TheRPGSite

Greetings to all...

Back in the 90's, I was a big fan of Vampire: The Masquerade because I felt it really emphasized the role-playing aspect and the need for elaborate social contacts. The relationship of the Prince, Primogen, one's Sire, the cotiere, inter-clan political games, clan vs clan stuff, Camarilla vs. Sabat, etc -- this was all very involved and nessessitated really commited players who were versed in social politics.

I thought the system worked well and the various Clans were well written and balanced. I also thought the Werewolf system worked well and it was easy to interface it with Vampire.

Somewhere around the end of the 90's, Vampire games started dying out and I quit seeing new books for a long time. Then, about a year ago, I was in a RPG store and ran into Vampire: The Requiem.  It had changed a lot of the clans, added new ones, changed the magic, but had kept much of the premise of the original 'Masquerade' books.

Since there are a lot of very knowledgable players here, I'm wondering if anyone knows why White Wolf shit-canned the original version and came out with Requiem? Was it just a marketing ploy?

Thanks for your time.

Quote from: Blazing Donkey;493720Greetings to all...

Back in the 90's, I was a big fan of Vampire: The Masquerade because I felt it really emphasized the role-playing aspect and the need for elaborate social contacts. The relationship of the Prince, Primogen, one's Sire, the cotiere, inter-clan political games, clan vs clan stuff, Camarilla vs. Sabat, etc -- this was all very involved and nessessitated really commited players who were versed in social politics.

I thought the system worked well and the various Clans were well written and balanced. I also thought the Werewolf system worked well and it was easy to interface it with Vampire.

Somewhere around the end of the 90's, Vampire games started dying out and I quit seeing new books for a long time. Then, about a year ago, I was in a RPG store and ran into Vampire: The Requiem.  It had changed a lot of the clans, added new ones, changed the magic, but had kept much of the premise of the original 'Masquerade' books.

Since there are a lot of very knowledgable players here, I'm wondering if anyone knows why White Wolf shit-canned the original version and came out with Requiem? Was it just a marketing ploy?

Thanks for your time.

Only 7 years late.

Quote from: 1989;493729Only 7 years late.

Please try to limit your verbosity in future posts. Thanks.

What he means is that the new World of Darkness line is 7 years old, now. Seriously, WTF?
Is starting a thread asking a question that has been hashed and rehashed by everyone who pays the least bit of attention really that much harder than a wikipedia search? (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Darkness). I don't want to sound like condescending dick, but man, r u srs?

Amongst other things, the oWoD was mechanically awful, especially for crossover games. It had huge canon bloat which was almost impossible for writers to keep track of, and that contributed to thematic drift. Finally, the zeitgeist had changed, since pre-millennial angst was no longer "a thing".

nWoD is much cleaner mechanically. It still has its problems, but they are no longer as overwhelming as oWoD. It crosses-over more easily, and it has a more schematic structure that makes modifying and developing it easier than before.

Quote from: Blazing Donkey;493720Somewhere around the end of the 90's, Vampire games started dying out and I quit seeing new books for a long time.

I am afraid it must have been a local thing, because Vampire kept getting new books at strong rate up to its end in 2004.

QuoteSince there are a lot of very knowledgable players here, I'm wondering if anyone knows why White Wolf shit-canned the original version and came out with Requiem? Was it just a marketing ploy?

Apart from Pseudo's answer, I would add that the End of the World was something that was part of the premise of the game since Day 1. So they decided it was about time.

I like nWoD more than oWoD, but I still love Masquerade. They have released a 20 anniversary edition recently. It looks great.

I never thought the OWOD worked when played as a crossover (except perhaps Werewolves v Vamps). The rules were fine. For me the appeal was playing as the supernatural force; the moralising I could take or leave. It was playing as a supernatural hero/antihero. I thought that was a refreshing take and that WW took it seriously (perhaps too seriously) made it work. The new stuff is perfectly decent, just different. What the future holds for it, I know not. I don't think WW is doing well as a producer of rpg's. Perhaps they'll reboot it again.

Nobody gives a shit about the internal decisionmaking of a small business 7 years after the fact. Do you have a question about Requiem itself? It's a good game.

There's only so many years you can carry on a metaplot about being right on the edge of Gehenna/Apocalypse/Armageddon/The Gathering/Ragnarok/whatever  before you have to pull the trigger.  Especially when your main marketing technique is to advance the metaplot closer to it with every novel and splatbook, of which there seemed like a hundred.

There were some quirky aspects to Masquerade and Co. yes, but running the game several times a week for seven years, I must say I've rarely had huge issues with it. The cross-overs were sometimes awkward, particularly if you lacked the balls to say "no" to a guy who wanted to play a gypsy werewolf ghoul mummy, and balance went through the window most of the times, given specific generation, Spheres allotments in Ascension and the like. The system seemed to become really annoying once you started dealing with enormous dice pools on difficulties of 8 and above, mostly because of the botch rules which made incredible fumbles more and more likely to happen. Ditto combat, with millions of dice rolls, hit-damage-soak-repeat, for not much benefits as far as the game itself was concerned, given its particular MO at our tables at least.

So the OWoD had its weaknesses, sure, but if you were aware of them and were not getting out of your way to break the game, most of the time you wouldn't notice them.

Overall, the flavor of the game world is fantastic, and you can pick and choose whatever you like to build your own game experience from there (except that's not exactly how they present it with the metaplot and contant hinting at 'the truth at WW offices' and so on).

Which is where Requiem comes in, as far as I'm concerned.

I had the same reaction as the OP seven years ago. I was a fan of Masquerade, and wondered "why the fuck would I invest in a reboot when the original game works fine for me?" so I moved on with the d20 games I played at the time.

It's Promethean which made me have a second look at the NWoD. At last, a game based on a genuinely new idea as far as the WoD was concerned. Frankenstein's monster? Osiris? Golems? All of that with an alchemical theme running throughout? Holy shit, let me check that out.

So I bought the WoD rules, the Promethean game, and read. And really, really, really liked what I saw. Rules very much cleaned up. All games acting as supplements to the WoD whole. Games concepts reworked to favor a personal and local feel to the books themselves, without getting lost into world conspiracies, macro-metaplot bullshit and the like.

NWoD is like a gigantic modern-supernatural RPG buffet where the authors just tell you "here, here, have a bite, pick and choose what you want for your game". Which basically means that, if you are so inclined, you can just pick up your OWoD notes and books and basically rework whatever stuff you like from there to make it work in your NWoD Chronicle. Check out the Requiem-Masquerade conversion guide on OneBookShelf on that score - it's really well done and gives you tons of ideas to make it work like YOU want it to.

That's the key to NWoD I think: that it really encourages you to think of the WoD as your own, and consider your chronicle as your own thing, not someone else's, and just gives you loads of ideas in the form of various toolboxes from there. That's how I use it anyway.

Now I just got V20, just finished reading it, and I'm considering rebooting my old Paris by Night as well, in addition to the NWoD Paris Alchymique I am currently running on a French-speaking message board. The point being that these are like parallel universes where you can explore different themes and known NPCs and conspiracies from different angles and still make each 'world' feel unique in its own way. That's how I look at it anyway. I really like both OWoD and NWoD, for different reasons, and I'm fine with that. My players seem to be fine with it as well, despite some initial doubts about the NWoD 'thing' when I pitched it to them, so I must be doing something right as far as they're concerned.

I pretty much agree with everything you wrote but this....

Quote from: Benoist;493822It's Promethean which made me have a second look at the NWoD. At last, a game based on a genuinely new idea as far as the WoD was concerned. Frankenstein's monster? Osiris? Golems? All of that with an alchemical theme running throughout? Holy shit, let me check that out.

Hell yeah. This particular game replaces my madlove for Mage 1E. To say I was sceptical is an understatement. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this one.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: David R;493858Hell yeah. This particular game replaces my madlove for Mage 1E. To say I was sceptical is an understatement. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this one.

Regards,
David R

This game is totally awesome. A gem. Really is. And I used it. It really is awesome in actual play. Did you check out the supplements? If you fell for Promethean like I did, you totally need to check out all the supplements. They're all fucking dynamite for your games.

I've avoided Promethean on account of it sounding vaguely misery-touristy (after reading comments like, "most depressing game since Wraith: the Oblivion 1e"), but your endrosement is intriguing. Now I just might pick it up to round out my nWoD core collection.

Gus, mate, the people who think Promethean is about misery tourism are the same people who are going to tell you that LOTR is "really" about WW2 or how Frodo wanted nothing more than an excuse to use his OneCockRing with Sam on the way to Mount Doom.

These are the same sore losers who fall asleep during representations of Hamlet and then pretend to explain to you why it's such a terrific play. You know the type.

Changeling: The Lost, btw, was a masterpiece.

Quote from: two_fishes;493733What he means is that the new World of Darkness line is 7 years old, now. Seriously, WTF?
Is starting a thread asking a question that has been hashed and rehashed by everyone who pays the least bit of attention really that much harder than a wikipedia search? (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Darkness). I don't want to sound like condescending dick, but man, r u srs?

If you haven't heard a story, then it's not old.

Quote from: JDCorley;493801Nobody gives a shit about the internal decisionmaking of a small business 7 years after the fact.

Obviously I do, or else I wouldn't have asked the question, Enlightened Master.

Since I don't keep up with the current pulse of the RPG world, as some here do, I thought there would be many experts who could answer my question. Pseudoephedrine and Imperator gave pretty good answers, I thought.

And the there's folks like you who apparently are just here to let the world know they had an 'accident' and require a clean diaper.

Quote from: TristramEvans;493884
Changeling: The Lost, btw, was a masterpiece.

I agree.

Quote from: CRKrueger;493802There's only so many years you can carry on a metaplot about being right on the edge of Gehenna/Apocalypse/Armageddon/The Gathering/Ragnarok/whatever  before you have to pull the trigger.  Especially when your main marketing technique is to advance the metaplot closer to it with every novel and splatbook, of which there seemed like a hundred.

That makes a lot of sense. Rifts has done that (but keeps reinventing itself) with several of its supplements. For example, the Rifts Africa contains info for a battle between the heros of Earth and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The thing difference as I see it is that Rift's event is not neccessary for the continuation of the game universe, whereas it seems that WoD's V:TM was continingent on Ghenna happening. Once it happened, there was nowhere to go.

Quote from: Blazing Donkey;493720Then, about a year ago, I was in a RPG store and ran into Vampire: The Requiem.  It had changed a lot of the clans, added new ones, changed the magic, but had kept much of the premise of the original 'Masquerade' books.

Out of the nWoD lines with direct roots in the oWoD, Vampire: The Requiem arguably remained the closest to its predecessor. At the time of the release there was a fair amount of complaining on various forums by people who had anticipated more dramatic setting changes and were disappointed that the game still featured relatively familiar Clans, Disciplines, the Masquerade, and so on. By contrast, for instance Changeling: The Lost has little more in common with its older counterpart than the subject of the fae and a handful of mostly redefined leftover terminology.

In keeping with the toolbox approach taken by the new WoD in general, one major change in Requiem is the lack of metaplot and unified origin myth. (No Caine, no Generation.) Despite various alternative beliefs and theories, the published material offers no solid canonical explanation for how vampires came into existence, and the books hint that the five clans may actually have begun as separate "species" grown to resemble each other through a kind of parallel evolution. And speaking of the clans, there are now precisely five of those as broad archetypes, while bloodlines constitute "subclans" within them instead of acting as minor lineages in their own right.

One thing that confused me and made me feel uninterested, like Blazing Donkey, was the way Requiem seems to be in the middle somewhere between reinterpreting clans and creating new ones. Gangrel didn't change much but Nosferatu and Ventrue had the "new coke" symptom. And why did the Toreador get a new name (Daeva) and not the others? I admit it's a cosmetic issue in a way but it added up with other stuff to make me feel "meh" about Requiem. Fortunately Benoist is showing me how awesome the game is in his Paris By Night PbP campaign.

The main thing about the "Clans" of Requiem is to understand they don't actually represent the same type of concepts as they did in Masquerade. As GrimGent said very well, clans are much broader in Requiem in nature, while Bloodlines act more as the equivalent of "Masquerade clans".

The Gangrel archetype is already itself very broad, the primal hunter aspect of the vampire, and all you needed to do was to take the animal features away for the archetype to be declined in many more ways.

Same thing about the Nosferatu : the concept behind the Requiem Nosfe is about Fear, without AND within, not "ugliness" or "I'm wearing my monster badge on my FACE" - so you still can play your ugly motherfucker if you want to, but you're not trapped into that schtick and may instead opt for more psychological expressions of the monster that inspires fear in others.

The Ventrue are still about kingship, or rather ruler-ship, but they are also very much about decadence and "power corrupts, inevitably" in nature. They're about madness, diseases born from their blood, and much more besides.

The Mékhet act as a much broader clan than the old Lasombra. Actually, the Lasombra would make a perfect bloodline for them (or a Ventrue bloodline if you prefer the "power behind the throne" aspect of the Lasombra, or even a Nosferatu bloodline if you prefer to emphasize the creepy aspect of Obtenebration in your WoD setting). They're the stalkers, the lovers of darkness, the vampires disappearing in the blink of an eye, damn complex besides, with tons of little tidbits about them that remind you of the Setites, the Nosferatu information network and spying schtick, and yes, a lot more stuff besides.

The Daeva are not the Toreador. The Daeva are succubi and incubi. They are agents of a warped, dangerous, deadly sensuality expressed through the vampire. They're the representation of the this duality of Sex and Death that mixed to give us the very archetype of the vampire, and his Blood.

So yeah. The Clan archetypes are just that: very, very broad archetypes, much broader than Masquerade clans. The Lasombra could be an Mékhet bloodline in Requiem. The Tzimisce would be Ventrue infected by a strange disease of the East, if you were to keep Vicissitude as it is in Masquerade. And there are those clans in Masquerade which would work best as something else in Requiem: the Assamites, for instance, would work great as a Covenant in Requiem. And so on, so forth.

Again, Ben's nailed it. Requiem's Clans are broad and archetypal, rather than tribal gatherings of vampires bound both by descent and social convention/tradition (i.e. actual clans), as they were in Masquerade. They are more like Werewolf's (old and new) Auspices, where Masquerade's Clans were more like Tribes. They're no longer as crucial in determining where one stands in vampire politics.

Quote from: Benoist;493921The Mékhet act as a much broader clan than the old Lasombra. Actually, the Lasombra would make a perfect bloodline for them.

Actually, the Khaibit (http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Khaibit) (from Bloodlines: The Hidden) are an amalgam of Setites (minus the silly parts, e.g. the snake imagery) and Lasombra; a bloodline of Egyptian Mekhet who serve the Circle of the Crone and master a Discipline called, you guessed it, Obtenebration. Much better than drug-peddling snake lovers, or "darker and edgier" Ventrue clones IMHO.

Quote from: Benoist;493921So yeah. The Clan archetypes are just that: very, very broad archetypes, much broader than Masquerade clans. The Lasombra could be an Mékhet bloodline in Requiem. The Tzimisce would be Ventrue infected by a strange disease of the East, if you were to keep Vicissitude as it is in Masquerade. And there are those clans in Masquerade which would work best as something else in Requiem: the Assamites, for instance, would work great as a Covenant in Requiem. And so on, so forth.

I like the idea of Assamites as a bloodline. Mekhet would be a natural parent clan, judging from the Discipline array, and from their love of sneaking around. The Akhud from VII, and the Azerkatil from Ordo Dracul, also feel fairly Assamite-y to me.

Still on the subject of recycling oWoD stuff: I loved the Bruja from the core book (it was nice to read, back in 2004, that the folks at WW finally learned to laugh at themselves). The Malkovians and Toreador felt half-hearted. Burakumin were okay, nothing to shout about.

From the supplements, I loved the Architects of the Monolith (http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Architects_of_the_Monolith), from Bloodlines: The Hidden, which to me are pretty clearly a Clan Tremere stand-in (a tightly-knit cabal of Ventrue sorcerers obsessed with power, hierarchy and vaguely Masonic occult imagery); and the Osites (http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Osite), from the Lancea Sanctum book, also a stand-in for the Cappadocians (and much, much better than the half-assed Sangiovanni from Bloodlines: The Legendary).

Of course, since the official take on the Sangiovanni sucked, I made my own. Therein lies the beauty of Requiem; stuff like this is easy to ignore, or switch. You try announcing to your Masquerade-savvy players "in my Masquerade game, the Tremere don't exist and the Salubri are still around", sit back and watch the fireworks.

I'm a big fan of recycling oWoD stuff into the nWoD. My group as a whole is fairly familiar with oWoD lore, and appropriating names and concepts allows me both to play on this familiarity, and to surprise them; the way I see it, it's a win-win situation. And Requiem's bloodlines and covenants make it really, really easy to reconstruct the stuff you like, while leaving out the stuff you don't like.

The one thing I dislike about the bloodline system is its prestige-class-like approach. It does make sense from a game-mechanical point of view, but I'm not sure it holds up as an in-setting thing ("waking the power of the Blood"). Like the tiered Merits, I blame it on d20 design principles seeping into everything.

Sorry if this feels kind of rambling and disjointed. I find Requiem and exciting and somewhat underrated game, that preserves a lot of great stuff from Masquerade, while fixing most of what I perceived to be bugs (namely, the calcification of vampiric hierarchy). And it's not everyday we get a nice WoD (old or new) thread going around here. :)

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Actually, the Khaibit (http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Khaibit) (from Bloodlines: The Hidden) are an amalgam of Setites (minus the silly parts, e.g. the snake imagery) and Lasombra; a bloodline of Egyptian Mekhet who serve the Circle of the Crone and master a Discipline called, you guessed it, Obtenebration. Much better than drug-peddling snake lovers, or "darker and edgier" Ventrue clones IMHO.

Correct. There's also the Followers of Seth in Mekhet: Shadows in the Dark (NB: all the Clan books in Requiem are really awesome to read, and recommended, contrarily to [most of] their Masquerade equivalents), but that's precisely it: you have several adaptations if you will of concepts of Masquerade deformed, rebooted in different ways in Requiem, several of them mirroring different aspects of the same old clans or bloodlines, plus the Conversion Guide to really make conversions on your own if you want something that really matches your own expectations.

That's the "giant RPG buffet" thing I was talking about earlier. You can build your own WoD from scratch much more easily and creatively with NWoD. So you have basically OWoD to play with all the background and threads and NPCs one might like, and NWoD to take it in a different direction and go "OK, that OWoD thing is great, but now I want to create my own version of the whole thing."

Quote from: GrimGent;493908In keeping with the toolbox approach taken by the new WoD in general, one major change in Requiem is the lack of metaplot and unified origin myth. (No Caine, no Generation.) Despite various alternative beliefs and theories, the published material offers no solid canonical explanation for how vampires came into existence, and the books hint that the five clans may actually have begun as separate "species" grown to resemble each other through a kind of parallel evolution. And speaking of the clans, there are now precisely five of those as broad archetypes, while bloodlines constitute "subclans" within them instead of acting as minor lineages in their own right.

Thank you for a very authoritative and well-spoken explanation; I greatly appreciate it.

Quote from: Benoist;493921...So yeah. The Clan archetypes are just that: very, very broad archetypes, much broader than Masquerade clans. The Lasombra could be an Mékhet bloodline in Requiem. The Tzimisce would be Ventrue infected by a strange disease of the East, if you were to keep Vicissitude as it is in Masquerade. And there are those clans in Masquerade which would work best as something else in Requiem: the Assamites, for instance, would work great as a Covenant in Requiem. And so on, so forth.

Excellently written and very informative & intuitive. Thanks for explaining this. It makes a lot more sense now.

You're welcome.

Quote from: Benoist;493921And there are those clans in Masquerade which would work best as something else in Requiem: the Assamites, for instance, would work great as a Covenant in Requiem.

That actually brings up another detail about the new splat arrangements...

As with many other aspects of the major templates (such as their power stats, fuel stats and Morality equivalents), White Wolf has to a significant extent standardized those across the various game lines, along what in forum discussions have been called the x (innate/personal), y (chosen/social) and z (advanced specialization) axes. The clans form that x-axis for vampires, while it's the y-axis, the covenants, which represents membership in ideological, political, or religious factions. That leaves the bloodlines as the z-axis, the "prestige class" as The Butcher said, which typically may be joined later in the game because of the required power level.

For werewolves, the three options corresponding to that Clan/Covenant/Bloodline set-up are Auspice, Tribe, and Lodge; for mages, Path, Order, and Legacy. (Seeming, Court, and Entitlement would be the changeling version.)

Which is like one of the greatest boons and the greatest curses the game brings to the table.

It's potentially one of its best aspects because it allows you to understand a particular WoD game instinctively from the way its organized, it allows you to also come up with your own WoD "game" or supernatural beings if you follow that pattern and so on, to add game elements that work with the whole without much issues, to make cross-overs happen without having to brainstorm endlessly about the way the rules will relate from one game to the next, because the frame is basically all there ready to be used.

It's potentially one of its worst aspects because it can make the games feel kind of same-y on a rules level, past the first brush with varying disciplines/gifts/spheres/transmutations/contracts/etc. power structures. It's one of those elements which can create a burn-out on the WoD as a whole because it's basically always the same frame, but with a different dressing with each game.

I guess it depends what you like about the game, how many of the different games you use at the same time within the same campaign frame, how you keep things fresh in the game itself, how "present" the rules are at the game table while you play, and so on, so forth.

I say, if you have the books, keep playing OWOD. I never cared for any of the NWOD books, myself.

Quote from: Benoist;494016It's one of those elements which can create a burn-out on the WoD as a whole because it's basically always the same frame, but with a different dressing with each game.

It didn't help that the Big Three (Requiem, Forsaken, Awakening) all conformed to a 5x5 pattern for the PC splats, with five clans and five covenants for vampires, and so on. But the later lines broke away from that, and even Requiem's since then gained additional covenants in the supplements. The so-called z-axis has varied considerably between the lines from the start: for instance bloodlines and entitlements function quite differently.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Still on the subject of recycling oWoD stuff: I loved the Bruja from the core book (it was nice to read, back in 2004, that the folks at WW finally learned to laugh at themselves). The Malkovians and Toreador felt half-hearted. Burakumin were okay, nothing to shout about.

Ch'in Tsao, one of the most prominent NPCs so far in the Paris Alchymique (among some ... 75 plus named characters met so far), the Sire of Boulet's PC actually, is a Burakumin. I love that bloodline in play. The mix of Japanese class plus cadaver business plus mummy-like appearance is something I really like.

Regarding the Malkovians, just ditch the bloodline and check out the Clan Book Ventrue: Lords over the Damned. I won't say more for fear of spoilers, but chances are, you are going to like this.

The Toreador are super-über specialized in their history and schtick and so on. There are some in Paris, but with a specific background attached to them.

I don't care for the Bruja.

