|
paradoxGentleman posted:...uh. White Wolf has been a de facto holding company for all of WW's IP's since CCP bought it, so Paradox Interactive now owns most of WW's IP (I believe OPP straight-up bought Aberrant and Scion), which includes licensing rights. If OPP wants to publish WoD or Exalted games, they'll probably have to ask Paradox very nicely. If Paradox really wanted to, they could probably license out World of Darkness and Exalted supplements to the guys behind Mutant: År Noll.
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2015 15:28
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 11:05 |
|
|
Though it's unlikely, Paradox could give the WoD and Exalted licenses to developers they are more interested in having develop their games. Vampyr: År Noll
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2015 16:40
|
|
|
Inzombiac posted:I just got the 2nd Vampire book and it feels a little overly complicated. Maybe in practice it will make more sense but the structure of it gives a lot of new terms before they mechanics are described. The rules for feeding have two different kinds; one system for people who want to roll dice where the ST is supposed to motivate players to play the role of the victim and nearby NPCs by offering their regular characters Willpower points and a different method for people who want to roleplay that involves a complicated storygame[1]-like scene of declarations and responses where the ST or feeding player can hand out Beats to players for participating as NPCs - that then ends in a dice roll. The really weird thing is that the mechanical result of feeding depends on which approach you take. [1] Like, Jeepform RPGs and stuff like Polaris
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2015 02:18
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:Yeah, during the 90's if you had a pie chart of gaming companies' share of the market, White Wolf would've been the only one other than WotC with a big enough slice to print the name on it. Depending on exactly which part of the 90's you're talking about, this speaks magnitudes about White Wolf's brand strength. WotC first acquired the D&D brand in 1997; prior to that White Wolf would have been competing with WotC's Magic: the Gathering entirely on the strength of their ability to mass-market RPGs to dissatisfied, pseudo-counter-culture teens and young adults. gtrmp posted:That, and they completely surrendered their position as second place in the market when they switched over from traditional publishing to PDF/POD-only. For all the arguments that traditional publishing is dead or dying or otherwise no longer viable, the fact remains that White Wolf's market share was second only to Wizards of the Coast's right up until WW/CCP dropped out of the market entirely. Traditional publishing being dead is a truism that I suspect has a lot to do with who's saying it. If you're an Internet-savvy person, you can easily go on forums and discussion groups to proclaim how much easier it is for you to buy all the games that you're actively seeking out. Maybe you even have a fancy, expensive tablet so you can read PDFs as if they were a book, instead of having to lug your laptop (which is so old it lags when browsing game books on PDF) to the table. Or maybe you like paper books, and can afford to have them printed on demand and to pay for the exorbitant shipping costs. It's probably not hugely a money thing, but all these claims about paper media being a dying medium because computers does it so much better ignores a lot about costs and opportunity costs. I can walk into a brick-and-mortar store, pick up a book that looks interesting, leaf through the entire thing to get an idea of the production values, and buy it because I kinda wanted to spend some money and I feel bad about going to hobby stores and not buying anything. A visited an RPG store and walked out with a copy of The Masks of Nyarlathothep that I wasn't even planning to buy because they had it in stock, I could get it right then and there, and if I didn't I'd have to wait weeks to get it. And, hey, I needed something to read on the 2-hour bus trip home. moths posted:WoD had three CCGs, a television series, two videogame franchises, and a pro-wrestler. It was pretty big. Jyhad was actually a WotC project running on some sort of license scheme. In a bit of genius from WotC, making a CCG for Vampire for White Wolf meant that White Wolf was locked out from capitalizing on the popularity of their Vampire brand and CCGs.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2015 19:42
|
|
|
Let's not forget that there are huge tonal and thematic differences between different editions of the oWoD that people can get very serious about. Early oVampire is a very different game from late oVampire, with changing focus. Likewise, 2nd ed. oMage and Revised oMage are almost completely different games. So the question is, do you want to play old old Vampire, new old Vampire, old new Vampire, or new new Vampire? Maybe new old Mage, or new new old Mage, or new-callback-to new old Mage, or old new Mage, or wait for new new Mage to come out?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2015 11:57
