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Effectronica posted:On the official Apocalypse World forums, the last time I looked, the consensus was that, apart from joke playbooks, the Touchstone was the most powerful playbook and pretty unbalanced. This analysis wasn't focused on PvP or white-room combat, either. Okay now I totally want to read someone doing in-depth Apocalypse World mechanical analysis. Not to laugh or anything, it just sounds like it'd be fascinating if done well. Axelgear posted:In his defense, Dave later stated he meant between-splat balance, not in-splat balance. Vampires and werewolves aren't going to be consistently designed with one another in mind, so why bother? This I totally buy; the gamelines aren't really designed to be cross-compatible to the extent that the mythoses are only really compatible with some working (and certainly don't have clear, visible "REQUIEM STARTS HERE" stickers on them).
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Jun 8, 2015 17:55
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Axelgear posted:In his defense, Dave later stated he meant between-splat balance, not in-splat balance. Vampires and werewolves aren't going to be consistently designed with one another in mind, so why bother? Matt's opinions are clearly laid out in the blog post linked to up thread. I do believe in game balance, within the confines of a game. Matt generally doesn't care if, say, one Demonic Embed is "better" than another, because you can't predict the usefulness they'll be in a game. I do try for balance between powers of the same class. It helps that Mage has a central set of casting mechanics, and Arcana that are ten different themes of the same power progression. If one spell seems very useful in one Arcanum, the flexibility of creative thaumaturgy will even it out in the end. Which helps because once I've got a central mechanic I like, I hate artificially balancing powers within it. So, while Awakening 2 is much clearer about what a Potency level is worth in a spell, it sheds all speed-bumps and cases where spells have been tuned against their Practices. Second ed Acceleration is not Celerity with the names changed, and Forces Adepts can actually fly. What I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about is balance between gamelines. If you run a crossover, that's your own problem. Where our two philosophies meet (that is, where I work for him) you get things like Beast's Lair system, where there's a central framework that the game then attaches any Environmental Tilt to.
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Jun 8, 2015 17:58
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spectralent posted:This I totally buy; the gamelines aren't really designed to be cross-compatible to the extent that the mythoses are only really compatible with some working (and certainly don't have clear, visible "REQUIEM STARTS HERE" stickers on them). That was true in the oWoD, not the new one. nWoD supernaturals don't run on mutually contradictory metaphysical premises and at least aren't SUPPOSED to exist on completely separate tiers in terms of personal character-to-character power and influence. Compatability and even footing were part of the nWoD's basic pitch; part of the appeal is that I can have vampires fight werewolves in a way that's not a ridiculous steamrolling or nonsensical chaos circus.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:02
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To be perfectly honest, I like the incompatible mythologies, especially since everyone seems to have their own evidences. I particularly love the Ordo Dracul there, because they are fully aware that other vamps predate their mythical founder, but give a heartily practical "gently caress it!" to the issue. Was Dracula cursed by God? Does God even exist? Who gives a drat!? I'm gonna br a super-vampire! And them they doff their sunglasses and ride off into the moon-set.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:03
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Dave Brookshaw posted:What I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about is balance between gamelines. If you run a crossover, that's your own problem. So I take it you had nothing to do with Beast's crossover focus.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:04
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Ferrinus posted:That was true in the oWoD, not the new one. nWoD supernaturals don't run on mutually contradictory metaphysical premises and at least aren't SUPPOSED to exist on completely separate tiers in terms of personal character-to-character power and influence. Compatability and even footing were part of the nWoD's basic pitch; part of the appeal is that I can have vampires fight werewolves in a way that's not a ridiculous steamrolling or nonsensical chaos circus. No. Compatibility was. "Even Footing" has never been an issue beyond a few powers here and there, mostly in Mage's original corebook. Examples of second-edition work we've done for Compatibility are things like the Dream Form rules in Beast, which you'll see again in Changeling and Mage, the Gauntlet rules in Werewolf and Mage, the Clash of Wills Mechanic, ephemeral entities being a rules base things like qashmallim, Strix, Supernal entities, and even Beast's Souls then modify. It's things like mage's rules for Sleepers being based on Integrity, the corebook spirit rules leaving mechanical connectors that hopefully one day a second edition of Geist will plug into (I won't say they'll definitely get an honorary ghost "Rank" like Werewolves do, but I wouldn't bet against it). Not "this splat has a power that increases Strength. All other Strength-increasing powers should be the same". Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 18:05