And the Morbus are totally awesome, IMO.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Of course, since the official take on the Sangiovanni sucked, I made my own. Therein lies the beauty of Requiem; stuff like this is easy to ignore, or switch. You try announcing to your Masquerade-savvy players "in my Masquerade game, the Tremere don't exist and the Salubri are still around", sit back and watch the fireworks.

Agreed. Why do you think the Sangiovanni sucked? Is that because they clash/are completely different than the Giovanni of Masquerade, or is there something more to it you didn't say, like the Necrophile aspect of the bloodline, maybe?

Quote from: The Butcher;493946I'm a big fan of recycling oWoD stuff into the nWoD. My group as a whole is fairly familiar with oWoD lore, and appropriating names and concepts allows me both to play on this familiarity, and to surprise them; the way I see it, it's a win-win situation. And Requiem's bloodlines and covenants make it really, really easy to reconstruct the stuff you like, while leaving out the stuff you don't like.

Very same thing here.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946The one thing I dislike about the bloodline system is its prestige-class-like approach. It does make sense from a game-mechanical point of view, but I'm not sure it holds up as an in-setting thing ("waking the power of the Blood"). Like the tiered Merits, I blame it on d20 design principles seeping into everything.

It does IMO from a game play point of view as well. I haven't had any issues with it so far.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Sorry if this feels kind of rambling and disjointed. I find Requiem and exciting and somewhat underrated game, that preserves a lot of great stuff from Masquerade, while fixing most of what I perceived to be bugs (namely, the calcification of vampiric hierarchy). And it's not everyday we get a nice WoD (old or new) thread going around here. :)

That's right. We might as well keep this going for a while.

Quote from: GrimGent;494062It didn't help that the Big Three (Requiem, Forsaken, Awakening) all conformed to a 5x5 pattern for the PC splats, with five clans and five covenants for vampires, and so on. But the later lines broke away from that, and even Requiem's since then gained additional covenants in the supplements. The so-called z-axis has varied considerably between the lines from the start: for instance bloodlines and entitlements function quite differently.

Agreed as well. It's nice to see the way they gradually (try to) overcome that format to do different things with it. I must say that I personally haven't felt the burn-out I was talking about in one of my last posts here, but I would understand if some gamers felt that way.

It's strange, because after enjoying NWoD, looking at the OWoD games again, I feel like I like them even more for their quirks and differences (like each game being its own thing, apart from one another, like the way lupines work in Masquerade being different from what the Garou basically are in Apocalypse, and so on), you know, like you are looking at familiar games with a new set of eyes and seeing stuff you weren't quite getting before, and it kind of renews my interest in the whole thing, actually.

Quote from: Benoist;494156And the Morbus are totally awesome, IMO.

You're right, I forgot about them. Great bloodline, though I'm more partial to the Morotrophians (even though "Institutionalize" is a crap name for a Discipline).

Quote from: Benoist;494156Why do you think the Sangiovanni sucked? Is that because they clash/are completely different than the Giovanni of Masquerade, or is there something more to it you didn't say, like the Necrophile aspect of the bloodline, maybe?

I'm a big fan of Masquerade's Giovanni (Justin Achilli's original clanbook really gave this weird, insular clan a lot of character) and my version is a lot closer to it. My beef with the official take on the Sangiovanni is that they're neither here nor there; their entry isn't much more informative than "extended family of Italian necromancers". I'd be thrilled to see new ideas clashing with the oWoD mold in an intriguing way (which is at least half the fun of recycling oWoD concepts into the nWoD), or just a mechanically well-executed port of the old Clan Giovanni into the Requiem milieu (which would be kind of lazy, but I'd still be happy). I felt I got neither.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Sorry if this feels kind of rambling and disjointed. I find Requiem and exciting and somewhat underrated game, that preserves a lot of great stuff from Masquerade, while fixing most of what I perceived to be bugs (namely, the calcification of vampiric hierarchy). And it's not everyday we get a nice WoD (old or new) thread going around here. :)

I find this all extremely interesting. Vampire (Requiem or Masquerade) never was a big thing with me but reading all this makes me want to take a second look. What were your (Ben, anyone :)) games like ?

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Benoist;494157I must say that I personally haven't felt the burn-out I was talking about in one of my last posts here, but I would understand if some gamers felt that way.

Well, Changeling's really the one and only nWoD line that I'm interested in using, so crossover comparisons were never an actual concern for me. Personally, I explain nearly everything supernatural in the setting with the fae, except for "dead things" and an occasional unverified anomaly just to keep everyone a little more uncertain about what's out there. So while there could well be all sorts of vampires, werewolves, and mages skulking in the shadows, those aren't the Kindred, the Uratha, and the Awakened as described in their own books. (Of course, the Kindred aren't necessarily the only vampires even in Requiem.)

A note to the OP, in case this is new information: unlike Masquerade and the other oWoD titles, Requiem and the rest of the nWoD lines aren't standalone games but rather expansion sets for the core RPG, The World of Darkness, which covers the basic rules and character creation procedures for mortal PCs, by default ordinary people who somehow find themselves up against sinister supernatural phenomena, with ghosts as the featured sample antagonists. Each expansion then revolves around a specific major template which can be applied to that base either before or during play, converting the character into, say, a vampire. All of the major templates share certain traits which for the most part are treated almost identically by the system, rendering crossovers easier: a power stat which measures the character's mystical might (for vampires, that would be Blood Potency, replacing the old Generation), a fuel stat which can be spent for a variety of effects (for vampires, Vitae, or blood points), and a modified Morality equivalent which determines the circumstances for degeneration checks (for vampires, Humanity).

Quote from: David R;494192I find this all extremely interesting. Vampire (Requiem or Masquerade) never was a big thing with me but reading all this makes me want to take a second look. What were your (Ben, anyone :)) games like ?

Regards,
David R

It's a hard question to answer without having you precise what type of aspect you are after. Do you mean from a set up point of view, the way the game unfolds, the background, ... ?

I'll answer a little bit of these and you'll tell me if you want more detail on any or all aspects, okay ?

Concerning Paris by Night (PbN) V1 and V2 (or Paris Alchymique), the set up is basically the same. We could call that "the sandbox before the term was coined." I basically have an environment, a city, Paris, with a society of the Damned (and other supernatural and mundane beings), various factions, coteries, power and influence structures, conspiracies, secrets, and so on.

The players create the characters they like. We work out the details of the background together. Usually that means inserting specific goals to start with, like "my Sire abandoned me and I really want to find out why", or "This vampire killed my entire family, I'm going to find him, and destroy him" or "I'm the infant of X and I'm a mole trying to achieve goal Y for him", and so on, so forth. From there, the PCs basically show up in town and present themselves to the powers-that-be (in Masquerade's PbN this meant originally François Villon, but he came to disappear pretty early on in the campaign, and then this became a huge clusterfuck of musical chairs, if you see what I mean, which was part of the point in Villon's disappearance, to eliminate further opposition to his rule, but that completely backfired for him over the years, particularly when Ontaï/Montano got involved and claimed part of the rulership in the name of his Sire, Lasombra himself).

From there, the PCs basically do what they want. They can investigate some mysteries, act on their goals, determine new ones as the game evolves, create a domain, develop their contacts and influence, go to war against this or that faction they want to destroy, ... whatever the case may be. I've had all sorts of PCs going through Paris over the years. I made a count recently and must have had more than 50 distinct players. Probably around 70+ individual player characters. I've had all clans, all sects, all types of goals and personalities... each of them acting like pebbles thrown into a lake, and/or rolling down a hill, creating their own avalanches which then clash with each other and basically trigger all sorts of events left and right in a sort of domino effect that never stops in years and years of gaming.

Some examples : a PC was playing the Justicar Tremere who in fact was acting as a mole for the Sabbat, a Ravnos living in a gypsy cart who got enslaved by ghouls with submachine guns reconverted to fire hypodermic needles filled with another PC's blood in his own lair, a Malkavian with an obsession for gambling who managed to overturn the ban on gambling in Paris to create the sole Casino in town, which in time became a hot spot and pretty important domain of the city, a Ventrue who got completely manipulated by the Giovanni to become "le Roi des Morts", a conduit for the dead to reach the world of the living through the Sangréal flowing in the vampire's veins, a mage and a garou brothers dressing as bozo the clown and his sidekick to hunt and kill all the vampires of Paris (including a number of PCs before they were taken down by another PC, an Assamite Antitribu part of the Sabbat himself), a mummy who thought himself to be Anubis and who acted accordingly, a Toreador Antitribu prostitute from England who came to Paris to reenact the murders of Jack the Ripper who she both admired and hated at the same time, ... an entire pack of Sabbat PCs called les Cinq Lames (the Five Blades) who ended up blowing up the Cathedral of Notre Dame after a HUGE magical backlash (players were super proud of it, and that was remembered for quite a while after in the campaign)... alright. Lots of PCs. :)

One thing that to me is most jarring about the nWoD is that the vampires have no sense of history.  The continual forced cycles of Torpor means that "the new guy" next to you could have been a peer of Homer, but has no memory of it.  It's hard to get into a character that has no real sense of self.  It seems like the "ennui of the immortal" would be overwhelming.

Quote from: CRKrueger;494257One thing that to me is most jarring about the nWoD is that the vampires have no sense of history.  The continual forced cycles of Torpor means that "the new guy" next to you could have been a peer of Homer, but has no memory of it.  It's hard to get into a character that has no real sense of self.  It seems like the "ennui of the immortal" would be overwhelming.

The Mists can affect a vampire's mind in any number of fashions. Some vampires will see their memory mostly erased, but they are far from being the majority. In fact, the dreams populating your torpor screw with your mind. So you might come to believe things about your previous periods of activity that never were, or you switched two people you knew in your mind, or you remember almost nothing but the most emotional time you went through.

The Mists shouldn't stop you from playing what you want : they should allow you to come up with all sorts of wacky backgrounds instead, where your character himself might not realize what is fantasy and what isn't, what really happened, and what didn't. It's a license to be creative, instead of sticking to rigid timelines and metaplot that wouldn't allow you to come up with your "angel of death persuaded he was the one who visited Sodom with his buddy back in the day, except the day wasn't prior to Christ's birth, but after his death, and the town wasn't called Sodom, it was Florence".

Did anyone ever play Hunter: The Reckoning? It's the only WW game I myself bought (but played in Vampire quite a bit) and I fell in love and ended up buying tons of the splats, but never really ran it for... some reason I can't put my finger on. I think maybe I was concerned (or my players were) that going against the Vampires they were used to playing as PCs would be a lost cause.

Any opinions on the game? Maybe it's time to take it off the shelf for another look-see.

Reckoning is one of the games of OWoD I know the least. I never bought it, never read it. I do own Hunter: the Vigil, however, for NWoD, and it's a damn fine game. It's about compacts and conspiracies, humans trying to uncover truths in the WoD, for the sake of an agenda, or protecting others, or whatever the background of the groups they're part of is about. It has tiers of play, from isolated groups trying to uncover what's going on on their own, X Files style, to big conspiracies with their own supernatural powers and so on.

Not at all the game centered on the lunatics with True Faith burning witches one might expect.

Quote from: Benoist;494253It's a hard question to answer without having you precise what type of aspect you are after. Do you mean from a set up point of view, the way the game unfolds, the background, ... ?

How about the first two. What you wrote was good but I'd like to see how it all come about. Also, were there any limitations on what kind of characters your players could create ? What aspects of the official setting info did you abandon ? Stuff like that. And off course how it played out during the course of the campaign :) And I am really interested here. Like I said, I was never never really interested in running a Vampire game, until you and The Butcher started going on about it. Then it's like, how did I miss this stuff ?

As for Hunter 1E, yeah I liked it a lot. I ran a very well recieved campaign (The Righteuos Kind) heavily inspired by the early works of John Carpenter set in a bizarre 70's era-like America.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Benoist;494284I do own Hunter: the Vigil, however, for NWoD, and it's a damn fine game. It's about compacts and conspiracies, humans trying to uncover truths in the WoD, for the sake of an agenda, or protecting others, or whatever the background of the groups they're part of is about.

And the nWoD hunters really are human, more competent and motivated than most people but still without actual powers of their own below the conspiracy tier. Mechanically they don't constitute a separate template in the same sense as, for instance, vampires. But then, Vigil doesn't expect familiarity with the existing templates, either: instead, it presents its own versions of the various supernatural beings, simplified and toned down to turn them into more suitable antagonists for mortal PCs, often based on assumptions which have the side effect of making it perhaps the least crossover-friendly line of the lot.

Quote from: David R;494330How about the first two.

OK I will in a moment. Do you want me to talk about the first OWoD Paris by Night, the NWoD Paris Alchymique, or both? The answers might vary, given the specificities of each games, how they relate to stuff like metaplot and so on.

Quote from: Benoist;494337OK I will in a moment. Do you want me to talk about the first OWoD Paris by Night, the NWoD Paris Alchymique, or both? The answers might vary, given the specificities of each games, how they relate to stuff like metaplot and so on.

Why not both. It's been years (and never here ;)) since I read a good WoD thread.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: David R;494330How about the first two. What you wrote was good but I'd like to see how it all come about.

I came to Vampire on my own, after reading some previews and rumors about it in the magazine Casus Belli in France. My very first game was set in Canada, where I imagined Winnipeg to be a village lost in the woods (no kidding, still have the maps to prove it somewhere), and it wasn't really that great.

Then I ran my first "real games" set in LA by Night back when there was no such book published, which went on for a while, and this was basically the phase where I started reading a lot about the Anarchs, the Sabbat, I think the Player's Guide had just come out, or came out around that time. Then I basically realized that the game would be better if I had a personal connection to the city itself, and I transitioned the characters to Paris shortly after that.

Building Paris itself started with fishing for information in the supplements, which at the time was rather scarce, including details about François Villon, how this was the fief of the Toreador, etc. I looked into Chicago by Night and decided on a couple of Methuselahs I'd like to use myself to manipulate stuff in the background. I think I came up with Andromeda and Agamemnon first, being tied to the story of Helena and Menele in Chicago, then came up with Salemnus and the conspiracy surrounding him I called the Mercurialis Circus, long before there was such a thing mentioned in the Book of Nod (actually the way it turned up in the Book of Nod blew my mind away, because that was pretty close to what I had come up with myself as a young teen - I felt very proud of that at the time).

I drew some trees of genealogy of the different clans, and came up with many NPC names that way. Then I would make up stories for them, and organize them into various coteries with different goals and secrets, each members having relationships with other NPCs in town and so on. The history of Paris itself evolved from the interaction of (1) the macro ideas, Agamemnon/Andromeda, Salemnus, plus others soon, like Sulhe the Salubri child who created the dream-like "refuge" in the depths of the Catacombs, or Quintus Arius the Roman who followed Mithras in his campaigns, with (2) the NPCs coming out of the genealogy and the various coteries spawning from there, and (3) the actual history of Paris which informed all the steps of that process, from NPCs to locations to how such an event was in fact manipulated by this or that faction and so on so forth, as well as (4) personal stuff and references : private jokes, conversions of situations I've known, homages, and stuff like that.

All this formed a web of intrigue going from the every day interactions of various groups and individuals in Paris, to the most ancient mysteries that had been unsolved for ages. The structure of power helped tremendously as well, of course : I had the Prince, alright. François Villon, 5th generation Toreador, his Sire overseas for now centuries... I saw him as a very shrewd, very competent, very savvy Methuselah who managed, unlike so many others, to conduct most of his schemes and machinations from his standing right there in plain fucking sight, instead of hiding in torpor. That guy had huge undead balls of steel, and that's how I was going to play him. Then came a whole lot of questions : who are the Primogen ? What are their relationships with the Prince and between each other ? Who enforces the law of the Prince ? Who are the harpies, the movers and shackers, etc. Sometimes I would pick a name I had not fleshed out in my genealogies, and sometimes I would just make up a new character that specifically fit that role, retrofitting him or her into the background, or I would pick a known NPC of the books and come up with his recent story to justify him being around (as was the case for Antoine le Fanu, Madame Guil, Democritius and a whole lot of others over the years).

Thinking about all this is like fitting the pieces of a huge puzzle until it looks believable and alive in your head. Then you run the thing. You let the players come to town and just get interested in stuff depending on their own personalities, their characters', their background stories, and so on. And from there it just comes alive, like Frankenstein electrifying his monster. It takes a life of its own, and if you do your job right, in the end, after a while, you don't even have to come up with anything every game session. It's just a matter of making NPCs react to stuff the PCs do.

Wow ok. I wrote more than I wanted. Let's see the other questions now. We'll stick with the basic concepts for now.

Quote from: David R;494330Also, were there any limitations on what kind of characters your players could create ?

At the beginning yes for PbN, they were pretty much vampires by the book, but then I loosened that very much as we acquired different games and supplements. We started using the Elysium rules to play older vampires as well, and the power level of Paris being what it is, it seemed only fair that players would not begin with a 3-dot 13th generation something.

For the Paris Alchymique, characters created are pretty much by the book. I openly favor the choice of vampires for a first visit to the city, that makes it easier for players to interact with each other and see a lot of stuff if they want to, but I'm not adverse to other supernatural creatures or mortals being played either. I've had a mage for instance, and there's a long running character who's a Promethean in the game (Paris itself is a bit particular regarding Prometheans.. I can't get into details without going into spoilers so I prefer not to go there).

Quote from: David R;494330What aspects of the official setting info did you abandon ? Stuff like that.

I picked and chose from the supplements and came up with my own stuff for PbN. As we played and played, people started running their own by Nights, and all these cities would basically exist in the same world, so that an NPC chosen by a friend would not be used by me unless I had permission and I would not screw with his background and so on. Some official NPCs got used pretty consistently throughout the cities though, like Madame Guil, who was a dream of a bitch to throw at the players when you wanted them to really hate a Justicar.

I started with Paris. Then we had ... London, Amsterdam/Benelux, Venice, Rome, Pragues, Cardiff, Florence... and I'm forgetting tons of others I'm sure. Each with a different GM.

Basically we started with a situation in the city and would feed whatever we liked from the supplements as they were published into our campaigns. But sometimes we were just like "no, that is really fucking stupid, we won't have that." The Kuei Jin for instance. Some GMs didn't play at all with the True Black Hand. Those kinds of things.

So you had someone saying earlier they couldn't go on forever with the metaplot. I agree, not only because they'd be way too much stuff and so on, but also because each tables would have run with their own backgrounds at that point, and whatever WW would publish would sooner or later create a "WTF?" reaction on the part of the guy who was running his own game at home for years. And then suddenly this guy would stop being a customer, because all that stuff WW was printing became increasingly irrelevant for his game. Nice way to shoot yourself in the foot, guys!

For the Paris Alchymique, I discarded some aspects of some games. The one I most heavily modified was Mage. I basically came up with my own Order of Hermes based on Ars Magica, and I incorporated some aspects of Nephilim into it to create basically the background I wanted. It's more complicated than that, because you basically can play a Mage dude by the book if you want to, but you get the gist of the modifications that way I suppose.

Quote from: David R;494330And off course how it played out during the course of the campaign :) And I am really interested here.

Hm. Maybe I'll come back to this later, if you don't mind. Like if you want to ask me about something specific from what I just explained there, that'll provide me with something to run with. It's not that I don't want to answer or can't, but I don't want to go all over the place writing a massive post about this if I don't really answer your question in the first place!! LOL

How is it so far?

Here, have a look on the French Paris Alchymique/PbN v2 there. (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?board=34.0)

La Ballade des Pendus (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?board=38.0) is the game itself.
Le Livre des Damnés (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?board=35.0) is a record of all the known information about all the PCs and NPCs met in the game (pinned threads are the PCs, all the others are NPCs).
Le Paris Alchymique (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?board=37.0) is a record of all the places, coteries, factions and the like.
And la Fosse (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?board=36.0) is the OOC stuff.

It's in French and all, but hopefully by checking out the NPCs and whatnot, you'll see some stuff that'll spark some interest.

Quote from: David R;494330Like I said, I was never never really interested in running a Vampire game, until you and The Butcher started going on about it. Then it's like, how did I miss this stuff ?

There are so many games out there. And let's face it, the disinformation about the games is pretty thick in some corners of the web plus I get the feeling that WW itself hasn't been helpful either in that regard, hugely advertising some aspects of its settings while completely ignoring others while they're there, right there in the books to play with.

Let's also not forget that this very site accuses WW of intentionally trying to destroy all roleplaying forever on a pretty regular basis.

Anyway, great thread, I like the description of your process.

I can answer some questions about Hunter: The Reckoning.

A lot of the shit this game has taken over the years (and it has taken a lot of shit) is because people didn't have a clear idea of what the game was about. They went in expecting it would just be a reboot of earlier supernatural-hunter material like the Year of the Hunter stuff. It wasn't.  What it was was an approach to supernatural-hunting stuff that had more in common with Buffy, Supernatural and other monster-hunting shows in that the characters develop supernatural abilities of their own and are caught up in conspiracies and double-crosses.  They are in the dark about a lot of stuff and their lives are often completely ruined.  If they get too involved in their crusades they may go mad with power and become problems themselves that the other heroes may have to take out.

The characters are people who undergo brushes with the supernatural and find within them strange stores of power that they unleash in various ways connected to their motivation to fight against supernatural threats. They also begin to see strange mystical sigils and signs that may be giving them supernatural information or may be leading them astray.  They join up with each other because their goals intersect and their abilities complement each other.  Of course as they become more effective, the supernatural forces of the World of Darkness begin to take notice of them.

It was a very cool game. I've run it several times.

Quote from: JDCorley;494349Nobody gives a shit about the internal decisionmaking of a small business 7 years after the fact.

Quote from: JDCorley;494349Anyway, great thread....

Imagine that.

I know! It's all because of my decisive, complete answer to the original question.  It allowed the thread to move on to other topics. You're very welcome.

Quote from: Benoist;494345How is it so far?

Brilliant ! You've given me a lot to chew on. Questions forthcoming when I've had a little more time to sniff around bit.

QuoteThere are so many games out there. And let's face it, the disinformation about the games is pretty thick in some corners of the web plus I get the feeling that WW itself hasn't been helpful either in that regard, hugely advertising some aspects of its settings while completely ignoring others while they're there, right there in the books to play with.

All this is accurate IMO but in my case it was more like, the whole vampire genre didn't interest me. I've seen some cool flicks concerning Vamps, Nosferatu, Near Dark ....Let the Right One In....shit, I might be missing a few but Vampires themselves never did anything for me. I did get the original game and thought it was great and WW games fired up my flagging interest in RPGs but I never really ever considered running a Vampire game.

Regards,
David R

Come on guys. Please don't go on with the sniping.

Btw , what did you think of Kindred of the East and all those supplements?

Regards,
David R

Quote from: David R;494373Btw , what did you think of Kindred of the East and all those supplements?

Regards,
David R

Never cared for it. On one hand it was completely clashing with Vampire from a thematic point of view, and on the other hand the Kuei Jin themselves were not operating on the same scale of powers than the Kindred at all. I liked the Bushi and Gaki. I'm still using them, as a matter of fact. And replace that by some stuff that was like anime-style proto-Exalted bullshit, instead of going back to that feodal Japan dark place vibe that was so awesome? You lost me WW guys. You fucking bastards.

