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GimpInBlack posted:I think you'll like how we're presenting mechanics text in Geist 2e. Please tell me the rules are condensed all in one section and not spread across 300 pages.
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Jun 14, 2018 19:31
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Also you should absolutely make the players wade through an office ball pit where the balls attack them like tiny, colorful Langoliers. Ballpits and fire escapes are great, I've also seen giant slides which need to be "staffed" or they constitute a major insurance hazard. Climbing through elevator shafts, air ducts, or the outside of the building would be neat. Represent the infinitely recursive patterns by flipping on one of those multicolored LED bulbs. Go full Achewood and have them flush themselves down a giant possessed toilet.
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Jun 14, 2018 21:20
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blastron posted:My Mage players are gearing up to infiltrate a Seer operation, which is a mid-sized tech company. I want the big defensive trap to be a pocket dimension that’s an infinite maze of open-plan office space that gets weirder and weirder the further in you go, to the point where they’re constantly being attacked by animated office equipment in a jungle made of towering standing desks and trash cans overflowing with paper. If the trap is meant to protect the Seer sanctum or some macguffin, it doesn't really need to stop people from leaving it. Just make whatever the players need to find/do at the "solved" heart of the maze (however they figure that out,) if they teleport out of it or use some other brute force then they're out if it but they still don't have what they need/haven't gotten where they need to go. Just because they're the Seers doesn't mean they have to make inescapable deathtraps, it's enough to just deter and divert.
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Jun 14, 2018 21:50
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Lambo Trillrissian posted:If the trap is meant to protect the Seer sanctum or some macguffin, it doesn't really need to stop people from leaving it. Just make whatever the players need to find/do at the "solved" heart of the maze (however they figure that out,) if they teleport out of it or use some other brute force then they're out if it but they still don't have what they need/haven't gotten where they need to go. Just because they're the Seers doesn't mean they have to make inescapable deathtraps, it's enough to just deter and divert. If the place is leaning harder into office bureaucracy, may the procurement of the macguffin require a chain of going to various locations to recieve, sign, and submit forms in exchange for others with challenges including waiting untold amounts of time for a form to even be looked at to sign (and god help you if it's the wrong one).
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Jun 14, 2018 23:15
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I need to know the thread this came from because this is the best new emote I've seen in years. Also I suggest striking a deal with an internal security element that's gotten bored out of its skull and/or is on the take from some rival Seer cabal and looking for an excuse to gently caress the tech ones.
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Jun 14, 2018 23:22
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Xelkelvos posted:If the place is leaning harder into office bureaucracy, may the procurement of the macguffin require a chain of going to various locations to recieve, sign, and submit forms in exchange for others with challenges including waiting untold amounts of time for a form to even be looked at to sign (and god help you if it's the wrong one). "No no no, this is the clandestine infiltrator form for werewolves, but don't worry, we can fix that." "The form?" "Hah hah, no."
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Jun 14, 2018 23:38
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Daeren posted:I need to know the thread this came from because this is the best new emote I've seen in years.
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Jun 14, 2018 23:45
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Kurieg posted:After poo poo takes a turn for the surreal have them spot a giant flaming exit sign in the distance. It's not actually a lie, but you want them to be suspicious of it. If they actually manage to make it that far then them must defeat a golem made out of time clocks, exit signs, lockers, and snippets of payroll software given form. The golem can be defeated by handing it an official request for exit form, that can be found flying around. Because you know one of your players is going to ask what type of forms are attacking them.
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Jun 15, 2018 00:57
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Xelkelvos posted:If the place is leaning harder into office bureaucracy, may the procurement of the macguffin require a chain of going to various locations to recieve, sign, and submit forms in exchange for others with challenges including waiting untold amounts of time for a form to even be looked at to sign (and god help you if it's the wrong one). Yeah I was just going to suggest a direct copy of the Permit A38 scene, and the players can defeat it the same way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtEkUmYecnk
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Jun 15, 2018 03:00
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Xelkelvos posted:If the place is leaning harder into office bureaucracy, may the procurement of the macguffin require a chain of going to various locations to recieve, sign, and submit forms in exchange for others with challenges including waiting untold amounts of time for a form to even be looked at to sign (and god help you if it's the wrong one). If the term "PC Load Letter" doesn't come up, I feel bad for you. Clearly, the heart of all Seer evil is located in a fax machine. Slimnoid posted:Please tell me the rules are condensed all in one section and not spread across 300 pages. I have apparently run mage for too long as I look at chapter 4 as "the rules" and everything else as recommendations because they're just going to break them anyway.