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Axelgear posted:[...] This reminded me, somehow, of Lost Boys, which I watched for the first time ever yesterday. It was entertaining and so very 80s.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:07
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Ferrinus posted:That was true in the oWoD, not the new one. nWoD supernaturals don't run on mutually contradictory metaphysical premises and at least aren't SUPPOSED to exist on completely separate tiers in terms of personal character-to-character power and influence. Compatability and even footing were part of the nWoD's basic pitch; part of the appeal is that I can have vampires fight werewolves in a way that's not a ridiculous steamrolling or nonsensical chaos circus. Yeah, but this was permission to have it happen and not be a game breaking event in either the "Huh. This splat just loses. Oops?" way or a "The rules have no idea where to progress from this point. Oops?" way. And the universes aren't designed to fit together, so much as they just avoid really commenting on each other overmuch (except Beast). This extends even to a thematic level; if you have a Changeling, a Werewolf and a Promethean in the same group it dilutes that. The result, the way I always took it and am completely happy with it, was that it would be easy for things to exist in the same universe if you wanted but that it wasn't an expectation. The obvious example being mages now have to contend with vampire blood potency instead of just declaring them all lawn chairs. It's never been a guarantee that every splat would be exactly the same power level across the entire line to me. For one that'd be absurdly limiting in the kinds of powers you'd have and would be really hard to maintain given the different kinds of powers everyone gets.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:08
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Okay, let's See if I am gettino this right: the problem with Matt's stance on the matter is that he confuses "ability to punch stuff" with "ability to influence the game world", right? The objective of a TTG might not be' to win, but if someone gets to do all the fun stuff while my characters just stands there with nothing to do there is a problem somewhere. Apart from his unncesarily snarky attitude, I mean.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:12
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Matt's opinions are clearly laid out in the blog post linked to up thread. This is exactly how I'd want it to be done (as I've posted before), so I'm generally optimistic about Mage's coming rules. That said: quote:What I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about is balance between gamelines. If you run a crossover, that's your own problem. This sucks! Now, admittedly, it also sucks for you. Like, I cannot blame you, the developer and writer "Dave Brookshaw", for simply deciding not to care about the feasibility of crossover in the WoD as it stands. Like, even if you did care, what could you actually do? Do you have the power to sit down all your fellow developers and writers and work out benchmarks for mind control duration or per-round combat damage or something? Can you actually phone or email whoever wrote that 1-dot Lancea Sanctum merit that lets a vampire subtract 5 dice from the pool of any magic used against them - explicitly including that of an Awakened mage - so long as the vampire's holding something pointy in one hand? I bet it's not feasible at all and would ultimately only detract from your ability to make sure that Mage is as good as it can be. I'm sure at some level you're aware that a normie can roll 10 dice to attack for +5 damage at best, and that a vampire can roll ~20 dice to attack for +10 damage at best, and are at least to some extent pegging what mages can do to what other creatures can do, but it's not really possible for you to actually watch for the specific wording of twenty different powers and see how they look compared to mage spells or whatever. You know what, though, the Mage game I run, and the Vampire game I play in, are both definitively enriched by the baseline assumption that other supernatural creatures exist and are basically equally significant and potent characters as the PCs themselves are. It's good that our vampires don't cower in fear of werewolves, and that our mages don't (justifiably) scoff and wave a