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Old 07-24-2017, 06:04 PM   #19
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: my new campaign ideas

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
The other is the character modelling: there was something in White Wolf's ideas about how people behave that I've never quite grasped. This makes it hard for me to deal with the representation of personalities in Storyteller, whereas I can do it fairly easily in GURPS or Hero System.
Of course this is purely a matter of taste. But I've felt for some time that Hero characters are really flat, whereas GURPS and OWoD characters are interesting, in quite different ways. OWoD is like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Big Eyes Small Mouth or Call of Cthulhu in that it doesn't have a lot of personality mechanics. But the campaigns of all of those that I've played in or run have had plenty of roleplaying, whereas I didn't feel that Hero's support for that was as good somehow.

Just speculating, it might be that Hero gives maximum resolution to the combat scenes and tactical decisions; everything else feels a little sidelined. So characters in Hero seem to spend less time revealing personality or engaging in social interaction.

On the other hand, it's true that Mage is a lot about superpowers! Perhaps the difference is that in Mage you're explicitly required to think about the style with which you perform superhuman feats, and the organization where you learned them, and its relationships with other organizations, and the typical personalities of members of the organization, whereas Hero looks at powers through a more purely mechanical and tactical lens.

Or maybe it's that, like Call of Cthulhu, the various OWoD games have an explicit "you're so ****ed" mechanic, and you always have to trade off power against personal problems.

In any case, the Mage campaign I ran and the Changeling one I played in both had characterization and personal quirks and social interaction all over the place. But that might be because of the people I was gaming with.
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