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Desiden posted:Well, at last nuWW has something to show for all their efforts with the Storyteller's Vault: I glanced at the free PDF preview it generated and honestly? I don't even want to make fun of this. It's so clumsily earnest it's endearing. It'd be like kicking a puppy. The Storyteller's Vault has not even earned the honor of being a successor to BJ Zanzibar. I will look at it again when they sell Clanbook: Deathskaters, and you drat well know if I take the Can't Skate Flaw I better have to pair it with Sire's Resentment. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Jan 19, 2018 |
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Jan 19, 2018 05:38
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I Am Just a Box posted:I glanced at the free PDF preview it generated and honestly? I don't even want to make fun of this. It's so clumsily earnest it's endearing. It'd be like kicking a puppy. Yeah, that's fair. I wasn't really bringing it up to mock the kid who wrote it so much; hell, I made a terrible loving homebrew of highlanders and EXXXTREEEMMEEEE edgelord demon hunters for my gaming group back in the 90s. It more just stood out to me that OPP was advertising, with a straight face, chupacabras in Swedracula's highly politically relevant mature game not for whiney SJW babbies.
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Jan 19, 2018 19:47
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I don't think opp has much control over wwp's storytellers vault.
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Jan 19, 2018 21:18
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Kurieg posted:I don't think opp has much control over wwp's storytellers vault. They definitely don't, but they include the Storyteller's Vault books in the lists of releases they link each month in the OPP blog.
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Jan 20, 2018 00:14
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dvk38gC_kY Here is a fellow who made an in-character VLOG as a Toreador 6th gen for a LARP. I haven't seen it yet, so I'm watching it with you, in case anyone cares enough.
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Jan 22, 2018 07:54
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do NOT jack off posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dvk38gC_kY The start is kind of cute but it's not worth 35 minutes. And the second one is 48. He appears to have a script of some sort, but makes no effort to edit out stumbling over lines. He sets up a ghoul assistant who is a perfect excuse for the usual jump cuts and any other necessary editing tricks, too. 
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Jan 22, 2018 09:26
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It looks like I may be running a Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition game. Are there any quirks I should be aware of? Any quality of life system hacks? This will is also my first actual play experience with a post-GMC CoD game so any more general tips/words of warning are welcome too.
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Jan 22, 2018 13:06
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Bosushi! posted:It looks like I may be running a Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition game. Are there any quirks I should be aware of? Any quality of life system hacks? Consider using group beats rather than individual gains, especially if you have a mixed-skill group of players. It both makes sure less experienced players aren't left with an XP gap, and means everybody gets something when dramatic failures start popping up. With Dramatic Failures, I found that offering options for the dramatic part helped people get into the system at first. "OK - you failed your Larceny check. Do you fail to bypass the lock to the door, or do you want to take a beat and be caught by a security guard on patrol just as you pop it open?" Also, I tend to pit dramatic failures as a choice between: failure - you don't get what you want; and dramatic failure - you get what you wanted but with new consequences. (rather than just failure vs. big-time failure). Don't be stingy with Conditions. If a player resolves more than one in a scene, they only get one beat anyway - and it gets them used to the process.
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Jan 22, 2018 13:43
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Bosushi! posted:It looks like I may be running a Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition game. Are there any quirks I should be aware of? Any quality of life system hacks? The whole Beats, Aspirations and Conditions system is a bit controversial, and its with reason. Some people ditch it entirely. Personally I like it in principle, but have found the bookkeeping to be hard to manage. If you're playing in person (or can otherwise manage) I'd suggest using physical cards to represent Conditions, because they're otherwise easy to lose track of. I'd also recommend pooling Beats as a way to cut down on confusion - if you as ST keep track of the fact that the group has earned 6 experiences, the players only need to keep track of how much they've spent and you won't have to deal with the question of "wait how much did I have again did I get one for resolving that Aspiration oh god did I forget entirely to write down my xp from last session?"
