General WoD Discussion #2: Its time to Celebrate!

[CN the Logos]

Eh...if you don't want the world to randomly start hating your guts at the most inconvenient times, why would you want to play Promethean?

Because Prometheans have awesome powers and an amazing character arc that works even without every NPC you meet immediately hating your guts, and in fact can work better if you can actually interact with the NPCs?

Yeah, I like to use the Promethean books for NPCs and general splat-diving, but actually running a game of it would be torture. The rules make it almost impossible to interact with society, unless you want to play a "road trip" game where you hit a new town every week and the only recurring NPCs are villains or creepy pseudo-angels.

It's especially bad because it actively undermines the whole point of Frankenstein and the idea of the noble monster; the persecution of the Prometheans isn't supposed to be their fault. But the rules make it completely impossible to show genuine hatred towards them; the humans aren't bigots or ruled by fear, they're just too weak to withstand the magical "hate me" aura. And the reason they get run out of town has nothing to do with people hating and fearing them... their presence actually does ruin the land around them, so the torches and pitchforks are the logical solution!

The problem with removing Disquiet and/or the Wasteland is that it drastically changes the tone of the game, to the point where you have to rewrite pretty much the whole thing, fluff-wise. The entire point of Promethean is that being a Promethean is so terrible that becoming a homeless mortal with no legal identity qualifies as a GOOD END for the character. This is mostly accomplished via Disquiet (people hate you) and the Wasteland (the world hates you). Without those things, you're an ugly, potentially immortal guy with superpowers. Which is cool, I guess, but doesn't come with much in the way of built-in conflict. There are people who'd hate Prometheans anyway, even with no logical reason, but those people hate a lot of humans too. So you end up with a NWoD gameline where the protagonists are better off than mortals in pretty much every way (even the ugliness only shows up if the character uses his or her powers). Even Geist had "and if you don't use your powers responsibly, a burglar will kill Uncle Ben ghosts will haunt you forever" to keep it from becoming a nonstop party that all the PCs are invited to. So what replaces the hate plague as a creator of conflict?

I've thought about altering Disquiet and the Wasteland so that they only start to build up when the characters upset people for non-Disquiet reasons and/or use their powers. Something along those lines would make it possible for PCs to stay in one place for longer than a few days while still retaining the game's central themes. Unfortunately, I haven't written down these changes yet.

Re: fansplats. I love what I've read of Leviathan, but don't want to get into a game of it until it's all finished and exists in downloadable, non-wiki form. The little bit I've read of Princess seemed alright for the genre, which I'm not really a fan of unless we count Bewitched (which most of the early magical girl anime were inspired by) and/or Revolutionary Girl Utena. Genius is... odd. I like it, but not as a horror game. There are some genuinely sad/creepy elements in it that could be played for horror, but it seemed like the writers were torn between that and "OMG TEH LAZARS!!11!" I'd probably like it more if it didn't refer to the World of Darkness at all, and was just Dexter's Lab: The RPG.

That said, I've been considering using the Purified from the Immortals splatbook as the basis for a nephilim template, so take any criticism I have of someone else's homebrew with a grain of salt. No accounting for taste and all that.