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They did, but they also added the ability to maybe accidentally make a watered-down vampire just by feeding on someone to death as well.
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Jan 15, 2015 15:36
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Doodmons posted:After 3 PCs in a row died due to fallout from taking a beat for a dramatic failure in the Requiem game I'm in, we've all stopped taking those dramatic failures. Our ST make dramatic failures reaaaally severe. Who the gently caress do you people let GM your games
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Jan 15, 2015 16:42
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I mean I don't know if it's a widespread practice but generally the group of people I play nwod with likes to take time to really establish the backstory of its characters through a series of mandatory "answer these background questions" during character creation, and it would be a pretty big gently caress You if the GM turned around and killed them off afterwards. But what kind of relationship do you have to have with the person running the game where a majority of players feeling pissed off doesn't just result in either the game being postponed for a week while the GM solves his terrible mood, or the players just peer pressure the GM into not being a huge rear end in a top hat?
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Jan 15, 2015 16:46
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tatankatonk posted:I mean I don't know if it's a widespread practice but generally the group of people I play nwod with likes to take time to really establish the backstory of its characters through a series of mandatory "answer these background questions" during character creation, and it would be a pretty big gently caress You if the GM turned around and killed them off afterwards. But what kind of relationship do you have to have with the person running the game where a majority of players feeling pissed off doesn't just result in either the game being postponed for a week while the GM solves his terrible mood, or the players just peer pressure the GM into not being a huge rear end in a top hat?
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Jan 15, 2015 16:54
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Yawgmoth posted:The groups I've had that were the worst were always the ones that had "answer these mandatory questions in your backstory" rules, since that kind of thing usually points to some kind of passive-aggressive micromanaging bullshit.
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Jan 15, 2015 16:59
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Good ST - "tell me about your character." Bad ST - "here is your character history mad libs." It's not a hard and fast rule by any stretch, but in my experience the guy who has all these questions already lined up also has an expectation for what the answers will be (and gets salty if you answer "wrong") or doesn't trust you to have the answer at all. I much prefer to play with people who let me worry about my character and spend their time worrying about theirs, or in the ST's case the world around the PCs.
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Jan 15, 2015 17:22
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Yawgmoth posted:Good ST - "tell me about your character."
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Jan 15, 2015 17:31
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Yawgmoth posted:Good ST - "tell me about your character." What the heck are you talking about What kind of questions do your STs ask? I'm talking about open-ended questions that let the players flesh out their characters with little personal touches. By way of example here's a few from a VTR game i'm working on 5. How do you get around Orange County on a nightly basis? 6. You still have (at least) one strong emotional connection in your Requiem. It might be a mortal descendant, or a ghouled friend, or even a Kindred relative, rare as they are. Try as you might (some may have tried harder than others), the relationship has resisted all efforts to dissolve it. You might even be trying your hardest to get rid of it, but it’s still there on the first night of the chronicle. Who are you connected to? 7. Is your sire around? If not, what happened? 8. Where do you see yourself in five years? 9. Where do you live? 10. What’s your favorite song? Like, what are the questions you're thinking of?
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Jan 15, 2015 17:33
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18. What do you mistakenly believe your character to be good at? 19. What plot development would forever sour you on even the thought of playing this character? 20. What substance or phenomenon is your character (allegedly) immune to?
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Jan 15, 2015 18:20
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A lot of that stuff is also key background information that most people wouldn't think of unless prompted. A player probably won't otherwise stop to consider his character's father's occupation, but it's a cool way to explain how he came to know a little about architectural engineering. And as pointed out before, it's a page full of plot hooks. Instead of some random NPC architect stumbling across mystical ciphers encoded in blueprints, it can be someone your dad worked with.
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Jan 15, 2015 18:30
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21. What is it that Mr. Carter, of course, will have to do something about?
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Jan 15, 2015 18:39
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:You have had some dump-rear end experiences then tatankatonk posted:6. You still have (at least) one strong emotional connection in your Requiem. It might be a mortal descendant, or a ghouled friend, or even a Kindred relative, rare as they are. Try as you might (some may have tried harder than others), the relationship has resisted all efforts to dissolve it. You might even be trying your hardest to get rid of it, but it’s still there on the first night of the chronicle. Who are you connected to? Ferrinus posted:18. What do you mistakenly believe your character to be good at?
