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Dammit Who? posted:Yes! Yes!!! You're welcome. EDIT: I came this close to including a Nightmare called That Song You Like is From Twenty Years Ago. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Apr 14, 2015 |
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Apr 14, 2015 14:16
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Mors Rattus posted:Did you do You Are Meat? 'cause that one is a bit of a problem. (Pretty much all the rest are great, though!) I did all the Nightmares, yeah. Glad you liked (most of) them, and glad to see people pick up on the idea that most of them can be used as buffs, provided you're cool with the Darth Vader school of employee motivation. As for You Are Meat, can you elaborate on what you see as a problem? It's beefy, yeah, but I'm curious if there's something blindingly obvious I missed or if something in the Nightmare isn't as clear as it should be. I haven't seen anyone use that particular Nightmare in playtest yet.
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Apr 14, 2015 14:55
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Mors Rattus posted:You Are Meat removes souls; okay, that's fine. That's not how soul loss works in nWoD 2E, though. There's nothing inherently fatal about any of the Soul Loss conditions, the worst you get is the Thrall condition, which prohibits you from spending Willpower, using Defense, or spending Experiences (which probably doesn't matter unless you're in a PvP scenario), and you suffer the Broken condition. That's harsh, but it's not a death sentence--and don't forget it can take days or even weeks to progress to that level, depending on how fast the target burns through Willpower. It's a long-play power that's way better for creating havoc and leeching your target's mental reserves; if all you want to do is make someone loving die, there are way more efficient means to do it. Even then, the permanent version has an out in the form of a crazy vision-quest to recover their sense of self. Sure, your victim might need to find a Beast, or maybe a mage or a changeling, to start the journey, but that's a great story hook IMHO. It explicitly works the same way on everything to avoid crossover arguments; mechanically, every target follows the Soulless > Enervated > Thrall track, so there's no "well, but my soul isn't really a soul, so this doesn't work on me" wiggle room or questions of "what happens if I use this Nightmare on [splat from a game line three years down the road that didn't exist yet when the power was written]?" Future-proofing, if you will. The missing Resistance Trait is legit my bad, though. Should definitely be Int + Satiety - Resolve.
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Apr 14, 2015 15:32
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Luminous Obscurity posted:If the pre-Fall Demon doesn't have a cover for whatever reason, they better hurry up and get one, cause that's a bad day for them. Yeah, technically any angel can fall, even those with no cover or a weird cover like a black dog or a cursed split-level rambler, but for playability purposes, PC demons are all assumed to have been placed by the God-Machine with a reasonably robust, human cover. Attorney at Funk posted:It's important to remember that angels have covers too, in this sense. Right. Angels don't track Cover as a game mechanic because a) they can't act outside the identities the God-Machine gives them and b) even if they could, they have the G-M's Infrastructure constantly supporting it and compensating for any glitches, but the same fundamental structures that allow an angel to manifest in the guise of Professor Cuddingsworth, the weird physics instructor, are what let a demon maintain a human identity. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 00:48
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Gerund posted:
Ugallu are about the fear of exposure, both in the sense you describe and in the sense of being stranded in a vast, open place with no shelter or means of survival. Knowledge, observation, and spying are often metaphorically associated with height, towers, and being "above" (hell, that's what the word "surveillance" literally means), and wide open deserts with no place to get underground or inside are natural hunting grounds for giant, winged things. The whole "winged monstrosity" theme also ties into nightmares of plummeting from a tremendous height, which absolutely is a fundamental nightmare built into the human brain. The conceptual link seems pretty clear and interesting to me. Admittedly maybe calling them "Nightmares of Exposure" would get that across better in a slugline than "Nightmares of the Skies," but there's a little more to them than "and also birds, I guess."
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Apr 15, 2015 16:50
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neaden posted:Lucious Soulban is still the greatest WoD author name of all time. It's Lucien, but you're still correct. 
