Quote from: 3rik;992738Maybe Supers! Revised could pull it off?

Search me. I know absolutely nothing about the game.

Quote from: Bren;992732I think you would have to rescale things though. A game that needs to accommodate the strengths of Superman and Jimmy Olson doesn't do a great job discriminating between things in a narrower band like say the strength of humans and werewolves. We might want to differentiate between an average human, an above average human, that guy at your gym who lifts the heaviest weights, a world-class weight lifter and a whole bunch of therianthropes with widely varying strengths and such, e.g. a wererat, werecat, werefox, werewolf, wereleopard, weretiger, and a werebear.

Well you give a normal person 2 APs for everything unless they are enfeebled somehow or extraordinary somehow and then assign strength to werecreatures according to how strong or fast they are in relation to "Mr. Average." Strenghts of 1, 2, 3, and 4 cover all the range you'll  ever need for anyone who isn't super-powered. For a werewolf, I'd assume he's 3 or 4 as that's  twice or fourfold a normal average human, respectively. If you want superwolfmen, maybe you'd go to 5 or even 6 APs. Thee are even animal writeups in the back that make it easy to decide. And any animal without a writeup, you just say (for instance) if a wolf has 4 APs of Strength and a tiger has 6, a leopard should have 5 (or whatever) if a leopard is twice as strong as a wolf, otherwise the leopard is 4. It's easy and I've never bought the argument that there isn't enough range to differentiate characters as is sometimes claimed. The claim is usually made about non-super characters "all have the same stats." Well, yeah, guess what, Batman, Captain America, The Punisher, and all those other guys have the same stats because they're all supposedly peak-level humans in every physical way; it's their personalities methods, accoutrements, and psychologists that make them different, not their ability scores. I see the same thing with the allegedly "granular" Champions...sure, you can buy Strength 10, 11, 12, 13, etc., to make your hero "1 stronger" than a normal person rather than double...but no one ever does because there is no actual use for or benefit to a Strength of 11 in Champions...anyway, not trying to push DC Heroes, but just trying to clarify that is actually astoundingly easy to assign scores for the different werecreatures you might use. I think the main problem with DC Heroes is that it states 2 APs is normal and every +1 doubles that level, but when you look at the writeups for heroes they all have ridiculous Strength and Dexterity and such. I think they gave Batman 5 APs AS of Strength, which is 8 times a normal man, which I find idiotic and knock back down if I ever use Batman. Same with his 10 Dexterity. Ridiculous. The inflationary writeup, I think, do a disservice to the game, as they give a hero a Dex of 7 when really a 4 would be outstanding.

Plus we were only talking about werewolves anyway, not all those goofy D&D were-thises, were-thats, and were-the-others.

Also, we're all grownups here and know Batman, Captain America, and the rest are all the same guy anyway...Mr. Male Fantasy.

Quote from: Dumarest;993114Strenghts of 1, 2, 3, and 4 cover all the range you'll  ever need for anyone who isn't super-powered.

That's my recollection with a 4 being a world class weightlifter. How strong a were creature is would depend on what sort of campaign one wanted. I could see having them be significantly stronger than a human putting a werewolf at say a 4 or for something like the Underworld films maybe a 5. Werebears and tigers would be stronger than a wolf.

QuoteIt's easy and I've never bought the argument that there isn't enough range to differentiate characters as is sometimes claimed. The claim is usually made about non-super characters "all have the same stats."

You don't have to buy it. But I think there is merit to the notion that a logarithmic scale like in DC Heroes fails to distinguish as much as one might like. In the human range 1-4 scale is used by other games. Honor+Intrigue for one. I think Savage Worlds is around the same range. It works, but personally I find it a bit too coarse grained for my taste.

Quote...anyway, not trying to push DC Heroes, but just trying to clarify that is actually astoundingly easy to assign scores for the different werecreatures you might use.

Your numbers aren't too different than the numbers I had in my head for DC Heroes and on which I based my conclusion that it was too coarse grained.

I think the main problem with DC Heroes is that it states 2 APs is normal and every +1 doubles that level, but when you look at the writeups for heroes they all have ridiculous Strength and Dexterity and such. I think they gave Batman 5 APs AS of Strength, which is 8 times a normal man, which I find idiotic and knock back down if I ever use Batman.[/quote]I assume its to boost his ability to damage other heroes and to put him sufficiently above elite normal humans that it explains his ability to take down a dozen or so at once. The Dexterity is high so he can survive an encounter with mightier heroes and not get squashed into jelly.

