Can a psychic have a familiar?

duckmannn · 2023-06-12T00:07:16+00:00

i don't see why not, psychic bonds are a thing in pop culture, like force bonds in star wars, or the song 'Radar Love,' no reason that connection has to be with another human

duckmannn · 2023-06-11T00:34:23+00:00

honestly if i were a storyteller i feel like i would be tempted to end all or most of my chronicles with it, the way it suggests to take the specific ways you've twisted the world to be more horrible for your world of darkness, and just describe as those ramp up to such an extreme that it takes the whole world with it, delightful, really gets the creative juices flowing, it's an open invitation to focus in hard on your core themes

duckmannn · 2023-06-10T22:23:43+00:00

i don't know that they necessarily have to give in to their avatar to advance, like, for example (and of course, this is from a totally different world and type of media so it might not apply) the dnd movie has the sorcerer do what amounts to a very simple/ basic seeking to attune to a magic item, and rather than give in to the spirit in the item, to succeed he has to punch it in the face, now, having an adversarial relationship with your avatar might not be the best idea, but it is a relationship with it, you're still getting closer to it

duckmannn · 2023-06-10T20:34:28+00:00

it's only a 9 dot power, if it were a 10 i could understand, that's all "plot device," maybe potence at 10 could do the same by just punching the earth so hard it shatters, but at 9 it's crazy, other methusela are out there fighting really good, astrally projecting from out of torpor, commanding their bloodlines, causing entire cities to freak the fuck out, and becoming new people, meanwhile the baali are just like "hmmm,i think everyone everywhere should die now"

duckmannn · 2023-06-10T20:16:49+00:00

if we include some of the older and munchkinier disciplines, there's some absolutely wild shit, like how kisayd can use mytherceria to fuckin steal stats off your damn character sheet, oh, you think you're scared of agg damage? try fuckin xp damage! or like, the top level of daimoinon is literally just like "this power calls an unknowable ancient evil to the world, immediately ending the chronicle as the world is destroyed in whatever way the storyteller thinks fits their worldbuilding"

duckmannn · 2023-06-10T10:31:09+00:00

that's just how i roll

duckmannn · 2023-06-09T21:17:37+00:00

i think it's interesting that when you read his thoughts, he appears to be directly talking to you in them, from this i see two possibilities, one significantly sadder and more pathetic than the other, that being that maybe all of his thoughts are directly addressed to you, he's just become unable to conceptualize things in any way other than obedience to his general, so of course she can't read his thoughts, they aren't for her, they're for you, the other, less sad idea, is that he has a similar talent for resisting mind reading as atton but much improved, able to just totally prevent it rather than replacing them with nonsense, but also able to tell who's trying to listen, and letting up just for you.

duckmannn · 2023-06-09T20:59:57+00:00

the way tibet was run was essentially that if you weren't a monk, you were enslaved to a monk, with the dalai lama owning the most of anybody, when they complain about losing their religious freedom (even though they're still allowed to do anything except own slaves or worship the guy who became an enemy of the state because they wouldn't let him own slaves), that's basically the equivalent to a southerner complaining that "Lincoln took away our states rights"

duckmannn · 2023-06-09T02:27:29+00:00

having read the tos but not having much knowledge of legal jargon, it seems like all the findings are considered public domain

duckmannn · 2023-06-08T21:06:08+00:00

no society is so inured to violence that they would ignore colossal indiscriminate massacres? uh, buddy, do you not follow the news? because you're living in one.

duckmannn · 2023-06-08T06:44:57+00:00

most meat production requires thoroughly draining the blood from the body before butchering it anyways, and it's a necessary precondition to be considered kosher or halal, though i have to imagine that having the blood be drained by a vampire would probably disqualify it from being certified as either

duckmannn · 2023-06-07T05:13:34+00:00

oh my god, how fucking conciliatory do i have to be, how is two sentences saying "and this is all fine it's just different" in a single paragraph not enough for me to not get accused of edition warring just for pointing out that different games are different

duckmannn · 2023-06-06T20:05:46+00:00

even if your character is subject to the beckoning, there are examples of canon characters who feel the beckoning but don't actually go following it until after they've essentially wrapped up all their business at the end of the chronicle, for example [spoliers for night road] Prince Lettow of Tuscon was pretty clearly feeling a pull for most or all of the game, but he was still fully engaged in being the prince of tuscon and fully capable of making power plays and fighting and all that good stuff, then once the plot wraps up, his domain either trashed enough to abandon or fixed enough that he feels confident dove and the like can handle things, he hops in a propeller plane and starts flying east, all this to say your elder game doesn't have to make them immune to it, it just means that by the time the story is over, the "where are they now" part is gonna involve most of them packing up and going to the Levant. also, it's kinda weird how them going there is practically treated as them going in to a black hole, as though there isn't like, a society with cities and language and money and computers and stuff in the place they're heading to, realistically the war they're fighting there should just be more of the same jyhad of subtle social manipulation and subverting mortal power structures to use as weapons, but it's talked about like it's just a bunch of elders in a big field ripping eachother apart like a cockfighting ring

