General WoD Discussion #2: Its time to Celebrate!

[CN the Logos]

It doesn't make the game any less oppressive. I'm just saying there is a glimmer of hope in the darkness...and of course it's difficult as hell, you're murdering a demigod. Beating a Fae should be the end of an entire chronicle, likely with multiple PC deaths along the way. You might not get the one you wanted, the guy you're getting vengeance for is probably dead, and there are an infinite number of Gentry left that you'll never be able to kill...but that's the whole point of WoD. You'll never make serious, lasting change, but you can have small victories if you're willing to pay the Phyrric price.

But you can do it. And unlike the Antediluvians, not only are they actually killable (if barely), they are, as you said, directly tied to the characters. That makes it personal. Any sort of victory against anything is ultimately ST fiat, the True Fae are no different.

As I've mentioned before and will probably end up mentioning again (at length, in text-wall form, because I do that), it's not just that the True Fae are fiat bosses that bothers me. It's the combination of them being fiat bosses, the fact that they're involved in everyone's backstory, and that Changelings already work as the mythical fair folk without the need for cosmic horrors everywhere.

But really, when I think about it, the big thing, the thing I can't get past, is that I find the idea of a society consisting almost entirely of rape victims who got superpowers from surviving the experience really creepy. Not good "we're playing a horror game" creepy. Just regular, uncomfortable, "I don't want to be here anymore" creepy. I know there's no accounting for taste, and I'm not saying people who do like Changeling as written are wrong to do so (it's just a game), but no matter now many times people tell me "you don't have to mention it all that often," I'm still going to be creeped out by it.

And C'mon...dissing Geist? There are eight different archetypes to pick from, only one is The Crow. You don't see Eric using his magical ghost powers to scam people out of sports cars.
Geist is the best game ever.

No, no, you've got it all wrong. I love Geist. It's tied with Promethean as my favorite thing White Wolf's ever done. It's an examination of potentially grim subject matter that manages to balance seriousness with lack of wangst. The magic system is powerful and versatile without ascending to the heights of utter ridiculousness possible in other high(er) magic systems (except for Boneyard, Boneyard's broken as hell ). The geists and kerberoi are cool. It's got an interesting take on the classical Underworld. Danny Elfman wrote a kickass soundtrack for it. No wait, that last bit's not official, I forget that sometimes.

But anyway, while there are many stories about people being possessed by otherworldly entities (ghosts or demons) and many stories about dead people refusing to die when they're killed, I'm only aware of one other story that combines those two folkloric ideas in that way.* Maybe I'm just ignorant and there's an entire subgenre of stories about people coming back to life due to bargains with benign spirit entities, it wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong. But I think Geist is pretty upfront about its sources of inspiration.

And you know what? Every time I've tried to describe Geist to someone, I've gotten puzzled looks when I try to describe sin-eaters, right up until the point where I give up and say, "you're like The Crow, but you don't have to be a murder victim and you don't have to be looking for revenge on anyone. You could be a formerly homeless guy who froze to death and now works to make sure other people don't go that way, or a ex-businessman who decided life was too short for an office job and went walking the earth after not dying in a plane crash that killed everyone else on the plane. Stuff like that, the sky's the limit as long as it includes a near-death experience at some point. Also you can see and talk to ghosts, and have various other death-themed powers, including opening portals to the land of the dead." Believe it or not, the response to that description is pretty positive. A premise doesn't have to be carved in tablets made of solid originalium by the god of originality to be good, it just has to present its material in a way that makes it stand out positively from the other stories covering the same ground.

But by that argument its no victory for, say, a Vampire to kill a Werewolf ( to use an OWoD set) as there are always more of them and most of them want to kill you. I can't think of any game where defeating one of them is going to mean you're never bothered again by the entire race.

And other than using it as an occasional source of plot hooks, cool powers, and interesting NPCs (regardless of what system I end up using for the magical girl game, Sascha Vykos is showing up as one of the Dark General-equivalents), I dislike the OWoD. But that aside, werewolves don't have to show up in a Masquerade game. True Fae must show up in a game of Changeling: The Lost, even if it's only as backstory, which leads me to...

True but it can only be their backstory. They don't have to ever show up in person again.

But if you're going that route, why have them as required backstory at all? It isn't like Geist, where a good portion of the powers revolve around death and therefore whatever fluff you use needs to involve death as well unless you're using a fairly radical system hack. The contracts, magical oaths, and dream-weaving stuff is all grounded in folklore. So is the idea that the fae are a bit crazy by human standards and thus would have a sanity meter instead of a karma meter. The premise of elves hidden in the modern world could be taken in all sorts of interesting directions, so I'm having difficulty understanding why the response is so negative to me saying that I don't like the "cosmic horror with really creepy rape subtext" that White Wolf decided to go with.

And there are plenty of reasons why somebody would want to leave the alien world where he was kidnapped to to return to the world where his friends and family are even if his Durance wasn't particularly awful.

I always assumed Durance's don't always have to be mind shatteringly horrible or there wouldn't be Loyalists (though know I think of it Loyalists could just be operating on the grounds its better to serve as torturer than be the tortured)

This can be true for individual cases, but seriously, I've read the book. I own the book. The default assumption is soul-shattering trauma.

Not gonna lie, I've been playing WoD wrong my whole life, so there's a bit of a difference in perspective. Horror's not really my thing. An astute reader may question why I would bother given that...

I'm of the firm opinion that there's no such thing as badwrongfun as long as no one gets hurt. In fact, my girlfriend tells me that when she played Vampire: the Masquerade, she was in it for the vampire superpowers ("SHADOW TENTACLES"). It's just that the Persona games I've played have involved a lot of drawn-out combat which the protagonists typically win without serious injury, whereas NWoD's combat is over in seconds and usually results in serious injury or death for at least one of the parties involved. You could base a NWoD game on Persona, I suppose, but to me it would have a very different feel than the actual Persona series by virtue of the combat alone.

In fairness, Nyarlathotep was beaten three times in a row through straight up violence, not the power of friendship.... :D

And as someone who enjoys the work of H. P. Lovecraft, that breaks my heart.



*Some versions of vampires are demons possessing a corpse, but in those cases it's usually made clear that the original person's either not there at all any more, or unable to act while the demon uses the body to terrorize the living. Nothing like the geist/bound symbiosis as far as I know.