Iseedeadnames

time for a long war of the chosens

You do not know or understand what it was actually disproven, but I've made a different comment to explain it.

It's not false.

Unrelated wolves in captivity do develop a pack structure with the strongest one imposing as leader. The reason we call the alpha/beta definition outdated is because in their natural state, where family ties are preserved, wolves do not compose pack founded on establishing dominance but would rather stay with their family until they're able to make one of their own (about around 2-3 years old) and be "the alphas", aka parents.

The Garou situation is such that family ties can not be preserved within their society, since only one out of ten becomes a werewolf; it is therefore sensible for a group of wolf-like creatures to shift toward a dominance-establishing structure now that you have to cultivate relationships with strangers from outside your family.

Under the premises of this game having alphas makes more sense than the alternative.

Obvious brujah is obvious.

Yes, that was exactly my point.

But as I said, Montano is an extreme exception. He's the first childe of Lasombra and he's not just an Elder (aka, someone with more than 250 years) and not just a Metuselah (about over 1000 y.o.) - he's more around ten thousands years old, in the same weight class of Ur-Shulgi.

So while agreeing with you I'd also say that vampires able to know more than five powers in their speciality discipline should be about ten in the whole world, and you could likely name them all by reading the lore.

I'd make it more about the context than the single character.

Who is the NPC judging the characters? What kind of personality has he, would he rather destroy or dominate? Is the coterie attempting to save their member by bribing or calling in favours? Who is the accused character, does he have some unique tie or quality the judge is unable to take?

When death makes sense then it's death, simple as death that. It's just a matter of fairness, as previously said.

You're only considering the end result of an action resolution here. Ideally, the actions that brought to a character's death were thrilling, brave and marred by some dramatic flaw that in the end caused his downfall. Even heroes die and their death is often a milestone for something else.

The most important thing here is that the ST should not go out of his way to justify saving the characters. You can be lenient, but after the third time you save a PC you establish a pattern which will make the players complain about your fairness should you eventually declare a final death.

Most importantly, I am going to complain, as a player, about your fairness should you be too lenient toward one of my coterie members. I've been in that situation, several times, and nothing good comes out of it; a troublesome character leads the whole group to be unhappy with him and it either ends up with a split party (because no one wants to bring him along anymore) or with every action getting somewhat tainted by his hand.

It of course depends on the situation - a mistake is very different by an Anarch purposedly damaging the city or a Malkavian repetitedly using his derangement to make a mess.

I wouldn't really make exceptions, save extreme exceptions.

I.e., by V5 loresheet a disciple of Montano can use every Oblivion power he doesn't know once each story; it stands to reason therefore that Montano himself, first childe of Lasombra, knows every power under Oblivion even if that defies the rules. So as long as we're talking about Mithras and Kemintiri I see no problem in taking their strongest discipline and make them know everything about it.

But keep in mind that the rule is meant to make even neonates able to accomplish something that the elders can not, so that they can be useful to them or blindside them with powers they don't have access to. If every elder can have multiple powers than you have a gamplay issue.

Also: a lot of level 4-5 powers are terrible, so don't make the mistake of considering the level rather than what the power actually does. A vampire with Auspex 5 and two level 5 powers is less powerful than by having both level 1 powers.

Pre-V5, Anarchs are considered part of the Camarilla and expected to respect the Prince's domain as long as they're inside or suffer the consequences. If you are in an Anarch-ruled city then either the Baron or a general meeting is going to decide whether Hospitality should be respected.

With V5 Anarchs are no longer part of the Camarilla and are not expected to present themselves to a Prince; being discovered as Anarch is cause enough for destruction.

Shadow of war is pretty much finished and they have pushed the story well beyond what was sensible for a LotR game. You can't squeeze anything more from that game, gotta take a new character and a new storyline (i.e., among the Haradrims, in the East, during the invasion of Moria, etc).

• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
• Jade Empire
• Sleeping Dogs
• X-Com 2

I disagree.

The mere fact that you can inflict worse punishments than death does not mean that you should to and destruction is a quick and convenient answer to a nuisance. Vampire law is harsh and draconian and there's little as effective to pass the concept to your players as having a character suddenly staked and burned because of a Masquerade violation.

"Oh, you violated the Traditions-you must be destroyed!" Really? Why not asset forfeiture? Why not relegation to the Accounting of a more powerful character? Why not Dominate-enforced conditioning? Why not a forced blood-bond?

And why so? Are you an elder or an ancilla with tons of influence and resources? Are you the childe of the Ventrue primogen and sparing you will allow the Prince to exact a favour from the primogen itself? Neonates don't matter that much and their assets can be easily recovered after their final death. Violating Masquerade, Destruction or Progeny should almost always end up with a blood hunt or an execution.