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah I don't know how much penetration the classic wahd had in Europe, but trying to market it to a more international audience faces the issue with the abuse of foreign language seen in the previous games, as well as the ethnic / regional stereotyping. My impression has been that the oWoD was actually far more popular in Western/Northern Europe than the nWoD. I've met lots of people hugely into the various oWoD games who still run or want to run games, especially oVampire. oVampire is big enough in Norway that the one cult-entertainment franchise we have here bough POD versions of oWoD metaplot books to have on their shelves so they could sell them. There's apparently enough oWerewolf fans in Norway that putting three copies of Apocalypse on one's shelves was a worthwhile endeavour. The store also had some copies of Gehenna and Ascension too - and they're gone now, so someone clearly bought them. Perhaps the huge popularity of the 20th Anniversary editions and oWoD reprints under OPP has convinced Paradox that there's significant money in the oWoD market that that the nWoD wasn't getting? (Or perhaps they're just a bunch of huge nerds who spent money to get the oWoD license so they could make more stuff for the favourite RPG out of love. Maybe not financially sound, but things made for love rather than pure profit warms my heart a little.)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2015 15:37
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:I think the reasons the nWoD isn't as well known are more related to the very different markets. If the Better WoD (it's the new name now) had had the old one's marketing, it would be just as popular if not more. The old one's marketing included things like tapping into subcultures and weltantschanunge that were strongly 90's; I'm not sure it would be possible for the nWoD to have tapped the same market, since said market evaporated after the 1990's. Perhaps if they'd tried harder to pander to noughties late teens and young adults' desire to be part of a special subgroup, but that itself was a very 90's thing that died out a bit.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2015 16:35
|
|
|
I Am Just a Box posted:The original Kickstarter version was tracked back a lot in the revisions, but in a way that rings hollow if you look at what they changed and what they left. That's not necessarily entirely fair, if the revised version is intended to be the final product, to judge it by older drafts, but well, you only get one chance to make a first impression. You can't do anything about a leak, but they felt confident enough in it for a public Kickstarter unveiling. It's also clear that most of these changes were made grudgingly, by someone who sincerely believed in the original draft and ridiculed those who found it objectionable. This is not the case of digging up some ancient draft where the author has had the insight to remove the objectionable material out of a realisation it wasn't actually good. The original public Beast draft has the appearance of being the version its author wanted to release, and the sincere self-rightenousness of Beast colours the interpretation of the revised draft in a way that might not apply as much to other works' revision histories.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2015 09:11
|
|
|
Rohan Kishibe posted:I've always been a bit skeptical of the "the player needs to know they can die at any time or they wont know that poo poo is getting real in my game!" argument. Like, I've got pretty invested in a lot of fiction. Movies, books, TV, whatever and I don't think that the main characters could just drop dead at any minute because I'm not four years old and stories don't work that way, and when they do they loving suck. The unpredictability of character deaths, and the tension that comes with it, is one of or the main attractions to some stories. Killing off a character when it's not expected is often used to raise tension in stories. And, to some people, myself included, some tension is lost when it becomes too obvious that the characters in a piece of fiction are invulnerable because of their protagonist status.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2016 20:24
|
|
|