QuotePlus we were only talking about werewolves anyway, not all those goofy D&D were-thises, were-thats, and were-the-others.

The OP clearly wanted other therianthropes, not just werewolves.

QuoteAlso, we're all grownups here and know Batman, Captain America, and the rest are all the same guy anyway...Mr. Male Fantasy.

Oh sure. On some level all superheroes are some sort of power fantasy. But so are Rostand's Cyrano and Dumas' D'Artagnon.

I am currently system agnostic. I want to get at the heart of what make lycanthropes/therianthropes/zoanthropes/etc unique, what makes them stand out from superheroes, other monsters, and so forth. I don't have a problem with monster mash specifically, but it tends to dilute any particular themes unless all the monsters are just variations on the same basic concept. For example, Nightlife made almost all the monsters into variations on vampires by feeding on humans in some way (much like the Showtime original series Lost Girl).

A lot of what I'd be doing is writing essays on werewolf fiction and providing advice on applying that to games. After getting that heavy lifting done, then I'd have to think up example campaign settings and creative werewolf varieties in the vein of All Flesh Must Be Eaten's dead worlds. If one can write that sort of variety and creativity for zombies, then I think it should be possible to do the same with werewolves.

If anyone has suggestions for creative takes on werewolves, or references to fiction which does so, feel free to share.

In terms of fiction Darker than you Think by Jack Williamson and The Wilding by Melanie Tem. The Gene Wolfe short story The Hero as Werewolf is as usual for him brilliant but rather sui generis. And there are the amazing grotesque fairy tales of Angela Carter.

Certainly no major one. I think the number of people who want to play sexy immortals is a lot higher than people who want to play angry dogs.

Quote from: RPGPundit;994493Certainly no major one. I think the number of people who want to play sexy immortals is a lot higher than people who want to play angry dogs.

I am unsure if that exact phrasing is accurate. The popularity seems to depend on the targeted demographic. My amateur survey of the online romance fiction site AO3 shows ~20% more stories about vampires than werewolves, and ~50% more stories about "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" than vampires.

Vampires are cool and sophisticated. Werewolves are grungy yokels.

Quote from: RPGPundit;995079Vampires are cool and sophisticated. Werewolves are grungy yokels.

Not in my neck of the woods.

I saw what you did there.

Vampires stopped being cool and sophisticated sometime after the 1979 Dracula with Frank Langella and the great music by John Williams. After that we get lots of Anne Rice novels, Gary Oldham wearing funny spectacles, and oodles of fancy dress party vampires. So not cool.

Quote from: Bren;995261I saw what you did there.

Vampires stopped being cool and sophisticated sometime after the 1979 Dracula with Frank Langella and the great music by John Williams. After that we get lots of Anne Rice novels, Gary Oldham wearing funny spectacles, and oodles of fancy dress party vampires. So not cool.

Yeah, vampires went the sensitive misunderstood "emo" route and have yet to recover. If I met one in a dark alley I'd be more afraid he'd ask me where he can get a mani-pedi than of being turned into another in his legion of undead.

Quote from: Bren;995261I saw what you did there.

Vampires stopped being cool and sophisticated sometime after the 1979 Dracula with Frank Langella and the great music by John Williams. After that we get lots of Anne Rice novels, Gary Oldham wearing funny spectacles, and oodles of fancy dress party vampires. So not cool.

Interview with a Vampire is published in 1976. One of the best vampire films ever, Near Dark is made in 1987.

But yeah I'm sure everything stopping being cool coincided with your wasted youth or whatever. What a coinkydink.

:rolleyes:

Vampire fiction has gone through numerous phases over the past two centuries.

First we had vampire folklore, where vampires were an explanation for the diseases, disasters and other misfortune that afflicted the peasantry.

Then we had gothic fiction, which introduced the classic vampires including Ruthven, Carmilla, Szandor, Varney, Dracula and a few others.

Then we had Nosferatu, Universal horror movies, Hammer Horror movies, horror comics, and the 80s renaissance. At this time we also got seminal vampire fiction including Interview with the Vampire (which made vampires into romance novel love interests), Necroscope (which mixed vampires with the Cthulhu mythos) and Vampire Hunter D (which mixed Grimm's Fairy Tales, Hammer Horror, Mad Max and Dark Tower).

