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Soonmot posted:I thought v5 let you respec? I don't think so but that's an easy house-rule. It's not that big a problem, it just bugs me haha. Oh and I forgot to talk about how great the Hecata Loresheets were. Both very flavorful, with interesting plot hooks, and some interesting mechanical benefits. Not sure how balanced they are though. They also set up Bloodlines being a Loresheet for a Clan, which works for a lot (but not all) of the old Bloodlines.
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Jun 23, 2022 18:27
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TheCenturion posted:So house rule that you can unlearn disciplines and get %50 xp refund. “After his embrace, Eduardo’s desire to hide from everything and everybody manifested as obfuscate. As he accepts his new condition, he finds himself wanting to, I don’t know, talk to cats. Cats are cool. So now he can’t fade into shadows, but he can commiserate with cats about what assholes they are. You should definitely not charge people XP to respec. That doesn't ease off the pressure to plan your "build" in advance at all, because mistakes cost you permanent resources.
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Jun 23, 2022 18:30
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The rule in every RPG I've ever been in has been that you can respec whenever the GM lets you. Which basically just means you say to the GM "hey this build isn't working how I thought it would" or "I'm not really enjoying this" or "this isn't coming up as often as I'd hoped" or "this doesn't make sense for how the character has changed." Sometimes the GM has made it an in-character quest, like a character who got his powers from demonic possesion respec'd into a different class and that meant we all had to do a big exorcism. But more often than not the GM just lets you do it cuz they're not a dick and they want the players to enjoy the table.
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Jun 23, 2022 18:50
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Ferrinus posted:You should definitely not charge people XP to respec. That doesn't ease off the pressure to plan your "build" in advance at all, because mistakes cost you permanent resources. It's to reflect that you got utility out of the disciplines while you had them, and to prevent you from functionally having every discipline at any time. "Oh, we're doing a social adventure tonight? Hang on while I redo all of my disciplines......" Choices should have costs.
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Jun 23, 2022 19:03
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TheCenturion posted:Choices should have costs. They also could've gotten utility out of taking the OTHER power all along. But we don't know! And...it doesn't really matter? e: Also, the reason people don't respec every discipline every session under this is, basic social courtesy to not be an rear end in a top hat to your ST, just like it's basic social courtesy for them to not force you to treat your session 1 character sheet and its choices like a student loan you took out before you'd even graduated high school. Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Jun 23, 2022 |
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Jun 23, 2022 19:05
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TheCenturion posted:It's to reflect that you got utility out of the disciplines while you had them, and to prevent you from functionally having every discipline at any time. I do see how free respecs could be abused, but really both the ST and the players should practice common sense. Presumably everyone in a gaming group are friends or at least peers, so they should respect each other. If someone wants to respec every session and that annoys the ST, they should talk it out.
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Jun 23, 2022 19:14
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TheCenturion posted:It's to reflect that you got utility out of the disciplines while you had them, and to prevent you from functionally having every discipline at any time. Your past character didn't somehow have more dots on their character sheet than everyone else's for the entire span of the game thus far. Everyone got utility out of their Disciplines while they had them. Why should your PC now have fewer dots for the rest of the game?
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Jun 23, 2022 19:21
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Who here has run a game where you didn't allow all your players to respec after the first major chapter or story? Sometimes you don't know what all these dots feel like until you get that character in play and see first hand that their mechanics don't match up with the spirit you designed them with.
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Jun 23, 2022 19:38
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The house rule that I'm throwing into Errata'd (the next supplement that I'm working on) is pretty simple: - You can respec one power per Discipline, per Story - You can respec power levels up to your equivalent BP, i.e. at BP 2 you can respec level 1 and 2 powers - For Clan Disciplines, you need only feed on the corresponding resonance, then spend a few hours meditating and expend the Resonance to change the power - For all other Disciplines save Blood Sorcery, you must do the same but with a Dyscrasia of the correct Resonance - Alternatively you can feed from another Kindred with that Discipline and change powers, if the Kindred is of a higher BP than you you can change powers up to their BP equivalent level - Changing a prerequisite power makes it impossible to use a power that requires it, you'll have to wait until next Story to change it (or respec in reverse order) Seems like a lot of words, but it's pretty simple in play and works well.
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Jun 23, 2022 19:51
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The Myth of Consensual Respeccing: Player: I Consent! Storyteller: I Consent! Justin Achilli: I don't! Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask??
