Revising the World of Darkness

[fbmf]

Are we talking "Worse than Orpheus"? I fucking hated that game even more than Werewolf and Vampire.

Anyway, I agree that the important thing about Promethians does seem to be "They were created. Made into existence. They are unique, and also not accepted." Even the precursor to the Buffybot had that problem, with the maker eventually deciding "Nah, I want a real woman." and the love-bot 2000 went batshit in attempting to track him down and kill off all opposition (women).

And I seriously wish Werewolf WAS based on the more common legends. "You're a werewolf. At night, you turn into a huge beast and go on a rampage. Because it's a game, we'll give you more control over when you turn into the beast and some ability to not rampage. But that's mostly what you have to do. Go for it, eat people."

[fbmf]

But remember, that's only one piece of the source material, Frankenstein's Monster, you're completely looking past Rabbi Loew's Golem, Osiris, Galatea, and folk lore of shamans being torn apart by spirits then stitched back together.

No. I'm not. Rabbi Loew's Golem follows the same general trend as Frankenstein's Monster. It can't possibly make more of its kind. And while initially Rabbi Loew accepts his creation and the Golem runs around Prague fighting crime and helping out, eventually society rejects it and the Golem and society have a war. The Golem grows bigger and more dangerous and eventually the Rabbi kills it with the whole word swapping thing. Galatea is actually quite a tragic story in which Pygmalion is already married and brings his statue to life with love only to return to his wife, leaving Galatea so rejected that she turns back into a statue. All follow a very similar pattern where the creator rejects the created, with the child eventually dying unloved and without a legacy. The only real difference is that in Frankenstein the creature outlives the creator and in the others the father stands over the body of the child.

There's also the fact that Frankenstein's Monster could have made more Frankies if really wanted to, especially since he has Victor's Journal.

Osiris isn't a Promethean story at all. Neither are Tupilaks. These are real living dudes with real ties to parents, families and children who are brought back from the dead using magic. They have no reason or basis to even be in the Promethean book because they are a completely unrelated story. Mummies are blessed/cursed with ever livingness. They are Vampires, Sorcerers, or Zombies depending upon which version of the story you are telling, but in no case do they stand in for Prometheans because they fucking well aren't children in a metaphorical sense upon their transformation into that state. For one thing, they aren't created, they are transformed. That's super important, god damn it.

Hell, in the actual other source material for this sort of thing (ex.: Metropolis, the Snow Child), the created never has children. Hell, even Frosty the Snowman fucking dies and his creators forget about him.

My girlfriend actually brought to mind another source material that really blows this all to hell, Pinocchio. He is a promethian, and in fact his story is the entire point to the promethian game, become a real boy and breed true without having to make a new promethian.

The whole thing about debilitating presence actually makes sense when you look at them as unnatural things which should not be and thus disturb reality to the point where even vampires and werewolves can't function right around them.

I don't give a flying rat's ass if it makes sense in the context of the game fiction they wrote, it's unplayable. And that means that it completely and utterly fails as game fiction.

You can't have a cooperative storytelling game if one of the players has the disadvantage that the other players don't function quite right. That's bullshit. The story is over before it begins. The game is built around the conceit that the players work together and hang out together, because otherwise there isn't a game.

It's forced roleplaying, can you really expect different from WW? I didn't say it was good, just explained it.

If Vampire were true to the source material...

I'm going to stop you right there. Vampire source material is a lot... bigger than Promethean source material. It has a lot of variation in it. The Vampire Encyclopedia is over nine hundred pages long. There is a fuck tonne of vampire source material, and WoD, both new and old, seriously does cleave to some of it. Even the whole bullshit Jyhad thing they had for oWoD had strong ties to real source material.

Vampire has a lot of problems, but failing to get "the point" of vampirism is not one of them.

Yeah, and most of it deals with the vampires being murderous psychos.

[fbmf]

There's also the fact that Frankenstein's Monster could have made more Frankies if really wanted to, especially since he has Victor's Journal.

No he could not. That was the major sticking point. The creature wanted victor to make another creature or two so that he could have company. The deal that the creature offered was that he would leave human civilization forever and make a civilization of their own off in the wilderness if Victor would only make him a wife.

And Victor considered doing this for a while and even begins on the project. But before the second creature is finished, he has second thoughts and destroys the new monster and his original creature swears vengeance.

The monster sees Victor dead and then goes out on the ice to die.