At least Mage exploded the mold in style. This was weak in comparison. Oh so very weak.

So I never implemented KotE in my games.

One GM amongst us wanted to run a game, but that didn't go anywhere. I had created a character for it, but never played in the end.

Wow, interesting reading all this... so unlike my assumptions about Vampire.
I'd bought the original Masquerade books in the Wayback but never really got sucked in... borrowed bits here and there for other games... then was surrounded by a coffeehouse full of Larping goth-thespians from the college who put me off anything vampire for a good long while.
Reading this has me wanting to delve into the big stack of OWOD/NWOD books I inherited a few years back.

Quote from: JDCorley;494368I know! It's all because of my decisive, complete answer to the original question.  It allowed the thread to move on to other topics. You're very welcome.

Egad! A true pithecanthropus!

Let me get a picture of you so I can prove that you really exist.

Quote from: Benoist;494345Building Paris itself started with fishing for information in the supplements, which at the time was rather scarce, including details about François Villon, how this was the fief of the Toreador, etc. I looked into Chicago by Night and decided on a couple of Methuselahs I'd like to use myself to manipulate stuff in the background. I think I came up with Andromeda and Agamemnon first, being tied to the story of Helena and Menele in Chicago, then came up with Salemnus and the conspiracy surrounding him I called the Mercurialis Circus, long before there was such a thing mentioned in the Book of Nod (actually the way it turned up in the Book of Nod blew my mind away, because that was pretty close to what I had come up with myself as a young teen - I felt very proud of that at the time).

Ok, I'm not very familiar with the sourcebook or names but (if I'm reading this right) you created a connection between Chicago Vamps and the Undead in Paris, right ? Did you do any research on the history of Paris itself ( in terms of who built what, scandals, etc) and weave that into your campaign ? Did any real world Parisian figures play a part in your campaign ? Or was it mainly the mythos of the WoD?

The reason I ask and my question about the Kindred of the East sourcebooks, is that I've always wanted to run something based on Sterling Seagrave's Lords of the Rim.  (http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Rim-Sterling-Seagrave/dp/0399140115) I think Vampire would be a good fit but I want to how combining real world figures and the supernatural (esp in the WoD, context) actually plays out in a campaign as opposed to just reading about people who say they do this in their games.

QuoteThinking about all this is like fitting the pieces of a huge puzzle until it looks believable and alive in your head. Then you run the thing. You let the players come to town and just get interested in stuff depending on their own personalities, their characters', their background stories, and so on. And from there it just comes alive, like Frankenstein electrifying his monster. It takes a life of its own, and if you do your job right, in the end, after a while, you don't even have to come up with anything every game session. It's just a matter of making NPCs react to stuff the PCs do.

Ok, here's where you are going to have to elaborate a bit. How exactly did they get interested in stuff. Did they know the history of some of the stuff that was going on ? Were hooks introduced during chargen ? Because it all sounds very complex and I'm trying to get a feel of how your players got involved in the web, so to speak.

Right, just this for now. More when I've had a chance to take a closer look. I have to say, this is what I really dig, seeing a game through another perspective.

Regards,
David R

It's true, I am a photogenic old man of whom a picture would be extremely valuable to all thinking persons, thank you for the compliment, I accept it in the same spirit in which it was offered.

Anyway, Kindred of the East had two big problems:

1 - It didn't fit in with the rest of the Vampire mythos, so really didn't have any place in the world of Vampire: the Masquerade. God didn't act like that, which led to the creepy conclusion that God's a racist?  This problem could be solved by making KotE a standalone game, which it worked better as anyway.

2 - It still had some racist/orientalist shit in it, but thankfully ignorable. In fact you can use it as a starting point to dig into a lot of interesting folkloric stuff to flesh out the world in a properly horrific manner.

Those were the two main issues I had with it. I never really had an opportunity to run more than a one-shot with it, though thinking about it for this post made me think of it fondly.

Quote from: David R;494422Ok, I'm not very familiar with the sourcebook or names but (if I'm reading this right) you created a connection between Chicago Vamps and the Undead in Paris, right ? Did you do any research on the history of Paris itself ( in terms of who built what, scandals, etc) and weave that into your campaign ? Did any real world Parisian figures play a part in your campaign ? Or was it mainly the mythos of the WoD?

I basically came up with really old Methuselah (4th generation) vampires that I could use in the background as the masterminds of the local "Jyhad", the chess game played with other vampires and factions in Paris. I took a look at Chicago, where you have Helena (of Troy) and Menele fighting a war against each other since the days of the Antiquity. I came up with my own couple, Andromeda (Toreador) and Agamemnon (can't remember the clan, I think he was Ventrue, though, not sure anymore), and that got me started on the large scale historic conspiracy angle.

Now, yes, there are actually tons of historical figures amongst the vampires of Paris. There were from the very start. For one thing, I was basically raised with a respect of history and a huge set of Encyclopedia Universalis in my hands. I can't help it. It's in my blood.

Second, let's face it, the portrayal of France in the eyes of WW people sucks ass. France for them is about Toreador harpies, fashion shows, and 15th century poet (Villon) ruling it all (I could make a case that WW's treatment of history sucked and still sucks -less though, since it went from laughable in the Masquerade days to missed opportunities in the Requiem days, though I will say this: Requiem for Rome is AWESOME- to this day but I'm going to move on). "Err... excuse me? For hipster thespian dudes you could have done better than that. It's not the baguette and beret thing, but that's not much better than that either." So that meant for me that I would use the "official" description as a front. Paris basically "looks" like this from an outsider's standpoint, but as soon as you're in, you realize that the society of the Damned there is a LOT more complicated than Villon, his harpies, and fashion shows.

Third, Vampire, the game, BEGS you to do this. I mean come on. It's a huge part of the fun in designing your own city by Night! Immortal beings going on through the ages fighting their wars in secret. How the fuck could you NOT use historical figures and go into weird what-if scenarios like "What if Charles Baudelaire hated the guts of Maximilien Robespierre? What would happen then?" And it's awesome for the players to meet these characters too, particularly when they have evolved over time and challenge their expectations, while at the same time making sense if they dig around a bit to find out about their past.

So yes, I used TONS of historical figures. From the very start (I got some of my papers from 1992 right next to me right now) I can see... Descartes (a mage who was embraced later on), Rodin, Camille Claudel, Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoléon II, Maximilien Robespierre, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (a genius forgotten by popular history, this man), Michel Ney, Charles Baudelaire, the Baron Haussmann, Gustave Eiffel (a mage), the Grand Condé, Quintus Arius being inspired from a real life Roman... and on.

PCs were encouraged to play historical characters too, if that's what they wanted. Stanislas de Guaita (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=2519.0) and Anton Kartachev (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3174.0) in the Paris Alchymique are historical characters, for instance. Miyamoto Musashi (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3229.0) as well.

In the Livre des Damnés I linked above, you can find some characters inspired by their historical equivalents. Baudouin de la Butte d'Omont (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3251.0) and the whole gang of the Chevaliers de Saint Ladres are all historical characters, though I can't actually tell you who without going into huge spoilers, Tommy Dilward (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3250.0), Joseph Antoine Boullan (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3248.0) (an insane SOB this one, in real life I mean: Catholic priest satanist and all the shebang), Antonio Mansini (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3247.0) is a composite of several historical characters, the name itself coming from my mother misremembering the name when she was talking to me about Mazarin, Eustache Dauger (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3221.0) is the man with the Iron Mask, Sekhmet (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3212.0) is inspired from real life Egyptian figures, Césario Visconti (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3203.0) is inspired from the real life Visconti family, the Marquis de Sade (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=2325.0) (actually an old player character from PbN v1), Maximilien Robespierre (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=2556.0) well... everyone knows THAT crazy son of a bitch... and on and on it goes.

Likewise the history of Paris itself, the who built what, what was the rule like in which and which period, and so on... all this stuff affected the history of the by Night, obviously, in such a way that, in play, you could basically look at the real life history as a CLUE of what might really have happened in the shadows.

Quote from: David R;494422The reason I ask and my question about the Kindred of the East sourcebooks, is that I've always wanted to run something based on Sterling Seagrave's Lords of the Rim.  (http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Rim-Sterling-Seagrave/dp/0399140115) I think Vampire would be a good fit but I want to how combining real world figures and the supernatural (esp in the WoD, context) actually plays out in a campaign as opposed to just reading about people who say they do this in their games.

If you want to go for an Asian take on vampires, you basically have three choices as far as the rules are concerned: (1) you get yourself Dark Alliance: Vancouver for the Apocalypse and Masquerade which features the Bushi and Gaki (also in the World of Darkness first ed supplement), and you basically rework it to work with the Caine myth somehow (totally feasible with a little bit of research and imagination), coming up with your own bloodlines in the process, (2) you opt for Kindred of the East, which means you embrace the proto-Exalted anime-style uber-powered schtick that's going on there. Like JD said, that works best as its own game, you don't want to mix everything with that, and (3) you opt for Requiem instead, where you don't have an monolythic myth of origins and all that stuff, you basically can come up with your own answers from the start, you can hunt down all the Asian bloodlines in various supplements, invent your own as needed, and so on.

Personally, I'd go for (3).

Quote from: David R;494422Ok, here's where you are going to have to elaborate a bit. How exactly did they get interested in stuff. Did they know the history of some of the stuff that was going on ? Were hooks introduced during chargen ? Because it all sounds very complex and I'm trying to get a feel of how your players got involved in the web, so to speak.

A bit of all this. Usually when people would present themselves to the Prince or court there was something going on there. NPCs are just not waiting frozen in place to interact with a dude with a "I'm a PC" tag on his shirt. They do stuff. They have discussions, or they compete at court against each other, or they try to gain prestige by organizing events, or there's some crime committed, whatever the case may be. There is some stuff going on, and the players pick up on whatever's going on and go for what interests them the most.

There's also their backgrounds, where for instance a player might tell me "OK my Sire was a real bastard and he did this and this and this to me" and I would answer "OK. Your Sire is [name]. You haven't heard about him in a while, but you heard rumors he might be in Paris scheming something big, at least that's what a Toreador harpy told you in some evening in Amsterdam." Player: "The SOB. I'm going to catch up with him and twart his plans."

And all variations thereof.

It sounds complex, but it's very simple in practice. Players just need to know that well, they're playing characters, so they should have their own backstory, their own goals and needs and wants and personality, no matter how sketchy (a couple of paragraphs is more than enough to work with really, ask any gamer out there), and from there, on they go. I'll use what I can off their backgrounds, and stuff, and between that and what naturally goes on in the city, plus them witnessing the stuff other players are doing themselves, it just... rolls down the hill from there, so to speak. Doesn't take that much effort, seriously.

I think a lot of game companies don't really know what to do with history and WW is no exception. Even GURPS, which is widely (and rightly) regarded as the leader in historical RPGs very rarely has more than a few paragraphs about how to bring history alive and to the table, essentially assuming that GMs and players will do that themselves.  Which is fine, but I know I can always use the help.

I ran a Victorian era adventure game set in a supernaturalized Paris in the late 19th century, and even fictionalized and made larger-than-life and exaggerated, as pulp adventure should be, I really was not able to find much to use out there in RPGworld.  And this is a setting that's just so amazing for Victorian-era stuff because it avoids a lot of the costume-drama/overwhelmingly mannered shit that you get if you dump your campaign in London.  

I've always been a Francophile, though, so maybe I'm prejudiced.

Historical gaming is something I'm very interested in and have done many times. The key is immediacy.  The players need to feel that the events of the game are not happening at arms length, but instead are relevant to their characters and actions.

Maybe not super-relevant to this thread, but here's (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QySl2AZlNoYoOKfmbAFRaFnuWIKCcL-K7lfCS2c8BcQ/edit) the Google Doc I wrote about the setting, and I did a timeline (https://docs.google.com/document/d/17MOeZ1183wk9ajbR9gymCFAOgtuGfVlz0VZH0ROP3Qk/edit) to try to set the events of the game in historical context - the best part about the timeline is the many links to public domain pictures and books, and links to musical performances of works popular at the time.  It's more of a pulp adventure setting than a horror one, though there were some horror elements, with a Dracula-like vampire stalking the city, and so on.  I expected them to read the first doc, but not the second, they could just page through that when bored/curious about something.

Quote from: JDCorley;494476I ran a Victorian era adventure game set in a supernaturalized Paris in the late 19th century, and even fictionalized and made larger-than-life and exaggerated, as pulp adventure should be, I really was not able to find much to use out there in RPGworld.  And this is a setting that's just so amazing for Victorian-era stuff because it avoids a lot of the costume-drama/overwhelmingly mannered shit that you get if you dump your campaign in London.

Actually, my first thoughts after hearing about the upcoming historical supplement for Changeling: The Lost were that Victorian London is getting a little overplayed by now, and that instead fin de siècle Paris could make for a more interesting change of scenery.

Quote from: JDCorley;494476I ran a Victorian era adventure game set in a supernaturalized Paris in the late 19th century, and even fictionalized and made larger-than-life and exaggerated, as pulp adventure should be, I really was not able to find much to use out there in RPGworld.  And this is a setting that's just so amazing for Victorian-era stuff because it avoids a lot of the costume-drama/overwhelmingly mannered shit that you get if you dump your campaign in London.  

I agree. As a matter of fact ... (time to use those spoilers tags - players of Paris, don't look if you don't want to spoil yourself)

Spoiler

I have a PC Mekhet right now who discovered a Glass Harmonium kept in Fantômas (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3249.0)'s collection of antiques. It's basically a variant from an idea included in Mekhet: Shadows in the Dark.

When you play it (clicky link link), (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UpLYuSVgoQ) the instrument allows, among other things, to basically connect with the memory alive within the Vitae of Clan Mekhet, and "be" some other Mekhet back in time, exploring different events from different perspectives as if you "were" those Mekhets back in time.

This basically sent the PC Mekhet from the 2007 Paris back into the times of the Commune de Paris, in 1871 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune), during the last weeks of combats around the city. So the player was her own character, Ambre (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=2079.0), living in the veins of another vampire of Clan Mekhet, Madeleine Villard (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3210.0), with its own character sheet and abilities, with the player piloting the character as though she was reliving her memories back in time... it's been quite fun so far, as the player really had fun with it, having the two characters shifting back in forth within the same body and consciousness. :)

Here's a link to the play thread in case you read French. (http://forum.lespetitspotes.com/index.php?topic=3238.0)

(http://enrill.net/images/requiem/pics/Glass-harmonium.png)

That's a great plot concept and a good way to introduce some historical material in a horror/vampire way. I have a similar thing in my current supers game, at some point I want to stop the session halfway through and reveal that the events are being recounted by a precognitive to her therapist, years previous. "So, Marie-Ange, you believe these events are fated to happen..." And we start to play out her life. Playing with time is great fun.

I wouldn't call it a "plot" obviously, since I don't think of RPGs in those terms, but yeah, it's great fun, for sure. :)

I totally call what goes on in my campaigns 'plot'.

Suck it you french dog.  ;)

You're doing whatever the fuck you want with your games, I'm not your mum, Pika-poo. :D

Quote from: GrimGent;494478Actually, my first thoughts after hearing about the upcoming historical supplement for Changeling: The Lost were that Victorian London is getting a little overplayed by now, and that instead fin de siècle Paris could make for a more interesting change of scenery.

It would, and I do think the Victorian era in London is overplayed in RPGs. Now you got to admit though, the combination of Changeling with that trope could give us some amazing results. Wait and see. :)

One thing I would like to mention as well regarding "by Nights" : the Requiem supplement Damnation City is absolutely excellent. It's sort of a toolbox, a huge tome that provides you with different modes of play, methodologies to come up with sites and domains and districts and power structures for your city, lots of NPCs archetypes and the like.

It really was a great read for me. I ended up using very little of the tools included in the box as-is, but it helped me consider the setting in different ways, using different angles and POVs, and it helped for my Paris Alchymique from an inspiration standpoint at least.

Also, I wanted to point out that just as I hunted down bits of background about Paris in WW supplements back in 92-93 when the setting was fresh and all to then build it to my liking, I did the same thing with Requiem. I did use some bits here and there : an NPC from the Carthians book, another from Rites of the Dragon, a bloodline from another sourcebook and so on. The descriptions of Paris, its power structure and the like (as is the case as an example amongst many other iconic cities in Damnation City) totally left me cold, however. It almost universally sucked. So I basically built my own from scratch.

Most people would call the situation, choices and experiences of a fictional character a "plot", but mote it harm none, do as thou wilt.

I agree, Damnation City is amazing. I used the district rules for my Vampire game set in 1801 Poland game to help give the various districts of Warsaw distinct feels. That way the characters could be like, "this area is too afraid, it makes hunting harder, we need to get the garrison to stop hassling people after dark" and have a goal that had some mechanical oomf behind it.

Quote from: JDCorley;494657Most people would call the situation, choices and experiences of a fictional character a "plot", but mote it harm none, do as thou wilt.

Yup. Except for me as a GM, kind of the point of a RPG is to consider these characters as not being fictional while we play, and the players to play as if they were the character, not manipulating a fictional narrative construct. But you know all this already. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=18804)

Doesn't stop me from appreciating the WoD games, that said. It might be an important point for the discussion, since you don't have to get into the whole "storytelling" schtick to get the most out of the games.

Quote from: JDCorley;494657I agree, Damnation City is amazing. I used the district rules for my Vampire game set in 1801 Poland game to help give the various districts of Warsaw distinct feels. That way the characters could be like, "this area is too afraid, it makes hunting harder, we need to get the garrison to stop hassling people after dark" and have a goal that had some mechanical oomf behind it.

I can see how that can be great fun. I don't need the mechanical aspect personally, as I find that's not the focus of the game per se, and I prefer the rules aspect to remain secondary to the action itself, rather than its sole mean of expression, but regardless, the chapter on Districts gave me lots of food for thought to try and come up with different feels for different areas of the city.

One thing I'd like to try is a Primacy game. It'd be a significant departure from the current game play of the Paris Alchymique, but it'd be interesting to try in a different time period for instance, particularly with players who would know PbN and would have come to a basic understanding of the playing field after some time playing a game under the normal Requiem rules.

Quote from: Benoist;494667Yup. Except for me as a GM, kind of the point of a RPG is to consider these characters as not being fictional while we play, and the players to play as if they were the character, not manipulating a fictional narrative construct. But you know all this already. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=18804)

Got news for you - the character doesn't become nonfictional no matter how you treat them.  You made them all up.

QuoteDoesn't stop me from appreciating the WoD games, that said. It might be an important point for the discussion, since you don't have to get into the whole "storytelling" schtick to get the most out of the games.

I've found that themes help me organize what can otherwise be a big sprawling mess of a game, even if I'm not doing much else story-wise.  Try it sometime!

QuoteOne thing I'd like to try is a Primacy game. It'd be a significant departure from the current game play of the Paris Alchymique, but it'd be interesting to try in a different time period for instance, particularly with players who would know PbN and would have come to a basic understanding of the playing field after some time playing a game under the normal Requiem rules.

The Primacy game in DC is pretty great, but also needs strong GM intervention. Like, they forgot to put in how many points you start with. Whoops.

Quote from: JDCorley;494673The Primacy game in DC is pretty great, but also needs strong GM intervention. Like, they forgot to put in how many points you start with. Whoops.

Doesn't bother me. :)

PS: for the 'story v. actuality' tangent, see there. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?p=494675#post494675) I won't pursue this argument here.

Well, I decided to design a city from scratch. It's going to be located around the Kra Isthmus aka The Devil's Neck. I going to use Kowloon Walled City as inspiration and move on from there. I considered using an existing city but thought I do something a little more ambitious. A Created built this city with the requiste far reaching secret/implication(s).

Regards,
David R

Sounds awesome.

I remember going through each American state and re-naming it in case I ever wanted to do an "alternative world game" set in that state.  Pretty cool.

That sounds like a terrific idea, David. :)

Hey, so one thing that occurred to me is, if you're not using the nWoD in a story-oriented way, are you still organizing the game by scenes and chapters? How do you handle the duration of powers that are scene-length, or XP awards that are per-chapter?

Quote from: JDCorley;494764Hey, so one thing that occurred to me is, if you're not using the nWoD in a story-oriented way, are you still organizing the game by scenes and chapters? How do you handle the duration of powers that are scene-length, or XP awards that are per-chapter?

Even if you are not playing in story-oriented manner (whatever that is), you can use the scene as a basic unit for measuring the duration of powers and all that. Regarding XP awards, I give players a flat 3 XP rate / session, and maybe an additional XP if they go through a really significant learning experience.

Well, normally the organization of experiences into scenes is associated with stories - people don't experience "scenes" in their ordinary lives.

Quote from: JDCorley;494778Well, normally the organization of experiences into scenes is associated with stories - people don't experience "scenes" in their ordinary lives.

The "scenes" in WoD aren't really that different from the "encounters" in D&D, though. And in Changeling they also exist in-character: that's how the Fae instinctively measure time.

Quote from: JDCorley;494764Hey, so one thing that occurred to me is, if you're not using the nWoD in a story-oriented way, are you still organizing the game by scenes and chapters? How do you handle the duration of powers that are scene-length, or XP awards that are per-chapter?

But you know what the funniest thing about France is? It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that we got here, but it's just...it's just there it's a little different. You know what they call "story" in France ? They got the Fench New Wave they wouldn't know what "story" is. They call it Mise-en-scène. You know what they put in their games instead of "plot" ? Verisimilitude. I've seen 'em do it, man. They fuckin' drown 'em in that shit.

Just kidding, Ben. You know, I consider you one of the more interesting cats around here :D

Anyways back on topic. Some of the ideas I'm throwing around is the whole idea of counter myth. It was Oliver Stone's fancy pants way of saying that JFK was riddled with untruths and inconsistencies much like the Warren Report. So what I'm aiming for is a strong conspiracy theory vibe in the game. I know that the city was the final expression of the friendship between a Cryptic (Demon) and Ulgan (Created).

I know that because of English, French and Dutch historical presence in the region, Kindred from those cultures have a waning influence. Just as in real life the influx of the African diaspora is beginning to be felt in this part of the world, so too will the Laibon (African Kindred) play an important role. Of course this being my WoD game there will be a a clan of Garou under the thrall of a Kurtz-like Wraith. Just throwing around some ideas. Reading Ben's campaign write ups has given me some interesting avenues to explore.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: JDCorley;494764Hey, so one thing that occurred to me is, if you're not using the nWoD in a story-oriented way, are you still organizing the game by scenes and chapters? How do you handle the duration of powers that are scene-length, or XP awards that are per-chapter?

I have never run WOD, just been a player. I started back when Vampire came out and we had a lot of campaigns in the 90s. Had just a few with NWOD. In every game we played it was very freeform, what I would call character driven. So there was no story structure that I could detect. We just interpreted scenes as encounterd and handled xp after each session.

