White Wolf Forum: The Dresden Files

[iago]

Sheryl, mentioned above, was on Dune, which I think predates AmberMUSH And Lydia/Amberyl was all over the place, and created the MUSH manual (and I'm sure coded alot as well...I'm not a coder, I'm not sure).

Yeah. We're old young at heart.

Dune did?  Huh.  I recall AmberMUSH being one of the very few games in town, beyond PernMUSH, at the time I first encountered it.  Of course, the old hoary place went through a large number of cycles of new groups of people suddenly discovering it. Made apping to play one of the feature characters a real bear, if you wanted any kind of respect paid to in-game history.

[The Doctor]

Come to DC.  I've yet to meet White Wolf players who *haven't* wanted to run a game in the new stuff.  The new Wraith in particular has gotten some serious props.

Chalk one up.  I still run a hybrid of second and third edition Mage (sort-of world of second, ruleset of third).  The cosmology and organisations of M:tR (Mage: The Reboot) do not do much for me.

[Mickey Finn]

Sheryl, mentioned above, was on Dune, which I think predates AmberMUSH And Lydia/Amberyl was all over the place, and created the MUSH manual (and I'm sure coded alot as well...I'm not a coder, I'm not sure).

Dune did?  Huh.  I recall AmberMUSH being one of the very few games in town, beyond PernMUSH, at the time I first encountered it.  Of course, the old hoary place went through a large number of cycles of new groups of people suddenly discovering it. Made apping to play one of the feature characters a real bear, if you wanted any kind of respect paid to in-game history.

I could be completely wrong on that, but I thought it went Pern/Dune, then Amber, then a pause, then Masq and GarouMUSH, then Elysium/Amaranth/City of Darknes, then a sudden deluge of WoD MUSHes.
When I joined Amber, the RPG wasn't out yet.* The MUSH wasn't brand new, though...when my roommates and I ran a possesion plot with a character named ".", people though someone named Legion had returned, and that was before we joined.  I was under the impression that Dune had been around pre-Amber...but I wasn't there to witness it.

And you should try to app a feature, now...it's even more convuluted. I've looked into possibly apping Bleys, Random, Mirelle, and  Fiona in the past few years, and it's convuluted as hell.


*What's freaky is that Finndo existed on the MUSH like the Finndo in the RPG, before the RPG was released. I suspect the player had inside info

[wydren]

Sheryl, mentioned above, was on Dune, which I think predates AmberMUSH And Lydia/Amberyl was all over the place, and created the MUSH manual (and I'm sure coded alot as well...I'm not a coder, I'm not sure).

Dune did?  Huh.  I recall AmberMUSH being one of the very few games in town, beyond PernMUSH, at the time I first encountered it.  Of course, the old hoary place went through a large number of cycles of new groups of people suddenly discovering it. Made apping to play one of the feature characters a real bear, if you wanted any kind of respect paid to in-game history.

I could be completely wrong on that, but I thought it went Pern/Dune, then Amber, then a pause, then Masq and GarouMUSH, then Elysium/Amaranth/City of Darknes, then a sudden deluge of WoD MUSHes.
When I joined Amber, the RPG wasn't out yet.* The MUSH wasn't brand new, though...when my roommates and I ran a possesion plot with a character named ".", people though someone named Legion had returned, and that was before we joined.  I was under the impression that Dune had been around pre-Amber...but I wasn't there to witness it.

And you should try to app a feature, now...it's even more convuluted. I've looked into possibly apping Bleys, Random, Mirelle, and  Fiona in the past few years, and it's convuluted as hell.


*What's freaky is that Finndo existed on the MUSH like the Finndo in the RPG, before the RPG was released. I suspect the player had inside info

Ambermush?  Fiona?  Finndo?  I'm going to need some kind of guidebook to decipher this thread pretty soon.

[Mickey Finn]

*tosses a copy of Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny at you*

If you like Jim, you'll probably like the Amber series.

[XavierDLH]

Definately a strange little world.

I hope you're not the one spellchecking the game book, rdonoghue, because there is no A in the word definitely. 

No grammar stridency on the boards, please.

And, no, he's not.  Rob types with flippers.

I know better than to reply to this, but I am going to anyhow.


Firstly, I typically would not be too troubled by a spelling mistake, but misspelling definitely happens to be a pet peeve of mine.  He is also authoring a book -- A book I am decidedly interested in!

And secondly, it had nothing to do with grammar.  Grammar is an entirely different beast from spelling.

[rdonoghue]

Worth noting that in addition to definitely, I will almost always spell criteria incorrectly.

Just one of those things.

-Rob D.

[Bobbin]

And if you even want to get mor convoluted there was the whole series of MUDS that were trying to become mushes. There was a cyberpunk mud we had up and there was the Dune Mud that was getting going abou the time Dune Mush was taking off. Of course that is if you avoid the whole furry muck thing that was starting, never did really understand furry.