---

Point is: Frankenstein's monster can't make another monster, whether he has the book or not. And he feels despondent enough to kill himself when he is rejected by humanity, because he knows that he can't ever find his own kind because there aren't any.

But she's right. Pinocchio is the same story as Galatea except that the creator does not abandon his work and it has a happy ending. Although interesting note: the original Pinocchio has an unhappy ending as Pinocchio is killed and the wood tossed aside. The author wrote a second part where fairies give him a second chance and he eventually is turned into a real boy (but of course, never makes an army of puppet people to make that happen).

-Username17

[fbmf]

To be clearer: the well-known Pinocchio is the story that should not happen in-game. It's at best a Golconda-like pipe-dream (yeah, I'm aware there's stuff on playing however the hell the people who got it had; yay for genre-destruction, at least until they started hinting Golconda might make you less human).

[fbmf]

To be clearer: the well-known Pinocchio is the story that should not happen in-game. It's at best a Golconda-like pipe-dream (yeah, I'm aware there's stuff on playing however the hell the people who got it had; yay for genre-destruction, at least until they started hinting Golconda might make you less human).

Welp, sure wasn't my assamite. Diablerized too much in an attempt to become more human, or at least gain the respect of, but ended up becoming more of a monster than most other vampires.

[fbmf]

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Here's the thread back, near as I can make it work. I am sorry for the delay. This weekend has really sucked.
[/TGFBS]

[Koumei]

Thanks, fbmf! That looked like a lot of annoying work.

Can I ask for a reminder of what Golconda is, again? Was that the mythical "reach humanity 10 and above, you might suddenly turn human again"?

[JonSetanta]

Eeesh, it's messy, but that works. Thanks FBMF.

[Voss]

Thanks, fbmf! That looked like a lot of annoying work.

Can I ask for a reminder of what Golconda is, again? Was that the mythical "reach humanity 10 and above, you might suddenly turn human again"?

Well... more a basic promise of some sort of redemption for vampires that don't really need it. Becoming human again was one of the rumored possibilities, but it was pretty wacky, since it required being a better person than most humans. They kept it really vague for quite a while, other possibilities including losing the necessity for blood and assorted other things that didn't really matter since it was more fun just to be immortal and awesome rather than angsting about the state of your soul.

[Username17]

Golconda was indeed a pretty lame set of rules for becoming a real boy again. Also it's a real place in India, so I'm not sure what that's about. Like the original Vampire's purposeful misspelling or mispronunciation of words from jihad to bruja. Mark *Heigan apparently thought that uniquing up normal words made you sound ancient and mysterious in the modern world rather than making you sound like a jack ass.

Anyway, I've been thinking, and I think that the primary difference between different supernatural types should be resource management. Sure, lycanthropes start with a specific power set where they can all turn into animals (wolves, rats, or great cats as it happens), but a vampire can turn into a bat with the right magic, so it's not really that big of a deal.

But if:

• A Vampire has a potentially large power point pool, which degrades over time and requires blood drinking to refill.
• A Witch has a power point pool which refills upon doing magic rituals like a D&D Wizard.
• A Leviathan gains power points to spend every day no matter what she does.
• A Lycanthrope gets power points every night depending upon the moon phase.
• A Promethean gets a small number of power points to spend every scene.
• A Transhuman does not have to spend power points to activate powers and cannot juice herself by spending additional power points.

This makes each of the different supernaturals have a different "feel" over and above having different selections of disciplines.

-Username17

[UmaroVI]

That seems like a good idea, Frank, but I'd hesitate over some of those specific implementations. Leviathan, Promethian, and Transhuman all seem good, but in a mixed group I think Vampire, Witch (maybe) and Lycanthrope might be problematic.

In a party, what the Vampire refill method might well lead to is "hold on guys, I need to go get some blood, see you in an hour." The GM gets put in the position of either letting the player just go get blood, which is fine for gameplay speed, but makes the vampire potentially too powerful compared to the other types, or making it a "mini-adventure," which is annoying for everyone else. In a Vampire-Only game, making getting blood fast and easy for the player works; it's balanced. I can see it being problematic in a mixed group.

Witch has, I think, similar issues depending on implementation; I'd just stay away from variations on "everyone wait around while I do my magic ritual." I can see this one working OK though.

Lycanthrope, the main problem is the whole "well, this session I suck, that session I'm awesome, now next session I'm OK." Also, it sorta forces the GM to vary the time of month from session to session, when they may not want to do that.


