World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate
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@Aria - If you squint enough, a nosforatu looks kinda like an elf
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Really disappointed that this image wasn’t in the first post.
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I remember first running into WoD. On Dark Metal.
I’ll tell you what impressed me:
This was an RPG that women played. It was startling to me. I had never come across meaningful numbers of women who played things like D&D and GURPS.
But it was an entirely different tone, texture, and style of RP going on in WoD land.
That fascinated me and I had to learn more. What was different about it? What was interesting about it?
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@Polk said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
That fascinated me and I had to learn more. What was different about it? What was interesting about it?
My vampire LARPs typically had half women players. Sometimes they outnumbered the men. There’s a lot of reasons why, and many of them can be expressed simply as You Can Be This Queen:
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As much as I make fun of WoD game culture and get exasperated (I wonder sometimes if it wasn’t so much genre as just…the time. 90s/00s gamergeek culture towards women was just so…disgusting, looking back on it)–once I left the world of Shadowrun games, it was just the fact that got to meet so many other women players on WoD that made me pretty much never look back at that point. Made some of my closest friends. Finally felt that I was around lots of other women who were fine with me being myself (instead of the weird guys and Not Like The Other Girls gals of my Shadowrun days–that is not to say there weren’t plenty of people like that in WoD too, there absolutely were especially in my early days, but it was nice to meet lots of older women and my peers who had like–RL professional careers (this wasn’t an encouraged thing in my culture–I was the second woman in my extended family to go to college and complete it, and even then it was in a suitably ‘feminine’ major). Women who were unapologetic about enjoying all kinds of RP. Women who just did what they wanted to do because they wanted to do it, who weren’t quite so crippled by needing to please everyone and not be ‘too much’. Even in my conflicts with some individuals, that was actually pretty important to me.
Plus, as I have mentioned before, I enjoy a lot of ‘dark’ type of RP due to a lot of factors. So the genre was welcome too. It has its glaring problems, and after spending some time out of WoD places there’s a lot about the game cultures that tends to be irritating to me now, but you know. I will always have a soft spot for that hot mess.
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@shit-piss-love said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
What is Christopher Walken doing to that fish?
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@GF That is the infamous FishMalk, visual evidence that you should probably expect that anyone playing a Malkavian might suddenly try to turn any scene you’re in the middle of into an episode of Animaniacs.
The arrival of the FishMalk is known to make any of the Very Serious and Mature Roleplayers
in the room start weeping into their hands, contemplating murder, or both. -
Honorable Mention to the runner-up Malkavian stereotype, I Think I’m Caine.
About once a year in one of the longer-running oWoD LARPs, when we were moving a new “season” of plotlines, we’d do a Weird World of Darkness night where the plots and NPCs we’d roll out were strange stuff that didn’t fit with the rest of the continuity. Really Bad Santa, The Feaster Bunny, etc.
One year we did 5 NPC Malks who were all variations on I Think I’m Caine and PCs got to pick which ones they wanted to help “win”. True to form, this led to one of the bloodiest nights we ever had.
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@shit-piss-love We all know the real Caine is just cabbie that’s just vibing.
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@WhiteRaven I feel like I remember seeing that in Dark Age Vampire. Man, I really miss Dark Age Vampire.
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I sometimes think I would like to play Dark Ages: Mage, but then I think about how long my character would go between baths and my skin starts to crawl.
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@GF said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
I sometimes think I would like to play Dark Ages: Mage, but then I think about how long my character would go between baths and my skin starts to crawl.
So long as you remember that the Dark Ages is before the enlightenment, so the 9 spheres don’t exist actually, and it’s a lot more like sorcerer. As for baths, obviously give yourself a geas that requires you bathe regularly. Now you’ve got a flaw/extra bonus points, which gives you proper hygiene!
edit to add: ALSO OPEN DARK AGES: FAE! And maybe wyrm, too, for the lulz.
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@Jennkryst Yeah, I’m aware of the mechanics of DA:M. It’s the big draw for me. I know it kinda works in the meta that every Tradition was eventually forced to conceive of magic through a Hermetic lens, but I like the other Traditions having their own ideas, and I like the magic system in general being a little more narrative in nature.
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@GF said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
I know it kinda works in the meta that every Tradition was eventually forced to conceive of magic through a Hermetic lens
Eh, not… really? I mean, OOCly, sure, because real world science helps explain IC stuff. But each tradition does view it through their own paradigms and junk. This is why different traditions might have a rote for a spell that other traditions don’t (though in oWoD, a Rote is just a -1 on the difficulty of the spell, if memory serves? THEN AGAIN, you can also ‘aim’ your spell with a skill roll, and the whole idea of getting rid of a focus with each Arete raise means you are learning that traditions and paradigms are all an illusion, all that matters is knowledge and will, and oh god, how did we end up discussing mechanics?!?)
AHEM.
But yeah, totally pick up that geas, give you a reason to go meditate under a waterfall while naked or whatever.
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@Jennkryst said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
Eh, not… really? I mean, OOCly, sure, because real world science helps explain IC stuff. But each tradition does view it through their own paradigms and junk.
Their paradigms are mechanically indistinguishable from a Hermetic one, using Hermetic concepts like Spheres and Arete but with a different shirt, like the difference between Mario and Luigi. I think that acting as if Hermetic isn’t the magical default is bad game design; I think the fancy term for it is ludonarrative dissonance.
DA:M doesn’t make a new magic system for each Fellowship, but it does enough to make me feel better about them.
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@GF I believe the idea that they didn’t bathe that often in the dark ages only applies to certain locations and is something of a myth overall. IIRC bath houses were a thing exported by the Romans to much of Europe.
Then again, it’s WoD, so of course it’s nastier and darker than reality.
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If you’re a Mage and not using magic to shower you’re doing it wrong.
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@shit-piss-love said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
If you’re a Mage and not using magic to shower you’re doing it wrong.
THIS, also. Because also remember, the reason that the Technocracy exists and invented SCIENCE was because the other wiz-nerds built mage towers and flaunted their majikz over people.
… or something like that.
