Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1090018There was a time on TBP that got me glared at badly by the mods there. What did I do to justify that? I accused the long time developer of Werewolf: The Apocalypse of basically writing an equivilent to FATAL.

Kinfolk: Unsung Heroes showed that the Garou put their kinfolk into forced breeding camps to keep their family lines line "pure". And that they committed all manner of atrocity to those Kinfolk. In addition to what atrocities that the Garou participated in everyday.

You see. Much of the design of the Garou was based on some of the most vile inhuman tactics supposedly expoused by various extremist supremesist movements. Straight from their playbook. The most disgusting, horrible, and inhuman imaginable.

I felt justified in my accusation. And I still do to this day. What they did was no different from what the authors of FATAL did. So yes. I was exposing their hypocrisy.

You see. I grew up around certain ethnic supremesist groups. That expoused forcing relatives into forced breeding camps. To keep their family lines "pure". So I recognized the doctrines that the authors of Werewolf: The Apocalypse drew the most disgusting and reprehensible of the Garou's tactics from. And I am  not proud of that knowledge. I'm as horrified and sickened by that behavior now as I was when I was first exposed to that doctrine.

I feel I have been harassed and singled out by the mods of TBP because I called out those authors for glorifying those horrible subjects. To this very day, I feel I have been meeting stronger penalties than anyone else when I post something the mods there take a dislike to.

I never thought the Garou were meant to be really "good".  I mean, these guys are werewolves.  Sure, you play them.  But it was the world of darkness.  They were pretty fucked up protagonists and the tribes did messed up things.  If a human did something that offended the tribe, they might eat that person.  Sure, it was "against the litany" and there were rules that the Garou shouldn't do it, but the offender might just get a slap on wrist.  "Bad Dark Claw!  You shouldn't have eaten John Smith for working for that nuclear power plant.  Now you're on patrol duty at the sept for a month... and uh... say three prayers to Gaia, and make a sacrifice to Coyote too.  No more eating humans!  Bad!"  

Anyway, most of Garou thought humans were messing up the earth, so killing them was no big deal.  Eating them- sure against the rules.  Breeding them the way they wanted to keep the bloodlines pure-and also make sure more werewolves are born- the Garou wouldn't even think twice, imo.

Also.  The mods at rpg.net are idiots.

A lot of fiction is pretty reprehensible, if examined without the suspension of disbelief lens.

The CW show Arrow is basically Dexter with costumes and a firm conviction they're really good people (they're not). Even the "heroes" of the much more upbeat and supposedly not gray Flash literally ran their own private Gitmo. You can do that to nearly any piece of fiction, because when genre tendencies become tropes they stop being examined, and people just take things as they're presented instead of interpreting actions and events using their own moral code.

And something like Werewolf goes even further, because it's misery writing. It's not just the garou who rage against the world after all, it's also the authors. They're exploring terrible things, and it's really easy to slip and forget the boundaries. So all kinds of skeevy shit gets written. And it's easy for both the writers and the readers to overlook what's actually being said, and the consequences, because we read and read and create fiction using dream logic as much as real world logic. We express ourselves and enjoy fantasy via symbols and familiar conventions, which are not the same standards we apply when something happens to us, or we read something in the news. And that's especially true in areas like the everyday life of a secondary set of characters who are not PCs. They're basically part of the background set, and not the dynamic being focused on during the game, so it can persist indefinitely without comment and self reflection.

tl;dr Don't read too much into it. The way we process fiction doesn't necessarily reflect the moral stances we hold in real life.

Quote from: Pat;1090123[...] The way we process fiction doesn't necessarily reflect the moral stances we hold in real life.

So much this.

What is strange is that some people seem unable to understand this. Hence they are readily on the side of censorship.

World of Darkness has a lot of crazy shit like that. I think it was originally supposed to be satirical, but nowadays I cannot tell. One of the reasons I left the fandom years ago was because a disturbingly high number of the people I talked with supported the in-universe atrocity without recognizing that it was an atrocity.

Not every fan held these views. Glasswalker fanboys consistently criticized the werewolves for terrorism when it would be more effective to subvert the bureaucracy from within.