I don't have hard numbers or anything other than my vague impressions from talking to people and going to cons, but as far as I understand it, Scandinavia + Germany is way, way bigger on being oWoD holdouts than the US. Masquerade and Apocalypse are apparently comparatively big next to the nWoD. Like the Oslo brach of the Norwegian cult entertainment store Outland, which actually got POD copies of oWoD metaplot books when OPP put them up on DriveThruRPG, because apparently they expect that stuff to actually sell? The tail end of nWoD 1e certainly didn't sell well, because the shelves were completely barren. (Of course, I started watching the market during the period where nWoD 1e was at the end of its life, Internet purchases exploded, and the Anniversary editions happened, so it's natural my perspective would be skewed towards observing an older audience buying 20-year-old games.)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2016 22:23
|
|
|
Rohan Kishibe posted:Part of the thing I find with tabletop games is that just because people are playing games doesn't mean they are buying them. In the entire time I've been playing games with my current group of compadres, I can list all the books that anyone who isn't me has bought. One guy bought the 4e Player's handbook, one girl bought the mouse guard box set, and one dude bought Edge of the Empire. That's it. They all either rely on me bringing my stuff or, in the last guy's case, play homebrews of game systems they bought like 20+ books for back in the late 90s. That ain't great for making money. People not buying more than a few books and using those for eternity has been the festering sore of the RPG industry since pretty much its inception. There's basically no money in making the RPGs because they don't sell well. Elricsson's oWOD-focus is probably not as stupid an idea if he wants to capture the European market, but his visions of returning to the glory days of mid-90's White Wolf are completely misguided, because the market that devoured Masquerade doesn't exist anymore, and cannot exist anymore.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2016 00:37
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:I came in towards the tail end of Revised and I'm a die-hard nWoD fan so for my money, yes. I think the idea that the WoD taking itself seriously means the same thing as the WoD being less fun or exciting comes at least in part from a lot of the people who e.g. saw Ascension Revised as a traitorous plot to turn Mage into Vampire. I'll raise you one: people who saw Revised as a conspiracy by White Wolf to ruin the thematic integrity of Ascension in other to run it into the ground so Vampire would be strengthened as a brand.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2016 00:41
|
|
|
Luminous Obscurity posted:Has Europe's gaming community been having the same scale of conversation about racism/sexism that we've been having over here? From personal experience, I've talked with a few Masquerade-fans whose attitude towards the whole thing "oh gods Vampire was so incredibly loving racist it's the single worst thing about the entire game", and a few vampire fans who gave off the attitude of "portraying the Roma vampire-clan as a bunch of begging welfare-queens is just harmless fun!" (because he wrote a con module where the local Ravnos Primogen was a welfare queen who begged for money outside the welfare office).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2016 21:47
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:AFAIK, no oWoD game after Mage was an unqualified success, and White Wolf had seen diminishing returns year after year. At least it made being a collector of oMummy really easy!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2016 11:53
|
|
|
Gilok posted:Was oMummy good? I never hear anyone talk about it. Since I own the entire line of Mummy: the Ressurection (all two books!) I believe I'm well-qualified to speak on this.  It's... dull. A lot of thought and effort was put into making Mummies their own distinct thing in the World of Darkness with their own ties to the other supernaturals and the alike, and it doesn't really matter one bit because there's basically nothing to do. The only real hook Mummies have is that they fight the servants of Set (vampires in general and the Children of Set in particular), and other than that the Mummies just kind of are there. In the great lineup of old World of Darkness games, the Mummies inhabit the role of "...and Mummies were there too." There's some hints at something really interesting there though; Mummies have a Solar-like two-part soul that consists of both an ancient Egyptian and a recently dead person, which could make for some interesting personal roleplay in the vein of Promethean, but in the end nothing is done with it. There's also an appendix of rules for non-Egyptian Mummies, which is slightly more interesting if just for novelty. It allows you to play smoke-dried Incan Fire-Mummies!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2016 16:03
|
|
|
Mendrian posted:It's not really that hard. Just decouple "con man" from "gypsie". I would probably just make them non-racially-specific conmen. A friend of mine made a similar suggestion for the Assamites; non-racially-specific sneaky assassins.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2016 20:23