Hmm, some alternative ideas:

Lycanthropes, maybe play up the "rage" aspect a bit, and have some regeneration come every night (maybe with a small bonus for moon phase, just enough to be a nice bonus with the fool moon and a minor penalty with the null moon), and then give lycanthropes back some power every time they kill an "important foe" (ie, as part of the game session, not "I'm going to wander around and massacre bums").

Actually, I guess just making it a little dependant on moon phase - enough for flavor - but not so much to create large swings in power from one game session to the next. I kinda like the idea of a Werewolf getting more frenzied as they kill people, though.

Witch: Maybe have the witch be allotted a certain amount of magical energy on a "per task" basis, ie, they get power points per "game session." Of course, this is dependant on how long game sessions are, and I can see it clashing with the "per time unit" people. Then again, this is pretty much just an extension of the "per encounter" versus "per day."

As an alternative, maybe have it be actually "per task," with witches getting a small reserve they can use all the time, and then when they want to do something, they petition for a resource pool to do it - essentially, the GM assigns them a power pool at the start of each undertaking, and it has to last until it's done, or something new comes up and a renegotiation takes place?

I can't seem to come up with one I like for vampires. I mean, they should drink blood to refill, I just don't really like the gameplay implementations. Maybe I'm wrong and it could be done well, and you just balance it under the assumption that downtime = vampire at full power.

Just throwing some ideas out there; I know these also have some issues.

EDIT: On further thought, another system would be an "essentia" style setup where your power pool is on a per action basis, rather than a per combat/day/etc. basis. So you get a small amount, and it refills at the end of each action. This could probably be flavored for any of the types: Vampires can store up tons and tons of blood, but can only spend so much at a time, and the blood drinking is like eating; they need to do it, but it does not always need to be onscreen, and it affects their power level no more than a Werewolf starving to death. Werewolves could have this be amount of "werewolf juice" (Gnosis, if you want to keep that, or Rage, or whatever), maybe with a small bonus under the full moon. Witches could just have "this is how much power your body can handle channeling."

[Username17]

Any time you have different resource management systems, you're going to have situations where one character is better than another. The only way to fight that is to give everyone the same resource management systems. And frankly, I'm not convinced that it would even be desirable to have a situation where everyone had the same operating standards.

As I see it, there are three types of resource management that you can have:

• Preparation: If you can do your thing, you are awesome. If you are in prison or stuck at a fancy dress ball or whatever, you may not be. This is essentially the Vampire and the Witch as I conceived them. In a game where social interactions exist and keeping one's presence secret from society is paramount, a preparation setup is a real limitation.
• Daily: If things take place over sufficiently long time frames, you are filled with awesome. Such a setup rewards delays between events but allows you to go completely to ground if need be. It's actually most useful when you're imprisoned or otherwise delayed because time extensions are enforced and you get your powers back. This is the Leviathan and the Lycanthrope method - one of them getting the same bonus every day and the other getting a variable bonus between days so that which one shines the brightest will vary.
• Encounter: If you get your fighting strength every time you start shit, it rewards rushing from objective to objective. In time dependent situations you shine, because your stuff works every time. When others flag, you don't. This is the Promethean and Transhuman method, with Prometheans getting a bonus pile of whupass at the start of every encounter and the Transhuman going strongish all day longish.

Now I know that at first it probably seems weird to have Werewolves be encouraged to hold back and delay confrontations. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. A player of a werewolf should feel the constant pull of the beast and constant call to conflict as an imposition - something that they genuinely want to fight against. Having werewolves simply ride the wave every time they rage is boring and anti-dramatic. They honestly should try to keep the beast inside unless and until they "really need it."

-Username17

[cthulhu]

Frank, you use leviathan as example all the time... I guess I'm used to leviathans being 'really big whale monster things'

is it something else as well? If it is a big monster, how does that fit in with the rest of the options?

[CatharzGodfoot]

Frank, you use leviathan as example all the time... I guess I'm used to leviathans being 'really big whale monster things'

is it something else as well? If it is a big monster, how does that fit in with the rest of the options?

Think 'nonhuman Methuselah'. A leviathan is a throwback from antediluvian times when reptiles ruled the earth (or fish ruled the earth, or bugs ruled the earth, or whatever the hell else ruled the earth).

[Prak]

yeah it's the term Frank is using to refer to Creature from the Black Lagoon, Mole Men, Mothman, and other assorted creepy crawly stuff.

[Koumei]

Unless the entire system is getting massively revamped for this, probably including a large alteration to the point-buy, balance only has a minor part anyway, so I don't really have a problem with the power-point management being a bit unbalanced.

