Truth or Dare

[CajunKhan]

You'd have to homebrew Humanity if you want to run a game about high blood potency characters, because they are going to have to eat people routinely. By rights, high blood potency characters should either all be wights, or all have been killed due to constant frenzies and beastial failures/messy criticals.

Since they don't allow Paths anymore, Humanity must somehow be sustainable for creatures who eat people on a weekly basis. Somehow. Really, this system breaks down at high blood potency, because high blood potency characters are intended to be NPCs whose ability to maintain a four...

[CajunKhan]

The Syndicate are fundamentally economists, and economics is the study of incentive-structures. Incentive structures can be difficult to balance. For example, back in the day the Vietnamese government tried to incentivize the killing of rats by offering a bounty on rat-tails. The populace then proceeded to farm rats for their tails, chopping them off and then releasing the tailless but alive rats to bred. The rat population became worse than ever.

Setting up incentive structures can be deceptively complicated. Set up a competition based incentive structure, and the first winners attempt...

[CajunKhan]

Which, to me, raises an interesting question: is the Syndicate for or against Anti-Trust laws? Anti-Trust laws restrict capitalism in the short-term, but they do so with the intent of preserving capitalism in the long term by preventing capitalism from transforming into feudalism. Once a handful of people win the capitalist race, the rise of monopolies and oligopolies destroys capitalism. Capitalism is always on the verge of suicide, which anti-trust laws prevent. But, again, they do so my restricting capitalism. So which side would the Syndicate be on?...

[CajunKhan]

What kinds of questions/dares would happen at a Gangrel gather if they decided to play it?

What kinds of questions/dares would happen at a Sabbat gathering if they decided to play it?

[CajunKhan]

Nah, but, irrc, it was basically the first few levels of Requiem Protean and then became Path of Conjuring mechanics adapted to make biological machinery when you have a restrained victim and lots of time in a laboratory.

The Wamphyri have modest shapeshifting ability, and the ability to make complex, powerful biomachinery when they have restrained victims and lots of laboratory time, so it was just a matter of adapting Protean and Path of Conjuring mechanics to simulate this....

[CajunKhan]

I wanted to make Necroscope Wamphyri, and was deeply dissatisfied with Viccissitude. Vic is too powerful in some ways, and too weak in others to duplicate the powers of the Wamphyri. So I came up with my own discipline to duplicate the Wamphyri power more precisely.

[CajunKhan]

But it's not post-apocalyptic for the humans, just the vampires. Things are actually looking up for humans, since the age of monsters is finally ending.

[CajunKhan]

Irrc, one of the developers said this edition is about replacing the old system with something new, and seeing if this new system is any better than the old. I'm paraphrasing massively as I don't remember the exact words, but that seemed to be the gist of it.

Which is implies that defeating the few remaining elders is almost expected to be the cold open of this edition. Defeating the elders is like defeating Scarecrow in the second Bale Batman movie: something almost perfunctory before getting to the REAL story.

And the real story is mostly you dealing with this almost...

[CajunKhan]

Perhaps they should go back to their feudalistic roots to flesh out the Anarchs? I've always viewed all three sects as the main three variations on feudalism throughout history:
The Sabbat are the version of feudalism that mainly follows the will of the Pope, and goes on crusades in his name.
The Camarilla is the version of feudalism where the High Nobles and Monarchs have most of the power.

The Anarchs are the version of feudalism where the Low Nobles have more collective power than the High Nobles and Monarchs. That's a pretty respectable chunk of the old timey world,...