|
Book of Hungry Names actually takes Werewolf 5E and makes it something I'd like to run but reading the core book that comes with some caveats. The biggest being harano and hauglosk which feel like planned obsolescence for a Garou and I don't think I want them in my game, especially with no way to lower them save maybe a one-shot relic so I'm wondering how much the game changes if I just strip them out. Certainly in my <cough> years of running Werewolf we never worried about harano.
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 04:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 06:56 |
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Book of Hungry Names actually takes Werewolf 5E and makes it something I'd like to run but reading the core book that comes with some caveats. The biggest being harano and hauglosk which feel like planned obsolescence for a Garou and I don't think I want them in my game, especially with no way to lower them save maybe a one-shot relic so I'm wondering how much the game changes if I just strip them out. Certainly in my <cough> years of running Werewolf we never worried about harano. The design behind Hauglosk and Harano is incredibly lazy, so you can easily erase those two trackers from the sheet with little consequence. The only real effects, that I can tell, will be; 1) Your players will not have desperation buttons that allow them to refill Rage or Willpower. 2) Touchstones become less important since interaction with them could shift a point from one Track to another, and the threat of increased Harano/Hauglosk is the biggest risk that comes with failing to protect one. Otherwise the Trackers are completely benign until either one hits max. There's no other rules interactions that I can see.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 05:01
|
|
|
Free Gratis posted:The design behind Hauglosk and Harano is incredibly lazy, so you can easily erase those two trackers from the sheet with little consequence. The only real effects, that I can tell, will be;
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 05:45
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:
You know a ST could easily say that this piacular spirit is fine with the pack using they power that way because they're desperate to survive, think the pack will use they power responsibly, just that nice, a total pushover, ect.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 06:31
|
|
|
It's true there are a lot of bricks in Holyoke
midwifecrisis fucked around with this message at 08:52 on May 4, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 08:48
|
|
|
More BoHN highlights:   
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 10:24
|
|
|
Free Gratis posted:The design behind Hauglosk and Harano is incredibly lazy, so you can easily erase those two trackers from the sheet with little consequence. The only real effects, that I can tell, will be; Having slept on it, I think I'll go with you fall to harano/hauglosk if you lose your all Touchstones - whichever one depending on how it happened. Keeps it as a thing without being so omnipresent or inevitable.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 12:36
|
|
|
in a better game your touchstones would be how you remove points. the fact that it's two 5 point tracks rather than one 9/10 point track is just there to make it easier to enter a fail state.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 15:22
|
|
|
The rule should be that if you can mark the last point in both tracks simultaneously they mutually annihilate and reset to zero so you can keep playing your character.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 15:34
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:in a better game your touchstones would be how you remove points. the fact that it's two 5 point tracks rather than one 9/10 point track is just there to make it easier to enter a fail state. A better game would also feature some kind of interesting effects as either tracker rose and fell instead of the Binary No Effect/The Worst Effect. From play reports from two separate friend circles, the Hauglosk/Harano rules have not come up at all. They're very disjointed from the experience unless you go out of your way to include them, and it doesn't sound like the players ever felt compelled to tap into the Desperation maneuvers they allow. Even if it weren't borderline offensive, it's dull and poorly integrated. Just garbage design all around.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 15:57
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:in a better game your touchstones would be how you remove points. the fact that it's two 5 point tracks rather than one 9/10 point track is just there to make it easier to enter a fail state. It's funny that looking into seeing if people had come up with their own house rules before I decided to tamper in God's domain myself how many people automatically assumed that was the case which is partially from just misreading the bit on how Touchstones let you shift points around which I guess is like "I spend time with my friend and instead of being depressed about Gaia I am now mad about Gaia" which in another, more interesting game could have been... well, interesting.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 16:07
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:in a better game your touchstones would be how you remove points. But enough about Deviant: The Renegades...