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Jun 23, 2022 20:13
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Are you playing a game with your friends or are you balancing a PvP-based MMO? Let people loving play. Well, this is the age old dichotomy between 'game' and 'shared story.' Some people like the crunch aspect, some people like the fluff aspect. Tailor your experience as your group prefers. Obviously there's a difference between 'new campaign' and 'two years in,' between 'experienced with system' and 'newbies just learning how it all works' and many other things. The golden rule 'do what works for your group' didn't need to be pointed out, I thought, but here we are.
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Jun 23, 2022 20:25
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e: not even worth it.
Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jun 23, 2022 |
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Jun 23, 2022 20:33
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Ferrinus posted:The Setites should just be a covenant. Unbelievers. Great way to disrespect the true Dark Father. Just smdh.
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Jun 23, 2022 20:57
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TheCenturion posted:Well, this is the age old dichotomy between 'game' and 'shared story.' Okay, so, we have to figure out what the group prefers. Who would prefer that anyone who wants to change some character building choices be penalized with permanent XP loss, and why?
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Jun 23, 2022 21:15
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So I haven’t played or read V5, but people keep talking about how cool lore sheets are. Anyone have an elevator pitch for what they are and maybe an example?
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Jun 23, 2022 21:15
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In my experience running games, there's really no problem a strict or complicated-but-generous respec rule could solve that the GM's silver bullet, "Are you serious right now?" doesn't solve easier and with less collateral damage.
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Jun 23, 2022 21:17
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tabletop RPGs don't really have to worry about bad actors in the same way MMOs do. having explicit rules for respeccing is useful to clarify that changing your build at will isn't intended gameplay that you should be optimizing around in practice, but it's not like it needs to be rigidly policed, only made clear that exceptions are, well, exceptions.
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Jun 23, 2022 21:30
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Berkshire Hunts posted:So I haven’t played or read V5, but people keep talking about how cool lore sheets are. Anyone have an elevator pitch for what they are and maybe an example? Examples include, broadly: Are you related to (by blood or business) someone famous in your clan/the setting? Maybe that earns you a favor 1/story. Maybe it gets you bonus dice on rolls where you're like, hey I really believe in the mission of the insane Tremere hardliners, don't try to influence me away from pursuing their agenda. What do you know about the Week of Nightmares, or the Convention of Thorns, or attaining enlightenment via Golconda? Maybe you get a little item related to where you've been and who you've been around. Maybe you get some allies/contacts in your little study buddy club. More generic High Clan/Low Clan splits, with various social bonuses. They're something that I think appeals to people (to me, conceptually at least) because they hit a few points: - It's a background but not one you have to number-crunch Merit or Background points on (depending on your game/edition), but still with some mechanical weight - It gives the ST a cheat sheet of plot hooks for your character at any time - It gives you, especially as a relatively new player, a specific setting thing your character cares about, with enough support around it that it's easy to use to slip into the mindset of the character Storypath's uhhhh, Path system, is a similar concept but with a much more self-defined practical element, but also reinvents the entire chargen wheel to get there. But loresheets are an idea you could just rewrite and restat and staple onto anyone in any game, in theory.
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Jun 23, 2022 21:30
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:tabletop RPGs don't really have to worry about bad actors in the same way MMOs do. having explicit rules for respeccing is useful to clarify that changing your build at will isn't intended gameplay that you should be optimizing around in practice, but it's not like it needs to be rigidly policed, only made clear that exceptions are, well, exceptions. In a world where the release rate of RPG supplements has slowed to a trickle, I'd argue that a rule that isn't actually meant for using in play but for establishing a social norm that can simply be established through social relations in the first place is not a good use of word count.
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Jun 23, 2022 21:32
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Attorney at Funk posted:In a world where the release rate of RPG supplements has slowed to a trickle, I'd argue that a rule that isn't actually meant for using in play but for establishing a social norm that can simply be established through social relations in the first place is not a good use of word count. i can think of games where it absolutely is meant for use in play (like the level-by-level replacement of old abilities in D&D 4E for example) and isn't just regulating the social contract, but at the same time, every example I can think of is a very different type of game than WoD / ChroD stuff, so yeah in this context you're probably right
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Jun 23, 2022 21:36
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"You get one Discipline power change each time you go up in Blood Potency" seems like a decent way to square the circle re it having a 'cost' but it also not being a penalty if you want to houserule it that way.Berkshire Hunts posted:So I haven’t played or read V5, but people keep talking about how cool lore sheets are. Anyone have an elevator pitch for what they are and maybe an example? Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Basically a layer of "what's a big plot element you're in some way engaged with, and how engaged are you?," a way to ensure every character has some hook into the extant overarching plot of the setting in a somewhat-mechanized way. My Ravnos has the Week of Nightmares loresheet to represent the hooks CPP talks about - he lived through it so he has tidbits to share, plus he has a Malwa to represent scattered clanmates he's stayed in touch with. The New Coke loresheet our ST came up with - which i've posted in this thread - is a way to tie in the previous chronicle, with other loresheets reflecting old PCs and their impacts.