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Jan 22, 2018 13:48
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For aspirations, I find it useful to have a couple that can reasonably be accomplished in a single session, one that can be finished in 2-3 sessions, and one even longer term than that. Short, medium, long term, basically. For long (and some medium) term aspirations, I encourage the player to create short term aspirations that will allow them to advance to the next step of their aspiration. Use them as an RP aid and character direction guide so that the players never feel aimless. Throw them little hooks over the course of a session and if they bite, cool. If they don't, then whatever set, they just aren't interested in pursuing that at the time. If someone has an inspiration they haven't completed in two sessions, talk to them and see if they want to replace it with something else. It sounds like a lot of busy work, but it's not. The aspirations written on the sheets can give you inspiration for the next session and it helps keep the players motivated to accomplish things with their characters.
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Jan 22, 2018 14:58
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Terrorforge posted:The whole Beats, Aspirations and Conditions system is a bit controversial, and its with reason. Some people ditch it entirely. Personally I like it in principle, but have found the bookkeeping to be hard to manage. If you're playing in person (or can otherwise manage) I'd suggest using physical cards to represent Conditions, because they're otherwise easy to lose track of. I'd also recommend pooling Beats as a way to cut down on confusion - if you as ST keep track of the fact that the group has earned 6 experiences, the players only need to keep track of how much they've spent and you won't have to deal with the question of "wait how much did I have again did I get one for resolving that Aspiration oh god did I forget entirely to write down my xp from last session?" I find it's easiest to use them as a system feature, not a necessity. Everyone has Obsessions (as it's a mage game), but the aspirations part is only sort of useful as there's basically a to-do list of scenes and story to go through, so there's not any use in worrying about things that can be completed easily as I'll often just give beats when we complete good scenes anyway. We do use shared beats and I just make piles of d6s and everyone gets what there is at the end of the night. No division or anything, you just get what there is. Usually have more arcane beats than regular, but in total we have between 4-8 per night. Seems to work good for our group, but we're nearing a power level where it's starting to get a little slower as they're starting to raise power stat and then arcana. It seems to move pretty organically this way, and we're not worrying about if we completed aspirations every night and they can be medium length goals instead.
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Jan 22, 2018 15:56
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Use Group Beats. The fact that it's the optional version while individual is default has never made sense for me (my gaming group as playtesters for GMC is why Group Beats are a thing at all!) Give Aspiration beats for making progress toward a long-term one.
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Jan 22, 2018 20:34
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Speaking of Beats, I remember there being a suggested number of beats per session each player should get printed somewhere but I can't for the life of me find it. Does anyone remember where that would be (or am I just completely misremembering some other thing?) Alternatively: Dave, what would you say is a good number? I ask because my current VtR ST likes to make us wait multiple sessions just to get a single xp, even when we go out of our way to hit aspirations and clear conditions and all that. Pretty sure this game is going to die with a wet fart because nothing happens, but maybe if we saw some progression people might be slightly more motivated to show up.
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Jan 22, 2018 21:59
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I have some murky memory of seeing something like that, but also went looking and couldn't find it. But from contextual clues (you get 1 beat for the session, 1 for an Aspiration which you're supposed to do about 1/session, and maybe 1-3 from resolving Conditions and accepting dramatic failures) as well as previous discussion, 1 exp per session (give or take) seems to be a good baseline. Supernaturals and/or players who really try can increase that substantially, and the ST should probably do it on purpose for particularly dramatic sessions, but just going by the book it should be really hard to not give at least one experience every two sessions unless you were deliberately denying not just free extra Beats, but the ones the players are entitled to by RAW.
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Jan 22, 2018 22:20
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Yawgmoth posted:Speaking of Beats, I remember there being a suggested number of beats per session each player should get printed somewhere but I can't for the life of me find it. Does anyone remember where that would be (or am I just completely misremembering some other thing?) Alternatively: Dave, what would you say is a good number? The Beat Economy on p84 of Awakening 2e. Right in the same side-bar as Group Beats. You should be getting 3-8 beats per play session is the general rule of thumb. If you aren't, why aren't you? So that's probably about an XP every other session at the very least. If your ST is being stingy with it, maybe ask why? If nothing is happening, can you make things happen by being a catalyst, or is it the sort of game where the ST is just dangling story out of reach because they don't know where it's going for any number of reasons? Maybe they are more familiar with a previous edition (or LARP) where XP is very rare. Best to just have a discussion about it like grown ups. At the very least you could start suggesting rolls when you're more likely to fail and then make them dramatic.
