In V5 if you don’t completely drain a person when you feed you will always still a little bit hungry.
Doesn’t that only happen if you have high blood potency? In normal play it pretty much works the same as v20, the restriction is only a thing for elders
Don’t really play v5 so could be wrong
The trade-off there is that a lot of those choices are less consequential as a result. It might be a stylistic thing, but I personally prefer each reply to give at least a paragraph or two of divergent consequences.
Are they less consequential? There’s no law that forbids giving them that extra paragraph of flavor text. In fact that bit of extra narration is kinda the point.
Take the detective’s reaction to the supernatural being real in Wayhaven. If you look long and hard at the story, the two attitudes are either acceptance or suspicion, and the spectrum between the two is so small that it makes the choice, practically speaking, a binary one. And yet there are more than half a dozen(iirc) choices given to the player, and each gets a little bit of flavor. That’s a lot of effort obviously, but I’d argue it has very drastic in the player experience. A lot of players like to roleplay a clearly defined and consistent character as their MCs, or at least that’s what I’ve observed. And there’s only so much of that they can do all in their own head. Even though the effects of the different choices ranging from curiousity, excitement, apprehension, revulsion, and fear get simplified into two main outcomes it still gives the player a chance to portray their character in the specific way they envision them, which I think has a tremendous affect on their enjoyment.
There isn’t, but there is the fact that doing this makes a million-word game seem a lot shorter than it would be otherwise - and since CoG prices games based on word count rather than playthrough length, that could be a problem, on top of the obvious fact that I’m putting in more work for a shorter playthrough.
That being said, one of the reasons I really like having an open development process is because I can solicit a lot of “Hey, I’d really like this response, can you put it in?” feedback, which lets me know if players are going to feel overly constrained by the choices I give them.
Obviously in this case, I couldn’t do that because this was licensed and under NDA, and I think it might have suffered a bit as a result.
I am frequently someone who is providing exactly that kind of feedback (“Wish there was an option for X”) and the only time in AtoM that I didn’t really like my options was the epilogue after the run where I fully rejected the gang, but I did spend time increasing my community score, and ended up running the gang anyway.
I don’t even think that is really a problem in the story but just a lack of good options for how some scrappy vampire hunters might want to enmesh themselves in their community without being forced to work with and within the existing power structures of the cops*, the gangs**, the Cammies***, and so on.
I guess I’m saying I feel there should have been one more epilogue where we start the glorious revolution and get quietly killed off by the CIA.
*Class enemies
**Class traitors, lumpenproletariat
***Class enemies
Ironically, the reason I made you work with the existing power structures was itself something of a theme, because any revolution which wants even the barest shot of being successful needs to make alliances with existing power structures. The Bastille got stormed because the mob had the sympathy of the French Guards, the November Revolution probably would have never happened if Kerensky hadn’t declared “no enemies to the left”. The CIA backed Castro (before they turned on him and tried to kill him a gazillion times)
The Apex Predator ending is sort of “starting the glorious revolution”, because so long as you’re confined to the resources of the poorest, most dysfunctional part of a single city, you have to start small, by delivering an alternative theory of social good and organisation where you can. The fact that you have to do it by inheriting a criminal organisation is also pretty true to real-life revolutionaries: the Guomindang were deeply enmeshed with the Triads, the Bolsheviks robbed trains and banks. You have to get your resources from somewhere, and when your goals are outside the law, then your methods almost always have to be as well.
That’s a fair point. I wanna preface this by saying that I’m not exactly complaining here, I just really find the intricacies of interactive fiction fascinating so I’m delighted to talk with you about it. Sometimes I don’t come across very pleasant in text conversations.
There’s still an argument to be made about sacrificing the length of a game in order to add more depth. The most extreme example of this would be Skyrim imo, where there’s so much to do but the dragonborn is completely devoid of character . Of course that’s completely subjective, so none of my personal ideas about what makes for a good work of IF is gospel or anything.
There absolutely is. One of the things I really need to consider more going forward is the balance between giving the player enough reactivity and consequence to justify the use of the medium, and respecting the player’s time/wallet by making sure that they’re getting their value for money in a single playthrough (because honestly, I think most players will only go through a game once unless there’s some major metaprogression mechanic).
Up until now, I’ve basically been reflexively leaning into as much branching as possible because - once again, Sabres of Infinity got negative feedback for being too linear and I kinda took that personally for 12 years.
My personal take is that ‘character’ branching (that is, the ability to split how your character reacts to and deals with a specific set of events) is always going to feel better than ‘path’ branching (where your character experiences an entirely different set of events). Like, and this is no offense to Lords which is still a very solid work, it would have played better to me if the Aetoria/Estate split was cut in favor of forcing the player into a linear track on one (or a hybrid track where you bounce back and forth seasonally perhaps) path with greater options for interacting with characters and characterizing the MC with more detail. Part of the appeal of this sort of narrative is really getting to craft a character in a way you often can’t in bigger budget stuff, to me anyways.
I do not disagree, hell, Gramsci himself pointed out that the lumpenproletariat/subalterns/organized criminal elements are, if not brought into the fold of the revolution, are going to join the fucking Blackshirts.
There’s an inherent tension there in trying to raise class consciousness in people, to turn them into allies when they can very easily be co-opted by the ruling classes as a reactionary paramilitary. And that tension feels like it really belongs in World of Darkness, where generally speaking the main rule is There Are No Good Guys and There Are No Good Options.