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Apr 18, 2015 00:10
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Close. Every line in the NWOD besides the big three were set to be limited runs. Changeling just did so well that they gave it another run of books. Also, WW started to fall apart while Geist was in dev so it wound up with a chapter in a bluebook. That's the real strength of the digital/POD model Onyx Path follows, yeah: lines can get as many books as they need/as many as developers have cool ideas for, and since they're not competing for shelf space in stores and the whole collection is always available from DTRPG and the like you get less of that "well, Werewolf hasn't had a book out in six months, it's obviously dead and never coming back!" sentiment that you saw back in the supplement treadmill days. It also means nobody's going "uhhh, poo poo, we need a new Vampire book for October... umm... gently caress, I dunno, let's do a book about vampire gerbils."
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Apr 18, 2015 20:58
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Mors Rattus posted:The Ancient pair was a great set of books, at least, and Night Horrors was generally middling to good. Bloodlines...gave us the Players? I was fond of the Melissidae, but I'm always a sucker for OH GOD BEES. (My very first WoD writing ever was in a Bloodlines book. It was not anything cool.)
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Apr 18, 2015 23:54
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Flavivirus posted:The amount of free rein you apparently have to interpret tyranny, destruction etc makes me think of something like Nobilis - you can do good things, bad things or weird things, so long as they're destructive/tyrannical/whatever things. Makes me quite a bit more interested, as it's a far cry from the 'you have an urge to do horrible things' the preview material sent out. I mentioned this to a few of the other members of the Beast team a few days ago, but now that the Families and the Hungers have been previewed I can say it more publicly: You could absolutely run the TV show Leverage as a game of Beast. You've got Nate Ford as an Anakim Nemesis, Sophie Devereaux as an Eshmaki Predator (she doesn't eat people, but she earns their trust and their love and uses that to take everything from them), Parker as an Ugallu Collector, and Elliott Spencer as a Namtaru Ravager who really doesn't like indulging his Hunger. Hardison is a little harder to pin down--maybe an Eshmaki Tyrant, since he's the ghost in your systems that casually smashes through even your most secure digital protections and shows you just how pitiful they are. Or maybe he's an Ugallu, if you want to go more in the "all your digital secrets are mine" direction. That scene at the end of every episode where they let the mark see them all together and realize just who it was that took him down so thoroughly is the whole brood getting a Satiety hit off of the Hunger for Power. So yeah. Creatures of nightmare and terror they may be, but it doesn't have to be unrelieved people-eating and traumatizing small children. This preview doesn't even include my favorite sample concept from the Hunger for Punishment. Flavivirus posted:Hopefully they similarly widen the Raptors. I think you'll be happy when the final text hits.
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Apr 20, 2015 17:45
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Luminous Obscurity posted:We've finally found NWOD Batman. Why do you think criminals swear up and down that he's some kind of inhuman monster instead of obviously a dude in a bat costume? It's because some of them get dragged into his Lair, and they see Bruce Wayne's Soul.
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Apr 20, 2015 18:27
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Twibbit posted:Does that make Joker a "Hero?" Nah, I don't think so. He's obsessed with Batman, sure, but he doesn't want to slay the Bat, he wants to make the Bat like him. He might be another Beast, a Namtaru Ravager, maybe, one who really enjoys sating his hungers in the most harmful ways possible. If any of Batman's rogue's gallery is a "Hero," I'd say maybe it's Bane, with his whole "break the Bat" obsession. But I'm honestly not that up on Batman comics, so maybe I'm totally off base.
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Apr 20, 2015 19:00
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Crion posted:Yeah, they're not bad, they're just kinda redundant. It's not impossible to imagine a world where TF:V, Barrett Commission, VASCU and Division Six all exist, but it is tough to imagine them all being distinct, independent of, and presumably secret from each other. You seem to have a great deal more faith in the efficiency of the US government/military than I do. (Serious answer is that much like bloodlines/lodges/Legacies you're not necessarily meant to assume that every single compact/conspiracy actually exists in your version of the WoD. If your game doesn't benefit from the federal government being riddled with various and contradictory groups of secret monster hunters, then those groups don't all co-exist.)