I'm pretty sure the old world of darkness didn't have the chapter distinction...maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

Quote from: JDCorley;494931I'm pretty sure the old world of darkness didn't have the chapter distinction...maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

Both the old and new games measure time in the same terms: turn, scene, chapter, story, chronicle.

"Chapter -- One independent part of a story, almost always played in one game session, made up of scenes connected by periods of downtime." (Mage: The Ascension, 2e, page 79.)

Cool, thanks. I didn't have it close to hand.

Quote from: JDCorley;494931I'm pretty sure the old world of darkness didn't have the chapter distinction...maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

I wouldn't know. I never GM'd really so only used the books as a reference when making a character.

Old WoD did indeed already use the terms of Chapters and Scenes from the start. See awarding experience in any of the first editions WoD games, for instance.

The comparison with units of action, like an encounter in d20 games, is appropriate, in the sense that you can use these units as 'live' pacing elements instead of narrative elements. Just like you could leave your office in real life to go home and close a 'chapter' of your day to go to the one about 'relaxing at home, or whatever happens when I get there.'

By using these terms, you have allowed story-ness to  infect your game forever, please kill yourself to protect the purity of the hobby, swine.

Quote from: JDCorley;495032By using these terms, you have allowed story-ness to  infect your game forever, please kill yourself to protect the purity of the hobby, swine.

LOL. Swine, yes! Story? No.
That's the hilarity of the WW Swine, they want to pretend they're "radical" but they're not. They aren't "storygamers" they're just roleplayers who use the word "chapter" instead of "session", or "scene" instead of "encounter".

RPGPundit

But surely using even the slightest amount of story-related terminology will open the doors for....infection.  Like "plot", above! Benoist thoroughly explained this, go back and read it.

Quote from: JDCorley;495352But surely using even the slightest amount of story-related terminology will open the doors for....infection.  Like "plot", above! Benoist thoroughly explained this, go back and read it.

I thought you guys patched this up with a beer summit.

Quote from: JDCorley;495352But surely using even the slightest amount of story-related terminology will open the doors for....infection.  Like "plot", above! Benoist thoroughly explained this, go back and read it.

Wasn't that, in fact, the whole origin of the Forge?  

A bunch of morons (in particular, Uncle Ron) read the Vampire book, assumed it meant something other than it did because it used literature-like words, and decided to try and ruin the hobby by introducing storygames (which wouldn't have been so bad if every "story" they want to portray wasn't something out of the Marquis de Sade's library).

Yes, ironically, JDCorley's sarcastic statement is in a way right; and Jgants has already explained how.

RPGPundit

QuoteA bunch of morons (in particular, Uncle Ron) read the Vampire book, assumed it meant something other than it did because it used literature-like words, and decided to try and ruin the hobby by introducing storygames (which wouldn't have been so bad if every "story" they want to portray wasn't something out of the Marquis de Sade's library).

Hm, interesting theory, let's look at a very successful and highly regarded story game, Happy Birthday, Robot!, to see if this makes sense.

Quote from: RPGPundit;495470Yes, ironically, JDCorley's sarcastic statement is in a way right; and Jgants has already explained how.

Yes, please tell us more about how language must be controlled with an iron fist in order to prevent infection.

Quote from: JDCorley;495515Hm, interesting theory, let's look at a very successful and highly regarded story game, Happy Birthday, Robot!, to see if this makes sense.

Never heard of it.  Or ever saw it mentioned online.

Clearly I was more mocking the Sorcerer/Poison'd/Japanese Maid (or whatever that was) games.

But you are correct, not all storygames are pretentious misery/fetish tourism; I forgot about the other half of the forgey games that are merely boring and pretentious.

Quote from: jgants;495574Clearly I was more mocking the Sorcerer/Poison'd/Japanese Maid (or whatever that was) games.

Maid isn't a "storygame", "forgey", or "something out of the Marquis de Sade's library", though.

Hmm. Actually, I might as well quote one of my recent posts on another forum...

"To demonstrate the game at its simplest, I just rolled up this set-up on the charts:

The World is Space, so the general genre at least starts out as space opera. The Mood is Romance, the fluffiest of the lot.

The Mansion, the locale where the bulk of the play takes place, is a pink-and-indigo warship, carrying a private army and equipped with a sizeable indoor pool.

The Master, the employer of the PCs, is a shy nine-year-old professional criminal, whose power comes from the ship itself as well as an immense personal fortune.

The Butler, strong against outside threats but weak against Maids unless acting on the Master's orders, is a misshapen hacker, apparent age 43, who secretly plots against the others and intends to take over the ship himself.

The Maids, the default PCs, are a priestess princess who serves the Master to repay some great service in the past, a greedy wereraven who's been sent by the Master's enemies to infiltrate the ship, and an angel who's actually a guy and took the job just because he's a big fan of maids.

And a random event to kick off the scenario: 'The space pirate guild has put a bounty on the master and the maids! But why?'"

Quote from: jgants;495574Never heard of it.  Or ever saw it mentioned online.

Your expertise is surely unmatchable.

PS, did you know Sorcerer has a GM, players, and you play only your character, and the GM says what happens and you say what your character does? It's basically a White Wolf game from someone other than White Wolf.

Quote from: JDCorley;495516Yes, please tell us more about how language must be controlled with an iron fist in order to prevent infection.

Its you fucking relativists that believe in nothing but semantic manipulation for the obtaining of power. So you weasel-word your way around like fucking wormtongues spreading your filth by eroding values not with anything that's true, but with lies and deception, and the manipulation of language.

You're just pissed off because I know your game, and have played it better than you, in the name of Truth, against you. I won the war.

RPGPundit

Interesting, you feel I am a relativist (of some kind?), your psychic powers are formidable indeed, please tell us more.  Do you think that everyone everywhere must use language as you do, or do you think that just the people talking about RPGs on the Internet must? Are there other forbidden words? Are people allowed to think the forbidden words so long as they keep silent about what they think, or must they guard even their thoughts? Do psychics like yourself stand by to assist in policing our thoughts? About how many minds can one of you regularly patrol?

Quote from: GrimGent;495586"To demonstrate the game at its simplest, I just rolled up this set-up on the charts:

The World is Space, so the general genre at least starts out as space opera. The Mood is Romance, the fluffiest of the lot.

The Mansion, the locale where the bulk of the play takes place, is a pink-and-indigo warship, carrying a private army and equipped with a sizeable indoor pool.

The Master, the employer of the PCs, is a shy nine-year-old professional criminal, whose power comes from the ship itself as well as an immense personal fortune.

The Butler, strong against outside threats but weak against Maids unless acting on the Master's orders, is a misshapen hacker, apparent age 43, who secretly plots against the others and intends to take over the ship himself.

The Maids, the default PCs, are a priestess princess who serves the Master to repay some great service in the past, a greedy wereraven who's been sent by the Master's enemies to infiltrate the ship, and an angel who's actually a guy and took the job just because he's a big fan of maids.

And a random event to kick off the scenario: 'The space pirate guild has put a bounty on the master and the maids! But why?'"

I don't care what people does with their free time and I don't think that Maid is a terrible game that pollutes everyone's minds and destroys the hobby, but this must be one of the most retarded premises for a game I've ever seen. If someone offered me to play in a game like that I would laugh and laugh and laugh.

Surely laughter is not what the game is trying to evoke, and therefore your reaction would be heart-rending to the person offering you a seat at the table.

Quote from: Imperator;495741I don't care what people does with their free time and I don't think that Maid is a terrible game that pollutes everyone's minds and destroys the hobby, but this must be one of the most retarded premises for a game I've ever seen. If someone offered me to play in a game like that I would laugh and laugh and laugh.

That's the "Completely Random" playstyle in action. It's basically intended as silly filler for when you have a bit of free time, maybe from fifteen minutes to an hour, and just want to play something light and quick with no prepwork in advance.

Granted, the incredibly random nature of the charts does mean that some tweaking may well be required for more substantial scenarios, and some Special Qualities don't fit in at all in certain genres unless you go for kitchen-sink mash-ups. The angel and the wereraven from that example aren't hard to describe as aliens, but you could just as easily end up with, say, robots in the Wild West or wizards in Cyberpunk.

Then again, if it's consistency you're after, the "Scenario-Based" playstyle would probably be a better choice from the start.

Quote from: JDCorley;495730Interesting, you feel I am a relativist (of some kind?), your psychic powers are formidable indeed, please tell us more.  Do you think that everyone everywhere must use language as you do, or do you think that just the people talking about RPGs on the Internet must? Are there other forbidden words? Are people allowed to think the forbidden words so long as they keep silent about what they think, or must they guard even their thoughts? Do psychics like yourself stand by to assist in policing our thoughts? About how many minds can one of you regularly patrol?

You can say whatever you like, shit-head; but A is motherfucking A. You don't get to be the one who redefines truth to fit your agenda.  Fuck you and your reality-bubble.

RPGPundit

I am not redefining anything to fit my agenda! I'm just a regular person, an average joe.  I seek only wisdom and enlightenment, and was enthralled by your dramatic passion about what words can and cannot be used to talk about RPGs, or maybe to think about them? Oh well, it was worth a try. I guess I will muddle on with my normal everyday language instead of the psychic uber-language we have received just a tiny glimpse of.  Too bad nobody wants to answer my questions, as the most foolish person on the forums, this seems unfair to me.

Quote from: JDCorley;495747Surely laughter is not what the game is trying to evoke, and therefore your reaction would be heart-rending to the person offering you a seat at the table.

I am aware of that, I'm sorry. But I can't help myself when I see a pink-flamingo starship.

Quote from: GrimGent;495775That's the "Completely Random" playstyle in action. It's basically intended as silly filler for when you have a bit of free time, maybe from fifteen minutes to an hour, and just want to play something light and quick with no prepwork in advance.

Granted, the incredibly random nature of the charts does mean that some tweaking may well be required for more substantial scenarios, and some Special Qualities don't fit in at all in certain genres unless you go for kitchen-sink mash-ups. The angel and the wereraven from that example aren't hard to describe as aliens, but you could just as easily end up with, say, robots in the Wild West or wizards in Cyberpunk.

Then again, if it's consistency you're after, the "Scenario-Based" playstyle would probably be a better choice from the start.

It's cool man. As I said, Maid is not for me simply because I loathe anime and all things anime and I find them ridiculous and retarded, but I acknowledge is just a matter of taste. I'm cool with people playing games they enjoy no matter what I think of those games.

Quote from: JDCorley;495937I am not redefining anything to fit my agenda! I'm just a regular person, an average joe.  I seek only wisdom and enlightenment, and was enthralled by your dramatic passion about what words can and cannot be used to talk about RPGs, or maybe to think about them? Oh well, it was worth a try. I guess I will muddle on with my normal everyday language instead of the psychic uber-language we have received just a tiny glimpse of.  Too bad nobody wants to answer my questions, as the most foolish person on the forums, this seems unfair to me.

But if you ARE foolish and you don't understand the language, if we answered your questions, would it matter?

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;496081But if you ARE foolish and you don't understand the language, if we answered your questions, would it matter?

We'll never know now!

Quote from: Imperator;496080I am aware of that, I'm sorry. But I can't help myself when I see a pink-flamingo starship.

The sight of the cutest battleship in the galaxy will lull the enemy into a false sense of security!

Anyway, the main colours for the Mansion can be rolled on the Maid Colour Table, which is also used for the eyes, hair, and uniforms of the PCs. Yes, someone's character may well end up randomly with indigo hair and pink eyes. "Metallic" is probably the most appropriate entry for things like starships.

Quote from: Imperator;496080As I said, Maid is not for me simply because I loathe anime and all things anime and I find them ridiculous and retarded, but I acknowledge is just a matter of taste.

Player buy-in is an obvious issue. A taste for anime or manga, and at least some familiarity with the general concept of maids as presented in various series, definitely help, even if it's just Roberta from Black Lagoon. (A former international terrorist, she became a maid to atone for her violent past, but although she tries to act demure and polite now, she still reverts into an unstoppable killing machine at any threats towards her master or his son.)

Also, the game itself is peppered with, for instance, events, items and powers which are nods to various titles from Floating Classroom to Fruits Basket.

Quote from: JDCorley;495937I am not redefining anything to fit my agenda! I'm just a regular person, an average joe.  I seek only wisdom and enlightenment, and was enthralled by your dramatic passion about what words can and cannot be used to talk about RPGs, or maybe to think about them? Oh well, it was worth a try. I guess I will muddle on with my normal everyday language instead of the psychic uber-language we have received just a tiny glimpse of.  Too bad nobody wants to answer my questions, as the most foolish person on the forums, this seems unfair to me.

Tough, it must be all that brain damage you got from playing games Ron Edwards didn't think you should before you learned how to use HIS special language that actually defines words in completely different ways than normal people would, aiming for intentional complexity for elitism's sake.

See how easy it is to play your game, you stupid fucker?

RPGPundit

My game?

Hmm, would that be my Firefly game or my X-Men game or my D&D game?

And...I hope it's pretty easy to play? I like easy, relaxing games.

I didn't think you agreed with Ron Edwards about the brain damage thing.  But it's good to know you agree with Ron Edwards, please tell me more about how much you support his theories.

I think you both believe you have psychic abilities to tell you what and how other people are thinking, so in retrospect it shouldn't surprise me that you're on the same side.

Alright bitch, answer me this: Is it or is it not fact that Edwards' "Storygaming" movement primarily comes out of a massive rejection of the White Wolf "story-based gaming" that he accused (correctly, in fact) of being just a regular RPG that tries to pretend its something deep but doesn't follow up; while he in fact tried to push the Forge as a place to produce games that were NOT regular RPGs and actually DID try to "create story" rather than just acting gothy?

Because if this is the case, motherfucker, then you have no basis for anything you've said on this thread. If it isn't, you better prove it or its clear you're just trying to act as a disruptive element for a thread that's going in a direction you don't like.

So, get to it, or I'll draw my own conclusions.

RPGPundit

I don't know what he thinks, I'm not psychic?  

I know a few years ago he posted somewhere that he really didn't like story games...

...and he doesn't post on story-games.com very much (Edit: I went back and checked, he hasn't posted there since 2007, so he's really not that interested in story games I would guess)...

...and his main game, Sorcerer, is pretty much a normal RPG in the White Wolf mold...

...and plenty of games that came out of the Forge were pretty normal RPGs with GMs and adventures and so on...

...so I'm going to say based on what he's written, I lean towards no, he didn't really reject White Wolf "story-based gaming", at least as I understand it?

He didn't like a lot of stuff about White Wolf games, but that's okay, not everyone has to like every game out there!  I don't like WH40K, but lots of people do, it doesn't hurt me any.

But if you were really interested in what he thought, you could e-mail him and ask him?

Or you could just use your psychic powers and tell me what he thinks, that would be interesting too, do you get a real-time stream of his thoughts, or is it time-delayed somewhat?

Anyway, I don't see what that has to do with your belief that you know what I'm thinking (relativism?), or that ordinary everyday language of discussing RPGs must be controlled (by you, or a committee or something? I was never clear) in order to preserve RPGs from the creeping menace of something-or-other?

Also, you never answered whether it was okay for people to think the forbidden words when thinking about RPGs, or if we must also police our thoughts. (Or psychics will police them for us?)

The ones who want to twist and control language by focusing on semantics is your side. On this site, we don't allow that to happen.

Your ridiculous weasel-worded reply is typical Forge Swine dissimulation.

You want to play around with nonsense terms that modify the fundamental assumptions of RPGs so that they can fit the insane theories of a gang of pretentious idiots? Go to Storygames.  Of course, that's not satisfying to you because the mission of your cause is to subvert regular RPG sites into framing their discussion along Forgite terms.  

Sadly, here is one place where you won't be allowed to succeed in that.  So you can go whine about it elsewhere, or you can go lick your wounds all by your lonesome, that's your choice.  But keep trying to disrupt this site and I won't hesitate to end you.

RPGPundit

An interesting response - claiming to read someone's mind and knowing what they really think is contributing constructively to the site, policing language (and maybe thought) to keep regular ole words from being used in regular ole ways to talk about regular ole RPGs is doing the site a service glorious and true, and refusing ro answer straightforward, simple questions is a sign of purity and valor.

Whereas discussing RPGs is a cowardly, skulking act, a hideous tumor to be cut out, honestly and humbly giving answers when asked is only proof of evil intentions.

So, if I described the episode from Benoist's game to someone and they complimented it by saying, "Wow, that sounds like a cool chapter" (or plot, or development, or character, or whatever the banned words are), do you think I should physically attack them, or spit on them, or...? What kind of punishment does this kind of language crime bring with it? Are some words more damning than others? How can I, a non psychic, determine if their use of the word is innocent, or is it more like a quarantine that must be maintained regardless of their guilt?  "I am sorry, the story language has infected you. You are expelled from the con."

I always miss out on the origins of these fun awkward scenes... Like catching the schoolyard fight right when the teachers arrive. :(

Quote from: RPGPundit;497035But keep trying to disrupt this site and I won't hesitate to end you.

RPGPundit

How's he disrupting this site ? Does he stalk threads and derail conversations ?

Regards,
David R

Remember, all I did was post a perfectly normal compliment using perfectly normal average everyday words. I'm in trouble for what he thinks I think (like, he says I secretly am a relativist of some kind and secretlly believe in Ron Edwards' theories, etc.)

If I did believe in GNS, it would be a Christmas miracle for the fucking ages, because everything I've posted about it on every site forever is that it's malformed garbage, to the point where it's a running gag people comment on. But basically he says even that nearly decade-long history is just part of my plan to lull everyone into complacency so that I can do my treacherous work unhindered. Such a pathology is rarely displayed so boldly. Hence my constant request for more.

Quote from: David R;497120How's he disrupting this site ? Does he stalk threads and derail conversations ?

Regards,
David R

He's derailed this thread by pages and pages of sniping and arguing in bad faith.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;497379He's derailed this thread by pages and pages of sniping and arguing in bad faith.

RPGPundit

JD may be a pedantic little fucker but he never argues in bad faith. Weren't you the one accusing him of being a GNS/Forge Swine when his positions ( downright hostile to Forge theory) is well documented across various boards/blogs? And since when is sniping and arguing in bad faith site disruption. If this is the case, look around, there are a few who would qualify for "ending" :rolleyes:

Regards,
David R

Let's document this:

1. post 88: JDcorley initiates the sniping: "But surely using even the slightest amount of story-related terminology will open the doors for....infection. Like "plot", above! Benoist thoroughly explained this, go back and read it.".

2. Jgants points out that his ironic bullshit is actually basically true, over in post 90. I concur in post 91.

3. In post 93, Jdcorley, unwilling to let it go, starts to snipe in earnest; trying to claim that its my side, and not the Forgers, who believe in controlling the language to support lies.

4. post 96, jdcorley continues to defend forge games from jgants (so much for his "well known position" of being against the forge).

5. post 98, jdcorley, clearly unhinged at this point, (sarcastically) accuses me of being psychic, engages in all kinds of attack, and keeps engaging in a blatantly FALSE argument that he must know is false (i.e. ARGUING IN BAD FAITH), where he tries to claim that the control of language is something the forgers are the poor innocent victims of, rather than the constant perpetrators in their quest to subvert the industry and hobby.

He continues from there, to engage in weasel-wording passive-aggressive sniping against both myself and jgants, until the thread has been completely derailed, which I assume is, for him, mission accomplished.

RPGPundit

Jgants was missinformed that all Forge games are of the sick/torture porn variety. JD merely enlightened him. From claiming that JD defends GNS (and by this you meant he wants to control language) you shift the goalpost to defends Forge Games. Of course he never ever denied he plays certain Forge games but thinks the theory is crap. And then you claim he's arguing in bad faith because "he must know"....Jesus, you really are psychic. And then you claim that he wants to derail this thread when he and Ben were having a fairly civil discussion until Ben gets all hot in the neck by JD's complement that included the word "plot".  Yeah, you're really big on the truth here :rolleyes:

Regards,
David R

Having said that, i think Corley isn't far behind Pundit in the number of forums he's been banned from.

Quote from: David R;497620Jgants was missinformed that all Forge games are of the sick/torture porn variety. JD merely enlightened him.

Bullshit. Gants was making the TRUE argument that there is a huge propensity in forge games toward misery tourism and intentional "edgy" degenerate themes. JD's response was to point out a game so obscure that it might well just be invented, and claim that its a more accurate representative of the forefront of Storygame thought than Poison'd or Grey Ranks.

QuoteFrom claiming that JD defends GNS (and by this you meant he wants to control language) you shift the goalpost to defends Forge Games. Of course he never ever denied he plays certain Forge games but thinks the theory is crap. And then you claim he's arguing in bad faith because "he must know"....Jesus, you really are psychic.

Of course, there is the slightest possibility that he might not know, in which case the level of his ignorance is just so astoundingly high that he should have no business posting on the subject. It'd be like if went onto a forum about the Asian Stock Market and started making bold statements about things being a certain way without knowing the slightest fucking thing about the Asian Stock Market.  It doesn't take a psychic to say that given what other things JDCorley does know, the fact that he wouldn't know these things (rather than just being intentionally deceptive) for which I'm calling him out is pretty fucking miniscule.  That just takes common sense to deduce, something that the Forge Swine always seem to start lacking the second they want to weasel out of being rightly caught in a LIE ("how could you know that I didn't know the Sun wasn't blue? Are you psychic or something? For all you know I might have lived in an underground bunker all my life! You're oppressing me for not accepting any bullshit I say at face value!!").

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;497629Bullshit. Gants was making the TRUE argument that there is a huge propensity in forge games toward misery tourism and intentional "edgy" degenerate themes. JD's response was to point out a game so obscure that it might well just be invented, and claim that its a more accurate representative of the forefront of Storygame thought than Poison'd or Grey Ranks.

Nope. The TRUE argument is that the only games that get any attention here are those that cause the most controversy. JD was aboslutely right to point out the numerous other popular games amongst the Forge crowd that doesn't involve trangressive play.

Edit: And when he mentioned Happy Birthday Robot! he didn't claim (as you say) that it was a more accurate representation of the games the Forge crowds puts outs only that misery tourism or whatever you call them are not the only games that come out of the Forge. Something that Jgants accepts. Whose arguing in bad faith, now ?

QuoteOf course, there is the slightest possibility that he might not know, in which case the level of his ignorance is just so astoundingly high that he should have no business posting on the subject. It'd be like if went onto a forum about the Asian Stock Market and started making bold statements about things being a certain way without knowing the slightest fucking thing about the Asian Stock Market.  It doesn't take a psychic to say that given what other things JDCorley does know, the fact that he wouldn't know these things (rather than just being intentionally deceptive) for which I'm calling him out is pretty fucking miniscule.  That just takes common sense to deduce, something that the Forge Swine always seem to start lacking the second they want to weasel out of being rightly caught in a LIE ("how could you know that I didn't know the Sun wasn't blue? Are you psychic or something? For all you know I might have lived in an underground bunker all my life! You're oppressing me for not accepting any bullshit I say at face value!!").