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:How did WoD get like this? What authors are responsible and why can't they bring back the good ones (evidently Exalted can't find their good artists with both hands but hey). I checked the White Wolf Wikia, and it turns out that while most nWoD 1e core books have a credited Concept & Design team (sometimes three!) and a long list of writers, late-period 1e and 2e titles don't have anyone credited for Concept & Design, and the pool of writers is smaller, if there aren't fewer writers working on a project overall. In addition to a lot of writers no longer doing work for White Wolf/OPP. For example, compare Changeling: the Lost to Mummy: the Cursed: Changeling Concept & Design: Kelley Barnes-Herman, Bill Bridges, Will Hindmarsh, Conrad Hubbard, Aileen E. Miles, Ethan Skemp, Richard Thomas, Mike Todd, Aaron Voss, Zack Walters, Fred Yelk and Jennifer Young Writers: Justin Achilli, Joseph Carriker, Jess Hartley, Wood Ingham, Matthew McFarland, Peter Schaefer, John Snead, Travis Stout, Chuck Wendig, Peter Woodworth Developer: Ethan Skemp Mummy Concept & Design: C.A. Suleiman Writers: David Brookshaw, Michael Goodwin, George Holochwost, Khaldoun Khelil, Ari Marmell, Malcolm Sheppard, Greg Stolze, C.A. Suleiman Developer: C.A. Suleiman New Demon has been generally well received: Demon Concept & Design: none listed Writers: Dave Brookshaw, N. Conte, Susann Hessen, David A Hill Jr, Alec Humphrey, Danielle Lauzon, Michelle Lyons-McFarland, Matthew McFarland, Mark Stone, Travis Stout, Stew Wilson, Eric Zawadzki Developers: Rose Bailey and Matthew McFarland We can also compare VTR 1e to 2e: Vampire 1e Concept & Design: Justin Achilli, Philippe Boulle, Bill Bridges, Dean Burnham, Ken Cliffe, Conrad Hubbard, Mike Lee, Chris McDonough, Ethan Skemp, Richard Thomas, Mike Tinney, Stephan Wieck, Stewart Wieck, Frederick Yelk Concept & Design, stage 2: Justin Achilli, Bill Bridges, Ken Cliffe, Chris McDonough, Mike Tinney, Aaron Voss, Frederick Yelk Concept & Design, stage 3: Justin Achilli, Bill Bridges, Ken Cliffe, Conrad Hubbard, Chris McDonough, Mike Tinney, Aaron Voss, Frederick Yelk Concept & Design, additional: Carl Bowen, John Chambers, Matthew McFarland Writers: Ari Marmell, Dean Shomshak, C. A. Suleiman Developer: Justin Achilli Vampire 2e Concept & Design: none listed Writers: Rose Bailey, David Brookshaw, N. Conte, Joshua Alan Doetsch, Elizabeth Greenberg, Susann Hessen, David A Hill Jr, Alec Humphrey, Wood Ingham, Audrey Whitman, Stew Wilson, Filamena Young Developer: Rose Bailey In short, it seems like a dedicated "concept & design"-process has been entirely dropped from the making of nWoD titles, and there's been a reduction in the number of available writers such that the same names appear a lot. Some people also don't do work for WW/OPP anymore: Bill Bridges, Conrad Hubbard, Justin Achilli, Mike Todd, Will Hindmarsh... Of course, Alan Alexander is also on the list of people who don't write core books for OPP anymore, so not working for OPP is not a sign of quality, but I found it telling that the obvious differences between the nWoD books I like, and the nWoD books I think are badly written poo poo, is the absence of Concept & Design credits, a reduction in team sizes, and the absence of several prolific writers/designers.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2016 16:40
|
|
|
Gerund posted:As the fellow with the most personal experience, would you ever attend or organize a College of Wizardry game- where there was both the proper meta-techniques and the expectation to use them as part of "the game"- in which the professors could isolate a student and demand sexual favors in exchange for better grades? You seem to be railing against something of a strawman here. Like, if someone were to organize a Harry Potter LARP where it was expected that teachers demand sexual favours in exchange for better grades, it would probably be one which has 18 PLUS ADULT SEXUAL THEMES PLEASE ONLY JOIN IF YOU ARE COMFORTABLE WITH SEXUAL SCENES: TRIGGER WARNING POWER RAPE/SEXUAL ASSAULT plastered all over every piece of documentation the LARP has. It would probably come with a preface saying something like "This is the kind of LARP where we want to explore the power dynamics between teachers and students in a boarding school settings, and it will involve teachers demanding sexual favours in exchange for better grades. This is the kind of thing we expect to happen; only join if you are comfortable with this.". Then, since it did include such sexual themes, there'd probably be a fuckton of rules on what is and isn't acceptable in-character/out-of-character behaviour, as well as "safewords" players can shout when they want a LARP coordinator (or anyone