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New thread again? Guess I'll have to datamine this one like the previous. That said, I wouldn't mind some input from some folks on a skype/roll20 game I'm trying to get things set up and organized for. Long story short, a V20 set in Austin. Camarilla controlled but just barely, what with all of the assholes from out of town moving in and making things more difficult with the natives. The Anarchs have either gone nominally Cam and are full on accelerationists in wanting to see it collapse that way, visiting from the Free State due to the crossover for SxSW or they're batshit Sovcits calling in to Alex Jones and screaming out "I AM A FREE KINDRED OF THE PRAXIS AND I DO NOT CREATE JOINDER WITH YOU!" when the Sheriff comes a knocking. The Sabbat are basically MRA who object to the feminization of the Cainite nature. People livestreaming from bestwurst carts as part of a scheme to bring the Masquerade down. poo poo like that. It's not really that much of a serious game is what I'm getting at. Tradition verses innovation, since it's going to be up to the players to finally realize how to live in a world where constant social media is a thing now. Starts up during SxSW as I said, with it hopefully ending on the Day of the Dead.. The problem is that 1) I'm used to dealing with a digichat based environment when it comes to stuff and am unsure about my chops in running a smaller group and 2) I tend to overthink and over complicate poo poo. What resources would y'all suggest for me to check out re crafting a chronicle for the characters? I have the broad brushes but I don't want to end up rearranging deck-chairs on the titanic. What are some resources for me to look in to, which ones to avoid, how much should i spell out for my players as to what sort of characters I'm looking for, poo poo like that. I don't want to limit them too much on what they can play as, but it's meant to be a political and social game and I don't want to have someone roll up with a Nagaraja or over the top. Any advice welcome. Thanks in advance. If anyone would like to look at what I do have, I can set up a google doc for folks to glance over and offer their notes.
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Mar 31, 2016 05:03
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citybeatnik posted:New thread again? Guess I'll have to datamine this one like the previous. That said, I wouldn't mind some input from some folks on a skype/roll20 game I'm trying to get things set up and organized for. Also maybe use Obsidian Portal for tracking? I dunno what their free level services are like these days but historically it's been pretty good for storing character sheets + setting info in a central place so everyone remembers 3 months from now that OH that guy's the Prince's ex's best friend's roommate from the bad old days who secretly has beef with the Sheriff. Picture a conspiracy theory yarn wall. That's how you want things to make sense for a fun, semi-light social VtM game: convoluted but ultimately sensical. On a local level if anyone makes a character from California please kill them before the end of the first session.
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Mar 31, 2016 05:26
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:First off, if it's not going to be much of a serious game, definitely just let people make Whatever with the caveat that this is theoretically going to be a Talkie so if you make a Celerity-powered katana blender, you may need to solve your problems through alternative means. And absolutely go broad strokes, because the best way to have a not-so-serious but heavily social game is to think of how soap operas do it: Thing happens, everyone talks about thing separately and reacts to it, their reactions cause everyone to talk, repeat. You can maintain a few overarching out there beats, but the more room you leave in the setting, the faster the characters' actions will rush to fill the gaps. I had planned on using both Roll20's storage for sheets as well as an on-going google doc with information that they know about, stuff they want to look in to, etc. One that they can edit, one that's just for me. But! I'll look in to Obsidian Portal as another option. And yeah, about the only thing that the native anarchs and the cam in the city is "gently caress calis". https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z7by4eeeXAnpdqgsTn0i9IxbOeNqahmwvzCVKU4GQ7A/edit?usp=sharing There's the general thing I'm working with atm. Well, a back up of it, for people to toss up ideas and suggestions if they feel like commenting.
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Mar 31, 2016 05:35
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:On a local level if anyone makes a character from California please kill them before the end of the first session. We're not all tech yuppies  :If someone does make one though, ash them.
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Mar 31, 2016 05:44
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Eh, geist is loose enough for me to write up some cool plot threads and tie them to other stuff on the fly. And this reminds me I've got one of those wod vampire novels that happens in California. Something about a new dude in town being blamed for vamp cannibalism. Seemed like a good read at the time. (I know nothing of WoD vamps)
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Mar 31, 2016 07:12
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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. Hey, I like both.
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Mar 31, 2016 09:11
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One thing about nDemon that I think doesn't get enough attention is how fantastically fun the interlocks can get. They really help to define a character with a few tricks that are entirely their own and unique to them. For example, the demon I'm playing in the game I'm currently in had their first interlock be a combination of Momentum and Just Bruised to create a force-redirection counterattack. I've gone on to do such fun things with it like fastball special a hyper-charged plasma shot back at the mech that shot it at me (the game is set moderately ahead into the future, Daeren has talked a bit about it in the past). It fits the character perfectly, since their method of defusing ambushes, traps, etc. is to walk directly into them, even if they notice them in advance.