hand dismissively at the idea that vampires might oppose something they do. It's good that the basic balance that existed in 1E was one that basically puts all the playable creatures on the same page, and that only really gets ruined if you do stuff like sit in your basement for a month straight stacking twenty buffs on yourself, rather than if you just pick any random power out of the book and use it exactly as intended. It makes for a richer, cooler setting. If the Onyx Path team were, overall, doing the work to make sure that the balance that existed between different supernatural types was an interesting sort of balance, it would be to the setting's benefit, so it's a shame that no one's doing the work. And, like... you are creating a balance whether you want it to or not. You're going to end up with a situation in which vampires are laughable chumps and demons beat everyone, or whatever, whether you want to or not. It'll just be a lovely balance instead of a good one, and one that ultimately leads people to write off the setting - or at least add a bunch of apologetic qualifications when they're trying to sell the setting - rather than embrace it. quote:No. Compatibility was. "Even Footing" has never been an issue beyond a few powers here and there, mostly in Mage's original corebook. Nope. Inter-line balance actually was a concern. From the very beginning you'd hear Achilli and Skemp or whatever talk about how they assumed that vampires and werewolves would be basically evenly powerful but vampires would have an edge when it came to social manipulation while werewolves would have an edge in combat, or whatever. This throwing-up-your-hands "who even gives a gently caress" attitude is an understandable one... but it's not one that dates back to the line's founding. spectralent posted:Yeah, but this was permission to have it happen and not be a game breaking event in either the "Huh. This splat just loses. Oops?" way or a "The rules have no idea where to progress from this point. Oops?" way. And the universes aren't designed to fit together, so much as they just avoid really commenting on each other overmuch (except Beast). This extends even to a thematic level; if you have a Changeling, a Werewolf and a Promethean in the same group it dilutes that. The result, the way I always took it and am completely happy with it, was that it would be easy for things to exist in the same universe if you wanted but that it wasn't an expectation. The obvious example being mages now have to contend with vampire blood potency instead of just declaring them all lawn chairs. It's never been a guarantee that every splat would be exactly the same power level across the entire line to me. For one that'd be absurdly limiting in the kinds of powers you'd have and would be really hard to maintain given the different kinds of powers everyone gets. There's no "the universes" - you shouldn't be using the plural. There is one World of Darkness setting, and one of its assumptions is that none of the marquee supernatural creatures are trivial or godlike relative to each other. You're supposed to be able to take werewolves and mages equally seriously. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 18:22
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What gave you the impression that every splat was supposed to be' somewhat equal in power? I don't remember reading it anywhere.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:27
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Given that he namechecked Justin Achilli and Ethan Skemp, I would assume it was those two.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:31
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spectralent posted:Okay now I totally want to read someone doing in-depth Apocalypse World mechanical analysis. Not to laugh or anything, it just sounds like it'd be fascinating if done well. It isn't even that in-depth- the Touchstone's set of moves allows them to very quickly be excellent at everything except Seduce/Manipulate and Read a Sitch. Or they can have Indomitable and Towering Presence, which allow you to seriously affect the course of battles and force people to choose between attacking you or giving in when you give them an order or warning, respectively.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:32
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It was one of the major differences between how the nWoD was going to work and the oWoD actually did work, back when the nWoD was being announced/pitched to us the consumers. Different supernaturals were no longer going to exist in mutually contradictory universes and they were going to be comparable and intelligible enough to each other that you could run, e.g., a vampires vs. werewolves gang war (an actual example I saw Ethan Skemp use back on the old White Wolf forums) without it being a ridiculous stomp or arbitrary crapshoot. They actually succeeded at this. Like, this was actually true.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:34
