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Halloween Jack posted:I'm glad that people are complaining about random stuff, because I want to complain about Disciplines in Vampire. I was reading V20 and V5 over the past few days and struck by how bad some of them are. But I do think you're hitting on something that I feel comes up whenever anyone looks at WoD/CoD books as a whole long enough: Vampire is always the first book of a given edition, so it ends up having the least amount of risks taken in its design, because in many ways it is the baseline assumption for construction of any subsequent power schema. Also Thaum just straight up should be one discipline with one set of blood magic powers and some stupid niche rituals, full stop. Want to control fire? Too bad you're a vampire. Want telekinesis? Find some stupid bloodline and get it out-of-clan or whatever.
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Jun 21, 2021 16:50
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't think I need to explain why there shouldn't be a dozen different versions of Thaumaturgy that let you talk to trees, set people on fire, or summon two hundred pounds of cocaine. i have often thought that the "actually good" version of the oWoD is simply Unknown Armies and this is doing nothing to persuade me otherwise
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Jun 21, 2021 16:51
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It's like the difference between East Coast Noir and West Coast Noir. I'm still learning the mechanics of V5, so take this with a grain of salt: the problem there seems to be that there are too many powers and they ran out of ideas for them. Some are too situational, some are just silly, and they default to "you can share your Discipline" when they couldn't think of anything else. Potence is a good example: wall-crawling at 3 dots, sharing Potence at 4 dots, and an Earthquake Punch power at 5 dots. I'm all in favour revamping Celerity/Fortitude/Potence to work like other Disciplines, but it could be better.
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Jun 21, 2021 17:12
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I think it's actually common for RPGs that the core stuff is the most broken one way or another, while expansion/splatbook stuff is overbalanced sometimes to uselessness.
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Jun 21, 2021 17:57
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I actually don't like earthmeld being Protean 1, certainly not free earthmeld. My group was pretty quick to replace "always anger frenzy" with "always-on wallcrawling". Also, aggravated claws shouldn't be optional for anyone learning Protean.
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Jun 21, 2021 18:09
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I think it's actually common for RPGs that the core stuff is the most broken one way or another, while expansion/splatbook stuff is overbalanced sometimes to uselessness.
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Jun 21, 2021 18:10
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Halloween Jack posted:It's like the difference between East Coast Noir and West Coast Noir. Did V5 not have design space for something like VtR's Devotions? It seems like that's a solved problem already.
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Jun 21, 2021 18:18
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Arivia posted:Did V5 not have design space for something like VtR's Devotions? It seems like that's a solved problem already. Those take up the slots that would otherwise contain your "regular" Discipline powers. Like, you can insert Dementation powers in place of Dominate powers if you've got a few dots of Auspex.
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Jun 21, 2021 18:21
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Ferrinus posted:I actually don't like earthmeld being Protean 1, certainly not free earthmeld. My group was pretty quick to replace "always anger frenzy" with "always-on wallcrawling". Also, aggravated claws shouldn't be optional for anyone learning Protean. In classic Vampire, claws help make up for the fact that Fortitude kinda sucks. (A better solution is to fix Fortitude.) I can't exactly track it, but it seems like aggravated damage started off as this very rare thing outside of fire and sunlight, and eventually became very easy to get ahold of for multiple character types in multiple games. Edit: I'm also aghast at the decision in V20 to go back to the rule where Celerity can boost Dexterity rolls. Hell, they should have gotten rid of extra actions and said that Celerity gives extra dice that you can use when you have to split your die pool. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jun 21, 2021 |
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Jun 21, 2021 18:48
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Protean claws don't do aggravated vs vamps anymore in v5, but it's non-halved superficial with a +2 which is also really good. I've played a v5 gangrel, they are pretty scary to tangle with between that and both physical and mental resistance in Fortitude. To do true aggravated in melee you need Fist of Caine, at potence 5. That's one of the best v5 powers, and the other choice at potence5 is Earthshock which is petty garbage. So there are some trap options.