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Mar 31, 2016 15:34
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I Am Just a Box posted: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. No seriously this is the best thing. I'm so glad I backed this just for these guys alone. It's adorable, and I now want to just port them into other non-CoD games , just to spread the idea.
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Mar 31, 2016 16:05
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I think one of my favourite interlocks is Merciful Gunman, inspired by John Reese from Person of Interest. It combines Merciless Gunman with Knockout Punch and lets you do disabling leg shots on a roomful of mooks, to avoid leaving a trail of corpses behind.
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Mar 31, 2016 17:10
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Doodmons posted:I think one of my favourite interlocks is Merciful Gunman, inspired by John Reese from Person of Interest. It combines Merciless Gunman with Knockout Punch and lets you do disabling leg shots on a roomful of mooks, to avoid leaving a trail of corpses behind. Nice! We give our John Reese-inspired demon the ability to do that with standard Merciless Gunman because it fit better for the tone we were going for, bit it was still their first key. Then it interlocked with Cause and Effect to create Ricochet, where a designated target takes 1L for every mook that would have been taken out by Merciless Gunman while the mooks only take 1l. I was also pretty proud of Dance Like Nobody's Watching, an interlock of Alibi and Freudian Slip that completely removes someone's consideration of how their actions might be perceived and causes them to act without fear of judgement.
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Mar 31, 2016 17:19
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Obligatum VII posted:One thing about nDemon that I think doesn't get enough attention is how fantastically fun the interlocks can get. They really help to define a character with a few tricks that are entirely their own and unique to them. I still the funniest use of that was when you got hit by the van.
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Apr 1, 2016 01:30
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E: Found the answer, Virtue still works like Virtue Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 21:08
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Ferrinus posted: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. If you try and make all the splats crossover friendly, though, instead of making each line true to itself first and foremost, you end up with stuff like Mage being the absolutely nutter-butters tangled mess it was in 1e; where, for some reason, Matter 2 let you create tidal waves if you got lucky on a dice roll, but you couldn't, say, make a simple breeze to blow out a candle because controlling air wasn't a thing that happened until Matter 4. Making each splat true to itself and pretending the others don't exist is the best way to go about it. If you make a game line worse for the sake of improving another game line the person buying it may not care one lick about, you are making a terrible decision for your audience.
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Apr 2, 2016 21:35
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Yeah, the benefit of the nWoD method isn't that everybody is equally capable, which would be bad; it's that when you use those capabilities you know what happens, and you don't wind up with werewolves having shut-down-all-your-magic magic that only werewolves actually have a chance of resisting because the roll uses werewolf-only traits.
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Apr 2, 2016 21:47
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Axelgear posted:If you try and make all the splats crossover friendly, though, instead of making each line true to itself first and foremost, you end up with stuff like Mage being the absolutely nutter-butters tangled mess it was in 1e; where, for some reason, Matter 2 let you create tidal waves if you got lucky on a dice roll, but you couldn't, say, make a simple breeze to blow out a candle because controlling air wasn't a thing that happened until Matter 4. That doesn't make any sense at all. What does low-level tidal waves and high-level breezes have to do with inter-splat balance? How is it that you concluded that the liquid-solid-gas progression of 1e Matter was written for the sake of some non-Mage splat? In 2E, the reason some effects you'd expect to be high-level (like directing lightning strikes or controlling someone's decisions) actually come pretty early, and the reason some effects you'd expect to be low-level (like conjuring light) actually represent full mastery, comes down to the way the Practices are arranged and phrased. In 1E, it's a lot more arbitrary, but most of the Arcana contain implicit three-step progressions (bugs->dogs->humans, light/sound->fire/lightning->gravity/radiation, liquid->solid->gas) presumably to better differentiate between the capabilities of novices and experts in an environment in which the Practices weren't really taken seriously. Either way this has nothing to do with one splat being able to massively out-damage or out-dominate or whatever another. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Apr 2, 2016 |
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Apr 2, 2016 21:51
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The arbitrary handicapping of Life, Matter, and Forces to only affect certain phenomena in Mage 1e was a feature of "game balance" (something that the writers for the Mind arcanum didn't get the note on, apparently). Life was kneecapped as well, with the Lesser, Medial, and Greater categories for what you could affect with a given type of spell. It's nice to have the game be internally consistent before we worry about external concerns.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:04
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Axelgear posted:The arbitrary handicapping of Life, Matter, and Forces to only affect certain phenomena in Mage 1e was a feature of "game balance" (something that the writers for the Mind arcanum didn't get the note on, apparently). Life was kneecapped as well, with the Lesser, Medial, and Greater categories for what you could affect with a given type of spell. It wasn't arbitrary handicapping, it was just a power progression that substituted nouns for verbs. 1E Forces could create light at level 3! Properly speaking, that's Making, and it shouldn't be able to do that until level 5, but whoever wrote the majority of the 1E Arcana either didn't care about the Practices as a power rationing mechanism or didn't believe they'd serve as a good one on their own. What I'm not seeing is any indication that the theoretical existence of werewolves is responsible for this. Also I have no idea why you're mentioning it at all since the actual means by which 1e mages were overpowered, and the arena in which 2E supernaturals are way out of kilter with each other in a way 1E supernaturals weren't, has nothing to do with the narrative effects of unresisted, scene-sculpting powers and everything to do with broad arenas of action like combat that any character can potentially compete in. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Apr 2, 2016 |
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Apr 2, 2016 22:08
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Oh I want to get into a game of this. Anyone here playing nWoD/CofD in the Boston area?
