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What original theme interests you?
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@STD IF you want to do that worldbuilding.
You don’t have to. Most modern urban fantasy doesn’t, and a Masquerade-heavy world runs into just as much illogic as a Masquerade-absent world. Magic, or the supernatural in any regard, being an active presence in the world would result in a very different world.
That is the only truth. Everything else we do is just deciding what parts of that change we’re interested in playing with, and what parts of it we’re not. The parts we’re not, we handwave, the same way we handwave TBI when people have a punch up in a bar.
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@Pyrephox said in What original theme interests you?:
@STD IF you want to do that worldbuilding.
You don’t have to. Most modern urban fantasy doesn’t,
Sure. I said as much. You can just dictate that the world hasn’t changed. But you will also make the setting that much harder to get into or take seriously.
and a Masquerade-heavy world runs into just as much illogic as a Masquerade-absent world. Magic, or the supernatural in any regard, being an active presence in the world would result in a very different world.
I’m not sure I agree with this. It seems to me that, if supernatural stuff did exist, but was actively hidden, you’d just get the same sort of stuff we have now with Caught on Tape and Ancient Astronauts trash TV that most people laugh at.
It’s simply a lot easier to handwave the lack of massive changes to the world if stuff that would change it isn’t widely known.
That is the only truth. Everything else we do is just deciding what parts of that change we’re interested in playing with, and what parts of it we’re not. The parts we’re not, we handwave, the same way we handwave TBI when people have a punch up in a bar.
I’m not saying you can’t, only that it’s much harder to suspend disbelief.
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@STD This gets into the weeds, but I’d disagree, due to some of the things you mentioned up above.
If the supernatural exists, then eventually it is going to get recorded and tested. ‘Actively hidden’ doesn’t cut it; believing that hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people (supernatural or otherwise) could keep a perfect conspiracy with no evidence of the existence of a real, active supernatural not just for years, or decades, or centuries, but millennia across every single human culture on Earth is as much a drastic violation of everything we know about social science and basic human behavior that it blows my mind even thinking about it. Nobody’s that good at keeping secrets. No, not even if their life depends on it.
The reason people laugh at Caught on Tape and Ancient Astronauts is because those things are frauds at worst, and…excited people being very credulous, often still with a profit motive, at best. If only one person in a million had a psychic power at any given time, that’s still thousands of people. People have legitimately given away top secret military documents to the internet in order to prove they were right about a mobile game. Do you think we’d last one year without someone demonstrating pyromancy or demon summoning on America’s Got Talent?
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This is probably something we’d just have to agree to disagree on.
Grand Illuminati Conspiracies do not exist, that’s true (two people can only keep a secret if one is dead), but emergent conspiracies – that is, when everyone involved has a self-interested reason to keep silent – certainly do. And there’s plenty of examples of instances where attempts at Grand illuminati Conspiracies collapse – but then the people involved manage to coverup, gaslight, and distract the vast majority of people so that the facts never really come to light.
And even if that wasn’t the case? It’s still going to be a lot easier for players to swallow a world that is exactly like ours only there are hidden supernatural aspects than one which is exactly like ours but supernatural aspects are out and about. This is especially true of a setting in which philosophical and metaphysical thought is encouraged as part of RP.
“Think deep thoughts about the nature of good and evil and humanity’s place in the universe, but don’t think about the giant pink elephant in the room with huge symbols stomping around and screaming selected passages from Mein Kampf! Just ignore it!”
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@STD Yeah, I think that’s one of those things that will definitely go into the agree-to-disagree pile.
I’ll just note that a lot of very popular urban fantasies do just fine without a Masquerade, and I would be happy to play on a game that didn’t have one.
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Yeah, different groups of players will always have different lines! it’s surprising at times. Because some people definitely can’t fathom a world where stuff is out in the open, but some people can’t believe it could be hidden.
I personally fall in the latter camp, especially in any modern type setting. Think of all the money the US government alone threw at investigating wild stories like ESP, etc. Factor in all the surveillance and media accessibility? I don’t think you could keep true supernatural abilities/happenings a secret.