Don't get upset because he doesn't subscribe to your narrative about the Forge and Uncle Ron. The fact is that JD has been pretty upfront of his disdain for GNS and most kinds of Forge theory. He's been upfront about the Forge games he does like. You go on about how the Forge Swine lie and accuse anyone who doesn't agree with of being Swine or a Pundit hater (go ahead, look it up, you probably would be surpried how many of us here , you have accused of being Swine of some sort) and yet JD has anwsered all your question, just not in the way you want. So then it becomes that he is lying or the goalpost shiftng (first he's defending GNS and then he's defending Forge games). If you really think he is a disruption to this site - sniping and arguing in bad faith - ban him.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: RPGPundit;497629Bullshit. Gants was making the TRUE argument that there is a huge propensity in forge games toward misery tourism and intentional "edgy" degenerate themes. JD's response was to point out a game so obscure that it might well just be invented, and claim that its a more accurate representative of the forefront of Storygame thought than Poison'd or Grey Ranks.

Number of threads about Happy Birthday, Robot! on story-games.com in 2010-2011 (determined by subject line): 17
Number of threads about Grey Ranks on story-games.com in 2010-2011: 3
Number of threads about Poison'd on story-games.com in 2010-2011: 2

I'll even pick out some more widely-thought-to-be story games to test against your theory that Grey Ranks and Poison'd are the forefront of story-game thought. Again, I'm looking at the last two years.

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple (flying kung fu monks answer letters and get into trouble): 8
Fiasco (Coen Brothers style nonsense): 127
Dresden Files (magic detectives and swordfighting in alleys): 23
Mouse Guard (mouseys with cute widdle swords!!!): 14
Burning Wheel or Empires (fantasy kickpunching/science fiction laserbeaming mind controlling alienz): 23
Penny For My Thoughts (non-RPG mutual storytelling engine): 10
Bliss Stage (teenage relationships, plus giant anime fights? I'm not 100% clear on this one): 12
The Shadow of Yesterday (fantasy/sword and sorcery): 2
In A Wicked Age (sword and sorcery): 15
Dogs in the Vineyard (western religious fantasy, cleanin' up the town!): 15

And now some games that I consider possible story games, under my far-superior-to-the-normal definition (games which can be played aiming at story).    Same time frame.  Let's see how much story-games.com thinks about games people don't normally consider story games, but which I do:

Dungeons & Dragons (searched for "D&D"): 65
("Pathfinder" only gets 3 hits, but some of those D&D threads were about D&D3.*, so make of that what you will. Still as much as Grey Ranks and more than Poison'd!)
Vampire (any edition): 4
Mage (any edition): 2
Changeling (any edition): 1
Shadowrun: 4

Yes, story-games.com talks and thinks about D&D around 20 times as much as Grey Ranks, and even Vampire gets about the same about of chit-chat as Poison'd does.

And now some games that are not (as far as I know) story games, just to compare to those 3 threads about Grey Ranks and 2 about Poison'd:

Werewolf/Mafia/Are You The Traitor?: 2
Chess: 1

That was an interesting set of searches, let me know if you want me to do some more!  But I think it's pretty clear that Poison'd/Grey Ranks are not really that significant in story-games.com thinking over the last two years.

QuoteOf course, there is the slightest possibility that he might not know, in which case the level of his ignorance is just so astoundingly high that he should have no business posting on the subject. It'd be like if went onto a forum about the Asian Stock Market and started making bold statements about things being a certain way without knowing the slightest fucking thing about the Asian Stock Market.  It doesn't take a psychic to say that given what other things JDCorley does know, the fact that he wouldn't know these things (rather than just being intentionally deceptive) for which I'm calling him out is pretty fucking miniscule.  That just takes common sense to deduce, something that the Forge Swine always seem to start lacking the second they want to weasel out of being rightly caught in a LIE ("how could you know that I didn't know the Sun wasn't blue? Are you psychic or something? For all you know I might have lived in an underground bunker all my life! You're oppressing me for not accepting any bullshit I say at face value!!").

Wow, just amazing.

Look, I said the word "plot", in a compliment, and the place went completely apeshit.  And I thought that was hilarious and poked fun at people about it.

I don't claim "Forgites are victims of language control", and I don't think that. In fact there was a concerted effort by Forge posters to create a shitload of jargon that doesn't make any sense.  Absolutely everyone who knows anything knows that.  That's what makes it funny that people here now desperately want to do the same thing.

And on this thread, people unironically advocate language control of their own, including you.  Nobody must use the word "plot", even in perfectly normal and natural ways to describe things that absolutely every single other person in the world would call a plot and which have been called a "plot" in RPGs since the early 1980s.  We must scour the word from our vocabulary or risk.....infection.  I poked a little fun, and you decided, nope, that's unironically true, in every possible way, what's so funny about that?  

So I wanted more.  I still do! I'm still waiting for the forbidden word list! Let's hear it!

That said, I took that conversation elsewhere, David, precisely because I didn't want the shit to hit the fan here.

David> Pundit's pissed because Corley is tearing him a new asshole.

Yes you did, Ben. And I know you don't really have anything against JD...well except for normal gamers stuff. I just detest the way how the Pundit threatens bannation against certain gamers. What does he want this place to turn into, an echo chamber ?

Regards,
David R

That's right. I wish JD would just quit it when there's obviously no way we're going to agree on a certain point, and his rhetoric pisses me off sometimes (no, JD, that's not a good thing), but I'm sure he's a cool dude and we could get some great gaming off the ground together.

Getting me to quit it and leave a thread or the site, as you well know, is simple, just tell me to leave. I always do.

Quote from: David R;497641Nope. The TRUE argument is that the only games that get any attention here are those that cause the most controversy. JD was aboslutely right to point out the numerous other popular games amongst the Forge crowd that doesn't involve trangressive play.

Edit: And when he mentioned Happy Birthday Robot! he didn't claim (as you say) that it was a more accurate representation of the games the Forge crowds puts outs only that misery tourism or whatever you call them are not the only games that come out of the Forge. Something that Jgants accepts. Whose arguing in bad faith, now ?

He claimed that it was enormously successful, when in fact its not. By Forge terms, its games like Poison'd, Grey Ranks, the Shab Al-hiri roach, My Life with Master, etc. that are enormously successful. They are the ones that are talked about. That's what its all about.

QuoteDon't get upset because he doesn't subscribe to your narrative about the Forge and Uncle Ron. The fact is that JD has been pretty upfront of his disdain for GNS and most kinds of Forge theory. He's been upfront about the Forge games he does like. You go on about how the Forge Swine lie and accuse anyone who doesn't agree with of being Swine or a Pundit hater (go ahead, look it up, you probably would be surpried how many of us here , you have accused of being Swine of some sort) and yet JD has anwsered all your question, just not in the way you want. So then it becomes that he is lying or the goalpost shiftng (first he's defending GNS and then he's defending Forge games). If you really think he is a disruption to this site - sniping and arguing in bad faith - ban him.

Regards,
David R

He's answered my questions with snide sarcastic comments, non sequiters, counterattacks, and a general willful obstinacy when it comes to saying things even he can't possibly believe.  Its not about "accepting my narrative", its not "my narrative" that Ron Edwards hates White Wolf's games and has written about how they failed to actually "tell story". That's not me, that's FACT. He fucking WROTE ABOUT IT; and there's no reasonable way that corley couldn't have known that.  And remember, that was the part he was initially trying to dispute.

Believe me, I won't hesitate to ban someone who is consistently disruptive.   Its not a step I take lightly.  If I were just going around banning someone for not liking them, he'd be gone by now.  But that's not the standard I use, contrary to what the pundit-haters try to pretend (idiotically, because if that were the case none of them would be here).

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;497650Number of threads about Happy Birthday, Robot! on story-games.com in 2010-2011 (determined by subject line): 17
Number of threads about Grey Ranks on story-games.com in 2010-2011: 3
Number of threads about Poison'd on story-games.com in 2010-2011: 2

I'll even pick out some more widely-thought-to-be story games to test against your theory that Grey Ranks and Poison'd are the forefront of story-game thought. Again, I'm looking at the last two years.

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple (flying kung fu monks answer letters and get into trouble): 8
Fiasco (Coen Brothers style nonsense): 127
Dresden Files (magic detectives and swordfighting in alleys): 23
Mouse Guard (mouseys with cute widdle swords!!!): 14
Burning Wheel or Empires (fantasy kickpunching/science fiction laserbeaming mind controlling alienz): 23
Penny For My Thoughts (non-RPG mutual storytelling engine): 10
Bliss Stage (teenage relationships, plus giant anime fights? I'm not 100% clear on this one): 12
The Shadow of Yesterday (fantasy/sword and sorcery): 2
In A Wicked Age (sword and sorcery): 15
Dogs in the Vineyard (western religious fantasy, cleanin' up the town!): 15

And now some games that I consider possible story games, under my far-superior-to-the-normal definition (games which can be played aiming at story).    Same time frame.  Let's see how much story-games.com thinks about games people don't normally consider story games, but which I do:

Dungeons & Dragons (searched for "D&D"): 65
("Pathfinder" only gets 3 hits, but some of those D&D threads were about D&D3.*, so make of that what you will. Still as much as Grey Ranks and more than Poison'd!)
Vampire (any edition): 4
Mage (any edition): 2
Changeling (any edition): 1
Shadowrun: 4

Yes, story-games.com talks and thinks about D&D around 20 times as much as Grey Ranks, and even Vampire gets about the same about of chit-chat as Poison'd does.

And now some games that are not (as far as I know) story games, just to compare to those 3 threads about Grey Ranks and 2 about Poison'd:

Werewolf/Mafia/Are You The Traitor?: 2
Chess: 1

That was an interesting set of searches, let me know if you want me to do some more!  But I think it's pretty clear that Poison'd/Grey Ranks are not really that significant in story-games.com thinking over the last two years.

Your numbers are bullshit.  The Storygames site (its public element, anyways) was largely designed to act as a publicity/recruiting front, giving a "nicer" image to the general public of what those games are like than what the Forge provided.  Were those numbers from their public side, or from the secret forums only members can access? How could we know?
And do an internet-wide search, and I guarantee you that you'll find shitloads more about MLWM, DiTV, Grey Ranks, Poison'd and all the other misery-tourism "edgy" piece of shit storygames than your flavour-of-the-month robot game.

In fact:
"Poison'd" yields 431,000 results.
"happy birthday robot", a term far more likely to be in reference to something other than the storygame, btw, yields 289000 results.  Its pretty evident after the first couple of pages that most of the entries aren't about the game.

QuoteLook, I said the word "plot", in a compliment, and the place went completely apeshit.  And I thought that was hilarious and poked fun at people about it.

I don't claim "Forgites are victims of language control", and I don't think that. In fact there was a concerted effort by Forge posters to create a shitload of jargon that doesn't make any sense.  Absolutely everyone who knows anything knows that.  That's what makes it funny that people here now desperately want to do the same thing.

I'm glad you're finally admitting that the Forgers create jargon, and hopefully you'll admit that they USE that jargon as a WEAPON by which to subvert forums, by introducing the jargon you force the Forge's definition of the words they use, based on assumptions about RPGs that are NOT TRUE, into the discussion, obliging people to work already from the Forge's assumptions, creating a rigged game in any kind of debate.

IF you admit that, then you'd have to admit that what I've done, which has been so successful in keeping this forum from being subverted, unlike so many others, is not "the same thing" it is merely a preventative measure, saying they're not allowed to inflict that jargon on us.  No normal words are forbidden, no normal definitions of words are forbidden.  What's forbidden is for people to come along and talk about "narrativism" as if it was something that really existed or to talk about "story now" as though that was the goal of roleplaying games, or to pretend that storygames and rpgs are the same thing.

QuoteAnd on this thread, people unironically advocate language control of their own, including you.  Nobody must use the word "plot", even in perfectly normal and natural ways to describe things that absolutely every single other person in the world would call a plot and which have been called a "plot" in RPGs since the early 1980s.

Absolute bullshit. I use Plot all the time. RPG adventures generally have a plot.  I don't even know where the fuck you get the notion from that I'm against the use of the word plot.
What I'm against is assholes pretending that "creating a story" is the goal of an RPG, when in fact it in no way is.

 

QuoteWe must scour the word from our vocabulary or risk.....infection.  I poked a little fun, and you decided, nope, that's unironically true, in every possible way, what's so funny about that?  

So I wanted more.  I still do! I'm still waiting for the forbidden word list! Let's hear it!

The forbidden word list does not include "plot". It does include using words like "simulationism", "gamism", "narrativism", as though these were things that were actual workable categories for RPGs.  It includes also using the word "immersion" as though it were a dirty thing to be avoided at all cost, rather than a central goal of RPG play.

There's probably a few others, none of which are actually forbidden words, just words that people won't get away with using in specific weasely ways to try to subvert the discussion on this forum.  You can use any of the words above if you were to discuss something about the Forge; what you can't do is start using it freely in a discussion about a real RPG as if it was a given, an understood and accepted definition based on solid assumptions by which we can then guide the discussion.  That's what you can't do and hope to get away with here, which is why this place is so dangerous to the storygame Swine.

RPGPundit

I'm confused by why you think a general internet search is better for telling what story gamers think is at the forefront of story game thinking than a search at a specialized forum limited to the last 2 years. Like, your idea includes people who dislike the games, or who don't understand it, or who are selling it,  or whatever. Mine only includes people who are interested in thinking and talking about story games.

As for the story-games forums searched, yes, the search did include the members-only forum.

If you agree with me (and disagree with Benoist) that "plot" is a perfectly normal word people can fruitfully use when talking about RPGs, then what else is there to say? I didn't say (and don't believe in) simulationism (either in the GNS or GDS sense), so why you bring it up as if it's an accusation that should sting me is beyond comprehension.

I took your comments to mean a general objection to the idea that we should oppose storygamer Swines' use of jargon to control discussion overall; not a specific complaint against the use of the word "plot".

In fact, the specific differences between "plot" and "story" are quite important; it makes perfect sense that  GM in a regular RPG should try to have a "plot" for his session, but should most certainly not be trying to "create a story" either in the sense of doing it himself beforehand (where the PCs are then turned into powerless cheerleader's for the GM's brilliance, a la so many WW-games), or in the sense of making that the central mission of the game (where creating a certain kind of story becomes the central purpose of the gameplay, in a game that is not meant to create story intentionally at all, a la so much Forge theory nonsense).

If you agree with this, then I'm left wondering why the fuck you spent several pages derailing this thread to come after me with bullshit accusations and not-so-clever sarcasm, rather than addressing whatever the fuck it is you're on about that benoist may or may not have said.

RPGPundit

Nobody said anything about a story, why would I bring that up in a thread that had nothing to do with that? I make a little joke, you come screaming in blubbering about something that you now say has nothing to do with the topic, and suddenly I'm the one who needs to take a stand on some ridiculous irrelevancy that only you have brought into the thread?

 Anyway, I don't agree, plenty of regular ole RPGs are played with an eye towards creating a story, which really has nothing to do with GM-prepared stories. GMs can push towards story without pre-preparing anything, and that's a problem if that's not your goal, and it's not if it is. But that isn't really the topic here.

Quote from: RPGPundit;497684He claimed that it was enormously successful, when in fact its not. By Forge terms, its games like Poison'd, Grey Ranks, the Shab Al-hiri roach, My Life with Master, etc. that are enormously successful. They are the ones that are talked about. That's what its all about.

He didn't claim it was enormously successful he said that there were other games besides the ones that are mentioned here. And then he linked to what people at storygames and the Forge talk about and yes it's not only the misery tour games that are talked about. Of course with you and others bringing up and linking to these games every single chance you get a general search would reveal that those are the games most often talked about but it's not what the storygames and Forge crowd obsess over. And let's not forget that by constanly linking to these games you and others have contributed to the sales and the success of these games.

QuoteHe's answered my questions with snide sarcastic comments, non sequiters, counterattacks, and a general willful obstinacy when it comes to saying things even he can't possibly believe.  Its not about "accepting my narrative", its not "my narrative" that Ron Edwards hates White Wolf's games and has written about how they failed to actually "tell story". That's not me, that's FACT. He fucking WROTE ABOUT IT; and there's no reasonable way that corley couldn't have known that.  And remember, that was the part he was initially trying to dispute.

Did you even read his post ? He didn't deny that Ron didn't like WW games. It's right there in his post. So what the hell are you going on about. That he (JD) doesn't believe and buy into the narrative that the whole Forge/Story movement is completely a reaction against WW games ? Got news for you, there are many critics of the Forge/Storygames who don't buy this. (JD, correct me if I'm wrong here)

QuoteBelieve me, I won't hesitate to ban someone who is consistently disruptive.   Its not a step I take lightly.  If I were just going around banning someone for not liking them, he'd be gone by now.  But that's not the standard I use, contrary to what the pundit-haters try to pretend (idiotically, because if that were the case none of them would be here).

Ok, where has JD been consistently disruptive ? And if you can't point to a pattern, why threaten him in the first place ?

Regards,
David R

I am not sure there is a story games "movement" of any particular kind, remember, I see story gaming as existing (at least) within the RPG hobby almost since the very beginning, so yes, I agree with you that whatever-it-is certainly is not a response to White Wolf games. Some examples of what-other-people-call story games that I have close to hand include things like Cartoon Action Hour, an indie RPG developed outside the core Forge group, Penny For My Thoughts, which is not a RPG at all and is focused entirely on collaborative storytelling, and Passages, a d20 RPG developed at the height of d20's popularity but which includes a lot of literary stuff.  There are plenty of what-people-call story games I can think of that just don't have any connection whatsoever with anything White Wolf did.

But to try to get the thread back on topic by talking about White Wolf and its influences...

Games like Sorcerer clearly owe a major debt to White Wolf games - in fact I'd say Sorcerer is a White Wolf game in virtually every way except, of course, who owns it. (Also it is very much more specific and focused than White Wolf games, which relied a lot on individual GMs to design campaigns thoroughly.)  Other what-people-call story games that have significant elements in common with White Wolf games include Don't Rest Your Head (special powers balanced with declining personal control), Houses of the Blooded (houses, political maneuvering in a highly structured system, duh) and Apocalypse World (which takes splatbooks as the core organizing feature of the game).  I've also heard Conspiracy of Shadows has White Wolf-esque elements but I don't have experience with it.

I think the main thing that indie story games have not been able to take from White Wolf is the incredible detail WW puts into its settings - many multiple volumes spanning many lines.  This is very expensive and beyond the reach (and I think interest) of most indie RPG producers, story-game or non-, excepting of course the d20 fantasy realm. I think there's a perception, right or wrong, that developing more and more setting material is chasing a declining trend - eventually people are going to check out of buying the next thing, and you could have put that effort/money into creating a new game entirely. Me, I adore super-detailed settings because as a GM I like to have all kinds of new things I can introduce.

My only problem with indies really begun when I started to read some of the creators/players opinions, taking their, I admit, good and interesting design, and adding the whole absurdal amount of philosophy and "It has been since DnD, but ssssh - WE HAVE DISCOVERED IT" attitude.

I love how story Swine love to point at absolute marginalia to try to claim "storygaming has been part of RPG's mainstream all along... there was that one game published in the mid-80s that like, three people played! THAT PROVES IT!"

Fuck that. Storygames are not RPGs. At most, you demonstrate that there were misguided idiots long before the Forge who mistook what RPGs are for way back then too, and tried to make RPGs do something they're not made to do.

RPGPundit

I was mostly thinking of Star Wars d6, which urged you to use cinematic storytelling techniques, and James Bond 007, which explicitly compared playing a character to improvisational acting.

But yes, in a way, all games other than The Current Edition Of D&D are marginal in the hobby.  Even then, magazines and letters columns showed that people were very concerned with story in their D&D game and gained great benefit from considering it.  And eventually, of course, Dragonlance, Al-Qadim, and Ravenloft came along and introduced story-oriented material more directly.

Then in the 90s, you had the big White Wolf boom that included things like Theme and Tone as campaign organizational tools.  Lots more to talk about there, and that was 20 years ago.

I understand that you feel RPGs are "meant to do" something, but people have included story elements in their RPGs and talked about story concerns in RPGs since (very close to) the beginning.  Even if I spot you everything before Vampire (which would be silly, Vampire had its roots in many other RPGs), that's still 21 years of story stuff in RPGs. How many more years do you need to show people are interested in it?

I don't mind being the marginalia - after all, I haven't ever felt the need to only play The Current Edition Of D&D, which has always been a supermajority or majority of the hobby. I'm fine with that!

Or were you talking about Cartoon Action Hour, Passages and such? I'm pretty sure those games didn't expect to replace The Current Edition Of D&D, but you'd have to ask the designers.

Quote from: JDCorley;497914I was mostly thinking of Star Wars d6, which urged you to use cinematic storytelling techniques, and James Bond 007, which explicitly compared playing a character to improvisational acting.

But yes, in a way, all games other than The Current Edition Of D&D are marginal in the hobby.  Even then, magazines and letters columns showed that people were very concerned with story in their D&D game and gained great benefit from considering it.  And eventually, of course, Dragonlance, Al-Qadim, and Ravenloft came along and introduced story-oriented material more directly.

Then in the 90s, you had the big White Wolf boom that included things like Theme and Tone as campaign organizational tools.  Lots more to talk about there, and that was 20 years ago.

I understand that you feel RPGs are "meant to do" something, but people have included story elements in their RPGs and talked about story concerns in RPGs since (very close to) the beginning.  Even if I spot you everything before Vampire (which would be silly, Vampire had its roots in many other RPGs), that's still 21 years of story stuff in RPGs. How many more years do you need to show people are interested in it?

I don't mind being the marginalia - after all, I haven't ever felt the need to only play The Current Edition Of D&D, which has always been a supermajority or majority of the hobby. I'm fine with that!

Or were you talking about Cartoon Action Hour, Passages and such? I'm pretty sure those games didn't expect to replace The Current Edition Of D&D, but you'd have to ask the designers.

It doesn't matter what you think about some nebulous idea of what people might have "wanted".  The FACT is that RPGs were not designed to tell stories. That was not the goal.  The goal is to IMMERSE in a character in an EMULATED WORLD.

And the proof of that is that from the first RPG onward, the mechanical structure of the game was made to encourage immersion and emulation, and NOT story.  

Whether or not people "wished it wasn't so" is irrelevant.  The evidence is so significant that in fact UNTIL THIS DECADE even the overwhelming majority of those games that CLAIMED to be "RPGS for telling story" did not in fact manage to do that, they failed at that because they didn't change the fundamental mechanic.
And in this decade, the games that claimed to be "rpgs for telling story" did change the fundamental mechanics and therefore ARE NOT ACTUALLY RPGS.  They fail in their claim, only the other way around.

RPGPundit

I don't know what you're on about, I've only ever been talking about normal ole RPGs here (except I think I mentioned one non-RPG in my list of story games not related to White Wolf).

