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Dave Brookshaw posted:This. The Mekhet are at least three unrelated sorts of Vampire who resemble each other enough to be called a Clan. Three? I got normal flavor, Empty, and which else?
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Jul 28, 2023 23:15
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Double post because I can't find it in the book, but for Deviant, was there a rule about combining multiple scars to entangle a single high magnitude variation? Or is it only adding deviations to scars that can do that?
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Jul 29, 2023 01:14
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Soonmot posted:Double post because I can't find it in the book, but for Deviant, was there a rule about combining multiple scars to entangle a single high magnitude variation? Or is it only adding deviations to scars that can do that?
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Jul 29, 2023 01:31
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Soonmot posted:Double post because I can't find it in the book, but for Deviant, was there a rule about combining multiple scars to entangle a single high magnitude variation? Or is it only adding deviations to scars that can do that? You'd need a lot of scars for this to be very balanced. Variations and Scars both ramp up heavily as their Magnitude increases, and a pair of two-dot Scars is going to be much easier to bear than one four-dot Scar any day of the week, even assuming that you rule out one-dot Scars, which literally have no compulsory mechanical effect.
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Jul 29, 2023 03:51
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Soonmot posted:Three? I got normal flavor, Empty, and which else? The Norvegi bloodline in the Mekhet clanbook mentions that it may not be a Mekhet bloodline at all, but a bloodline of the little-noticed Clan Grettir. Also note the multiple clan origin stories in the 2e Requiem corebook. They may or may not be true, but if one of them is true, that doesn't mean the others aren't. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Jul 29, 2023 |
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Jul 29, 2023 03:54
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YggdrasilTM posted:The whole thing was the byproduct of a Malkavian grave robbery, if I remember well. I'm picturing Jesus being bemused and thanking a couple of crazy vampires for saving him the trouble opening his tomb for him on his way out.
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Jul 29, 2023 06:31
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I think you'll find Jesus is a Lasombra. EDIT: Unrelated - continuing my trend of creating regional factions within traditions, my players are now confronted with: - Neo-Pagan Celtic/Hellenic Revival Verbena Aristocrats who hide behind Masonic side degrees and use those temple follies every English aristocrat worth his salt has as actual temples and refuse to recognize the primacy of those unwashed old faithers in their dirty little houses; - Quaker Dream-Speakers who're helping birth the spiritualism movement who the other myriad dreamspeaker traditions look at with considerable apprehension and confusion; - A bunch of Akashic Portugese Sailors who practice jogo Do pau and learned about the dharma during Portugese expeditions to Siam, who the mainline Akashayana factions are deeply confused by. Loomer fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Jul 29, 2023 |
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Jul 29, 2023 08:19
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Soonmot posted:Three? I got normal flavor, Empty, and which else? As I am Just a Box says; I Am Just a Box posted:The Norvegi bloodline in the Mekhet clanbook mentions that it may not be a Mekhet bloodline at all, but a bloodline of the little-noticed Clan Grettir. Hollow, Regular, Norvegi. At least.
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Jul 29, 2023 10:46
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Ferrinus posted:One complaint sometimes made about Awakening is that it turned every mage into a Hermetic, but that's not really accurate. Especially in 2E, it's clear that every one of the Awakened is in effect a Hollow One: yeah, all this stuff's mostly bullshit, but there are glimmers of truth throughout, so while I do have my own favorite scrying pool back at my sanctum in a pinch I can combine this pocket mirror, this pencil, and some chanting I improvised on the spot to work real magic. Oh, it's a full moon out? That's a useful vibe, let's work that in somehow. Yeah, mages being enthusiastic syncretics is really cool. It leads to a lot of fun chains of association, like my mage using Hatsune Miku and the Antikythera Mechanism as references to the Fool and the Wheel of Fortune in the Awakened Tarot in order to symbolize the Realm of Arcadia for a Demon. It also means that, say, the distinction between the Pentacle and the Free Council, despite being very important from their perspective, is even more confusing and meaningless for a non-mage. "So you scrape existing stuff for scraps of magical lore?" "Right." "And those other guys do too?" "NO IT'S DIFFERENT"
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Jul 30, 2023 21:56
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Dammit Who? posted:Hatsune Miku […] as the Fool in the Awakened Tarot AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 01:09
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I’m thinking about running a Hunter game for a group relatively new to WoD and was wondering if the thread recommends the new version of Reckoning or should I go with HTV (2e I think?)
