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Author Topic: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?  (Read 3794 times)

Ghostmaker

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #45 on: April 05, 2021, 08:21:09 AM »
So much edge I'm using it to mass-manufacture vorpal swords for D&D campaigns.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #46 on: April 05, 2021, 10:34:26 AM »
Ah, now we know what the real trouble is that the concept would cause: it would provoke another rules argument about exactly what Conscience is supposed to mean in V:tM psychology. :)
This is why I switched over to the lightside/darkside mechanic in Whistlepunk’s Feed.

That still doesn’t reflect a realistic human psychology. The kind of person who can repeatedly commit horrific atrocities without any psychological trauma is a clinical sociopath and/or a religious fanatic who doesn’t see their victims as human beings, not resilient. If you don’t rationalize really awful shit you did, then that means you have a conscience. Not the opposite.

All the various karma meters in WW games have worked like this and it doesn’t reflect real human psychology. I despise those mechanics.
The vast majority of games have an assumption that PCs inflict casual violence without any lasting psychological trauma. WW is really no worse than others in this regard.
The addition of a humanity mechanic was supposed to challenge this assumption. Not that it actually achieved what it set out to do, but the thought was there.

GeekEclectic

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #47 on: April 05, 2021, 11:10:35 AM »
It’s very weirdly designed. The more conscience points you have, the easier it is to get away with horrific acts without dinging your humanity meter. You’d think it would work the opposite or something.

A realistic depiction of how guilt affects you would work completely differently. You would suffer PTSD as a result of guilt, not the absence of guilt.
I thought that the higher your conscience, the lesser the bad act had to be to trigger a check, with going particularly bad imposing additional penalties to the roll . . . like high conscience, having to steal would ping you and actually killing someone(innocent and not in self defense) would ping with penalties, but lower conscience you could ignore stealing altogether and the murder would ping but with no penalties to the roll since it was on the level of your conscience now.

I know humanity worked like that. And tbh I don't remember conscience or those other 2 things at all. I thought that was all handled by Humanity(or your Path, if using those) and Willpower.
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Reckall

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #48 on: April 05, 2021, 11:18:39 AM »
That still doesn’t reflect a realistic human psychology. The kind of person who can repeatedly commit horrific atrocities without any psychological trauma is a clinical sociopath and/or a religious fanatic who doesn’t see their victims as human beings, not resilient. If you don’t rationalize really awful shit you did, then that means you have a conscience. Not the opposite.

All the various karma meters in WW games have worked like this and it doesn’t reflect real human psychology. I despise those mechanics.
The vast majority of games have an assumption that PCs inflict casual violence without any lasting psychological trauma. WW is really no worse than others in this regard.
That's the beauty of Call of Cthulhu. When I ran "No Man's Land", which is about "citizen soldiers" thrown amid the horrors of WWI, both I and the players were surprised by how, by just applying the standard SAN rules, the characters were already suffering from PTSD way before the Mythos appeared. It was sobering.  :(
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BoxCrayonTales

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #49 on: April 05, 2021, 11:21:56 AM »
It’s very weirdly designed. The more conscience points you have, the easier it is to get away with horrific acts without dinging your humanity meter. You’d think it would work the opposite or something.

A realistic depiction of how guilt affects you would work completely differently. You would suffer PTSD as a result of guilt, not the absence of guilt.
I thought that the higher your conscience, the lesser the bad act had to be to trigger a check, with going particularly bad imposing additional penalties to the roll . . . like high conscience, having to steal would ping you and actually killing someone(innocent and not in self defense) would ping with penalties, but lower conscience you could ignore stealing altogether and the murder would ping but with no penalties to the roll since it was on the level of your conscience now.

I know humanity worked like that. And tbh I don't remember conscience or those other 2 things at all. I thought that was all handled by Humanity(or your Path, if using those) and Willpower.
I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten. I don’t think anybody liked those mechanics. They were streamlined in VtR and V5. Conscience stats and rolling Willpower were removed.

That still doesn’t reflect a realistic human psychology. The kind of person who can repeatedly commit horrific atrocities without any psychological trauma is a clinical sociopath and/or a religious fanatic who doesn’t see their victims as human beings, not resilient. If you don’t rationalize really awful shit you did, then that means you have a conscience. Not the opposite.

All the various karma meters in WW games have worked like this and it doesn’t reflect real human psychology. I despise those mechanics.
The vast majority of games have an assumption that PCs inflict casual violence without any lasting psychological trauma. WW is really no worse than others in this regard.
That's the beauty of Call of Cthulhu. When I ran "No Man's Land", which is about "citizen soldiers" thrown amid the horrors of WWI, both I and the players were surprised by how, by just applying the standard SAN rules, the characters were already suffering from PTSD way before the Mythos appeared. It was sobering.  :(
Indeed. RPGs typically offer an extremely romanticized depiction of violence and its effects on people.