Nothing you are saying seems to be related to any of the games or examples I brought up?

Can you give an example of how Star Wars d6 is not an RPG, so maybe I can follow you?

Quote from: JDCorley;498074Can you give an example of how Star Wars d6 is not an RPG, so maybe I can follow you?

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you sincerely didn't comprehend what I meant in my last post.

Games like Star Wars D6, or Vampire for that matter, are real RPGs in every sense.  They both made some claims to "literary" aspirations of "telling a story", but neither of them actually did anything to mechanically allow that to happen.  The result is about the same as telling a little story while you play monopoly, something that is entirely inconsequential to the actual play of the game itself.  Of course, a group of people playing either of these games (or any other game, including D&D, or Monopoly for that matter) could decide that "the story" matters more than "the game" and start to break the rules and consistency of the game in favour of what they feel makes "better story".  In WW games this was even something that the GM (or "storyteller" as they preferred to call it) was theoretically encouraged to do, usually to the detriment of the Players, as their PCs were reduced to powerless cheerleaders whose decisions and agency in the world didn't matter at all because the GM already had an idea of the "story" he wanted to tell, and wouldn't let something as petty as the actual participation of his players ruin that "art".

But this doesn't mean, none of this means, that RPGs were "meant" to tell stories. They explicitly aren't, and the problem with games like SW d6 and Vampire PROVE this; because the attempt to inject "story" as a priority there inevitably ends up creating a conflict of interests and priority between "the story" and "the game" itself.

No major game presenting itself as an RPG actually dealt with that issue until the forge came along, and their solution was to invert the problem: instead of creating RPGs that failed at telling stories, they created storygames that fail at being RPGs.  Everything an RPG is supposed to do cannot be easily done in a storygame, because the whole goal is different.  And since Ron Edwards was desperate to try to subvert the RPG hobby, rather than create a new "storygaming hobby" of his own, this problem with his inversion was why he had to attempt to redefine concepts and engage in a kind of ideological war, where he claimed that the way all previous RPGs were set up was "broken" due to a conflict of "priorities" and that things that were in fact the essential POINT of standard RPGs (emulation, immersion) were undesirable things that were delusional and caused brain damage.  He tried to subvert the hobby by claiming we all were really just wanting to "tell stories" all along, but until he came along to save us no one knew how to do it right.

Never mind that what he (and storygame Swine as a whole) define as "story" is really highly debatable since it doesn't even really fit with the more standard literary concepts of "story"... but that's an unrelated issue to this debate.

RPGPundit

QuoteNo major game presenting itself as an RPG actually dealt with that issue until the forge came along, and their solution was to invert the problem: instead of creating RPGs that failed at telling stories, they created storygames that fail at being RPGs. Everything an RPG is supposed to do cannot be easily done in a storygame, because the whole goal is different. And since Ron Edwards was desperate to try to subvert the RPG hobby, rather than create a new "storygaming hobby" of his own, this problem with his inversion was why he had to attempt to redefine concepts and engage in a kind of ideological war, where he claimed that the way all previous RPGs were set up was "broken" due to a conflict of "priorities" and that things that were in fact the essential POINT of standard RPGs (emulation, immersion) were undesirable things that were delusional and caused brain damage. He tried to subvert the hobby by claiming we all were really just wanting to "tell stories" all along, but until he came along to save us no one knew how to do it right.

Or as I like to call it, he jumped out of the bathtub screaming "Eureka", and people instead of pointing out that he needs a towel, agreed that he rediscovered Archimedes' law. I like storygames, it's just the "artists" and their claims that I have a problem with. Not to mention that his famed "social contract" is pretty much "rules with added house rules  and common decency" >.>.

I don't agree about the "evils" of story games - I usually run my games relatively loose mechanically, and they never develop into railroads. If that makes me a Swine, well - good I ain't Hebrew. I dunno why exactly you attack Star Wars d6, since I found it to be a rather superior game mechanically.

Quote from: RPGPundit;498615I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you sincerely didn't comprehend what I meant in my last post.

I get it, I just don't know what in the world it has to do with the topic at hand, which is good ole normal RPGs like Vampire.

QuoteGames like Star Wars D6, or Vampire for that matter, are real RPGs in every sense.  They both made some claims to "literary" aspirations of "telling a story", but neither of them actually did anything to mechanically allow that to happen.

Really?

The GM is an important part of the mechanics of both games, and the GM advice gave solid information on how to pace games like a story (or movie), how to use movie language and imagery in order to vividly enhance the story of your game, use Themes and Tones to organize the game and characters, and use character traits (Vampire) and stereotypes (both games) to quickly get your story moving, and information on setting up dramatically interesting (Vampire) and exciting (Star Wars) conflicts....

But none of that to you is doing anything to "allow" story to happen.  To me, that's promoting story happening in the game!

Now, if you don't think the GM is important, or what the GM does is important, or if you think telling GMs to do things or not do other things in their game is not important, then I dig what you are saying.  To me, the GM and what the GM does in a game with a GM is a very important part of the mechanics and the play experience.

QuoteIn WW games this was even something that the GM (or "storyteller" as they preferred to call it) was theoretically encouraged to do, usually to the detriment of the Players, as their PCs were reduced to powerless cheerleaders whose decisions and agency in the world didn't matter at all because the GM already had an idea of the "story" he wanted to tell, and wouldn't let something as petty as the actual participation of his players ruin that "art".

This actually is not what the games themselves said to do. But yes, many modules said to do this, not all of them Vampire.  Dragonlance is a big offender here. (I believe this is clearly anti-story advice, as consequences of character decisions are the central elements of virtually all stories, especially genre stories like Star Wars or vampire stories!  But that's something for another time.)

QuoteBut this doesn't mean, none of this means, that RPGs were "meant" to tell stories.

Nobody said they were, at least not in this thread! You are the only one who is making a claim about what RPGs are "meant to do".

QuoteNo major game presenting itself as an RPG actually dealt with that issue until the forge came along

Wait, what? Didn't you just say Vampire and Star Wars tried to deal with the issue? I mean you say they fail, I say they succeed, but it's not like the Forge (collectively, which is a stupid way to talk about it since the games that came from it were so diverse) was the first to look at it.

Actually, I do remember (again trying to get this back on topic) that there were a number of sandbox/exploration-style GMs in the early days of Vampire who pushed back on the drama elements of the game and saw it more as a horror world-discovery game, where the characters, noob Vampires, slowly came to grips with how fucked they were.  They used city books like Chicago by Night to simulate how Vampire society would operate and what players would find when they started to go different places.  Their interest in online discussion was primarily in "How can I help the players decide what a reasonable goal is in this situation?"  It really wasn't that well supported as a playstyle until the Gilded Cage supplement came out, very late in the Vampire Revised cycle.

Requiem had the excellent Damnation City supplement, which we already discussed.  Similar principles advanced there.

Quote from: Rincewind1;498618Or as I like to call it, he jumped out of the bathtub screaming "Eureka", and people instead of pointing out that he needs a towel, agreed that he rediscovered Archimedes' law. I like storygames, it's just the "artists" and their claims that I have a problem with.

Many of the things-people-call storygames actually have an influences/bibliography of games that explicitly call out what their roots are. Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, Dust Devils, etc.  They all thank and point to earlier RPGs as inspirations. Can you be more specific?  I've gotten pretty jaded on games (of all sorts) saying they do something AMAZING and NEW. It certainly hasn't been limited to "arty" games.  At this late date in my jaded career I glaze over those sorts of back-cover-copy like girls in beer commercials.  I'm pretty sure if I buy the beer, the girls are not going to show up to party with me.

To keep on the Vampire topic, how well I remember sniggering at the "you're a REAL ROLEPLAYER NOW!" text in First Edition Vampire in 1991.  The great "roll vs. role"-player insult-off of 1989-1997.  The good old days of gamers hating each other. Not like today...

Quote from: JDCorley;498685Many of the things-people-call storygames actually have an influences/bibliography of games that explicitly call out what their roots are. Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, Dust Devils, etc.  They all thank and point to earlier RPGs as inspirations. Can you be more specific?  I've gotten pretty jaded on games (of all sorts) saying they do something AMAZING and NEW. It certainly hasn't been limited to "arty" games.  At this late date in my jaded career I glaze over those sorts of back-cover-copy like girls in beer commercials.  I'm pretty sure if I buy the beer, the girls are not going to show up to party with me.

To keep on the Vampire topic, how well I remember sniggering at the "you're a REAL ROLEPLAYER NOW!" text in First Edition Vampire in 1991.  The great "roll vs. role"-player insult-off of 1989-1997.  The good old days of gamers hating each other. Not like today...

Like this snippet that's supposedly in AW,  that I picked up on TBP the other day, in a post claiming it to be the discovery of decade in RPGs

Quote(R)oleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth, talking about these fictional characters in their fictional circumstances doing whatever it is that they do. (...)

All these rules do is mediate the conversation. They kick in when someone says some particular things, and they impose constraints on what everyone should say after. Makes sense, right?

Come on. I've known that since I picked up my copy of Warhammer at the age of 12. Claiming this is "new" means that you either commit purposeful bias, or it's your first RPG. And the funniest thing is, I actually find AW a good game. It's just that the author's commentary to it sounds like something I'd cut out of the damn piece.

There's a difference between "mechanical looseness" (my players would point out I'm not exactly the most steadfast defender of the "rules as written") and actively changing the central priority of why you're there.
If you're not being a rules-stickler, that doesn't affect the fundamental function of the roleplaying game experience.  In fact, one can easily play fast and loose with the rules IN ORDER to enhance emulation or immersion.

On the other hand, If you are putting the game experience itself, including emulation and immersion, into a secondary place of priority in favor of "crafting a story", that's where you end up going against the very grain of what RPGs are supposed to be about, "playing the game".

If its more important to you that you "craft a story" than that you effectively emulate a world, to the point that you fuck over emulation for the sake of "story", or that you break the immersive experience for the sake of story-crafting, then you don't really want to play an RPG, you want to play a storygame.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;498696There's a difference between "mechanical looseness" (my players would point out I'm not exactly the most steadfast defender of the "rules as written") and actively changing the central priority of why you're there.
If you're not being a rules-stickler, that doesn't affect the fundamental function of the roleplaying game experience.  In fact, one can easily play fast and loose with the rules IN ORDER to enhance emulation or immersion.

On the other hand, If you are putting the game experience itself, including emulation and immersion, into a secondary place of priority in favor of "crafting a story", that's where you end up going against the very grain of what RPGs are supposed to be about, "playing the game".

If its more important to you that you "craft a story" than that you effectively emulate a world, to the point that you fuck over emulation for the sake of "story", or that you break the immersive experience for the sake of story-crafting, then you don't really want to play an RPG, you want to play a storygame.

RPGPundit

And that sentiment I can agree with. I'd not put storygames beneath RPGs though, or accuse all of them of "artsinessness" as I like to call this trend in general works today - but I know you are in a different trench on that, Pundit, and chances of any of us persuading the other are pointless. I also think there's a certain interesting fine line between story and immersion, that Gumshoe mechanic treads, for example.

Quote from: Rincewind1;498688Like this snippet that's supposedly in AW,  that I picked up on TBP the other day, in a post claiming it to be the discovery of decade in RPGs

Come on. I've known that since I picked up my copy of Warhammer at the age of 12. Claiming this is "new" means that you either commit purposeful bias, or it's your first RPG. And the funniest thing is, I actually find AW a good game. It's just that the author's commentary to it sounds like something I'd cut out of the damn piece.

Well, but the game isn't claiming it's a huge discovery, just some idiot on the Internet, right? Or does the game claim this is a big discovery? (I don't actually own AW, so I don't know.)

Quote from: RPGPundit;497689And do an internet-wide search, and I guarantee you that you'll find shitloads more about MLWM, DiTV, Grey Ranks, Poison'd and all the other misery-tourism "edgy" piece of shit storygames than your flavour-of-the-month robot game.

In fact:
"Poison'd" yields 431,000 results.

Umm... You might be an idiot. "Poison'd" is the name of a bestselling metal album.

Quote"happy birthday robot", a term far more likely to be in reference to something other than the storygame, btw, yields 289000 results.

Quick fact check:

1st page of results of "Poison'd": 2 links refer to the STG, 12 refer to other stuff.

1st page of results for "happy birthday robot": 9 links refer to the STG, 1 refers to something else

It's confirmed. You're an idiot.

If want to go a little bit deeper:

""Poison'd" "story game"" + ""Poison'd" "roleplaying game"" = 1,440 results + 9,260 results = 10,700 total results

""happy birthday robot" "story game"" + ""happy birthday robot" "roleplaying game"" = 4,190 results + 46,900 results = 51,090 results

I know facts are pesky when they contradict your pet peeves. But check 'em out. They're totally cool. All the rationalist kids are using them.

Quote from: JDCorley;498702Well, but the game isn't claiming it's a huge discovery, just some idiot on the Internet, right? Or does the game claim this is a big discovery? (I don't actually own AW, so I don't know.)

AW does not, but it's main influential work, Sorcerer, did claim that. Heck, Foul Ole Ron created 2 bloody theories to mandate his games that are out on Wikipedia. As I said - towel.

Sorcerer's only saving grace is that it gave a birth to indie genre, which produced Inspectres.

Quote from: Rincewind1;498688Come on. I've known that since I picked up my copy of Warhammer at the age of 12. Claiming this is "new" means that you either commit purposeful bias, or it's your first RPG.

Thinking of an RPG as explicitly being a "structured conversation" is actually a useful ideological concept, and it's not explicit in most RPGs.

With that being said, Traveller said literally the exact same thing in 1977. So it's not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination.

It's relatively important, however, to remember that everyone encounters these revelations in their own ways. There are people right now figuring out how awesome hexcrawls are. More power to 'em.

Quote from: JDCorley;498702Well, but the game isn't claiming it's a huge discovery, just some idiot on the Internet, right? Or does the game claim this is a big discovery? (I don't actually own AW, so I don't know.)

What the game actually says is:

"You probably know this already: roleplaying is a conversation."

It's literally presented as the exact opposite of a "revelation".

Quote from: Rincewind1;498707AW does not, but it's main influential work, Sorcerer, did claim that. Heck, Foul Ole Ron created 2 bloody theories to mandate his games that are out on Wikipedia. As I said - towel.

Sorcerer's only saving grace is that it gave a birth to indie genre, which produced Inspectres.

QFTW.

I ain't saying it's bad that they found this out in AW. But seeing this in context - someone mentions that snippet, and everyone in discussion goes "Oh yes, those games are indeed so edgy and new"...

Meh. Maybe I just hate pretense that much, even if it makes me a bit pretentious as a result.

I think I am way behind this conversation to participate, and I know nothing about the game poison'd. But searching "poison'd"+"RPG" yields me about 96,000 results. See one or two general RPG threads about poison, but most of the first several pages appear to be about the RPG in question. So it certainly looks like it has gotten some attention (but contrast that with "Pathfinder" + "RPG" which yields over 5 million results. I don't know what that means though in terms of how much the game is being played and where it fits in with the story game community.

Communication is a secondary activity in roleplaying, and roleplaying games - not the primary activity. The primary activity is decision-making. Results are produced through the interaction of our decisions and the rules. Conversation/Communication is a tool that gets used to convey decisions to other players, who then follow a rule procedure (either improvised or specified, depending on the game) to determine the outcome.

Communication may be part of roleplaying games, but not necessarily role-play, which can be done alone - and therefore has no requirement of 'communication', per se. "Roleplaying is a conversation" is insufficient as a definition.

Conversations often happen when you roleplay. That doesn't mean that conversations ARE roleplay.

Quote from: Rincewind1;498707AW does not, but it's main influential work, Sorcerer, did claim that. Heck, Foul Ole Ron created 2 bloody theories to mandate his games that are out on Wikipedia. As I said - towel.

But Sorcerer didn't include those theories? At least I don't remember it including those theories. Maybe in an appendix?  It's been a while since I looked at it.

Like, whatever Edwards wrote or didn't write about anything else, Sorcerer is a  completely normal RPG, with a GM and players and character sheets, and all that stuff.

QuoteSorcerer's only saving grace is that it gave a birth to indie genre, which produced Inspectres.

Well, I wouldn't even give it that.  Indie roleplaying games, by the definition of "indie" that Sorcerer advanced (creator-owned), have routinely existed in the hobby.  Even using the more generally-used "off the beaten path" definition, weird little RPGs have always existed.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;498740I think I am way behind this conversation to participate, and I know nothing about the game poison'd. But searching "poison'd"+"RPG" yields me about 96,000 results. See one or two general RPG threads about poison, but most of the first several pages appear to be about the RPG in question. So it certainly looks like it has gotten some attention (but contrast that with "Pathfinder" + "RPG" which yields over 5 million results. I don't know what that means though in terms of how much the game is being played and where it fits in with the story game community.

I go a lot more into detail in the thread in the Other Games forum as to what exactly is being played, thought about and discussed in the present day by people with an interest in story games. Spoiler alert: not Poison'd or Grey Ranks to any particularly significant degree. An order of magnitude more are in D&D games. (Not a huge surprise, most of the hobby plays D&D most of the time.)

Quote from: Kaldric;498758Communication may be part of roleplaying games, but not necessarily role-play, which can be done alone - and therefore has no requirement of 'communication', per se. "Roleplaying is a conversation" is insufficient as a definition.

How do you roleplay alone? Like, do you just imagine yourself to be someone else and....then what? Say something? To no one? Are you also then imagining who you are talking to?  Do you stand up and walk around like the character would if they were were you are?

Edit: Or are you talking about computer games and solo adventures? Aren't you in those situations responding to what a game designer is telling you?

Quote from: Rincewind1;498712I ain't saying it's bad that they found this out in AW. But seeing this in context - someone mentions that snippet, and everyone in discussion goes "Oh yes, those games are indeed so edgy and new"...

Meh. Maybe I just hate pretense that much, even if it makes me a bit pretentious as a result.

Yes, it's 100 percent you.

I really like when RPGs give really simple, straightforward descriptions of what an RPG is and how to roleplay in them.

Like, do you know what D&D3 says the job of a player and the job of a DM is?

You probably don't, (most people don't! I didn't until I'd been playing D&D3 for 4 years!) you probably never actually read it.  But it's right there on literally the very first page of text, in the introduction.  Reading it solves a shitload of problems that people have had with D&D3 and makes your D&D3 play better.

I always, always read "what is an RPG" sections. I often learn something from them!  At least I learn how the author approaches RPGs, which helps me figure out what their expectations were.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;498705Umm... You might be an idiot. "Poison'd" is the name of a bestselling metal album.

Now I'm trying to imagine a storygame based on the adventures of an 80's hair metal band.

JG

Quote from: JDCorley;498813Yes, it's 100 percent you.

I really like when RPGs give really simple, straightforward descriptions of what an RPG is and how to roleplay in them.

Like, do you know what D&D3 says the job of a player and the job of a DM is?

You probably don't, (most people don't! I didn't until I'd been playing D&D3 for 4 years!) you probably never actually read it.  But it's right there on literally the very first page of text, in the introduction.  Reading it solves a shitload of problems that people have had with D&D3 and makes your D&D3 play better.

I always, always read "what is an RPG" sections. I often learn something from them!  At least I learn how the author approaches RPGs, which helps me figure out what their expectations were.

LoL. Need to result to attack my competence as a reader already? Cheap tricks, mate, since I did read that. I read even a lot lot more then that. And Ron created not one, but two actual frigging psychologicallo - philosophical theories to explain his idea of RPGs.

See - the thing with Sorcerer, DitV and the AW is - I ain't saying they are bad games. But all that mechanical stuff they do? I do that in a "classical" RPG like Warhammer, without tossing odd terms like "Fallout", "Moves" and the like. It's called narration, player imput, player backstories and good GMing.

Quote from: Rincewind1;498897LoL. Need to result to attack my competence as a reader already? Cheap tricks, mate, since I did read that.

Did you miss the part where I said I didn't read it myself?  Or was it just more fun for you to pretend my post said something other than what it did?

My whole point was that even a ridiculously simple "here's what a GM does" section of a game is useful both for noobs and for veterans.  So AW's description of how roleplaying is done is not claiming to be some huge innovation, it's just talking about how you play the game.

QuoteI read even a lot lot more then that. And Ron created not one, but two actual frigging psychologicallo - philosophical theories to explain his idea of RPGs.

Sure, but not in the game.  See you're attacking Sorcerer because you say it falsely claims to be some big innovation in roleplaying. But I don't think it claims that at all.

QuoteSee - the thing with Sorcerer, DitV and the AW is - I ain't saying they are bad games. But all that mechanical stuff they do? I do that in a "classical" RPG like Warhammer, without tossing odd terms like "Fallout", "Moves" and the like. It's called narration, player imput, player backstories and good GMing.

Well, Fallout and Moves are specific game mechanics. They are not actually connected to any of the things you describe any more than "hit points" or "armor class".  You can't replace them with "good GMing", then the games won't work.  It's like replacing "armor class" with "good GMing".  I guess you could, but it's not the game.

Yes, I agree that those three games are pretty normal RPGs! It's what I've been saying all along!

Ah, then we're on the same page, sorry.

My point is - they are normal RPGs, but they are marketed as something brand new and tossing away the old school of RPG design.

You know, sort of like if you jump out of the bath, and start rambling on your new law of physics, and you are describing Archimedes.

Two options then present themselves to bystanders

A) Give you a towel, and a cup of warm cocoa.
B) Believe you.


Because from that assumption,  the one I posted on the top of my post, draws the later "Wow, so after 14 years of RPGs, I finally discovered this in one of those new, edgy RPGs...."

Quote from: Rincewind1;498924My point is - they are normal RPGs, but they are marketed as something brand new and tossing away the old school of RPG design.

So many games over so many years have claimed that to me that I've lost track, but I don't think any game that contains a bibliography/game-ography page as big as Dogs' is really claiming to be something that is brand new.

QuoteBecause from that assumption,  the one I posted on the top of my post, draws the later "Wow, so after 14 years of RPGs, I finally discovered this in one of those new, edgy RPGs...."

Maybe the person didn't read those kinds of sections before, or didn't play that way before, or they read those sections but it never got across to them before because of different ways of presenting it, or maybe they're stupid or drunk or trolling. But the game can hardly be faulted for that, especially when what the game actually says is "this isn't new, this is something everyone knows".

Quote from: JDCorley;498938So many games over so many years have claimed that to me that I've lost track, but I don't think any game that contains a bibliography/game-ography page as big as Dogs' is really claiming to be something that is brand new.



Maybe the person didn't read those kinds of sections before, or didn't play that way before, or they read those sections but it never got across to them before because of different ways of presenting it, or maybe they're stupid or drunk or trolling. But the game can hardly be faulted for that, especially when what the game actually says is "this isn't new, this is something everyone knows".

This is a bit like gun debate - "Guns kill people" "Guns don't kill people", while the problem is really "Morons who use guns wrong" and "Cunts who use debate about guns for their own means".