nearby) to intervene. Then on top of this, from my experience, there'd be a role coordinator who makes sure that all characters conform to the purpose of the LARP, write roles, and vet write-ins. This person would have the responsibility to make sure that if a player gets handed a character, that player is comfortable with what is expected to happen to the role. Then there'd be coordinators all over the place to make sure that everyone are following the rules. Like, I'm not sure where you get the idea that LARPers with student-roles will suddenly be put into a position where they're blackmailed into sex against the player's will with no out? Everyone would be consenting to the kind of roleplay the LARP is about and have the ability to withdraw consent at any moment. Perhaps someone will be made uncomfortable anyway, but someone stepping over a line could happen in any LARP, no matter how chaste. All these safeguards could fail, but nothing's stopping you from playing the Rapist Teacher in a regular, chaste Harry Potter LARP either... except all those safeguards.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2016 05:13
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:My advice to you is to literally delete every mage-specific sin from the Wisdom chart and make it lost identically to the way that Morality is. I think that this is a good idea for almost all the game lines; committing Morality-sins doesn't stop being bad for you just because you've become a magical creature. Being a mage just means you have so many more fancy ways to commit sins. Being a vampire opens up questions of what blood-drinking, ghouling, and diablerie means in terms of Morality, and are ultimately answered by carefully considering the Morality scale.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2016 11:13
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:Since this (obviously) can cause conflict, the second rule of the beast litany(which is another new thing) is "don't criticize other beast's feeding habits". It's like a perfect metaphor for the geek social fallacies that poison online communities only not ironic.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2016 14:04
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:Brucato's mage insanity is mostly confined to the side bars, and the in-character descriptions, the ST advice, the setting description, the entire Nephandi chapter...
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2016 15:47
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Well, it should be noted that Brucato is on record that he deliberately changed things from real-world magical traditions to prevent players from accidentally doing real magic. Not changed. Left out the details.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2016 15:32
|
|
|
Terrorforge posted:We know that vitae is not literally blood. The vampiric body converts and condenses blood in this weird, mystical power source. Which begs the question: where does it go? According to a popular fan theory (and V20: The Black Hand, which is surprisingly not-bad), Vitae (in the old World of Darkness) is a kind of Quintessense that becomes part of the vampire's pattern when consumed.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2016 21:30
|
|
|
Attorney at Funk posted:It's understandable given how wonky and uneven the seven cardinal virtue/seven deadly sin framework was in 1e. Fixing bad mechanics is one of the most straightforward and satisfying ways to make your mark on a game. But like... we get to write our own Virtues and Vices now. My group started doing that years ago, and once we did I really appreciated the mechanic as a touchstone for drawings comparisons between the motivations of two characters - even ones whose life and subjectivity are (often literally) worlds apart. OPP completely dropped the Seven Deadly Sins/Seven Heavenly Virtues from the Virtue/Vice mechanic with 2e corebook though, so the most common objection to V/V is gone. What Vampire 2e did was replace Virtue/Vice with
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2016 21:37
|
|
|
Loomer posted:You know, if the new Planet Nine turns out to be real, it'd make a badass centerpiece for a M20 supplement. Each of the planets (also Pluto) has a shard realm for one of the Ten Spheres, so Planet Nine (Ten, with Pluto) should have its associated shard realm. Cue the mad scrabble to reach it first by literally everyone. Then you'd have to answer difficult questions like "Why doesn't Eris have a Shard Realm", "Why doesn't Ceres have a Shard Realm", "Why doesn't Makemake have a Shard Realm". "Why doesn't Quaoar have a Shard Realm" and things like "What happened after 1801 when the first dwarf planets and asteroids were discovered, quickly reaching numbers far greater than 10?", and "What happened between 1845 and 1930 when the number of planets was decreased towards eight?"
