Ask Me Anything: witchdoctor

I haven't but I can definitely see the appeal. WoD had a robust system but it worked differently in each iteration and that made cross-play difficult even between White Wolf's own properties. I played in & ran a crossover VtM/Werewolf campaign back in the day and rectifying the differences in the two properties was difficult because of the nit-picky differences in combat and other rules.
Chronicles of Darkness rectified that you a large extent and really unifies the system. CoD is something I'd consider using as a system to run a game outside of the WoD IP but I think it'd have to be a setting that fit the system. Aberrant was an attempt to broaden the scope of the system but I think it broke the system more than it expanded it.

WoD/CoD sits in a space where it isn't an overly crunchy simulationist system and it definitely isn't rules-lite either. The mechanics rely in some "special quality", I e Blood Pool, Rage, Glamour, etc..., to put the player characters above normal people and it's be difficult to operate as a PC without that quality and that quality is unique to the setting and story. Finding & defining that unique quality is the hard part.

Come to think of it, ShadowRun would probably make for a good fit for the WoD/CoD system. I've been shopping around for a system to sub-in for the SR system. I've been eyeing Unisystem for that but WoD might be just as good a fit and a bit more familiar.

Whoa, now THAT is a combo I'd like to see in action...

I'm also working on a Star Trek idea using the BRP system.

Shadowrun in WoD sounds like something that isn't really my thing personally but that would get a lot of interest here on GP.

Star Trek in BRP sounds like it would work. I'm not too much of a fan of BRP, but it's not a bad idea

oooOO What's your favorite fandom to explore in writing / what fanfic have you written most??

What bands/genre do you enjoy the most and do you listen much? How about concerts? Have you been to any lately?

Who's your favorite Star Trek captain and which is your favorite Star Trek alien species?

If you had more time for hobbies, what's one you'd be most interested in sharing with other people?

Do you think Star Trek still has the same cult status it used to have? Do you think newer iterations of the show and movies have breathed new life into Star Trek, or is it kind of a zombie thing now?

I also hoping it avoids the general curse of "fiddly RPGs" via PbP by being easier to generate characters. The more convoluted the character generation system is, the higher the 'failure to launch' rate seems to be. I think it robs the game's momentum. ShadowRun is terrible about that with so many moving parts that you need a spreadsheet or program to keep up with it.

Trek is just a reaction to just not liking the way Mophidius' 2d20 system is geared. It's definitely more narrative and I just like a more simulationist system. Narrative systems feel a bit more adversarial (GM vs player) to me with their Threat/Momentum metacurrency and I've had some bad experiences with that. I really have to trust a particular GM to get involved in a narrative based game.

Oh man, favorite fandom to fanfic? Probably Star Trek. It's definitely my oldest & first fandom to write from. I started writing alternative story endings to OG Trek back in early high school. OG Trek, the Original Series, was the only flavor of Trek then...and would be for quite a few more years. Having looked back on some of the things I wrote, it's pretty obvious I was writing "weird tales" set in the Trek universe more than anything once I started with stories of my own.
The most prolific amount of fanfic I've written has got to be in the Supers genre. I played in a really long Supers campaign based in a universe where the DC & Marvel Comics characters both existed. I wrote TONS of stories and articles about how the two universes mixed together and integrated seamlessly. I remember writing a timeline and history of the shared universe from like 14.5 billion years back to the current era of 1989 and it filled an entire notebook. I sure would love to have the fevered creative drive and free time I had back then!!

I don't have a "favorite" band or genre of music per sé. I'm pretty eclectic when it comes to my listening tastes and I'm grateful to modern technology for allowing me access to a much wider range of music than ever before.

The only genre of music I actively avoid is modern country. Older country (Johnny Cash, Dolly, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, etc.) I like... Modern Country is AWFUL. It's propagandist pop that feeds a dangerous narrative and reinforces xenophobic tendencies. Musically, it's trash too. I worked at a country music radio station for a couple of years and I was shocked to find out that there was a list of songs we, as DJs, had to avoid playing because those tracks contained explicit racial slurs. The list was as long as my arm.