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2024 19:54
|
|
|
Honestly If I was making Wod I would just use a simple call of Cthulhu style Santy meter for all splats and have splat specific "hang-ups" as added on as a secondary systems
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2024 00:44
|
|
|
CoC sanity is far from an improvement on Derangements lmao.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2024 01:15
|
|
|
I've thought about homebrewing the stress meters from Unknown Armies/Nemesis into World of Darkness in the past for mortal games, could probably use the same infrastructure for supernatural specific hang-ups.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2024 01:20
|
|
|
Ghost Armor 1337 posted:Honestly If I was making Wod I would just use a simple call of Cthulhu style Santy meter for all splats and have splat specific "hang-ups" as added on as a secondary systems nWoD/CofD 1e had a sanity meter for every splat with modifications for splat-specific hang-ups and one of the better ideas 2e had was not doing this. Even mortal Integrity is more like tracking stress than sanity.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2024 05:38
|
|
|
Does 5E still have Willpower? That would be the quick kludge.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2024 05:42
|
|
|
Is there a good D10 rolling app?
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2024 18:53
|
|
|
Pocky In My Pocket posted:Is there a good D10 rolling app? onyx path has a rolling app I use, Onyx Dice
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2024 19:02
|
|
|
drat. Book of Hungry Names is really good. I hated the early chapters because it seemed like nothing I did was the right thing to do, but it turns out that is exactly like being young and old folks will never give you and inch if they can make themselves feel better about their own bitter life choices.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2024 20:00
|
|
|
Mushika posted:drat. Book of Hungry Names is really good. I hated the early chapters because it seemed like nothing I did was the right thing to do, but it turns out that is exactly like being young and old folks will never give you and inch if they can make themselves feel better about their own bitter life choices. Yeah, it turns a corner when you start to raise some skills and get some Gifts.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2024 20:19
|
|
|
In unrelated news: the final stretchgoal book for Deviant, the Clade Companion, has been released to backers. I've read through it now, and I... am not impressed. Chapter 1: Four weird mechanical variants (not to be confused with Variations, or with the variant in this chapter where you're a guy whose soul was put into a car by a corrupt Ford executive) that let you play even weirder stuff. Horrible living machines, Deviants whose minds jump into a new clone that just slid out of the vat every time they die, aliens and angels who were subjected to the same kind of horrors that human Deviants were, animals with human minds. The chapter's a bit dry, because Deviant is a horror-themed superpower building game with a very broad range of thematic concepts, but it's solid content that does what it says on the tin. Chapter 2: More basic animals to use as the basis for either the "horrible animal experiment" player option from the first chapter or as the basis for new Manticores, and also some mechanics for Manticores that give the handler they've bonded to access to their Variations but tend to give them Scars long-term. However, the example symbionts are... not super interesting? There's a cat that was infused with intense amounts of luck magic, telepathic ravens, and invisible cougars the conspiracy uses as assassins/bodyguards. None of them go into detail on what the negative effects of long-term use might be so all you have to hook your interest is a basic concept that might carry a mediocre Steven King short story, and the mountain lion doesn't even fit the "use a Symbiont to temporarily get a Variation" format, it's just a normal Manticore that's here. Chapter 3: In theory, this is talking about how Deviants and their tattered souls interact with the wider multiverse. In practice, this chapter starts with another reprinting of the mechanics for ephemeral entities (ghosts, spirits, etc) and then moves into what I would describe as "what if you hired someone on Fiverr to write an essay about CofD's cosmology". Which given OPP's business model, they kind of did? Part of why they go into such boring detail is because they list a bunch of weird stuff that third variant could be in the first chapter, but the one sentence description of fae in that chapter is more intriguing than the paragraph rehashing Changeling: the Lost lore in this one. The only part of this chapter that inspires anything in me is the two and a half pages at the end about coming up with your own weird realms, and even then it isn't much. Chapter 4: Deviant-themed equipment. Some mundane gear and vehicles that are relevant but feel like they've been reprinted, some Deviant-specific stuff like power limiters/enhancers, and rules for Prototypes, weird items that basically give their user a Variation and a Scar. It's not a weighty chapter, but the example Prototypes just feel better-written than the example Manticores in chapter 2. (Also, the little fiction blurb between chapter 3 and 4 is reprinted at the end of chapter 4, which really doesn't speak well of their editing standards.) So, what are my takeaways here? 1) This book could have been better because you can feel hints of something more interesting in here, but also... it's a $5 stretch goal book. I'm not going to blame the writers of Chapters 2-3 for not bringing out their best work here. I'm just happy the writers of 1 and 4 managed to hook me despite it. 2) God, you feel the need for an actual core book here. If you took out everything that would have been printed in a fully fleshed-out core rulebook for all of CofD (or at least been printed previously in an equipment book I haven't read), this book would easily be ten pages shorter. That's a lot when it's only 60 pages in the first place. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 19:19 on May 8, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 19:16
