Our 4th installment, and our most spook-tacular yet. The Tech Top Three takes a terrifying turn with stories about robots run amuck, mind-control devices, and zombies on the hunt. And in the gaming table… Vampires!
Episode 4 (17.2 MB, 37:38)
Show Notes:
- Giant robots on the Dutch coastline (Wired)
- Remote control for humans (CNN)
- Microsoft’s zombie spam hunter (CNet)
- Dracula 2-player boardgame (BoardGameGeek)
- Vampire: the Requiem (White Wolf)
Any comments or suggestions?
Email: colin@bostongeek.com or carl@bostongeek.com
Skype: bostongeek
Voice: 1.617.209.4200
I’ll have more podcast-specific criticism later, but there’s no such word as amock. I thought the only valid spelling was amok, but dictionary.com claims that amuck is also kosher.
thanks for the spelling critique.
you should really be dragged out into the street and beaten senseless for uttering the phrase “spooktacular”.
like, with your own leg.
hrm…looks like your timestamps never got the daylight savings time message.
hrm…not being able to skype you doesn’t necessarily imply no computer, just no mic for the computer. (like me)
horror title voices…so…very…ghey…
There’s no such word as ghey… oh… wait… I get it… its so you can use the word but remove the negative statement about homosexuality. Ah… clever.
you’re queer!
Big pvc robots are scary?
Hmm…not looking like it after following the links. Looks like a big piece of modern art done by some cock-smoking homo.
(and yes, i’ll lay off the gay jokes now)
…and then carl starts in on the ballet jokes…
oh, god, he’s going to start in on teledildonics, isn’t he?
whew, nice save there, colin
carl can’t possibly be trying to claim that windows is the most easily r00ted os out there
fuck, was it ars that did that test? /.? can’t remember. and yes, it was down to something like 2 minutes to get pwned after connecting to the net.
come on, you’re cracking on me for making gay jokes?
yes, we understand that groping the vampire book gave you a hardon, carl. move on.
remember, rem said he’d give up his left…ah, there we go, colin catches it.
fucking white wolf bastards. “oh, yeah, all that money you spent on all these canon books? we’re wiping our asses with it. now go buy all the _new_ canon books. and get some fucking sunlight…we want you to live long enough for us to be wiping our ass with your cash for years to come.”
also, werewolf was the one focused on the coming armageddon. vampire was mostly focused on the masquerade. (hence, you know, the name of the old game)
fucking white wolf bastards, part the second:
“i’ve got your d20 aberrant conversion right here, ya dirty sheepfucker!”
one interesting thing i saw when i hit up the vampire link: looks like boston is the core city for the new mage game, which is amusing.
please note: “scary horror kind of game” only applies to white wolf if you manage to maintain the tone, which is really, really tricky.
“mostly” hack’n’slash? we’re _all_ hack’n’slash. but then again, that’s what these dungeon crawl boxed campaigns are for.
Was it Carl who told me that there was a spot under the overpass near the Forest Hills train station where some vampires lurked?
According to the Vampire novels that focus on the Final Days, it was the underpass that is always covered by tarps that go right over the Forest Hills Station.
And even though the Vampire: TM game focused on the Masquerade, you’ll remember that Jyhad was a focal point of it… the inevitable outcome of the existence of vampires.
As for White Wolf’s ‘re-imagining’… Yeah, I agree. It was a pretty sleazy thing for them to do. Although, to be fair, WotC did the same thing moving from 2e to 3e… and again from 3e to 3.5e! Don’t think I’m not pissed about the useless splat books I own. Granted, WotC redid an entire rules system, while White Wolf merely cleaned up their rules sets and then pigfucked everyone who was a loyalist to the original V: TM world, but… it isn’t unprecedented.
And frankly… I think Aberrant could be cool as a d20 set. I know that violates your purist sensibilities, Dave, but I mean, it isn’t like the original Aberrant was a rules masterpiece.
Bleh. I doubt that Aberrant is any good as a d20 game, just like Call of Cthulu wasn’t good as a d20 game (for mostly the same reasons).
That doesn’t mean I don’t like d20, and it doesn’t make Dave a “purist” (for what?). I just don’t think d20 does a good job at Supers games (and how the hell did they make Quintessence/Taint work, if they didn’t just graft that exact same mechanic on to the d20 system?). Storyteller seems to be better able to handle that sort of setting.
…
To pick a nit, the reason that WW rewrote the WoD, at least AFAIU, was because they wanted to dump the huge, complicated meta-plot that they had accumlated in the course of writing untold WoD books over 10+ years. Sure, they rewrote some of the rules, but I don’t think that was the central focus of the revision.
And I don’t see how releasing new books is “sleazy”. Trying to extort “licensing” fees out of people running WoD LARPs? That was sleazy. But releasing a new set of books doesn’t force anyone to run out and buy them; if you wanted to, you could keep right on playing the 2nd edition of V:TM (or the 3.0 edition of D&D) without any problems. Half the problem with WoD was all that canon meta-plot crap that you had to buy into if you wanted to run a game, IMHO. I pretty much never used that stuff anyway, except in broadest outline (”IV. Gehenna arrives.”).
