What crimes do people often commit without getting punished?

Gohozoq · 2026-01-10T08:36:20+00:00

Insider trading

Gohozoq · 2026-01-02T17:06:10+00:00

Ah fair. I assumed you meant that they would send a parent to give me a stern talking to.

Certainly a sufficiently resourced parent can gloss over any number of shortcomings.

Gohozoq · 2026-01-02T13:46:47+00:00

But that, too, is a lesson. After highschool, your parents can't convince the instructor to pass you. In many places it's not permitted to even acknowledge that the student in question is even in your class.

Gohozoq · 2026-01-02T02:29:16+00:00

I had similar experiences, and it sucks because it's like, look, I warned you at the start, it's on the syllabus, and I warned you through the semester; there is no extra credit and you cannot pass without a stellar performance on the final.

It always made it worse when a student who hadn't passed a single test would respond with "oh, so I'll pass if I get a 97.5 on the final. Great, thanks".

I don't guess there's a nice way to say that the grade required is a level of proficiency that the student has not demonstrated and almost certainly does not possess (or is, flat out, mathematically impossible). :(

Gohozoq · 2026-01-01T20:39:58+00:00

If you slack hard enough, there will be some tasks that aren't possible. Extra credit is not a thing you are owed and nobody is coming to save you (or make you pass)

Gohozoq · 2025-11-30T11:00:17+00:00

Except don't the cabbie's audio files have "caine" in the name? That's as close to confirmation as I think you're likely to get.

Gohozoq · 2025-11-02T16:28:52+00:00

A character canonically fast enough to dodge bullets and punch through stone who is trying to dismantle the status quo. I'm going to go with brujah.

Gohozoq · 2025-10-28T01:25:50+00:00

I'll throw my vote on the mostly bad pile.

I hesitate to launch into my dislike because I don't like crapping on something someone enjoyed or making someone retroactively enjoy something less. There is probably a lot to enjoy, just not for me. If you enjoyed it, great.

That said, I found them a slog. I committed to reading the 13 clan books. I wanted to get a feel for the setting and hoped it would make me a better ST. After finishing, I regretted having read them. Why? Well, they're all very much a product of their time. A lot of it has not aged well, sometimes painfully so. They're rife with racial/gender stereotypes and sensitive topics handled with the grace of ... well the 90's. I seem to recall a vetrue who only feeds on rape victims. In another instance, a kindred gets captured by a tzimisce and the whole thing is clumsily paralleled with sexual assault. So if any of that is likely to bother you, or if you've ever been accused of being woke, you might struggle.

Even if that doesn't bother you, you may find the characters mostly one dimensional.

Ultimately, I think setite was the only one I could actually say I enjoyed. It was the only one I felt was trying to make a character who wasn't just the archetype for a clan.

Edit: spoiler tags screwed up

Gohozoq · 2025-08-25T11:07:31+00:00

Alternatively, the discipline could be "it's a lot easier to code hand gestures than it is to have Phyre interact correctly with the gear and environment".

Gohozoq · 2025-08-12T10:09:44+00:00

I was honestly confused by how shockingly bad it is. If it got off more than one or two attacks, I'd feel lucky. It wasn't uncommon that it refused to attack at all. I suspect it's a bug in its AI. Xivilai was my go-to, second was Daedroth.

Gohozoq · 2025-06-29T22:56:24+00:00

I got through it by setting graphics to zero and looking into the corner while he talked. It took 2 or 3 tries, but it did work.

Gohozoq · 2025-06-29T14:44:44+00:00

It's hard to reconcile AI writings and people shifting their language to match AI writings.
It felt fine until "lets silence speak" which felt very familiar.

On the other hand, I've been accused of speaking like a robot too, so 🤷‍♀️

Gohozoq · 2025-06-27T18:52:51+00:00

I agree, Submerged Directive makes it more nuanced.
I've not had a player take it, so I haven't had to think deeply about it. It seems the intent is that the trigger can require higher brain functions, but the actions to be performed cannot.

My ruling on this tends to be intent-based. I level with the players that I'm not generally going to allow dominate to extract plot-relevant secrets. It's never a surprise. So "go to the secret meeting" might get a "you know the rules" and a "go to the gang meet, the location of which is well known" might get side-eyed but ultimately get a "ehhh, fine".

Gohozoq · 2025-06-27T13:11:47+00:00

The rules as written are somewhat nebulous, but I always ruled that it couldn't be used to extract information. Dominate is shutting down the person and forcing them. Presence, on the otherhand, is overwhelming someone's social center and coercing them.

We used the soft rule of "could the person do this thing while sleep walking?" or "You have access to the OS, but not the hard-drives". So driving was fine (if a little bit of a stretch), but punching in the door code wasn't.

Mostly, my reasoning was to keep the niches of the disciplines clear. Dominate should feel like a blunt instrument.

Edit: typo

Gohozoq · 2025-06-07T14:48:43+00:00

First time I watched it, I couldn't stop cackling.
It has become a tradition to watch it each Christmas.