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Jun 21, 2021 19:20
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Halloween Jack posted:Earth Meld immediately marks Gangrel out as different and allows neonate Gangrel to do the thing that Gangrel do. Like hey, I don't need your politics, I can find shelter anywhere. Interested what you think of the Vampire the Requiem 2e Disciplines, because while there are missteps (powers that are Conditions I'm looking at you), Requiem 2e Protean does exactly this and I love it for exactly this reason.
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Jun 21, 2021 19:26
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Halloween Jack posted:Earth Meld immediately marks Gangrel out as different and allows neonate Gangrel to do the thing that Gangrel do. Like hey, I don't need your politics, I can find shelter anywhere. There's a big difference between can find shelter anywhere and can freely find shelter anywhere. Gangrel scanned perfectly well as nomad survivalists in both VtM (earth meld is Protean 1 and costs blood) and VtR 1e (earth meld is Protean 2 and costs vitae). It's a step further to make earth meld cost literally no resources, though - it means there's not even a metabolic incentive for a Gangrel to stake out a cave or something. And you don't want to give people 1 dot powers that aren't usable at will, so... ritorix posted:Protean claws don't do aggravated vs vamps anymore in v5, but it's non-halved superficial with a +2 which is also really good. I've played a v5 gangrel, they are pretty scary to tangle with between that and both physical and mental resistance in Fortitude. Yeah, and it's awful design. They increased Protean claws' DPS, but decreased Protean claws' narrative significance. It's still really funny to me that V5 was so scared of combat disciplines being any good that you need a full 5 dots of Potence before you're any more likely to win a fight with another vampire than if you had Potence 0, but the Strix Chronicle writers being overcome with agg damage anxiety is really disappointing. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jun 21, 2021 |
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Jun 21, 2021 19:30
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That's a really good point. Earth Meld should cost blood, so if you're sleeping in the dirt every night you're using twice as much blood as you need to. "1-dot powers shouldn't cost Blood" sounds like a good guideline, but there are powers like Awe and Shadow Play where it's worth it.
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Jun 21, 2021 20:19
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Speaking of trap options, v5's earthmeld requires a rouse check. If you are at hunger 4, that can potentially put you to hunger 5. You also have to rouse to rise the next night. If you fail that check while at hunger 5 you go to torpor instead. So it's only safe to use earthmeld at hunger 3 or below. At 4 there's a 25% chance of torpor. And of course this isn't explicit in the power description.
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Jun 21, 2021 20:20
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I still think they should've allowed you to make infinite rouse checks even at Hunger 5, but make failed ones damage your Humanity. That'd at least make Hunger functionally distinct from blood.
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Jun 21, 2021 20:24
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm still convinced The Project could be used as a proxy for the OWoD's True Name the way Tremere was trying to use the Mormon genealogical records to target humanity itself in that one Gehenna scenario. Which was fantastically batshit and pants on head stupid while also being peak 90's in terms of how the OWoD liked to utilize conspiracy theories (in a potentially offensive way) of the times. Like, they didn't just build genealogical records. They fully mapped the human genome and all it's variants or something insane like that from what I recall. Apparently the Mormon faith can out techno-wizard the technocracy? Kind of surprised it didn't send right wing christians into a frenzy back then too. Or at least had someone in the Mormon religion freak out. The entire plot point basically co-opted the "Mormon's are going to use their perfidious and mysterious ways to baptize all dead people into their religion!" fear mongering/conspiracy theory that was floating around back then, only amped up to eleven and with a Cronenberg surprise at the end that made it clear it the whole thing was just a vessel to get to that point. Edit: Also, the bit with God basically being implied to be the penultimate villain and monster of the setting was a thing that probably would have caused a stir if so much of the moral panic back then wasn't performative in nature. Archonex fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 04:50
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The right wing outrage/grift engine had found different ores to process by the time they came out with Gehenna. I thought the Tremere thing with the Mormon documentation was meant to be a kind of happy accident rather than being a dark and ominous thing the Mormons did for dark and ominous reasons. Like, "How handy, this immense genealogical project was done by some sort of mortal sect and there's no big water between me and it."