But, I could maybe handwave for fun rp.
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@hellfrog said in What original theme interests you?:
Yeah, different groups of players will always have different lines! it’s surprising at times. Because some people definitely can’t fathom a world where stuff is out in the open, but some people can’t believe it could be hidden.
To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s more believable that supernatural things would remain hidden than found out, but that if they are out in the open that society would have absolutely no changes.
Given the choice between handwaving supernatural forces somehow remaining hidden or handwaving that society would not change one iota from having supernatural forces in the open, the former seems a lot easier to swallow than the latter. Especially if one of primary vectors of RP in the world is to consider the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of demons and angels running around.
YMMV.
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One last post before I go back to lurking quietly and sometimes upvoting people.
The Angels v Demons thing sounds like the most fun to me. I think a lot of the problematic issues (re: harmful content) can probably be solved with a sufficient staff-size, an up-front warning about what kinds of content will be unacceptable, and no hesitation to issue bans to anyone introducing that content for any reason (if it’s a weird gray area situation, issue a temporary ban, and if it happens again permaban).
I’d also try to, OOCly, frame the Angels/Demons as being more religiously-agnostic. If people WANT to play Biblical Angels and Demons (whatever that means to them), then that should be okay. But the prior post about having the “Upper Management” (on both ends of the spectrum) be more mysterious and BEYOND MORTAL KENNING would be the ideal to me.
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I’m reading all these angels and demons posts, and I’m doing my best not to blurt out Silent Heaven spoilers. So I’ll just say that I love religious supernatural themes and would love to see more games with settings like that!
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@Jumpscare Since you brought it up, I’d love to see an update on that game. For no reason. >_>
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Trudging over to the desk to write an update.
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I’d just like to say that all of these themes sound fun. I mostly lean toward the soap opera because it’s so particularly unique, but the mall is also pretty high up because it has a quirk to it that I find completely charming.
It seems a lot of talk is on the Angels/Demons, so I wanted to share my initial thought: can we play humans, as well? I’m not sure what exactly it is, but my favorite characters in grand conflicts and battles are the small, ‘unimportant’ people caught in the middle who are just trying to live their lives and survive to another day. In a game like that, I’d love to just be a human. Heck, even if the humans don’t last long, it’d be fun to just churn out a new one when the last one expires, because character studies are kinda my jam. So I just wanted to float that thought/question out there.
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@Tekumux said in What original theme interests you?:
I’d just like to say that all of these themes sound fun. I mostly lean toward the soap opera because it’s so particularly unique, but the mall is also pretty high up because it has a quirk to it that I find completely charming.
Soap Opera was my favorite as well. I would love to see a game that’s like, a soap opera but also it’s a reverse-masquerade sort of thing where the soap opera characters slowly awaken to the reality that they are in a Truman Show situation being watched by elder powers and they can’t directly talk about this or else they will be returned to the nothingness from whence they came.
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@shit-piss-love said in What original theme interests you?:
Soap Opera was my favorite as well. I would love to see a game that’s like, a soap opera but also it’s a reverse-masquerade sort of thing where the soap opera characters slowly awaken to the reality that they are in a Truman Show situation being watched by elder powers and they can’t directly talk about this or else they will be returned to the nothingness from whence they came.
Oh, I like that too! And that nothingness will always be so magical, because it could be falling down an elevator shaft, or being lost at sea in a freak lightningcane. Frozen at the top of Mt Everest? Those sorts of things always tickle me. And maybe they can come back from the nothingness after being suitably corrected by the all-powers that be?
I’m in.
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I’d mostly want to play the soap opera game just so my character could suddenly quit to pursue a career in voice acting for Disney Channel shows and I could write a vignette about how the writers killed her by having her get mauled by a leopard while on a camping trip.
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Keeping evidence of supernatural stuff from being revealed to mortals at large impossible? People will leak all the details?
Sure would be a shame if an omnipotent being were to decide they didn’t want any evidence to be found, because of mysterious ways…