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Jun 15, 2018 03:09
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Lambo Trillrissian posted:If the trap is meant to protect the Seer sanctum or some macguffin, it doesn't really need to stop people from leaving it. Just make whatever the players need to find/do at the "solved" heart of the maze (however they figure that out,) if they teleport out of it or use some other brute force then they're out if it but they still don't have what they need/haven't gotten where they need to go. Just because they're the Seers doesn't mean they have to make inescapable deathtraps, it's enough to just deter and divert. Thank you for this, you’ve just upgraded this from a trap intended to wear them down if they got stuck in it but ultimately not actually serve any other purpose and into the unnecessarily complicated security system guarding their inner sanctum. The “correct” way into the actual sanctum will be to tap one of the Seers’ badges at any of the easily-visible keycard doors. Brute-forcing the doors only gets you deeper into the maze. Also definitely stealing the idea that the platonic concept of a horrible open-plan office would have clearly-marked exits leading to emergency stairwells.
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Jun 15, 2018 04:00
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I wonder how much work it'd take to make a VtM text adventure that isn't awful.
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Jun 15, 2018 04:41
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Loomer posted:I wonder how much work it'd take to make a VtM text adventure that isn't awful. L Y I N G I N I T S O W N S M E A R
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Jun 15, 2018 05:08
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Emphasis on the isn't awful. Kind of a Bloodlines meets Sunless Sea kinda deal, maybe.
Loomer fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Jun 15, 2018 |
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Jun 15, 2018 05:14
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Looking into it, I'm pretty sure it's doable fairly easily with some of the IF editors out there. Be a little tricky to implement the ST system but the rest - clans, disciplines, even a prelude or a ghoul option - should be quite doable, and branching storylines with consequences are definitely doable. In theory you could do one that worked with every splat as well. I might mock up a simple demo based on Alien Hunger to see how it goes.
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Jun 15, 2018 07:29
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Throwing out another update - what's with the radio silence, where's the usual magechat to break up my double posting? It's actually coming together nicely. I haven't started on the actual plot stuff yet since I want to get the basic mechanics down but it's going super smoothly for someone with as little experience scripting and programming as I do. So far I've got it recognizing daytime vs night-time, external areas vs internal, blood requirements and caps (not sure of how to incorporate turn limits on expenditure just yet - I'm sure there's a way though), basic implementation of clans + bloodlines, sects and sect infiltration for appropriate bloodlines (e.g. Tlacique posing as Serpents of the Light, True Brujah as Brujah), a generation system with attribute and BP caps, daily bloodburn, blood pools, a humanity system, attributes both as 'base' and as functional with disciplines etc (including the nossie weakness), classic ST system damage levels, torpor, and even a willpower-based system for staying active during daylight hours. There are obviously going to be limitations to what can be done in terms of NPC interaction but I think I can rig it up to require care in feeding, hunter attacks, the sheriff coming to kick your fangs in for masquerade breaches, etc. It'll be an abstraction - I don't think the language and engine I'm using is robust enough to handle a generic 'are other NPCs present with flag 'masqueradebreachwitness'?' check, but it might be and the work around is to set up rooms with a 'feedingbreachesmasquerade' check etc so, say, a restaurant is set that way but you can lure an NPC into the toilets or the alley outside where it isn't true. Disciplines are also going to be tricky where they have some more subjective effects, but I'll borrow from Bloodlines and Redemption for those use cases. For dialogue etc they're no problem at all though.
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Jun 17, 2018 11:06
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I'm away from the book at the moment so I'm sure I wouldn't be surprised if I'm mistaken, but in my read-through of Promethean it would have been nice to be told in the actual Osirian chapter that they're all missing a body part. I mean, I get it, it's thematic, but I swear they don't mention it in the pages on the actual Lineage.
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Jun 17, 2018 14:20
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Dawgstar posted:I'm away from the book at the moment so I'm sure I wouldn't be surprised if I'm mistaken, but in my read-through of Promethean it would have been nice to be told in the actual Osirian chapter that they're all missing a body part. I mean, I get it, it's thematic, but I swear they don't mention it in the pages on the actual Lineage. I just checked and I didn't see it either -- I did a quick search for "missing" and "body part" and as far as I can tell there are only two references to Osirans missing a body part in the entire book, and one of them is ambiguous. The Frankenstein lineage description on page 20 is the only specific mention of Nepri missing a body part, although there's also description of creating a Promethean on page 76 that includes "The programming is perfect, the right body part was removed, the voltage is correct: whatever the process, they call down the Divine Fire with their obsession and bring their work to life."