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Jun 22, 2021 05:35
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Well, there's some irregularities in Salt Like City - like an angel destroying the Nephite Brotherhood en masse and the local chantry up and dying several times - but I don't recall it being threaded through that the entire Mormon genealogical archive was a sinister plot so much as just the inevitable outcome of assembling an enormous genealogical database. The genome element was courtesy of the actual Human Genome Project - the two in combination produced the True Name, but were separate components with different origins.
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Jun 22, 2021 05:51
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Loomer posted:Well, there's some irregularities in Salt Like City - like an angel destroying the Nephite Brotherhood en masse and the local chantry up and dying several times - but I don't recall it being threaded through that the entire Mormon genealogical archive was a sinister plot so much as just the inevitable outcome of assembling an enormous genealogical database. The genome element was courtesy of the actual Human Genome Project - the two in combination produced the True Name, but were separate components with different origins. I will never get tired of you occasionally just popping in to throw oWoD tidbits like "Salt Lake City wasn't an evil vampire project, though angels did come and kill a bunch of people that one time".
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Jun 22, 2021 18:24
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Loomer posted:Well, there's some irregularities in Salt Like City - like an angel destroying the Nephite Brotherhood en masse and the local chantry up and dying several times - but I don't recall it being threaded through that the entire Mormon genealogical archive was a sinister plot so much as just the inevitable outcome of assembling an enormous genealogical database. The genome element was courtesy of the actual Human Genome Project - the two in combination produced the True Name, but were separate components with different origins. Huh. This was pre-DtF I'm guessing?
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Jun 22, 2021 18:26
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Dawgstar posted:Huh. This was pre-DtF I'm guessing? Yes, 2000. It was a demon rather than an angel though, refreshed the memory. It now lives in Yucca Mountain, where it has proclaimed a 'ten thousand year reign' of 'death' on the earth. Man, that's awkward. I mean, to overextend the sell-by date that far. It's got four years, tops.
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Jun 22, 2021 23:56
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I have that sourcebook on hedge wizardry with Mormon wizards. I should dig it out.
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Jun 23, 2021 15:21
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Had our first planning session for our V5 game, mostly hashing out chronicle tenets and cotorie ideas. Proposed ideas for the former include "apes together strong" (my contribution), "don't start none won't be none", "reject the trappings of imperialism", and "don't play with your food". So this'll be entertaining. As i bodge together my character sheet i do have a question: since i still don't grokk the new difficulty system, should I avoid the jack-of-all-trades distribution? Just having a bunch of 1s in stuff seems like it might not be worth it.
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Jun 23, 2021 18:18
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citybeatnik posted:Had our first planning session for our V5 game, mostly hashing out chronicle tenets and cotorie ideas. Proposed ideas for the former include "apes together strong" (my contribution), "don't start none won't be none", "reject the trappings of imperialism", and "don't play with your food". So this'll be entertaining. Basically read this and avoid jack of all trades. https://www.strangeassembly.com/2019/character-optimization-in-vampire-the-masquerade-v5 Make sure your predator pool isn't like a 2. 6+ would be better.