|
|
|
I had such hopes for the Clade Companion when I opened it and saw that there was a chapter on animals and a chapter on ephemeral entities, given that I've been playing a Deviant who interacts heavily with both, but then it's just kinda...there. Like there's some funny art (flying ipad with guns, rabbit with a knife) but no new Variations (even the Devoted Companion managed one there!), some merit-type-things that only work for a couple of the new mechanical variant/origin-types, and yeah like you're saying here Lurks With Wolves posted:Chapter 3: In theory, this is talking about how Deviants and their tattered souls interact with the wider multiverse. In practice, this chapter starts with another reprinting of the mechanics for ephemeral entities (ghosts, spirits, etc) and then moves into what I would describe as "what if you hired someone on Fiverr to write an essay about CofD's cosmology". Which given OPP's business model, they kind of did? Part of why they go into such boring detail is because they list a bunch of weird stuff that third variant could be in the first chapter, but the one sentence description of fae in that chapter is more intriguing than the paragraph rehashing Changeling: the Lost lore in this one. The only part of this chapter that inspires anything in me is the two and a half pages at the end about coming up with your own weird realms, and even then it isn't much.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 19:25
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:with the variant in this chapter where you're a guy whose soul was put into a car by a corrupt Ford executive Finally, we can run that stephen king game we've always wanted.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 19:30
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:Finally, we can run that stephen king game we've always wanted.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 19:36
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:The chapter's a bit dry, because Deviant is a horror-themed superpower building game with a very broad range of thematic concepts, but it's solid content that does what it says on the tin. This is kind of the whole problem I had with Deviant; it's the most unfocused, toolboxy WoD game. Somebody got really high, was in the middle of playing Prototype, looked at their copy of Champions sitting beside their copy of Vampire: The Masquerade, and thought 'hmmmmm.' I think it's a great idea, and would have been a fantastic standalone game, but I don't like it as a WoD game. And they do a terrible job separating game terms from character terms. TheCenturion fucked around with this message at 17:23 on May 9, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 19:54
|
|
|
Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Like there's some funny art (flying ipad with guns, rabbit with a knife) but no new Variations (even the Devoted Companion managed one there!), some merit-type-things that only work for a couple of the new mechanical variant/origin-types, and yeah like you're saying here I don't even want more mechanics for Deviant, really. I want things that make me go "oh poo poo, I can do something cool with that", and that needs quick but evocative flavor more than anything. Half of the chapters in the Clade Companion completely failing to have any is the real heartbreaking part for me. Also: yeah, I love Deviant but Centurion's read is entirely fair.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 21:32
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:I don't even want more mechanics for Deviant, really. I want things that make me go "oh poo poo, I can do something cool with that", and that needs quick but evocative flavor more than anything. Half of the chapters in the Clade Companion completely failing to have any is the real heartbreaking part for me. Though I understand that this is a lot of Deviant, c'mon. Even some more crumbs would be nice here. Also give me explicit rules for how super-strength lets me throw people if I have the strength equivalent to "lift an 18-wheeler or whale" and "ignore Size penalties for thrown objects" because the obvious mechanical implication here is just, too stupid to even ask my ST for.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 21:39
|
|
|
Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:That's fair, but also: I not only want things that make me think "I can do something cool with that," I want them to do some of the something-cool of it for me, that's part of what I'm buying here. Like give me another couple pages of examples of reflavoring abilities, or maybe expand Otherworldly Connection, or give me more environmental conditions/tilts to utilize for Storm Caller, or give some examples of any of the super-senses abilities beyond "here is +2 Where Applicable" motherfucker my ST's already going to tell me where it's applicable, do even a little work here for a book it took like 5 years for you to put out. Give me meaningful descriptive-if-not-narrative options for so many of these gaps, so it's not even more of the CoD2e style "there's just one problem with a cool expression of an idea: you haven't written it for us." Oh, I 100% agree with you now that you've said it like that. A new Variation is a level of mechanics I don't really want, but part of that is just that the raw mechanics of Deviant make my head spin. (That's honestly the main reason the Devoted Companion didn't do anything for me. Too many raw mechanics in too large chunks.) But you still need mechanics. The fluff in the first chapter is decent, but it's