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[Stupid Loserman]

That is exactly how I would describe their role. I think "not at all" is very much supposed to be a viable option for those who prefer such, in the same way that not every Werewolf game needs to deal with the idigam....

[Stupid Loserman]

Contracts of one's own Court is the sensible way to read this, I would say.



Yes....

[Stupid Loserman]

I'm leaving room for Mummy to surprise me, but as it currently stands, I am hovering around here. I would say that for my money, I'm disappointed at how conservative the changes to Mummy in general have been. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I considered Mummy to be one of the weakest of the 1e gamelines, despite respecting some bold choices it made like the unique relationship of the Arisen to their Sekhem. The nonlinear relationship to time is a cool new wrinkle the new edition adds, and I respect the added attention to cults and the demolishment of the wall between player and Storyteller...

[Stupid Loserman]

There is nothing in the setting resembling a personal God, nor any just afterlife for the soul.

Hell exists. It waits on the other side of the Wounds. Its population is small, comprised mostly by those who struck Hell's greatest and most heinous bargains. The demons of the Inferno spend little time in Hell. Why would they? It is they who command the prison gates.

Hedge Ghosts exist in a "new" fae layer of Twilight. So much about their insubstantiality (and that from the one Shield Contract) matches how Twilight works that it feels contrarian to assert other...

[Stupid Loserman]

There's Strange Dead Love, for late first edition Vampire: the Requiem, and a chapter of the Chronicler's Guide for Werewolf: the Forsaken dedicated to sex and romance in that game. I thought those treatments were somewhat blunt, myself, but your mileage may vary. Between the two, SDL is better than the Werewolf chapter....

[Stupid Loserman]

Not LordHeru here, but I remember being optimistic about the Ritual Sorcerer Merit in Dark Eras, but on review finding it to be unusually loaded down with prerequisites and ritual components for very little payoff, to the tune of an expensive Merit with some of the highest Merit prerequisites giving a couple circumstantial bonus dice or the privilege of learning complicated means of human sacrifice. Generally I think things like the Rite of Seeding would have been better fit as examples of Open Rites to keep that option interesting and underline the Chronicles of Darkness as a place where occult...

[Stupid Loserman]

Or to put it in shorter terms:

The Judges of Death condemn you for your sin. The point of doing this is not to prevent people from sinning. It is because they want reasons to condemn you....

[Stupid Loserman]

Most of the God-Machine Chronicle's Introduction is missing from the text of the Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook, which is unfortunate, because the excised text remains the best primer to understanding what the God-Machine is, how to use it in a chronicle, and what to use it for in a chronicle. (The missing text here also includes the passage about the fly-man who orders pizza and leaves it strewn about his apartment to feed giant maggots, despite the illustration of the fly-man remaining in use. I don't mention this because it's an actual problem. I just really liked the fly-man.)

...

[Stupid Loserman]

Do you sincerely believe that some people think that writers morally approve of the actions of every character they write about? Do you expect people to give an unqualified "yes" here?

An author need not endorse the behavior he is depicting in his work for it to exist in a flawed social context. One of the Internet age's most infamous examples, in fact, is explicitly done because the author is looking for behavior as condemnable as possible: the "women in refrigerators" trope, where a villain hurts a male protagonist by victimizing and often killing a female loved...

[Stupid Loserman]

It's designed a little more for online games than for printing out and bringing to physical tables, but:...

[Stupid Loserman]

While we're talking broad concepts that haven't been covered and which supplement material might one day facilitate, one concept I tried to work out mechanically was a character with an inhuman Conspicuous Appearance, who could only take on human semblance by stealing one from others a la Face Thief. My first assumption was that Mimicry would cover that and then it would take some clever choices of Controlled or Involuntary Scars with conditional factors, but it doesn't look like an intended use of Mimicry to keep reactivating it at the end of every scene.

In general, Mimicry is one...

[Stupid Loserman]

Whatever amount of effort and resources produce a net benefit in exchange for keeping the sorcerous sleeper agent active, no more and no less.

If that's not a very useful answer, it's because this question is extremely hard to answer in the abstract. What actual decisions is it weighing against each other?...

[Stupid Loserman]

I think you're fighting uphill to fit this into Deviant without bending it a bit (certainly not impossible, but a lot of work), but the largest conceptual sticking point here is your idea with the Anchors, which I advise against. Loyalty and Conviction aren't powers, they're obsessions, and having only one or the other makes for even more extreme personalities than Deviants are already designed to be. Having access to Loyalty and its Touchstones only when you're around your brother literally means your ability to love and care about and attach yourself to someone positively is directly tied to...

[Stupid Loserman]

Geist 2e has a passage that's surprisingly explicit about this on p. 185, describing ghosts as echoes or copies left behind of a person when they die, though clearly taking the position that while a ghost is not the same person who died to leave it behind, the ghost is still very much a person.

There are various curiosities in Mage and Geist that this makes possible, like the Create Ghost spell and the existence in Geist of doppelgangers, ghosts generated by near-death experiences.

[Stupid Loserman]

I can't claim to be knowledgeable about ASMR, but I think it's a rather hard case to make that it alone constitutes an equivalent resonance and importance to established Court responses as broad as Anger, Desire, and Hope.

You could try to fold it into a broader concept. Perhaps it might be especially popular among Courtiers of Comfort or Repose.

[Stupid Loserman]

No, you can't have Variations that are not entangled with any Scars (except for the one free dot granted by your Origin). You can, however, entangle multiple Variations to a single Scar, with a number of Variations after the first equal to the difference between the Scar's rating and the Variations' rating. So you can entangle two 4-Magnitude Variations to one 5-Magnitude Scar, or three 3-Magnitude Variations, or four 2-Magnitude Variations....