I do like a lot of electronic music, though. Unusual for someone as old as I am. I usually have some kind of Ambient or Atmospheric music on in the background while I'm at home. Cryo Chamber, Altrusisn Grace Media or SpaceWave are the YouTube channels I stream from for the most part.

I'm fond of a lot of traditional Native music but generally listen to that over headphones since it can be a bit much for people who didn't grow up with it. Black Lodge Singers is a good example. Sounds WAY more Metal than it is 😂.
I do listen to newer Native artists as well, Tribe Called Red/Halluci Nation have some great songs , Frank Walln & Dreezus too but that's definitely for a more specific audience.
I'm a bit of an old school Rap fan as well. Busta Rhymes' older stuff, especially. His music videos were a visual treat!

Hm. I'm not a huge fan of Kirk nor Picard really. Favorite would be a tossup of Sisko, Janeway or Pike. Those three, I feel, have more of the qualities I'd like to see in a leadership position.

Favorite species in Trek? Andorians are pretty cool (pun intended). I thought they had a striking look and an interesting society.
Writing is something I'd like to get back to. I get a fix writing in GP and I enjoy sharing that with the people I play with on here. Pen to Page writing is a wonderful feeling and I enjoy it immensely...even when it's frustrating. I worked on a story for Qralloq's anthology but I just didn't have the time to get it whipped onto shape to submit and it's still a deconstructed mess...


Fandoms have changed a lot since back in the day when they were secretive underground things that people hardly ever talked about openly. Now, they're huge, sprawling groups of the most unlikely people and you can just let your fan-flag fly without being called a geek or nerd and that's GLORIOUS!
I'm old enough to remember when Star Trek Next Generation first dropped. So. Much. Griping. I didn't particularly care for it at first but I have it a shot, a LOT of other Trek fans I knew didn't. They just moaned and complained about how it "Wasn't Really StarTrek"... The modern Trek carries on in the same vein. Fans griped about DS9, then Voyager, then Enterprise and about every movie that wasn't Wrath of Kahn. It's just a cycle and fans will come to begrudgingly enjoy it (more or less) once the cycle of outrage/anger subsides. Each series has its strengths and weaknesses but they're all StarTrek.

I feel that with the newer series of Trek - Discovery, Prodigy, Lower Decks - has expanded the range of Trek beyond what it was and opened up new ways to enjoy the Trek mythos for a newer and wider audience. Those shows literally go where no one has gone before, Trek-wise. I enjoy all of the new series for what they bring to the table.

A lot of the hate that gets heaped on Discovery is because, at its heart, it requires a level of emotional intelligence that a lot of fans weren't prepared for, or in some cases capable of, investing into a story. It has inconsistent writing but every Trek series does...looking at YOU, Voyager...and fumbles the technical aspects and occasionally established history but Enterprise stepped all over those things too. Discovery takes the heat for pushing Empathy in a historical period (now) that sees that as a weakness not a strength.

Picard, as a series, is misunderstood. Some see it as poorly executed fan service, some as just a ratings grab for Paramount+, and some as just "woke trash"... What Picard is, is an elegy for Next Generation and that's why it's as gritty as it is. It's a counterpoint to the Baron Munchausen of the Next Gen series & movies. It's the winding down of a mythology as it comes to a final rest. It seems like Patrick Stewart, having been given creative control of the series, has decided to use that to explore his impending mortality. That's the lens through which Picard makes much more consistent sense.

Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds are great additions to Trek. SNW is OG Trek with modern sensibilities and awesome special effects. A nice way to bring back OG Trek and redeem some of the antiquated views from the 60's and showa utopian future in a way that feels less stilted. Lower Decks is pure fun and irreverently pokes fun at itself. It occasionally gets fairly serious but is a fun romp.

