Numetal/Retromux
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@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:
I’m suggesting that sometimes, PC leadership (especially in a WoD game) is bad, and needs to be ICly dealt with.
Usually, it needs to be OOCly dealt with. The leadership isn’t bad because it’s demanding, or evil, or cruel, it’s bad because it’s a power trip for some prat who has no interest in aiding in the telling of interesting stories for anyone who isn’t them or their cronies/friends/harem.
It’s far more rare for PC leadership to be bad intentionally, to create that tension and interesting story. Because, typically, the type to seek out that kind of power don’t come with the intention of losing it.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
The leadership isn’t bad because it’s demanding, or evil, or cruel, it’s bad because it’s a power trip for some prat who has no interest in aiding in the telling of interesting stories for anyone who isn’t them or their cronies/friends/harem.
You also forgot “because sometimes staff just hands out the leadership roles and then those players just ignore that aspect of their character and never actually do anything at all within the PC organization.”
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Do note my first response was not to stab Larry the Leader in his face. My first response was ‘staff cannot control my emits or rolls’.
So say staff says ‘you cannot depose the Prince’. And then you go out and do lots of social RP and get most other people to support disposing the Prince and you +roll your big social dice and everyone at court is like ‘New Prince New Prince rah rah rah!’ And staff says ‘despite your successes, you were never allowed to try in the first place. So you fail’?
Now is when the stabbing happens. Because social dice are fast and loose, but combat dice are explicitly laid out, and staff had already shown to everyone they do not care about the rules.
It has to be called out to their face in front of everyone. Because suppose there is a game where every sphere has the same staffer PC in a leadership position, and a bunch of people keep quitting the game because they throw their dicks around. Maybe not everyone, but plenty. And even when the reason is given in private, its private and so you can pretend to ignore the obvious connection.
Going big is the only way to maybe open the eyes of people who are willfully ignoring it.
… what do you mean ‘am I talking about somewhere specific’? What would give you that idea?
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A lot of the time a moral victory is the only kind you can get.
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@Prototart said in Numetal/Retromux:
A lot of the time a moral victory is the only kind you can get.
The best moral victory is just leaving, letting them have their mutual admiration society*, and finding a better game.
*Google says this is nicer than the term that came to mind.
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That’s all well and good if you’re a normal, heathy, functional adult, but what about the rest of us
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@Prototart said in Numetal/Retromux:
That’s all well and good if you’re a normal, heathy, functional adult, but what about the rest of us
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@Prototart said in Numetal/Retromux:
That’s all well and good if you’re a normal, heathy, functional adult, but what about the rest of us
@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
@Prototart said in Numetal/Retromux:
That’s all well and good if you’re a normal, heathy, functional adult, but what about the rest of us
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@Ashkuri All of this is why I don’t play WOD at all. It seems pretty par for the course.
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@Lemon-Fox said in Numetal/Retromux:
@Ashkuri All of this is why I don’t play WOD at all. It seems pretty par for the course.
It’s really no better nor worse than any other genre, there’s shitfuckery everywhere.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
It’s really no better nor worse than any other genre, there’s shitfuckery everywhere.
Can confirm, I’ve seen shitfuckery in all types of games. I think it’s just easier to spotlight WoD because the authors constantly traipse into edgelord territory.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
It’s really no better nor worse than any other genre, there’s shitfuckery everywhere.
I don’t know that I agree with this.
I’ve played plenty of oWOD, many many years of it, though never nWOD or the other newer iterations, so, speaking from that perspective. This system was never meant to be in a MUSH format. What was supposed to be “a cadre of me and my buddies fighting overwhelming forces of corruption and monstrosity working against us” at a table becomes, on a MUSH, other groups of buddies in the role of the forces working against you. WOD was never designed for vampire and werewolf at the same table, much less Mage and everything else.
It’s not balanced for it. So what you’ve ended up with is this really problematic soup of theme that hasn’t aged well, players in thematic opposition to each other, and rules/structures that aren’t balanced between spheres and require interpretation, and a ton of spheres that have to be supported, all against a backdrop in which “the world is gritty and dark” is used by some players as an excuse for very toxic behavior.
I still like oWOD. Love to play an Ananasi someday, somewhere. I’m not saying WOD games can’t be good or fun, but I do think it takes an extremely firm hand and clear head at the wheel to make them so. While there is shitfuckery everywhere, unfucking the shit is a more uphill battle in WOD than elsewhere.
In my opinion, anyway.
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@Ashkuri While that’s all true, and it may explain some of the behaviours seen in WoD games, it doesn’t make anything we’ve seen exclusive or even more prevalent in WoD when compared to other genres.
I’ve seen just as much egotistical bullshit from Lords and Ladies games, Star Wars games, Star Trek games… Alas, I’ve only heard about the kind of bullshit that happens on comic book games, but that’s a whole different kettle of sparrows.
WoD was simply one of the more popular genres in our corner of the hobby for an extended period, so we have a stronger institutional memory of the problems.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
Star Wars games
AoA is probably the current prime example of near constant shitfuckery, just based on the thread here.
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While I agree that many genres have similar issues, I do kinda think oWoD has a unique brand of chaos thanks to allowing a certain kind of player to gesture to the sourcebooks and go “it’s thematic for me to be a raging asshole”. Most players don’t do this. Some do. Some buckle down hard. The older books have a lot of sexually charged lore as well, and that particular player may latch onto that with some… colorful manifestations that everyone gets to deal with.
I say this as a wod player who loves wod, though I prefer newer stuff.
Sure there’s probably star wars/star trek/lords and ladies sourcebooks that give players carte blanche in this regard. But man… wod has a secret sauce or something.
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@Ashkuri said in Numetal/Retromux:
This system was never meant to be in a MUSH format.
This is always a very silly complaint to me. With the exception of systems like (presumably since its creator is the developer of Ares – also I may be incorrect but I believe it was designed as a tabletop system first) FS3, no tabletop system was meant for a MUSH environment. Even systems designed with VTT in mind are designed with the same dynamics as World of Darkness where you have a small handful of people who are exceptional representatives of whatever larger group they belong to – adventurers, werewolves, wizards, investigators, nobility, etc., etc. – and people external to that group are either benign NPCs or enemies. One could also say that Star Wars doesn’t work because you’re not intended to run Imperial and Rebel Alliance characters at the same table.
I’m not disagreeing with the overall point that WoD games always seem to have the wildest and weirdest stories, but blaming the system of a collection of separate tabletop games that people insist on shoving together because they use the same names for stats digresses from the overall point of why WoD games end up as a huge mess, which is usually:
@Yam said in Numetal/Retromux:
thanks to allowing a certain kind of player to gesture to the sourcebooks and go “it’s thematic for me to be a raging asshole”. Most players don’t do this. Some do. Some buckle down hard. The older books have a lot of sexually charged lore as well, and that particular player may latch onto that with some… colorful manifestations that everyone gets to deal with.
