/CofD/ &/wodg/ Chronicles of Darkness and World of Darkness General

Or if anyone could give me some pointers on what a Beast could learn from Mages and Changelings that would also be really helpful.

We never really "took anything down".
Think more Feudal Japanese Ghostbusters.

So no fighting spooky yokai?

Yes.
That's basically what they do. They Monkey See, Monkey Do and imitate the powers of other splats using their Nightmares, which are essentially exactly what it says on the tin: Mental effects that supernaturally spook the target based on the metaphorical dreaminess of the original powers. So it's not so much that a Beast copies someone's ability to set things on fire so much as they understand how to cause the fear of being set on fire.

For instance, in the Beast SAS, one of the NPCs is meant to be a psychic of some sort. He can teach the players a special Nightmare that [I'm too lazy to double check] makes you fear the future and eventually fuck up a roll.

You press your fingers against their forehead in a special way and mind meld.
I'm fucking with you, just talk to them and watch them

But the Beast can't actually set things on fire with their powers, just give people the fear that they are. Once it wears off they're fine?
Am I understanding this correctly?

Not with Nightmares, no. Though if someone burns with a Nightmare, they'll still likely leave a charred corpse if I recall correctly.

If you want to breathe fire, though, that's an Atavism.

I was in a 1e Mortals game where we played as ourselves that turned into a DRYH session that involved me vividly hallucinating in real life.

Fun times.

HM
I may have to rethink where I place them in the group's ranking then if this is all that they are capable of; illusionary damage outside of their specific avatisms.

I wouldn't think of it as "Illusionary damage".
The damage is real, even if it's a hallucination. Nightmares are the mind powers. Atavisms are your dragonfire and wings and Protean style claws. And I don't think Atavism is limited by type, either.

>because basically the only difference between Mortal and Tier 1 Hunter is "you don't fight monsters regularly).

I've always said the difference is that mortals encounter a monster and hope it never happens again. Hunters encounter a monster and go looking for the next one.

Did anyone ever say if Celerity allows you to use the Aim action and shoot in the same turn in V20?

So the Illusion is real?
Like... make a person die from your fire Nightmare and they will end up a charred corpse.

I think that Atavisms are what Beast self is; you want to be a dragon you get yourself some fire breathing, impenetrable hide and flying atavisms. While a mermaid gets what.... a luring voice and breathing underwater?

You quoted the wrong person, but yes, I believe so.

You know how it is. You die in the dream you die for real.

And you can take out-of-Family Atavisms.

Well, sure, but you can only have regular people running into monsters week after week before it strains credibility.

How do you stop a game from devolving into murder-hobo territory without railroading people too much?

By having players who give a fuck about the world and the characters within it.

By having players who can do the basic calculus that killing people doesn't actually solve that many problems in the WoD.

Basically, stop playing with shitty players.

By having actual consequences.

Option 1: Talk to them (the PCs) about it
Option 2: Have NPCs react as appropriate
Option 3: Put them in situations where murder would actually be counter-productive
Option 4: Tell them that you're going to stop running if they don't get their shit together (after option 1)
Option 5: Remind them of the negative effects of such actions
Option 6: Change your game from one where murder-hobo-ism is an appropriate response

>Option 6: Change your game from one where murder-hobo-ism is an appropriate response
So werewolf?

Even werewolves can't murderhobo. 6 werewolves without pack infrastructure behind them will be demolished by the kinds of things that pick fights with 6 werewolves.

You want Beast to murderhobo.

Either have them make characters who aren't crazy murderers or have their actions have consequences. It would also do well to explain that that this game is set in our modern world, where you don't really murder people the way you do in D&D.

Oh user you know this never works

I know, but I have to repeat it to myself in hope that one day I'll get a group that aren't total cuntbags

You can't expect PCs to apply reason empathy and logic to a game.

You put all the fun stuff behind non murder hobo areas. and you don't acknowledge the thrill of killing. You stab he dies. He bleeds open. Every shot is a one hit one kill. No combat rolls. there is blood a cop has been called. Basically you go all robotic no soul

Hope is the most insidious poison

>You want Beast to murderhobo.

That doesn't work either. Who are Beasts going to murderhobo? Random mortals? One of the many monsters with an actual organized society?

To play devil's advocate combat should still be a viable tactic, perhaps not all the time but at least much of the time, especially since many splats have combat focused factions e.g. Arrow, Blood Talons, Carthians, etc.

>Random mortals?
Well, yes, why not?

>One of the many monsters with an actual organized society?
The ones weaker than them?

Either have the players make characters who are unwilling to murder people, or stop throwing NPCs at them who are begging to get killed. If all your NPCs are horrible evil monsters (or conversely, if your PCs are horrible evil monsters), your PCs are going to be killing them.

>It would also do well to explain that that this game is set in our modern world, where you don't really murder people the way you do in D&D.
I've been playing WoD for so long that I have a hard time having most of my D&D characters resort to lethal violence.

Oh no doubt. But that's distinct from murderhoboing.

