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I'm sorry, I meant Swansong, not the battle royale game
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Nov 5, 2020 17:31
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"Interactive novel" is close to what they did for The Council, and it looks like they're using the same mechanics here. Are you familiar with it?
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Nov 5, 2020 20:49
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Soonmot posted:I'm sorry, I meant Swansong, not the battle royale game There's officially too many games coming out for VtM and none of them are the one I want.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:06
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NGDBSS posted:"Interactive novel" is close to what they did for The Council, and it looks like they're using the same mechanics here. Are you familiar with it? No, but that type of game is not my jam, so I'm not going to worry about it. Dienes posted:There's officially too many games coming out for VtM and none of them are the one I want. no poo poo
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Nov 5, 2020 21:33
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Dienes posted:There's officially too many games coming out for VtM and none of them are the one I want. At this point, I'm kinda convinced that game isn't coming. That being said, as a WtA fan, getting a decent action RPG before Bloodlines 2 is anywhere near release ready makes me chuckle.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:07
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DantetheK9 posted:At this point, I'm kinda convinced that game isn't coming. Yep, honestly I never expected WtA to get a game done.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:15
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Soonmot posted:No, but that type of game is not my jam, so I'm not going to worry about it. I'd say it's more like a Telltale game than an interactive novel if that sways your opinion. But come on Paradox, make that official Vampire CKIII game.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:13
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CottonWolf posted:But come on Paradox, make that official Vampire CKIII game. They showed off the mod for that on their official channel. I suspect they feel said mod means they don't actually NEED to make one since someone else will do it for them for free.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:37
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Omnicrom posted:They showed off the mod for that on their official channel. I suspect they feel said mod means they don't actually NEED to make one since someone else will do it for them for free. Yeah, plus PDS wouldn't like being told to mix their games with an existing IP.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:39
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The lore of The Council really felt like off-brand WoD so it makes sense for them to do the real thing next.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:47
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I always forget, and love when I remember, that there are alien wraiths on the moon's shadowlands.
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Nov 6, 2020 04:40
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Omnicrom posted:They showed off the mod for that on their official channel. I suspect they feel said mod means they don't actually NEED to make one since someone else will do it for them for free. fwiw the mod hasn't updated to the current CK3 patch and I do not recommend it it has insane potential though
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Nov 6, 2020 09:03
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Loomer posted:I always forget, and love when I remember, that there are alien wraiths on the moon's shadowlands. haha what that’s amazing
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Nov 6, 2020 13:28
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Kuiperdolin posted:The lore of The Council really felt like off-brand WoD so it makes sense for them to do the real thing next. It was closer to being Assassin's Creed (in terms of setting, not gameplay) except you're playing the son of a high-ranking Templar at a Templar meeting. Which is a really cool fun idea for a choicey game and that promise really shines through in the game's first two episodes! Out of 5. The mechanics were that you did have skills to level up in, and skill checks to make. There were no dice rolls - if you attempted a skill check higher than your rating, you spent from a pool of limited effort. Completing certain objectives gave you unique perks to boost certain things. Items you could find would replenish your effort, or reduce your next effort cost to 1 from whatever it would normally be, or reveal the most efficient skill to use, or similar. You could also get certain perks that boosted things by completing certain objectives or playing in a certain way, similar to Alpha Protocol. If you'd brickwalled yourself skills-wise you might have to actually solve some kind of logic puzzle or search the hard way with minimal hints. Episode 4 of the game is basically entirely being presented with a logic puzzle and you can try solving it right away or go exploring and talking to characters to get hints. While the overall writing of The Council shat the bed I think their mechanical framework showed promise so Swansong if not mismanaged has the chance of being a passable game, if not great. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 14:05
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I’m actually looking forward to that with some interest but I am baffled by the geography. It might just be that I live in CT but like, if I was gonna pick any MA city to be in a shared domain with it it’s be Springfield, not Boston. I probably still wouldn’t but they’re much closer.