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Dave Brookshaw posted:No. Compatibility was. "Even Footing" has never been an issue beyond a few powers here and there, mostly in Mage's original corebook. If your conception of "balance" is "make it work the same and be the same", it's no wonder you're against it. But I'm also not sure how that's even remotely an idea anyone believes. It's so patently obvious you shouldn't do that because it's a strawman idea of how play balancing works. Limited information, resource asymmetry, opportunity cost, there's those and a dozen more ways to craft asymmetrical balance precisely to avoid the problem of things being "the same" while still not allowing one to always outdo the other. Even stuff like giving one person more or easier home advantage, basing it more in the fiction of location or opportunity than strict mechanics. Those are all game balancing concepts. And you've probably used them extensively, possibly to decry how balance doesn't exist.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:39
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Right so I'm going to quote bits to reply to because this is a big post and I disagree with bits and pieces of it. I think a lot of other things you can assume my reply is "To you".Ferrinus posted:And, like... you are creating a balance whether you want it to or not. You're going to end up with a situation in which vampires are laughable chumps and demons beat everyone, or whatever, whether you want to or not. It'll just be a lovely balance instead of a good one, and one that ultimately leads people to write off the setting - or at least add a bunch of apologetic qualifications when they're trying to sell the setting - rather than embrace it. I have never had someone go "Unless a similarly focused frankenstein's monster and vampire can fight each other to a standstill I abjectly refuse to play in your magic witch game". Never ever. Ever. Balance concerns have always been raised over intra-splat differences. quote:Nope. Inter-line balance actually was a concern. From the very beginning you'd hear Achilli and Skemp or whatever talk about how they assumed that vampires and werewolves would be basically evenly powerful but vampires would have an edge when it came to social manipulation while werewolves would have an edge in combat, or whatever. This throwing-up-your-hands "who even gives a gently caress" attitude is an understandable one... but it's not one that dates back to the line's founding. We are on second edition of it now, and lines do change over time. Certainly I was never promised that GMC would feature total parity between all splats. quote:There's no "the universes" - you shouldn't be using the plural. There is one World of Darkness setting, and one of its assumptions is that none of the marquee supernatural creatures are trivial or godlike relative to each other. You're supposed to be able to take werewolves and mages equally seriously. I think if you're going to bicker between "One universe but it's modular so stuff might or might not exist" and "Multiple universes of varying modular configuration" then the issue is ultimately semantic. If you're trying to say that you can't run modular WoD and like it or not you've always got Werewolves and Mages... I can't argue with that because it's so far outside my experience of both personal play and the ethos of the line as a whole I don't understand it. And I don't take Werewolves and Mages equally seriously. I never have. I would assume a werewolf charging at me is about to turn seven feet tall with big -rear end claws, and that the mage was going to try and mess with reality or screw with my head, or whatever. I have always assumed that there are big, notable differences between splats. None of them have made any creature "trivial", though, because it's very rare that there's a situation that can't be solved by ten guys with baseball bats. Ferrinus posted:It was one of the major differences between how the nWoD was going to work and the oWoD actually did work, back when the nWoD was being announced/pitched to us the consumers. Different supernaturals were no longer going to exist in mutually contradictory universes and they were going to be comparable and intelligible enough to each other that you could run, e.g., a vampires vs. werewolves gang war (an actual example I saw Ethan Skemp use back on the old White Wolf forums) without it being a ridiculous stomp or arbitrary crapshoot. This seems unlikely given Mage existed.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:43
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And, yeah, things like the Acceleration spell, the relatively modest bonus attribute dots starting werewolves got in their combat forms, etc, were all nods towards a general attempt to keep an even power level across all game lines. Frankly, the actual mechanics of the Acceleration spell were perfectly fine - if "subtract dice from incoming attack, increment initiative, and multiply footspeed" is how the World of Darkness represents entering bullet time, then there's no reason that the mage bullet time spell should work especially differently from the vampire bullet time discipline. The only problem with Acceleration was that it stacked with mage armor, when it really should've been a kind of mage armor.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:44