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Jun 23, 2022 22:00
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Soonmot posted:leftism.txt It was especially funny because instead of trying to build a worker's utopia, we were having these impassioned political debates about like, how many mortals we should be allowed to kill and who gets to drink how much blood and where while somebody's enslaved ghoul took minutes. The Dark DSA.
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Jun 23, 2022 23:48
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:tabletop RPGs don't really have to worry about bad actors in the same way MMOs do. having explicit rules for respeccing is useful to clarify that changing your build at will isn't intended gameplay that you should be optimizing around in practice, but it's not like it needs to be rigidly policed, only made clear that exceptions are, well, exceptions. My solution to this would have eliminated the "build" problem in the first place in the game. You don't need to tie things up behind a bunch of pre-reqs unless they're an expanded form of something you already have. And then you just don't limit how many of the powers a player can take in the first place. It's like games that lock using a certain magic item behind having a specific spell or ability. It only leads to disappointed players and it's not really adding a lot to the game because there's only 5-6 of you at the table and the goal is a cool story where everyone's having fun. Game design like this annoys me because it doesn't add to the fun, it really only takes away from it. But yeah, you should absolutely let players move dots around when they're not doing what they thought they would. I'd give a solid 6 months with the character sheet in my Awakening game before it started to be solid, and that was only for attributes and magic toys. You want more rotes or something after that, you can just buy them. But merits and even skills were a lot more flexible, because why not?
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Jun 23, 2022 23:58
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worm girl posted:It was especially funny because instead of trying to build a worker's utopia, we were having these impassioned political debates about like, how many mortals we should be allowed to kill and who gets to drink how much blood and where while somebody's enslaved ghoul took minutes. The Dark DSA. It's the old bit about the carthians where they're totally the "good guys" until you realize that the means of production being siezed are the mortals.
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Jun 24, 2022 00:10
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citybeatnik posted:The New Coke loresheet our ST came up with - which i've posted in this thread - is a way to tie in the previous chronicle, with other loresheets reflecting old PCs and their impacts. I made a bunch of sheets for LA by Night and the upcoming NY by Night, too. https://www.storytellersvault.com/product/385930/Loresheets-by-Night-Los-Angeles https://www.storytellersvault.com/product/393859/Loresheets-by-Night-New-York-City Feel free to grab them and toss in a rating or even a review! Helps get them some more visibility.
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Jun 24, 2022 00:13
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worm girl posted:It was especially funny because instead of trying to build a worker's utopia, we were having these impassioned political debates about like, how many mortals we should be allowed to kill and who gets to drink how much blood and where while somebody's enslaved ghoul took minutes. The Dark DSA. You've read the VtR 2E Trotskyist bloodline, right
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Jun 24, 2022 04:13
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for the thread's benefit (from Night Horrors: Spilled Blood) 
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Jun 24, 2022 04:17
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Soonmot posted:It's the old bit about the carthians where they're totally the "good guys" until you realize that the means of production being siezed are the mortals. lol drat that's dark
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Jun 24, 2022 05:40
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Tulip posted:lol drat that's dark Didn't that old joke go - Stloze said there's a big difference between vampire communists that believe humans are the workers are and vampire communists that believe humans are the means of production. EDIT I was love to hear everything about those carthian sessions.