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Jan 22, 2018 23:47
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The beats / session also assumes moderately long sessions, in my experience. I ran two-hour games of Demon and people were getting maybe 3 beats each time, which in conjunction with our game with bi-weekly felt insanely slow. If I ran the game again I would definitely just instate a one session = 1 experience rule and basically throw out everything about conditional experience completely except maybe to find some other incentive to replace voluntary dramatic failures. Or maybe just make dramatic failures for beats an extra bonus on top of that baseline.
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Jan 23, 2018 00:17
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Jhet posted:The Beat Economy on p84 of Awakening 2e. Right in the same side-bar as Group Beats. You should be getting 3-8 beats per play session is the general rule of thumb. If you aren't, why aren't you? So that's probably about an XP every other session at the very least. If your ST is being stingy with it, maybe ask why? If nothing is happening, can you make things happen by being a catalyst, or is it the sort of game where the ST is just dangling story out of reach because they don't know where it's going for any number of reasons? Maybe they are more familiar with a previous edition (or LARP) where XP is very rare. Best to just have a discussion about it like grown ups. As for why he's being so loving stingy, it's because he "wants to keep things low-powered" and "the book says elders are 25xp" (with the implied "so you should never have that much ever"). We just got an xp after 3 sessions of fuckall. I've had two discussions like grownups with him and the group; every time he agrees to do better, gets marginally better for 2 weeks, then goes right back to being disappointing. At this point I'm honestly only still in the game because of a lack of anything else to do on saturday morning/afternoons. I'd like to see him actually be a better ST but I have low expectations because there's one player who is just totally content to have exactly one conversation with one NPC every session and get absolutely nothing out of it.
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Jan 23, 2018 01:48
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Yawgmoth posted:Awesome, thank you so much! My pleasure. XP was something I really had to think about in the 2e rule set. My group is still reasonably low powered at the 3-8 rate and they're nearing Gnosis 5/Arcanum 5 levels. I say low powered because they're just really setting up their cabal into stable ground. We're about 40 sessions in, so that really only makes about 40 total experience. I'd put Elders at about 80 experience maybe, but you can't have that be the starting point for them in the book. It's always a bummer to have an unhappy playing experience, so hopefully you can turn it around or find something more fun to do during that time.
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Jan 23, 2018 04:15
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http://comicbook.com/tv-shows/2018/01/20/stephen-king-wants-a-law-order-vampire-show/ Stephen King basically wants VASCU the series. I'm down.
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Jan 23, 2018 04:39
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There's always the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency.
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Jan 23, 2018 05:00
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Just putting this here with new people to the thread: I like 2e Requiem. But there are some pretty valid criticisms of it and the beat system. It's more 'gamey' than 1e. Conditions naturally lend themselves to cards, and invoking them requires you to make counter-intuitive OOC choices to gain XP. It can sometimes feel like there's a lot of moving pieces ("okay, so i need to open with this power, then expend that condition to invoke this other power, then if the NPC chooses, the can...") just to get something relatively simple done. Gaining beats, as mentioned, requires you, the player, to make choices counter to you, the character, in order to gain XP (or not). Making choices is always good in an RPG but it's a different kind of choice and diverges from direct one-to-one character-player decision making. Group beats combined with both of the above can make some players feel pressured to always resolve conditions or make sure they're getting enough dramatic failures to enhance the group. You can try to fight this with good table demeanor but the pressure is still there.
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Jan 23, 2018 07:41
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Mendrian posted:Gaining beats, as mentioned, requires you, the player, to make choices counter to you, the character, in order to gain XP (or not). Making choices is always good in an RPG but it's a different kind of choice and diverges from direct one-to-one character-player decision making. To me, this is a good thing. Playing other systems I often find myself bending my characterization because I'm concerned about making good in-game decisions. With Beats and Aspirations I have incentive to act in a manner that's in-character but counterproductive to story goals, which leads to an overall more engaging story.
