Um, has anyone in here ever played Geist? Cause I accidentally (well, jokingly made up a character, got told I should actually play her) got recruited in a future game by my friend R, and I have never done any of this stuff before. Advice?
Geist is GOOD. It's about people who came back from the dead with superdeaths in their heads, and who thus handle Weird Ghost Bullshit. Advice is - well, what kind of character are you looking to build? What kind of games does your ST run?
I read the tvtropes page and started on the actual books (which I actually downloaded from this thread :D). It looks wicked fascinating! I really like the whole peppy morbid cultural mishmash thing going on. (My random mythology knowledge will finally be useful! I'm really not sure. I have never actually done anything like this before. (This is also the first time I've gotten involved in one of my friends games, the last few all were filled up by some people I have Issues with and therefore figured in was a better idea to just not.)
If you're not sure, you can always ask which themes, moods, etc they focus on - I'm a bit of a joker a lot of the time, and so are my players, so we have a balance between horror and hilarity going on. 4realsies, one session my players decided they were going to teach some werewolves that were harassing them a lesson... by getting them hella high.. then they walked in and realized someone had had a much more violent solution already, and we got to whiplash back into serious. :0
It's pretty fun! Right now they're in an underground city with no way out ( longish story ) and one of them is hooked up with a ghost of over of the inhabitants clinging to his side ( he's going sin-eater with a dose of changeling later on, so he's suspicious that he just met His geist to be. He's got ghost sight ic due to a ritual that was way too effective. ) :) he's also about to realize he's not in Kansas anymore - his team isn't the same as it was when he left. We planned out another way things could have gone 'for kicks' and then I asked the others if they were in on going au. He's going to flip! :D
Genius: the Transgression looked ridiculously fun when I downloaded it (unplayable without the nWoD core book though :( ), and friends' recommendations have made me want to try Changeling at some point. But my extensive RPG experience unfortunately does not extend to White Wolf, yet. *chinhands and watches thread*
I dropped a link to my nwod dropbox on the first page, it's got the core books to all the lines except Beast (which is TECHNICALLY not released). Plus Genius, so, have at. @emythos My favorite way of describing the Geist aesthetic is just "Aradia. This is the entire concept. Everyone is Aradia."
@Starcrossedsky TYVM, but I don't see the core core rulebook -- the one that lists things like Merits, Skills, and how dice rolls work. C:tL refers back to it a few times in the text, and I bet the other gameline core books do too -- that's just the only one I've read so far. No problem if you don't have it, though. I'm unlikely to play a game anytime soon, so I'm having fun just rolling around in the delicious flavor text.
It's... ... ... huh, where the fuck did it go. I have the fucker, it just somehow missed getting into the dropbox. Weird. Give it another shot, I just shoved it in anew.
I know I'm not the only person bothered by the fact that, as a human, you gain Derangements when your Morality drops and you can shed Derangements by raising Morality. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised. Tabletop games are consistently really bad at mental illness as written. But C:tL seemed like a pretty nuanced treatment of surviving trauma and abuse, with none of D&D's occasional "psychosis makes you chaotic evil" nonsense. So this thing in the core rules surprised me. other than that, I love all the gamelines I've read so far, though.
I do feel like the derangements/morality system might be easier to houserule out than most rules like that, at least. It feels like they were trying to bring the heaviness of horror monster person life into normal mundane person life, and went with the option of "Okay, a scale that makes you go crazy, with a (in terms of standard gameplay) a hard system of moral choices and forced sacrifices to bring you out of crazy into healthy person again". Even divorcing derangements from the morality and just make the penalty of sliding into poor morality being "You're a dick, with an incredibly bad rep" would help I'd think?
Good point. Most of the gamelines replace the Morality scale with something more suited to "horror monster person life," afaict... Has anyone here even played a WoD game where the characters were human? I vaguely remember something like that on an earlier page of this thread.
Which is a part of why the full-system update Onyx Path did (the God-Machine-Chronicle ruleset) updates Morality to Integrity, which is more a measure of "ability to function normally" than strictly morals. OP is, in general, a lot better than the original White Wolf rulesets.
i usually house rule morality out the window - my players are good and handle the consequences well, it pleases me. We have done some base mortals, edging into hunter and innocents, with some moving onwards into splats, and i may try to subject my friends to a quick one shot based on a story from nosleep.
Does anyone want to read over the stuff for the thing I've been working on? It's a Dreamwidth game, which I'm not sure who around aside from @itsAlana is familiar with, but I've bumped enough stuff into that document that I'm starting to need somewhere to offload it that isn't gdocs.
I'd be willing to read it over. Is it mechanics-work or fluff-work and plot or setting adjustments for your game?