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #50 on: April 05, 2021, 01:03:37 PM »
Indeed. RPGs typically offer an extremely romanticized depiction of violence and its effects on people.

True. But if they didn't, they'd lose a lot of their appeal as games.

Imagine a chess set where some evil designer had implanted sound chips in every piece, so that the moment a piece was removed from the board, it would scream in mortal agony for anywhere between five to thirty seconds, sometimes just trailing off in a bubbling gurgle and sometimes stopping abruptly. (For extra edgelordiness, make the queen's "voice" a woman's.) You'd no doubt sell a bunch of sets for the gag/novelty value, but I'd wager very few people would use them to play consistently after the first couple of times, especially if you couldn't turn the effect off.
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Reckall

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #51 on: April 05, 2021, 01:17:03 PM »
Indeed. RPGs typically offer an extremely romanticized depiction of violence and its effects on people.

True. But if they didn't, they'd lose a lot of their appeal as games.
It depends from the kind of experience the game wants to offer. A game about soldiers in a warzone can have rules for either "romanticised" (John Wayne) or "realistic" (Saving Private Ryan, Fury...) portrayals.

Even in D&D 3.5E you have the concept of "taint" introduced in Heroes of Horror: the psychological price a hero has to pay when confronted by horrifying things 24/7.

And then of course you have CoC, where it's the very concept of SAN that makes the game.
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BoxCrayonTales

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #52 on: April 05, 2021, 01:19:18 PM »
Indeed. RPGs typically offer an extremely romanticized depiction of violence and its effects on people.

True. But if they didn't, they'd lose a lot of their appeal as games.

Imagine a chess set where some evil designer had implanted sound chips in every piece, so that the moment a piece was removed from the board, it would scream in mortal agony for anywhere between five to thirty seconds, sometimes just trailing off in a bubbling gurgle and sometimes stopping abruptly. (For extra edgelordiness, make the queen's "voice" a woman's.) You'd no doubt sell a bunch of sets for the gag/novelty value, but I'd wager very few people would use them to play consistently after the first couple of times, especially if you couldn't turn the effect off.

Well, yes. But... whenever somebody tries to make a game which questions that assumption, such as World of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu (but mostly the former, by a lot), players make the mistake of maintaining that assumption and getting frustrated at the rules for "punishing" them when go around killing everyone in their path and stealing everything that isn't (or even is) nailed down. Even the developers fall prey to this by inventing new mechanics that let you ignore the "punishment" for engaging in such behavior (e.g. paths, touchstones, whatever), which makes it pointless to include in the first place.

To still use the chess metaphor, the problem here is that some people try to force the issue anyway. Rather than just not play with the screaming chess set, they force themselves to listen to the screaming and constantly complain about it. They make and buy special chess pieces that have a mute button they can press whenever convenient. They waste all that effort whining and complaining and making cheat pieces when they could just play with a normal chess set.

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #53 on: April 05, 2021, 02:08:17 PM »
But... whenever somebody tries to make a game which questions that assumption, such as World of Darkness ... players make the mistake of maintaining that assumption and getting frustrated at the rules for "punishing" them when (they) go around killing everyone in their path and stealing everything that isn't (or even is) nailed down.

I would have to say that if the players themselves are "maintaining that assumption" (i.e. that realistic representation of the long-term psychological trauma effects of personal violence is, for most groups, a net negative for overall game enjoyment) then they've just by definition proven that it isn't an assumption, or a mistake.

Quote
They waste all that effort whining and complaining and making cheat pieces when they could just play with a normal chess set.

They could, but the problem there is that there are many ways "chess sets" are not created equal.  It's not unreasonable to complain that a particular game which does give you a gameplay experience you really want (e.g. being a badass vampire creature of the night) only provides it at the price of enforcing a gameplay experience you really don't want (e.g. rules about losing conscience and humanity that strike you as either unrealistic or uninteresting).

Part of the difficulty with WoD games in particular, I think, is that they try to have it both ways: they want to make it possible to play as both action-packed urban fantasy adventure and as intense interior psychological existential drama, without considering the possibility that these modes are to some extent mutually exclusive -- if for no other reason than that sheer weight of repetition, in any ongoing long-running game, will undermine the dramatic impact of any particular psychological trope. Consider the need to hunt and feed in a Vampire campaign: almost without exception, such scenes get played through maybe once or twice "on stage" at the start of the story, and then are handled with quick "off-stage" die rolls for the vast majority of the rest of it. (At least in my experience.)
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BoxCrayonTales

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #54 on: April 05, 2021, 02:19:28 PM »
But... whenever somebody tries to make a game which questions that assumption, such as World of Darkness ... players make the mistake of maintaining that assumption and getting frustrated at the rules for "punishing" them when (they) go around killing everyone in their path and stealing everything that isn't (or even is) nailed down.

