A writer from Roosh Valizadeh’s terrible Return of Kings site recently got himself into a bit of trouble at a white power convention in Tennessee.
The problem wasn’t that the writer, one Blair Naso, didn’t fit in with the motley assortment of Hitler-lovers and former National Review writers who attended the 2015 American Renaissance conference, put on by an organization that actually has won itself an official “hate group” designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center for its virulent racism and its obsessive advocacy for a white “homeland.”
No, he fit in fine, ideologically speaking. In a post for Return of Kings, Naso praised the AmRen crowd for “doing a wonderful work,” and “saying the things that others are terrified to say.”
The problem? Well, Mr. Naso got a wee bit drunk and started harassing women at a local bar. As Naso sheepishly admits in his ROK post,
On the first night, I got very drunk. If I were wise, I would have gone to bed after the speakers, but instead I went to a nearby bar with the other guys. I went around asking girls to dance, because I wanted to use the swing lessons I had taken. All of them rejected me, because no girl likes an obnoxious wasted guy.
A few young girls were being especially snarky. I knew they wouldn’t dance with me, but I decided to ruin their night anyway. I go up to them and say, “You’re fat, and I’m balding. Let’s dance.” They kept saying no, and I kept asking them, just to piss them off. One pushed me, and I pushed her back, and then the bouncer literally threw me out of the bar.
Another conference attendee, Matt Parrott of something called the “Traditionalist Youth Network,” tells a similar story of Naso’s misadventures.
Here I was at the bar … when I felt pushed by a nearby scuffle and saw the short, balding, swarthy guy [Naso] being physically thrown, black-and-white Western-style, out of the bar.
Parrott ran outside to try to cool Naso off, sitting beside him on the grass while Naso went on about “how the girl was fat and had no right to reject his advances.”
We kept him off of the property and got him back to the conference safely, then spent the next hour or so effusively apologizing for him, buying the girls drinks right and left, and promising the locals we would avenge their girl in short order.
As Parrott evidently sees it, Naso’s actions don’t necessarily reflect badly on the white race, “since the guy’s (arguably) not exactly white.”
Naso, for his part, insists that despite his “olive complexion” he has a “largely Scottish background.”
White Supremacy sure is complicated, huh?
Parrott was much more impressed with Naso’s traveling companion (and Return of Kings colleague) Matt Forney, who also attended the event. In Parrott’s estimation, Forney was the Gallant to Naso’s Goofus.
Forney thoughtfully argued his anti-feminist and male-empowering positions until he was too drunk to thoughtfully argue. Meanwhile, his fellow attendee boorishly irritated both male and female attendees alike until he was too drunk to contain his frustration about women and pushed one of the local girls at the nearby bar.
It certainly sounds like a glorious moment in the history of the white race.
In any case, Naso’s post on the conference is, he says, his swan song to the Manosphere. In a post on his own blog, he declares that
I’m quitting the Manosphere and will very likely not return, because it’s been exacerbating some personal demons in my life for the last several months, which I won’t go into detail here with a sob story.
It would seem like this is a product of the fiasco at AmRen, but that would be a wrong assumption. AmRen at the very most only moved it up by a few weeks, if even that. This has been coming for a while, and it takes more than a few dorks who live on the internet to make me quit.
Also leading to his decision: his horror at discovering evil feminists like … Lindy West.
I could have gone my whole life without being exposed to Jessica Valenti and Lindy West. We are writing against some truly vile and empty human beings on a very deep level of the soul, regardless of their actions. I think any man or woman who is exposed to mainstream feminism long enough will lose some part of himself, no matter what his reaction.
Poor fella! As Lindy’s Twitter bio asks:
WHY FAT LADY SO MEAN TO BABY MEN
Why, Lindy, why?
P.S. If any of you have any doubt that a large number of the readers of Return of Kings are completely awful Stormfront-style racist assholes, take a look at the comments on Naso’s ROK post. Yow.
“(Oh wait, MRAs don’t fucking HAVE souls.)”
Careful about dehumanizing people you disagree with, even if their views and actions are reprehensible. That’s a dangerous habit that leads to reprehensible views and actions, and I don’t think you want to end up like them.