At this point in the real world, more people than ever are aware of the dangers of pollution and want clean energy. Millions of people are suffering the effects of pollution, know about it, and want to stop it. It just doesn't make sense for World of Darkness to keep advancing the "evil technology/pollution will destroy the world" narrative when so many are trying to stop precisely that.

Not that I particularly like World of Darkness as a setting anyway because of its suffocating monomyth and high school cliques. All werewolves are children of Gaia or Father Wolf, all mages are Hindu avatars or Atlanteans, blah blah blah.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1090415Not that I particularly like World of Darkness as a setting anyway because of its suffocating monomyth and high school cliques. All werewolves are children of Gaia or Father Wolf, all mages are Hindu avatars or Atlanteans, blah blah blah.

Atlantean is New World of Darkness and Hindu Avatars only turn up in old Mage (outside of technical jargon akin to calling wizard magic "arcane" vs. "occult" vs. "eldritch") if you believe in them (ex. the Technocracy doesn't and instead has the concept of Genius; your inner spark of creativity and drive).

Mages in the Old World of Darkness were "Belief Creates Reality" style magic where Mages had sufficient belief to outweigh the collective belief of humanity. The specific flavor of belief didn't matter. It could be in superscience or belief in God's miraculous action in the world or even popular occultism (one paradigm of belief was literally "money makes the world move and everyone has a price.").

The more out of line with the collective beliefs of humanity, the harder and more dangerous it is to make your belief a reality (and note that in this case "things fall down" is a nearly universal belief regardless of the specifics... so that's what you're fighting if you believe you can fly... not belief in gravity specifically).

But if you push hard enough and repeat it enough you can change those collective beliefs. In Mage, The Wright Brothers were mages who finally changed the collective belief that flight was impossible. The group of Mages called the Technocracy is entirely based on the idea of pushing their paradigm on the world through such incremental steps (their prototypes are buggy messes because the collective beliefs are against it, but they keep pushing and eventually it becomes acceptable and then just a normal part of reality.

Sorry, big Mage the Ascension fan. It's the only part of the WoD I've ever had any interest in... precisely because the characters are actually humans, not monsters with uncontrollable urges. They aren't fighting to maintain their humanity or against their rage. Their only supernatural attributes are Arete (their supernatural strength of belief) and the Spheres (their understanding of various aspects of reality like forces or matter or time that they can affect with their belief). Otherwise, they're just humans (vs. vampires and werewolves who have special rules for things like sunlight, virtues/humanity or silver, rage and its effect on your social attributes, stepping sideways, etc.).

Quote from: Chris24601;1090423Atlantean is New World of Darkness and Hindu Avatars only turn up in old Mage (outside of technical jargon akin to calling wizard magic "arcane" vs. "occult" vs. "eldritch") if you believe in them (ex. the Technocracy doesn't and instead has the concept of Genius; your inner spark of creativity and drive).

Mages in the Old World of Darkness were "Belief Creates Reality" style magic where Mages had sufficient belief to outweigh the collective belief of humanity. The specific flavor of belief didn't matter. It could be in superscience or belief in God's miraculous action in the world or even popular occultism (one paradigm of belief was literally "money makes the world move and everyone has a price.").

The more out of line with the collective beliefs of humanity, the harder and more dangerous it is to make your belief a reality (and note that in this case "things fall down" is a nearly universal belief regardless of the specifics... so that's what you're fighting if you believe you can fly... not belief in gravity specifically).

But if you push hard enough and repeat it enough you can change those collective beliefs. In Mage, The Wright Brothers were mages who finally changed the collective belief that flight was impossible. The group of Mages called the Technocracy is entirely based on the idea of pushing their paradigm on the world through such incremental steps (their prototypes are buggy messes because the collective beliefs are against it, but they keep pushing and eventually it becomes acceptable and then just a normal part of reality.

Sorry, big Mage the Ascension fan. It's the only part of the WoD I've ever had any interest in... precisely because the characters are actually humans, not monsters with uncontrollable urges. They aren't fighting to maintain their humanity or against their rage. Their only supernatural attributes are Arete (their supernatural strength of belief) and the Spheres (their understanding of various aspects of reality like forces or matter or time that they can affect with their belief). Otherwise, they're just humans (vs. vampires and werewolves who have special rules for things like sunlight, virtues/humanity or silver, rage and its effect on your social attributes, stepping sideways, etc.).