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Apr 21, 2015 23:18
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Tulul posted:Division Six are weird and I've never been sure how to use them in the game. The idea of a completely fake MIB organization is cool in theory, but the book kind of adopts a sneering "look at these idiots" tone to it that makes it hard to imagine putting the players in them. I'm not really seeing this tone, unless you're talking about the character art for them, which, yeah, not super flattering and not what I would have gone with. The actual text presents them as competent agents who just happen to be, through a series of cutouts and compromised agents, to be taking orders from the people they're supposed to be fighting against. I don't think that makes them idiots, it makes them prime candidates for a game inspired by Three Days of the Condor or any of the Bourne movies.
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Apr 21, 2015 23:45
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Boogaleeboo posted:Poor Division Six is such a knock off TFV. TFV is a secret government group taking orders from vampires. Division Six is....a secret government group taking orders from Mages. In fairness, Division 6 predates that particular twist on TFV by two years. The "it's vampires" sidebar appeared in Compacts & Conspiracies, a long time after Witchfinders.
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Apr 22, 2015 00:04
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Flavivirus posted:I heard you guys like blogs about Beasts. Guess the line! Since the Dramatic Failure, Failure, and regular Success results of Nightmares are the same for every one, there's a single "Invoking a Nightmare" action at the beginning of the section rather than reprinting a whole lot of "The Nightmare fails to take effect" and "The Nightmare takes effect, see below" for every single Nightmare. Probably allowed me to squeeze three or four more powers in than I would have been able to otherwise. As far as All Your Teeth Are Falling Out, the High Satiety effect is pretty nasty in a fistfight, yeah, but it doesn't do anything to weapon damage ratings, so it's not exactly insurmountable. Satiety Expenditure can be pretty nasty if you go into a one-on-one fight full and you're willing to come out starving, for sure, but you're also facing diminishing returns with each activation.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:21
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Ferrinus posted:That's the one where your natural weaponry goes to poo poo, right? Sorry, but whispering "you should've been spending XP on weaponry and carrying a chainsaw around" into a Gangrel or werewolf's ear doesn't really justify something like that. Hey, guys, archetypical monster and monster-enabler here, kin to all the creatures that haunt the dark! Yeah I can make a werewolf's claws and fangs stop working. It just seems appropriate, you know? All Your Teeth Are Falling Out reduces your rolled successes to 1 (or 2 on an exceptional success). Weapon ratings apply damage on top of your rolled successes. So if you've got 2L weapons, whether that's your claws or fangs or a knife or whatever, that damage still applies--a normal success would inflict 3 lethal damage in our example, while an exceptional one would inflict 4. Unless you've got a crazy high dice pool odds are you're effectively losing 2-3 damage per hit. If you're a straight-up brawler dude getting into a fight with a Beast and you have no natural weapons at all, yeah, it will ruin your day, but honestly, if you're a mundane brawler-type dude getting into a scrap with just about any supernatural critter it's going to ruin your day. Also, Satiety cost in Beast != Mana cost in other WoD games.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:29
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Nope, V20's still oWoD rules top-to-bottom, just with stuff cleaned up and made consistent between all the various versions of disciplines/bloodlines/etc. floating around in splatbooks. BUT the rules are completely self-contained so you could just, run a V20 game straight-up out of the book instead of doing anything with the nWoD/VtR/ Blood and Smoke stuff. You could also pick up the Vampire Translation Guide on DTRPG if you want a reference for converting oWoD concepts to nWoD rules. It's pre-second edition though, so it might not sync up 100% any more.
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May 10, 2015 00:14
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MonsieurChoc posted:The worst part is there's so many more cool stuff they could do with the core nWoD books, but it seems OPP decided to really focus on the various Supernatural gamelines. Were they simply not selling enough? I thought books like Second Sight Antagonists were hard to find because they sold out super early. Not wanting to speak for Rich or Rose, but I expect what you're seeing is just the result of a focus on rolling out the second edition lines rather than abandoning the blue books altogether. After all, Hurt Locker is still coming, as is the second edition World of Darkness core rulebook.
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May 22, 2015 15:41
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Mors Rattus posted:Hurt Locker is blue-book and is in previews. So is Dark Eras. There's also, ya know, the God-Machine Chronicle. EDIT: And I'm pretty sure a bunch of blue-book SASs have also trickled out over the last couple of years, but I could be wrong.
