Using Paladin for Hunter

[Mr. Sluagh]

I've just been skimming the indie RPG Paladin, and it occurs to me that with a little tweaking it could be adapted into a rules-light distillation of Hunter: the Reckoning into its most basic themes.  It would deviate from Paladin's inherent themes somewhat, but I think the system would still serve it well.

The biggest change would be that the central conflict would be contentment vs. madness rather than good vs. evil.  This would manifest externally in Hunter's standard morally ambiguous, relatively redeemable monsters, and internally in that the question would be whether you could maintain a relatively happy, normal life in the face harrowing adversity or would succumb to alienation and fanaticism.  I haven't got any idea what the actual rules for this would be, though.  Still working on that.  They'd probably be based at least partially on Creeds and Contrition would have to be dealt with in a much more abstract way.  It might also be good to remove the rule where you lose Light Anima whenever you spend Dark Anima, just to make it possible, if extremely difficult, to balance the two.

That said, Dark Anima would be renamed "Conviction", while Light Anima might be called "Composure."  Conviction could be spent to fuel your pursuit of the Hunt and to gain and use Edges, while Composure would keep you sane and fuel mundane activities.

Likewise, Attributes would be divided into Flesh, Mundane and Imbued rather than Flesh, Light and Dark.  Mundane Attributes would describe in broad strokes the pre-Imbuing lifestyle which you're trying to maintain.  Imbued Attributes would represent the methods you use in the Hunt, and would be divided into Mercy, Vision and Zeal rather than Active, Reactive and Social.  I'm thinking of doing this for Mundane Attributes, too, but I'm not sure how it would work.

You could spend a point of Conviction to activate the Sight and mind control resistance as normal, and a point of Composure would make a Messenger-granted vision cease immediately.  However, the lower your Composure dropped, the more frequent the visions would become.

If your Composure hit twenty or exceeded your Conviction by ten points, the visions would end and you'd finally be able to chuck the Imbuing for good.  If the opposite happened, you'd be approached by Something, a la Fall from Grace.

Of course, the rules for supernatural feats would have to be powered down quite a bit.  They'd most likely be limited to Edges, which would be a special class of Ability that you'd have to burn Conviction to use.

I think overall, the interplay of Composure and Conviction could be quite interesting.  The more you immersed yourself in your mundane life, the more your Composure would rise.  But stressful, mundane situations would have you burning tons of Composure to help with rolls, and then the voices would start bothering you again.  So you give in and go off to redeem, explore or destroy the supernatural world, depending on your preference.  You blow off some steam and come back all normal again, but then, hey, where the hell have you been?  Turns out all your cryptic antics haven't really helped your social life, and now are your friends and family are either horribly alienated or worried sick.  Sure, you could try and pick up the pieces, but wouldn't it be easier to just forget about them and keep on hunting?

Of course, this is just a rough, preliminary outline of the idea.  I'll admit that I'm not all that familiar with Paladin's mechanics, and it will probably require a lot more tweaks than those detailed here.  When completed, however, I think it would be a very interesting way of boiling Hunter down to its most essential themes, in the classic Narrativist tradition.

Thoughts?  Ideas?  Opinions?

[John Uckele]

Just looking at the system description makes me think of hunter with that bit about "or modern-day hunters of the supernatural". I think it'd be awful easy to convert, since it looks like you could just use the Paladin system and make the hunters deal with Werewolves and Vampires.

[Mr. Sluagh]

Just looking at the system description makes me think of hunter with that bit about "or modern-day hunters of the supernatural". I think it'd be awful easy to convert, since it looks like you could just use the Paladin system and make the hunters deal with Werewolves and Vampires.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was thinking.  The big hurdle, of course, is that Hunter isn't really about good and evil.  The protagonists and antagonists are much more complex than that.  Using Paladin for WoD: Inquisitor would be a much more direct conversion.