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Jul 31, 2023 03:33
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HtV 1e, honestly. That game did everything right.
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Jul 31, 2023 04:06
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mcclay posted:I’m thinking about running a Hunter game for a group relatively new to WoD and was wondering if the thread recommends the new version of Reckoning or should I go with HTV (2e I think?) Welcome to my Hell, trying to figure out the answer to this question for the last year or so. The pros and cons as far as I see it: Hunter: The Reckoning: This book is honestly really thin for being the corebook of a gameline and reading it left me thinking that I should have already been familiar with WoD5e mechanics before starting because I didn't feel like it completely told me how to play the game. That being said, it is a living system that still has a company releasing books for it and the books both seem to be coming out at a good pace and have high production value. You can also buy them from a store and get a real book, not a PoD piece of crap. It really leans in on Edges and Creeds as these hard mechanical things that represent stuff that is more abstract in Vigil. I'm not sure I really like that, but it might not be a turn-off for everyone. I still haven't discounted using this yet, I need to see what some of the supplements contain before I can make a choice. Hunter: The Vigil: This is a dead system. There will never be another book in this game line, and this can be a turn off for a lot of people. That being said, the original HtV is a near perfect product from which you could run a complete game (with the blue book) without any other supplements. But the game does have supplements! There are three expansion books covering the major monsters, Block by Bloody Block, multiple SAS modules associated with the expansion books, The Horror Recognition Guide, Compacts & Conspiracies, The Collection of Horrors 2-page modules, The "Hunted" SAS module and "One Year Later" SAS module, etc. etc. That also doesn't include things that were not directly Hunter related by were obviously written in a way that Hunter worked within them like Damnation City etc. The big flaws with the original HtV is that it still uses some mechanics from 1e that obviously needed to be fixed, and it can be kind of hard running it knowing that there are better ways of doing some of this stuff. Some of these things include fighting styles being busted, the scaling XP cost leading to there being min-maxing at character creation, etc. However, many of these things were fixed in 2e, so if you just read the 2e Blue Book and read the rules update at the back of Mortal Remains you can fix most of this. Hunter: The Vigil 2e This is a dead system. Don't let the fact that OP still has something in the pipeline for this system fool you. There will never be any significant updates to this gameline ever again. This is also just a really bad book. A lot of Onyx Path's stuff seems to be fan fiction, and it can be really good when a real fan of the line is put in charge, and absolute trash when not. There is nothing introduced in the 2e book that is not already there if you have the original game and the rules update at the end of Mortal Remains. The actual book is shorter than the 1e HtV corebook despite trying to fit the content of both the blue book and the new system into a single book. It gives the goddamn Slenderman as a sample monster, and is creatively dead in about 100 other ways. The editing and layout are absolute trash, and full of typos that hit me as soon as I opened the book. I paid a lot of money for a hardcopy of this book and got a PoD thing printed on thin paper with ink that came off when the perspiration from my hands rubbed against it. There are no redeeming qualities in this product. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 04:39
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Vigil 1e, use the 2e conversion rules in Mortal Remains, don't use Vigil 2e. Mortal Remains is fairly free of 2e's big sin, which is Condition bloat; ignore the small handful of Dread Powers that say their effects come in the form of a Condition. Or just Vigil 1e. The main appeal of the 2e conversion in Mortal Remains is getting rid of derangements as part of the Morality system.
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Jul 31, 2023 04:43
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The main issue I'm running into is trying to corral my friends into using the Blue Book and HtV 1e AND the Mortal Remains conversion stuff. I'd use HtV1e without any thought if it wasn't for all that. I was leaning towards Reckoning but it sounds like that game also has Extra Reading attached to it
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Jul 31, 2023 05:11
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You don't need to make them read all of that, only YOU do. Pull out the 2e character sheets, explain to them how dice pools work and just start running the game. The rules will fall into place as the game goes. You only really need to show them the character creation rules in the blue book, and how Hunter specific stuff works in HtV (the rest of the book is mostly for you). The important thing to impart is the feel of the game. You are candle in the darkness, there is no good end for you, but you are going to hold back the dark as long as you can. The people on either side of you can be the anchor that keeps you attached to the rest of humanity or the rock around your ankle that pulls you into the depths of psychosis and insanity, but if they weren't there then you'd be all alone in your fight. Ironically, the guy that ran an actual play of HtV 2e for Onyx Path proved this point when it became apparent that the best two players had never read the drat book and just had character concepts they liked, and the Storyteller and one of the other players were just telling them what to roll to make things happen. (With a special bonus being that he ran the game using the Ashwood Abbey, something that Onyx Path tried to memory hole in 2e) EDIT: Hunter is kind of unique in that "the players have no experience with how things work, and no idea what's out there" is kind of baked into the system. It actually makes the game even better that your players AND their PCs don't know the rules of the night, or what kinds of crazy bullshit monsters can pull. EDIT2: Really, if they just read the blue book then they know the rules of the game. It's really easy to say what the minimal changes introduced in 2e are once they know the foundation. After that, you just need to explain the couple of extra mechanics of HtV. Essentially, that your PCs can use risk-taking and gambling to give themselves edges over monsters, that investigation and planning are two thirds of the typical hunt, and that derangements can be avoided with The Code, but that comes at its own price. Describing The Code is probably the largest part of HtV, but it's not exactly rocket science and is pretty easy to show in play. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 05:23
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That does make sense, esp if all the extra stuff is mostly for me. Any books/hints on how to set up a Hunter campaign?