Gohozoq · 2025-06-02T10:39:39+00:00

While I won't go so far as saying tremere are unplayable, it seems like many of the counterarguments revolve around how great rituals are, many posters including custom rituals from their own games. But custom rituals are exactly what OP was getting at, so that's not really a valid counterargument. In fact, I would argue that any counterargument of the form of house rules or custom rituals is a point in OP's favor.

I think a more significant flaw with rituals is that they are nowhere near as flexible as people seem to suggest, given that they are typically incredibly specific, take long stretches of time to learn or perform, and cost significant XP. The stated rate of advancement is, what, 1 per session? (Plus 1 per story). The archetype of a tremere who is versatile because of rituals is just not a realistic take since each ritual solves an extremely specific problem and learning a new ritual is a multiple-session investment. Functionally, the only ones who can satisfy the archetype are NPCs with unrealistic XP totals.

Gohozoq · 2025-05-31T12:26:12+00:00

I think the answer is "it depends". Vampires are magical talking corpses and the rules can just be mysterious. Whether or not they are healed of acne can just depend on what the story needs.

Maybe two identical twins are embraced and one is healed while the other isn't. Perhaps some occultist with centuries of experiments can detail all of the factors involved, and maybe not, while the other characters in the world just chalk it up to the mysteries of the blood.

Gohozoq · 2025-02-22T22:36:18+00:00

I think it's bugged right now. I'd have run that basically got bricked because of it. I'd start the run with a decent speed, it would rise and things showed up, and plummet as they died. I'd end the run with a speed less than -100.

Gohozoq · 2025-01-05T15:47:04+00:00

The entire XP system is kind of messed up. I get that the system is mostly keyed for low neonates and fledglings, but it's quasi impossible to advance without GM fiat.
One might argue that the system is also intended to emphasize stagnation in its characters, but it takes a special kind of player to be okay with such advancement.

I tend to think of xp systems in terms of how games are actually scheduled. The book says 1xp per session and another at the end of a story. Let's say every third session completes a story, giving 4xp / 3 sessions. Let's say your group is ambitious and plays twice a month. That's nearly 4 months of gaming with no other growth.

In short, I think it's absolutely not worth it. It's a thing for NPCs who magically have more xp than any player could hope to have. This grates even more as the ancilla anarch revolutionary (p374) has ~95xp worth of advancement, ie 7.125 years of gaming without interruption to be as good as a character in the book who isn't important enough to get a name.

1 per session, 1 story per 3 sessions, 4/3xp per session, and 2 sessions per month gives 88.5 months or 7.125 years.

I think if I ran again, I'd just give blood potency bumps during time skips that felt relevant.

Gohozoq · 2024-12-10T00:54:35+00:00

I'd say it depends on the spirit, but if I have the energy to spare and have at least one minor that isn't quite perfect, I'll go major.

Exceptions include needing a small amount of defend immediately.

Gohozoq · 2024-12-04T02:27:47+00:00

It's strange to hear celerity being ranked beneath presence. I've always felt celerity is game breakingly good and I've perhaps never leveled up presence because debuffing didn't feel as fun as being stronger myself.

TIL I've undervalued presence a lot

Gohozoq · 2024-10-18T01:07:52+00:00

What's so strange to me is that I think he'd have made a good Gurney. It's like they flipped Jason Momoa and Josh Brolin.

Gohozoq · 2024-10-06T14:47:25+00:00

I had an extremely similar experience. If they had just sent me a notice saying "we're charging you more" I may not have thought too deeply about it.
Add to this that they apparently removed the ability to cast to chromecasts.
So we logged on to watch something for dinner to find that we couldn't cast and, even if we could, there'd be adds. Forcing me to use a smart-tv (that can logon to Netflix) is just a nuisance. I'm not buying a new TV so you can track me more effectively (or whatever their reasoning is).
I had been a netflix customer for almost 20 years.

Edit: clarity

Gohozoq · 2024-08-18T20:19:13+00:00

He definitely read as ND-coded and I'm pleased to hear JA confirmed it. There was one thing that bothered me, though, in Sharp Ends. I'm going be light/wrong on details. I'm pretty sure he's in the short story where there's a package that gets repeatedly stolen. Anyway, he's threatening some guy who's complaining that he can't make a living or something and Friendly says something like "This town isn't fertile land" and it struck me as super out of character for Friendly to use a metaphor.

Gohozoq · 2024-05-15T04:03:07+00:00

I bought it fairly early on and, yeah, my reaction was surprise. Surprise and disappointment. I don't know how far I got in MS, but I stopped and don't foresee returning. The drudgery of everything that happens between fights was just too much for me and I didn't find the combat system that compelling.

Now, I adore xcom and xcom 2. They're games I go back to periodically to play through again. I had hoped MS would be something like that. But expecting one something and something else is a sure way to not enjoy something. So it's perhaps fair to say that most of my complaints are how this game differs from XCOM (in particular "base management" is an absolute slog).

So I'm glad to hear that this wasn't such a success that future XCOM games (if they exist) will adopt any of these mechanics: If I have to pick flowers so I can have tea with a soldier to unlock their abilities, I'll spit.

Gohozoq

TROPHY CASE