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Jun 23, 2021 18:36
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citybeatnik posted:As i bodge together my character sheet i do have a question: since i still don't grokk the new difficulty system, should I avoid the jack-of-all-trades distribution? Just having a bunch of 1s in stuff seems like it might not be worth it. The short answer is yes. Since each die has a 50/50 chance of getting a success, the game treats Difficulty 2 Tests (2 dice in your pool that come up as a 6+) as a difficulty baseline, and quickly goes up from there. The book mentions that Difficulty 1 (1 die in your pool that comes up as a 6+) Tests exist, but these will be probably be very rare in your game. I don't think published adventures use Difficulty 1 Tests at all, at least as far as I can remember. I feel like they only exist for rolls where the actual question is whether or not the Beast makes something worse, as opposed to whether or not the character succeeds. Wins at a Cost (getting any number of successes but not meeting the Difficulty) do exist, but they're at the discretion of the ST. When I run V5, I always use Wins at a Cost and treat them like a Weak Hit in a PbtA game, but that might not be true for your ST. Willpower is very useful, but as Hunger increases, dice in your pool get converted to Hunger Dice, which can't be re-rolled with Willpower. Therefore, it is very, very difficult to succeed with small pools, and it only gets worse if your Hunger increases. Also, as your pool increases, you can take better advantage of Taking Half (i.e. dividing your dice pool in half and treating that as the number of success you got from a roll). If nothing else, you'll want to make sure that any dice pools related to your Predator Type, how your character prefers to win conflicts, and any other dice pools that you feel are important to your character's concept or shtick, have a decent amount of dice in them. ritorix posted:Basically read this and avoid jack of all trades. I'll second recommending that article, and I genuinely wish some form of that advice was in the V5 core rulebook itself. Free Cog fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 19:05
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Wow, that article makes the rules out to be quite a mess. In true classic White Wolf fashion, it seems like a lot of stuff was designed by bellyfeel. It seems like they fixed a few specific issues (Dexterity for everything!) while creating many more. I wouldn't expect any of that advice to be in the corebook, since if they understood these issues with their design work they would have fixed most of them.
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Jun 23, 2021 21:07
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In a few months I’ll be starting up my second ever Chronicle (we’re using the V5 rules) and I was thinking of setting the story in Miami in the early 1980s, if only because it’s such an iconic part of our (my players’ and my own) shared childhoods — we all grew up in the 80s, so the whole Miami Vice/neon-soaked, coked-fuelled drug war aesthetic is one we all can appreciate. (To clarify: we consumed it through TV and popular media; we weren’t actually there!) That being said, there doesn’t seem to be any official material about the city or the South Florida region with regard to World of Darkness. I’m happy to make stuff up, since my players are new and know nothing about the meta plot or even any other product lines. But official information is always helpful. Is there any mention of Miami in the canon? Does anyone have suggestions or advice for running a game in that region or even in that era? Also, I’d like to bring some of the other supernatural elements, like werewolves and changelings and mages and stuff — does anyone have plot hooks or story ideas for introducing them? Whizbat! fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 21:36
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It's Miami, instead of using werewolves, freak your players out and use Roeka!
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Jun 23, 2021 21:48
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Soonmot posted:It's Miami, instead of using werewolves, freak your players out and use Roeka! I had to look that up and hooooooooly moly 
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Jun 23, 2021 21:54
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Yeah weresharks! But don't use the rules from oWoD, because they were weird and rapey. Does V5 have any werewolves in their antagonist section? I'd basically just reskin whatever werewolf rules they have and add water breathing onto all forms. edit: gently caress, i just finished plotting out my new aberrant game, but now I want to run an 80's miami vampire campaign where the main antagonists are drug running weresharks.
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Jun 23, 2021 21:57
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It really sucks that the revised writers didn't seem comfortable enough to shuck all the real gross 1e stuff from the rest of the Fera. The Ajaba got most of their gross stuff excised but that's only because they were completely overhauled.
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Jun 23, 2021 22:01
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Soonmot posted:Yeah weresharks! But don't use the rules from oWoD, because they were weird and rapey. Does V5 have any werewolves in their antagonist section? I'd basically just reskin whatever werewolf rules they have and add water breathing onto all forms. A great, if crazy, idea. Maybe not the main baddies but drug-running weresharks will definitely be making a cameo. Thanks!
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Jun 23, 2021 22:14
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Whizbat! posted:Cool words It’s too bad you’re using V5 as there’s a supplement for Requiem that’s set in the 80s and has plenty of info for Florida. I’d maybe take a look at it anyway (New Wave Requiem), but I don’t know how much help it would be outside window dressing. Still possibly great for style and some story ideas even if you have to change a bunch of stuff to fit Masquerade specifics.