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Jun 24, 2022 06:43
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Imo the biggest unobserved tension in the Carthians - and why they're so boring, because the material doesn't really engage with real-world ideology in any interesting or insightful way- is ignoring the fact that the movement's elders came of age while the emancipatory pole of politics was liberalism and their formative political experiences would have been in 17-19th century liberal political thought. There's so much weird poo poo you can get into in right liberalism or third way-ism - what if the carthians are 1890s brazilian positivists, or 1850s benthamite utilitarians, or the last remaining American Whigs, or the architects of the 1960s New Frontier, or true believers in John C Calhoun Political Thought, or Peronists, or the secret hands behind the postwar Italian Republic and West European Christian Democracy, or true blue Reagan Republicans. all of those are dead ideologies, but that's what exactly could be interesting about carthians, they are dead *for humans*, not necessarily for obsessive, fanatical undead beings who can spend centuries nursing grudges and influencing society. Not to mention that elitist politics are a much more natural fit for, you know, vampires than the clumsy staplejob of duhhhh I guess they're like vampire commies  Or have an active civil war between the liberal elders and the marxist/fascist anicillae. Or have the Carthians actually win! They run society! The dog caught the car, and the Invictus are actually just a series of island city-states run by LARPing theater kids while the carthians are actually chain-smoking depressives five bunkers deep in the pentagon waging shadow wars over black budget line item appropriations. anythings more interesting than just auto-porting your own political hopes/fears and calling it a day
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Jun 24, 2022 07:03
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lol at the Parliamentarians, I hadn't seen those before. Our Carthian group was almost entirely composed of vampires who were less than 50 years dead, so there weren't a lot of Robespierres in the group. It wasn't a "clumsy staplejob" and neither were any of us trying to do our own real life politics in the game. It was all darkly funny pastiches of mid-century leftist thought except it was about preying on humanity. IDK if you meant it this way, but your post comes off as kind of lovely and condescending. My character didn't even have a coherent platform, she was just too low humanity to fit in with the Invictus amd too dumb for the other three. She left it up to her ghoul to figure out and somehow this resulted in the two of them taking a firm stance on vampire syndicalism. Night Road does some good work with the Anarchs and Camarilla. You get to see two feeding grounds run by either side and how that all shakes out both for the vampires and the mortals. It's neat! The idea that there's this battle between idealism and pragmatism and neither really work out well in the face of greed and hedonism is fun. worm girl fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Jun 24, 2022 |
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Jun 24, 2022 09:09
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It takes the right group but I can absolutely believe it that Carthians work the best for having ridiculous immortal bloodsucking predator takes on fringe politics, with every dynamic that implies. Also respecs should be taken as a good story opportunity, especially for a character who ends up with a new set of powers and abilities that IC they may not know entirely how to use.
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Jun 24, 2022 10:25
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Humans of the world, rise up! You have nothing to lose but your blood! Wait...
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Jun 24, 2022 14:15
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Ferrinus posted:Okay, so, we have to figure out what the group prefers. Well, why have XP at all at that point?
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Jun 24, 2022 15:18
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TheCenturion posted:Well, why have XP at all at that point? Nothing about the existence of XP necessitates players falling behind or getting ahead of each other. What's good about a permanent and unevenly applied penalty?
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Jun 24, 2022 15:22
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Even if you're in a game where players get XP unevenly normally, the interesting thing about that is that the amount of stuff on your sheet is directly related to how much stuff you've done. "I've done X, but I only have Y because I didn't get my character's mechanics right the first time" just makes it less interesting and encourages people to stick with mechanics they aren't enjoying for the sake of optimal XP spending. It's a bad system.
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Jun 24, 2022 15:28
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The Carthian book I recall reading had the Burning Horizon in it, where a cotorie of idealistic radical egalitarians tried to impliment "to each according to their need" with regards to blood. It started great! All you had to do was agree to the principals they laid out and you could go to your friendly neighborhood repurposed ice cream parlor to get your daily ration of blood. And if you didn't agree then the polite members of the enforcement committee would kindly drop you off at a motel outside of the domain. It ended with all but two members plummeting in Humanity until they were mindless beasts, one of the two surviving members just loving off when poo poo started to go tits up, and the members of the enforcement committee slowly having their vitae turn into brackish water because whoopsie they weren't actually dropping people off outside of town but instead had buried so many vampires in a forgotten quarry they had unleashed a literal curse of vengeance on themselves. The one surviving member now spends his time lazing about in another city's salon giving interviews and brain storming with fellow Carthians about how next time they'll get it *right*. That, coupled with example cotories that included "radical zen theocracy" and "what if we tried to copy literal bee swarms by hooking ourselves into a hivemind dedicated to the 'queen' of the cotorie" seem way more interesting than "DSA meeting but with fangs".
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Jun 24, 2022 15:35
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TheCenturion posted:Well, why have XP at all at that point? Literally to keep players on pace with each other??
