Quote from: elfandghost;676681Vampire the Masquerade for me. Looking back when I played it was certainly a very teenager angst game and I could not imagine playing it now.

I have no idea how the game or system evolved but it always seemed to me with the entire WoD that there was too much supernatural going on for any of it to be secret...

The issue was the number of vampires.  Could a few hundred active vampires exist without being noticed?  Across the whole of the west, of course they could.  But for them to be able to hide (and ditto with werewolves and any mages on the earthly plane) there have to be few enough of them that you mostly get things like unsolved murders and such.  

Urban fantasy was like that a lot.  A few sparks of magic could be missed in, for example, new York city.  Especially when cell phone cameras were not even thought of -- that drunk businessman really was having a bad night, not that there was a blood sucking monster.

Where it could hard was with the player characters actually not being the backbone of the local vampire structure.  That required many more vampires (and powerful vampires) as foils than even a large city was likely to conceal.

It is only a problem if you assume a social efficiency and a popular critical thinking that I have yet to experience in all my travels around the world. The world functions quite handily with dysfunction; the people cope daily without deep thinking. After the joys of various international bureaucracies, nothing seemingly insane and improbable surprises me.

Allen Steele once wrote that the chances of a science fiction writer accurately predicting the future were the same as those of a blindfolded man spun around randomly in a room with a target on one surface hitting it with that spray of shotgun pellets.

Quote from: jeff37923;676838Allen Steele once wrote that the chances of a science fiction writer accurately predicting the future were the same as those of a blindfolded man spun around randomly in a room with a target on one surface hitting it with that spray of shotgun pellets.

So, pretty high?

Quote from: jeff37923;676838Allen Steele once wrote that the chances of a science fiction writer accurately predicting the future were the same as those of a blindfolded man spun around randomly in a room with a target on one surface hitting it with that spray of shotgun pellets.

Even more amusing is if the scattershot predictions end up becoming declared "right", in a "texas sharpshooter fallacy" manner.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

Quote from: jeff37923;676838Allen Steele once wrote that the chances of a science fiction writer accurately predicting the future were the same as those of a blindfolded man spun around randomly in a room with a target on one surface hitting it with that spray of shotgun pellets.

Was Allen Steele born before or after HG Wells?

To be fair, Elmore's Dragon Lance art with its perfectly permed eighties hair really nails the books into that time frame.  It's a grim world of golden sunlight and supermodels posing in renfaire garb.

Quote from: ggroy;676899http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

I didn't know that one. This is SUPER common.

Quote from: CRKrueger;676224Would the Internet even be useful in CoC?  I mean sure, you can have a whole host of great scenarios like when McDonalds comes up with a new Logo and ad campaign "Have you seen the Yellow Arch?", but trying to research Mythos stuff on the internet?  Sweet christ, what a load of bullshit you would have to wade through.  I'd rather go the CoC route of trying to gain access to the Vatican catacombs.

The internet would be a magnificent vector for "Mythos Invasion" and practically useless as a scientific or academic research tool, kinda like real life.

After I ran a few games where the pcs slowly began to understand that a lot of modern tech was developed from reverse engineering mi-go technology, they slowly stopped using cell phones, web devices etc as much as they had previously.

Quote from: Nexus;676704I dunno, I have mixed feeling about this topic probably because so much of what I like is considered retro or dated. The whole thing is really a matter of taste and fashion.  Seems almost mean spirited to mock sci fi game writers

I don't think people are mocking the writers, so much as just stating that something that might have seen innovative and cutting-edge has fast become dated.  It's not so much a condemnation of the material but just an observation that it can get to a point where it interferes with "suspension of disbelief".

Fads too have a way of dating things--writing and culture has fads that come and go.  This is a lesser problem because, like you said, fads can come back--disco was a perfect example--it went from being cool R&B music to over-exposed to hated and mocked to becoming cool again or at least respected as its own genre.  Trends in RPGs will come and go the same way.

But there's a difference when it comes to specific genres such as near future science fiction and stuff like espionage or near-post apocalyptic stuff.  Part of the appeal of those genres is that you believe this is the near future, so when technology and social changes go off the rails of the predictions, suddenly it can get in the way of the enjoyment.  That doesn't mean you can't still enjoy them, but usually it becomes something different--an alternate reality or touching upon theoretical physics.  You can enjoy a Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon era SF campaign, but you know it's not the reality, so it's not going to have the exact same appeal--you either look at it ironically or you think of it as an alternate time.

Quote from: Nexus;676695As I understand and I could be dead wrong: Vampire and the other games weren't originally intended to be one big world. They were separate continuities set in the same "Gothpunk" genre but no more connected than say, any random two westerns. The leeches in Werewolf weren't the "Cainites" from Vampire, etc.

There's some room for argument here, but the rulebooks (starting with Werewolf: The Apocalypse) were always fairly explicit that they were separate games that were meant to be played separately, but they were all set in the same game world.

Quote from: David Johansen;676903It's a grim world of golden sunlight and supermodels posing in renfaire garb.

:rotfl:

A great description, DJ.

Quote from: David Johansen;676903To be fair, Elmore's Dragon Lance art with its perfectly permed eighties hair really nails the books into that time frame.  It's a grim world of golden sunlight and supermodels posing in renfaire garb.

All D&D adventures should be populated with 80s porn stars. This way lies awesome.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;676954There's some room for argument here, but the rulebooks (starting with Werewolf: The Apocalypse) were always fairly explicit that they were separate games that were meant to be played separately, but they were all set in the same game world.

I was never sure how serious they were about that.  They changed rules in Mage to make it work better with Vampire (making it easier for vampires to resist spells -- the famous "vampire to lawnchair example).  And they did a lot of crossover stuff (like the week of Nightmares or a module with both Vampire and Werewolf tracks).  

So it would be easy to get confused about this point.

Quote from: Votan;677069I was never sure how serious they were about that.  They changed rules in Mage to make it work better with Vampire (making it easier for vampires to resist spells -- the famous "vampire to lawnchair example).  And they did a lot of crossover stuff (like the week of Nightmares or a module with both Vampire and Werewolf tracks).  

So it would be easy to get confused about this point.

It is. It changed between various editions too.