[John Uckele]

I didn't get the impression the Paladin characters were pure 100% good. I mean, there's a big element with the dark side, and I think that you can kinda see that in Hunter. On one end you have innocents, on the other end you have waywards. Some hunters in WoD:Hunter are f* up psychos who are really closer to the monsters than the hunters. You also have monsters who aren't evil, but Paladin didn't say you had to fight a uniform opponent.

In all honesty, I think that Paladin looks like it would work better for H:tR than WW's Storyteller system. If you kill things, it messes with your head. After enough years of hunting vampires, you get jaded, you kill them with less remorse, and less proof that they really are vampires. Eventually, once you're too far into the hunt, you kill anything you suspect is even in league with super-naturals, and you might think half of manhattan in controlled by vampires... And thus problems are born.

I was thinking I might run a H:tR (heavily moddified), but looking at Paladin, I might just run it in that. *shrug* Dunno.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

John is on the mark here - Paladin characters are not 100% good.

A dissection of Paladin, and why it and Hunter are like whipped cream and strawberry pie

When I wrote Paladin, it was on a lark. I was having some blocks finishing up Donjon, which was not nearly as easy to write as it looks, and wrote out a game idea to clear my palate. It was based around the idea that there is a universal good, and that characters following it would be able to whip some furious ass.

And herein, I encountered a problem: I made an unplayable game.

To really understand Paladin, you've got to understand the author. I grew up in a severely fundamentalist home, and went for indoctrination - I mean church - twice a week every week for 17 years. I did missions work, went on retreats, sang in the choir - the poor ears of those around me - and bought it for most of the time.

The reasons why I don't now are irrelevant to Paladin. Paladin came from that part of me, a part that's not ever going away - that does buy it. I don't think you'll find anyone who spent his formative years in a highly religious environment that truly can write it all off as quasi-mystical bullshit. The mind's a truly unique organ, and it can fool itself.

So, Paladin's based around the idea of a universal right and wrong.

The author finds the enemy, and the enemy is... him?

When I ran Paladin for real, it was with a mixed group of people, some of which I'd never run an RPG for before. The adventure was pretty simple: a renegade general in the king's Defense Forces had gone to war in the south after his militia had declared themselves unfairly taxed, and in the north, a more mysterious happening had occured: a town reported a dark, possibly Unliving, creature in the night.

I expected a game with moral quandries and hard decisions: you see, I still didn't know what I'd created. Instead, I got moral absolutism in spades. The entire renegade army was put to the sword for their crime of murder, and in the north, a vampire, who was pretty much benign, was slain, and one paladin committed suicide, rather than admit to finding her wiles seductive.

Paladin is the game of fanatics, fundamentalists, people who are certain that they have the correct answer. Now, that sounds nice, but think about the idea that one person can be the arbiter of right and wrong, and it sounds a lot closer to the definition of insanity.

Hunting the Night Fantastic

I'm just going to go ahead and admit to not ever reading Hunter. If I get something wrong, them's the shakes.

As I understand it, Hunter's not about playing normal humans terrorized by night stalkers. Hunter's about playing people on the edge, given paranormal powers by some vague higher power in order to commit brutal genocide by any means necessary on whatever goes bump in the night.

Vampires and werewolves and what not: well, sure, they're bad things. No one said Paladin characters weren't part right. In fact, that makes them worse: they're almost right, and crazy. And almost right is the best that we can really be. The difference between a sane human and an insane one is the realization that you can't be right all the time, and some issues need outside input.

In the same way, Hunter characters are deluded. I mean, not all vampires have to be bad. And sometimes, if it would threaten the lives of a community, you can't go in all guns a-blazing to wipe out a blood-sucker. But, if you're a Hunter, touched by God and given Powers, you believe that's exactly what you've got to do. And that's why Paladin and Hunter work together great.

