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Sorry, in this case, they are not two great tastes that taste great together.
These are separate instances, except in so far as they are combined on the same page. I've been thinking a little more about Mage and my character in the Cam who has, I imagine, been sitting about playing gigs, and doing some cursory magical thinking, but these things don't really generate exp. Well, he hasn't been up to much, I guess. Story-wise, I feel I have a really good answer for this that grows naturally out of the rational I have for his move and his actions in-game right before I left.
Even if I've been thinking more about it, that doesn't guarantee a more active character, but I'm wondering about the viability of someone that doesn't show up to a venue very often but still exercises their downtime.
It's really just that Atol was such a fun channel to think about the WoD from, even though I'm pretty sure he is wrong about several canonical positions of the setting. I also felt he was a great foil to the real movers and shakers in St. Louis - he was frequently a tag along, almost a detriment to any magical task force he was put on due to his methods and assumptions. Almost be default, the brute force magical way used by concilium mages was efficient and potent where Atol absolutely depended on compromise. A simple repeated Forces 1 roll taxed his ability to its limits. He had his upsides - I certainly wasn't playing a purposely useless character. It just turned out that what he was good at wasn't something that people were interested. Magic is more powerful then skills, which both Atol and I were aware of. I guess the surprise would be when he learns some rotes based on those skills...
Of course, Perform doesn't have a lot of rotes. Even though it should! =D
On a different topic, I've never really been sold on Left 4 Dead. It's not the '4', everyone, though that isn't really points in its favor. No, it's that while I do possess a certain level of interest in the walking dead, that interest is purely on the level of logistics and maybe, maybe the themes a bunch of cannibalistic, shambling ghouls can represent. The prospect of mowing down whole crowds of the formerly-human holds fairly little romance for me.
Even so, I have fairly memorable dreams about these creatures, and I specifically dreamt of a Left 4 Dead setting last night (no doubt getting every particular wrong, in that I have never seen anything of it besides some art). Whence does my trepedation spring? Not in dying, specifically, but in losing free will. This is a theme that occurs frequently in nightmares I have, and interests me both in and out of those dreamscapes. It's a thing where I can even see someone go from a free-willed* individual to a thoughtless creature.
Vampire**, as a game was interesting to me in that when I first picked it up, I was still most familiar with vampires in my gaming from the D&D context. That is, when someone becomes a vampire, they immediately flip alignment and become an NPC - and completely capital 'E' Evil. Rather then just being forced to subsist on the blood or levels of innocents (or adventurers), I always assumed that an alignment switch was a forced change in metaphysical view - not just that your opinions changed on correct actions, but an entire worldview switch. My supposition was, since it happened instantly and to every character regardless of who they were and in exactly the same way, that when the character 'died' ,they were basically replaced by an alien intelligence; they were no longer the same person but changed, they were a totally different entity.
This had been my experience from movies, comics, et al and ect, as well. Basically, they were smart zombies. Vampire: the Masquerade (and ironically, later, Interview With A Vampire and so forth), posed that you were basically the same person but with an unnatural hunger. Perhaps where they went wrong were the super-heroesque powers (which are fun, so I don't really mind that), but it's the self-recognition that makes it a game of personal horror. Or what have you. I suppose that there's an element of horror in waking to find yourself in a body that isn't yours, but there's really no reflection inherant in that, it's the above that's required.
So, that's as far as I've gone with that. It's why I've been interested in Vampire from a conceptual level, but having never been in a paper-and-pencil game of it, I have rarely gotten into those themes. If you've got any thoughts about any of this stuff, yeah, I'm interested on other peoples takes on it, too.
* something that appears to be free-willed, in a dream, you of course realize that this is not a possibility.
** so this is technically 'Masquerade'
These are separate instances, except in so far as they are combined on the same page. I've been thinking a little more about Mage and my character in the Cam who has, I imagine, been sitting about playing gigs, and doing some cursory magical thinking, but these things don't really generate exp. Well, he hasn't been up to much, I guess. Story-wise, I feel I have a really good answer for this that grows naturally out of the rational I have for his move and his actions in-game right before I left.
Even if I've been thinking more about it, that doesn't guarantee a more active character, but I'm wondering about the viability of someone that doesn't show up to a venue very often but still exercises their downtime.