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Jun 17, 2018 14:41
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Loomer posted:Throwing out another update - what's with the radio silence, where's the usual magechat to break up my double posting? It's taken over the Order of the Stick thread.
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Jun 17, 2018 19:47
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Promethean session 2: A week after causing leaving a massive death carnival with an alchemist the group headed to St. Louis. There they kinda split up, Mio the 1980s Harajuku Gothic doll and Bob the Tammuz left to go to a comic shop, where Mio is introduced to Western comics, Bob learns not to open packages. Joseph and Griggs both head out to go shopping, Griggs tries to steal something and rolls a critical failure, meaning a cop was there and sees Griggs try to steal cat food. Griggs is forced to run and is chased down by a police officer, getting into a fight that he manages to escape and runs into hiding. Meanwhile Mafia appear to have a large amount of debt on the owner of the comic shop, Bob managing to scare him off and then follow them. Mio and Joseph go off to find Griggs, critically failing and heading off to the St. Louis Arch. And we have Mazyar, who lives in opulence in the hotel penthouse he was able to acquire for the group. That session's learning: Sometimes it is difficult to integrate people in the game and have them roleplay if they want to play in a situation you are completely unfamiliar with. However this has allowed me an idea for next session, and he was okay with being in the background letting Mazyar relax in the penthouse that he managed to get. Promethean is about personal journeys so its more likely the party is going to split up, trying to minimize the number of different groups should be a high priority.
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Jun 18, 2018 15:35
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I've got a barebones implementation of classic WoD style character creation going. The biggest holdup to progressing mechanically from here is how to handle dice rolling, but I think the basic model might actually be modellable. The question then is, should it be used? It has its weird irregularities around the increasing risk of a botch, so I'm tempted to discard it in favour of a straight hidden percentile system, which would be both easier to implement and less prone to bizarre fuckery.
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Jun 18, 2018 16:15
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Loomer posted:less prone to bizarre fuckery. Toss that idea out then, it's inappropriate for oWoD
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Jun 18, 2018 16:45
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Loomer posted:I've got a barebones implementation of classic WoD style character creation going. The biggest holdup to progressing mechanically from here is how to handle dice rolling, but I think the basic model might actually be modellable. The question then is, should it be used? It has its weird irregularities around the increasing risk of a botch, so I'm tempted to discard it in favour of a straight hidden percentile system, which would be both easier to implement and less prone to bizarre fuckery. You do want different numbers of successes to be a thing, so I'm say all in and implement dice rolling as a Poisson distribution where the average is given by [dice pool]*(11-Target Number)/10, with botches only happening on a subset of 0-success rolls (e.g. TN in 10 failures are botches, 10% of all failures are botches, etc.) This has several advantages: 1) The Poisson distribution is open-ended, meaning there's never an impossible task, just very unlikely ones 2) The Poisson distribution largely approximates the mad fuckery that is oWoD dice mechanics. 3) Implementing a Poisson distribution should be good practice!
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Jun 18, 2018 17:11
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Loomer posted:I've got a barebones implementation of classic WoD style character creation going. The biggest holdup to progressing mechanically from here is how to handle dice rolling, but I think the basic model might actually be modellable. The question then is, should it be used? It has its weird irregularities around the increasing risk of a botch, so I'm tempted to discard it in favour of a straight hidden percentile system, which would be both easier to implement and less prone to bizarre fuckery. Just wanna say I'm really curious about where this is going.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:04
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MonsieurChoc posted:Just wanna say I'm really curious about where this is going. Yes, but will there big big gay Spartans?