the fact that I could go "it's kind of kludgey, but I can actually make a guy that's a car" that makes it work for me. (Or a gun, or someone who's slowly melting into sludge and then gets dispensed from the clone vat when they finally die, or an alien, or that rabbit with a knife.) The fact that the mechanics for Prototypes make some sense and had some decent hooks attached are what made me go "I can work with this". The second chapter has one potentially-interesting mechanic for the whole chapter plus some technically-useful statblocks, but the examples are so nothing that the mechanic may as well not exist because I need to bring anything interesting myself. The third chapter is completely goddamn pointless, and just making "here's one mechanical trick tied to each realm" would have been so much more useful to everyone than what we got. Anyway, on a note that isn't me accidentally sounding way more opposed to you than I intended: ... any thoughts on how to make Otherworldly Connection more than just "you get a bonus if appropriate, figure it out"?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 22:07
|
|
|
Still flipping through Hunter 2e. I've decided to make my game a Task Force: Valkyrie game, so I decided to check out the rules on Endowments and, like so many other things, it's kind of a mixed bag. I've come around to liking the idea of standardizing everything around 3 xp buying you one Endowment, and of splitting them off from Merits to avoid cluttering that section of the character sheet. And in the case of TFV's Advanced Armory in particular, having each Endowment dot be effectively an equipment slot that can be swapped out at HQ makes perfect sense. Think I'll probably be skipping the part where certain AA have to be checked back in for renewal a set number of sessions, though. And I'll have to think of some 1984 (the year I've decided to set the game)-appropriate predecessor to the RFID chips. But then there's the perplexing decision to give every Hunter who is part of a Conspiracy two Endowment dots for free. It feels way too easy, even for groups like IE the Lucifuge who effectively are a supernatural Template-lite, raises questions about how you would roleplay characters starting out independent for a while and then joining a Conspiracy, and raises serious lore questions about types of Endowments that are difficult-to-acquire resources, and are we supposed to believe that every rookie gets two of them for free? (Thinking of Cheiron Group in particular, but Aegis Kai Doro would have similar questions if they were still in the book.) It kind of seems like the obvious alternative solution would be to allow players at character creation to trade 3 Merit dots for 1 Endowment dot, and also maybe put in a note that says that most Conspiracy recruits will have a bit of existing experience before they're formally brought in and given access to the special powers/training/equipment/whatever, so if you create characters that are members of a Conspiracy you should generally give them some number of starting XP. The only part where I could see any potential problems at all is with the Ascending Ones, who still have a Stamina+Elixir dots activation roll, and making such a roll with only one Elixir dot could make things a bit awkward, but the obvious solution there is to tweak that one roll (maybe it's Stamina + Resolve + Elixir dots, or maybe you get 3 dice from the Willpower point that you spend to activate most potions, there are any number of possibilities here). And yes, the Lucifuge's demon-based powers affecting monsters depending on whether they have a specific Dread Power is bizarre. Clearly the criteria of which monsters "count" should be up to the Storyteller, and maybe you can have a sidebar giving advice on a few potential options. It also seems like missing the point: the whole Dread Powers system is supposed to be an abstraction to make it easy to build monsters for the players to hunt, so it isn't built to have this level of crunch applied to it in the first place. Like I said, a bit of a mixed bag. Some good ideas in there, but you have to be careful.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 23:29
|
|
|
Deviant seems to me like the kinda toolkit used for miscellaneous weirdness compatible with WoD, like the one actual alien abduction victim who hangs with the Changelings.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 00:28
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:The second chapter has one potentially-interesting mechanic for the whole chapter plus some technically-useful statblocks, but the examples are so nothing that the mechanic may as well not exist because I need to bring anything interesting myself. The third chapter is completely goddamn pointless, and just making "here's one mechanical trick tied to each realm" would have been so much more useful to everyone than what we got. quote:Anyway, on a note that isn't me accidentally sounding way more opposed to you than I intended: ... any thoughts on how to make Otherworldly Connection more than just "you get a bonus if appropriate, figure it out"? So here's what I've been using for a couple months now, for a character who is the result of, seems like evil mages(? still mid-campaign over here), trying to make a werewolf by smooshing host shards into a person until they don't die from it. I know the 3* is pretty loaded because it also includes the ability to start buying Influence as an additional xp sink, but Deviants honestly don't have a lot of those for a campaign that goes longer (for a given character) than a short story. And below 4/5 dot effects Influence is mostly lame/flavor anyway. quote:Otherworldly Connection (Shadow) ( to )
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 00:37
|
|
|
Is there anything in Werewolf 5E about needing a Gift like Spirit Speech or is that something else they tossed? (Which is not as negative as it sounds, it was always a tax type Gift.)
