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World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate
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@GF Yeah it can be awkward if you’re not used to it, trying to take the MtA game mechanics that are all written Hermetic-first, and try to play an Etherite or anything else with them.
But it can be done. It just takes more work than just being able to talk about ranks of Ars Stuckupica
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@shit-piss-love
The Technocratic Union, in their higher ideals, are building a world built on comprehensible and predictable rules where the laws of the universe and the ability to effect it is the same for everyone, not the result of having special magic powers, and where the things that go bump in the night get shut the fuck down.
It was introduced back in the Guide to the Technocracy as more of a justification for why the forces of The Man are stomping on human faces forever, but it has been taken more or less straightforwardly in a lot of later material.I will also say that, these days, the fact that Mage: the Ascension has the heroic psychic surgeons, homeopaths, and crystal energists trying to overcome the paradigm of the evil germ theorists makes me feel… less enthused about the game’s presentation.
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That’s actually the most reasonable breakdown of The Technocracy I’ve heard in a long time.
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@insomniac said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
I will also say that, these days, the fact that Mage: the Ascension has the heroic psychic surgeons, homeopaths, and crystal energists trying to overcome the paradigm of the evil germ theorists makes me feel… less enthused about the game’s presentation.
To be fair, presenting that conflict as good versus evil was much more a 1E thing, but it is still one of the weirder and occasionally uncomfortable aspects of the game, making the whole “my opinion is just as valid as your knowledge” shit we’re all dealing with as a society very literal. Like, I know people IRL who would be miserable to play with because they would be a liiiiiitle too into it.
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Yeah to be clear my tongue is firmly in cheek here. Nothing in oWoD should be taken remotely seriously. I just really like the against-the-grain generous interpretations of the Technocracy. Some of the most fun characters I’ve seen were like NWO agents with complicated social philosophies, It-X researchers trying to solve food insecurity, or Void Engineers trying to equalize the access to Technology across socio-economic lines.
edit: My personal favorite Technocracy trope is “did you think we want to just mirror mundane society hierarchical models? fuck that, those always end up with the wrong people in charge. we’re concerned with making the system actually work for everyone.”
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@shit-piss-love said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
The Technocracy’s position is that reality should be dictated by the unconscious consent of mortals. Everything else is a Reality Deviant seeking to exert nonconsensual force in the pursuit of their urges and/or agendas. Are their methods, uh, suspect? Maaaaaaaaybe.
It’s not even that reality SHOULD be dictated by mortal belief… reality IS dictated by mortal belief - which is partly why when you surround yourself with a cult of mortals who BELIEVE in your magic/paradigm, you get a bonus. (See also: Demon the Fallen, souls being made of Godstuff/mortals being used to fuel powers with FAITH)
So if you get enough mortals to believe that the Earth is an oblate spheroid… reality conforms to that belief. But local reality can be overwritten, so if you then take a bunch of flat earthers to Antarctica, they might just walk up and find the edge… just like your cult makes your rituals work better.
This is also why planes crash sometimes. People were tricked into thinking there was a loophole in physics that lets multi-ton vehicles fly through the air, and enough people believe it is safe, and so it is. But every now and again… they don’t.
And we can keep going with examples, but that covers it pretty well.
Reality Deviants are Deviant from the norms that the technocracy want… but also are Deviant in that 100% of humanity could believe that vampires are fake, yet vampires will continue to exist despite this.
The Technocracy is totally cool with Drones (or Fomori that are easily disguised as Drones, see: Special Projects Division) so long as they further the ‘science is real, nothing else is’ paradigm. They are totally cool with fetishes and charms and talismans, so long as they use SCIENCE.
But also the why of it all is because as mentioned, Reality Deviants tend to like… want to control mortals; part of the Dark Ages being so dark was because Supernaturals operated in the open (more or less, there was still secrecy, but this is pre-masquerade days). So now we have to convince mortals that vampires are fake. So even though this won’t affect vampires existing, it means that humans are less likely to like… actively help them. Or worse, stop believing in SCIENCE/start believing in mystic bullshit again.
This, uh… got a lot more wordy than I anticipated.
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What I mean is, that hasn’t really been an against-the-grain portrayal of the Technocracy since the first edition of the game or arguably late second. There are POV chapters in the convention books that explicitly state that’s what a lot of people sign up for, and they retconned the history pretty early on to be that basically the entire reason the Technocracy was formed in the first place was as opposition to these strange weirdos wielding their power at the expense of the average mortal. The “good” Technocrats might run into Nephandic corruption at the top and/or rank-and-file (or at the very least plenty of people who are just extremely self-serving and interested in preserving the status quo), but I never walked away from the more recent editions and especially M20 feeling like the former were particularly all that rare. It isn’t (necessarily) the Technocracy’s intentions that can make them suspect, it’s their methods. That’s just my take tho.
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I’m not familiar with any of the oWoD stuff that’s come out since the nWoD stuff dropped. I was actually cruising around DriveThruRPG last night and noticed that there’s a new line of stuff coming out now that is a continuation of the original setting? Like it reconciles the Avatar Storm stuff? I’m not sure how interested I am in running or playing that but I’m curious how they are approaching it.
Personally, I love the nWoD (I guess it’s maybe called Chronicles now?) stuff for running generic Spooky Modern with most of the lore filed off.
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Ahhhhhh ok! We sometimes use 1E interchangeably with the oWoD line around here, haha, but oWoD itself was divided up into first, second, revised and now 20th anniversary editions over the course of the line. That’s the first edition I was referring to!
