Posted by The Student on May 04, 2002 at 14:26:25:
In Reply to: Re: hunter net cliches posted by The_Meehan on May 03, 2002 at 23:13:56:
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I thought that the Heralds had tried a more direct approach, which resulted in broken hunters. Hermits and Waywards didn't work out as planned,
now did they? Hunters are not force multipliers, but the best they could manage without breaking the new recruits.
The fun of Hunter is that hunters are not locked into a set course. They can change, and they can grow. Not to mention the bit where it always seemed to me that, even if the
Messengers have a hidden agenda, the idea is that Hunters can and do have their own goals. The Messengers just have to hope that those goals happen to coincide with their own.
If the messengers think like any kind of middle management, it's Viet Cong middle management. If the guy's not doing what you want him to do, let him go and do his own thing, and
hope that it goes generally in the direction that you've done your best to show him.
Sure, there might be the Patron background, and there might be spontaneous activation of the sight. But, and this is a nice, big caveat, there is no degree of compulsion with the
messages. The conflict is not being forced to do what they tell you to do, but rather the internal conflict of duty against personal values. And, I've always been of the opinion
that the spontaneous activation of the sight has more to do with subconscious warnings that the Messengers sticking their metaphorical fingers in people's ears.
And, I do believe that game designers can be mistaken, and game lines can and do go astray from where they ought. Since I'm the one telling the stories, it's as much my system as
theirs. If I think, thematically, they're going the wrong way, I can and will change it, while leaving the core intact. You should see some of the things I've done in the past
with Rifts or Mage.
And, since Hunter reactions can and do run the gamut from "How can I help" to "Kill them all" and everything in between, I do not believe that the "cosmic puppets forced into a niche"
applies.
But, hey, that's just me.
: : So, ultimately, Hunter as a game is nothing more than a cheap rip-off of Vampire.
: Well, yeah. In the limited sense that everyone's doomed and victims of circumstances and force beyond their control, *all* WW games are cheap rip-offs of VtM. All that really changes is *how*. But the differences in that "how" can be (and are) huge, resulting in games that are really very different to play.
: : I thought the game was about how regular folks reacted to a situation beyond their control, not about people who are nothing more than cosmic puppets.
: You know those circumstances beyond their control? That cosmic puppet is one of those circumstances. ;) Now, admittedly 99.99999% of all hunters will never feel that bite as badly as the poor schmoe we're talking about here, but 99.99999% of all hunters aren't giving the Hands that Imbued them the metaphorical finger either. This is *exactly* the kind of behavior that