Yeah, great.

Mage the Awakening has something vaguely similar, except that instead of magic changing the consensus that magic becomes more difficult in the future. Death mages used to be able to raise the dead, but because Yeshua ran around raising people it is impossible by the modern day outside of archmastery level of proficiency. Or at least that was implied by one of the books at some point, there are too many writers for there to be that much consistency regarding how the metaphysics work.

I am definitely not a fan due to the high school cliques, SJW politics, rampant ethnocentrism, Luddites, metaphysical arguments about process- and result-based determinism, the purple paradigm hypocrisy, and the generally incoherent everything.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1090092I'm a fan of the original Werewolf 1e. Never read anything beyond the original books, so I can't comment on whatever came later.

I get that the Garou are monsters doing monstrous stuff, but they're up against the end of the world. The rules of morality don't stand a chance when faced with oblivion.  It's the same reason I don't see the Coalition as villains in Rifts. The Garou are killing machines, but the world itself is dying and nobody else except the wolves can possibly stop the onslaught.

Eggs are gonna get broken to make that omelet.

Except that what little good the coalition does is then undone by all the horrible things they do in the name of "protecting you". This isnt 40k where the Imperium really does have to be that oppressive to keep idiots from sucking whole planets into the chaos, or worse. While still doing horrible things to keep the whole thing running. And progressively failing as its an untenable method.

There is absolutely no reason for the Garou to treat kin badly. Some sure as hell do. But not all. There is no reason for the Garou to slaughter innocent bystanders just to kill one horror. They do it because they dont care and they cant see how much its damaging them. And thats in even the core books. This is a mess of their own making. Their own absolute arrogance. And even in that, if I recall right, not all participated and it was the usual suspects of the Get, Furies and a few others who were the ring leaders.

Garou arent killing machines. They are morons.

Quote from: CarlD.;1090109IIRC, It was a member of the GlassWalker tribe who was working to promote Green Tech to her corporate clients by showing how it could mean profit that waa presented Changeling the Dream which also had Red Talon (perhaps most violently anti-human tribes) that went into the dreaded city to learn if they (humans/cities)  were as hideously corrupt and vile as her elders taught and was having a change of attitude. She was going so far as having her journey and the lessons learned preserved on her body as tattoos. I don't know if they were presented elsewhere.

The Garou's xenophobia and dogmatic attitude and resistance to change, arrogance and over reliance on the brute force method always appeared to be presented as failing of the species that have likely doomed them (and by extension the world).

I recall those two as well. Just not sure where. Think theres been one or two others along the way as well.

Pretty much this. WOD is a hell of their own making. With a great big push by the coyotes. And boy did they make it well.

Quote from: Chris24601;1090423Sorry, big Mage the Ascension fan. It's the only part of the WoD I've ever had any interest in... precisely because the characters are actually humans, not monsters with uncontrollable urges. They aren't fighting to maintain their humanity or against their rage. Their only supernatural attributes are Arete (their supernatural strength of belief) and the Spheres (their understanding of various aspects of reality like forces or matter or time that they can affect with their belief). Otherwise, they're just humans (vs. vampires and werewolves who have special rules for things like sunlight, virtues/humanity or silver, rage and its effect on your social attributes, stepping sideways, etc.).

Alot of that carried over to 2nd ed Mage. Which I believe is what I have. I am guessing that in nwod that changed massively?

Quote from: Omega;1090491Except that what little good the coalition does is then undone by all the horrible things they do in the name of "protecting you". This isnt 40k where the Imperium really does have to be that oppressive to keep idiots from sucking whole planets into the chaos, or worse. While still doing horrible things to keep the whole thing running. And progressively failing as its an untenable method.

There is absolutely no reason for the Garou to treat kin badly. Some sure as hell do. But not all. There is no reason for the Garou to slaughter innocent bystanders just to kill one horror. They do it because they dont care and they cant see how much its damaging them. And thats in even the core books. This is a mess of their own making. Their own absolute arrogance. And even in that, if I recall right, not all participated and it was the usual suspects of the Get, Furies and a few others who were the ring leaders.

Garou arent killing machines. They are morons.

