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I feel like everything of value from Second Sight made its way into the GMC conversion thing. It was really spotty and so many of the merits required about 40 dots' worth of investment before you could do anything of interest.
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Mar 30, 2016 18:41
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Yawgmoth posted:I feel like everything of value from Second Sight made its way into the GMC conversion thing. It was really spotty and so many of the merits required about 40 dots' worth of investment before you could do anything of interest. Pretty much, yes. The writing's hit and miss and the mechanics vary from "why would you ever buy this" to "actually incredible, so long as you spend your character's entire EXP budget for three arcs on it and its prerequisites." I wouldn't say it's actively worth avoiding, but it's not exactly on my short list of things I'd suggest people to read before other books.
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Mar 30, 2016 19:40
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Are there any other sources for Second Sight's same niche? Mainly lesser mortal 'unawakened' magic?
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Mar 30, 2016 19:59
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hangedman1984 posted:Are there any other sources for Second Sight's same niche? Mainly lesser mortal 'unawakened' magic? VASCU from Slashers. In addition to being the best Hunter conspiracy, they have access to mostly low-key psychic effects to help with their investigations. Really, you should read the VASCU section anyway, they're great.
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Mar 30, 2016 20:02
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hangedman1984 posted:Are there any other sources for Second Sight's same niche? Mainly lesser mortal 'unawakened' magic? I haven't read most of these very carefully so I'm not gonna make any judgements about quality, but here are the ones I know: Skinchangers and Immortals deal with mortals who have acquired some modicum of power through "low" magic. Inferno has rules for summoning and dealing with demons. Reliquary has rules for magic items, including making characters that can create them. From Hunter, the Lucifuge and Malleus Maleficarum have straight-up magic powers, the Ascending Ones practice alchemy, the Aegis Kai Doru wield mystical artifacts and the Cheiron Corporation turns its agents into part-monster body horrors. Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 20:35
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Wolf-Blooded characters can learn Pack Rites as of Forsaken 2nd Edition; they're not quite pure vanilla mortals, but they're close. Also don't forget that summoning, exorcising, and binding/warding ephemeral are basic actions that anybody can attempt, and the Esoteric Armory Merit can give mortal exorcists an edge in doing them.
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Mar 30, 2016 20:51
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I always recommend people just wholesale rip off Proximi and call them 'low' magicians. It probably requires a fair amount of houseruling but it's pretty easy to just have people buy rotes-as-merits straight out of Mage.
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Mar 30, 2016 20:53
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I liked Second Sight when it came out because it seemed to be something that the core book should have had. Like, the core book has all these weird little paranormal effects (ghosts, psychics, cryptids), but no systems for them at all, except for ghosts. It made the core feel empty. With God Machine Chronicles though, there are plenty of story seeds for paranormal stuff (although no cryptid rules, I believe), which means that pretty much everything I liked about Second Sight is rendered superfluous.
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Mar 30, 2016 20:55
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Reflections85 posted:I liked Second Sight when it came out because it seemed to be something that the core book should have had. Like, the core book has all these weird little paranormal effects (ghosts, psychics, cryptids), but no systems for them at all, except for ghosts. It made the core feel empty. With God Machine Chronicles though, there are plenty of story seeds for paranormal stuff (although no cryptid rules, I believe), which means that pretty much everything I liked about Second Sight is rendered superfluous. Chronicles of Darkness has a pretty robust set of tools for making cryptids and other supernatural gribblies; I think GMC had a few stat blocks, but I don't recall offhand.
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Mar 30, 2016 21:00
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I went back and read Ruins of Empire. I cannot speak to how good it is as a Mummy chapter still; I can, however, speak to it being well-written historically and that I find the idea of a Mummy waking up because some Egyptophiles raided their tomb and shoved them in a crate so they could bring him home with them hilarious.
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Mar 30, 2016 21:52
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Mors Rattus posted:I went back and read Ruins of Empire. I cannot speak to how good it is as a Mummy chapter still; I can, however, speak to it being well-written historically and that I find the idea of a Mummy waking up because some Egyptophiles raided their tomb and shoved them in a crate so they could bring him home with them hilarious. Jesse Heinig. He's very good. This sort of thing is a fun sideline for him since his main gig is narrative and design on Star Trek Online. He's the one who first hired me.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:29
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Jesse's time as Ascension Developer made me stick with roleplaying when I went to Uni, and I can draw a line following that fandom all the way to Developing.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:32
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This is all kickstarter backers talking about Dark Eras, right? If there's somewhere a non-backer scrub like myself can buy Dark Eras, please point me to it.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:57
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Can't be bought yet. And, having gone through it all: I would say the worst bits are Wolf and Raven, Doubting Souls and Lily, Sabre and Thorn. The rest ranges from 'quite good as history, less so as game' to 'pretty good' except for the three standout chapters of The Sundered World, To The Strongest and Beneath the Skin, which are amazing.