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Jun 23, 2021 22:43
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Jhet posted:New Wave Requiem Window dressing is perfect. I’ll be sure to check it out. Thanks!
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Jun 23, 2021 22:54
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Okay so I thought most or at least a lot of poo poo from around 2011 to 2015 was PoD, but I've found what appears to be tradprint copies of some end of Exalted 2e stuff (TCA, Splinters). Do these exist for other lines around that time, like Mage Noir, Left-Hand Path and Imperial Mysteries? Were there like limited print runs or something? Is there a list of which seemingly DTRPG-only products weren't actually PDF/PoD exclusive? (I thought maybe they were customer runs from Lulu or whatever, but they seem fairly high quality and they've got bar codes.) That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 23:48
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You're reminding me of the time my 'friend' did Sin City with the numbers barely filed off as a W:TA campaign, and That Yellow Bastard was a Wyrm Tainted Rokea.
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Jun 23, 2021 23:57
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That Old Tree posted:Okay so I thought most or at least a lot of poo poo from around 2011 to 2015 was PoD, but I've found what appears to be tradprint copies of some end of Exalted 2e stuff (TCA, Splinters). Do these exist for other lines around that time, like Mage Noir, Left-Hand Path and Imperial Mysteries? Were there like limited print runs or something? Is there a list of which seemingly DTRPG-only products weren't actually PDF/PoD exclusive? I don't know if this quite fits, but I have a traditional print copy of Invite Only.
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Jun 24, 2021 00:05
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ritorix posted:Basically read this and avoid jack of all trades. Free Cog posted:I'll second recommending that article, and I genuinely wish some form of that advice was in the V5 core rulebook itself. Thanks for that - it sort of mirrors what I was thinking. Going for a Roadside Killer Ravnos blockaid runner/courier that got burnt so i was investing heavily in Drive, Brawl, and Streetwise to begin with. The book mentions Kindred Cant involving more Intelligence and Craft for some reason but I'm sure i can bluster the ST in to letting Strewtwise work in most cases. It also made me reconsider Animalism 2 / Fortitude 1 / Obfuscate 1 to A2/F2/Presence 1 instead. Along with some of the advantages i was pondering.
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Jun 24, 2021 01:06
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Whizbat! posted:In a few months I’ll be starting up my second ever Chronicle (we’re using the V5 rules) and I was thinking of setting the story in Miami in the early 1980s, if only because it’s such an iconic part of our (my players’ and my own) shared childhoods — we all grew up in the 80s, so the whole Miami Vice/neon-soaked, coked-fuelled drug war aesthetic is one we all can appreciate. (To clarify: we consumed it through TV and popular media; we weren’t actually there!) Miami is a Sabbat stronghold, and Florida in general is a bit of a warzone both before and after the East Coast Crusade of 1999. Prior to, it was a beachhead against the Southern Camarilla strongholds, and after, subject to retaliatory warfare from reclaimed Atlanta. There's not a ton more, but: The Associates - a group of Sabbat lawyers who make pacts with demons - keep an office in the city. The Black Furies lost a pack there investigating Bloody Mary. Little Havana has its own semi-independent Tzimisce voivode. The House of Helekar maintained a Miami chantry house between 1988 and their exposure. The Euthanatos still have a cabal there, now unaffiliated with the House. The Verbena have a healthy presence among Miami's Santeria practitioners. Developmental Neogenetics Amalgamated has a significant research facility there. Pentex has a branch office. Grimm, a fairly significant Orphan mage, keeps a branch of his magic shop/chantry in the city, allowing him to teleport there from San Francisco. If you incorporate Orpheus, Miami had a major Pigment problem.
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Jun 24, 2021 03:27
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Loomer posted:Tonnes of great lore A lot of food for thought here. Thanks so much!
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Jun 27, 2021 03:54
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