Oh get this.  Even the Pure who are the antagonists in Werewolf: the Forsaken and represent the most extreme tribes of Gaia in Apocalypse have actually made some changes because guess what?  They were failing and one time they had the fewer numbers than the forsaken.  In the Pure book the pure tribes had to change their methods and how they recruit in order to survive.  Now there are more Pure than Forsaken and right now the Pure are winning.  So the group that suppose to represent the worst aspects of Werewolf: the Apocalypse had actually adapted to their world and made some smart moves which is what the werewolves of Gaia had never done.

I say this again.  The Garou are too stupid to live.  Literally!

Quote from: Omega;1090494Alot of that carried over to 2nd ed Mage. Which I believe is what I have. I am guessing that in nwod that changed massively?

Massively is an understatement. Magic went from subjective belief to "One True Way" (all magic descends from ancient Atlantis and everyone awakens to it through a dream wherein you inscribe your true name on one of five supernal pillars).

Further, magic wasn't vulgar or coincidental because of what humanity believed, but because of the rules established by the Exarchs; super mages who ascended into the supernal realms and re-arranged the cosmos to keep anyone else from doing it so they'd never have to share... and the best way to do that is make mankind forget magic is even possible.

Basically, it sorta smooshed the Order of Hermes and Verbena together into a single paradigm and said all magic works this way and your belief doesn't matter... only your knowledge of the secret truths; which is why Arete got replaced with Gnosis.

Frankly, the whole "Mage the Awakening" thing read like bad Gnostic literature (i.e. the Scientology of the ancient world; "give us your worldly goods and our wise gurus will teach you the secrets to transcending this broken world."); which was the main reason I could never get into it. The depth of its metaphysics wouldn't fill a faction within of the Traditions in terms of depth.

They gutted everything good about Mage the Ascension to make it easier to play in crossover games with the other supernatural types. The great thing about Ascension was you could actually fit the contradictory paradigms of the vampires, werewolves, changelings and wraiths into Mage cosmology without batting an eye and still have room for Hunter and Demon too.

We never had the problem with magic cliques BoxCrayonTales mentioned.

Likewise, the 20th Anniversary edition ended The Process vs. Results-based determism and Omniscient versus Average Observer issues by spelling out that the default;

Process-based determinism (i.e. if you want to have a taxi show up to ferry you across town while all the lights go your way, you're going to need Life and to Mind create a taxi driver, Matter to create his taxi and Forces to change all the lights). You couldn't just use a coincidental Correspondence effect with the coincidence being that a Taxi happening to show up to get you there quickly (that would be Results-based determinism).

-and-

Hypothetical Average Observer. Which means if you duck into a dark alley and then step out of a dark alley on the other side of town using Correspondence to teleport you there, it's coincidental (because people step into and out of alleys all the time and the average observer wouldn't note it as remarkable). The only way it turns vulgar is if a non-hypothetical someone is actually able to observe you disappearing and reappearing or could somehow note that you covered that distance in an impossibly short time (Omniscient would know you teleported regardless and smack you with paradox... but wouldn't hit you for conjuring up a taxi to ferry you quickly across town).

Likewise a LOT of the splatbook material is about how the newer generations of Tradition mages aren't buying into Ludditism, but are incorporating technology into their paradigms. For example, numerology is big in the Order of Hermes paradigm... and computers make it a LOT easier to find patterns in large strings of numbers/text. The Order also invented a ritual involving inscribing glyphs onto seven credit cards, placing them in a circle around your bills and then invoking spirits to gather up enough rounded-off fractions of a penny from electronic transactions to pay said bills. They say if the Technocracy didn't want them to be able to do it, they shouldn't be so sloppy as to only round the value of electronic currency to two decimal places.

So not very Luddite-like at all actually.

SJW wasn't really a thing back in 2e (which is what most people I'm aware of strongly prefer and what the 20th Anniversary edition actually pulls most heavily from) and is pretty easy to overlook in the 20th Anniversary edition too (I should know, I have the entire M20 line). It also fixed the "purple paradigm" issue with its revised rules on paradigm, process and props and through the availability of alternate spheres like Data, Dimensional Science and Primal Utility.