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Even if I was an equally experienced Werewolf or Vampire, sufficiently powerful mages always scared the crap out of me. It felt like they could do things to just wreck you and there would be nothing you could do about it if the mage was smart enough.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:46
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spectralent posted:I have never had someone go "Unless a similarly focused frankenstein's monster and vampire can fight each other to a standstill I abjectly refuse to play in your magic witch game". Never ever. Ever. Balance concerns have always been raised over intra-splat differences. Interesting. I've frequently seen people attribute absurd hyperbole to me because they couldn't engage with what I actually said. gently caress off. quote:We are on second edition of it now, and lines do change over time. Certainly I was never promised that GMC would feature total parity between all splats. In this case, they change for the worse. The total lack of any attempt at inter-line parity creates a worse situation than the efforts we saw in 1e. quote:I think if you're going to bicker between "One universe but it's modular so stuff might or might not exist" and "Multiple universes of varying modular configuration" then the issue is ultimately semantic. If you're trying to say that you can't run modular WoD and like it or not you've always got Werewolves and Mages... I can't argue with that because it's so far outside my experience of both personal play and the ethos of the line as a whole I don't understand it. And I don't take Werewolves and Mages equally seriously. I never have. I would assume a werewolf charging at me is about to turn seven feet tall with big -rear end claws, and that the mage was going to try and mess with reality or screw with my head, or whatever. I have always assumed that there are big, notable differences between splats. None of them have made any creature "trivial", though, because it's very rare that there's a situation that can't be solved by ten guys with baseball bats. We're not bickering - you're just wrong. "One universe but it's modular" is a correct description of the World of Darkness. Your attempt to transform "take equally seriously" into "assume they will behave identically" shames you. quote:This seems unlikely given Mage existed. Can you explain what made 1E mages overpowered? I bet you can't. I bet you're just repeating yet another pernicious meme. Mages didn't roll more dice to mind control people than vampires did. Mages didn't gain more physical attribute dots by entering monster forms than werewolves did. Pound for pound, mage powers were no stronger than - and, in fact, often weaker than - vampire and werewolf powers, and as earlier posts have stated they were often precisely identical in magnitude and effect. If anything, a lot of mage spells were tuned much weaker than they needed to be out of a fear of stepping on other creatures' toes. What made mages overpowered was buff stackability, indefinite duration increase, and a bunch of other rulesy grey areas that did nothing to stop someone who really wanted to abuse the system from doing so. 1E Awakening was absolutely not a case of someone throwing their hands up, going "gently caress it", and putting Finger of Death and Seven Shadow Evasion into the game because they'd wow the toilet readers. Kibner posted:Even if I was an equally experienced Werewolf or Vampire, sufficiently powerful mages always scared the crap out of me. It felt like they could do things to just wreck you and there would be nothing you could do about it if the mage was smart enough. Yeah, but it was because of like, inadequately reciprocal sympathetic casting rules or the hypothetical ability to generate suicidally loyal minions with 20 dots in every combat stat. If you just dropped a vampire and a mage into a room and had them try to kill or enslave each other it'd come down to who had higher stats and/or rolled better, not down to which one was the mage. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 18:51
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For the record, the "angry mob" heuristic has always been how I assess whether a given thing is too much: Is this powerful enough that a mob of angry humans is rendered a non-threat? I think Geist was probably what came closest to that. To my mind, every PC splat in the WoD should be worried by the chance they might freak out ten mortals who decide to drag them into an alley and club them to death.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:51