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Nov 6, 2020 14:29
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Berkshire Hunts posted:haha what that’s amazing It's a little one-line mention in Doomslayers: "In very remote regions of the Labyrinth — the parts beneath the Shadowlands of the Moon and further out — there are Spectral communities that do not fit any of the regular classes. Some are not human-derived at all, but seem instead to be the shadow-eaten forms of pre-human races and of beings that have never existed on the Earth." - page 155. So not only does this give us Moon's Haunted, but also the prospect of the mokole reptile-men having wraiths that have lingered here and there.
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Nov 6, 2020 14:30
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Loomer posted:It's a little one-line mention in Doomslayers: I always knew Wraith was the best White Wolf game, and I am very glad you have provided incontrovertible proof.
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Nov 6, 2020 14:51
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Mors Rattus posted:I’m actually looking forward to that with some interest but I am baffled by the geography. It might just be that I live in CT but like, if I was gonna pick any MA city to be in a shared domain with it it’s be Springfield, not Boston. I probably still wouldn’t but they’re much closer. I live north of Springfield and I'd pick Worcester, or even Manchester NH. In fact I'm starting work on my first V5 Game right now and almost made Western MA as a whole an entire domain. (Pioneer Valley + the Berkshires) midwifecrisis fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 19:53
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Speaking of which, I concluded that I didn't know the game well enough to do it, but there's money in it for whoever starts publishing a series of Legacies for Awakening 2e to the Vault, starting by filing the serial numbers off the 1e Legacies and converting them and then going on from there. If you know Awakening 2e and know how to use a layout program, this is a perfectly-decent way to make a few thousand dollars in 2021.
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Nov 6, 2020 20:07
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midwifecrisis posted:I live north of Springfield and I'd pick Worcester, or even Manchester NH. Oh, I mean shared with Hartford. Hartford and Springfield could MAYBE go together. Boston and Hartford can't. e: if I had to divide up CT it'd probably be split into three - big triangle of like Meriden/Hartford/Manchester, western CT (New London, Norwich, Storrs maybe) and southeast (everything south of Waterbury and east of New Haven, inclusive). Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 20:14
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Anyone have any advice/warnings for running Mage 2e? I am not as familiar with all the new 2e systems as I was with the 1e systems, but I have been getting myself up to speed with them as much as I can. I just worry that there are particular pitfalls I need to watch out for and that I might accidentally use a 1e rule in place of a 2e rule which I really don't want to do (since everything I have seen so far I like). Like, how often am I supposed to be applying conditions and tilts? How common are mages in any given community?
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Nov 6, 2020 23:50
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Broken Mind posted:Anyone have any advice/warnings for running Mage 2e? I am not as familiar with all the new 2e systems as I was with the 1e systems, but I have been getting myself up to speed with them as much as I can. I just worry that there are particular pitfalls I need to watch out for and that I might accidentally use a 1e rule in place of a 2e rule which I really don't want to do (since everything I have seen so far I like). Like, how often am I supposed to be applying conditions and tilts? How common are mages in any given community? I have nimbus flares and tilts only happening on exceptional success and not every single casting. Also there are as many mages as you need for the story. Like canonically, there are a poo poo load of mages in Boston, but in my game, there are none, and MIT, where my mage players are investigating, only has a single, small cabal.
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Nov 7, 2020 01:50
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midwifecrisis posted:I live north of Springfield and I'd pick Worcester, or even Manchester NH. You kind of have to. You can't have the domain of Amherst feuding with the domain of Northampton, that would be a fight between maybe three Kindred. I've also seen way too many GMs just absolutely pack the area with supernaturals and it just doesn't fit. A dozen packs of werewolves and enough Kindred in the area to fill a ballroom? Sure why not, just mind the BSDs/Sabbat Malks that inevitably infest the old mental hospital despite the fact that it hasn't existed for over a decade.
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Nov 7, 2020 02:50
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PantsOptional posted:You can't have the domain of Amherst feuding with the domain of Northampton, that would be a fight between maybe three Kindred. They would, of course, immediately go knives out on the first idiot from Connecticut dumb enough to try something.