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Mar 30, 2016 23:31
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Which ones are Sundered World and Beneath the Skin? The Kickstarter doesn't list any names for the stretch goal add-ons, which I assume those are.
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Mar 30, 2016 23:38
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Neolithic Mage/Werewolf and Aztec skin changers/Demon. The former features Pangaeans, which are spirit-gods of immense power, native to the world between flesh and spirit, which are neither spirit nor flesh, are both, and get both spirit powers and Arcana. The Aztec one has a lot of cool stuff, including civilizations of sentient scorpions that occasionally kill people and eat their memories, and meanwhile are developed scorpion religions and belief systems. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 23:40
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Tulul posted:Which ones are Sundered World and Beneath the Skin? The Kickstarter doesn't list any names for the stretch goal add-ons, which I assume those are. The other stretch goal add-ons are Three Kingdoms of Darkness (Changeling/Geist in the war of the three kingdoms), The Wolf and the Raven (Werewolf/Geist among Norse vikings), After the Fall (Demon following the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans), Fallen Blossom (Edo-jidai Hunter), and A Grimm Dark Era (Changeling in 1800s Germany). Beneath the Skin is easily my favorite chapter. The combination of Skinchangers and Unchained doesn't sound like it would mesh thematically, but the material expands on the outskirts of their subject matter to make a subtle tone of the clash between primal and organic forces, and the artificial and alien, without really being about Old World/New World (most of the material focuses prior to the arrival of the conquistadores). More importantly, it's packed with punchy, brief, evocative hooks and ideas that can easily be extracted without having to use the whole package, some even into games that are neither tied to the time nor the place. Thoughtful scorpion nests are my favorite idea in the whole book: sentient cryptid scorpions intentionally cultivated by the God-Machine, which gather into tiny kingdoms of their own, communicate abstract concepts by varying dialects of a tactile gesture language, develop their own religions, wage war against each other, and occasionally organize questing wars to hunt and consume a single mighty human. The God-Machine uses them as unwitting intelligence agents, because they can be eaten to absorb their memories and those of the things they have hunted. That whole idea is fascinating. The Sundered World and To the Strongest don't have that jam-packed dense feel, but they do create a setting that feels like it fits and is part of and illuminates the history of the Chronicles of Darkness, and I love how the existence of the Pangaean gods simultaneously complicates and brings together what the Uratha know of their mythology. So bravo DaveB, you and your writers placed two out of the three really exciting chapters in this book.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:18
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Wait what's the god machine chronicle, and do I need it to play wod?
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Mar 31, 2016 01:27
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Nomadic Scholar posted:Wait what's the god machine chronicle, and do I need it to play wod? So a few years back Onyx Path wanted to make new editions of the various nWoD lines, but they couldn't afford the licensing costs for a second edition. The God Machine Chronicle was a soft update to the WoD corebook that was also a campaign starter, Blood and Smoke: The Strix Chronicle was Vampire's update... Then they sold well enough to get the rights to make a second edition. Strix Chronicle was just renamed to VtR Second Edition, but the God Machine Chronicle wasn't really up to the standards they wanted a second edition of the corebook to meet so everyone just stopped talking about it. Anyway, now there's the Chronicles of Darkness corebook if you want to just play people, and Vampire, Werewolf and Demon's corebooks all have all the rules you need to play so there's no real reason to get it. EDIT: I Am Just A Box explains it better, read their post instead. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 01:46
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Nomadic Scholar posted:Wait what's the god machine chronicle, and do I need it to play wod? Ha ha, oh boy. A series of foibles led to this situation confusing a lot of people. The short version is that there's two editions of the nWoD/what is now called the CofD. When they were first putting out the second edition, though, the WoD properties were owned by CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online, and licensed to the writers at Onyx Path, and CCP told them not to call it a second edition, but they were allowed to release the new rules in the form of "chronicle books" that added a signature antagonist to each line. The first "chronicle book" was for the mortals line and was The God Machine Chronicle, because that's what its packaged signature antagonist was called, but for lack of a better name, fans took to calling the second edition rules as a whole the "GMC rules." Demon: the Descent came out next, and contained pretty much the same rules update appendix the GMC book had. Then with the second "chronicle book" for Vampire, at the time titled Blood & Smoke: The Strix Chronicle, they tried including the full rules for the game system, rather than requiring you to reference the World of Darkness Rulebook or the GMC book, and that was successful. Then, CCP's plans exploded, so they went ahead and just started calling it a second edition, going as far as to rebrand the Blood & Smoke book with a new cover as Vampire: the Requiem: Second Edition. Then later CCP sold the WoD properties to Paradox Interactive, and Paradox asked Onyx Path to rebrand the nWoD so that there weren't two Worlds of Darkness. You can now ignore the God-Machine Chronicle book, as most of its contents, both rules and "chronicle book" content, have been folded into the new Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook. Demon: the Descent (which is excellent) and Beast: the Primordial (which is... not) are only available in second edition form, but Demon hasn't been updated to the new standalone-rules format, so you need any version of the base rules (either the 1e World of Darkness Rulebook or any other second edition core) to run it. Vampire and Werewolf have second edition corebooks, with Mage, Promethean and Changeling in various late stages of development, and Hunter, Geist and Mummy being further off in the future. All the Demon supplements, of course, use the second edition rules, as does Mortal Remains, a Hunter supplement with a quick-patch to run Hunter in 2e. Everything else currently available for the nWoD/CofD uses first edition rules.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:48