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May 22, 2015 16:17
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MonsieurChoc posted:Hurt Locker is blue-book, and I'll probably get it when it's out, but I'm not sure if God-Machine counts considering it's a second edition: it's not really a supplement, is it? Likewise with Dark Eras: I love it and it looks great, but I'm not sure it counts as a core WoD supplement when it's actually a bunch of historical settings for different lines. SAS are just adventures, not supplements. Fair enough, but I'd still count GMC as a blue-book supplement--most of the book is the chronicle guide itself, after all, with an Appendix devoted to the rules update. There was also Glimpses of the Unknown in 2011. But really, if you're discounting SAS products, blue book WoD isn't that far behind any of the other lines in terms of products released in the last five years--part of the switch to PDF/PoD publishing meant that supplement churn was no longer necessary to maintain shelf space, so the overall number of products released has dropped. Consider: Requiem had three non-SAS products released since 2010 (Strange, Dead Love; Blood Sorcery, and 2nd Edition). Forsaken had three as well (Chronicler's Guide, Translation Guide, 2nd Ed) Mage had the most with four (Mage Noir, Imperial Mysteries, Left-Hand Path, and the Translation Guide), and that's mostly because Dave and Malcolm aggressively pitched stuff for the line. Mummy and Demon, being new lines, have gotten a bit more support obviously, but still. I wouldn't write off the blue book line, or assume Onyx Path is doing so, just yet.
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May 22, 2015 17:04
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Loomer posted:And the conceit that the Mafia's 'romantic' heyday never ended. So basically it's about a mafia that never actually existed, treating it like it did, and then filling it with bad stereotypes and poorly written Mario Puzo riffs. IMHO the way to do an nWoD organized crime book would be more of a build-your-own toolbox than a gazetteer of crime syndicates. Like, "this is the kind of organization and structure you can expect an international smuggling cartel to have, that's what a local protection racket looks like, and here are some ways they might interact with the supernatural" rather than "Don Luigi Lucabrazzi is a 9th-generation Toreador with a fluffy white cat ghoul." On an unrelated note I just finished watching Person of Interest Season 4 and holy hell do I want to play Demon: The Descent now.
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May 24, 2015 16:48
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Kellsterik posted:Yeah, for better or for worse I think that's a feature not a bug. I think maybe Demons can detect Aether being spent? Demons can detect Aether in general, not just being spent, so they can get a sense of another demon just walking around with a pocketful of the stuff. Of course, angels also "leak" Aether, and a demon's senses can't tell the difference beyond "there is Aether here," so, ya know... be careful. EDIT: My bad, I forgot that demons under Cover only register to Aetheric Resonance when they spend Aether. The rest still applies, though. As for how demons meet/learn about each other, Mors and Kellsterik are right. Mostly it's a matter of cautious paranoia and the occasional calculated risk of contact. Don't forget also that a Fall is, metaphysically speaking, a freaking huge deal and so most demons are found shortly after their Fall (the intro fiction is a good example of this). The lucky ones are found by other Unchained before they're found by loyalists. In other words, most demons who last longer than a few days probably end up getting at least a general introduction to the local Unchained "scene," probably including recognition codes and countersigns, dead drops, etc. And yes, that's all a very definite feature. We spent a lot of time during development making sure demons don't have abilities that undercut that sense of paranoia and mistrust.
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May 29, 2015 04:15
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tatankatonk posted:"A few key NPCs" would have to be over half of all regularly interacted with NPCs because ~the mysterious possibly untrustworthy NPC~ is best used as a singular exception, so why is your advice applicable for people actually playing the game Maybe because a ton of good spy stories come out of characters having to work with people they can never be entirely sure they can trust? Like, that's basically a foundation of the genre. "You can never really trust anyone, be careful and always have a contingency" is not the same as "OH GOD EVERYONE'S A SECRET TRAITOR TURTLE TURTLE KILL EVERYONE BEFORE THEY BETRAY YOU." EDIT IN RESPONSE TO YOUR EDIT: I think I get where you're coming from, but there's a difference between "you know, that Mr. Wrench guy is a shifty rear end in a top hat and I don't trust him" and "even this demon who's helped us out repeatedly might just be in it for the long con, I should keep my options open." The former, yeah, you don't want too many of (it's the Shadowrun problem, right? If every Mr. Johnson double crosses the runners, why are there even runners?), but the latter should definitely be omnipresent. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 04:43 on May 29, 2015 |
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May 29, 2015 04:39
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Gerund posted:The minute a LARP introduces a "can't trust anyone" body-snatcher plot, that game either goes to poo poo immediately or the social contract is established to never do it again. LARPs are a pretty different beast, though, and not the primary intent behind Demon's design.