That was an awesome set up and backstory for your character. One thing I heartily agree with you on regarding an advantage of simulationist games is that it's the specifics of the details (whether WoD or SR, etc) that inspire the character creation. I feel you might not have made up Murder Mountain had it been a system that didn't allocate points to 'Resources' aka lair or hideout and further specified how much is 3 or 4 dots of something worth.

I feel a deep need to properly deliver that supers game (we lost that because of missing players). Given a choice, what would be your current preference for systems for supers? More old-school DC Heroes, Marvel FASERIP, M&M, or agnostic ones like Fate or Cypher, or something more rules-lite?

I'm glad you appreciated Murder Mountain almost becoming a character of it's own. Sometimes these ideas just take on a life of their own and practically write themselves! You're right that Murder Mountain never would've come up of someone hadn't mentioned us needing a hideout and there being a 'rules scaffold' in place to better define what was allowed at what level of resource investment. In narrative based games I usually feel like I'm overstepping what's allowed because of the vaguely or undefined parameters of what's allowed or what the GM/Storyteller is comfortable with. Some people thrive in those types of play but I'm generally not one of them.

As far as my choice for Supers RPGs, I've played a fair few:

DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes is a fantastic system that scales well from low powered to cosmic levels well but lends itself to a very Silver Age, Four Color style of play. I played a long campaign in the system and it models most anything you'd need fairly well. Big characters and big plots is what it handles. Justice League, Avengers and main title X-Men live here but so does Batman, Wolverine and Watchmen.

GURPS Supers is great at handling lower to mid level superhumans fairly well with a good grasp of being able to make nuanced characters who also happen to have superpowers. George R.R. Martin's WildCards series is the hallmark setting for GURPS Supers but Daredevil, OG Teen Titans, OG New Mutants, Defenders, Punisher and Spiderman work well in this system.

Mutants & Masterminds I've played a few times and enjoyed the setting and system but it's an elegant way of putting a square peg in a round hole. It's one of the systems to take advantage of the Open d20 license with a clever and thorough treatment of the supers genre. It just doesn't have the same feel as a 'bespoke' system.

Champions... I'm a die-hard simulationist but no. Even I don't like the level of excruciating minutiae that Champions brings to the fold. I remember subbing in for a missing player at a convention one time, picked up a pre-gen character (a cowboy of all things...) and proceeded to de-rail the whole game because the GM (who made every one of the pregens) didn't realize that one of the powers he gave the Cowboy I was playing the ability to target invisible opponents by smell alone. The whole adventure folded in 30 minutes because of overlooked minutiae. (see also: Villains and Vigilantes.)

Marvel's FASERIP is another system I never got into although it was pretty popular. There wasn't a quality or depth to it from what I could tell. I bought a bunch of the supplements and learned to play it mainly so I could use the sourcebooks to generate equivalent stats for the DC Heroes game I was in at the time that blended Marvel & DC together. The random character creation tables really put me off. They made it incredibly difficult to generate a character that A) made sense, B) had any way to maintain a consistent power level between party members & C) didn't just careen wildly off the cliff with a single randomized roll.

Aberrant is a glorious mess. We've had discussions on this system... It's a madhouse of ideas and concepts jammed together in a crazy-quilt of a system. Ostensibly it's the World of Darkness system with a bunch of contradictory super powered advantages Frankenstein-ed onto it. The setting is a Masterpiece, the system is a Mess. With enough time, attention to detail, and care the system could be rectified into a really balanced and playable companion to the the awesome setting it was meant to run.

Fate, Cypher, PbtA Masks and other games like them I've just not had a chance to play. They're more narrative systems from what little I know about them and I tend to stay on the simulationist side of games. With simulationist games I cand find common footing with everyone as far as expectations go; with narrative based games I feel like I'm dangling over a void, not knowing which way ti too much or too little. Is Aneurism Man viable, excessively powerful or woefully underpowered? Hard to tell for me without a framework to go on...