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Jan 23, 2018 12:35
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So did anyone get the new Pentex book? Is it any good?
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Jan 23, 2018 16:37
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Mors Rattus posted:So did anyone get the new Pentex book? Is it any good? It isn't terrible. It probably won't surprise anybody who's read Book of the Wyrm already with new information.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:24
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Rand Brittain posted:It isn't terrible. It probably won't surprise anybody who's read Book of the Wyrm already with new information. Is it comedy gold like Subsidiaries was?
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Jan 23, 2018 20:00
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The beats / session also assumes moderately long sessions, in my experience. I ran two-hour games of Demon and people were getting maybe 3 beats each time, which in conjunction with our game with bi-weekly felt insanely slow. If I ran the game again I would definitely just instate a one session = 1 experience rule and basically throw out everything about conditional experience completely except maybe to find some other incentive to replace voluntary dramatic failures. In that scenario I'd consider just changing the beats:XP ratio to 3:1 or something. No real reason it has to be 5.
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Jan 23, 2018 22:36
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Mors Rattus posted:Is it comedy gold like Subsidiaries was? Yup It sadly does not have a chapter devoted to Black Dog Games. It does however have some deeeeeep cuts against CCP's mismanagement and EVE Online. Also this.  "RED News"
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Jan 23, 2018 22:53
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Kurieg posted:Yup I can still find people dreadfully upset about that chapter even today, and think to myself many of them would probably long for the days when White Wolf could poke fun at itself now. That said my favorite jab was with Apex Games and their trio of games 'Undead Cowboy,' 'Radioactive Undead Cowboy,' and 'Radioactive Undead Cowboy in Space.' (That probably just turned into an extended sourcebook.)
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Jan 23, 2018 23:22
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Kurieg posted:Also this. So, what's going on in this picture, exactly?
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Jan 23, 2018 23:24
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I'm guessing Pentex is using tech to disguise that one of their anchors is a giant demon man.
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Jan 23, 2018 23:26
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Yeah, there's a lot of notes paperclipped to pages talking about "Why is this Anne Collier person giving away all our secrets. When will that secret project to replace her with an Enticer that works over the air be done?"
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Jan 23, 2018 23:30
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"We can't CGI convincing clothing, tell Acquisitions we need to make a really big, really nice suit."
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Jan 24, 2018 00:16
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Kavak posted:"We can't CGI convincing clothing, tell Acquisitions we need to make a really big, really nice suit." 
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Jan 24, 2018 00:39
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Jan 24, 2018 01:41
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This is a very funny book, mostly because I recognize a lot of the corporate language here. And also because I find it hilarious that Pentex has an actual and serious focus on making sure all their horrific evil is pointed outwards and that, whenever possible, people aren't pissing into the circle. Their discrimination policy covers sexual orientation, gender identity, personhood status, lycanthropy and horrific mutations. Also: psychic premonitions are considered actionable evidence of discriminatory behavior, as are auguries and "cross-realm information gathering."
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Jan 24, 2018 03:23
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Mors Rattus posted:Also: psychic premonitions are considered actionable evidence of discriminatory behavior, as are auguries and "cross-realm information gathering." So Bill from Accounting having Spirits of Murderfuck following him around in the Umbra is cause for a sit-down with HR?
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Jan 24, 2018 03:26
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Kavak posted:So Bill from Accounting having Spirits of Murderfuck following him around in the Umbra is cause for a sit-down with HR? If they provide Bill with evidence of you acting in a discriminatory way, sure.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:28
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Mors Rattus posted:If they provide Bill with evidence of you acting in a discriminatory way, sure. I meant the spirits are following Bill for being a Murderfucker.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:29
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Kavak posted:I meant the spirits are following Bill for being a Murderfucker. Oh. Well, I mean, yes. Assuming his murderfucking is not benefiting the company.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:31
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are there regional differences? Pentex work councils in Germany where Bob gets a citation because he infringes on the murderfucking of the Murderfucker Work Unit?
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Jan 24, 2018 07:50
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