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Jul 31, 2023 05:33
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mcclay posted:That does make sense, esp if all the extra stuff is mostly for me. Any books/hints on how to set up a Hunter campaign? I can give some tips as I've been creating one over the past six months. But I'm still relatively inexperienced too. 1) Decide the tier before anything else. The tier tells you whether this is going to be a group of locals trying to clear out Pennywise from the city sewers (tier 1), Buffy fighting off a rotating cast of monsters with the help of trusty experts (tier 2), or a crew of world hopping hunters with all the tools but a sinking suspicion that the people they work for might be hiding something (tier 3). The tiers are all very different games both in how isolated the cell should feel, but also in how much they would know about the things they are fighting. You kind of need to know what kind of chronicle YOU want to run, but also what tier your PLAYERS want to play in before you can decide if they are trying to avert the apocalypse, or just get revenge for that thing that killed the kids down the road. 2) Now, decide the basic place you want the chronicle to end up. Is there a foremost horror? Is there a group of horrors? Is there a secret conspiracy that needs to be stopped? What will the hunters be achieving by the end of the chronicle? Again, this is tier-based, so I'll be sticking with tier 1 from here on out since it's what I want to run. The important thing here is that the chronicle should be open enough that your players can find their own way to the end goal, but you should definitely have one in mind. If you search my posts you can see the chronicle I am planning. In my chronicle, I want the players to stumble upon the secret reasons behind the founding of their home city, and the implications that has on the people living there. I've thought of different road signs that point to that destination, but I haven't attached them to particular plots so that I can throw those road signs down where I need to. 3) Now make some horrors! This is the fun part. The toolbox is there to build things, but first think of what kind of monster you want to make at the concept level. A monster made out of albino slugs? A man that skins dogs and uses the cloak of their skins to transform into a mighty beast? An artificial woman kidnapping people and stealing their organs so she can incorporate them into herself to make herself "real"? Think of something creepy, hosed up (with limits set by the content warnings your players give you), that both pushes the hunters physically, but also emotionally and morally. Hunting the monster should always entail physical risk, but also breaking the law, and doing things that normal people would never find themselves having to do. Now that you have the concept, you don't need to create some absurd stat block. Neither of the books really talk about this, but your horror really only needs the most barebones stat block. The first thing you need is just 3-4 "powers" that it is capable of. You can look at the dread powers to get ideas, but basically what you want is [description of what the power does] followed by [how many dice do I roll]. If the horror is just there for vicious combat, then really it only needs 1 or 2 powers that will really make a challenge to defeat. However, if it has a role in society then a couple of powers or abilities that allow it to manipulate emotions, people, or social situations are also good to include here. Once I generate its powers, I think about the stats the PCs are most likely going to interact with. So, Defense, Health, Resistance stats, the "power pool" it uses (blood, willpower, essence) which limits how much power it has. For everything else I usually just say it has a dice pool of 2 for things its bad at, 4 that it's average at, 6 for stuff it excels at. No other real stats needed. If you are thinking really deeply about a horror, then go hog-wild statting it up, but my personal experience has been that the stat blocks in WoD are cumbersome and you really only need a [what can it do] and [how many dice does it roll to do it] to make things work. 4) Now that you've created a horror, how will the cell learn about it? Not just how will they learn it exists, but how will they learn about what it can do? As written, horrors should always be able to pulp a mere human. They have all the edges, they are stronger, can shrug off or regenerate damage, bend minds, and manipulate reality. The only edge they lack is the element of surprise, because hunters working well should always be the ones getting the drop on the monster. But to do that, they need to understand how the monster ticks, and organically inserting this research into the game can be a bit of a trick. They should be able to research it in different ways, and in a manner that matches the skillsets they have. This can be anything from stuff written in ancient texts, information that can be gleaned from witnesses, or confessions that can be beaten out during interrogations. It can be the results of forensic analysis, or just things learned from tailing a suspect with high-tech bugs or gadgets. Again, you really need to be open on how information can be learned as the game allows PCs to have such a wide array of abilities. This will be a little easier once you see what kinds of PCs your players are making. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 06:23
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Speaking of the different VtR versions is there a decent version 1.5 of the other lines in the fan made supplements or anything? Something that cuts down on all the condition bloat and preferably the whole beat system which I don't think really worked either.
