But Chinese Hell and Christian Hell have to exist side-by-side because both Canites and Kuei-jin are perfectly valid choices with perfectly valid cosmologies.

Wraiths
-"This whole Limbo thing is frightfully boring."
The Underworld is a place of neither punishment nor reward. It simply is. Wraiths are souls that weren't evil enough to get sent straight to Hell (or perhaps found a way to avoid that fate, or escaped) but aren't given any sort of eternal reward or reincarnation, either. Many of them are bound by fetters from their own life, some even from several lives. Within the underworld they have their own civilization , built over thousands of years, and as complex as any mortal society. On Earth they're restless ghosts, striving to put right what once went wrong or to wreck their vengeance upon the living.

[Occluded Sun]

Technically there's no such thing as 'Christian Hell'. There are many different cultural conceptions of punishment-after-death, and a few existence-after-death, but that's all.

[BoxCrayonTales]

But there are lots of Infernalists of various flavors in World of Darkness and I take it as given that if you were going to do a World of Darkness reboot that you'd end up with a lot of teams who were on Team Demon. And at least all but one of them should be more interesting than killfuck soulshitter. Because you only need one of those, and they might not even be infernalists.

I'm not suggesting that and I don't like the "killfuck soulshitter" idea. Even in Demon: The Fallen the Raveners had more complex plans than that. They manipulate people with magic and trickery for the ultimate purpose of bringing down the world, not go around killing everything that moves at first opportunity.

Wraiths
-"This whole Limbo thing is frightfully boring."
The Underworld is a place of neither punishment nor reward. It simply is. Wraiths are souls that weren't evil enough to get sent straight to Hell (or perhaps found a way to avoid that fate, or escaped) but aren't given any sort of eternal reward or reincarnation, either. Many of them are bound by fetters from their own life, some even from several lives. Within the underworld they have their own civilization , built over thousands of years, and as complex as any mortal society. On Earth they're restless ghosts, striving to put right what once went wrong or to wreck their vengeance upon the living.

The problem I see with this is that you are still roboticly copying world of darkness' misuse of the word "underworld" as a prison plane without any self-awareness. In the real world, most people think of the underworld in either the sense of "criminal underworld" or the mythological underground place everyone goes to after death. When most people think of ghosts, they think "restless souls trapped on Earth." They do not think the underworld cohabitates with the everyday world and that's where ghosts live, because to them ghosts are characterized by refusing to pass onto the underworld like most dead people do.

But aside from that I don't much disagree with anything else you've said. Though I would steer away from having hells distinguished by culture, because that way lies exoticism, orientalism and the general racism of the world of darkness. I would steer away from making hell definable at all, even to demons themselves. Otherwise you're going to devote conceptual space to writing a very long travel brochure and political manifesto.

[Whipstitch]

I think it's difficult taking Frank Trollman's ideas about preserving the flavor of the WoD seriously when he simply doesn't 'get' the Mage line.

Okay, no one's going to force you to play it... but you can't exactly offer helpful suggestions about it, either.

Mage is about humanity getting so engrossed in a RPG that it's forgotten the difference between reality and the game... and a few players who remember enough to be able to cheat by changing some dice rolls occasionally.

Dude, being able to summarize something by cutting corners and being able to grok all its implications are two completely different things. For example, the first Matrix movie has a relatively simple setting because while one world is an illusion the people who are aware of that fact are still capable of agreeing on what the "real" world is actually like. Mage does not have that advantage. Instead, people argue about the nature of reality because they are in fact given incentive to do so--a big theme of setting is that reality conforms to what people believe the rules are, and the most powerful faction, the Council of Rules Lawyers Technocracy won that argument so hard that reality is now their bitch. That'd make for a pretty cool Zelazny or Philip K. Dick story but in a cooperative setting where people are trying to decide what to do with their time without stepping on eachother's toes it's completely bugfuck to deal with.

[Occluded Sun]

People play lots of games where the rules are entirely of their own creation without stepping on each other's toes. No one plays chess and tries to sneak in the rules of tennis.

In Mage, you're roleplaying a character that is roleplaying 'reality'. It's no different than playing a raksha, just without full awareness of the metacognition.

[Whipstitch]

this fucking guy right here

[Occluded Sun]

If for some reason you need your character to know what the actual reality is like, you can just look around the table at your fellow gamers. Because that IS the true reality behind the delusion.

Vampire is much harder to play, since presumably none of the players are undead monsters of the night.

[erik]

People play lots of games where the rules are entirely of their own creation without stepping on each other's toes. No one plays chess and tries to sneak in the rules of tennis.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/german-che ... ampionship

This fucking guy.