Werewolves getting their power points at night sounds good, giving them a reason not to wander around eating people for fun and profit (in contrast to vampires who are expected to be the kind of jerks who do that). How about giving them an extra burst of power points when they're close to death, however, for their rage threshold?

On leviathans: Can these things hide amongst humanity at all, or are they always going to look like a moleman, a huge shark-man, a deep one/mind flayer, an enormous shellfish, an elasmosaurus etc?

[UmaroVI]

Any time you have different resource management systems, you're going to have situations where one character is better than another. The only way to fight that is to give everyone the same resource management systems. And frankly, I'm not convinced that it would even be desirable to have a situation where everyone had the same operating standards.

I suppose it is, to a certain extent, a question of taste, but I think it works best when everyone is in the same research management paradigm, if not system. Look at the problems caused in 3.5 by the way that different classes have completely disjoint systems; it creates a situation where the DM has to have 4 or more encounters per day in order to stop the fighter from being even more useless compared to spellcasters, because if there's only 1 fight, classes with per day abilities outshine everyone else.

I also think there's a lot more room inside those paradigms, and I'd be inclined to classify them as Preparation Dependant (stuff you do during downtime affects your power level during adventuring), Game-Time Dependant (based on passage of time inside the game-world in units large enough to not recharge during action), and Metagame-Time Dependant (based on a metagame criterion, such as Rounds, Encounters, Adventures, etc).

As a side note, a very interesting story of the Promethian form I discovered:

Feathertop, by Nathaniel Hawthorne . It shows an interesting take on the archetype, I think, and is well worth the read.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I suppose it is, to a certain extent, a question of taste, but I think it works best when everyone is in the same research management paradigm, if not system. Look at the problems caused in 3.5 by the way that different classes have completely disjoint systems; it creates a situation where the DM has to have 4 or more encounters per day in order to stop the fighter from being even more useless compared to spellcasters, because if there's only 1 fight, classes with per day abilities outshine everyone else.

I think that the point is not that some characters are good part of the time and bad part of the time while others are always mediocre. Rather, every character reaches the same absolute maximum 'gooodness' and 'badness', just under different circumstances.

[Draco_Argentum]

Differing resource systems isn't just harder to balance. It also makes the DM a bigger factor in balance. If some people don't do well with frequent encounters then the DM either including or not including frequent encounters becomes a balence issue, rather than a campaign style.

[Username17]

And in a game emphasizing plots and politics, I think that's actually a good thing. Having the PCs choose to fight the enemy werewolf during the new moon when he's weak or challenge the enemy wizard in a crowded office building where he can't call on his magic doohickies is what it's all about.

In a game which is not about tactical combat and is instead about being an asymmetric threat, having asymmetric resource management concerns is not a challenge, it's an opportunity.

-Username17

[Koumei]

[/quote]

Goddamn it, can people learn to close their quote tags?

Incidentally, what types of Leviathans are we looking at having? I'm not sure if at any point, a decision was made on what is in and out for the various types. I know we have shark-people (possibly Sahuagin-style, possibly "Street Sharks" or whatever the cartoon was called), but can I look forward to any of the following:

*Mind flayers/small Cthulhu
*Omanyte/Omastar (see: Pokemon)
*Elasmosaurus (the aquatic dinosaur with 4 fins and a long neck. The head is full of sharp flesh-eating bits)
*Other dinosaurs (an aquatic T-rex?)
*Mole men that are just slightly different, in that one could mistake them for ferrets or weasels
*Sea serpents/serpentfolk

[Username17]

Things which are on the table in a very "I don't even know which we are going to use" kind of way are:



Troglodytes

Pale and sharp of tooth, the Troglodytes see perfectly in darkness and are blinded by light. They had an underground empire that was debased and horrible, and while their white skin and long fingernails are hideable, the long exile from the surface leaves the eldest of them completely clueless of goings on in the world of men.

Possible Inspiration: Morlocks (H.G.Wells), Ghouls (H.P.Lovecraft), Molemen (Universal Pictures)

These guys could plausibly be Leviathan. Accentuate the moleish traits and let the crazy run free. Play them up as descendants of a long forgotten empire of Atlanteans or something. Alternately, we could go with the whole flesh eating angle and make them an offshoot of Vampire.



The Deep Ones

Descendants of long forgotten fish demons, the deep ones inhabit coastal cities and want our women. They get the "Innsmouth look" and are degenerates.