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Jan 15, 2015 19:22
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Well Ferrinus's questions were jokes, so
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Jan 15, 2015 19:27
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tatankatonk posted:Well Ferrinus's questions were jokes, so
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Jan 15, 2015 19:41
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tatankatonk posted:Who the gently caress do you people let GM your games The full story of this, since people seem to be assuming that we're playing some sort of Gygaxian adversarial game (which we aren't) is that two dramatic failures two scenes in a row led to a sprawling, knock down drag out investigation that finally concluded with three PCs dead, the Khaibit NPC who is honestly our only hope against the Strix banished from the domain and the Ordo Dracul pretty much scraping being banished from the domain as well by the skin of our teeth. Dramatic Failure #1: A feeding roll. Unbeknownst to the PC (the player knew) he forgot to lick the wound closed and the person died of shock trauma half an hour after being fed on - collapsing in a public place. Dramatic Failure #2: (same PC) a Survival roll to find a decent place to hide from the approaching dawn. The results: The PC woke up in a morgue drawer naked but for a toe tag. He was still on like 3 vitae so accidentally wassailed and killed an orderly on his way out of the hospital. He saw on the nightly news that there can been a murder that sure looked like a vampire, what with the blood loss and holes in the neck, body found in the place where he last fed. He panicked and, since he was a Mekhet with Mystery Cult Initiation, went to his cult for their help in making the problem go away. The leader of the cult was a recent immigrant to the domain: Nikotris, an elder Khaibit. The same night, an emergency court meeting is held where the Seneschal personally vows to have the head of the one responsible for the Masquerade breach. All eyes turn to the player party, who are the only neonates on the island (and really, only a neonate would gently caress up that badly) and we all plead innocence, the Mekhet PC bossing his Subterfuge roll. This is where it gets interesting. Another PC is a hobo Mara who is openly contemptuous of the concept of a court and anyone who holds office because they politicked well. He thinks a domain should just be ruled by the strongest. He is also a ferocious Gangrel murdermachine who can barely read or write and looks and smells like poo poo because he is a hobo. The Seneschal - who openly detests this PC - flat out accuses him of being responsible in front of the whole court. A brawl ensues. A brawl which, before the rest of the player party pry him off the Seneschal, the Gangrel was handily winning in. He asks to be Dominated to prove his innocence, is and does, then tells the whole court that he is going to be the one to find out who was responsible for the Masquerade breach and that if he does discover the perpetrator before the court, he wants to be made Hound. The Regnant, a Toreador who couldn't give a poo poo about the entire event, and who hates the Seneschal, agrees. So now a near-literal bloodhound of a player character is gunning, unknowingly, for another player character. OOC we are all loving this. A series of big plays are made on the part of the cult, and one step ahead of the Gangrel they get hold of the body of the victim. There are some very close calls while they work out what the gently caress to do with it and a few entire scenes take place between PCs who have the body in the trunk of their car without them knowing. The Gangrel recruits another Mekhet to help him find the killer by Spirit's Touching the body, they break into the morgue to find it missing. Following the trail, they catch Nikotris and an accomplice at the crematorium, literally about to throw the body in the furnace. It's about as red-handed as you can get. Nikotris pretty much goes "c'est la vie" and bugs out using Obtenebration, leaving his accomplice to die at the hands of the ravenous Gangrel. With the body in his hands, the Gangrel races to the Sheriff to tell him that Nikotris is involved with the Masquerade breach somehow (he's intelligence 1 and has basically no idea IC what the gently caress is going on but is pretty drat sure Nikotris is old enough not to have made that mistake - but by god is he following the trail). He gets to the Sheriff's haven, where he is having a meeting with the Regnant and informs them of everything. There is a commotion outside which he immediately investigates to find nothing. When he gets back inside the house, the Sheriff and the Regnant are in torpor, their ghouls are dead and Nikotris is Obtenebrating out of there. Furious, he returns to the Ordo Dracul chapter house to tell the rest of the player party as he is out of ideas. Meanwhile, the rest of the party have been quietly ignoring the whole thing because we're Ordo Dracul dammit and who gives a poo poo there's occult secrets to find. A thing that should be noted at this point is that my PC, a Spina, was actually the last person to have seen the Mekhet PC before he killed his victim, and that the Mekhet did tell him he was going feeding and where. However, there was a lot of poo poo going on that night and he had simply forgotten (ie, I kept failing memory rolls). Furthermore, my PC was the only one who actually knew the Mekhet was in a cult and that Nikotris was in the cult. Having Majesty meant that people told me things they probably shouldn't. Also importantly, the Mekhet was out helping Nikotris clean up at this point. The Gangrel bursts into the chapter house and tells us what has happened. I finally make a memory check and put two and two together and realise that our friend is the one responsible for the Masquerade breach and that his cult are helping him clean up. The ST had actually gone out of the room to run a separate scene with the Mekhet, where he was helping Nikotris, and the rest of the party were in a room on our own. We