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Jun 18, 2018 18:41
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In lieu of proper Mage chat, let's do another classic derail: group Beats. I'm starting an online V:tR 2E game shortly (will be looking for players shortly) and I'm struggling with whether or not to implement group Beats. I understand the primary arguments for it: unevenness is character progression/power, spotlight time, etc. What I'm stuck on is two things - first being that Beats are a good measure of how much spotlight a players is getting, such that a player who is low on Beats needs more spotlight time and that's what really needs to be addressed (assuming everyone wants roughly the same amount of spotlight time, which is a basis for my game). The second is that Beats serve as a really good incentive for the player to screw the character over, which is an important mechanic in a horror game. Let's assume the first problem can be handled by just tracking condition resolution and trying to keep it even that way, that leaves the second problem. I don't want to hand out Willpower because that steps on the toes of the Virtue/Vice system. I'd want to find some other (preferably player-facing as opposed to character-facing) incentive to resolve conditions to the detriment of the character. Anyone have anything that worked well in their game?
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Jun 18, 2018 20:01
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Honestly as long as you have players interested in a good story it shouldn't be a problem. The PCs will do stupid poo poo and screw themselves over plenty without some extrinsic motivation and, in general, I've found that adding that sort of motivator has a tendency to cause the same loss of intrinsic motivation that paying someone to do their hobby involves. If you really need to give something out, give them a condition. The one that lets them upgrade a roll's Dfail/fail/success/Xsuccess by one step seems fairly appropriate.
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Jun 18, 2018 20:07
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Yawgmoth posted:If you really need to give something out, give them a condition. The one that lets them upgrade a roll's Dfail/fail/success/Xsuccess by one step seems fairly appropriate. I like that. I think I'll probably end up putting it up to the players to decide, and offering this as a thing if they don't want individual beats.
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Jun 18, 2018 20:12
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Yeah players have been loving themselves in WoD games long before Beats existed.
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Jun 18, 2018 21:03
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kaynorr posted:In lieu of proper Mage chat, let's do another classic derail: group Beats. First point: they're not. High Beat accumulation is more a function of system mastery than narrative presence. Second point: I don't see why there would be an issue. You're still getting Beats by resolving Conditions, they just go in a communal pool. So unless that player is solely motivated by things that benefit them and only them (in which case why are you playing with that person?) not only do they still have a personal interest in screwing themselves, the entire rest of the table has incentive to sit there going "do it, screw yourself over".
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Jun 18, 2018 23:24
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I really dislike the XP system used in White Wolf derived systems. They usually incentivate meta-gaming behavior that doesn't contribute much, in my not humble opinion. I just give everyone a flat amount every session, makes it easier and keeps the group within the same power-curve.
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Jun 18, 2018 23:50
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Mendrian posted:Yeah players have been loving themselves in WoD games long before Beats existed. Indeed. Just make your setting interesting and you won't be able to stop the PCs from poking their noses into things they shouldn't, ghouling people they ought not, and a multitude of other wonderful WoD nonsense.
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Jun 19, 2018 00:04
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ZearothK posted:I really dislike the XP system used in White Wolf derived systems. They usually incentivate meta-gaming behavior that doesn't contribute much, in my not humble opinion. Yeah, it's really bad. - It's a giant list of stuff you have to keep track of, and a lot of it is extremely subjective, "argue with your GM why this should count" bullshit. - It means that players with higher system mastery advance faster. Now, I love system mastery. I like being rewarded for it. But I like being rewarded for it with good outcomes, not inherent advantages that take me further and further ahead of everyone else in the group -- that's just going to slowly kill the game. - The incentive structure it creates isn't actually that good. The dramatic failure rule doesn't prompt players to screw up when it would be in-character to screw up; it just randomly gives you the option of failing harder when the dice already gave you a bad result. Aspirations are a good idea in theory but the rate at which you churn through them (in my experience) tends to either exhaust creativity or cause tunnel vision, or both. And then splat-specific beat triggers are a wildly mixed bag. A lot of them are antithetical to group play (Mage has a bunch of beat triggers that are basically "go have a solo scene with an NPC" or "putter around in your basement", while at the opposite end of the spectrum, in Demon, Integrators RAW have a beat trigger that encourages them to sabotage the party.) And even in the games that create good incentives with beats (Promethean) it's like... why use XP for this? Why not willpower or the game's mana-equivalent? (And sometimes even "do you really think players need an external incentive to do this?") Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Jun 19, 2018 |
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Jun 19, 2018 00:08
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Beast gives you shitloads of beats for playing your character in the dumbest, most sociopathic fashion and the BPG basically encourages you to do so.