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Jul 31, 2023 14:33
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the entire XP system can be cut out and replaced with 1-2 XP per session for the "working as intended" rate of progression, or at least 2x that if you want players to get cool toys in a realistic timeframe for adults playing once a week Conditions are frustrating because every developer seems to have a completely different idea of how they're supposed to work, but the original premise, as far as I can tell, is that the intended loop goes: - player has their character do something risky - bad thing happens to the character and has a powerful emotional effect on them - narratively, the character needs to do something to reassert their sense of control/normalcy; mechanically, the player is incentivized to do this thing - if you do the thing, you get XP. if you don't, there's a minor mechanical penalty that goes away after a while this is a pretty valuable system for a horror game to have; it nudges players to take actions in-character that are against their best interests, and generally models "screwing up and learning from it, assuming you survive" as the primary way of growing more experienced and capable. however, personally i extremely dislike the fact that XP is the carrot -- it's too important, it overshoots and distorts player behavior MORE than you actually want, and it either leads to disparate XP totals, or you throw up your hands and use group beats, but now the incentive is weirdly diluted. i would vastly prefer a system like in Jenna Moran's games where fulfilling your characters' weird personal quirks and dramatic flaws is how you charge your power resource, rather than your XP track, but that would already involve a pretty significant rewrite of the ChroD rules to achieve Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 14:45
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neaden posted:Speaking of the different VtR versions is there a decent version 1.5 of the other lines in the fan made supplements or anything? Something that cuts down on all the condition bloat and preferably the whole beat system which I don't think really worked either. For VtR just add in God Machine Chronicles for the rules update and go from there, though honestly the paring down of the 100+ Bloodlines each with their own magical special butterfly discipline was actually a good thing in 2e.
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Jul 31, 2023 14:57
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The wild thing is that Requiem was pretty tight and light about Conditions, being first and all I guess, so it's not too hard to just play 2e and simply use On-the-fly Conditions or whatever the loose guide thing is, and everything works fine for the most part because the Conditions don't contain like three interrelated clauses tying two half-page Conditions together. And, like said up thread, replacing the XP system with traditional # per session is incredibly easy.
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Jul 31, 2023 16:42
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Conditions as “let’s unify mechanical effects of common effects” is a great idea. That way, you say “this power puts the confusion or blindness or vomiting effect onto the victim” and have those definitions be consistent and easily referenced. 2E goes really nuts with them, and makes me think of frustrated Wikipedia editors for some reason.
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Jul 31, 2023 17:08
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neaden posted:Speaking of the different VtR versions is there a decent version 1.5 of the other lines in the fan made supplements or anything? Something that cuts down on all the condition bloat and preferably the whole beat system which I don't think really worked either. I don't think you're going to find many, if only because Vampire and Hunter's versions were written during the soupy period where they were writing a second edition without knowing if they could sell it as a second edition instead of a splatbook. Other lines will have a much harder time with that kind of backporting, just because they were written as a full new edition. Werewolf and Promethean have a lot of good quality of life improvements (and varying amounts of jank), but those improvements are broad enough and they're built on games whose 1e are iffy enough that teasing them out isn't worth the effort. Changeling: Mostly a sidegrade mechanically, it isn't necessarily worth the effort. And Mage 2e is basically just what the 1e corebook should have been in the first place, so the only 1e elements I could see people really wanting in the mixture are the condition downplaying houserules that people talk about all the time. EDIT: Oh yeah, Geist. I'd probably put that in the first category as well. It's another game where 1e is kind of weak and 2e's improvements are broad enough that you can't really make a list of easy fixes to backport. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 17:11
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Geist 2E is basically a different game with an entirely different set of problems. It's probably my favorite nWoD book thematically but it's also, like, the perfect textbook example of how not to organize a rulebook.