had a half hour completely in character discussion where we tried to work out what the gently caress we should do and came to the inescapable conclusion that we had to hand in the Mekhet ourselves. Previous PC fuckups had left the Ordo Dracul's reputation in tatters, our covenant has a well deserved reputation for being skeevy and we reckoned that if one of the court caught the Mekhet - and they probably would, since the Gangrel had made a real mess of the cult's efforts to clean up the evidence - we'd all be held culpable. And with the Sheriff, Prince and Regnant in torpor that left the Seneschal who hated us in charge and we'd probably be killed. The only way for the covenant to survive was for us personally to hand him in to make doubly sure nobody could accuse us of being involved. Not to mention the Gangrel was dead set on killing him personally, partly because he said he would, partly for the court position and partly because he was so furious at him at this point. So we set an ambush. Not long after, the ST and the Mekhet's player came back into the room and the ST told us he arrives back at the chapter house. He steps in the front entrance and my PC was supposed to Majesty him to make things easier. Unfortunately, he was genuinely my friend and so instead I looked him in the eye and quietly told him "I'm sorry." My in character thinking was that I didn't want him to die, if we had a big fight in which he got away and then told everyone it was him we were probably not dead and that I could probably convince the other PCs that my Majesty simply failed. The Mekhet understood immediately and fled, hotly pursued by the rest of the party. There was a tense foot chase and for a bit it looked like he was actually going to get away thanks to like 3 or 4 dots of Celerity, but the Gangrel's Protean speed boost won out, he got tackled and we had him staked in short order. Out of character, we apologised to him and he was like "No, no, I completely deserved that. I was wondering when you guys were gonna catch me." We handed his staked body over to the Seneschal, a blood hunt was declared on Nikotris and the Ordo Dracul lived to fight another day. Of course, now that the Strix are on the island and it turned out the Seneschal was one of them we are really wishing we had a big elder Khaibit like Nikotris around to help. The other two dramatic failure deaths are way less interesting but equally deserved. A dramatic failed frenzy led to one PC being separated from us in the Shadow, and a series of bad rolls and decisions later he was literally kicked to death by a dog walker who managed to do the last point of bashing after he stumbled back into the real world, drained and battered. The other one was a dramatic failed occult roll giving us misleading information in character and some really, genuinely astounding OOC stupidity on our part. We probably could have salvaged that last one if we hadn't apparently left our brains at home that evening.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:07
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Yawgmoth posted:Yes, I said as much. I don't doubt that asking a pile of chargen questions works for some groups, but almost all of my successful games have been from just giving the setting and important people, then letting everyone have free rein to create a character. To put in my two cents, session one for this game was the ST having an Ordo Dracul mentor sit us down and do Tarot spreads for each of us as his method of finding out more about us and OOC to give us ideas for our characters' backgrounds. It worked really well. Especially since my character was a kleptomaniac and I think the dominant card in his spread was King of Coins. The elder was just like "uh huh" and kept a close eye on him.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:10
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PantsOptional posted:They did, but they also added the ability to maybe accidentally make a watered-down vampire just by feeding on someone to death as well. To  on this, being said watered-down vampire, a revenant, sucks. Pun not intended.To put it bluntly, not only are you stuck as one of the undead usually because some Kindred was a callous jackass (you actually have to be killed via feeding, and the sire has to fail an easy Humanity roll, so it's safe to say that revenant sires are at least inhuman), but you have no Disciplines you're good at, you can't increase your Blood Potency, you are an easy target for Strix possession (while a vampire normally has to be in torpor before they become vulnerable, a revenant just has to be asleep), and, oh yeah, you sweat out everything you drank while you're sleeping leaving you both covered in dried blood every time you wake up, and on the verge of Final Death and starving. The bright side to all this is that most Kindred admit leaving you around like this is a moral evil as well as a Masquerade breach in progress. Thus, you can have the satisfaction of pointing the blood hunt in the direction of the rear end in a top hat who did that to you before you are given a quick and merciful end...or somebody decides to Embrace you for real, which costs the traditional Humanity dot and leaves you a hell of a lot happier. There's also a cross-clan bloodline on the Onyx Path website that specializes in the care and feeding of revenants, the Neglatu. They're mostly in it for the easy minions, since they can help with the blood retention problem and buff their "families" quite easily (they don't even need, or have, a Discipline for that, they just know how from the moment they're inducted). They can even sire/adopt revenants without losing Humanity, if they induct them as Neglatu in the process. Yes, this means that there's an entire bloodline of shovelhead-makers, and they know that. Even the writeup itself says that Neglatu tend to get their dumb asses kicked out when they start overpopulating. At least Neglatu culture really frowns on treating revenants like disposable minions, likely because the revenants might get pushed too far. EDIT: Oh yeah, and I forgot; their bloodline weakness is that they can't form Vinculums. So, no, you can't just order the revenants around via addiction, you actually have to pay and/or bully them into it. That's a pretty good balancing factor against 30 Days of Night vamp-zombie apocalypse right there (and why they haven't been hunted to extinction; Invictus needs that bond-free Vitae!). Erebro fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 15, 2015 21:09