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2016 18:12
|
|
|
Well, I guess it's true that if someone wanted to really hurt me or upset me, they'd use the name my parents gave me, but that's an aspect of reality I'd honestly prefer not to think about in my make-believe games...
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2016 14:58
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Am I complete idiot or is intentionally taking a dramatic failure on some of the Demon embeds and exploits a really good idea? Having not actually read the power in question, it may be an attempt at emulating the oDemon Torment-system where you could always, voluntarily, use the 'Evil' version of your power. Though in oDemon you didn't get XP, you just became more damned every time you did it.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2016 23:56
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:Literally studied statistics for a bit in college and I can generally figure this out pretty easily if and only if I'm figuring how many successes on average I get, NOT what my chances are of getting at least one success. To get your odds of just one success: you've got a 3/10 chance of success, go for the inverse like blastron said. You got a 7/10 chance to fail (.7^x) so the probability of getting at least one success is 1-.7^x. I never memorized my times tables, and I'm loving terrible at multiplying sevens, so that would absolutely require a calculator to figure out if I'm rolling more then, like, two dice. To calculate with the 7's, it's 1-.6^x, and guess what, I ain't that much better at exponentially multiplying sixes. So no, can't do that one in my head. A fun trick I realized is that if the TN is 7, 0.7^2 is 0.49 ~= 0.5, which means probabilities for even numbers of dice, having the progression 0.5, 0.75, 0.875, 0.9375 for 2, 4, 6, 8 dice - or even simpler, the probability of failure is a half, a fourth, an eigth, one sixteenth... (0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, ...)
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2016 09:34
|
|
|
MalcolmSheppard posted:There's a lot of folk recollection at work. Leaving aside the fact that 1s don't subtract successes anymore (and didn't from Revised onward), the basic system has always been that difficulty was a measure of . . . difficulty. Successes were degrees of success. CWoD games generally avoided modifying the dice pool itself, though with such a huge volume of material you'll see exceptions. The one major exception was multiple actions, where splitting the pool promoted ease of play in the face of rolls that might already have difficulty modifiers. I freely admit there are some exceptions I don't care for, such as Mage: The Ascension's use of successes to act as Effect benchmarks, driven by a variable difficulty pool, but the split between ease and output was baked in. "Whenever one of the dice comes up as a "1", it cancels out a success. Completely. Take the dice showing "1" and one of the dice showing a successful number and set them aside. In this manner, an otherwise successful action may be reduced to failure." Vampire: the Masquerade, (Revised Edition) p. 192. Sure, difficulty was a measure of difficulty. And successes were degrees of success, with 1 success being a "marginal success" that in some cases was basically a failure so you really needed 2 or 3 successes.. And 1 success being enough to succeed isn't even given; on page 191 it says "You need only one success to perform most actions successfully, but that's considered a marginal success." (Emphasis mine.) Besides, the interactions of dice-pool and difficulty are always the hardest when you're given a choice to alter one or the other, because that's when you want to determine which is best. For example, if you through some means can split your action to reduce the difficulty on the roll you want to make, is splitting the action actually worth it, or will you end up loving yourself over to no advantage? With Vampires it's even easier to run into this issue because they can spend Blood Points to increase their physical pools, which means you have to evaluate the value of that too. Or, for basically any CWoD game, say you can imagine two possible ways to solve a problem, and one is X+Y dice against difficulty Z and you need to score 1 success but the other approach is W+V dice against difficulty U, but then you need 3 successes to accomplish what you really want but the difficulty of the first action would be reduced if you could turn on your flashlight so you consider splitting your action to make a light but you could also use this multiple action power to not get the dice penalty but you're not sure if simply using your dice-adding power would be cheaper in the long run and... (Also, you have no idea what you're talking about because I have also read Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition, and it is full on Difficulty and Threshold Successes being just two ways to describe difficulty while 1's subtract successes and very liberal use of minimum Threshold Successes. That's not just for spell effects either; completely regular actions are X+Y dice against difficulty Z for more than W successes to actually succeed.)