And I'd say that Edwards' pretty much rides on the latter - as I said, two frigging theories that are basically slapping players who want to just immerse in the game across the face - because they'd fall short of both Gamer (since they do not care for mechanical advantage) and Simulationism (since they do not want to simulate the LotR party - they want to be their own party, which may resemble LotR a bit by composition,but maybe they will act nothing like LotR party did). And he probably knew that those theories'd raise hell, just as first ones did - so he went ahead and still did that.

Not to mention that really, any RPG theory raised controversy. Especially on the rather bullshitious claim that a DM must trade off any of the aspects of the game for the other, as Threefold Model suggested.

RPGs are like Wild West of art - there is no 5000 years of tradition that'd give us guidelines to say what is a good book, painting or RPG, and what is not, in a specified canon.

In a way, that's both terrible, as we have no point of reference, so all the sides of discussion are right in a way, and beautiful as well - as in a way, this gives us great material for another game. I bet back in the days of yore, Egyptians were arguing if Sphinx was a work of art, or some bullshit as well. In  2 -3 hundred years, we will know the answer. Or we would, if we'd be alive by then.

The Birth of Art: Roleplaying Art Critics in Days of Ancient.

Title's Swiny as hell, I know, right?

Quote from: Rincewind1;498954two frigging theories that are basically slapping players who want to just immerse in the game across the face - because they'd fall short of both Gamer (since they do not care for mechanical advantage) and Simulationism (since they do not want to simulate the LotR party - they want to be their own party, which may resemble LotR a bit by composition,but maybe they will act nothing like LotR party did). And he probably knew that those theories'd raise hell, just as first ones did - so he went ahead and still did that.

As I've said, about a billion times, I agree, but that doesn't mean Sorcerer advances those theories.  It doesn't.  It's just a regular old RPG. It has nothing to do with the theories.  Unless they were in an appendix or something and I missed them, the game just plain did not say it was some amazing new advance in RPGs.

(By the way, that's not what he said Simulationism was.  I don't agree with GNS, but isn't what he says.)

QuoteNot to mention that really, any RPG theory raised controversy. Especially on the rather bullshitious claim that a DM must trade off any of the aspects of the game for the other, as Threefold Model suggested.

Meh, GNS/Threefold really didn't identify GMs as a special player or call them out for particular decisions, only summing up numerous actions of a player (of any kind) over time.  You're thinking of GDS, where the special secret thoughts of GMs were the only important thing in gaming - not what they did, but what they thought. It was also a stupid theory, except when applied to campaign design, literally the one area where its proponents said it couldn't be applied.

QuoteAs I've said, about a billion times, I agree, but that doesn't mean Sorcerer advances those theories. It doesn't. It's just a regular old RPG. It has nothing to do with the theories. Unless they were in an appendix or something and I missed them, the game just plain did not say it was some amazing new advance in RPGs.

(By the way, that's not what he said Simulationism was. I don't agree with GNS, but isn't what he says.)

Then again, soon after Sorcerer, he suddenly pens the GNS and The Big Model - which is sort of like saying that Voltaire's Candide has nothing to do with his philosophical theories. Except of course, Voltaire actually put his theories in Candide already, and did not shoehorn them later with commentary.

Of course - Does Edwards shoehorn GNS (I can understand he may not shoehorn The Big Model, as it's later theory) into Sorcerer? I think yes, based on what I read of him.

On the Sumulationism - perhaps you are right. I'll sit down and re - read those theories more carefully again. I actually wanted to somehow shoehorn a place for an immersion - fascinated player into that theory - which is a problem, as it simply does not exist. Unless you put him as a Gamer (which is probably the most derogative part of that theory - and quite often they aren't that neither) or as Simulationist (where the problem is, that they are not this neither, as for example, OD&D pretty much didn't Simulate fantasy works in a way Simulationist suggests).

Immersion operates at a different level of the theory than at the GNS level.  In other words, the player who seeks immersion might or might not be happy in either of the categories other than narrativism, which requires a moral statement from the player through play, depending on their other preferences and interests.

Really, the Forge model is fine at the Social level (everything that happens at your table ultimately happens because of decisions you and your friends make, including when and how to follow the written game), and it's right to identify that there is a thing called Creative Agenda (the sum of all your aesthetic preferences about what you like and don't like about games, what you and your friends are trying to get out of the experience), but in classifying those Agendas it runs into a door, and in trying desperately to define those Agendas and apply them to game designs, it falls down a flight of stairs, and when it tries to apply them to gamers, it lands on an old lady, who dies. I think I lost track of the metaphor somewhere in there.  Anyway, GNS sucks, it's stupid.

If I can't point to a place in Sorcerer that pushes the theories, then I don't say there is such a place. You don't seem to have that level of reticence. Good luck with that, I guess.

You just proved my point.

If you make a theory on RPGs, and your only RPGs does no thing to support such a theory, then...?

It's sort of as it Nietzsche wrote all his life cooking books, then suddenly created the theory of Nihilism. I'd call bullshit on that theory too.

Quote from: JDCorley;498646Really?

The GM is an important part of the mechanics of both games, and the GM advice gave solid information on how to pace games like a story (or movie), how to use movie language and imagery in order to vividly enhance the story of your game, use Themes and Tones to organize the game and characters, and use character traits (Vampire) and stereotypes (both games) to quickly get your story moving, and information on setting up dramatically interesting (Vampire) and exciting (Star Wars) conflicts....

But none of that to you is doing anything to "allow" story to happen.  To me, that's promoting story happening in the game!

Now, if you don't think the GM is important, or what the GM does is important, or if you think telling GMs to do things or not do other things in their game is not important, then I dig what you are saying.  To me, the GM and what the GM does in a game with a GM is a very important part of the mechanics and the play experience.

To me, all that this was doing was promoting Bad GMing. It was telling the GM to specifically work against the actual structure of how an RPG works.  So yes, you could say Vampire et al. gave bad GMing advice.  In what way this is an accomplishment, or proof of anything as far as the actual structure of how RPGs work, is beyond me.

QuoteNobody said they were, at least not in this thread! You are the only one who is making a claim about what RPGs are "meant to do".

Ok then... if you are in agreement that RPGs are not built to "tell stories" as a goal, then I don't know what it is you're arguing with me about.

QuoteWait, what? Didn't you just say Vampire and Star Wars tried to deal with the issue? I mean you say they fail, I say they succeed, but it's not like the Forge (collectively, which is a stupid way to talk about it since the games that came from it were so diverse) was the first to look at it.

None of them suceeded, not WW et al, nor the Forge, because there is no solution. RPGs simply are not made to have "telling a story" as their goal.  What you quoted me saying there is that WW didn't even attempt to "tackle the issue" of how the very structure of RPGs isn't made for "storytelling"; the Forge did, by essentially inventing an entirely new type of game and trying to redefine the very meaning of RPG to mean that new type of game instead. In other words, trying to subvert the hobby.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;498808I go a lot more into detail in the thread in the Other Games forum as to what exactly is being played, thought about and discussed in the present day by people with an interest in story games. Spoiler alert: not Poison'd or Grey Ranks to any particularly significant degree. An order of magnitude more are in D&D games. (Not a huge surprise, most of the hobby plays D&D most of the time.)

If this is true, it only demonstrates that subverting the RPG hobby is still very much a major goal of the storygames movement, and that even this late in the game, they still want to do that rather than strike out on their own as their own separate hobby, which would of course be the non-cowardly thing to do.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;499040If this is true, it only demonstrates that subverting the RPG hobby is still very much a major goal of the storygames movement, and that even this late in the game, they still want to do that rather than strike out on their own as their own separate hobby, which would of course be the non-cowardly thing to do.

RPGPundit

I am not so extreme in such a thing, but I do agree that we could refer to classic RPGs and story RPGs (I'd say storygame RPGs but that'd be stupid as it's storygame role playing game)

Quote from: Rincewind1;499041I am not so extreme in such a thing, but I do agree that we could refer to classic RPGs and story RPGs (I'd say storygame RPGs but that'd be stupid as it's storygame role playing game)

"story rpgs" is as meaningless as calling "memoir '44" or "squad leader" "wargaming RPGs".  Its a pointless term. Storygames are a separate hobby, as related or unrelated to RPGs as the latter are to wargames. A person could theoretically enjoy both of course; I enjoy both RPGs and wargames, but I don't feel the need to pretend that D&D is a wargame.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;499036To me, all that this was doing was promoting Bad GMing. It was telling the GM to specifically work against the actual structure of how an RPG works.  So yes, you could say Vampire et al. gave bad GMing advice.  In what way this is an accomplishment, or proof of anything as far as the actual structure of how RPGs work, is beyond me.

Well, you call it bad advice, but really it's just advice that pushes for a goal you don't want.  For someone who is interested in that goal, it's very good advice.  Right? Of course!  That's why Star Wars d6 and Vampire were such successful games for so many groups.  Because the tools they provided were very effective at reaching the goals of those groups.

QuoteOk then... if you are in agreement that RPGs are not built to "tell stories" as a goal, then I don't know what it is you're arguing with me about.

I don't think there is a single goal for all RPGs, and the extreme diversity of RPGs throughout its history backs me up.  Hell, the extreme diversity of D&D GM advice  throughout its history backs me up.  You are the one pretending, against 30 years of evidence, that all RPGs have one single goal.

Me, I am more modest, a gentle soul, so I've never said anything about "what the goal of RPGs is", because I don't believe there is any one goal.  People play RPGs for many reasons and seeking many experiences.  I know this because sometimes I want different things from RPGs from month to month or week to week!  I want different things from RPGs today than I did when I was 15 and just getting started playing. Don't you?  Haven't you changed as a person since you were but a boy and a beardless youth?  Don't you want your leisure time to be different now than then?  Of course, and isn't it great that we belong to a hobby that can accommodate teenaged morons like I used to be and grownup morons like I am now?  

The diversity of the hobby is one of its great strengths. It has always been thus.

Quote from: RPGPundit;499040If this is true, it only demonstrates that subverting the RPG hobby is still very much a major goal of the storygames movement, and that even this late in the game, they still want to do that rather than strike out on their own as their own separate hobby, which would of course be the non-cowardly thing to do.

They like playing D&D and that makes them cowards? Interesting, please tell me more.

Quote from: Rincewind1;499033If you make a theory on RPGs, and your only RPGs does no thing to support such a theory, then...? It's sort of as it Nietzsche wrote all his life cooking books, then suddenly created the theory of Nihilism. I'd call bullshit on that theory too.

Yes, but you're calling bullshit on the game, accusing the game of having something in it that it doesn't.

Quote from: JDCorley;499047Yes, but you're calling bullshit on the game, accusing the game of having something in it that it doesn't.

Then I retract that, as you called bullshit on me here.

Quote from: RPGPundit;499043"story rpgs" is as meaningless as calling "memoir '44" or "squad leader" "wargaming RPGs".  Its a pointless term. Storygames are a separate hobby, as related or unrelated to RPGs as the latter are to wargames. A person could theoretically enjoy both of course; I enjoy both RPGs and wargames, but I don't feel the need to pretend that D&D is a wargame.

RPGPundit

Out of curiosity then, what's Memoir' 44 shelf according to you - board games? Not that I disagree with that statement, as Memoir is indeed not a wargame compared to some wargames I did play.

Quote from: Rincewind1;499048Then I retract that, as you called bullshit on me here.

Okay, it's cool.  

Sorcerer is a really interesting game. Like, I read it and thought it was neat.  And then I went online and everyone was like "oh, it's incomplete" or "oh, you don't really know how to play from reading it", and I was like "uh, really? Seems pretty straightforward to me".  Turns out there's this whole movement of Sorcerer fans to try to set up a really strictly-focused procedure of play, and I was just like "okay, so you are a dude with demons who give you power in exchange for bits of your soul/service, pretty awesome, yeah? Okay, some monsters are causing trouble with your girlfriend, WHAT NOW?" and we were off and playing.  Maybe I was underthinking it, but I kind of think other people overthink it.  

Maybe in part because of those dumb theories, as you point out, people know the theory more than they know the games, so that can overshadow the game to some degree.

Anyway, back to Vampire.

To finish things up, as it now came to me though.

I agree on most of that, Pundit. Actually I think that ironically, storygames could perhaps be more successful, if they got away from RPG niche and carved out their own name. I think that allowing the players to have a big narrative power is nothing wrong though, and there are some "story RPGs", like Trail of Cthulhu for example - not because they are all about players following the narrator's story to the letter, but because they allow players to influence the world by means other then their characters' actions. And I know you'll probably disagree with me, but I'm just putting this out here, to not be a hypocrite later.

Part of this whole problem here basically steams from White Wolf's nasty trick, that they used to get their product noticed, from what I read here.

"Now you are a real roleplayer". Nothing works better  to boost the sales, to split groups into sides, as this turns fans into fanatics.

White Wolf was hardly the first or last RPG company to say that by playing their product you were a person of taste and refinement far above the madding crowd. And if you look beyond RPGs...well, I think it was probably in the first advertisement ever created,  in some form.

100% of all businesses will tell you anything - anything -to to get your money, unless someone bigger stops them.

Then again, there's a difference in saying "You are better because you buy our products" then suggesting in advertisement "Those who do not buy our product are worse".

It's a subtle thing, but there is such a difference I believe.

You're wrong, as far as advertising goes. That's all it ever was. They didn't turn anyone away.

Why are people still mad at White Wolf fans?  They lost.  We won.  Enjoy the victory.

Quote from: Dog Quixote;499241Why are people still mad at White Wolf fans?  They lost.  We won.  Enjoy the victory.

I'd say that the very fact of actual conflict in this case means that both side lost.

QuoteYou're wrong, as far as advertising goes. That's all it ever was. They didn't turn anyone away

Of course they didn't turn anyone again. I am just saying that the advertisement was more based on negative emotions evoked in the audience, rather then positive.

Quote from: JDCorley;498810How do you roleplay alone? Like, do you just imagine yourself to be someone else and....then what? Say something? To no one? Are you also then imagining who you are talking to?  Do you stand up and walk around like the character would if they were were you are?

Edit: Or are you talking about computer games and solo adventures? Aren't you in those situations responding to what a game designer is telling you?

You roleplay alone by imagining a scenario, imagining a point of view held by some person within that scenario, and then making improvised decisions from that point of view. People do it all the time - it's a pretty essential human activity - it's how we plan for things, how we imagine decisions we might have made, etc.

What the quotation I objected to is doing is mistaking a byproduct of roleplaying games for the roleplaying experience itself. Roleplaying is making decisions - communicating those decisions to others (having a conversation, describing what you're doing, speaking in character) is a byproduct.

For an example of roleplaying in a game setting without conversation - two people LARPing in a fantasy game where they're playing people who don't understand each other's language.

Quote from: Dog Quixote;499241Why are people still mad at White Wolf fans?  They lost.  We won.  Enjoy the victory.

No, they won.  For several years.  Until the economy crashed and people realized that being Cool wouldn't help them buy the latest $40 hardcover when they got their hours cut at work.

JG

Quote from: JDCorley;499044Well, you call it bad advice, but really it's just advice that pushes for a goal you don't want.

NO. Its more than that. Its advice that runs DIRECTLY COUNTER to HOW THE GAME ACTUALLY WORKS.  "you should be a dick to your players" is a goal I don't want.  "You should make this D&D game into an attempt to do something that requires that you stop actually playing it as a game" is direct sabotage of the structure of the game.

Its like if in Monopoly you were told "you should ignore the rules whenever they run would indicate that someone might end up winning all the money, because we all know monopoly is about sharing".

Trying to make a regular RPG into a game that "creates story" REQUIRES that the following things take a lower priority than "creating story":
1. THE FUCKING RULES
2: THE GODDAMN SETTING
3.  THE MOTHERFUCKING PLAYER CHARACTERS
4. CHRIST-SHITTING IMMERSION
5. Basically, everything that an RPG is about

QuoteFor someone who is interested in that goal, it's very good advice.  Right? Of course!  

Again, NO. "good advice" would be "RPGs are meant to emulate a world and let you immerse into a character living in that world. Any "stories" that might happen are purely a byproduct of the actual play.  This type of game is not really made to intentionally create a story, and if that's your goal you'll be better off trying some other kind of game, like a collective story-telling exercise rather than clumsily trying to force an RPG to be something its not".

QuoteThat's why Star Wars d6 and Vampire were such successful games for so many groups.  Because the tools they provided were very effective at reaching the goals of those groups.

Nope. Star Wars was successful because it was goddamn star wars, and had great setting material (allowing for good EMULATION), and was not nearly as "storygamey" as you're trying to claim.  Vampire was successful because it made humanities and Arts majors in college feel pretentious for playing it, and because it latched onto the goth movement.

QuoteI don't think there is a single goal for all RPGs, and the extreme diversity of RPGs throughout its history backs me up.  Hell, the extreme diversity of D&D GM advice  throughout its history backs me up.  You are the one pretending, against 30 years of evidence, that all RPGs have one single goal.

Bullshit. You just have to look at how RPGs actually work, what their rules are made to do, to know what that goal is. Also, there is no great disparity in GM advice when it comes to the fundamentals.  ALSO, GM advice doesn't matter.  Someone could be an idiot about how they write their gm advice section and still create a regular RPG that in no way reflects the advice they give.  Which is what I've been pointing out here.

QuoteMe, I am more modest, a gentle soul, so I've never said anything about "what the goal of RPGs is", because I don't believe there is any one goal.  

First, you've just said something about "what the goal of rpgs is", then. Second, you're an idiot if you don't understand what RPGs are for.

QuotePeople play RPGs for many reasons and seeking many experiences.  I know this because sometimes I want different things from RPGs from month to month or week to week!  I want different things from RPGs today than I did when I was 15 and just getting started playing. Don't you?  Haven't you changed as a person since you were but a boy and a beardless youth?  Don't you want your leisure time to be different now than then?

I've changed in multitudinous ways.  But when I play chess, or monopoly, or D&D, or any other RPG, I'm still wanting the same thing I always wanted with them, which is to say what they were made for. I've just gotten better at playing them.
And I'm not such an insufferable pretentious piece of shit as to imagine that I'm superior to the unwashed masses because instead of actually playing chess WELL, I'm playing a losing game while making up a story about a torrid inter-racial homoerotic love affair between the black knight and the white rook.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Rincewind1;499050Out of curiosity then, what's Memoir' 44 shelf according to you - board games? Not that I disagree with that statement, as Memoir is indeed not a wargame compared to some wargames I did play.

Its a wargame. It (and other new games that wargaming grognards try to claim are "not wargames") functions with exactly the same parameters as any other wargame; their only claim is based on it being too simple, easy to play and fun.
Unlike the difference between a storygame and an RPG, while you can criticize memoir for being simplistic, it doesn't "do" anything that wargames aren't meant to do.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;499044Well, you call it bad advice, but really it's just advice that pushes for a goal you don't want.  For someone who is interested in that goal, it's very good advice.  Right? Of course!  That's why Star Wars d6 and Vampire were such successful games for so many groups.  Because the tools they provided were very effective at reaching the goals of those groups.

.

I can't speak to Vampire as I played but didn't GM that (and therefore didn'te really read the books). My vampire GM pretty much ran it as free-form character driven.

But in the 90s I remember a lot of the storyteller stuff creeping into TSR products like Ravenloft (which I was a big fan of). My complaint was much of the advice instructed the GM to railroad, cheat, etc for the purpose of advancing a story structure on the game. Don't get me wrong, I love the Ravenloft products from that period, and despite some quesitonable GM advice there is still a ton of great material to draw on. For me it is a bit like fitting a square peg in a round hole. The writers clearly wanted something more literary or cinematic, but the rules really went against what they were trying to accomplish, so you ended up with advice like "no matter what the players do this NPC doesn't die" or you ended up with modules that put players in the passenger seat while npcs and events advanced the storyline. In some books you got the sense that the designers were lamenting that GMs don't have the control a director or author does.

I still have fond memories of the stuff that came out in the 90s. The setting material for D&D was incredible in my opinion and I think this is because there was a strong focus on flavor. But by the mid 90s or so, they went a bit nuts trying to emulate scenes from movies and books.

Quote from: RPGPundit;499426NO. Its more than that. Its advice that runs DIRECTLY COUNTER to HOW THE GAME ACTUALLY WORKS.  "you should be a dick to your players" is a goal I don't want.  "You should make this D&D game into an attempt to do something that requires that you stop actually playing it as a game" is direct sabotage of the structure of the game.

We are talking about games where one person gets to say what a character says, thinks, feels and does (things amazingly important to stories), and another person gets to say what happens as a result (another thing amazingly important to stories). You are aware that those two things can create really powerful stories, right?  That there is no need for anything further in the rules to create stories? Surely you are.

No, the rules of normal ole RPGs can and historically have been used by people interested in story in RPGs since almost the beginning, because of those two rules: I get to say what my character says and does and the GM gets to say what happens as a result.

QuoteTrying to make a regular RPG into a game that "creates story" REQUIRES that the following things take a lower priority than "creating story":
1. THE FUCKING RULES

Nope, the rules support the creation of story, if that's what you want to do. Especially the GM and what the GM is supposed to do in the game, as I mentioned!

Quote2: THE GODDAMN SETTING

Interesting, please tell me more about how Star Wars' setting is not a good setting for stories. Or did Star Wars d6 make some kind of change to the setting that you feel makes it not a good setting for stories?

Quote3.  THE MOTHERFUCKING PLAYER CHARACTERS

Hmmm, I seem to remember there being characters in most of the vampire stories I've read?  Maybe I should double check.

QuoteNope. Star Wars was successful because it was goddamn star wars, and had great setting material (allowing for good EMULATION), and was not nearly as "storygamey" as you're trying to claim.  Vampire was successful because it made humanities and Arts majors in college feel pretentious for playing it, and because it latched onto the goth movement.

I'm not talking about financial success, I'm talking about play success.  I don't really know much about business and don't really care. I'm talking about having fun playing the game, enjoying the game together.  

QuoteBullshit. You just have to look at how RPGs actually work, what their rules are made to do, to know what that goal is. Also, there is no great disparity in GM advice when it comes to the fundamentals.  ALSO, GM advice doesn't matter.

Interesting that you feel it doesn't matter what a game tells the GM to do. I think the GM is an important part of both games and what they're told to do is highly relevant. It matters a lot what a GM does in a game!  A GM that is catering to the interests of a group who wants a good story out of a RPG campaign ought do very different things from a GM in a group with different interests.

Do you think that the GM role is overrated in some way? There's a lot of recent games that have drastically altered or eliminated the GM role, maybe you would like those if you think what the GM does, thinks and prioritizes isn't relevant.

QuoteAnd I'm not such an insufferable pretentious piece of shit as to imagine that I'm superior to the unwashed masses because instead of actually playing chess WELL, I'm playing a losing game while making up a story about a torrid inter-racial homoerotic love affair between the black knight and the white rook.