The history of people who have said other groups of people don’t have a soul is not a proud one.
This year for her birthday, my youngest asked for tickets to GenCon. She’s now counting down the days.
I have a signed copy of Changeling: The Gm’s Guide. Unfortunatedly in pencil, but he was a great GM and player (Mark Hunter)
Yeah, roll20 isn’t exactly intuitive once you’re learning it. I found some guides on youtube which helped me deal with the worst of it. As for learning Vampire: Masquerade?
Step 1: You don’t.
Step 2: You learn Vampire: Blood and Smoke, the updated rules for Vampire recently released. Easier, simpler, faster to learn, tied in with the rest of the nWod line because they use the same base system as everything else. WIth updated, neat rules for everything, exploits fixed and combat without rolling 4 dice pools every action!
Alternatively and far less glip, what questions you got? I’m running a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign for some friends of mine. Or, 20th Anniversary version of Masquerade, which is basically Masquerade except with some tiny details.
( Wait, Fibi, why would you tell people to learn V: BS if you personally DM VtM? Because my group refuses to play any game released after 2003, so it’s D&D 3,5 and VtM all the time every time. No Shadowrun or GURPS or Apocalypse World of Only War or Dark Heresy or anything for me, alas and woe. )
VtM Is a fun game though. Had an interesting session once where I showed up as a 14th generation caitiff (read: a vampire with such weak vampiric abilities that you’re treated as a joke, and blood so diluted you don’t count as any clan) in a coterie of gruff Ventrue 9th generation (read: 500 year old vampire aristocrat) and a 10th generation Toreador (read: 400 year old vampire Jackson Pollock). Cue an entire campaign going: “Yeeesss, Master!” and “With speed! Please-don’t-kill-me”.
It turns out the greatest vampiric power isn’t the ability to punch through a steel wall, outrun a speeding train or dominate the mortal masses, it’s Skills: Computer, because while everyone else is plotting the destruction of their enemies and having their eternal Jyhad, the person with computer skills can get online shopping to deliver 4000 pounds of fertilizer to a city block, triggering essentially every terrorist alarm ever.
Bah, 500 year old immortal demigods. I have google street-view and Craigslist.
Sorry to disrupt the gaming discussion but GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE!
London Transport has fucking FINALLY implemented a simple report system for sexual harassment/assault on the Underground.
http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/7062078
The comments are OK, but have a few idiots in it who are insisting that women should react to assault with violence. And aren’t getting that she’ll be the one with the report if she does…
If you want a game with vampires and more coherent mechanics than V:TM, you might also consider After Sundown. It was designed by an acquaintance of mine, and I helped with editing and development. It’s free. The rules are here as an html doc: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52316
There’s also a PDF, but I’m not seeing it hosted in the first page of google hits. If you’re interested, I can go find find the link where my friend hosts it.
I actually have the 3rd editions of Masquerade on PDF. I also really know the lore. Gehenna, thin-bloods, the Carmilla, the Sabbat, churches made out of flesh, Smilin’ Jack was a pirate–that stuff.
I also read Order of the Stick, plus Anti-Heroes (which I believe is coming back), so while I don’t know DnD, I at least know the setting.
Plus, I have an unfinished table top of my own I kinda forgot I was making that’s a ripoff of Fallout, and features an alternative universe where Nikola Tesla takes over the Continental Edison Company after Thomas Edison chokes on a fishbone. Then there’s a cold war, an alien invasion, an asteroid impact, and thousands upon thousands of nuclear power plants melting down around the world all pretty much in the same decade. It’s an unserious adventure.
@ Sunnysombrera
Obviously just reporting an assault is of course an option; it’s not idiotic to suggest (rather than insist) that the woman utilises violence. Violence can be a superb option in these cases. You have to know how to deal with the authorities (Key tip: It’s not what you do that gets you into bother; it’s what you say afterwards) but if you do know how to deal you can ‘get away’ with anything.
Basically there’s no duty on a woman to fight back, but there’s nothing wrong when a woman does.
Isn’t it “nostalgia”?