It's really just that Atol was such a fun channel to think about the WoD from, even though I'm pretty sure he is wrong about several canonical positions of the setting. I also felt he was a great foil to the real movers and shakers in St. Louis - he was frequently a tag along, almost a detriment to any magical task force he was put on due to his methods and assumptions. Almost be default, the brute force magical way used by concilium mages was efficient and potent where Atol absolutely depended on compromise. A simple repeated Forces 1 roll taxed his ability to its limits. He had his upsides - I certainly wasn't playing a purposely useless character. It just turned out that what he was good at wasn't something that people were interested. Magic is more powerful then skills, which both Atol and I were aware of. I guess the surprise would be when he learns some rotes based on those skills...
Of course, Perform doesn't have a lot of rotes. Even though it should! =D
On a different topic, I've never really been sold on Left 4 Dead. It's not the '4', everyone, though that isn't really points in its favor. No, it's that while I do possess a certain level of interest in the walking dead, that interest is purely on the level of logistics and maybe, maybe the themes a bunch of cannibalistic, shambling ghouls can represent. The prospect of mowing down whole crowds of the formerly-human holds fairly little romance for me.
Even so, I have fairly memorable dreams about these creatures, and I specifically dreamt of a Left 4 Dead setting last night (no doubt getting every particular wrong, in that I have never seen anything of it besides some art). Whence does my trepedation spring? Not in dying, specifically, but in losing free will. This is a theme that occurs frequently in nightmares I have, and interests me both in and out of those dreamscapes. It's a thing where I can even see someone go from a free-willed* individual to a thoughtless creature.
Vampire**, as a game was interesting to me in that when I first picked it up, I was still most familiar with vampires in my gaming from the D&D context. That is, when someone becomes a vampire, they immediately flip alignment and become an NPC - and completely capital 'E' Evil. Rather then just being forced to subsist on the blood or levels of innocents (or adventurers), I always assumed that an alignment switch was a forced change in metaphysical view - not just that your opinions changed on correct actions, but an entire worldview switch. My supposition was, since it happened instantly and to every character regardless of who they were and in exactly the same way, that when the character 'died' ,they were basically replaced by an alien intelligence; they were no longer the same person but changed, they were a totally different entity.
This had been my experience from movies, comics, et al and ect, as well. Basically, they were smart zombies. Vampire: the Masquerade (and ironically, later, Interview With A Vampire and so forth), posed that you were basically the same person but with an unnatural hunger. Perhaps where they went wrong were the super-heroesque powers (which are fun, so I don't really mind that), but it's the self-recognition that makes it a game of personal horror. Or what have you. I suppose that there's an element of horror in waking to find yourself in a body that isn't yours, but there's really no reflection inherant in that, it's the above that's required.
So, that's as far as I've gone with that. It's why I've been interested in Vampire from a conceptual level, but having never been in a paper-and-pencil game of it, I have rarely gotten into those themes. If you've got any thoughts about any of this stuff, yeah, I'm interested on other peoples takes on it, too.
* something that appears to be free-willed, in a dream, you of course realize that this is not a possibility.
** so this is technically 'Masquerade'
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From:
Vampire
First, let me say that you are not wrong in your sketch of Vampire, it posits that a vampire is a person who now has an unnatural hunger, and has to struggle to deal with that. But supernatural powers aren't where they went wrong, rather, they're core to the struggle in the game, because they let you do bad things, allowing a person to become a monster easily.
The creator of Vampire, Mark Rein*Hagen said that the game is fundamentally about moral choices: What if you could do anything you wanted to, and no one could stop you? The addition of the hunger pushes a character towards evil.
And then, in no time at all, most vampires lose most of their humanity, becoming the creatures of legend. Vampire provides an almost natural mechanism for the change.
The original version of the game didn't have the paths/roads -- all vampires were on humanity, and were gradually losing it. The PCs were imagined to be Louis-like characters struggling to maintain themselves for as long as possible. The game was based more on Ann Rice vampires than anything else (indeed, it predates Buffy, which made explicit, at least in its first few seasons, the "wake up as a monster" change you outline).
The roads/paths added a richness to the game, and an a level of "replay-ability". As interesting as Rein*Hagen's original formulation was, eventually almost everyone succumbs to the beast (the original game offered a few hints that the real goal was to become human again, or, barring that, achieve a mystical sense of peace through incredible struggle). The paths allowed the game to move beyond personal horror into a level of philosophical and psychological discovery. They answered Rein*Hagen's original question by introducing the ability transcend the human condition.
The paths (and Dark Ages Roads) are written with an eye to the beliefs that have motivated humans throughout history, incorporating religious beliefs, the thirst for power, simple curiosity, and bizarre obsessions. The game is intended to serve as a focus for examining ethics and questions of meaning from an alien perspective.