[Whipstitch]

Look man, I get it. Mage is ran by improv rules--nobody ever objects to anything because people have agreed not to object to things. Whatever. The point remains that it's still a shitty roadblock to creating a unified WoD game because the rest of the lines do not fucking work like that.

[Occluded Sun]

No, there were rules as to how Mages could break the rules. They weren't very good rules, but they were there.

[Whipstitch]

The rules-for-breaking-the-rules you're talking about are also tied in with a cosmology that basically says mages are better than you because they know the score, a concept which does an extremely thorough job of shitting on other supernaturals, particularly zealous ones like the Garou.

[Occluded Sun]

One of the basic concepts of the WoD is: You're Special. So every type of PC is, in its own line, Special - and the total focus of attention. It's rather like superhero comics where each character faces threats that they're competent to, and never the ones they aren't. Except crossovers.

There really weren't crossovers in the WoD.

[Whipstitch]

And with that admission please explain why again you were slagging Frank for talking about how Mage doesn't play nice with others?

[Prak]

Can people stop engaging Occluded Sun, at least in my thread? We all know that he is, at best, an obstacle to productive conversation, if not an outright enemy of it, so why is anyone bothering to respond?

Shit, he actually brought up a good point, even if it kind of doesn't matter. I recant.

[fectin]

Demons aren't real, so nobody can say what is true about them. I'm basing my depiction on the Bible, the Malleus Maleficarum, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Oh, that makes way more sense. You're basing your ideas on demons on, like, the three worst books to use to talk about demons in fantasy gaming and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

You are selling the Catholic Encyclopedia way, way short.

From the entry on demons:

But though the word demon is now practically restricted to this sinister sense, it was otherwise with the earlier usage of the Greek writers. The word, which is apparently derived from daio "to divide" or "apportion", originally meant a divine being; it was occasionally applied to the higher gods and goddesses, but was more generally used to denote spiritual beings of a lower order coming between gods and men. For the most part these were beneficent beings, and their office was somewhat analogous to that of the angels in Christian theology.

Or this one, from the separate article on demonology, in the subsection on early christian demonology (chosen mostly by scrolling about halfway down and reading at random):

According to his account, the angels were not overpowered with the passion of sensual love while they were as yet in their purely spiritual state; but when they looked down and witnessed the wickedness and ingratitude of men whose sins were defiling the fair creation of God, they asked of their Creator that they might be endowed with bodies like those of men, so that coming down to earth, they might set things right and lead a righteous life in the visible creation. Their wish was granted, they were clothed in bodies and came down to dwell on earth. But now they found that with their raiment of mortal flesh they had acquired also the weakness and passions which had wrought such havoc in men

Neither of those is at all simplistic, and neither demands pure-evil demons. In fact, either passage provides a reasonably interesting foundation of role-playing material that you could build an angsty character on.

Neither passage is remotely similar to what Crayon said though, so I can easily see why you might be confused.

[Prak]

Huh. I'm pretty sure my dad, being a deacon, has a copy of the Catholic Encyclopedia, but I figured going and checking what it said about demons could only be mind numbing at best. That's pretty interesting, actually, but, yeah, support's Crayon's assertion about as well as the bible, the book in which Satan is shown to have the motivation of wanting to fuck with God, and educate God's thoughtslaves, rather than purely to revel in depravity.

[Occluded Sun]

And with that admission please explain why again you were slagging Frank for talking about how Mage doesn't play nice with others?

Because that's not what Frank was saying, and not why I criticized what he was saying.

***

It's worth noting that the Job story involves 'Satan', which means 'adversary'. Some people argue that it's not the same entity as 'Lucifer'. Satan would be a prosecuting attorney-like angel, tasked with testing parts of Creation. That interpretation would completely eliminate the "Why would God indulge evil in persecuting Job?" question - Satan was doing his job in questioning the virtue of Job, and God's actions an example of listening to the experts you hire.

[Prak]

well, I mean, yes, that's the Jewish perspective on Satan. But so far as I know, judaism does not believe in fallen/rebel angels, so... if we were to go with that interpretation, demon characters either don't exist, or are indistinct from playing a fomor/gorgon (wyld possessed).

and excuse me while I edit a previous post because that was actually a good point.

[Username17]

As the Ars Magica thread demonstrably showed, people can't really agree on what would happen if reality had one alternate paradigm. If everyone has a different reality paradigm they are attempting to explain, you're really just playing solipsism the game. Which is what Mage was, of course. It was a game about being a solipsistic douche who describes their own ideal world to other people who do not and can not understand what the fuck they are talking about.


This is Mage.

So yes, I "get" Mage, but I also "get" how it wasn't actually playable in the sense that even splats like Wraith were "playable." Mage has a certain appeal, and it will always have a certain amount of fans (especially in the book collector crowd), but it was never something that could be or even was intended to be a game in the sense that the other lines were.

-Username17