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May 29, 2015 04:45
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tatankatonk posted:No, I get the appeal of the theme, but I don't think it can actually be explored concretely except at maybe the climax of a game. Paranoia can be emergent and organic when PCs confront the information deficit they have naturally, but its actual material consequences can't repeat themselves. "I should keep my options open" for a Demon means, in the case of betrayal, actual flight from the city or having to fight an angel, whereas for a vampire or mage it would mean summoning allies. You can keep the atmosphere of paranoia, but you can't keep its mechanics, because the powers used in response to it are so powerful and drastic in the context of the setting. Those are definitely campaign-climax appropriate betrayals (or at least campaign turning-point ones), but there's a whole range of stuff that can happen with betrayal that's somewhat less extreme than "Zathriel, Angel of the Ninth Aeon, comes for you with a sword of fire." Even in the most extreme case of "your buddy is replaced by a loyalist angel," it might not want to blow its cover yet, so it acts indirectly, sowing mistrust and factionalism among the city's various Rings. Demons can screw each other over for more immediate material gain--pacts, suborned Infrastructure, Gadgets, or just plain old mortal infrastructure. You're absolutely right that you probably can't have more than one big setpiece double-cross in a campaign, but I would disagree that that means you can't explore the theme concretely. Hell, a lot of times exploring themes of paranoia and mistrust is more poignant if nobody's actually a traitor, but nagging suspicion and doubt tears at relationships and wrecks the whole thing.
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May 29, 2015 05:00
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Doodmons posted:Surely the existence of the Resonance Sensitive Merit destroys that entire theme? Wits 4 is a fairly hefty requirement but certainly not out of reach of anyone wanting to get it. You can identify Demons on sight and do all the Aether Resonancing you want without pinging it yourself. Destroys? Not even a little. All it does is change the game a little bit. Just because you know for sure the person you're talking to is a demon doesn't mean you know for sure it's the same demon that approached you last week, or that said demon isn't an Integrator that's been promised a safe return to the Machine if he turns you in, or, hell, just a ruthless bastard who's totally willing to burn your cover to the ground if it advances his Agenda. The only thing that Merit eliminates as a concern is "is this walking pile of Aether actually a demon?" Also, remember two things: 1) Demons can still spoof this Merit with their Cover, and 2) Stealth technology, just like weapon technology, is always an arms race. If enough demons start using Resonance Sensitive to spot undercover angels, you can bet the God-Machine is going to start some projects to develop a Numen that makes angels ping as demons to Resonance Sensitives. If that doesn't work, it will change tactics and adapt. Or, to put it another way: Kyle Reese posted:The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human... sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait till he moved on you before I could zero him.
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May 29, 2015 18:14
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Ferrinus posted:Special angels arriving which detect as demons to the demon-detecting merit you bought would be some bullshit, though. That's not what I said, though. I said the G-M would start developing projects to foil the detection. In other words, introduce a plot hook that the PCs can investigate, infiltrate, and stop before it happens.
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May 29, 2015 19:37
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Beast, like 1st Edition Mage: The Awakening, is a game I think will improve tremendously with supplements.
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Jun 2, 2015 21:58
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Gerund posted:....so why ask for money to deliver the corebook in its current state, rather than release these supplements with a barebones starter system attached? Way above my pay grade. I'm just stating my opinion as a fan and player, I'm not going to comment or speculate on development decisions. I, personally, would like more structure and mechanical hooks to Beast. That's just me and the way I like to play and design games.