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Jul 31, 2023 17:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:this is a pretty valuable system for a horror game to have; it nudges players to take actions in-character that are against their best interests, and generally models "screwing up and learning from it, assuming you survive" as the primary way of growing more experienced and capable. I'm not sure it'd be that significant, since Virtue/Vice are already "act out to recharge your power resource" mechanics. At some point back in Requiem 2E's development, a dev on the official forums got asked what to do with Conditions and Beats in one-shot games, and they suggested that each Beat could be cashed in for +1 die on a contested roll or something like that, such that Beats were a feedback mechanism that turned succumbing to dread powers now into resisting dread powers later. All that said, this doesn't really fix other annoyances relating to Conditions and I'd much prefer to see them just act as traditional status effects without reward-generating metamechanics stapled on.
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Jul 31, 2023 17:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:also, like, the perfect textbook example of how not to organize a rulebook. Excuse you, that's basically every White Wolf book other than the blue 1E nWoD book, and even that sorta sucked.
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Jul 31, 2023 18:23
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Fuzz posted:Excuse you, that's basically every White Wolf book other than the blue 1E nWoD book, and even that sorta sucked. they're all bad but Geist 2E is a disasterpiece
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Jul 31, 2023 18:30
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:they're all bad but Geist 2E is a disasterpiece
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Jul 31, 2023 18:38
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:they're all bad but Geist 2E is a disasterpiece All of the 2e corebooks quaver in the presence of Mummy: the Curse Second Edition's total heartfelt commitment to putting the cart before the horse.
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Jul 31, 2023 18:38
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I Am Just a Box posted:All of the 2e corebooks quaver in the presence of Mummy: the Curse Second Edition's total heartfelt commitment to putting the cart before the horse. Did Mummy 2E fix 1E's odd problem - and one Suleiman got salty* about if you mentioned it - in that it seemed very determined for only one person to play the actual title creature in a group at one time? *His eyes blazing with an intensity some call 'alarming.'
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Jul 31, 2023 18:49
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ars magica-style troupe play is, by itself, pretty cool i've just never heard anything ELSE positive about Mummy
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Jul 31, 2023 18:51
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The main good thing about Mummy is that you can cast Meteor.
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Jul 31, 2023 18:54
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Dawgstar posted:Did Mummy 2E fix 1E's odd problem - and one Suleiman got salty* about if you mentioned it - in that it seemed very determined for only one person to play the actual title creature in a group at one time? No. Arguably it made it harder, because it tries to make hay out of the new concept that Descents do not proceed in chronological order from the mummy's perspective, meaning if your Descent ends in 2023 CE, your next Descent may begin in 310 BCE.
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Jul 31, 2023 19:00
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I knew Mummy was gonna be bad the moment they said they were bringing back shifting TNs.
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Jul 31, 2023 19:24
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I really hope this Curseborne game OP has been t teasing takes the lessons from what's worked and what hasn't from CoD and Scion. They sure are keeping mum about it though.
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Jul 31, 2023 20:38
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neaden posted:I really hope this Curseborne game OP has been t teasing takes the lessons from what's worked and what hasn't from CoD and Scion. They sure are keeping mum about it though.
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Jul 31, 2023 20:49
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It is genuinely impressive how the organization of WoD/OPP books has gotten worse with time. It is like the opposite of institutional experience.
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Jul 31, 2023 21:21
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ZearothK posted:It is genuinely impressive how the organization of WoD/OPP books has gotten worse with time. It is like the opposite of institutional experience. i mean because it is, right? as wod's cultural relevance declined they got less and less full-time staff, so any potential for that experience went
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Jul 31, 2023 21:47
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Yeah, the books are written by a huge number of freelancers and then stitched together by an underpaid developer, which is why they ping-pong back and forth between topics and introduce concepts in a random order. I'm honestly really glad that people are starting to notice that books like Mummy 2e were just word salad, because I felt like I was screaming into the ether "but, but, he's just a giant chicken!" (Although it was the same thing with Mummy 1e when I pointed out that large, important segments of the book were written by someone who thought mummies could create new artifacts [they cannot], and people started falling over themselves to deny this obvious fact.)
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Jul 31, 2023 22:06
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