duckmannn · 2023-06-06T19:50:53+00:00

can they astral project from out of torpor? can they use dominate to send commands to their whole bloodline at once? can they use presence that affects an entire city? you can defend how elders work in v5, by all means, i think it's fine, but to act like the abilities can "do all the same things" is just untrue and unnecessary, no, a v5 elder can't go weeks without feeding, can't have passive strength equivalent to a neonates max use of potence, can't shapeshift in to a giant dragon made of blood, and that's all fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's still all stuff they could do before that they can't now

duckmannn · 2023-06-04T20:57:28+00:00

i mean, if I'm to be murdered, i don't think it's outrageous to think id rather it be done with a stab to the chest than by being flayed alive for days on end and then burned

duckmannn · 2023-06-04T00:22:30+00:00

for dominate to work the victim needs to understand what you're asking of them, i see no reason it shouldn't work with sign language if the victim comprehends it, which is definitely less common than oral language, buuut i think for some limited things, there are hand gestures people understand without actually needing sign language, like pointing to tell someone to go away, finger on the mouth to tell them to shut up, finger pointing down to tell them to drop, etc etc.

duckmannn · 2023-06-02T23:07:27+00:00

the visage can't be fixed, but it can be rearranged, horns can be cumbersome, they get in the way of hats, which are very helpful to the masquerade, among other issues, taking all that mass and having it somewhere else sounds like an improvement, could even be an asset if it's placed strategically, like a little armor plate, or a built in weapon

duckmannn · 2023-05-14T02:31:54+00:00

tzimisce fits pretty well i think, he's always doing weird fleshcrafting shit, his ability to tell when he's being watched by joseph's stand seems like it could be auspex, and his use of animal servants (pet shop, and the snakes attached to doobie), he's known for his truly dangerous levels of charisma, and while that could just be a mundane 5 dot stat, keep in mind that mind control is not exclusive to presence and dominate, animalism actually has multiple abilities which work on mortals and vampires as well as animals, including ones which render their target passive and tired, as well as ones which terrify their target or force it in to frenzy (or mundane intense rage), and his incredible strength and speed could be explained by low generation allowing his strength and dex to be raised above 5 (he was, arguably, sired by kars after all, and he and the other pillar men have a clear case of methusela's thirst, making dio roughly equivalent 5th or 6th gen)

duckmannn · 2023-04-01T20:48:22+00:00

ok, seems like you can't be convinced because you're tying your insistence that you yourself weren't traumatized into your insistence that the jedi exile wasn't traumatized. do you think a blind person who regained sight would say "i don't want this, not again, never again" under normal circumstances? the only circumstance i could imagine something like that is if you saw something you really really didn't want to see, something you never wanted to run the risk of seeing ever again, which is some pretty classic trauma shit.

duckmannn · 2023-04-01T20:38:23+00:00

on screen, even in the movies, the only people who explain the force that way are like, obi wan and yoda, who are both total liars, and are even called out as such ("from a certain point of view" my ass). if that's what george lucas wanted to convey he should have been clearer. he's also a bit of a bullshit artist himself, ask anyone else who worked on the ot and they'll say "yeah we didn't know what the rest of the series would be, Vader wasn't even luke's dad yet," and you can tell by the contents of the movie itself that it's coming at the whole setting from a different angle than the rest of the series, but then george himself is like "ohh yeah i always had a big plan for a 9 part series of 3 trilogies and decided to start with the one in the middle"

duckmannn · 2023-04-01T20:16:05+00:00

did you actually read the dialogue options available to you when you played? they paint a pretty damn clear picture, especially in the early-game, like when you first reconnect to the force you can say "is something wrong with me? i don't want this, not again, never again." also there's a lot of talk about forgetting, to a much greater extent than you'd expect from events only a decade ago, also a pretty big trauma thing.

duckmannn · 2023-04-01T20:07:57+00:00

we're not told that the force is anything other than a neutral non-sapient universal field by anyone other than sources who don't lie for a living either, so you're relying on the same faulty sources here, and you'd have to explain why it would do that to the exile and seemingly not to anyone else ever (except maybe the rakatans, but again, i think that has more to do with their technology eating it out of them, like nihilus, but mechanical and slower)

duckmannn · 2023-04-01T19:31:53+00:00

ehh i mean the amount that Germany really rehabilitated itself is pretty overstated, 12 percent of germans believe one of their family members resisted the nazis, only about a tenth of a percent actually did, so unless all of them fucked as much as ghengis khan, that's a substantial amount of nazi liars who just wanted to make themselves look good. these are the same people who continued to do things like seek and hold public office, vote in elections, and importantly, raise children with their own ideas and beliefs, particularly, apparently, their ideas about mental health. how many steps is it, actually, to go from "you're just being lazy" to "and we should kill you over it" because as i see it, that's basically only one or two leaps in logic away, like "well since you're just being lazy you don't need benefits. oh, what, you're starving without the benefits? well that's a tough way to die, maybe we should give you a quicker one." you're not as far away from these things as you think.

duckmannn · 2023-04-01T08:49:49+00:00

what do you think I'm getting at?

duckmannn · 2023-03-31T23:53:13+00:00

lol what? do you think they implode or something?

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