Well, in chess there's no rule that says you have any characters, no rule that says you get to say what your character says, thinks and does and nobody to tell you what happens as a result.  So I agree with you that we should stand against the tide of story-gaming in chess.

Oh, except for The Dance And The Dawn, which is a really cool game that uses a chessboard as a resolution tool, but it's not using the normal chess winning rules/etc., it's a normal RPG.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;499431But in the 90s I remember a lot of the storyteller stuff creeping into TSR products like Ravenloft (which I was a big fan of). My complaint was much of the advice instructed the GM to railroad, cheat, etc for the purpose of advancing a story structure on the game. Don't get me wrong, I love the Ravenloft products from that period, and despite some quesitonable GM advice there is still a ton of great material to draw on. For me it is a bit like fitting a square peg in a round hole. The writers clearly wanted something more literary or cinematic, but the rules really went against what they were trying to accomplish, so you ended up with advice like "no matter what the players do this NPC doesn't die" or you ended up with modules that put players in the passenger seat while npcs and events advanced the storyline.

This has always existed in module play. Dragonlance actually was the worst offender in this regard, and those modules predated Vampire by years. I will always remember one paragraph that was: "The party will go right at the fork. If the party goes left, punish them with increasingly dangerous monsters suddenly attacking until they go right or they are all dead."  

Vampire's early modules were also like this.  They were dungeon crawls, too!

I have a ton of early Champions modules, "Deathstroke" from 1983, 8 full years before Vampire 1ed, is about a supervillain stealing some mysterious radioactive isotopes, then using them to threaten the world.  The first part of the scenario is about the theft and the PCs trying to find out about it and stop it.  The module literally says "Regardless of what happens, those isotopes will be stolen."  Because if the PCs beat Deathstroke's plan in the first part of the module, what about the second part, huh? Terrible.

But not due to Vampire.

Quote from: RPGPundit;499430Its a wargame. It (and other new games that wargaming grognards try to claim are "not wargames") functions with exactly the same parameters as any other wargame; their only claim is based on it being too simple, easy to play and fun.
Unlike the difference between a storygame and an RPG, while you can criticize memoir for being simplistic, it doesn't "do" anything that wargames aren't meant to do.

RPGPundit

Right, I didn't see the "wargame RPGs" there. I dunno, I'd say that it's a board game by aesthetic design rather then a wargame, but that's nitpicking and talking about things I don't care to fight that much.

Quote from: JDCorley;499436This has always existed in module play. Dragonlance actually was the worst offender in this regard, and those modules predated Vampire by years. I will always remember one paragraph that was: "The party will go right at the fork. If the party goes left, punish them with increasingly dangerous monsters suddenly attacking until they go right or they are all dead."  

I didn't mean to imply this all started with Vampire (I was simply commenting on what became prevalent in the 90s). And I agree Dragonlance was a big offender (loved the setting material, loved the books, but hated the modules). I guess my point was by the 90s this stuff was out of control IMO (and I think in the case of Ravenloft at least they were specifically trying to emulate vampire----not just with the storyteller thing, but also by releasing products that allowed you to play angst filled monsters).

QuoteVampire's early modules were also like this.  They were dungeon crawls, too!

I have a ton of early Champions modules, "Deathstroke" from 1983, 8 full years before Vampire 1ed, is about a supervillain stealing some mysterious radioactive isotopes, then using them to threaten the world.  The first part of the scenario is about the theft and the PCs trying to find out about it and stop it.  The module literally says "Regardless of what happens, those isotopes will be stolen."  Because if the PCs beat Deathstroke's plan in the first part of the module, what about the second part, huh? Terrible.

But not due to Vampire.

Yes, railroading has existed as long as the hobby has. And there are always going to be earlier examples of the kind of story heavy games you saw with things like Dragonlance and Vampire. The point was, the reason some people react negatively to story first approach, is because many of us trying to run  and play games had negative experiences with that kind of material when it was at its height in the 90s. And to me the common problem was the mechanics of the game said to do one thing, while the GM advice and modules often said to do another. Again though, I wasn't a vampire GM, so I talking mostly about how this style effected other product lines around the same time.

Yeah, the mechanics of most RPGs that use a GM are such that if the GM wants to railroad, for whatever reason, they can. (4e and Spycraft are 2 exceptions, because of their GM budget system).

Although story is one reason GMs railroad, my experience is there are other reasons. A lot of times it was just "this is what I have prepared tonight. So you are going to experience it" or "I have more stuff prepared, you can't end the adventure now". Neither of those are story reasons. But yes, railroading sucks. (And is actually anti-story most of the time, as I mentioned above.)

Quote from: JDCorley;499443Although story is one reason GMs railroad, my experience is there are other reasons. A lot of times it was just "this is what I have prepared tonight. So you are going to experience it" or "I have more stuff prepared, you can't end the adventure now". Neither of those are story reasons. But yes, railroading sucks. (And is actually anti-story most of the time, as I mentioned above.)

Sure. But what I am talking about is how much of the Ravenloft stuff I was reading at the time basically said "railroad and ignore the rules" so you can tell a story. I still think Ravenloft was putting out some of the best stuff I've ever read (the Van Richten line remains my favorite and continues to serve as a source of inspiration for me). But I noticed the more the Ravenloft designers tried to ape Vampire (and mind you this is my impression as a Ravenloft GM who didn't read the Vampire books, so it is just that: an impression) the more I disliked what they were doing. This isn't because I hate Vampire (like I said I played it and had a blast), I just think the design philosophy of Vampire was a bad fit for Ravenloft (on a number of levels) and the storyteller thing (as I understood it) wasn't my cup of tea.

Quote from: Rincewind1;499244I'd say that the very fact of actual conflict in this case means that both side lost.

No, they lost. In a big way. They went from being the ideological vanguard of gaming in the 90s and the 2nd biggest (and possibly at certain peak moments the biggest) RPG company around, to being a nonentity today.

They were taken out on two fronts: 3e helped all the regular gamers realize that all this story-artist stuff was pretentious crap, while the ultrapretentious went on to create the Forge and steal away their hardcore would-be elitists with something that promised to be even more "elite" and a whole new and better way to look down on other gamers while pretending that your games made you special.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;499433We are talking about games where one person gets to say what a character says, thinks, feels and does (things amazingly important to stories), and another person gets to say what happens as a result (another thing amazingly important to stories). You are aware that those two things can create really powerful stories, right?  That there is no need for anything further in the rules to create stories? Surely you are.

And here you intentionally pretend to be ignorant again, as if you don't know what I'm talking about, as if this isnt' a debate that's happened a thousand times before here and elsewhere in the gaming world.  
Look, bitch, if you want to be banned from here, that kind of coy "I'm going to pretend to be dumb to wast the other guy's time so he has to explain everything I already know but don't want to have to admit to" shit is the best way to get me to do it.

QuoteNo, the rules of normal ole RPGs can and historically have been used by people interested in story in RPGs since almost the beginning, because of those two rules: I get to say what my character says and does and the GM gets to say what happens as a result.

And what you say, and what happens, both are utterly bound by the EMULATION OF THE WORLD. The system, the mechanics of RPGs are set up not to create the best LITERARY result, but the best EMULATIVE result.

QuoteNope, the rules support the creation of story, if that's what you want to do. Especially the GM and what the GM is supposed to do in the game, as I mentioned!

Bullshit. The PC decides that he wants to pop a cap in the town's mayor who was crucial to the "story" the GM was going to tell, right out of nowhere.
The GM wants to make an intricate story about a prophecy told by three witches, and the PC just decides to kill them right off the bat.
The young farmboy is clearly literarily meant to rise to a great destiny... and then gets  killed when an Orc hits him for 8 points of damage two turns later.

The second you bring "STORY" into the mix as a goal and not just a side-effect, you have to decide whether its more important that the orc do 8 points of damage or that your farm boy live because its better for the story. So suddenly, the emulation of the world doesn't matter anymore. When that happens, nothing about the setting matters anymore. The players choices don't matter anymore. In the end, all that you might as well be doing is getting together with NO game and creating a story collaboratively like some writing exercises do.

To suggest that RPGs are made to create story is like saying the main goal of going fishing is to "create story". Yes, lots of time, some kind of story gets told... its usually of no literary worth, and its the kind of story that everyone who wasn't there gets bored out of their mind hearing.

QuoteInteresting, please tell me more about how Star Wars' setting is not a good setting for stories. Or did Star Wars d6 make some kind of change to the setting that you feel makes it not a good setting for stories?

By setting, I mean emulation of genre. Of course, you being a Forge Swine want to keep pretending that's not central to the RPG experience. IT IS AND ALWAYS WAS AND EVERYTHING IN THE MECHANIC OF THE RPG IS SET UP TO DO IT.  So go fuck yourself.

QuoteHmmm, I seem to remember there being characters in most of the vampire stories I've read?  Maybe I should double check.

Player agency ruins the GM's ability to be a "storycrafter".  GM-authority ruins the power of players to do so. Which is why White Wolf games always turn Players into powerless cheerleaders meant only to serve as the audience for the GM's brilliance, while Forge games always turn the GM into a castrated monopoly banker with no power to stop the most diva-esque or manipulative player from dominating the whole exercise to create the story he wants.

QuoteInteresting that you feel it doesn't matter what a game tells the GM to do. I think the GM is an important part of both games and what they're told to do is highly relevant. It matters a lot what a GM does in a game!  A GM that is catering to the interests of a group who wants a good story out of a RPG campaign ought do very different things from a GM in a group with different interests.

A GM who has a group that thinks they want to "make a story" should be telling them you can't actually do that with an RPG.

QuoteDo you think that the GM role is overrated in some way? There's a lot of recent games that have drastically altered or eliminated the GM role, maybe you would like those if you think what the GM does, thinks and prioritizes isn't relevant.

Fuck you. I'm done with this. You're banned.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;499436This has always existed in module play. Dragonlance actually was the worst offender in this regard, and those modules predated Vampire by years. I will always remember one paragraph that was: "The party will go right at the fork. If the party goes left, punish them with increasingly dangerous monsters suddenly attacking until they go right or they are all dead."  

Vampire's early modules were also like this.  They were dungeon crawls, too!

I have a ton of early Champions modules, "Deathstroke" from 1983, 8 full years before Vampire 1ed, is about a supervillain stealing some mysterious radioactive isotopes, then using them to threaten the world.  The first part of the scenario is about the theft and the PCs trying to find out about it and stop it.  The module literally says "Regardless of what happens, those isotopes will be stolen."  Because if the PCs beat Deathstroke's plan in the first part of the module, what about the second part, huh? Terrible.

But not due to Vampire.

The difference is that before Vampire, we called that "Bad module-writing".  After Vampire, they called it "the way you SHOULD run your games because you're an artisté".  That is to say, while Vampire didn't invent this type of writing or style of play, they were the first ones to actively ENCOURAGE it as the height of how rpgs should be run.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;499433We are talking about games where one person gets to say what a character says, thinks, feels and does (things amazingly important to stories), and another person gets to say what happens as a result (another thing amazingly important to stories). You are aware that those two things can create really powerful stories, right?  That there is no need for anything further in the rules to create stories?

You're banging your head against a wall of irrational prejudice. Just look at his response to the fact that a lot of people over at storygames are talking about D&D. It can't possibly be because they enjoy D&D and there's a lot of overlap between it and other games they like. No, they must be talking about a game they hate and participating in a conspiracy to subvert and destroy TRUE RPGs. Pundit is Bismarck fighting teh warz on the side of truth and justice and all that is good and right. Don't expect him to be swayed by rationall argument and facts.

JD's banned?

Quote from: RPGPundit;499456The difference is that before Vampire, we called that "Bad module-writing".  After Vampire, they called it "the way you SHOULD run your games because you're an artisté".  That is to say, while Vampire didn't invent this type of writing or style of play, they were the first ones to actively ENCOURAGE it as the height of how rpgs should be run.

RPGPundit

Wrong. Dragonlance, as JD quoted, came quite a few years before that, and was all about reproducing the novels on the game table.

But by now I should know that, like any delusional schizo, you're impervious to logic; so feel free to keep tilting at that particular windmill.

Also, I see you've banned JD. This was even lamer than your banning of Seanchai.

Quote from: The Butcher;499509Wrong. Dragonlance, as JD quoted, came quite a few years before that, and was all about reproducing the novels on the game table.

This is true. And it was lauded as one of the greatest modules of all time prior to Vampire's appearance, at least in some of the crowds I knew at the time. Also, some Cthulhu adventures are actually guilty of similar thinking. The whole story thing was with the hobby from the start, the issue being that it picked up steam until it radically affected RPG design by the end of the 80s, which basically made Vampire's bed for the 90s, and later, by reaction, the Forge's in the 2000's.

Quote from: The Butcher;499509Wrong. Dragonlance, as JD quoted, came quite a few years before that, and was all about reproducing the novels on the game table.

Dragonlance did do that yes, and was criticized for it.  What it certainly didn't do was suggest you were a sophsiticated "artistic" person for playing tasslehof.

QuoteAlso, I see you've banned JD. This was even lamer than your banning of Seanchai.

He brought nothing to this forum, all but admitted he was trying to subvert it to Storgame revisionist history, and was engaging in thread-derailing "intentional obtuseness" of the kind that seems weasely over on rpg.net, but here is nothing short of direct cowardice.  If he really had no counterarguments, then he could at least have actually had the balls to say "I think you're a poopyhead and I don't like your ideas". But no. He had to pretend that he'd never heard of shit before when in fact he had been arguing about said shit not two threads ago; we don't need that kind of fuckwit mentality in our trolls here.   I prefer a more sophisticated type of troll, like yourself.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;499525He brought nothing to this forum, all but admitted he was trying to subvert it to Storgame revisionist history, and was engaging in thread-derailing "intentional obtuseness" of the kind that seems weasely over on rpg.net, but here is nothing short of direct cowardice.  If he really had no counterarguments, then he could at least have actually had the balls to say "I think you're a poopyhead and I don't like your ideas". But no. He had to pretend that he'd never heard of shit before when in fact he had been arguing about said shit not two threads ago; we don't need that kind of fuckwit mentality in our trolls here.   I prefer a more sophisticated type of troll, like yourself.

RPGPundit

You call him a coward when you reply to a post of his after you ban him. Brought nothing to the forum? You mean like the gold fuckers like B.T. bring to this forum. Even if you think JD is an unsophisticated troll, at least he was talking about gaming.

Edit: And the "cowardice" as you have defined it is now a reason for banning? And does this only apply to gaming related talk ?

Regards,
David R

I suspect that bans will become more frequent and more arbitrary in the year to come.

If you ban JD, then you must seriously consider banning Darwinism and TheCasualOblivion, who are blatantly "disrupting the site" by your definition. The latter just argues for the sake of shit stirring and never ever has a point, while the former is so far up the crazy Forge-4e virtual asshole I can hear the rectal echo from where I'm sitting when reading his verbal diarrhea.

Quote from: Benoist;499608If you ban JD, then you must seriously consider banning Darwinism and TheCasualOblivion, who are blatantly "disrupting the site" by your definition. The latter just argues for the sake of shit stirring and never ever has a point, while the former is so far up the crazy Forge-4e virtual asshole I can hear the rectal echo from where I'm sitting when reading his verbal diarrhea.

I can't even remember a single post for either of them. If you want to make a serious argument for moderation, then please send me links that explain where and how they've been disruptive.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;499613I can't even remember a single post for either of them. If you want to make a serious argument for moderation, then please send me links that explain where and how they've been disruptive.

RPGPundit

I don't know if I want to. I hate the guts of these guys and I really do think they are only here to disrupt the site, but on the other hand, I didn't agree with the banning of Seanchai earlier, and I'm not sure I agree with JD's now, though I did warn him in my capacity of random OP poster here about this (publicly, in another thread, I think that's the start of the one about the Ghost of D&D's Future).

Check the "slamming of 4e has already started" current flamewar. You'll see what I mean.

Quote from: Benoist;499608If you ban JD, then you must seriously consider banning Darwinism and TheCasualOblivion, who are blatantly "disrupting the site" by your definition. The latter just argues for the sake of shit stirring and never ever has a point, while the former is so far up the crazy Forge-4e virtual asshole I can hear the rectal echo from where I'm sitting when reading his verbal diarrhea.

This is one of the most pathetic things I have ever read on a public forum. You want people banned because they disagree with you? You're an idiot.

Quote from: soviet;499626This is one of the most pathetic things I have ever read on a public forum. You want people banned because they disagree with you? You're an idiot.

You're a fucking moron searching to back up people who happen to agree with you. You comment on something that's already been answered to in the next post: no, I'm not asking for them to be banned. What I'm pointing out is the lack of consistency in the banning of JD. Is that clear with you now?

So stop projecting and check your reading comprehension. Thank you very much, asshole.

Quote from: two_fishes;499600I suspect that bans will become more frequent and more arbitrary in the year to come.

I concur.

That ban did seem unnecessary, when it would have been easier to step out of the argument and ignore him.

Quote from: Benoist;499620I don't know if I want to. I hate the guts of these guys and I really do think they are only here to disrupt the site, but on the other hand, I didn't agree with the banning of Seanchai earlier, and I'm not sure I agree with JD's now, though I did warn him in my capacity of random OP poster here about this (publicly, in another thread, I think that's the start of the one about the Ghost of D&D's Future).

Check the "slamming of 4e has already started" current flamewar. You'll see what I mean.

The last few days here Seanchai spent all his time basically waving his dick in Pundit's face daring him to permaban him.   "So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it."  Pundit did him a favor and put Seanchai out of his misery.

JD, I don't know.  The guy was obviously doing the same thing.  His whole "But wait a minute..." smug innocent sounding bait questions were getting old.  It got kind of tiring during High School debates, let alone 25 years later.  Lots of people on this site tear Pundit's ass a new one now and again, but it do it with more style, not one percent as annoying, and usually with some shred of intellectual honesty.  Ignoring him when he does that though is, as pointed out, a better response.  JD's like most people here, when he's not in jackass mode, he's a great poster.

The 4vengers, well they don't participate here any other time, and only come to flamewar about 4e.  They haven't been interested in actually discussing mechanics or design of 4e for years and usually only appear under AM's skirts when he's summoned by Windjammer when WJ once again validates criticisms of 4e using the words of 4e designers.  Right now a bunch of people are having fun spinning Darwinism in a circle, but it's to the point now where he's answering posts with stuff like "hahahahahahaha", so fair to say that well's about run dry.  They'll disappear again, they always do.

Should Pundit ban more people?  If he does, it doesn't matter why he does it.  People like twofishes will spin it as being arbitrary and personality-based no matter what he does, and the "anti-Pundits" on this site will agree.  

The bans happen with more frequency though, and this place will become where big purple jihadists come to sacrifice themselves to prove this site's speech isn't free and to get the vibes of 70 transgendered post-surgery virgins.

I pretty much agree with everything CRK.

Whatever. The only thing JD did that other posters mentioned didn't do was argue directly with Pundit. Clearly the qualification for banning is piss Pundit off enough and little else. JD just argued about shit, that's it. He disagreed with Pundit and he didn't shut up about it.

Quote from: Benoist;499620I don't know if I want to. I hate the guts of these guys and I really do think they are only here to disrupt the site, but on the other hand, I didn't agree with the banning of Seanchai earlier, and I'm not sure I agree with JD's now, though I did warn him in my capacity of random OP poster here about this (publicly, in another thread, I think that's the start of the one about the Ghost of D&D's Future).

Check the "slamming of 4e has already started" current flamewar. You'll see what I mean.

I'll try to keep an eye out (haven't even looked at that thread at all other than very briefly at its inception) but it seems to me that at least one of the people you name there (I've yet to find any actual posts by the other one) are vehemently arguing their position, maybe in an aggressive way, but that's not really what I'd call "disruption".  If on the other hand they were merely semantically nitpicking everything their opponents said while intentionally refusing to acknowledge even the most basic of arguments, in other words, engaging in NON-debate, then I'd find a bit more to be concerned about.   Particularly if they had a history of doing that in multiple threads.

Again, if you think there's a case for the latter, bring it up, ideally with specific cases in point.

RPGPundit

Quote from: CRKrueger;499634The bans happen with more frequency though, and this place will become where big purple jihadists come to sacrifice themselves to prove this site's speech isn't free and to get the vibes of 70 transgendered post-surgery virgins.

For the record, the last person banned before corley was seanchai, and that was FIVE MONTHS ago.  They were the only two users banned in 2011.

That means we had TWO banned posters in 2011, averaging 1 per six months (though in actuality, there were 0 in the first six months of 2011, and 2 in the last six months).

In 2010 we banned THREE actual non-spam posters, Cylonophile and two guys who had only about 3 posts each (which were pure site disruption; one of them was just promoting his site, so he might arguably be considered a spammer).  

In 2009 we had 2 bans, in 2008 we had about 12 bans, though some of those were socks or arguably spammers.  

So at least in the last 3 years, we've pretty much been unwavering in our rate of banning, averaging about 2 bans a year, which is probably less than what rpg.net bans in a week.  Just to give you all a sense of perspective.

RPGPundit

Quote from: two_fishes;499637Whatever. The only thing JD did that other posters mentioned didn't do was argue directly with Pundit. Clearly the qualification for banning is piss Pundit off enough and little else. JD just argued about shit, that's it. He disagreed with Pundit and he didn't shut up about it.

Lots of people, yourself one of the main contenders, have argued with me countless times without being banned.  You've managed to rack up over 1000 posts of which a sizable percentage amount to nothing more than opportunistically attacking me (including this post I'm quoting), and yet you're still here.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Rum Cove;499633I concur.

That ban did seem unnecessary, when it would have been easier to step out of the argument and ignore him.

Well, banning IS like Ignore, except you're able to impose your preference on an entire site, and since you don't have that option, it didn't occur to you as reasonable.
Or put another way, to the man with a banhammer, everyone looks like a nail.

JG

Quote from: RPGPundit;499650Lots of people, yourself one of the main contenders, have argued with me countless times without being banned.  You've managed to rack up over 1000 posts of which a sizable percentage amount to nothing more than opportunistically attacking me (including this post I'm quoting), and yet you're still here.

I'm not that persistent. I'll take a jab when you're being particularly egregious, but most of the time I just roll my eyes and move along. I'm not gonna dog you for 100 posts calling you on your bullshit. The last two bans have come after just that--someone getting on your case. In this case you banned without a warning or anything. JD pissed you off and wouldn't let up, so off he goes. I think 2012 will play out just as I predicted: more frequent, more arbitrary.

Quote from: RPGPundit;499452Fuck you. I'm done with this. You're banned.

RPGPundit

This is disappointing.

I know that JD was a damn picky bastard, but at least some of the picks he had at me were good - and I like to think I actually managed to get some of my picks at his ideas back to him as well.

I'd call it a damn shame, as he was a fine, if assholish, conversation patron. While I find that manner of his annoying, he was at least discussing RPGs and doing that with much, MUCH more style then Darwinism and his yoke.