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To be quite honest. I think that Death Rage/Gauru is a bit too powerful in 2e. But in a straight up one on one fight with anyone I don't think it's too untoward to think that a werewolf could and should win. Vampires and Mages have always had their advantages in other areas, and those are the levers they should be manipulating to win a fight against a werewolf. To say that in a mass combat everyone should be equal either means that everyone gets massive combat buffs, or the combat buffs that werewolves get by shapeshifting, which is basically their entire reason for existing, are anemic to the point of uselessness. When I played 1e werewolf for a brief period of time, almost no one used Gauru, not because it was dangerous to do so, but because the dire-wolf form was as good or better. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 18:55
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It's clear you're really invested in this make-believe game about vampires, so I'm just going to let you have it.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:56
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spectralent posted:It's clear you're really invested in this make-believe game about vampires, so I'm just going to let you have it. Yet you cared enough to start this in the first place, so I'm guessing you're just intimidated by the big scary dracula fanboy or something. Kurieg posted:To be quite honest. I think that Death Rage/Gauru is a bit too powerful in 2e. But in a straight up one on one fight with anyone I don't think it's too untoward to think that a werewolf could and should win. Vampires and Mages have always had their advantages in other areas, and those are the levers they should be manipulating to win a fight against a werewolf. Mages and Vampires have natural limiting factors, conceptually, that mean that Werewoofs would have the advantage in combat overall, even if they had identical dice values for full combat mode.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:59
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Kurieg posted:To be quite honest. I think that Death Rage/Gauru is a bit too powerful in 2e. But in a straight up one on one fight with anyone I don't think it's too untoward to think that a werewolf could and should win. Vampires and Mages have always had their advantages in other areas, and those are the levers they should be manipulating to win a fight against a werewolf. "Werewolves are the strongest one on one fighters in the WoD" is against my personal preference - I think combat is cool and rhetorically significant enough that all the different splats should be able to be top-tier in it if they're in the right subsplats, and I argued vociferously against werewolves being the on-purpose strongest back in 1E - but at least it's an ethos. It's something you can set out, describe, and then build towards, and you'll end up with the setting you wanted to end up with - one in which other creatures are scared of pissing off werewolves face to face and so try to deal with them in more circuitous or abstract ways. It's not what we have right now. Right now, whether someone can beat a werewolf basically comes down to accidents of wording. Can this creature do aggravated damage easily? Yes? Okay it wins. No? Don't bother. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 18:59
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spectralent posted:It's clear you're really invested in this make-believe game about vampires, so I'm just going to let you have it. Man, this is such a terrible look.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:03
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I think it's fine if splats have varying areas of power, and think that one universe that could be totally different between given people amounts to having multiple universes from a common reference point. I just don't actually care enough to get into a blow by blow swearing match over what's a roleplaying preference and semantic difference, and to be honest I'm kind of surprised that it got taken that harshly. If my examples were overly reductive then my bad.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:07
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Well, like, while I wouldn't personally want WoD splats to have varying levels of power (I like vampires, werewolves, and mages too much to like any of them outclassing the others) I don't think it's necessarily bad if they do. The thing is, it'd be nice if they did on purpose, rather than at random. Give me 1E WoD or give me Exalted, but don't give me "pssshhh, who balance isn't even REAL, MAN."
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Jun 8, 2015 19:11
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If we do another nWoD game, I kinda want to do a deliberately lower-powered one compared to the others.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:13
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Goddamn this thread moves to fast. I suppose that's to be expected when you have a bunch of nerds whose primary hobby is storytelling. I've skimmed over the Beast stuff and, as much as I want to like it, I'm pulling the mechanics out for antagonists and leaving the themes behind. I'm going to write a worm monster that lives under a store and is managed by a proxy thrall that over charges people a tiny ammount. The sheer economical turmoil will make the old god strong! And frugal!