I don’t even really think I can fully articulate what would be better other than possibly if, when Jangles summons the MC and declares he’s making them his heir, and they still say “No” that instead Zheng or Mandy step into the role and are clearly struggling with it. That an MC who wants to just focus on killing vampires and doesn’t want to get too involved in all the criminal stuff has to face the fact that in order to fight the bloodsuckers they have to make some compromises. I’m not sure, but I think if there’s any weak point it’s Jangles declaring you his heir and people just going along with it. At that point in the story we should have a bunch of choices, all of them bad. Not equally bad, but all requiring some kind of compromise of our ethics and morals.
Maybe something as simple as Jangles actually offering something other than the burden of having to lead his crew. I didn’t need anything from him to destroy the thin bloods because I was uno-reverse-honeypotting Lydia. I didn’t need anything from him to destroy Lydia because Mister Sunshine helped there. What could he have offered in that scene to convince a hostile MC to take ownership of his criminal organization?
Jangles wasn’t even (I think) aware that the threat was supernatural, which feels like the final trump card he could play to win the cooperation of a hostile MC. I probably wouldn’t walk out of the room saying “See you never, loser” if he’d been able to sweeten the deal by telling you that he buys drugs from a bunch of werewolves, or that the working girls could get you unofficial assistance from the Second Inquisition. Those carrots could even turn out to be worthless, like the garou just straight up not giving a shit about helping you, or the SI contact being a corrupt priest who makes grandiose promises and no follow through.
I’m thinking that maybe he could just articulate what actually happens if he dies without a clear successor: Dead Red and Three-Eyes at each other’s throats with the rest of the DTES suffering as collateral damage, but I’m not sure if that’ll do it or not.
I think he did articulate that and it did not sway me. I think you did include some mention at one point of how they were already scuffling and some of the working girls got killed and I simply cannot imagine being okay with any status quo where there is any kind of peace to be had with people who kill sex workers.
Give me a gun with two bullets in a room with a human trafficker that pimps women out, a drug dealer who kills prostitutes, and a literal goddamned vampire slavering for my blood, and I’ll shoot the two humans.
Honestly? That’s the objection a lot of people have to extrajudicial methods - just because the order-that-is seems unjust in some (or even most) cases doesn’t mean it doesn’t protect people.
What I might end up doing is articulating that as an option for siding with the Vampires.
Part of the tension is that the villains of the piece are fictional. Yeah, the vampires are awful in ways that these baby hunters cannot comprehend. I can forgive a lot of fictional crimes in a fictional supernatural nightmare. Hey, we’re all just playing pretend here.
Juxtapose them with some people who really do exist in the real world of today and they literally prey on, abuse, and murder women.
…I mean, the vampires are just some thirsty bois, right?
This is also an interesting thing to consider, because humans generally tend to judge personal evil differently from detached, “theoretical” evil.
We tend to - at least subconsciously - think of the evil of the murderer who stalks and stabs a single person to death in an alley as somehow sharper and more vile than the evil of the legislator in a suit who decides to cut the budget of a food aid programme, or the contractor who cuts corners on an infrastructure project - which will end up killing way more people. One of those crimes seems more real to us because it’s got more direct causality, and it’s easier to empathise with an obvious victim.
I do think a pass to make Lydia pick up on the player’s Drive better wouldn’t hurt. Her pitch is strong for an Envy or Greed player, less so for a Protection one, and I think she’d be sharp enough to pick up what exactly you’re about and act accordingly. Would make her a more insidious threat.
The way I understood it, the original Hunter lore was written back when White Wolf was still toying with the idea of Exalted being a loose prequel to the World of Darkness, and the Hunters were meant to be Solar Exalt stand ins, which was at the time the only exalt type that didn’t have a clear parallel in the WoD. It’s the reason why alot of the early lore for Hunter the reckoning is so, well, weird and needlessly over complicating what would’ve been a simple concept of “regular people see stuff that go bump in the night and decide to strike back”.
Bear in mind that mages are also responsible for literally the entirety of modern civilization, both the good and the bad parts, with all the baggage that implies.
The hunger system is easily the best thing about V5.
The problem with blood points and costs is that people tend to treat it like a mana bar. This is boring.
Rouse checks are just so much better at working a vampire’s hunger into the story and making it a central aspect. You fail one or two rouse checks and now you’ve got those hunger dice and they’re affecting everything you do. Then maybe you fail at something else because you couldn’t reroll those hunger dice with willpower, and now you’ve got to risk getting even hungrier because you have to use another power to handle the results of that failure, and you’re starting a failure cascade.
That potential is really good at keeping your hunger on your mind, and that feels like a very vampire thing.
Created a quick article for this game on the Paradox wiki. Don’t know if it’ll actually reach any new eyeballs but every bit helps, right? It’s pretty hastily done so if anyone here knows more about wiki styling or has access to the larger version of the cover art, that’d be a great help.
I also don’t have the ability to edit the games navbox or the front page, so if someone can get in contact with a person who has those rights, that’d probably help too.
Trust me you succeeded. I’ve never hit “restart” faster on any game after finishing the Bloodhound route because I felt like such a traitorous piece of shit. Having a sober-Wil throw himself on MC’s knife was genuinely heartbreaking. For context I routinely play IF games as a sadistic asshole and aim for “evil” endings cos it’s usually more fun. Not this time! The guilt 