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Oh nice. That's some good poo poo. And a bunch of crazy business decisions drat. I had been curious as to why a friend was calling demon: the descent Not Fun and just kept saying GMC was garbage. Thanks for clearing that stuff up.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:27
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Nomadic Scholar posted:Oh nice. That's some good poo poo. And a bunch of crazy business decisions drat. I had been curious as to why a friend was calling demon: the descent Not Fun and just kept saying GMC was garbage. Thanks for clearing that stuff up. If they're saying Demon is not fun you can't trust them. Ever.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:32
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Nomadic Scholar posted:I had been curious as to why a friend was calling demon: the descent Not Fun and just kept saying GMC was garbage. Your friend is crazy, Demon: the Descent is the game where you customize your own crazy boss form and pick powers from things like literalizing puns, turning people into pillars of salt if they disobey your orders, grabbing an injury and throwing it at someone, and staring at someone so they freeze up so hard they pass out or die. I mean, the base 2e rules aren't flawless, and Conditions take a bit to get used to. But Demon is a smart game that still passes the cool test with flying colors.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:36
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gonna go on a limb and guess it has to do with the general idea of the god machine and technological trappings of descent
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Mar 31, 2016 02:45
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I can sympathize with that, until Demon came out I was really, really skeptical of them handling that well. SPOILERS: They handled it really well.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:46
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This friend likes being a murderball and didn't like a bunch of the implementation of some mechanics. Idk if loving Demon: the Fallen has any implications here, but I'm throwing that out there.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:50
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I've never been a fan of the literal physical mechanical aesthetics of the God-Machine's mechanical trappings, like the angels made of creaky gears and so on; it just comes off as cartoonishly on-the-nose (and definitely too close to steampunk for my tastes). I'm sure I'm not the only one who was initially turned off by the cog-laden pneumatic gargoyles that visually define the GM's infrastructure in the GMC rulebook.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:02
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Demon is a game where instead of having arcane vocabulary to sound more weird and exotic, they use spy jargon which is designed to sound as unremarkable as possible and I love it for that.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:03
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gtrmp posted:I've never been a fan of the literal physical mechanical aesthetics of the God-Machine's mechanical trappings, like the angels made of creaky gears and so on; it just comes off as cartoonishly on-the-nose (and definitely too close to steampunk for my tastes). I'm sure I'm not the only one who was initially turned off by the cog-laden pneumatic gargoyles that visually define the GM's infrastructure in the GMC rulebook. Also Nomadic Scholar posted:This friend likes being a murderball and didn't like a bunch of the implementation of some mechanics. Idk if loving Demon: the Fallen has any implications here, but I'm throwing that out there.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:06
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gtrmp posted:I've never been a fan of the literal physical mechanical aesthetics of the God-Machine's mechanical trappings, like the angels made of creaky gears and so on; it just comes off as cartoonishly on-the-nose (and definitely too close to steampunk for my tastes). I'm sure I'm not the only one who was initially turned off by the cog-laden pneumatic gargoyles that visually define the GM's infrastructure in the GMC rulebook. I see angels and demons as being more gieger than steampunk.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:06
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Soonmot posted:I see angels and demons as being more gieger than steampunk. Yeah, I mean you can do the Terminator thing if you want but the Gieger influences are there as well. I also don't really get a steampunk vibe off it at all.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:22
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Giger influences puts me more in mind of phallic and yonic imagery all over the place. Oval jet intakes, etc
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Mar 31, 2016 03:26
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There's certainly enough problems with the 2nd Ed system that I'm going to keep using the 1st Ed one instead: - Badly designed XP system - Easy to abuse and cumbersome condition system - Rocket tag combat - Lots of power creep But there's also genuine improvements and I feel like a third editions taking the best from both 1E and 2E would be amazing and blow both out of the water. Demon is also really good, with the caveat that it has the same problems as other 2E stuff.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:27