He talks about a re-write, again

Really, I'm going to re-write Paladin. It's going to be fantastic: I've tossed it over and over in my head. After we entered the great war of our times, the New Crusade, fundamentalist versus fundamentalist, I realized how weirdly topical and sickening Paladin is. The first time I wrote it, I didn't see and acknowledge its relevance: I thought it would be good to play Jedi. In the re-write, I'll embrace it.

[Mr. Sluagh]

As I understand it, Hunter's not about playing normal humans terrorized by night stalkers. Hunter's about playing people on the edge, given paranormal powers by some vague higher power in order to commit brutal genocide by any means necessary on whatever goes bump in the night.

Vampires and werewolves and what not: well, sure, they're bad things. No one said Paladin characters weren't part right. In fact, that makes them worse: they're almost right, and crazy. And almost right is the best that we can really be. The difference between a sane human and an insane one is the realization that you can't be right all the time, and some issues need outside input.

In the same way, Hunter characters are deluded. I mean, not all vampires have to be bad. And sometimes, if it would threaten the lives of a community, you can't go in all guns a-blazing to wipe out a blood-sucker. But, if you're a Hunter, touched by God and given Powers, you believe that's exactly what you've got to do. And that's why Paladin and Hunter work together great.

Actually, that's where you're wrong.  You see, despite its name, various slogans associated with it and the art seen throughout the corebook, the monsters in Hunter are not necessarily evil, and Hunters don't necessarily think they are.  At least a third of Hunter's splats are designed to cover Hunters who try to redeem, understand, or cut deals with supernaturals.  One of the game's primary themes revolves around ideoligical conflicts between Hunters, mainly over whether monsters are to be fought, redeemed, or studied and whether they should really be called "monsters" at all.  In my version, this is represented by the division of Imbued Attributes into Mercy, Vision and Zeal, which reflect the Virtues in standard Hunter.

Of course, to be fair, Hunter is often run in a way which reflected quite accurately by your description, and Paladin would probably handle these games quite well.  However, I think the original intent behind the game before it was corrupted by corporate bastardization and the left hand not knowing what the right was doing and so forh was somewhat more complex, and would warrant some of he drastic changes that I've described if it was to be done justice by Paladin, IMHO.

Then again, I could be wrong.  You obviously know Paladin better than I do, after all.  Any thoughts on how the sort of game that I'm talking about might be handled by Paladin with a more wieldy set of tweaks than the one I suggested?  Possible Laws?  Powers?

[John Uckele]

It still seems to me that Paladin, which is about doing what's right, would fit very well. Not all Hunter's are good, not all Hunter's are bad. At the same time, that's true of monsters as well. Most Werewolves are working to save the world. That said, that doesn't mean that a Paladin character has to kill everything they see.

Innocents, and Judges are two of the most reasonable creeds. They are the ones who want to talk to the vampire and get the full story before they kill it, or quite possibly spare it. If you're running a Paladin game, is there anything to stop you from making a vampire who is actually pro-humanity?

Same time, Waywards kill plenty of monsters, but they also kill innocent human bystanders, and often it's not accidental, they just assume the wrong thing. Matyrs are so into the greater good that they are willing to sacrifice, and sometimes that sacrifice isn't themselves.

I think Hunter is really a game about balance and moral quandaries.

[Mr. Sluagh]

Hm.  Good points, there.

As for a Code...  At first, I was thinking of having different Codes for different Creeds, but then I thought it might be cooler to have them all work under the same Code, which all their philosophies conflicted with in one way or another.  Here goes:

Minor Laws:
1) You shall not put your own safety above that of another.
2) You shall not ignore supernatural activity.
3) You shall not act without thought.

Major Laws:
1) You shall not ignore a cry for help.
2) You shall not put your personal life above the Hunt.

Unbreakable Law:
1) You shall not kill an innocent.

I set this up to create tricky, moral balancing acts.  The first and second Minor Laws conflict somewhat with the third, setting up questions as to the difference between initiative and recklessness.  Likewise, the first Major Law could clash with the second where mundane emergencies are concerned.