Possible Inspirations: Gillman (Universal Pictures), Deep Ones (H.P.Lovecraft), The Harbormaster (Robert Chambers)



The Serpent Cult

Snakes are awesome. The Yuan Ti are cool, and Skeletor is pretty sweet too. The Followers of Set were far and away the coolest of the expansion clans, and everyone knows it. Voodoo magic uses snakes, Hindu mythology uses snakes, and so on and so forth. Having reptile based supernaturals is a no brainer, and when that happens you are going to use snakes.

Possible Inspirations: Naga (Hindu Mythology/D&D Yuan Ti), The White Worms (Brahm Stoker), Followers of Set (Robert E. Howard)

Armed with fangs and an orally fixated method of sensing the world around them, snakes make an ideal template for Vampires. They also have a built-in way to be awesome as Leviathan, what with the whole Nagas vs. the Sun angle. Whether they are man eaters or an ancient race of evil serpent people, the snake-people have a place in the world of darkness. But just one place.

The Bugs

Bugs can either be all hiveish or the can be all spidery. Both are cool, but they overlap a lot and probably shouldn't be used together. Bugs make good horror elements because they are really crazy looking and totally inhuman. But they are also hard to fit into a human-centric setting for the same reason.

Possible Inspirations: Aliens (Giger), The Spider Woman (M. Puig), Shan (Ramsey Campbell), Invae (Shadowrun), Klackon (MoO), Mellisidae (nWoD), The Fly Village (House of Mysteries).

You can do them up as vampires (like the Melissidae) or as Leviathan (Mothman). The difficulty here is that the primary appeal is that they are very alien in thought - which actually puts a strain on a roleplaying game for obvious reasons.



The Bat Wings

Let's face it, we want women in lingerie with little adorable bat wings. Also we want people to transform into bats. But that's where the problem comes in. If the bat types are all Draculaed out, they aren't Morrigan. You see the problem here, right?

Possible Inspiration: Dracula (Bram Stoker), Morrigan (Dark Stalkers), Etna (Disgaea), Selene (Underworld).

Basically: the Bat types are vampires, that's not even up for discussion. The question is whether they are all Eurotrashed out, or Succubitastic. There's ample source material either way, but having both your standard Eurotrash vampire and your demonic vampire be bat-themed is kind of over the top (unless you made the Nosferatu bat themed as well, which would be kind of weird).

So anyway, you could chop things up like this:

Vampires: Eurotrash (Bat Theme), Serpent Cult (Snake Theme), Nosferatu
Leviathan: Deep Ones (Fish Theme), Mothman (Bug Theme), Troglodytes

or like this:

Vampires: Eurotrash (Bug Themed Wasp Women), Demonettes (Bat Theme), Nosferatu
Leviathan: Deep Ones (Fish Theme), Naga (Snake Theme), Troglodytes

Or like any of like twenty other permutations, right? It's difficult, because the setting as a whole doesn't really exist unless and until you chop it down to a single vision. The days of having umpteen different clans of Eurotrash that are largely interchangeable (Ventrue, Toreador, Tremere, Lasambra, Tzimisce, etc.) has just got to go.

-Username17

[Koumei]

While I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "Eurotrash", I get the gist. And the second division looks a lot better. I mean, wasp-women, Etna/Morrigan-style demonettes (and the absence of "I vont to sock your bloot" vampires who play organs and turn into bats. It's either classic or cliche, depending entirely on whether you ask someone who loves them or hates them. I think I gave away my opinion), snake-people added in as well...

When you said "mole men", as a result of having not seen the source material, I seriously thought you meant some kind of giant actual mole, like a were-mole stuck in the middle form. Which would be kind of funny. And terrifying if the star-nosed mole was used (see: Cthulhu).

And once again, lolcats-style image macros are used to explain everything.

[Calibron]

Insect Vampires please and snake/deep one/mole man leviathans. I'm not super sold on mole men in general, but unless something significantly better comes along for the third spot those are my votes.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Vampires with snake tongues and fangs are just about the best, but IMO an ancient race of serpent men hibernating in their burrows deep underground is just too good to pass up. The glint of torchlight off scales, the soft susurrus of something slithering through sandy & claustrophobic passages..

I also like the idea of leviathans all having scales and growing without bound when food is available. Scales are less alien than mucosal mollusks or the chitin of scarabs, and therefore more believable as PCs. The serpent people underground and the sea-caves of the deep ones are very plausible hiding places even in populated areas, and make sneaking into sewers and subways simple.

Unfortunately, that only leaves two leviathan groups. Do you really need a third?