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This all sounds pretty rad, like when I got to hear a story of how a hunters in darkness werewolf tore through the previous alpha's face for 11 damage in one hit. I'm down for some god espionage. I should really try and put some stuff together for a geist campaign. (and learn the actual rules aside from chargen info so I'm not in the dark)
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Mar 31, 2016 03:32
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I should mention that not every group will be affected the same by the failures of the 2E system. If your group has no problem tracking all the conditions and won't feel compelled to exploit the XP and Condition systems then 2E is fine. But for my group, full of players who engage deeply with the systems and will exploit holes in them, it was a deal breaker. They couldn't play a game where the mechanically superior way to play was at odds with the story it tried to tell.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:40
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Nomadic Scholar posted:This all sounds pretty rad, like when I got to hear a story of how a hunters in darkness werewolf tore through the previous alpha's face for 11 damage in one hit. I'm down for some god espionage. I should really try and put some stuff together for a geist campaign. (and learn the actual rules aside from chargen info so I'm not in the dark) Geist is a game of potential wrapped in tragedy and executed by firing squad and I'm not talking themes or plot.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:57
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MonsieurChoc posted:There's certainly enough problems with the 2nd Ed system that I'm going to keep using the 1st Ed one instead: I'm genuinely curious about why you think the XP system is poorly designed. And I would argue 1e combat is also very rocket tag-y. When you say 'power creep' do you mean with regards to 1e or regards to different lines within 2e itself? I agree with both but I think it would be a constructive discussion. I'm less bothered by 2e characters being more powerful than 1e characters as I am by say, Demons being scads more powerful than Vampires. Conditions I think were poorly implemented and inconsistently applied. Things that should be conditions (Cruac rituals, for instance) often aren't and things that are sometimes feel arbitrary. If they were only applied to things that provided the player with an incentive to explore the full consequences of a given situation (being bewitched, having a broken leg) I think it might have been cleaner.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:58
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My takes, and this is the short version since I think we've all had these discussions before:Mendrian posted:I'm genuinely curious about why you think the XP system is poorly designed. Some of the means by which beats are earned can lead to goofy or metagamey behavior. I don't really see the advantage of using them over just giving some integer each session. quote:And I would argue 1e combat is also very rocket tag-y. Nowhere near as much as 2e combat is. It takes a lot more work and a lot more disparity to throw around a dicepool that can one-shot someone; generally, fighting someone to a standstill is more about filling up a meter, and the person being fought has at least one or two decision points at which they can look at how fast their meter is filling and opt to surrender or change tactics or something. quote:When you say 'power creep' do you mean with regards to 1e or regards to different lines within 2e itself? I agree with both but I think it would be a constructive discussion. I'm less bothered by 2e characters being more powerful than 1e characters as I am by say, Demons being scads more powerful than Vampires. I actually like that most creatures are a little stronger out the gate than they were in their 1E incarnations, but as you say there's like no effort made whatsoever to standardize power between different types of supernaturals, and as often as not the flashy and rhetorically potent superpowers that let you trivialize normies are just as effective at letting you trivialize other supernaturals, even other player characters. quote:Conditions I think were poorly implemented and inconsistently applied. Things that should be conditions (Cruac rituals, for instance) often aren't and things that are sometimes feel arbitrary. If they were only applied to things that provided the player with an incentive to explore the full consequences of a given situation (being bewitched, having a broken leg) I think it might have been cleaner. I really feel like "conditions" should've been generalized things that replaced the health track entirely and which other powers could hang off of. Like there'd be a standardized list of conditions like "winded", "wounded", "cursed", etc, and if power X wounds you, or power Y curses you, Z happens.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:23
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I feel like everybody else punking vampires is something that's always happened in WoD? In any case, demons being incredible powerhouses doesn't faze me at all given that a linear increase in the amount of flexing you do correlates to an exponential increase in the chances that you're signing your own death warrant by doing it.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:34
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What Ferrinus said. It should be noted that these issues came up through actual play and I was actually really excited about 2E before playing it. I'm not a fan of the power creep because one of the things I loved about the nWoD as compared to the old one was that it was lower powered and more balanced. I still haven't forgiven that nWoD designer who said in his blog that he didn't believe in balance.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:40
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