Then we had the Twilight craze and its knock offs like Vampire Diaries and whatever. Then in direct response to the Twilight craze, a decade too late, we got awful television dramas like the Strain and Van Helsing. We also got What We Do In The Shadows, an [strike]Australian[/strike] Zealandian mockumentary which portrays classical vampires dealing with mundane daily life problems like shared housing, chores, cleaning up bodies, dealing with police, etc.

Werewolves have displayed a fair amount of diversity in fiction. The 1930s and 40s form what I would call the classic period. The 1950s, 60s and 70s form what I would call the exploitation period, as b-movies were in vogue; the earlier part of this period has an emphasis on discredited pseudo-science (reincarnation, hypnosis, drugs, radiation, etc) while the later part of this period becomes sexier and gorier due to relaxed censors. The 1980s is what I would call the renaissance period, which introduced more humanities explorations and better special effects. This renaissance petered out by the 90s and most werewolf flicks returned to b-fodder, but a few good werewolf films come out every so often.

Werewolf fiction has tried to explore other avenues, such as using werewolves as a metaphor for returning to nature or, conversely, adding human qualities to cold unfeeling nature. For example, The Black Wolf connects to the Cthulhu mythos a la Necroscope. The werewolf roleplaying games, what few exist, either stick close to their roots or give werewolves laundry lists of superpowers or spells.

In the early 1990s, the computer game Gabriel Knight seemingly introduced the concept of alpha and beta werewolves for the first time; the alpha is the leader and recruiter while the beta is the recruit and follower. This convention is not common in werewolf fiction, but it has been recycled by the TV movie Nature of the Beast and the TV show Teen Wolf. It was also recycled in some editions of D&D under the name natural/hereditary and afflicted/pathological lycanthropes, respectively.

Werewolves seem to be stuck in a rut, with recycled and predictable plots. Another article argues that many movies without obvious werewolves may be construed as werewolf movies, because the shared theme of werewolves is that they represent inner darkness.

Most long-running fiction with werewolves typically adds other monsters to maintain variety. Underworld adds vampires, immortals and a half-dozen different kinds of hybrids; Teen Wolf adds druids, banshees, berserkers, weresnakes, werepanthers, etc. Being Human adds ghosts, vampires, mediums, demons, etc. Most recent or still-running werewolf shows are aimed at the teen demographic.

Discworld (possibly inspired by Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter) adds some much needed variety to its werewolves and vampires, at one point stating that all the rules are true for different individuals. For example, some vampires are vulnerable to carrots through the ears rather than stakes through the heart, others consume youth rather than blood; testing this out may resemble torture to anyone who stumbles upon it without knowing the truth. Some werewolves transform into wolves, or wolf-headed men, or are wolves most of the time and turn into men when the moon is full. Some werewolves may be born with a birth defect that makes them unable to change, letting them pass effortlessly into human society.

I touched upon it in my last post, but amateur romance fiction (that without a publisher to filter it) has introduced "alpha/beta dynamics." This originated in werewolf fiction, but soon spread to become a typical convention of amateur romance fiction. For those unfamiliar, most amateur romance fiction is written by women and most written romances are between two guys. Said couple typically falls into traditional gender and sexual roles that ape heterosexual couples. A common convention is to make one of the guys literally transgender so the couple may have kids without adopting, which may offend some sensibilities. Sexual content is common, but dubious or non-consensual sex where the victim develops Stockholm syndrome is disturbing prevalent. (I attribute this to the common female attraction to "bad boys" for casual flings, but "nice guys" for long-term relationships, and the common fantasy of turning the former into the latter.) This convention was inevitably mixed with werewolves and from there it picked up concepts like "heat cycles" and "rut cycles", which writers applied as some kind of universal date rape drug. I find the whole situation extremely disturbing, but I had to research it as part of my overall study of werewolf fiction and films.

In other news, pack dynamics are not actually a thing. Real wolf packs are organized as families: the oldest wolves have seniority because they are the parents of all the others. A werewolf pack should not be much different from a human family, despite what paranormal romance fiction would tell you.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTalesWe also got What We Do In The Shadows, an Australian mockumentary

What We Do In The Shadows was a NEW ZEALAND movie! Fucking Australian my arse....

Quote from: TrippyHippy;995926What We Do In The Shadows was a NEW ZEALAND movie! Fucking Australian my arse....

Thank you for correcting me. I have edited my post.