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Nov 7, 2020 02:59
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I always imagined there were all of two vampires in Contra Costa east of the coast, and they traded "Praxis" and a cool car each year by rock paper scissors.
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Nov 7, 2020 03:14
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Ah, the What We Do In the Shadows style of Vampire storytelling.
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Nov 7, 2020 03:15
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Broken Mind posted:Like, how often am I supposed to be applying conditions and tilts? Go look at the list of Conditions in the Mage appendix. I'm gonna point out Conditions that are good examples you should follow, and examples of Conditions that are fiddly nonsense, building up to the best example of what you should use them for. Addicted, Amnesia, Blind: These are examples of "was it a Flaw in 1e? make it a Persistent Condition." They mostly matter if you have a character whose concept revolves around an impairment like this. They're fine. Forgettable. Not a great example of non-Persistent Conditions. Bonded, Connected: These Conditions are a waste of time. Nobody needs to keep an index card on the table to remind us that their dog loves them. This is an example of something that should just be a circumstantial modifier decided on the fly ("this is your loyal dog of three years so sure, +3 to your Animal Ken roll"). It doesn't benefit the game for this to be a Condition. Embarrassing Secret: This is okay if events in game create a short-term ticking-time-bomb scandal, not so much if it's a life-or-death secret that the character is going to keep across multiple stories. Note that this Condition is all carrot, no stick: it has no hard-coded mechanical effects (but could certainly justify circumstantial modifiers on the fly) except to output a beat when the dramatic payoff occurs. This is what Conditions are good for: hanging a marker on dramatic situations that will pay off over the course of play. An index card with a Condition written on it sitting on a player's sheet is Chekhov's gun hanging over the mantle. It is there to remind everyone "this is a payoff waiting to happen, and if you need ideas for how to weave drama into the events, and it makes sense in the story, think of using this." Soulless, Enervated, and Thrall: These are "Condition as status effect." They move rules for a status a character falls under into the Condition appendix. This is a bad use of Conditions. Conditions are looking for short-term payoff. These are long-term and there is little dramatic payoff when they progress or roll back. Charmed: This is "Condition as status effect" merged with "Condition as rules for a supernatural power." These are worse because they break a rule: Conditions work best when you play fast and loose with their immediate mechanical effects (+2 modifier in appropriate situation? -2 penalty when it hinders you? Resolve this Condition at will to make a success a better success, or resolve this negative Condition voluntarily but it means you suffer a dramatic failure on the spot?). But a supernatural power should have some reliability in doing what it's meant to do, so "Condition as rules for supernatural power" probably shouldn't be freestyled. Which means these should not be Conditions. Spooked: This is the best Condition in any Chronicles of Darkness game. Again, it does nothing on its own mechanically (though a Condition is a good reason to improvise a suitable dice modifier). You put the card on the player's sheet and it says "you're a horror movie protagonist, you're on edge and liable to do something unwise." This is the Condition that makes the group split up or the character go off and investigate the creepy noise in the basement, or in Mage terms it makes you read the leather-bound eerie Latin tome aloud, and it rewards you with a beat by resolving the Condition when you do so, so that it feels good that you're playing into genre. Follow this example when improvising your own Conditions. Use Conditions to nudge the players towards actions that make the story feel appropriate and move it in interesting and dynamic directions. Use them as reminders that a plot "beat" has been set up a few minutes ago in the movie and that can be followed up on for payoff. In general, when something sets up tension that is waiting for a short-term payoff (like within a couple scenes or so), you can improvise a Condition, probably just by giving it a name on the spot. Rather than assigning it specific resolutions and mechanical effects, use the written temporary Conditions as examples of stuff Conditions can do and improvise them in play. Encourage your players to go "hey, can I resolve Condition if I do X?" especially if it leads their players to do suitably entertaining or interesting things. One particular time to consider deploying a Condition is if you don't have immediate ideas for consequences for a roll outcome. If a failed roll's result is "nothing happens," or if somebody gets an exceptional success and you can't think of a more interesting outcome to make it exceptional, pause to think if there's an appropriate idea for an improvised Condition that could result. And if there isn't, don't dwell on it, you can just keep moving. Tilts don't matter as much, since they don't hook into the beat economy. Tilts really are status effects, whether laid on parts of the body or parts of the environment. If somebody's arm gets broken or the house, the house, the house is on fire, you can apply Arm Wrack or Inferno. You don't have to be thinking too deep about when to deploy a Tilt. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 03:17
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Yeah, Conditions (and their authors/creators) never seem to know if they want to be a standardized, codified list of mechanical benefits or penalties based on circumstances (without requiring tables of circumstantial modifiers or completely on-the-fly adjudication), OR if they're Post-It notes that say "RP this to get xp for playing along" and unfortunately this decision is made differently on every line of every page of every CoD product, much as I love playing them.