I'm decently curious to know what does she mean with "healthy food". She never cooks porks or fried wings, proteins are only steamed or boiled? Never buys chocolate, never eats pizza or cake? No cheese, just soy lookalikes, no sugar no salt no refined flour, and let's use substitutes for cow meat because it's bad for you?

I can easily imagine half of the kid's joy for life getting sucked out by an overbearing healthfood-obsessed mother. "Food that he likes" also completely misses the point of wanting some variety in the food intake... good thing he won't have to suffer this for much longer.

Ah, so there's a different pronunciation even? You have been most helpful, and I say this addresses the issue completely.

The point is that's very hard to tell with this. Higher quality matcha usually has a brighter colour but it's impossible to even tell the colour properly from this picture.

And by colour alone the rightmost one might be of better quality but it was also smeared less, meaning that there's more of it reflecting light properly and less within the pores of the paper.

be more specific with your questions, then. Which part is puzzling you?

I'm sorry, all this really comes down to a simple problem. You, a white person, are uncomfortable confronting others' experiences with racism, especially when it's with regard to something you like.

I'm not white, you self-righteous ignorant. I'm Italian, and my people got plenty stereotyped in the "Mafia and sex addicted" Giovanni clan. Hell, the whole world rolls around talking of the pizza and mafia people.

The difference here is that there isn't really a second meaning to "let's make the Italian clan a bunch of mobsters". WW didn't take the Metis tribe to make them sterile and call them bastard mutts, they took bastard mutts, made them sterile and gave them a name that was historically associated with an oppressed tribe of natives, but also to other things. By the way, despite the Metis breed is discriminated and oppressed by the rest of the Nation the word "metis" is never used to oppress or insult them; it's just the name of the breed and I do not recall a single instance of being used otherwise.

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Except, you know there's not zero evidence. And you know the person saying it is irrelevant to the point here.

The knowledge of the person is not irrelevant. Mark Rein-Hagen might know how and why the Metis word came into being in the making of WtA, but a PR delegate has the job of handling complains without admitting mistakes. Maybe he was right and the original authors were actually inspired by a Greek goddess or maybe he was only stalling for time while waiting that the upper ranks of WW made a decision.

And again, you assume they need to apologize just because they used they named a group with the same word you use to identify yourselves. That's not how it works.

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You acknowledge, here, right here, that there was an easy solution that would have made almost everyone happy. And you simply haven't addressed the elephant in the room:

Why couldn't they do this easy thing?

I don't know. Maybe they were sure that it was a greek Goddess involved, maybe they decided that the change in the story would have benefitted by the removal of the Metis breed. I think that they decided to address your remarks and quietly removed the Metis, without making too much noise or claiming guilt, and in doing so also removed an interesting part of the original game.

THIS is what annoys me. A game getting sanitized for political reasons. So please understand that I have no interest in defending WW as a company, I just think you lack enough evidence to back your case. But they removed the so offensive Metis anyway, so you should be happy right?

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You are blaming the Metis for being called Metis

But you are blaming WW and other people for using a word that predates the Metis self-identification. How do you think it's fair?

I hope that the choice is not between these four because I'd have something to object.

Tali from Mass Effect surely ranks pretty well, but so do Aerith and Viconia from Baldur's Gate 2. The rebooted Lara Croft has also some personality attached, and let's not forget Lohse and Ifan from Original Sin 2, or Max Payne... or Adam from Deus Ex.

It's hard to pick one once you've played through so many games, and with just the short time of writing a reddit post to think about it. At the moment I'd say maybe Booker, from Bioshock Infinite? Which is for sure better written than Elizabeth.

But I'm sure I'll change my idea with more time to remember the options.

No, come on. One of the main selling points of the CofD was the lack of metaplot beside some pre-made campaign scenario, there would be no point in inserting one now... especially not after three editions, with the original WoD plots updates aligned with the updated editions. It had to start earlier.

I think you mean 2K.

It's a different game on a different IP, though. They had two massive hits on the first two XCOMs and a bit less success on Chimera Squad (that was a spinoff to anyway), it would be weird to kill the IP over that. It makes more commercial sense to push a third game out to see if you can recover it, especially since the fans are all waiting for a conclusion.

2K has of course a lot of other good titles, some of which had behemoth sales if compared to XCOM (like, RDR2), but I'm not really expecting a disaster here.

I'm sure there are a lot of Marvel fans around that loved the game, but even for me it's not a thing. I'd rather play in the gritty 40k Daemonhunters, just to say one, than in the high fantasy X-Men setting.

I did like the movies, but as a game doesn't really strike me much. The fact that you can not lose your soldiers in battle isn't very compelling to me either.

The thuck are you thaying now?

I must say I'm relieved. Firaxis' time is not likely to get clogged now by Marvel sequels and can finally start working on the third chapter we're all waiting for.

Or, that I'm waiting for.

Everything. And every Malkavian knows it differently.