>MurderHobo isn't a rampant illogical killing

Yeah we know the system has combat but murderhobo is a known game destroyer. Dozen of threads talk about this problem in more depth. The problem is when it destroys the verisimilitude of the game.

>Well, yes, why not?
It's incredibly boring and pointless.

>One of the many monsters with an actual organized society?

>Vampires
Have Blood Sorcery, can ghoul and brainwash an arbitrary amount of people, and abuse Dominate.
>Werewolves
Have their pack, fetishes (more broken than they appear at first glance), some really nasty Gifts, and the war form.
>Mages and Demons
lol

So i'm coming back to WoD (or is it CotD now?) and I have one question:

How bad is beast?

Kind of bad, but not as bad as some people make it out to be.

Not as bad as anyone tells you, but completely directionless and unfocused and with frankly nothing all that interesting going for it.

It's worth pirating, but unless you've got a good idea of what to do, there's no point in playing it.

It had potential, but it squandered it by pretending they were anything more than horrific parasites suckling on the primal terror of mankind.

What a fucking waste of being the "astral" splat.

It originally was basically an otherkin revenge fantasy, where beats dindu nothin' and fighting monsters who literally live off of human suffering apparently made you an irredeemable shitbag.

Now they stripped out the parts that made it interesting along with the parts that made it annoying, so now we've got a bland, directionless sandwich.

But that's basically exactly what it says they are.

When do the Carthians get the fighting style 52 Blocks?
fightland.vice.com/blog/the-legend-of-the-52-blocks?utm_source=fightlandfbus

Being something and being a great something are two different things. In this case they're a lackluster astral splat

>it squandered it by pretending they were anything more than horrific parasites suckling on the primal terror of mankind.
I meant this.

Well I was trying to be nice to it. but yeah thats pretty much it

No, I mean that the game itself acknowledges that fact, even if the characters don't. Much like how vampires don't acknowledge the fact that they're parasites.

That's though what I find interesting about beasts the implied duality. The fact that the human part of them isn't gone, it's become the super ego and something slumbering in the back of your mind for so long has become the ID.

Beasts seek meaning in their existance like anyone else. "What is the meaning of life?" becomes something beasts try to answer and some come up with the idea of "Hey the big bad wolf was there to teach the moral of the story if I'm like him then I need to make sure I'm teaching a lesson too." Or some other thing. It's that human part bubbling to the surface looking to establish rules and generate compromise through the Ego.

I know. I like that. It's why I like that Lessons exist *and* that they really are "tacked on".

It's like Dexter and his Code. Beasts' Code is just "I'm teaching lessons", while Dexter's is "I'm making the world safer for normal people".

Eh, not so much. Vampire are less parasites, and more predators.
Them being Parasites would imply they are dependent upon a singular organism.
They're no more parasites than we are by herding and cultivating cattle.
Which is something that the book makes abundantly clear.

Beast makes clear their relationship with society, then tries to ameliorate that by justifying it with this "lessons" bullshit. Vampires doesn't care about that, any justification for your bloodlust is individual, you merely must feed.

What's more Beast seems to be a game that's solely fixated on feeding. With Vampire, it's a key theme, but they've got so much more going for it.
What's more, I can't really see any good justification for beast-on-beast conflict unless someone stepped on someone else's plan to terrify someone.
And honestly, there's enough of that go go around.
Unlike reliable cattle.

The fact you can make both a argument that vampires are parasites and or predators is really good selling point of the game. and one of the conflicts found within.

Certainly they require and live off of another organism to survive which is parasitical in nature. and They can cultivate a population to prey upon as well.

>Sin eater recomended media
>Sixth sense
>Not Bringing Out The Dead
youtube.com/watch?v=sfUwvmRmMtw

So as a starting storyteller with some experience of gming in other games seeking to run a Mage campaign for my D&D group, what would you recommend, ascension or awakening?

>D&D Group
Run and hide

They are new to role playing games in general, they got introduced to D&D first because it's what everyone thinks of when they hear tabletop RPGs and they are quite open to a story based game, onky one of them has any sort of murderhobo inclinations so introducing them to a storyteller game won't be a problem, I was just wondering which would be better to use for Mage, ascension or awakening and what the pros and cons of each are.

Biggest difference is the settings, look up a few summaries of each.
Personally, I see Ascension as making a character which fits within an existing setting, which can sometimes be incredibly complex.
Awakening allows you to be a bit more free to create your character as you like.

Biggest challenge for both however, is getting players to make the kind of characters who would actually BE Mages. I've had far too many people who've just wanted to play everymen who just happened somehow to Awaken.

I see, in that case I will probably go with awakening, do you have any advice on running the game, what themes to focus on. I'm planning on setting it in either modern day Rome or Munich, with the players having to deal either with the malus maleficarum or Chiron group respectively with, as well as several mages making pacts with abyssal entities and running lose in the city. I'm planning on emphasis g a sense of urban decay and a feeling of glories gone by, while having the local consilium harried by enemies on the outside and full of corruption within.

Bump?

Awakening. You won't have nearly the trouble you would with the more free form power of Ascension.

