#(this is a vtm game if it wasn't clear)

[1800duckhotline]

what is vampire the masquerade and whats killer is dead. i assume videod games but i could be wrong... you seem to be having soo much fun im nosaayy 😁

omg hi mani im so flattered u would ask!! yeah ive been in the throes of videogames lately AHAH... oc brained but videogame about it sort of...

vampire the masquerade is actually a ttrpg originally published in the 80s i think, but it keeps getting updated so its not like. anything super old... whenever i mention "vampire the masquerade: bloodlines" im talking about the 2004 videogame created based off of the ttrpg! im biased in loving vtm and vtmb since well. it's about vampires. but i think it's an unique take on them that like makes the supernatural aspect not too boring compared to the classic supernatural vampire take. since it involves clans, a lot of vampire politics and societal aspects to it all, etc... Bloodlines itself is not a perfect game (ill avoid geeking out too much about the brief dev hell history it had) but i value it so dearly bc its so 2004 and is so gothic/alternative in its genuine influence. also the story is goofy but really good too (with um, simultaneously, the con that It Is a 2004 Game, meaning it has a lot of weird bigotries that were normalized for the time lol). Unforchy it's almost unplayable without downloading an additional patch mod that restores also a lot of cut content ^_^ but you make do... its so easy to make ocs for the game and the general ttrpg, sooo many ways you can go with your characters!! Bloodlines itself as a game is an action/adventure RPG mostly focused on combat (with stuff like stealth sessions) as well as various ways to resolve different quests. the variety of said outcomes is mostly limited by the fact the studio wasn't able to polish the game at all for release due to activision, the publisher, pushing troika games (dev team) to release the game early to compete with half life 2 at the time (yeah crazy i know). that said, the dialogues can be really charming and fun and offer a nice variety of things to do.. its not perfect but seriously is the best vampire RPG game around so far..

killer is dead is completely different (mostly because i can never focus on one thing for too long lmfao), it's an hack and slash 2014 game created by suda51 and grasshopper manufacture (same game devs behind no more heroes, lollipop chainsaw, shadows of the damned etc) and it's. an okay game. i dont even know if i can explain the story bc its like, a clusterfuck. and usually clusterfuck stories are goichi suda's specialty but this one goes over the moon (funny joke if You Know). it's a pretty mid game. I love it on one hand bc its easy to play and very stylish, tho the shaders sometimes can give you an headache. I also love the protagonist (mondo zappa) because to me thats a butch not just some guy. Unfortunately the game has the very strong cons of being too short for the kind of game it is, and also has an infamously bizarre minigame that's called "gigolo missions"... you basically go on "dates" with beauties (sexy girls basically), you give them gifts until they 'love' you and then you go have sex and they give you weapon upgrades as a result. the date though consists of you building up your "guts meter" by looking at their boobs or legs so it's like. REALLY STRANGE. CANT HASHTAG IM SORRY FEMINISM OUT OF THIS ONE I'M AFRAID.... it's so conflicting bc apparently suda didn't want to add this function but publishers forced him to. oh well. a solid 6.5/10 tbh. idk if i'd reccomend it tho maybe gameplays are better than getting it at full price imo (i got my game as a gift)

UM SO SORRY FOR GEEKING OUT...I HOPE THE EXPLANATION WAS CLEAR. My brain keeps jumping from media to media with no pause... i wanna focus on ocs again but this keeps happening hahaha

[shantyslimes]

Whenever I hear someone say that silent protagonists aren't immersive I can't help but think about how for years people made fun of Bioware games having dialogue options like "hey don't kill eachother" and the character actually saying "you're both lame idiots who nobody loves fuck you you suck absolute waste of precious oxygen smh" because a character with a voice inherently changes the meaning from text. Plain text is forced to be clear in its tone and how harshly it tries to be.

Remember how in Fallout 4 how every single dialogue had a "sarcastic" response which was usually just you being an asshole and the conversation not moving at all? Or that one robot you can talk to who describes methods of cooking and killing you, and your dialogue options are all responses to the different methods it describes. But your character literally just says "What?" for all the options.

I see more depth of personality from the Fledgling in vtmb having options between "I listened very closely, here's what was said to me" and "something about anarchism? I wasn't really paying attention" partly because every time I play for the anarch ending, I say I wasn't listening. Because I, the player, interpret that as not letting on that I was taken by what was said to me. In either case it doesn't change the response LaCroix gives. "You would do well to pay attention to what everyone says"

If those lines were read by a voice actor then it wouldn't add to my immersion. It doesn't help my mental image of my character absentmindedly picking wax out of their ear. It sits you down and tells you "this is how the line is being said." and leaves me with less room to put my own voice in the world.

In games like bloodlines especially that's important because you're a POV character. They exist to be projected upon. I don't think I've heard anyone say they're more immersed by the Fallout 4 protagonist having a voice, if anything I remember everyone being frustrated and annoyed by them being an extremely fixed character without much room to make them your own outside of what faction you work for and what build you use. But everyone loves how the Courier felt like a person who existed in the world before you started playing yet never imposed itself upon you, meaning you were able to roleplay and actually get immersed without the main quest being entirely about how your character had a life before you that you don't care about. Back to Bloodlines, how you play the fledgling is up to you, but you know they had a life before you, because one of your friends before you were embraced, in a panic, tries to bring you back to your old life after you disappeared. She assures you everything is going to be okay, that it's fine that you vanished but now you can come home. And you tell her no. Because in the players mind, you were minding your own business and now you're being ambushed by someone who you have no idea about. When the game tells you that you've redeemed the masquerade for it, you realise that woman was right. Your character used to know her. The themes of VTMs horror is sold more by your own choices of dialogue being rewarded than having a voice actor stammer out lines to make it clear that they're lying ever could. Hell, assume you the player pick up on it immediately as many do, and you still have to lie to her. The game doesn't give you an option to go back, but it's an act of quiet horror that you have no choice but to commit to, just like how the fledgling has to knowingly lie to this woman. If you had a voice, and could hear the performance, unless it was played to damn near perfection, you'd lose something by not feeling these be your own choices that you need to commit to.