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 04:32
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Is there anything in Werewolf 5E about needing a Gift like Spirit Speech or is that something else they tossed? (Which is not as negative as it sounds, it was always a tax type Gift.) It seems to be gone from what I can tell. One of the things they do mention is that nature spirits won't often speak per se, but will instead communicate in gestures or symbolic behaviors. So it stands to reason that other spirits will indeed speak although I would personally have them do so in a way that underlines the fact that their understanding of the world will be radically different from a human's. E: There's a sidebar that I missed before posting, all about communicating with spirits. Most can "speak" in some fashion, whether that be verbally or by etching runes into the air, tracing patterns of moonlight, producing memories or even just smells, or straight-up projecting thoughts. It's also very dependent on the hierarchy of spirits. Werewolves are most likely to be able to speak with a jaggling or even an Incarna, but Celestines are too high up in the food chain and usually deal through intermediary spirits and gafflings often aren't intelligent enough to speak. PantsOptional fucked around with this message at 05:50 on May 16, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 05:41
|
|
|
A bit random, but I remember hearing one of the more derided bits of lore was the idea the unique Tzimisce Discipline coms from aliens. That it was an alien virus or something. Did somebody at WW just decide to go all-in on the Tzimisce being based on those Necroscope books? That is what was on my mind, to be honest. I was curious about reading those books and looking into them revealed that their "vampires" are really just humans infected by an alien or something. (Also are the books worth checking out?)
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 20:38
|
|
|
NikkolasKing posted:A bit random, but I remember hearing one of the more derided bits of lore was the idea the unique Tzimisce Discipline coms from aliens. That it was an alien virus or something. Did somebody at WW just decide to go all-in on the Tzimisce being based on those Necroscope books? Yeah, that was Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand and it was basically somebody deciding to go all-in on a Necroscope reference in a way that most people weren't super-fond-of as being canon. Later books retconned or ignored it all, although the 20th Anniversary line had V20 The Black Hand as a much-better-handled take on the same material. (DSotBH isn't actually bad as something to read, though, it was just ill-considered as an addition to the lore of the broader setting.)
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 21:00
|
|
|
Dirty Secrets even has its defenders now, who point to it as the apex of the gonzo sensibilities of the line. Despite being what amounts to Huge Revelations it's shockingly easy to ignore, which was the dirty secret of most WW heavy metaplot books.
Dawgstar fucked around with this message at 21:37 on May 19, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 21:14
|
|
|
Most of the book was trash, but I always liked that idea though, that the Tzimisce were infected by some weird umbral or bane virus and they'd become something more and more horrific than normal vampires.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 21:15
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:Most of the book was trash, but I always liked that idea though, that the Tzimisce were infected by some weird umbral or bane virus and they'd become something more and more horrific than normal vampires. Yeah, and we all know aliens are just umbral beings! I can't hate Dirty Secrets simply because of the True Brujah and Temporis. Yeah, let's give vampires time travel powers, why not?
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 23:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 06:56 |
|
|
I am going to be honest, I kinda like Vicissitude being an alien virus (that's also carrying Earthbound bullshit thanks to Kupala's pact with the Tzimisce AND is also a vessel for an eldritch night god; I am not sure which version I am going with in my on-going chronicle). I also have a soft spot for the True Brujah.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 23:52
|
|