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@Wizz said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
Ahhhhhh ok! We sometimes use 1E interchangeably with the oWoD line around here, haha, but oWoD itself was divided up into first, second, revised and now 20th anniversary editions over the course of the line. That’s the first edition I was referring to!
There is now also a 5th edition of WoD being produced by Paradox Entertainment, which purchased the IP related to White Wolf from CCP Games in 2015.
@shit-piss-love said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
Personally, I love the nWoD (I guess it’s maybe called Chronicles now?)
Yeah, the new World of Darkness gameline and IPs are now Chronicles of Darkness, a change made by Paradox after the abovementioned purchase in an attempt to prevent confusion related to the brand.
I’m… unsure whether you could say it was successful.
(I swear to God, cross me and I will explain the whole goddamn thing.)
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@insomniac You still haven’t told everyone which book the jizz-blood ghouling is in and honestly, why are we even married if I can’t wield your terrifying knowledge of WoD minutiae and random internet things for my own fun and profit?
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@Aria Oh, yeah, sorry.
…I think that one was from CoD’s Ghouls book, but I might be mixing it up with Ghouls: Fatal Addiction from the original WoD line, which also features…
…uh, is there a spoiler feature here? I don’t know about dropping some of this “For Mature Minds” material on here for just anyone to stumble on.
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But seriously, I love WoD. Both incarnations. They mean a lot to me.
People are talking about what a huge shift it was to be in games where women were playing, and that was a deliberate choice on White Wolf’s part. They were deliberately mixing up pronouns for both players and characters in play examples only a couple years after D&D was including sidebars about how “he” is totally gender-neutral and so they were gonna keep using that in every case thanks.
On top of that, they were a huge branch in the idea of who they thought would want to play their RPGs, trying to expand the appeal from the basement-dwelling pocket protector crowd to the pseudo-countercultural drama nerd wannabe author set. (I say this with all love to both demographics.) They did this in the focus of their writing, and they did this by going against the whole trend of RPG design at the time, making more and more ultra-specific rules cases for every possible eventuality (probably with a percentile chart) to rolling single-digit numbers of dice and counting high numbers on your hands.
They were a revelation, to me, in terms of what someone could do with an RPG. I know they weren’t the first people to make an RPG that went from “heroes in secondary world completely removed from our own fight monsters and get treasure” to doing something else, but they were the first one I dived into. They were writing with an eye on commentary on social issues and the world around them and the zeitgeist and a real intent of including more diverse ideas.
Now, I will absolutely acknowledge that they often did a really bad job at all of this. The social awareness and criticism were often profoundly adolescent. They frequently started from a place of “we want to really say something with our games and fiction” to unbearably pretentious “we’re doing real roleplaying for real role-players, people who pretend to be wizards in dungeons are doing baby games for babies, our games where you make pretend you’re a sexy wizard who fucks all the time and does magic with freshman-level philosophy is super deep.” The attempts at inclusion were frequently clueless to the point of being offensive, from with the Werewolf ultra-90s “colors of the wind” treatment of Native Americans to the weebtastic treatments of Japan and China (mostly treated as interchangeable) to… everything they tried to do with the Romani. One of the biggest influences on modern game design can trace its origins to a V:tM player who got hyped at the promise of a game about internal emotional struggle and then got a book whose rules were about badass fight scenes and that supposed focus amounted to “RP it out or whatever.” That image above where you get a talk about the seriousness of mental illness on the same page as the fish-smooch picture is really emblematic of a lot. I don’t want to ignore the gamelines’ faults, and for whatever it’s worth most of the people who’ve been working on the games for at least the last couple decades (barring a period right after Paradox picked up the rights) have been making active efforts to be better on these points.
The reason I’m familiar with these faults is because I do care about the games, a lot, and I think there’s a reason so many of us cared so much about them.
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I think one of the greatest things that WoD games did was to put so much focus on social competition and solving problems for your community. Those communities were made up of agency-ignoring blood parasites or narcissistic reality benders or whatever, but the context of the interactions you had with them were light years away from the murder-hoboism of “traditional” RPGs of the time. Our community is being threatened by such and such and outside force. The person in charge of this important community function is bad for their job. This group of people fucked with my friends and need to be adjusted. Especially in a LARP format, where you might have 50+ players, this was transformational.
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@insomniac said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
…uh, is there a spoiler feature here?
I asked that recently and was told there is not. I believe they said the plugin is broken.
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@GF Fair enough. Then I’ll just say that I was going to comment on how “Games For Mature Minds” often drifted into “Games For Overgrown Adolescent Edgelords Peddling Cheap Shock” by bring up the Revolting Revenant sample character from Ghouls: Fatal Addiction and then maybe talk about White Wolf’s Black Dog sub-line in general, specifically one of the abilities that even they decided to remove in later printings of Freak Legion (not mine!).
If you know, you know.
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@insomniac said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
If you know, you know.
It is known. Black Dog was… a lot.
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On my first WoD game, my first PC ended up getting the Fomori treatment and I distinctly remember reading the Savage Genitalia merit with quiet concern after getting a scan of the Black Dog book. Those books were wild!
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Wasn’t Freak Legion also the book that basically dedicated a page or two to saying how awful you and your table were if they contemplated actually using anything in it?
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@Wizz Sounds about right.
Which means it is due for an x20 update on one of these games, who wants to step up and get weird?