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Doodmons posted:snip
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Jan 15, 2015 23:31
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Erebro posted:Revenants The Revenant rules also lead to a change I really like in 2nd Ed. Draugr (vampires with Humanity 0 who are just blood crazed serial killers) have a huge chance to produce revenants or another draugr when they feed because they always drain their victims dry and then roll a chance die on the revenant check, in which 10 is fine 2-9 is revenant and 1 is draugr. And draugr spend pretty much all night every night feeding and making more revenants and draugr. The downside is that a draugr loose in your city is going to produce a loving zombie plague of them within days (and draugr are full powered vampires, so yeesh) but the upside is that any one of the umpteen million revenants they produce can help the domain track them down and end them. The aftermath of a draugr outbreak would be a great starting point for a campaign. Loads of new neonates, a domain in chaos, revenants that got away, a weakened Masquerade and higher police presence and the chance that there are still some loving draugr out there that the domain hasn't killed yet. Don't lose your last dot of Humanity, kids.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:41
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I had a GM once give us a set of background questions with the best of intentions, except that we realized that we couldn't even answer most of them about our actual selves.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:59
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Gilok posted:I had a GM once give us a set of background questions with the best of intentions, except that we realized that we couldn't even answer most of them about our actual selves. Like what?
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Jan 16, 2015 00:01
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I'm trying to remember them. It was oddly specific things that most people wouldn't really have a point of reference for. It was stuff like "Name a time in your life you were completely, perfectly happy." But that wasn't one of them. This is going to drive me crazy. I dug up my email conversation with the GM but it doesn't have the questions.
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Jan 16, 2015 00:08
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Asking questions about the way characters react to things can be a quick way to learn more about the character, how to interact with the character, and things the player themselves may not have thought about the character. I've seen questions like "You gain enough money to buy a large manor or hire a band of mercenaries; what do you do?", "How does your character relax when sitting around the campfire?" and "Assume you have a 13-year-old-daughter. You discover a pack of condoms in her bedside drawers. How do you react?" Horror campaigns can also have great fun with "What is your character's greatest fear?".
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Jan 16, 2015 00:57
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LatwPIAT posted:Asking questions about the way characters react to things can be a quick way to learn more about the character, how to interact with the character, and things the player themselves may not have thought about the character. I've seen questions like "You gain enough money to buy a large manor or hire a band of mercenaries; what do you do?", "How does your character relax when sitting around the campfire?" and "Assume you have a 13-year-old-daughter. You discover a pack of condoms in her bedside drawers. How do you react?" The answer to all these questions, of course, is "Roll initiative."
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Jan 16, 2015 02:29
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Yawgmoth posted:I once had a guy want a paragraph for every dot on my sheet, and a different guy say that anything less than a 5 page history was proof that the player was a munchkin. Plus ferrinus has always been a constant source of interesting ideas about gaming. What dicks. And that's coming from a dude who often writes ten or more pages about a character and his history, context, etcetera. (e.g. I'm rocking a vampire in a grimdark over-the-top DnD game at the moment and I've written, in idle moments, twelve pages of content atm) If it comes, awesome, if it doesn't, it'll develop through the game! (please do reward well-thought out and consistent backstories with XP though, that's the way to do it if you're going to do it. Incentivize, rather than demand)
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Jan 16, 2015 02:42
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I'll be honest - as a GM I prefer to ask a few leading questions and get answers then to get a huge backstory. I'm not going to read your ten page magnum opus. I have other poo poo to do with my time.
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Jan 16, 2015 03:02
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Yawgmoth posted:I once had a guy want a paragraph for every dot on my sheet, and a different guy say that anything less than a 5 page history was proof that the player was a munchkin. Plus ferrinus has always been a constant source of interesting ideas about gaming. The characters in V20 Children of the Revolution have 4-7 pages and that's something someone was paid to write about a character. One of the characters even has 3 pages. These are also characters who have been alive for hundreds of years and are considered notable examples of their character types.