@Hoosier X
HAH!
Thanks for all the tips for V:tM, everyone! 😀 I’ll be sure to look into those other games as well.
I’mma be honest: The only real reason I got into V:tM was because of the game Bloodlines. It’s a terrible game in terms of mechanics and functionality, but it’s still really fun.
@Fibbi: We’re not sure when we’d run the campaign, and I’ve been more interested in making sure I know roll20 first that I haven’t done much research outside of a couple of quick Google searches. I’m really leaning on my best friend and all his DM skills for this one, to be honest. He’s got way more experience than me (in Pathfinder mostly).
My husband and I played V:tM briefly a few years back. I did enjoy it while the campaign lasted. All of the players were novices, our characters were fledglings, so a lot of it was figuring out what was going on while not getting killed* over ignorant mistakes. One cool.part – much of the action took place in downtown Denver. When I visited that city, I was able to recognize landmarks from the game.
*Permanently, that is.
That’s one of the things I really like about V:tM is that it scratches my itch for a more “modern” fantasy world, and it can take place in a city you already know.
V:tM is a fun game, but Werewolf: the Apocalypse was much more enjoyable for me. I loved playing a Red Talon. They are a tribe of werewolves that are 0% human-born. They are all wolf-born, or rarely metis (born of two werewolves, which is Not Legit). It was an immense amount of fun to try to get into the head of a character who had been born a wolf, thought like a wolf, had a wolf’s outlook, and absolutely loathed humans.
If you’re attached to V:tM, though, I have to agree with Fib: clever player use of the available skill set is far superior to any kind of powergamer minimaxing. One of my characters was a standard 13th Gen Giovanni who made a living out of creating new identities for old vampires who understood that the Social Security Administration and IRS constitute a problem for them but had no clue how to resolve that problem. By the end of the campaign I had SO MANY FAVORS to call in! Tons of really old and powerful vampires owed me boons, and I was basically untouchable. 😀
@Banana Jackie:
The Spanish Armada sailed east through the English Channel, fought a couple of battles, and then legged it further east and north. They sailed up and around Scotland, then meant to sail west and turn south well clear of Ireland, but the Gulf Stream pushed them east and south, and they got caught in storms off Ireland. Lots of ships got pushed onto the rocks because they had abandoned their anchors (cf “legged it” above).
@I almost swallowed …
Wow was that absolutely unfair to Charlie Brown. Chuck don’t hate, yo.
Also, virgin shaming: knock it off.
@smithshadow:
Eh?
*Pours a libation of a few GPU cycles for Argenti, who’s not here for all the Vampire talk*
Oh god — I thought getting Savage Worlds’ exploding dice to work in Roll20 was bad, but all that looks like is “/r {1d6! , 1d6!}k1”
Here’s the World of Darkness wiki page.
Oh yeah, I was going to link to white wolf wiki. Good stuff, thanks Falconer.
And I agree with Policy of Madness! Werewolf is also lots of fun, because it’s… interesting, I guess. It’s difficult to sum up exactly why I found it so neat, but I think it was the fact you were essentially an unstoppable murder-machine that could rip 99 % of anything apart and ripping things apart was a bad idea. I have a great big joy for games where you’re handed very powerful abilities and have to figure out a way to avoid ending up in situations where you have to use them. Granted, the version I played was Forsaken, not Apocalypse, so it might have changed a little.
Knowing Law(Bureaucracy) is far more powerful than Celerity 6. Well, unless you’re being run down. Then I guess Celerity does end up winning.
I also really quite love Changeling: The Lost, maybe because after doing rounds of Vampire and Werewolf it’s neat to work with an entirely different set of assumptions and rules. People play changelings who were stolen by superpowerful fairy lords and recently escaped back into the world. Make deals with electricity! Make a contract with a troll for strength! Be hunted down by the artificial humanoid puppet the fairies put in your place when they stole you!