Bowl talks up Smallville but I've had zero interaction with that system either.

Smallville also leans more simulationist but I don't think you'd have the Aneurism Man problem with that one as the game does have established powersets to choose from (though they're a bit more loose). Also, the system is explicitly designed to have you play Superman alongside Lois Lane, both as PCs, and it works pretty well. I played and then ran a game on here that had a Kryptonian PC and a human without powers (though she later got a few minor gadgets) and it never felt unbalanced.

The rulebook is pretty messy, though, I think. Not as confusing as Cortex Prime, but it still took me a while to fully get it.

Fellow in my 50s. What about the red box nostalgia hit do you wish 5e would have? What innovations in 5e do you like best? Best D&D version?

Osiyo! I believe if I remember correctly, you were learning Cherokee and wondering about your progress. Do you think keeping the language alive is a necessary step in maintaining a cultural identity?

I haven't played 5e yet...at all...and thus far don't feel the need to. Something about it just doesn't grab me like other editions did. I started out on the OG Red Box and graduated up to 1st Edition and played it perhaps the longest. I still have all my old orange spined rulebooks! They didn't carry D&D in bookstores around where I lived when they had the cool demonic covers, unfortunately.

I'd moved on to the wider universe of gabes and genres by the time 2nd Edition cane out. I thought it was a nice improvement and played it some but not anywhere near as much as 1st Edition.

3rd Edition brought me back into D&D after a really long hiatus. It and 3.5 rekindled the magic of Old School D&D. I bought the books and played a little but by then it was real hard to find a group to play with so I played via PbP for a bit before turning my PbP attention to other gabes and genres. I still feel that 3.5, the mess that it was, is the best non-OSR version of D&D.

I took one look at 4th Edition on the store shelf, leafed through it and put it back. It was definitely not a ruleset or environment I'd want to play in. Thankfully, as a standard ruleset, it didn't last long. Pathfinder cane along and was like 3.5+ and I liked it MUCH better but never had an opportunity to sit down and play a game.

5th Edition rolled out and overall it looked much better than 4th did but it just didn't make me want to play. I guess as an older player who started with editions that were pretty merciless I just didn't feel the same sense of imminent danger for my character with all the mechanisms and mechanics in play to (and I hate to use the term) 'coddle' a character through the adventure. It sounds like a curmudgeonly grognard when I say that I miss things being hard and dangerous and dirty.

Of the 5E mechanics I'm aware of, I do like the Inspiration mechanic. Rewarding a player for innovative thinking or good roleplaying is definitely something be encouraged! It's a metacurrency and I generally dislike them in most games but it's a good addition in this case, I think.

So, TL;DR: 1st Edition I still like best but 3.5 using the E6 variant rules is probably my favorite "modern" take on D&D.

ᎣᏏᏲ ᎠᎬᏱ ᎠᎩᏙᎯ!

I'm still learning and try to use it as much as I can. It's been a journey learning Cherokee just because it's really different from English. I'm still definitely at a beginner stage but it's coming together. I've used it a bit in a couple of the games I'm playing in on GP. I know there are a lot of players on GP for whom English is a second or third language and I'm always impressed with them being able to manage fluency in multiple languages.

It's absolutely necessary to maintain a language as a part of culture. Language is as much a way to form a thought inside your own mind as it is to communicate that thought to others. Being able to understand and communicate in a language let's you better understand how those people think and feel. As a tool for cultural cohesion language is vital, I think. If it wasn't, there wouldn't have been such a strong effort to stamp it out over the last 500 years.

I remember watching the series back in the day although I never finished it. It was definitely the show that set the standard for superheros shows on the CW network up until The Flash. If I remember correctly, there were quite a few TV & Movie IPs that released Cortex based games, right? I want to say Firefly had a Cortex based game but I could be wrong...

Do you think the Smallville game fit the tone and feel of the TV show well?