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Jun 8, 2015 19:16
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Dave Brookshaw posted:If we do another nWoD game, I kinda want to do a deliberately lower-powered one compared to the others. I'd like that.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:18
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Ferrinus posted:Well, like, while I wouldn't personally want WoD splats to have varying levels of power (I like vampires, werewolves, and mages too much to like any of them outclassing the others) I don't think it's necessarily bad if they do. The thing is, it'd be nice if they did on purpose, rather than at random. Give me 1E WoD or give me Exalted, but don't give me "pssshhh, who balance isn't even REAL, MAN." I guess I always assumed it was on purpose; I pitched vamps and werewolves about equal, with vamps being more able to specialise socially and werewolves having the final throwdown card of "Turn into a seven foot manwolf and eat things" putting them ahead in combat. Mages were a little poorer at direct action but would have distance effects that made them a more pervasive threat. Changelings were weaker but weirder and harder to efficiently counteract (I guess cribbing from mages a bit) and Prometheans were a bit stronger and tougher but had to deal with the fact angry mobs regularly kick the poo poo out of them. Hunters were weaker overall, too, but I'm not really so against lone humans being weaker than splats (though there's endowments I guess). For the record, I agree balance is usually desirable within the confines of a game's play-space, and the occasions when it isn't tend to have their own justifications usually relating to incentivising behaviour.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:19
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Yeah, I don't remember inter-game-line balanced being pitched to me as a nWoD feature; in fact the use of templates and how to design them for your own monstars would indicate to me that this is emphatically not a nWoD feature. Given how crossovers work in (any) WoD campaign, with Theme and Tone primarily forming the basis for campaign decisions instead of trying to create a consistent world that every group plays in, that makes sense to me. Unbalanced crossover play makes sense in the context of some campaign decisions. Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand got poo poo on for many no doubt deserved reasons but one thing it did do correctly was create a crossover campaign that made sense because the characters were mid-tier or above in terms of power level and the enemy was superpowered monsters from beyond space. Within the splatterpunk/apocalyptic Theme/Tone, it was okay if one PC was better than another because compared to the opposition all the PCs were wusses and compared to the average denizen of the world all the PCs were unstoppable badasses. I've run a Mummy one-shot with two Mummies, a Second Sight hedge wizard with some cool artifacts, and a Second Sight psychic with some cool artifacts (the two chief leaders of the Mummies' cult.) The Mummies stomp everywhere, crazily overpowered, but the other two have all the Allies, Contacts, etc. because the bosses have been asleep 600 years. It works because it gives permission for the Mummies to say "oh my god, what is this 'America' continent, I have never heard of such a thing" without holding up the game, gives the cultists crucial abilities to moving the game forward that the Mummies don't/can't have, and when the Mummies sweep into open conflict, the cultists aren't a complete waste of time, but their chief goal is to support their uberpowered god-bosses. So I can understand someone who says that game balance is a tool whose use can only be evaluated in the context of individual games. I can remember oWoD games where Backgrounds were pretty much useless. Should have spent those points on getting more Dodge, sucker! Trying to balance for both types of games seems impossible given the Attribute+skill roll-a-die-pool framework. I've been thinking about the Heroes-create-Beasts fix and I am liking it more and more. I am going to do a bit of a writeup, though my idea connects Heroes more firmly to the Changeling mythos because story-crafting gone awry(?) seems like the best way to produce degenerate "heroes" of that sort. The other reason this could be cool is because you would be creating your antagonist at the same time you made your character. Since they predate you, they were fighting you before you really were anything to be fought. That said, I don't think it's inherently a bad idea to re-create Vampire without using vampires; vampires have a bunch of cultural weight/baggage even independently of the Anne Rice-style romantic mythos that Requiem tries to shoulder. If Beast becomes just another vampire themed (this was done to me without my say, I have to do bad things or worse things will result, I cling desperately to my human feelings to keep from wrecking the world) game that isn't about vampires, I'm fine with that.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:21