Frankly, the primary antagonists essentially embodying the concepts of the Globalist Deep State makes it super-easy to a very conservative themed campaign about individual liberty and rights vs. the corrupt collective.

Oh boy...  You really don't know Mage the Awakening beyond the core don't you?

Let me just say is that the Atlantis thing is both truth and lie.  See in the book Imperial Magic which is a supplement in the later parts of Mage the Awakening 1e run that reveals the secrets of magic.  This is the supplement that focuses on arch mages and what happens when they ascend to the supernal realm.  I will say this.  It is like the Matrix.  Once you go ascend you got number of points to effect three areas which is the world, the self, and the supernal.  The ratings go from one for small changes to five which are cosmic changes.  

You can literally say magic is now belief base and remove Atlantis altogether.  Maybe instead of that you can say that Fat Toni's Pizza place down the block is the true origin of magic and Fat Toni discovered it while working in his garage.  You could create your own watch tower and awaken more people to magic.  You could be a god like being that takes out the Exarchs, or at least a large number of them to weaken their grip on magic.  At this point reality, its history, and its future is your clay to mold with.  It might be feasible that one can remove a watch tower if he so chooses if he was a friend of the Exarchs.

Quote from: Chris24601;1090509Massively is an understatement. Magic went from subjective belief to "One True Way" (all magic descends from ancient Atlantis and everyone awakens to it through a dream wherein you inscribe your true name on one of five supernal pillars).

Further, magic wasn't vulgar or coincidental because of what humanity believed, but because of the rules established by the Exarchs; super mages who ascended into the supernal realms and re-arranged the cosmos to keep anyone else from doing it so they'd never have to share... and the best way to do that is make mankind forget magic is even possible.

Basically, it sorta smooshed the Order of Hermes and Verbena together into a single paradigm and said all magic works this way and your belief doesn't matter... only your knowledge of the secret truths; which is why Arete got replaced with Gnosis.

Frankly, the whole "Mage the Awakening" thing read like bad Gnostic literature (i.e. the Scientology of the ancient world; "give us your worldly goods and our wise gurus will teach you the secrets to transcending this broken world."); which was the main reason I could never get into it. The depth of its metaphysics wouldn't fill a faction within of the Traditions in terms of depth.

They gutted everything good about Mage the Ascension to make it easier to play in crossover games with the other supernatural types. The great thing about Ascension was you could actually fit the contradictory paradigms of the vampires, werewolves, changelings and wraiths into Mage cosmology without batting an eye and still have room for Hunter and Demon too.

We never had the problem with magic cliques BoxCrayonTales mentioned.

Likewise, the 20th Anniversary edition ended The Process vs. Results-based determism and Omniscient versus Average Observer issues by spelling out that the default;

Process-based determinism (i.e. if you want to have a taxi show up to ferry you across town while all the lights go your way, you're going to need Life and to Mind create a taxi driver, Matter to create his taxi and Forces to change all the lights). You couldn't just use a coincidental Correspondence effect with the coincidence being that a Taxi happening to show up to get you there quickly (that would be Results-based determinism).

-and-

Hypothetical Average Observer. Which means if you duck into a dark alley and then step out of a dark alley on the other side of town using Correspondence to teleport you there, it's coincidental (because people step into and out of alleys all the time and the average observer wouldn't note it as remarkable). The only way it turns vulgar is if a non-hypothetical someone is actually able to observe you disappearing and reappearing or could somehow note that you covered that distance in an impossibly short time (Omniscient would know you teleported regardless and smack you with paradox... but wouldn't hit you for conjuring up a taxi to ferry you quickly across town).

Likewise a LOT of the splatbook material is about how the newer generations of Tradition mages aren't buying into Ludditism, but are incorporating technology into their paradigms. For example, numerology is big in the Order of Hermes paradigm... and computers make it a LOT easier to find patterns in large strings of numbers/text. The Order also invented a ritual involving inscribing glyphs onto seven credit cards, placing them in a circle around your bills and then invoking spirits to gather up enough rounded-off fractions of a penny from electronic transactions to pay said bills. They say if the Technocracy didn't want them to be able to do it, they shouldn't be so sloppy as to only round the value of electronic currency to two decimal places.

So not very Luddite-like at all actually.

