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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

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[KingofstarrySkies]

yea, he's doing some balancing around the three lines we're using to make them Not Broken in a mixed party. i don't blame him, since hunter vampire and werewolf are like the closest to the same power balance and even they need some tweaking

trust me if balance wasn't an issue i'd be popping some fuckin demon up in here but alas

[Egan_BW]

Aren't humans way less powerful in general than vampires? Aren't werewolves like, scary powerful compared to vampires?

[NullForceOmega]

That's rather dependent on how the storyteller handles things, I ran a human that embarrassed the hell out of both vampires and werewolves, but that was due to almost Old Man Henderson level backstory stuff (well, not really, I actually wrote everything out, it wasn't hundreds of pages, and my storyteller actually read and okayed everything and held me to what was written.)

If the storyteller plays everything exactly according to the books, werewolf and vampire are fairly close, but humans are terrifyingly weak (except full-fledged hunters).

[wierd]

I love how these systems overlook the obvious;

In a universe where these creatures are so powerful, and their food so weak in comparison, there is no check or balance against a vampire hegemony, or a werewolf superpack (lol) running the whole damn world.

Since humans manage to somehow stay on top, there *HAS* to be an elite caste of human, otherwise the narrative structure lacks sufficient tension to have suspension of disbelief.

So, where is the "super human" demographic in these universes?
*crickets*

[NullForceOmega]

True Faith Hunters, generally.  But they're incredibly rare, and I'm pretty sure they had some ridiculous restrictions.  It's been like fifteen years tho' so my memory is a bit hazy, I also never owned Hunter, just Masquerade and Apocalypse.

My character bypassed all of that by having a monitor attached to his pacemaker that alerted the DoD when he was in danger, which would of course lead to serious problems for the silly hidden groups of supernatural creatures.  After all, having their whereabouts broadcast to the whole world is universally bad for those groups.

[Jimmy]

Possibly the vampires and werewolves are kept in check by plucky bands of unlikely heroes?

Or crime-solving adolescents and their talking pet animal side-kick?

Or maybe just by murderhobos.

[Trekkin]

I love how these systems overlook the obvious;

In a universe where these creatures are so powerful, and their food so weak in comparison, there is no check or balance against a vampire hegemony, or a werewolf superpack (lol) running the whole damn world.

Since humans manage to somehow stay on top, there *HAS* to be an elite caste of human, otherwise the narrative structure lacks sufficient tension to have suspension of disbelief.

So, where is the "super human" demographic in these universes?
*crickets*

Well, setting aside the large subset of those settings (including the WoD Vampire games) where the supernaturals do rule the world and domesticate humans into doing whatever they want us doing without requiring their constant attention, the super human demographic is usually just normal humans. You don't need an "elite caste" when you have numbers and the capacity to effectively coordinate them, and the majority of urban fantasy posits supernaturals that are relatively rare and usually isolated.

There's also a question of incentive. Vampires in particular are notorious for being deeply insecure in many settings, WoD included, and hunting is a way of showing their superiority and place in the hierarchy and so forth; a people farm would provide them with blood, sure, but not prestige or entertainment. Mages and to some extent Werewolves from the same setting don't necessarily want anything from humans that would require outright ruling them anyway.

Lastly, of course, the biggest obstacle most of the overtly predatory supernaturals face is each other; in many cases the prospect of world domination is administratively untenable for any subset of them small enough to be stable, in part since they're written primarily to accommodate 3-5 person gaming groups being significant.

All of this points to being the secret rulers of a humanity overtly controlled by the human puppets of the supernaturals, which is the baseline assumption for a lot of these games anyway.

[wierd]

In this last case, which I can indeed see, there would still be underground guerilla like outfits.

Depending on their level of sophistication, they would be able to produce superhumans of varying degrees. (Human inocculated with special intestinal flora that constantly secretes garlic compounds, for instance. Sure, they smell horrible all the time, but they are totally toxic to vampires-- etc.) Perhaps even with agendas toward covertly converting large demographics of the population into such "variable superhumans". (Introduce their new transgenic lactobacillus into the local drinking water, AFTER the treatment system... et al.)

I really dont see these being demonstrated.

[Jimmy]

I can see it now: Raised from a young age, fed only on holy water, sacramental wine and communion crackers, the Catholic Crusader comes to purge the unclean from God's sight!

[wierd]

Less that, more

"Holy shit-- Did that guy just FLY!?"
(Gets grabbed from behind and pulled into a dark alleyway)

[shadowy figure]
"Listen. If you know what is good for you, you will say nothing about what you just saw."