I would have to say that if the players themselves are "maintaining that assumption" (i.e. that realistic representation of the long-term psychological trauma effects of personal violence is, for most groups, a net negative for overall game enjoyment) then they've just by definition proven that it isn't an assumption, or a mistake.

Quote
They waste all that effort whining and complaining and making cheat pieces when they could just play with a normal chess set.

They could, but the problem there is that there are many ways "chess sets" are not created equal.  It's not unreasonable to complain that a particular game which does give you a gameplay experience you really want (e.g. being a badass vampire creature of the night) only provides it at the price of enforcing a gameplay experience you really don't want (e.g. rules about losing conscience and humanity that strike you as either unrealistic or uninteresting).

Part of the difficulty with WoD games in particular, I think, is that they try to have it both ways: they want to make it possible to play as both action-packed urban fantasy adventure and as intense interior psychological existential drama, without considering the possibility that these modes are to some extent mutually exclusive -- if for no other reason than that sheer weight of repetition, in any ongoing long-running game, will undermine the dramatic impact of any particular psychological trope. Consider the need to hunt and feed in a Vampire campaign: almost without exception, such scenes get played through maybe once or twice "on stage" at the start of the story, and then are handled with quick "off-stage" die rolls for the vast majority of the rest of it. (At least in my experience.)

This is why I prefer Whistlepunk’s Feed. It uses a lightside/darkside mechanic instead that doesn’t feel overtly punishing. These rules are flexible enough that you can switch seamlessly between playing b-movie vampires and angst fest. (Both options are presented with their own sub-chapters.)

Shasarak

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #55 on: April 05, 2021, 04:47:34 PM »
Death cult, lots of references to blood, keeps coming back, wants people to "let him in".

I can see a game where that is a secret truth. I can also see people going absolutely crazy just mentioning the idea.

Could it Ever be done? Is there a group of people that would actually give it a go?

Sounds like a terrible idea to me.

Why not just stick to making Abraham Lincoln a vampire like the other cool people  ::)
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Reckall

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #56 on: April 05, 2021, 06:00:39 PM »
But... whenever somebody tries to make a game which questions that assumption, such as World of Darkness ... players make the mistake of maintaining that assumption and getting frustrated at the rules for "punishing" them when (they) go around killing everyone in their path and stealing everything that isn't (or even is) nailed down.

I would have to say that if the players themselves are "maintaining that assumption" (i.e. that realistic representation of the long-term psychological trauma effects of personal violence is, for most groups, a net negative for overall game enjoyment) then they've just by definition proven that it isn't an assumption, or a mistake.
I guess that anyone who signs up for Call of Cthulhu knows what he is signing for...
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Mishihari

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #57 on: April 05, 2021, 09:13:10 PM »
It depends from the kind of experience the game wants to offer. A game about soldiers in a warzone can have rules for either "romanticised" (John Wayne) or "realistic" (Saving Private Ryan, Fury...) portrayals.

Ugh.  No offense, but I find that particular phrasing of types of games really irritating.  It implies that if characters don't come out of combat emotional wrecks then the game is unrealistic.  PSTD is real and it's awful, sure, but a vast majority of the combat vets I know personally are just fine with regard to their sanity and emotional wellbeing.

Kyle Aaron

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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #58 on: April 05, 2021, 09:52:24 PM »
It's an interesting topic. Personally I like Junger's take on it in Tribe. He noted that PTSD is higher among non-combat guys than combat guys, and doesn't appear after X time, but once the person leaves the service, whether that be 10 days or 10 years after the supposedly-precipitating event. He notes too that during the Blitz in London, after 9/11 in NYC, after many natural disasters, the rate of mental health issues and suicides goes down.

His theory is that PSTD is about trauma, certainly, but is also about alienation. During a disaster people come together - they have a sense of community and common purpose. Combat units tend to be tighter (esprit de corps) than non-combat - they more of a sense of community and common purpose - and while you're still in you've got the support of your tribe, once you're out you're a bit fucked. Like that scene in a war movie where the vet comes home and he's walking through the supermarket looking at the 38 brands of applesauce, and he's miserable. So he goes back to war. For your mental health, it's better to be shot at and have a tribe than be at peace and alone.

A good game group is something of a tribe. You have a sense of community and common purpose - that's why you bring snacks and have an adventure module. It's not a terribly profound version of a tribe, but it's still a tribe. With a sense of community and common purpose, with a tribe, you're happier.

And in a tribe, you try not to deliberately offend people just to be SuperShockEdgyCool.
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Re: How Much Trouble Would Playing Jesus As A Vampire Cause?
« Reply #59 on: April 05, 2021, 10:05:15 PM »
You generally offend whatever the absent outgroup is instead, which can result in stuff like piss christ and Vampire Jesus and whatever.

How is Tribe, any good?
I don't want to play with you.