If in Fallout 4, you had no voice but the world simply reacted to you diving into the most secure location in the country just find your kid, people asking how you did it, being amazed that love can drive someone that far, or even horrified at the implication that you managed to pull it off, then people would lavish it with praise. Like they did when that happened in Fallout New Vegas, and the moment you've hunted down and killed the guy who tried to kill you, every major faction starts gunning for your attention because that's an insane thing to do and they want you. It's not the voice that ruins that idea, but the writing surrounding the player.

Anyway tl;dr voiced protagonists aren't more immersive you just need to write really well and people will praise the writing.

[unofficialoxtimeline]

Some Lingering Questions, Part 1

I have a number of these kinds of unsolved mysteries; I cleared off several of them with the Barricade post, but here we go. First off: a lingering mystery of Foundry No. 12!

Was the grenade Edvard threatened the Brighteners with at Foundry No. 12 a real grenade?

Here's what we know for sure: Edvard ticked two separate boxes of load for two flashbangs and one fragmentation grenade. At least one of the flashbangs was detonated, blinding Zillah; neither of them were returned to Edvard during the course of the episode.

There's a couple of reasons to think the frag grenade wasn't real. Edvard has access to flashbang grenades; it would also be very easy to build a dummy grenade; it's a batshit thing to do even for Edvard, for two people who are really just his coworkers. There's also the fact that Blades is a retroactive game, and the CRB directly states in its best practices section that it is "not a no takebacks game".

Here are the reasons I suspect that it was in fact a real grenade. First is the fuse length. Grenades used to be less stable, and Edvard does say he built the frag grenade, but I decided to go off modern weapons. A frag grenade can have a fuse of between 3 and 5 seconds, but a flash grenade typically has a fuse of around 1.5 seconds, for reasons I think are obvious.

I counted up all the time Edvard said he had his finger off the lever. If he didn't give a time, I counted it as half a second. By this accounting, Edvard burned at least two seconds off the fuse of the grenade he was holding. It could have been a dummy, but if it were a flash grenade, it would have gone off in his hand.

It was a wild thing to do and over the top even for Edvard. But, if Edvard were going to do it for anyone, the groundwork was already laid for Zillah and Kasimir to be the people he'd do it for. As early as The Gut-Cutter Bargain, Kasimir says outright that he and Edvard have become close, and Edvard spends a whole phase building the electroplasmic cane for him. Edvard has a great admiration for Zillah; he takes a moment just to appreciate how cool she is in the same fight, despite the fact they're about to die. Kasimir and Zillah get a mechanical benefit for going to the fighting pit. Edvard doesn't, but he comes along and makes a little sign just to cheer her on. He doesn't do these things for other people, and coupled with his confidence in his own abilities, it ultimately makes sense that this is a bet he'd take.

Then, maybe the most important part: no takebacks.

Some newer RPGs, like Blades and the It Came From series, take what's called a cinematic perspective (explicitly in some rulesets). D&D, Pathfinder, VtM, and many other popular games are about improvisation and skill efficiency. If you don't have something, you just don't have it. They are no takebacks games. If you step in the trap, if you offend the Prince of New York, that's the ballgame.

Blades and It Came From are meant to be collaborative storytelling where tropes are welcome. If you don't want to do something in Blades, you can just not do it. If you step in a trap, flashback: you cased the place earlier and wedged a shim into it. If you offend the director of your spy agency in They Came From [CLASSIFIED], you buy a do-over with your points pool. They are meant to produce a world where the PCs are the heroes of their own stories, and feeling like a badass is the whole point.

Why do I go off on this? Because I think the choice of whether the grenade was real was made by both Luke and Andy, and by not making the grenade fake, they wrote it into canon as real. If something had gone wrong, if Edvard had fumbled it, if a Red Sash had tackled him, by the rules, it could have been fake at any time. The chance remained; the chance was never taken. If he walked in with a dummy grenade, he walked out leaving a real one.

In summary, I have a lot of feelings about Edvard Lumière.

[pyrrhiccomedy]

hey i'm the previous anon! thank you so much for answering, i 100% agree with u btw, i just wasn't clear on what you meant! i'm gonna be playing in a vtm game pretty soon and i'm super excited about exploring all those themes :D

Oh, awesome! Have fun!

In our epic 2-year VtM campaign, the PCs all had some major Humanity shifts:

Selene went from Humanity 6 to 3 (you have to apply yourself to reach Humanity 3) & is probably lucky she got possessed by an Antediluvian at the end of the game to stop her from sliding any further. She was like one of those informercials where a guy tries to open a curtain and so catastrophically fucks up that he ends up on a stretcher, only in this case “trying to open a curtain” means “trying to be decent and otherminded for like, five whole consecutive minutes.”

Isaiah went from Humanity 7 to Metamorphosis...4 I think? The biggest swing, Best At Not Being Cool About Anything

And Cora went from Humanity 6 to 8 & is probably going to reach Golconda eventually. The rare success story. We’re very proud of her.