>Certainly they require and live off of another organism to survive which is parasitical in nature.
Not it isn't. By that logic every carnivore is parasite. Even every herbivore would be parasite as they need to eat plant organisms. I'm not plant expert, but (mostly?) they need organic nutrients from soil too.

So to the people who've gotten Secrets of the Covenants: was it worth the wait?

Daily reminder that the Invictus is best covenant.

They're actually haemovores, which is a seperate class of consuming organisms, along with leeches, mosquitoes, and vampire bats. They aren't predators or carnivores, or even parasitic.

>I was just wondering which would be better to use for Mage, ascension or awakening and what the pros and cons of each are.
DaveB once gave an indepth account of the differences between Ascension and Awakening.
If you are interested, you can find it here: archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/40817373/#40832122

Nope. It turned the Carthians into the Anarch Movement.

>Nope. It turned the Carthians into the Anarch Movement.

Wasnt that always the case?

Nah, they had more nuance. The new Carthians in this book are pretty much reduced back to a lot of the Anarch Movement's raw tropes, rather than their expanded role from 1e's Carthian book.

par·a·sit·ic
ˌperəˈsidik/
adjective
adjective: parasitic

(of an organism) living as a parasite.
"mistletoe is parasitic on trees"
resulting from infestation by a parasite.
"mortality from parasitic diseases"
derogatory
habitually relying on or exploiting others

Yes they can be parasitic stop being pedantic

Nope. Pirate it

>Pirate it

I would love to, but no one as yet shared Secrets of the Covenants and Hurt Locker.

Are you trying to be obtuse?
The last part of the definition is derogatory transferred meaning, it can be as well used for humans. That doesn't make them parasites.

I'm in a Promethean game that's dragging along slowly due to holidays and :life: but I still haven't made my character. I can't seem to think of anything good. Originally I was going to go with Nana Natsu from Beast, but in Canada, and as an Unfleshed, since neither I nor the ST wants to deal with an Extempore. But I'm not a music person, so I was going to change it from a Vocaloid to a video game character.

I'm just not sure if a video game character as an Unfleshed is even an interesting concept to me or not. I'm not sure how I'd do it, and I'm not sure how fun it would be after six weeks, or even what I should do about my Bestowment.

I figure for the actual creation, I could be some programmer or designer's waifu who ended up coming to life somehow and animating one of those life size displays they make.

Alternately some /r9k/ loser's waifu come to life. Just straight up Weird Science about it. "Lightning is magic".

I'm thinking of running a cyberpunk Vampire game. Like "Dracula meets Ghost in the Shell" or something.

Is this a terrible idea or an awesome one?

Pleased to announce that Darker Days Radio will be the official podcast for World of Darkness: Berlin podcast.darker-days.org/e/darker-days-radio-teams-up-with-world-of-darkness-berlin/

>Have you ever run (or played in) a mortals game?
No. Fuck mortals. I play these games to be super.

I'd play in it

Could be cool. Both versions have support for it.

I'm running a cyberpunk OWoD game currently, and it's going pretty okay. If you want my conversion notes for it, just ask (Though they are all 2020 related, I'll warn you).

You wanna look into world of darkness mirrors:bleeding edge. Gives idea suggestions for how to make that work

Honestly the Demon STG handles augmentations better, though I don't like either of the settings.
Bleeding Edge basically just explains the concept of Cyberpunk

Oh, no way. Rad.

I'll probably be running my game in CofD, but I wouldn't mind seeing someone else's ideas on how to approach, it regardless of system.

Glad to hear I'm not totally crazy. The idea came out of nowhere while I was brainstorming the next game to run with my group, but the more I think about it the more I like it.

Yeah. It eventually turned into a Hunter game, but it started off with mortals being attacked by a slasher gang.

Was my way of introducing the game to several of my friends who had only played DnD. They absolutely loved it, and went on to play like 4 or 5 sessions before schedule changes made it almost impossible to go on.

>Bleeding Edge basically just explains the concept of Cyberpunk
From what I remember, it doesn't really give stats for anything at all. When I read it, despite being in to OWoD more, I was at least hoping for some vague stats or something that would make it easier for me. But no, I just got a book doing a not-so-great job at explaining what a genre is.

It's not super finished, as there's hundreds of things I need to stat, but it has all the core concepts down. pastebin.com/zNf67jvM

So now when you are officially BFF, can we still expect you to tear them a new one like with Beast?

Well, it's easy to play up whether or not the bloodsucking mega-corps are any better than the actual bloodsuckers, so it's a better fit than people expect.

Fucking Vampion fags.

Given we are not paid by them you can still expect us give honest reviews. We don't even get free review copies from DTRPG (it's been that way for a while now), so we maintain complete independence (which is also why we updated our logo recently so we can sell t-shirts etc).

If you wete to make a visualization of Reaching when spell casting for a show, how would you represent it?

Werewolf, my man. Fuck Vampires, too.

>psyhic character's nose starts bleeding

Something unnatural veins pop flourescent green, sparks fly, smells of sulphur, etc.

An anime-style internal monologue, complete with dramatic camera angles, wherein the Mage has a fierce internal debate over how much power he needs for his spell and how much he can risk "reaching" for.