User Profile

[CaptOtter]

At a minimum, in both Revised and M20 (as well any number of the other storyteller games), stimulants such as cocaine, meth, crack, etc., have had the practical in-game effect of giving its user an additional action per turn--the downside being bashing damage, impaired judgment, etc. However, the fact remains that this is a non-magical means of getting an extra action, and therefore has two pretty serious implications: first, that operating at a speed that provides an extra action is something the human body can just do; and second, that if this is something that (unfortunately) plenty of people...

[CaptOtter]

It's largely immaterial whether you or I, or anyone, believe the clan is fulfilling its purpose, if our goal is to analyze a statement made by an Assamites (ostensibly representative of the clan as a whole); what's germane to that analysis is the Assamites' general self-perception, state of mind, and underlying motivation for making the statement. Despite what you and I may agree the effective reality of the situation is, the Assamites leverage how well organized they are as a clan to generally enforce a pretty rigid orthodoxy among themselves--and the company line is that they were made for X...

[CaptOtter]

If you read the first ten pages of Clanbook Assamite revised, it's explicitly stated that the clan was created to police other vampires. There were no Assamites beyond Haqim until the other Antes came to him, and begged him to keep order and preside over their society as judge, after which he disappeared into the desert and came back some time later with a posse: the first Assamites. So they're cop, judge, jury, and executioner; essentially they're the Street Judges from Judge Dredd. Leave it to White Wolf to throw subtly completely out the window and create a clan of vampires whose method of...

[CaptOtter]

I could see a cop saying this about more or less anyone; not feeling the overwhelming contempt here....

[CaptOtter]

I'm a Ravnos fan, and (natually) I have some thoughts.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that the people who wrote the game in the first place didn't like the Ravnos either--small surprise that they're the clan that got all but annihilated during the week of nightmares. Why the hate? First, the company had egg on its face because it made a clan of criminal vampires with a supernatural compulsion for doing crime and heavily associated it with an actual, real life ethnic group that has been unjustly maligned, persecuted, hunted, and murdered for centuries based on racist ideas about...