[shocked guy]
What are you talking about?! That guy just ripped that chick's throat out, and literally FLEW OFF! That is some whack shit!

[SF]
"Look, those things? they OWN the cops. They OWN the government. If you go blabbing, they WILL erase you. Just like there will be no news about this death in the paper tomorrow."

[SG]
How the hell do you know so much about this shit?

[SF]
We secretly oppose them. Now-- Either go home, and forget you ever saw what you just saw tonight-- OR, come with me if you want to do something about it, because the cops wont do shit.

[IcyTea31]

The Hunters are those "super humans" in WoD, at least those that join the Conspiracies. The Ascending Ones do alchemical drugs that temporarily give them superhuman abilities, the Cheiron Group sticks monster parts into their operatives for the same, Aegis Kai Doru wields ancient relics, and so on.

Even without the powers, though, the Hunters' primary advantage is their unity. Vampires, for instance don't rule the world because they have too much internal strife to actually work together or decide who of them should be the highest ruler.

[wierd]

The need to operate in secret means that they would be suspicious of incorporating new members. This means that while there would be some very powerful and influential groups, there would also be countless other local groups of far less renown, all operating in strict secrecy, and thus unknown to each other.

EG, a group could form when 2 hunting (as in, deer/elk/other) buddies witness a werewolf totally shred the fuck out of a moose they were getting ready to shoot, and then decide to start their own group.  They would not have access to many resources, and their group would necessarily be small-- but they would have goals towards finding out about the creatures, and how to oppose them, which would include approaching and recruiting specialists to improve their capacities to do so.

Depending on who they approach, and how successful they are (perhaps they get the PhD student specializing in proteomics, and synthetic protein synthesis, who has access to the university equipment for the PhD project), they could gain "untested, likely very dangerous" capabilities as a group.


The number of potential adaptations would be alarmingly diverse, but each group would all think they are the only ones, except in rare circumstances where they meet.

[Rowanas]

Good points, certainly, but these things also run on the dramatic.  hunter groups meet -all the time- because when several groups all have a very niche focus, they find each other just out of dramatic necessity, and then those two hunters and a PhD student meet up with a proper group of hunters, or join up to form a proper group or whatever.

Drama demands it!

[KingofstarrySkies]

it's also old world of darkness so like
hunters have their Own Magic it's just kind of shit in comparison to the ability to turn someone into a chair or turn into a wolfman

but yknow, i got a gun and judge powers so i'm sure i'll be just fine
also yeah literally the exact 'super humans' you're on about is literally just Hunter: The Reckoning and to a far, far lesser extent Hunter: The Vigil, wherein they're blessed with spooky fucking pseudo magic/supernatural power and told to INHERIT THE EARTH and TAKE BACK THE NIGHT etc though hunters are so spread out and sparse that there's not really any coordinated takes on what that means beyond your own cells in cities, which are almost always groups of Imbued (hunters) who all got Woke together in the same incident.

so there are some hunters who honest to god want to help any monsters they can and see the good in the ones that have it, and there are the standard KILL EM ALL losers, etc. it varies a lot depending on your creed but only a few are outright Kill All Monsters Forever

for example i'm gonna be playing a judge creed, someone who believes in finding the guilty and the innocent and that there are monsters/supernaturals that aren't so bad and are relatively alright compared to some of the fucking corrupt, awful people given that yeah, most of society? it's run by the supernatural. vampire clans run cities and mages are constantly trying to do much of the same- they clash a bit- and vampires are frequently bogged down by infighting and politics

werewolves are like, furry hippies? not sure

demons are way too fucking busy for your stupid politics because the literal actual creatures from hell are making cults and our cult has to be way cooler than theirs also theirs is into human sacrifice and mass slaughter

demon is pretty fucking rad

one more edit: hunters are vaguely organized via a website called hunternet or some shit but they actively don't use it for 'meetups' or whatever because, well, it's on the internet and is as easy to browse as, say, this very forum so some vampire could happen to be posing as a hunter on the forum, meet up with you, and gun you down like the stupid bastard you are. however it's a general rule that most if not all hunters by a few weeks in know that other hunters exist and they're not the only Imbued out there hearing voices in their head or seeing words that don't exist

[Egan_BW]

Now, if there are bullshit magical predators out there eating humans all the time, that naturally means that said humans will experience some form of selection pressure. People with habits that get them munched by vampires die, and fail to spread those habits. Maybe innate magic works in a similar way, and Hunters are basically an adaptation to deal with the predators. This means that as vampires continue to kill normal humans are a rate faster than hunters (cause it's easy), the number of hunters will gradually increase until all of humanity are hunters.