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Apr 3, 2016 05:54
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Also the fact that rules of Magic have nothing to do with the rules of physics is a good thing.
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Apr 3, 2016 06:22
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Latest DD episode is up, where we interview one to the players of the "End of Line" LARP, plus general talk about Nordic larp. http://podcast.darker-days.org/e/darker-days-radio-70/
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Apr 3, 2016 18:26
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Mage. OWOD or NWOD? You decide. Then you tell me so I can decide.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:28
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Trier posted:Mage. OWOD or NWOD? You decide. Then you tell me so I can decide.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:45
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Yawgmoth posted:NWOD. Unless you like arguing forever about what is and is not coincidental and/or in your paradigm, and what sphere(s) you need to accomplish effect X. I hate arguing. Thanks! Does this go for all the branches of WOD? I might be looking into Hunter as well in my desperate search for a game to run.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:47
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Not all, but on the average the OWoD games have a more extensive backstory and metaplot, while the CofD/NWoD games have a lighter story with more focus on tighter rules.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:51
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Trier posted:I hate arguing. Thanks! Does this go for all the branches of WOD? I might be looking into Hunter as well in my desperate search for a game to run. Other game breakdowns, very loosely: Vampire: O - Which lunch table in the high school cafeteria has adopted you? You are that now. Also superpowers stapled onto Judeo-Christianity. N - Pick what flavor of awful thing that wants to pretend it's still human (or not) you want to be, and how. Werewolf: O - Thread-titular crypto fascist eco-terrorists N - Spirit world / physical world border patrol / cops who occasionally accidentally kill some folks. Mage: Covered Changeling: O - LARPers who are probably prohibited by law from living within X feet of a school N - Abuse victims trying not to perpetuate the cycle but probably eventually doing so anyway. Promethean: N-only; one of the greatest games you will never play Wraith: O-only; a great game to read, and play if you find the one group who can do it well Geist: N-only; lamenting squandered possibilities as both theme and execution. Mummy: O - the 90s cartoon Mummies Alive! N - Probably super-cool but runs into the Promethean problem with Wraith shading Demon: O - We had a big Bible party and EVERYONE showed up and then the world ended N - The Matrix and Bourne Identity had a baby that was actually a spinning, flaming wheel made of eyes that are constantly blinking LEDs, and it's pretending to be a normal person or else angels show up. Beast: N-only; No. Don't. e: But yeah the general distinction outlined as far back as VtR (NVamp) was that OWoD is a Universe while NWoD is a Toolkit so you can take or leave big chunks of NWoD stuff (both within a given book and ESPECIALLY in the setting at large) without anything feeling missed, but VtM's a more holistic, "here is the world of the game and you are In That poo poo" from the word go. Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 22:04
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Werewolf: ...accidentally?
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Apr 4, 2016 22:06
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Mors Rattus posted:...accidentally?
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Apr 4, 2016 22:08
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Oops. Whoops. Oops. Oops. Welp. Oops. Whoop-
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Apr 4, 2016 22:15
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:a bunch of informative poo poo One question though: Does NWOD still provide the kind of fluff-wise safety net, the lack of which is completely screwing up my current attempt at DMing because I decided to run a homemade setting as my first real game? I'm not as imaginative as I thought I was, and basically gently caress me thinking up stuff is hard.