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2016 13:22
|
|
|
I'm not totally against two or even three-variable dice systems (oWoD is 3-variable, with pool, difficulty, and threshold; Exalted 1/2 is mostly 2-variable, with pool and difficulty, and nWoD is with the exception of Structure a 1-variable system with only pool changing.), but they create both an increase in mathematical overhead and have a proclivity towards combinatorial nightmares when you can alter several different variables at once, often without really adding anything of substance that simply modifying a single variable would do. However, their use requires very careful application in order to keep the mathematical overhead small and avoid combinatorial problems, and White Wolf has not shown itself capable of that kind of restraint except in the nWoD. When White Wolf's successors then decide it's time to go back to variable TNs in a WoD game, it makes a lot of people anxious for understandable reasons. From what I've heard nMummy isn't particularly egregious in this regard since their TN-altering powers are limited in scope, so you don't get any of the oMage-like effects where there's a million different ways to adjust TNs up and down when casting a spell. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 22:50 on May 26, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 26, 2016 22:39
|
|
|
MalcolmSheppard posted:Not really. d10s are inherently decimals. The tricky thing is x agains/exploding dice. Before you add that feature you can simply multiply the number of successful die faces by 10 for a basic per-die probability, or treat each face as a 0.1 success for rough averaging purposes. I can do this trivially, but lots of other people in this thread have noted that it's something they're not capable or interested in doing during a game. Like, I play Phoenix Command; I have a certain tolerance for multiplying numbers a lot because you can't swing a knife around in that game without multiplying a 1d3 roll by three different decimal factors, but I also recognize that for a lot of people, decimal multiplication is not really their thing. I don't think you can really just, as someone in the game design business, talk about how easy all the math is when you're, presumably, trying to make games marketed to the very people complaining about how hard the math is.
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2016 22:50
|
|
|
MalcolmSheppard posted:Deep thinking definitely is required to figure out the *exact* probabilities of a dice pool. For winging it, which is what this argument was about in the first place (remember the comment this whole line of discussion builds off?) it isn't really that hard. The supposition was that figuring out 6 dice/TN8 vs 5 dice/TN 7 was a difficult problem -- but it isn't a difficult problem. The difficult problem is figuring out that matrix. I explicitly agreed with that. What folks seem to be talking around is that this has nothing to do with a floating target number, and everything to do with dice pools as a thing. The thing that makes figuring exact per die probabilities? Again, not floating TNs, but dice tricks like 10 agains. Look, how many times do you need to be told that for a lot of people doing that multiplication is more effort than they think is reasonable for their RPG sessions? Not everyone finds recalling the results of the multiplications table easy, and from the reactions in this thread, certainly not enjoyable. It might not be a huge issue if a game is designed such that the need to do multiplication is minimal, but the context of this entire discussion is "why do people hate variable TNs", to which "figuring out how likely something is and/or what the expected number of successes are on any given roll requires exponentiation and multiplication respectively, which many people find detrimental to their playing experience" appears to be the answer. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 08:42 on May 27, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 27, 2016 08:39
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:A number of Exalted players I've known don't realize their odds of a single success given a certain number multiple dice are close to 50% because of the weighting at 10. No, see, that's the funny thing. The expected number of successes per dice is 1 because of the weighting of the 10. But when you want only one or more successes, the probability of success is 40%, since getting 2 successes on a 10 isn't worth any more than 1 success. However, once the Difficulty becomes 2 or more, the weighting of the 10 starts giving benefits.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2016 08:53
|
|
|
dr_ether posted:Well exactly. And knowing you can get at least one success with a dicepool is pretty much the most standard thing you need to know. When the TN is fixed, it is immediately obvious that having more dice is better. But if TNs change along with dicepools and you have to make a meaningful choice about an action or how to spend xp, should I expect players to be dealing with working out if 1-0.6**5 is better than 1-0.7**6. Even if you memorize the probabilities by rote, it's far easier to learn by rote the probability of success for any given dice pool for one static TN than it is to learn the same for a number of TNs. This is particularly relevant when you have dice-adding powers (like Vampires, who can spend Vitae for increased Attributes), because of the diminishing returns; having done through all the work of figuring out when it becomes a waste of Blood Points to add a dice to my Dexterity at TN 7, the results will not apply to TN 8.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2016 13:17
|
|
|
citybeatnik posted:So, imagine a large block of text here that ends with "who the gently caress thought that making the equivalent of racial purity in to a game mechanic was a good idea to start with". Look, this is the game that has rules for raping corpses. What did you expect?