@Paradoxical:
Bloodlines is lovely. Argenti would tell you all about it where they here. I still recommend learning the ruleset for Blood and Smoke, then using it to just run old Masquerade stuff (with Gangrels and Nosferatu and things!). It’s a lot “better” all around. The ruleset for V:Tm is clunky, at best. It does what it needs to do but nothing more than that. There’s actually a lot to be said for the way the mechanics reinforce the thematic underpinnings of the game in some instances, though. Conscience for instance is a pool of 1-5, and when you have a crisis of humanity, you coll your conscience. If you fail, you lose Humanity, and if you pass, you don’t.
And then you might wonder: Wait, so having a higher conscience means I have more dice to roll when taking the Humanity tests, and so higher conscience means less odds of me losing humanity when I murder and kill stuff? That seems odd, wouldn’t high conscience mean I regret murdering and killing more?
no, because Conscience actually measures whether you’re still human enough to feel bad and need to justify your actions to yourself. So a high conscience roll allows you to avoid losing Humanity when you have to take that test because you can use it to self-delude yourself into thinking ripping three guys apart with your barehands was neccesary. Low conscience characters don’t have the little voice that says “Hey, this is bad” any more.
Fun stuff.
Anyhow, Vampire: Blood and Smoke rules are easier to learn.
I might also recommend Demon: The Descent (For playing the cast-off detritus of a divine intelligence trying to avoid notice in modern times), Demon: The Fallen (for playing actual demons recently escaped from Hell and having to do fastuain bargians to get Belief to fuel powers, fun times all around).
Those are all nWoD, which use dice pools of d10s to solve actions.
Night’s Black Agents is gumshoe, which means instead of rolling you “spend points” to find important clues at times, and then roll when more randomization is needed (using d6). You play secret agents of all stripes (cold war veterans, iraq intelligence chums, stressed corporate goons) who, after serving their time, found out some part of who they worked for where, err, vampires. Oh yeah vampires are real. And now they know you know.
Good luck!
GURPS has a Vampire: The Masquerade supplement, which is GURPS rules through and through. 3d6 to roll under skills, mechanically brilliant, intuitive and easy to use (and learn) with options for extra rules and extra rules and extra rules until you need a compendium for your compendiums of rules. It’s easier to learn and more coherent than World of Darkness basic rules. White Wolf (/Onyx Path)’s general strengths are their settings and amusing inventiveness, not their coherent mechanics.
I agree with Fibinachi: the actual mechanics of dice rolling and whatnot are better in the nWoD (“New World of Darkness”) games than in the original set, which are technically called “Classic World of Darkness” but everyone call them “Old World of Darkness.” However, in many cases the stories and settings are less interesting than the old ones.
Vampire: The Masquerade is the classic Vampire game, and it’s much more interesting than the new one, “Requiem.” Playing Masquerade with new world rules makes sense. The most up to date rules are not in the product called “New World of Darkness Core Rulebook,” but bizarrely, in a book called Blood and Smoke. This happened for stupid legal reasons. Basically, Onyx Path, the company that makes these games now, wanted to make a second edition of the core rulebook, but couldn’t get the legal rights. So they wrote a new edition of the rules anyway and then printed it under weird names like “Blood and Smoke” or “Chronicles of the God-Machine.”
Anyway, I would actually offer one caveat to Fibinachi’s advice. I haven’t read Blood and Smoke yet, but in the new world of darkness rules that preceded it, combat rules were absolutely terrible. If Blood and Smoke didn’t fix them and you want to have a lot of fighting in your game, you should stick to the rules for Masquerade and not use the new stuff.
Depends on your preferences I guess. B&S and the new God Machine Chronicles use a combined [Stat] + [Skill] + [Environmental/Personal Modifiers] – [Defenses of target], with each success adding to damage and each weapon having a flat damage at start. So it’s really your attack pool minus the total of an enemies defence, then damage minus armor if applicable. This means its one roll to figure out what happens in any combat situation, which I find infinitely superior to rolling 4 pools every time I want to resolve an action. Defences are higher compared to standard nWod, (dex/wits + atlethics, not jus dex/wits), damage is higher and armor is a little easier to get but harder to conceal.
There *was* some issues with damage in the original New World of Darkness rules – I fondly remember my perfectly normal human investigator being shot 9 times and being absolutely fine because of unlucky rolls on behalf of the person doing the shooting.