BTW, Carl, the word you were looking for there was “Gehenna”, at least IIRC. The Jihad was the eternal war amongst the different Vampire power groups (Tremere, Giovanni, Ventrue, Sabbat, etc., etc.) and also between the generations — the coming end of all things (when the oldest vampires would come out of torpor and eat everyone, just because they could, I guess) was called “Gehenna”.
BTW, I haven’t listed to the ‘cast yet. Just commenting on what I’d seen written so far in the comments on this post…
Also, to clear something up, I think Dave is pretty much correct that _Werewolf_ focused much more strongly on the immenient arrival of Armageddon (which, basically, is the werewolves’ fault, since they’re the ones who were supposed to be defending the earth or whatever all along, and they let Pentex/the Wyrm/Vampires/your mom fsck it all up — that’s the tragedy at the center of the story), while _Vampire: The Masquerade_ focused on, well, the Masquerade. Hence the whole “Humanity” mechanic (it got harder to hide your beast-nature as you lost humanity, making it hard to keep up the pretense of being human).
Now don’t ask me what _Mage_ was about — I never played that one as much (or, Lord forbid, _Wraith_; and I don’t even own a copy of _Changeling_).
Clarifying, in no particular order:
* The Aberrant conversion was fucking horrible. There’s a long review over at rpg.net that is much more forgiving than I would be. My main objection is forcing the class system into the game, followed quickly by the bastardization of the Mega-Attributes and by the Superhuman/Aberrant template kludge. Oh, and the Quantum-rating-as-average-physical-attribute-bonus kludge. In general, I think that games that are designed for the very flexible, very rules-light storyteller system suffer when converted to the more rigid d20 system. Round peg in a square hole, and all that. As J said, I obviously don’t dislike the d20 system in and of itself, just conversions to it from other systems.
* The 3.0/3.5 updates were primarily rules updates. As such, if you liked a particular splat books or setting, it just needed updating to the new rules. The WoD update was an attempt to get out from underneath a decade or so of canon backstory. Updating an old splat to the new system is in many cases impossible.
WoD’s main selling point for a lot of people has traditionally been the rich backstory that comes with it. It’s certainly what convinced me to pick up most of the Aberrant splat books when I don’t own anything but core in d20. However, when that backstory becomes so complicated that new players need to spend a year reading up on it all, it becomes an obstacle rather than a strength. When J and I played Vampire, they hadn’t even released all the Camarilla clan books yet. Last I checked, they had all the Camarilla and Sabbat clan books out, along with Dark Ages versions of those same books, plus at least a half dozen other city books. In order to convince the faithful to buy those, they had to advance or flesh out the WoD world somewhat, and now in order to strictly follow canon, you need all of those fucking books.
Now that I think about it, I can see a lot of reasons for WW to want to dump the old canon and get something a little more coherent out there. Aside, you know, from raw, naked avarice. It’s just a much more inconvenient switch for people with substantial investments in their books than I think the 3.0/3.5 switch was.
I would tend to agree about the conversions on a more… umm… philosophical ground. I think a well made RPG will choose a game mechanic that suits the story (I suppose choosing a story to match a particular system works as well). I think once you change the system, it becomes something completely different. For ana analogy we can look at the movie Serenity. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Serenity. But, it was no Firefly. Firefly was great because its story & characters were well suited for the television medium. Pacing, plot development, and cahracter development all benefited from the medium. Through the conversion to film, it has lost alot (but not all) of what made it great. Now, in the case of Serenity, the conversion was forced by the cancellation of the series and accepted by most as there was no alternative. But, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a fan who thinks the conversion has made it better.
Back to RPGs, and I think one would agree that taking a game that was developed for the Storyteller system and converting to D20 would force alot of changes. Changes to things (like the flexibility given to the GM) that alter the game in such a profound way that it becomes something different altogether. Unfortunately, it appears as though the people doing the conversion don’t or won’t accept that the game becomes entirely differnt and create duct-taped, kludge-y fixes/adaptations.
That being said, there are always exceptions. And since I hate making broad generalizations, I always try to keep an open mind.
Writing about the Aberrant d20 conversion, Dave wrote that:
> “My main objection is forcing the class system into the game”.
I’m sorry, but WHAT?! How the hell do you fit a Character Class system into Aberrant? No, seriously, I’m really curious. What were the classes?
> “followed quickly by the bastardization of the Mega-Attributes”
This one, I don’t even want explained to me — I can pretty much guess.
> “and by the Superhuman/Aberrant template kludge”
Again, I think I can pretty much guess. Nothing like taking a nice, elegant system and kludging it way up so that it can “kinda sorta” work in a totally different rules set.
> “Oh, and the Quantum-rating-as-average-physical-attribute-bonus kludge”
WHAT?!?!
Yeah, the scary part is that at the end of detailing all of that, the reviewer says it’s a decent conversion. I think he was looking more for internal consistency, and equivalent power levels (he recommended a total ECL of about 7 for a base storyteller aberrant character) than for anything else.