SJW wasn't really a thing back in 2e (which is what most people I'm aware of strongly prefer and what the 20th Anniversary edition actually pulls most heavily from) and is pretty easy to overlook in the 20th Anniversary edition too (I should know, I have the entire M20 line). It also fixed the "purple paradigm" issue with its revised rules on paradigm, process and props and through the availability of alternate spheres like Data, Dimensional Science and Primal Utility.

Frankly, the primary antagonists essentially embodying the concepts of the Globalist Deep State makes it super-easy to a very conservative themed campaign about individual liberty and rights vs. the corrupt collective.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1090514Oh boy...  You really don't know Mage the Awakening beyond the core don't you?

Let me just say is that the Atlantis thing is both truth and lie.  See in the book Imperial Magic which is a supplement in the later parts of Mage the Awakening 1e run that reveals the secrets of magic.  This is the supplement that focuses on arch mages and what happens when they ascend to the supernal realm.  I will say this.  It is like the Matrix.  Once you go ascend you got number of points to effect three areas which is the world, the self, and the supernal.  The ratings go from one for small changes to five which are cosmic changes.  

You can literally say magic is now belief base and remove Atlantis altogether.  Maybe instead of that you can say that Fat Toni's Pizza place down the block is the true origin of magic and Fat Toni discovered it while working in his garage.  You could create your own watch tower and awaken more people to magic.  You could be a god like being that takes out the Exarchs, or at least a large number of them to weaken their grip on magic.  At this point reality, its history, and its future is your clay to mold with.  It might be feasible that one can remove a watch tower if he so chooses if he was a friend of the Exarchs.

The World of Darkness edition wars generally rely on the haters having absolutely no knowledge of the edition they criticize. Most criticisms of the Chronicles of Darkness by World of Darkness fanboys rely on having only the most superficial knowledge of the Chronicles of Darkness.

There are plenty of things to criticize about Chronicles of Darkness, like some of the settings have a cosmic monomyth (e.g. Werewolf, Mage) while others superficially lack a cosmic monomyth (e.g. Vampire), but the World of Darkness fanboys miss the forest for the leaves. They still have yet to read beyond the first edition rulebooks, if they did not skim the surface of those.

I think both can go die in a fire. I absolutely hate White Wolf's obsession with their absurd monomyths and monolithic secret societies. If I was writing my own emo goth urban fantasy setting, I would go in a completely different direction.

Vampires? Plenty of vampire progenitors have arisen throughout history, Cain does not hold a monopoly on vampires.

Werewolves? There are plenty of ways to become a werewolf and they are not limited to wolf aspects. They have a bunch of religions claiming descent from Gaia or Father Wolf, but there is no universal truth.

Mages? They are power hungry psychopaths and will make up whatever story suits them. There are so many secret societies working at cross purposes that every imaginable sob story has sprung up.

Regarding the New World of Darkness; you only get one chance to make a first impression and NWoD sadly failed in its effort with the people I knew (we had a weekly game of NewMage for about three months before we just decided it wasn't any fun).

As to the Mages being psychopaths... sure, plenty of NPCs are; you've gotta have something for the PCs to fight. Most PCs though start out as newly awakened who are just learning this stuff and still have connections to the mortal world; including day jobs, family and friends. In my experience players choose family and friends over secret societies probably 90% of the time.

The primary example of this was the PC Cabal in my setting who called themselves the Errants. They started out as an outcast Hermetic, Virtual Adept and Celestial Chorus and an Orphan learning from all three and picked up another Orphan and an Ex-Technocrat along the way. Their whole mission as a Cabal (and found family) was to keep their little slice of the South Side of Chicago safe from the things that went bump in the night; vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons and power hungry mages... also ordinary gangs and organized crime... anyone looking to exploit the people in their neighborhood they did their best to stop.

They also organized groups to clean up the neighborhood. The Celestial Chorus member opened up a homeless shelter/soup kitchen, the Hermetic (who owned a bookstore) started an after school book club to encourage kids who'd be out on the street joining gangs to come to her store and read instead, the Orphan became a beat cop who walked the streets, the Virtual Adept hooked the neighborhood up with free wifi and helped people look for work.

They changed the world way more than most of the secret societies ever did and only part of it was actual magic.