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Nov 7, 2020 03:24
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There's another little buried note in Wraith, and one that might be relevant to the next big project - classical Fae, pre-1350, passed through the Underworld proper as part of their churn of reincarnation (so it's something like Fae-realms and proto-Arcadia > Mortal World > Shadowlands > Proto-Arcadia...) and it was actually a noteworthy event when they stopped coming. This implies that in addition to pockets of Little Green Wraiths and Tyrannosaurus Dead, the Reptile King of the Far Shores, there was a significant traffic of DA-style fae through the Shadowlands and Stygia's periphery for most of its history, as well as the possibility that somewhere out there there may remain ancient changeling and firstborn wraiths for modern games (I mean, poo poo, if there can be a city of ghost-eating vampires, there can be a Dwimorbeorg).
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Nov 7, 2020 04:56
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Yeah, Conditions (and their authors/creators) never seem to know if they want to be a standardized, codified list of mechanical benefits or penalties based on circumstances (without requiring tables of circumstantial modifiers or completely on-the-fly adjudication), OR if they're Post-It notes that say "RP this to get xp for playing along" and unfortunately this decision is made differently on every line of every page of every CoD product, much as I love playing them. let us not forget Geist 2e, where they’re used to codify the mechanics of core Geist powers and abilities, and consequently moved to a completely separate section of the book from the rest of the related mechanics, making understanding what anything does an incredible chore while providing no discernible benefits whatsoever LGD fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 07:26
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I warned my players going into the game that Chrodd is worse-edited and less internally consistent than Shadowrun* of all things; just to set expectations. We still had several changeling-centric games before someone figured out that Lost can use their contracts reflexively, found a 'User to get an e7240 with extra monitor from us & run larger jobs on VLX/Condor' copy-pasted into a wolf blooded tell instead of a minus sign, and other fun mishaps. EDIT: * Shadowrun 4th, specifically. It's still better than 5e.
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Nov 8, 2020 03:56
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Yeah, Conditions (and their authors/creators) never seem to know if they want to be a standardized, codified list of mechanical benefits or penalties based on circumstances (without requiring tables of circumstantial modifiers or completely on-the-fly adjudication), OR if they're Post-It notes that say "RP this to get xp for playing along" and unfortunately this decision is made differently on every line of every page of every CoD product, much as I love playing them.
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Nov 8, 2020 19:05
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 The writers somewhere decided EVERYTHING should be conditions and it was awful.
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Nov 8, 2020 19:17
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:
*Glares intensely at Geist*
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Nov 8, 2020 19:23
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:
Eh, that's not really the bad part. Without radically realigning the game toward a much simpler philosophy, you can't collapse what they're doing here much further. You don't have to rebuild the game from the ground up to fix the worst excesses of Conditions. It's mostly an organizational thing. (Though of course I would personally have preferred a serious realignment away from the heavily traditional system we got, but I could wish for all sorts of things all day if I wanted.)
