[OSSER]Havens of the Damned

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Omegonthesane
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Schleiermacher wrote:Specializiation is well and good - to be encouraged, in fact. But specialization is not the same as being unable to function from night to night without the assistance of the other PCs. And I don't mean "function as an adventure protagonist" here, just "live independently by whatever means your backstory says you've been doing."
"We all got Embraced at about the same time and learned how to cope as a group, not as Randroid individuals. That's why we can trust that we have eachother's backs without having to come off as too sympathetic." There - you've been living independently by not living independently at all and instead helping one another to get by and that's why you trust eachother enough to be a player party.
Schleiermacher wrote:If character creation gives you too few resources to make that feasible -which it does for many concepts - then the correct answer is to rewrite character creation, not incentivize people to play completely illogical, individually-helpless pieces of a synergistic puzzle. Just about everything Mechalich said is in fact t true, just about everything Omegonthesane said is tilting at straw men or just rubbish.
It's illogical for a group to stick together because they need eachother now is it? It's illogical for people to have weaknesses that mean their friends have to cover their ass in one area in return for their support in another now is it?
In any case, it is a lot easier to play a coordinated team that was made to be codependent than it is to write a whole new RPG to be able to make a team of Randian supermen that only come together for the duration of a single adventure and then go their separate ways.
Schleiermacher wrote:
Ha ha ha you think the GM is playing by any kind of rules beyond, at best, "what do I think will entertain the party" when designing challenges.
This is especially rubbish. The rules exist to reflect and support the fiction. A consistent relationship between fiction and rules is necessary for the game to be coherent at all. Which means among other things that the stats of NPCs should be consistent with the benchmarks established by the PCs - min-maxed to the hilt if the PCs are, otherwise not. This is not about difficulty per se or about punishing the players, just about establishing what the baseline of competence looks like in any given game.
It is... I don't wanna say adorable, but certainly very weird to assume that most GMs are going to go through the rigamarole of statting by the book for even every named adversary let alone stock NPCs. Even if I accepted your concerns as valid that'd result in NPCs getting more XP rather than bother to think about the details of how every single one is fed every single night when they're unlikely to appear for more than one scene.
And this is a particularly odd hill to pick out since the core bone of contention was saying "never split the party" is a horrible awful terrible thing to be moved away from instead of a limitation of the medium to be accepted and even embraced.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Thu Sep 21, 2017 9:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Voss
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Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Voss »

Schleiermacher wrote:Specializiation is well and good - to be encouraged, in fact. But specialization is not the same as being unable to function from night to night without the assistance of the other PCs. And I don't mean "function as an adventure protagonist" here, just "live independently by whatever means your backstory says you've been doing."

If character creation gives you too few resources to make that feasible -which it does for many concepts - then the correct answer is to rewrite character creation, not incentivize people to play completely illogical, individually-helpless pieces of a synergistic puzzle. Just about everything Mechalich said is in fact t true, just about everything Omegonthesane said is tilting at straw men or just rubbish..
Both you and mechalich are pretty crazy. Vampire is bugfuck about the cooperative aspect while being really bad at it, but sharing living space or the abstracted money system isn't a problem area for a table. The characters are dead. They have functionally zero resource needs, and as far as food-fire-shelter goes, they need a closet and a clueless drunk or bloodbag. The end.

Not having money for groceries or an actual house isn't actually a problem for a vampire- granted there may be some discipline costs to live without completely independently, but you can entirely be a constant couch crasher (except you stay in the closet, and convince them that this is perfectly normal).

If you can do it for three nights running, whether by subtle or more overt methods, you can arrange it so the folks you're guesting with don't get a choice in the matter any more. At which point you have effective dots in haven, herd AND resources, as theirs are now yours.
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