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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dykstrav" data-source="post: 3201552" data-attributes="member: 40522">Have you ever played the old World of Darkness games, the ones published before 2004? In a nutshell, this sort of thing was the rule rather than the exception. But it added to the flavor and tension of the games rather than make players question the design and rules of the game (most of them, anyway).If you were a neonate vampire, you couldn't just go mouth off to your sire or the Prince unless you were very careful about it. If you happened to run into a Tremere with maxed out Thaumaturgy or a Gangrel with even median Protean (all possible for brand-new characters with no experience) they could ruin your night pretty quickly. And that's not to mention werewolves, who typically could reduce a vampire of roughly equal experience into a bloody smear on the wall pretty easily. For young vampires, you couldn't just run in and bash everything you wanted. You were a very small fish in a very big pond. To survive, you had to engage in warfare socially and politically. You either made some friends or you didn't survive very long. Things usually ended badly if your first response was to try to directly attack anything. There was no question of 'balance,' because it was obvious that the deck was stacked against you.Same thing with Mage: the Ascension. If you started lobbing fireballs downtown or summoning manticores, some gentlemen in black suits and mirrorshades with Very Big Guns would be paying you a visit. There was even a mechanic built into the magic system of the game itself (paradox) that essentially kept you from being "too cool" with using magic. But these things had a firm basis in the setting and added to the game.Wraith: the Oblivion was even worse than that. You were a new ghost recently awakened in the Underworld. Everything there wanted to take your soul and forge you into items or corrupt you into a servant of destruction. People in the living world often sought to destroy the things that bound you to it.To me, these games prove the idea that the entire world CAN be out to get you and the game is still fun to play. The idea that you can't rely on your cool new powers to solve most of your problems (because everyone else has the ability and inclination to tear you into a bloody pulp if you buck the status quo) made the game far more interesting and complex than the mechanics would lead you to believe.</blockquote>

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