That’s resolved a lot in B&S (And CotGM), which makes armor worth having and damage higher in general. A few fun options like all the varies penalties, beats and effects that can apply, merits and flaws and so on change things up. I guess I like it because I don’t really want “combat” to be the main point of my WoD games, so the system works for what it does, which is to resolve combat in a dramatic fashion with repurcussions to allow the story to continue.
When running Shadowrun it makes more sense that each attack is so involved and includes rolling 4 pools with a bunch of modifiers, when you’re fighting in Shadowrun it’s kind of “the point”.
Anyway, I suppose going on about the specific implements of RPG games is only tangentially on topic in the comment section of of an article on drunken return of the kings writers, so I’ll stop now.
ANd thanks for the link to your friends game, Orion! It’s actually some good stuff.
3 or more rolls per attack are unnecessary. It’s one of the worst mechanics in shadowrun and it makes Shadowrun combats really painful to play. However, ease of play is only one of the two big questions I have for a system. “Is it fast/easy/fun to use?” and “does it spit out results that make sense/are fun?” The nWoD 1-roll system fell down hard on the latter, last I checked.
The problem is that adding a few more dice really doesn’t matter much. You don’t need much skill to almost always hit, and once you have that, any extra bonuses are just small amounts of extra damage. This is a game where the difference between and average person’s strength and the strongest mortal human is +3, and if you have vampire superstrength you maybe get another +2. That ends up being 2 extra damage per attack, when your weapon already does 4 or 5 or something.
What this means is that quantity beats quality every time. A vampire or werewolf can probably punch out two humans with baseball bats, but it’s almost impossible to get tough enough to fight 5 people at a time. That’s certainly “realistic,” in terms of how fighting usually goes in real life, and it might be a good thing if you really want to encourage players to be cautious and avoid conflict. But, it does mean that characters can’t be action heroes, and it tones down the horror aspect a bit too. If you think an angry monster should be able to tear its way through a biker gang or a police station, you really shouldn’t use nWoD.
Oh man, GURPS. The few times I tried to play, i got bogged down in all the little modifiers, and people with modest Guns skills (like, 14-15) can’t hit anything at range dependably.
I think the baseline is expected to be Guns + the Accuracy of the gun you’re using +/- the size of the target +/- the larger of speed and range.
I’ll stick with THAC0, thanks.
GURPS does have a wonderful library of sourcebooks.
You know how THAC0 works?
oh arcane master, teach me your wisdom
THAC0 is a little counterintuitive, but not that hard to use after you’ve turned your brain the correct direction.
I have to admit that I have never played a WoD game that wasn’t the original “old” version, 2nd Edition. Never played 1st Edition, never played 3rd, never played the new games after the old ones were wrapped up.
The original WoD combat rules were … clunky, especially if you were playing online, which I did in addition to playing tabletop and LARP. A single combat round online could take 30 minutes to resolve, and that was if the players were paying close attention. Any AFK time only added to that.
However, there were ways around that. For V:tM we decided as a group that getting into combat constituted a failure, and the painful rules existed as an incentive to avoid combat situations.
For W:tA, where combat is practically the point of the game, we changed the rules somewhat. There is a mechanic called “automatic success,” where if your dice pool is higher than your difficulty, you could just choose not to roll at all, and you would be counted as having 1 success. 1 success, however, is a marginal success. It’s barely a success. You scraped by, by the skin of your teeth. So most of the time people would choose to roll, and try to get a higher number of successes. We changed that rule so that if you took an automatic success, you were counted as having 3 successes instead of 1.
You wouldn’t believe how much that simple change speeds things up. In combat, a werewolf might routinely have 11 dice to roll, which means that EVERYTHING can succeed automatically, and this time with complete – not marginal – success.
Since one’s target can sometimes try to evade getting hit, this didn’t resolve all of the issues with the mechanics. You might still want to roll your 11 dice and try for 6 successes instead of 3, to be extra-sure of hitting your target. Nevertheless, having people just skip rolling about a third of the time made this much less painful.