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Jun 2, 2015 22:11
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Xelkelvos posted:So is this shaping up to be better or worse than Geist in terms of wasted potential? IMO the mechanics of Beast are better than those of 1E Geist, for what that's worth.
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Jun 2, 2015 23:19
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paradoxGentleman posted:What exactly are they refering to, here? What attractive features were in Scion apart from "you get to be a demigod and kill monsters"? Pretty sure that means "you're still rolling a number of d10s determined by how many dots you have in traits, then counting how many dice come up > X."
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Jun 3, 2015 20:40
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Gerund posted:You should create a better system to make dramatic failures happen more often than tying their rate of occurrence to the number of dice you are rolling, because your current method makes the fear of a increasing the chances of a dramatic failure completely orthogonal to the inherent appeal of more dice being equivalent to a larger success. Or use the nWoD 2e rule and let players choose to turn one failure per scene into a dramatic failure for sweet, sweet XP.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:24
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RPZip posted:Does that still contradict every possible game mechanic for satiety? Can they really get away with only feeding once every few years? It says he only lets it feed with abandon every few years. Presumably in the interim he stays lean and hungry and only gives the Horror little meals just to stay above starvation, but every few years the hunger gets to be too much and he gorges. EDIT: Mors Rattus posted:No solid mechanics in the new draft yet, but it might work if they jumped up to Satiety 10, since last draft that basically un-Beasted you for a good, long time. Or this, yeah. I'll mention to Matt that it might be worth putting a second axis on the "Satiety loss over time" chart so a more sated Beast needs to feed less often than one who's straight-up starving.
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Jun 22, 2015 22:11
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unseenlibrarian posted:Call it whatever big city you like but base all landmarks and locations from google maps searches of Vancouver. This is the Katanas & Trenchcoats way. It is a good way.
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Jul 10, 2015 19:25
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Mysterium preview is up.
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Jul 17, 2015 15:57
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Flavivirus posted:I'm not a huge fan of the Egregore merit - maybe I haven't fully grokked the new spellcasting rules but it seems pretty underpowered, especially compared to the Arrow's one which is simple, potent and thematic. I mean, the old Mystery Initiation wasn't great, but the initiations themselves were so great and flavourful it didn't need to be. If anything it seems nerfed from what it was before - for one thing the second dot no longer helps you plant and decode secret mysterium messages. The Egregore Merit does lean pretty heavily on some of the new spellcasting mechanics that maybe aren't readily apparent from previews, and also on the Order's theme as "the academia order." It's maybe not as immediately flashy or readily-obvious in its uses in a vacuum as Adamant Hand, but when you leverage it in concert with the Mysterium's other, generally pretty strong, support systems for members, it can be pretty effective. Like, that first dot doesn't look super impressive until you realize that probably pretty close to every low-ranked Mysterium mage in the Caucus probably has it, which means you can walk into just about any Athenaem and grab five apprentices to help out on a spell without worrying about anybody having to roll chance dice because they don't have the right Arcana or whatever. That's a pretty easy +5 bonus to a spell, one that's not a Yantra and so sidesteps all the restrictions on those.
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Jul 17, 2015 16:24
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Prison Warden posted:So we had our little character creation/game setup pow-wow thing for Mage yesterday. The character concepts that got brought up were a Mastigos Guardian of the Veil private detective who knows krav maga, a Obrimos scientist who upon Awakening got filled with Divine Purpose and became a war-wizard and a literal ninja Mastigos Silver Ladder, so I didn't really need to ask whether they wanted a more action focused game or something a bit more cerebral or complentative. I'm running chargen for my Mage game next week, and I can only pray I get concepts as awesome as these.
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Aug 10, 2015 21:34
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Pope Guilty posted:If you're looking to get into NWoD I think I would start with the God Machine Chronicle rules simply because that's what all the books will be supporting going forward. Though I guess you'd still want to read the old rules to use the old books? Yeah, until the nWoD 2nd Edition core book comes out, you kind of need the original nWoD core and the GMC update (which you can get as a free pdf here), because GMC only includes the rules that have changed. Personally I think the 2nd Edition ruleset is much improved, and I'd recommend splashing out for at least a pdf of Mortal Remains to get the quick-n-dirty Hunter updates, but if you don't want to deal with all the cross-referencing, Hunter runs just fine with just the 1st Edition nWoD core book and Hunter: The Vigil. (I'd also highly recommend Slashers, mainly because VASCU is one of the best conspiracies in the game line.) Of course, the other option if you're not in a hurry is to wait for Hunter: The Vigil Second Edition, but since it was just announced at Gen Con it probably won't be out till sometime next year.