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Jun 24, 2022 15:48
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tatankatonk posted:Imo the biggest unobserved tension in the Carthians - and why they're so boring, because the material doesn't really engage with real-world ideology in any interesting or insightful way- is ignoring the fact that the movement's elders came of age while the emancipatory pole of politics was liberalism and their formative political experiences would have been in 17-19th century liberal political thought. There's so much weird poo poo you can get into in right liberalism or third way-ism - what if the carthians are 1890s brazilian positivists, or 1850s benthamite utilitarians, or the last remaining American Whigs, or the architects of the 1960s New Frontier, or true believers in John C Calhoun Political Thought, or Peronists, or the secret hands behind the postwar Italian Republic and West European Christian Democracy, or true blue Reagan Republicans. all of those are dead ideologies, but that's what exactly could be interesting about carthians, they are dead *for humans*, not necessarily for obsessive, fanatical undead beings who can spend centuries nursing grudges and influencing society. Not to mention that elitist politics are a much more natural fit for, you know, vampires than the clumsy staplejob of duhhhh I guess they're like vampire commies I mean I absolutely 100% get why they don't. Like I agree that in general it would be interesting on several levels - like its already interesting that vampires are even more out of time than any living person, like a sort of psychotic dream that happens when you realize that its canon that James Bond is an active spy in 2020 who served in WW2. Political ideologies is an interesting field for it, certainly more interesting than like boring ethnic bigotries. But like...I have a lot of very lefty friends and knowing old politics, at most, an intellectual hobby. Would it be funny if the people who are relitigating grudges that ended a century ago were political agents instead of nerds. But what I mean is that its a niche within a niche within a niche. Not a big audience at all. And fleshing it out would probably be like 1000 pages long or some poo poo. That said it still winds up in a weak place and it's a weakness that felt most acute in LANCER, which I'm just going to use as an illustrative example. LANCER evokes the idea of having millions of different planets, but never really spells out any of that, and it creates a kind of sticky nothingness. It's a challenge for an RPG book - you want to create the space for your players to project onto, invite them to use a canvas, but if the canvas is too broad TheCenturion posted:Well, why have XP at all at that point? I think you need to ask the deeper question: why have rules? The purpose of rewards & punishments, the subset of rules that XP tinkering most involves, is to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. So with a given rule for XP, what behavior are you trying to encourage and which to discourage, and why? If you give people bonus XP for lavish descriptions of food, or for taking damage, that encourages certain behaviors at the expense of others, and XP penalties for revealing secrets or talking out of character discourages other behaviors. A lot of the reason rules in other games are strict is to accomplish certain objectives. Often its because the ratio of moderators to users is very low, so the ability of the game to tailor responses to individuals is limited. This is true even in things that are only academically games, like y'know "law." But strict rules have drawbacks - they inevitably create inefficiencies and injustices, and "keeping the rules strict" only really pushes the value of "rules following," its not really in the interest of any other value. Even the largest notional game, the global economy, walks stuff back all the time: consider chargebacks on credit cards. Routine special negotiations to get around failures of following the rules super strictly. The other common reason for strict rules is competitive fairness. Infinity is very strict about list building, for example, and this is also part of the intended challenge of the game: you can bring two lists to one tournament that has three missions, so you cannot tailor 1:1 of lists:missions, you need to either build one list to two missions or use a different paradigm. This is part of the fun and challenge of the game. But that's a competitive game. I guess all of this is largely philosophical wankery that I'm writing as an alternative to paying attention to work, but I think for any rule you should put in a moment to consider why the rule would be superior to ad hoc.
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Jun 24, 2022 16:21
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Right, so there's multiple ideas here. "You can respec because it turns out that if you don't know the system perfectly, you can seriously gently caress yourself over." "You can respec because what's the fun of not being able to?" Well, at that point, why not just give all disciplines to all characters? Hell, why not allow characters to be rewritten at will? "Hey, I know I was playing a gangrel last week, but now my character is a wereshark." Why not allow any past decision to be changed at any point? "Hey, I know last week my character told the prince to go gently caress itself, but I don't like how that turned out, so now last week my character agreed to do the thing." I mean, in some cases, that's what respecing is functionally doing. "Sure, I spent six weeks toiling at menial labour so the crone would teach me Croneamilism. But now I don't want to have Croneamilism, so I guess I spent that six weeks socializing?" Obviously there's a line somewhere between 'no changes whatsoever' and 'your character is a formless chimerical beast.' Part of what draws that line is where you are on the simulation->story axis of what the thrust of your game is.
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Jun 24, 2022 18:56
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