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2016 22:12
|
|
|
Roland Jones posted:So, gently caress Onyx Path. If Matt is the kind of person they want representing them and they don't care that he spews that kind of bullshit because he couldn't handle people telling him his game was bad, then I'm not giving them a penny. While firing Matt, releasing a public statement showing they knew what was wrong with Beast and they were actually sorry for all the bullshit it and Matt had caused, and making a rework of it that actually addressed any of the issues the game had would have been ideal, at least they could have done something saying hey, maybe comparing your customers to loving hate groups isn't appropriate and our project lead who is representing us shouldn't do that poo poo. I think firing McFarland over Beast would be pretty harsh, it would be nice with something like a public statement recognizing that the game handled the topic of abuse poorly and in a hurtful manner and that OPP does in fact not silently back comparing all detractors to real-life hate groups. A public apology for the same might also work!
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2016 11:32
|
|
|
Loomer posted:Let's not forget the rapey-vibe of some of the powers. "Vibe", yes... Like how each type of werewolf (human-born, wolf-born, and werewolf-born) have their own thing they do when frenzying from Rage. Eating bodies, mutilating bodies, and loving bodies., respectively. Bodies don't have to be dead. Not that only loving dead people would make it any better, really...
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2016 16:27
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:The MES just issued an absolute ban on rape and sexual assault from MES-sanctioned rp and character backgrounds. I'm glad to hear it but deeply unhappy that something happened to occasion it. I'm generally all for this, but part of me wants to say that banning it from backgrounds is unnecessarily restrictive.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2016 19:31
|
|
|
Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I don't really know how you extensively rework something whose core conceit is so fundamentally bad (our vampires are special and magical because they're Of the East right in the title). Maybe just quietly rename and republish VtM20 rules? It's been a constant observation that the Kuei-Jin are a lot like Risen, so somewhat more agnostic take on the setting might simply make them into corpses reanimated by ghosts that had been sent to hell, with magical powers based on balancing passion with control and keeping your evil self in check. (You could in fact flavour it wholly in western philosophy; the five paths are Id, Superego, Ego/Man, Animal, and Übermensch.) But I believe almost the entire appeal of KOTE is the pop-cultural tourism of East/South-East Asia, so I suspect they'll just open up playing Kuei-Jin to non-Asians and mumble something about magical influences concentrated in Asia that cause Kuei-Jin to arise from dead corpses more in East/South-East Asia than anywhere else in the world.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2016 19:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 11:05 |
|
|
Basic Chunnel posted:I'm thinking of undertaking some light homebrew action to run a Fallout game thru the ST system (nWoD core, I'm thinking). The only things in need of significant tweaking are the skills on offer - what are the thread's thoughts on what should be swapped out and what might serve to replace on the sheet? Eg, there wouldn't be any need for an occult skill. One of the ST system's strengths is that it's a very generic system, and every skill except Occult is pretty much analogous to one or more skills in Fallout. In fact, no skills really come to mind as missing and there are more skills in the ST system than in the J.E. Sawyer Fallout RPG. You might at best be able to split up some of the broader ST skills into narrower ones, like separating Traps/Explosives from Weaponry. However I think it might be thematically appropriate to replace Occult with a combination of "Pre-War Knowledge" and "Wasteland Lore"; the skill of know about all the weird poo poo that goes around, like rumoured mutant creatures, hidden pre-war bunkers, and the alike.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2016 10:05
|
|