[Grogtard]

Thanks to a posting last year on the WW forums, I was introduced to Dresden Files. 
I'm running a Mage Campaign right now and just don't think it would translate well into a DF game.  The system is too linked to White Wolf's view of universe and I just think that feeling wouldn't  be  the same.  I mean FATE is the best system for DF. Right guys?  Yeah that was an obvious kiss up attempt.
Another good generic RPG system would be the Hero system.  Yeah I know it can be math intensive but it's still a good system.  It's the system that I'm planning on using for the next campaign I run using the same setting I created for my Mage game.

[ashton]

Definately a strange little world.

I hope you're not the one spellchecking the game book, rdonoghue, because there is no A in the word definitely. 

No grammar stridency on the boards, please.

And, no, he's not.  Rob types with flippers.

I know better than to reply to this, but I am going to anyhow.


Firstly, I typically would not be too troubled by a spelling mistake, but misspelling definitely happens to be a pet peeve of mine.  He is also authoring a book -- A book I am decidedly interested in!

And secondly, it had nothing to do with grammar.  Grammar is an entirely different beast from spelling.

Howdy.

I'm a technical writer by profession. I've worked with both Rob and Fred in that capacity. Both of them are entirely capable of making a clear distinction between "casual post to a bulletin board" and "professional product what we are selling for actual money".

Additionally, there is no risk at all that Rob and Fred will put out a product of anything but the highest quality. Your concerns are, to put it mildly, misplaced in the extreme. I would suggest reviewing some of their other game products for a sampling of what you can expect in any product with their names on it.

And, finally, pedantry has a place, and that place is not here.

[karmakaze]

Come to DC.  I've yet to meet White Wolf players who *haven't* wanted to run a game in the new stuff.  The new Wraith in particular has gotten some serious props.

Chalk one up.  I still run a hybrid of second and third edition Mage (sort-of world of second, ruleset of third).  The cosmology and organisations of M:tR (Mage: The Reboot) do not do much for me.

Chalk another one up - and I used to run WoD LARPs, which is the extra-geeky subset.  And, once, their Mage system was my favorite of the WoD lines.

I found the new Mage book practically painful to read through and was wholly turned off by both the setting and the fact that we're back to spell lists.  I tried their chat RPG in a couple of genres to see if actually playing improved the experience for me.  It didn't, so I gave my books back and moved on.  I do hear, though, that part of the problem was that the writer they assigned Mage to hated the original Mage, so...

I did happily play Ars Magica (starting back with 2nd edition - because I am an old gamer), where they pulled the original sphere concept from.  (Ars Magica had a slightly more complex breakdown - a sort of verb-subject combination rather than just combining elemental spheres) 

[Artarus]

And see.. other then an ultra-extreme hardcore sect of the Mage:the Ascencion fan base, Mage: the Awakening is seen as a tremendous step forward in the execution of that kind of magic in the White Wolf Universe.

Everyone is welcome to their opinion of course, but I frankly feel that Ascencion catered to a rather pretensious fan base, and reveled in it's complexity and eliteism. It was far to easy for Ascencion to be abused like a red headed step child. Awakening is more accessable to players without degrees in metaphysics.

While I think a White Wolf game could be used to RP the THEMES of the Dresden-verse (and I'm copy writing that if I'm the first to use it) the systems aren't compatible with the flair of the setting.

[Grogtard]

Very true. The magical world view in Mage doesn't mesh up with DF.  It's a different kind of universe.

[Mickey Finn]

Everyone is welcome to their opinion of course, but I frankly feel that Ascencion catered to a rather pretensious fan base, and reveled in it's complexity and eliteism. It was far to easy for Ascencion to be abused like a red headed step child. Awakening is more accessable to players without degrees in metaphysics.

While I risk sounding pretensious...complexity? It's like a cooking show. You want an effect, you combine two spheres and away you go.  It's as simple as the Amber diceless RPG, and just as easy to abuse. You just need a good gamemaster.
I'm really bad a rules-lawyering, having to look up things in tabletop almost constantly because I can't remember the system rules, and I found the original Mage quite easy.

YMMV.

Now, they pure amount of money-making attempts with books is quite astonishing....

[finarvyn]

It's as simple as the Amber diceless RPG, and just as easy to abuse. You just need a good gamemaster.

Mickey, I'd say you hit it just right, but I would add that you need good players.

Pretty much any RPG system can be bent if participants want to badly enough. What you need are players who don't want to exploit a game system and instead want to play a game.

Your example of ADRP is a great one -- a game where there is balance by giving each player an identical number of points, but a potential imbalance if players create characters that are loaded up in one area and thereby one-dimensional.

The GM certainly regulates what the players do, but it's the players who need to police themselves to keep the game interesting.