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Jan 16, 2015 03:28
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PantsOptional posted:They did, but they also added the ability to maybe accidentally make a watered-down vampire just by feeding on someone to death as well. There's also the "what the gently caress did you do" draugr option from Night Horrors: The Wicked Dead, where you create a draugr if you try to Embrace someone but don't spend a dot of anything at all.
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Jan 16, 2015 03:34
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Ferrinus posted:20. What substance or phenomenon is your character (allegedly) immune to? Bulllets  Edit: How much would you consider paying for MtA storytellers screen? Im considering splurging out 50bux for this one. DJ Dizzy fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 03:55
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DJ Dizzy posted:Bulllets Zero American dollars
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Jan 16, 2015 04:25
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Is it that bad?
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Jan 16, 2015 04:28
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Doodmons posted:The Revenant rules also lead to a change I really like in 2nd Ed. Draugr (vampires with Humanity 0 who are just blood crazed serial killers) have a huge chance to produce revenants or another draugr when they feed because they always drain their victims dry and then roll a chance die on the revenant check, in which 10 is fine 2-9 is revenant and 1 is draugr. And draugr spend pretty much all night every night feeding and making more revenants and draugr. The downside is that a draugr loose in your city is going to produce a loving zombie plague of them within days (and draugr are full powered vampires, so yeesh) but the upside is that any one of the umpteen million revenants they produce can help the domain track them down and end them. Oh man, I wish I had though tof that before starting my New Wave Blood and SMoke game. Instead I had the characters embraced by Belial's Brood and then kidnapped by the Prince and forced to "redeem" themselves in a blatant ripoff of the start of Vampire: Bloodlines.
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Jan 16, 2015 04:37
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DJ Dizzy posted:Is it that bad? The NWoD screens were made of hinged hardcover book cover stock and are way sturdier than their predecessors. I don't know about 50 bucks though.
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Jan 16, 2015 04:45
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Effectronica posted:The Beats system is fairly prone to degeneracy because of the need to model everything as a formal Condition. I also somewhat dislike the hold "character development through angst and slapstick" has on design, but that doesn't make it bad in and of itself. On the design side, right now we're going through a process where we remind each other: "Don't make everything a Condition because that gets unwieldy." As for what Beats encourage, if things start to turn into parody you need to have a conversation about it. In many situations like this folks are grasping because the rate of advancement isn't doing it for them, or because they're competing for attention. In the former case you need to get in front and award Beats more aggressively for desired actions. In the latter case, use the option to contribute beats collectively.
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Jan 16, 2015 04:56
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Yeah, finding the right rate of Beats is not easy.
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Jan 16, 2015 05:04
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MalcolmSheppard posted:On the design side, right now we're going through a process where we remind each other: "Don't make everything a Condition because that gets unwieldy." Yeah, I misspoke there. It should have been "tempts" or something. I was also being somewhat sarcastic because a lot of more recent RPGs have used similar approaches to character development and it's starting to feel a little samey. Obviously, if someone is trying to negotiate being color-blind and not having a phone to garner a steady stream of Beats, you've got some issues/unique playstyles going on deeper than mechanical encouragement or discouragement.
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Jan 16, 2015 05:54
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Anyone tried the mage SAS Lines of Power? Is it worth running?
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Jan 16, 2015 08:38
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Mexcillent posted:The shadow character sheet is essentially that. Yeah, the tools are there. I think Wraith's difficulty has been exaggerated by the fact that it was shuttered early, but you have to keep in mind that at that time Wraith was successful by the standards of all companies that didn't hold at least WW's then 20% market share in an industry an order of magnitude larger than now. There was internal grousing about the game's difficulty too, but it's always had loyal fans and players. A good friend of mine ran a long-running Wraith game and actually found that the difficult parts were: 1) The scale of Necropolis government. Wraiths exist in significant numbers and have something resembling a state, so figuring out who the officials are and how the local economy works can be annoying. He did a whole bunch of NPC work to get his game up and running. 2) Details about the physical nature of wraiths themselves when they interact with the Skinlands. What are objects like when you can touch them but can't transfer force to them? My buddy eventually came to some awesome conclusions where wraiths ended up fighting on top of power lines and the heads of people in crowds.
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Jan 16, 2015 10:21
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Oh just noticed M:tA 2 is only in redlines, for some reason I was thinking it came out very soon! I'm sad now. Guess I'll run a Vamp or Demon game then, instead of waiting for new Mage.
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Jan 16, 2015 13:45
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Yeah. Same  Guess I will have to make do with 1st edition.
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Jan 16, 2015 15:23
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