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Nov 8, 2020 19:28
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:
and people say 3.5 D&D grappling is a bad system
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Nov 8, 2020 20:30
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LGD posted:let us not forget Geist 2e, where they’re used to codify the mechanics of core Geist powers and abilities, and consequently moved to a completely separate section of the book from the rest of the related mechanics, making understanding what anything does an incredible chore while providing no discernible benefits whatsoever This happened in Vampire 2e too. To know what even a basic Discipline like Dominate 2 actually does in full you have to flip back and forth between the Discipline and the Conditions it inflicts. I think I counted and they're separated by over 100 pages. Yawgmoth posted:Conditions are one of those things I loved the idea of but absolutely loathed the implementation. The basic concept of "you have X condition which gives Y effect until Z resolution" is fantastic; unfortunately they seem to be completely incapable of keeping track of causes, effects, and condition names so cause A could attach condition B or C or D, and condition D might have effect X or Y or Z depending entirely on which book you're reading. Seems like the sort of thing that would be incredibly simple to just set up as a google doc/spreadsheet shared with authors, with columns for name/effect/general cause/resolution, but instead we get the same "left hand doesn't know/care what the right is doing" kind of design/editing as always. Vampire: the Requiem 2e has Majesty 1 make targets "Awed", which is not a Condition, despite being literally a status effect inflicted upon a target. Promethean: the Created 2e has "Refinement Conditions", which are not Conditions at all. Conditions are literally the worst and everyone involved should be slapped with paper fans for their crimes against good game design.
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Nov 8, 2020 23:41
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Another problem with the implementation of Conditions is that they're intrinsically tied to the idea that every time a Condition is inflicted, it's supposed to mean something interesting enough to the story to count as a plot "beat" has happened, which is why the mini-XP they grant when resolved is measured in "beats." Being a status effect shouldn't intrinsically mean being a Condition unless every time it's laid implies something interesting or fun has happened that shifts the story (which presumably is the logic behind 2e Dominate and Majesty having powers that inflict Conditions, but this already iffy decision set a precedent writers took the wrong lesson from). As reluctant as I am to bring up Beast as an example of anything, it does demonstrate the worst excess of this vice in Condition design: Satiety Conditions. As written, a Beast is always, automatically, under one of several Conditions just from being a Beast: three Conditions are distributed among the "safe" or "normal" levels of Satiety, with a Condition each for the "bad extreme" of Satiety hitting either the ceiling or the floor. Whenever your Satiety changes, which might just be the activation cost of a power, you "resolve" your current Satiety Condition and acquire the Condition corresponding to your new Satiety level. With the requisite beat for resolving a Condition. So in addition to all the pointless note-taking this introduces, Beasts are written so that just restoring and spending their Evil MP over and over accrues beats for no reason. I really do like Conditions as a system that can be used well. But there's like two or three books at max that do so. (I exclude Influence Conditions from this. Codified Influence Conditions were never a good idea.) I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Nov 9, 2020 |
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Nov 9, 2020 00:39
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It seems like the preponderance of conditions is designed to make everything your character does generate a beat, which seems like a really needless level of complication relative to the Just Use Group Beats method.
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Nov 9, 2020 01:04
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I Am Just a Box posted:As reluctant as I am to bring up Beast as an example of anything, it does demonstrate the worst excess of this vice in Condition design: Satiety Conditions. As written, a Beast is always, automatically, under one of several Conditions just from being a Beast: three Conditions are distributed among the "safe" or "normal" levels of Satiety, with a Condition each for the "bad extreme" of Satiety hitting either the ceiling or the floor. Whenever your Satiety changes, which might just be the activation cost of a power, you "resolve" your current Satiety Condition and acquire the Condition corresponding to your new Satiety level. With the requisite beat for resolving a Condition. So in addition to all the pointless note-taking this introduces, Beasts are written so that just restoring and spending their Evil MP over and over accrues beats for no reason. The Beast Player's Guide even includes a section that's basically just "Gaming the Satiety Beats system for fun and profit."
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Nov 9, 2020 03:03
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