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Apr 4, 2016 22:33
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Trier posted:One question though: Does NWOD still provide the kind of fluff-wise safety net, the lack of which is completely screwing up my current attempt at DMing because I decided to run a homemade setting as my first real game? I'm not as imaginative as I thought I was, and basically gently caress me thinking up stuff is hard. Also do yourself a huge favor and go buy the Horror Recognition Guide, a great little book of short fiction presented as a Hunter cell's notes (and the notes of other hunters about those notes, etc.). It's a good fun read on its own for fans of anthologized horror but also gives you a dozen+ story hooks to partially or wholly steal from. e: Oh AND in addition to Hunter: the Vigil (the core book for Hunter), Hunter has a couple side-books (Spirit Slayers, Night Stalkers, Witch Finders) that offer specific takes on spirit world/ghosts/werewolves, vampires, and mages. And for Mage chronicle ideas/shameless theft opportunities, check out Intruders: Encounters With the Abyss and/or Night Horrors: The Unbidden for whole books of "weird antagonistic poo poo to drop in wherever, whatever" in your Mage game. Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 22:50
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Other game breakdowns, very loosely: Poor Orpheus, so forgotten. It really went all-in on the oWoD tendency of tying books to a metaplot, so Orpheus leans more toward being a campaign sequence than a regular core book/toolkit approach.
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Apr 4, 2016 22:51
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Emy posted:Poor Orpheus, so forgotten. It really went all-in on the oWoD tendency of tying books to a metaplot, so Orpheus leans more toward being a campaign sequence than a regular core book/toolkit approach. It was really cool.
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Apr 4, 2016 22:55
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Ferrinus posted: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. Back in 1e testing our group was very much of the opinion that 2 in everything baseline stuff should lead to around three strikes until incapacitation, and everything else was a slider up and down. It's more like 5 strikes, 4 for guns -- enough to preserve some verisimilitude without instakills. This would be okay if the grind made room for decent tactical choices, but 1e wasn't really built for that, to blunt the tendency optimizers/tacticians have for dominating and dictating play.
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Apr 4, 2016 23:30
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Back in 1e testing our group was very much of the opinion that 2 in everything baseline stuff should lead to around three strikes until incapacitation, and everything else was a slider up and down. It's more like 5 strikes, 4 for guns -- enough to preserve some verisimilitude without instakills. This would be okay if the grind made room for decent tactical choices, but 1e wasn't really built for that, to blunt the tendency optimizers/tacticians have for dominating and dictating play. I'm still used to the oWoD combat system, which seemed like it was designed to punish you for not talking out your problems ahead of time and instead resorting to punching people.
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Apr 4, 2016 23:44
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:investigating a ghostly conspiracy ooOooOoOo.
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Apr 5, 2016 00:12
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Orpheus was my favorite oWod thing, partially because it was self contained and very focused. It was a great toolkit for telling stories and the metaplot wasn't even bad for once.
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Apr 5, 2016 00:21
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citybeatnik posted:I'm still used to the oWoD combat system, which seemed like it was designed to punish you for not talking out your problems ahead of time and instead resorting to punching people.
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Apr 5, 2016 00:53
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citybeatnik posted:I'm still used to the oWoD combat system, which seemed like it was designed to punish you for not talking out your problems ahead of time and instead resorting to punching people. Having done recent design for the old combat system, I think its main virtue is that you can extend it in a whole bunch of novel ways because it has more dials. The problem is that you make three or four rolls for every exchange. That, and the / X * tracking methods are really cumbersome.
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Apr 5, 2016 00:57
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The big Orpheus campaign is really col and one of my dreams is to run it one day. Also this: Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Beast:
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Apr 5, 2016 03:51
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Back in 1e testing our group was very much of the opinion that 2 in everything baseline stuff should lead to around three strikes until incapacitation, and everything else was a slider up and down. It's more like 5 strikes, 4 for guns -- enough to preserve some verisimilitude without instakills. This would be okay if the grind made room for decent tactical choices, but 1e wasn't really built for that, to blunt the tendency optimizers/tacticians have for dominating and dictating play. That's how I remember it working out, yeah, if you assume 3ish weapon bonuses. Like, the classic example is of someone with Dex 2 and Firearms 2 turning a +3 pistol on someone with Stamina 2 - seven dice versus seven health boxes. I'd say that if 1e combat was missing anything it was more explicit 2e-style support for surrendering, or turning a fight into a footrace, or whatever.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:32
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