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JDCorley posted:Yeah, I don't remember inter-game-line balanced being pitched to me as a nWoD feature; in fact the use of templates and how to design them for your own monstars would indicate to me that this is emphatically not a nWoD feature. Given how crossovers work in (any) WoD campaign, with Theme and Tone primarily forming the basis for campaign decisions instead of trying to create a consistent world that every group plays in, that makes sense to me. This is probably the biggest reason I've never felt crossover play was meant to be a focus (honestly, it's surprising to hear it was though I'll take your word for it; I wasn't playing WoD back then). Changeling's strong themes of escaping abuse are helped by constant paranoia, which would be diluted by a Mage, who both has the theme of poking every hornet's nest in existence to see what happens and resources to be abundantly clear and certain about how things are happening, as a random example. Vampire is heavily about entrenched social situations which are lovely and unhelpful but self-perpetuate because that's politics; these don't work with many other splats which aren't just adopting outsider roles but legitimately are outsiders and don't care about the power hierarchy unless it's going to kill them or something. Thematically, I've always taken the WoD books as very self contained, and the role of others as being a lot like "guest stars"; the desire for unified mechanics just being A: good practise in a game line and B: ensuring that you're not (hyperbole, again) drawing playing cards to check damage from a mage's attack when everyone else is rolling dice. Probably ranted enough about crossover play now. Beast still sucks.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:27
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Ferrinus posted:Well, like, while I wouldn't personally want WoD splats to have varying levels of power (I like vampires, werewolves, and mages too much to like any of them outclassing the others) I don't think it's necessarily bad if they do. The thing is, it'd be nice if they did on purpose, rather than at random. Give me 1E WoD or give me Exalted, but don't give me "pssshhh, who balance isn't even REAL, MAN." I agree with you that "PFFTT CLASS BALANCE SHUT UP" is a pretty dick move. But JDCorley put my thoughts better than I could. I don't think that in multiple games with wildly diverging themes and tones you can have 100% perfect racial parity. Which is why Beast being so crossover centric confuses me. What's Bob the Beast supposed to do when the rest of the players go off on the Siskur'dah, besides glare at them menacingly while licking his lips and going "mmm that's nice."
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Jun 8, 2015 19:28
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Kurieg posted:I agree with you that "PFFTT CLASS BALANCE SHUT UP" is a pretty dick move. But JDCorley put my thoughts better than I could. I don't think that in multiple games with wildly diverging themes and tones you can have 100% perfect racial parity. Which is why Beast being so crossover centric confuses me. What's Bob the Beast supposed to do when the rest of the players go off on the Siskur'dah, besides glare at them menacingly while licking his lips and going "mmm that's nice." Creep out the werewolves by begging to eat the communion wafer so he can tell how the Body of Christ tastes.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:31
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Thank you Winson, for the sadly appropriate thread title.Dave Brookshaw posted:If we do another nWoD game, I kinda want to do a deliberately lower-powered one compared to the others. Do Wraith, you know you want to.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:45
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Dave Brookshaw posted:If we do another nWoD game, I kinda want to do a deliberately lower-powered one compared to the others. I aleays assumed that 1e Changeling was designed specifically to be lower-key than any of the "big three" splats to reinforce the idea that you're playing fugitives and unfortunates more so than you're playing Real Monsters. It jived, too, with the fact that changelings were the #1 most benign playable supernatural; they didn't eat people, they didn't let demons into the world, and they were in general capable of being genuinely and unqualifiedly wondrous/magical without there being some catch that exported the true costs of that magic onto innocent bystanders. .... Stories about running a game with two vampires and one ghoul or whatever are missing the point. The ADVANTAGE of clearly defined and smartly designed inter-splat balance is precisely that you CAN do that. If whoever wrote Second Sight was like "pfft, who gives a poo poo about other splats? not me, I'm only balancing one kind of hedge magic against another", it would actually undermine Second Sight and the overall setting simultaneously; the whole point is that mortal occultist can barely scratch true supernatural power! The writer of Second Sight HAS to look carefully at Mage and at Vampire and so on and peg the power of Sleeper thaumaturgy firmly below what he or she finds there.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:45
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How have your games been when you do crossover play, Ferrinus? I'll freely admit to being biased against it from bad chat game drama when I was in high school, but that was mostly the result of dick players and STs.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:49
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Kavak posted:Thank you Winson, for the sadly appropriate thread title. Winson's not been a mod for awhile, that was probably Ettin.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:50
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Dave Brookshaw posted:If we do another nWoD game, I kinda want to do a deliberately lower-powered one compared to the others. What would be the purpose of designing a game with that intent in mind, other than to provide a talking point in a discussion about brand-level game design?
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Jun 8, 2015 19:52
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