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Aug 11, 2015 19:22
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Mendrian posted:I think nWoD part 2 tracking fiddly bits is in keeping with horror themes of consequence and scarcity, but yeah there are probably non-interger ways of tracking that stuff. Part of that, I think, (and I was not part of the GMC redesign team, so don't take this as behind-the-scenes gospel or anything) is down to the fact that 2nd Edition started as a simple revision and update to some key elements of the rules. I expect that if GMC had been "The World of Darkness Second Edition" from the start, you might have seen more sweeping changes. And Flavivirus is right: Condition Cards help out a ton with tracking Conditions, and unless you're running a game where intra-party conflict and one-upsmanship is the order of the day, group beats are the way to go. But yeah, there's certainly stuff I gloss over or don't use. I've never had players track ammo in a game, for example--in nWoD2, I use the "turn a failure into a dramatic failure for a beat" to let players declare they're out of ammo at dramatically appropriate moments. Pretty much anything involved with range, area of effect, etc. gets approximated in my games too. It's easier, I think, to intuitively grasp "this will affect everyone in a large living room or the equivalent" than "this affects everyone within a three meter radius." I personally like the Social Maneuver system a lot, you just have to get a feel for when to use it and when not to. It's great for long-term social engineering projects or making a tense negotiation have more systemic weight than a Manipulation + Persuasion check, but not so much for "I sidle up to the crime scene tape and try to fast-talk the cop into telling me who died." I also rip out the Resources Merit and replace it with a Filthy Rich Merit I wrote up (and a Poor Persistent Condition players can take if they want that to be a part of their character's story), which contextualizes wealth and privilege in a more thematically relevant way, I think. I think that's about the extent of what I tweak, though. I'll let you know if the Mage game I'm starting up next week reminds me of any others.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:48
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Yawgmoth posted:I generally dislike the new combat system for this reason. It feels very Exalted to have these huge defenses that you have to burn resources to beat (and can be negated with similar expenditure) and once you run out you're just hosed. I mean it works, and it's not terrible, but I certainly prefer the old skill+att+tool bonus and def being just the lower of two attributes. The thing about the new combat system is it's not really designed to model "combat" in the sense that most RPGs model it. It's meant to model the application of violence as a means to achieve your goals. That's why fight scenes start out with a declaration of intent, it's why the Beaten Down and surrender rules exist, and it's why the math is balanced to heavily favor spending Willpower and seizing any advantage you can. (And remember, just because weapons are no longer equipment bonuses to dice pools doesn't mean you can't get equipment or circumstance bonuses from other factors.) It's also why Defense drops for every subsequent attacker. It's not meant to be a tactical minigame, it's meant to be an escalation, and to ask the question "how far are you willing to go to get what you want?" You might have to punch a dude three or four times before he'll cry uncle and give in. Or you could give him one good crack with a baseball bat and he'll probably give in right then and there. Or you get five of your buddies together, jump him on his way to his car after work, and kick seven shades of poo poo out of him. And, hey, if you're really worried about those huge defenses and you're all out of tricks and up against a wall, one little snub nosed .38 renders them moot. (Unless you're fighting something freaky and supernatural, I grant you, but that's a slightly different kettle of fish.) Now, sure, sometimes some of that doesn't apply. Sometimes a fight is all about "we need to kill that thing in the basement of Jenkins House" and not "I want Benny to give me my goddamn money." And yeah, maybe in those cases it's not so much a moral question of escalation, but it's still a question of "how much of yourself are you willing to put into making this thing not be alive any more?" And if you run out of Willpower or whatever tricks and you can't find away through its defenses, that's a sign to run the gently caress away and come up with a new plan. Maybe something involving C4 and some unlicensed renovation.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:16
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