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Jun 19, 2018 00:31
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I award beats for anything that creates drama or results in good RP, which are pooled. I only cash in the beat pool at the end of a chapter, while beats are rewarded per scene. I'm probably going to send my werewolves into the internet to fight programs soon, so that'll be fun. Our serial killer just found the datafarm where the neonazis are farming bitcoins and made a deal with data spirit ruling the brood of electricity, cold, greed, and other data spirits in the warehouse farm. And they're interested in hacking the records of a high tech hospital run by the Ivory Claws, so I'm thinking of going full Tron with it.
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Jun 19, 2018 02:42
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All this talk of barebones WoD reminded me that I have a port of Vampire the Masquerade to the Monsterhearts system that I've had finished for a while. While admittedly there probably isn't a huge overlap between OWoD fans and Monsterhearts fans, the work's done and maybe someone else will find it useful. Monsterhearts is a PbtA game that draws its inspiration from Buffy and other highschool supernatural dramas. It's a system where you literally need to buy an ability to engage in positive social interactions, so it seemed perfect for running a Cam game. https://nofile.io/f/1wtMSQazapY/BloodAndBastards1.3.pdf
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Jun 19, 2018 03:15
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LatwPIAT posted:You do want different numbers of successes to be a thing, so I'm say all in and implement dice rolling as a Poisson distribution where the average is given by [dice pool]*(11-Target Number)/10, with botches only happening on a subset of 0-success rolls (e.g. TN in 10 failures are botches, 10% of all failures are botches, etc.) This has several advantages: ...those are certainly numberwords, which I definitely understand. On a serious note I'll try and wrap my head around 'em. As it stands I think I can actually set it up to replicate classic oWoD dice rolling but like you say, implementing alternative modes is good practice in scripting and I can definitely stand to learn more about how probabilities and statistics work anyway. The biggest issue with botches I think is the lack of a live narrator to reply appropriately but that's a generalized weakness with IF. MonsieurChoc posted:Just wanna say I'm really curious about where this is going. The hope is to produce a halfway decent text adventure or text-and-graphics adventure in the oWoD, more or less just because I can and it'd be neat to have one floating around that isn't produced by the tragically hip with a mobile phone design conceit. Old school Zork or Westland (or even modern Fallen London and Sunless Sea, which has definitely helped me think of ways to implement things) more than a visual novel. It's also a way for me to poke myself with a sharp stick using something I love - vampire - to learn a skillset (scripting, even if in a specific and limited language since knowing one language will help me prime for a second) that I'm completely lacking any ability in and which might be useful for some homebrew projects of mine that aren't quite suited to regular prose (read, they're poo poo) or to tabletop play (read, I'm poo poo at DMing them). Going with the oWoD stuff has some advantages as practice. I have to work out things like scripts for time of day, vulnerabilities to sunlight, moon-rage-form dynamics, etc. There's a lot of possible complexity to slowly work my way towards as well as relatively basic stuff like how to make a blood pool limited by generation. Since it's a setting I love and am familiar with, I don't need to do much setting research or brainstorming, and I can just sit down and script and spend a few hours working out why the magpie NPC is turning into a crinos garou only at 6:55PM and only on a Tuesday. It's a little bit like how I wound up using the Project to also learn about database management, manipulating datasets, and creating excel formulas. As for specifics, I'm torn between creating a fictional city ala GTA for it or just setting it in Chicago and building it around the early oWoD adventures there, since they exist in a form that's relatively straightforward to adapt. We'll see how it goes once I move from building the mechanics into the actual game itself, which is the easy part for me. Building worlds, writing dialogue, no problem. Coding a discipline system? A little trickier. Jhet posted:Yes, but will there big big gay Spartans? Does an aggressive elder Brujah from Lacedaemon supervising a training camp for Anarch militants count?
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Jun 19, 2018 09:15
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At the start of each session I give each player five beats, and take five for myself, in the form of poker chips. Anytime someone does something you think is cool, flavourful, improves the game or drives the story in an interesting direction, give them a beat from that pile. Any you get awarded, you keep. Any you didn't hand out at the end of the game are lost. As GM I make sure to reward players that others aren't focusing on.
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Jun 19, 2018 09:37
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Jhet posted:Yes, but will there big big gay Spartans? Someone should stat them up as a Vigil Compact.
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Jun 19, 2018 12:25
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MonsieurChoc posted:Someone should stat them up as a Vigil Compact. It really wouldn't be hard to do a fratbros compact that is based around a gay frat hunting vampires and dressing up as Spartans for fun.
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Jun 19, 2018 13:58
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