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Jerik posted:Hey, question here for people who know more about the nWoD than I do (which is probably most people here; I have a fair amount of experience with oWoD games, but almost none with the nWoD, but some recent reviews in FATAL & Friends have really piqued my interest): I've run LA as a supernatural hotspot, with all kinds of things coming out and trying to carve up some territory. Strictly Canonically, I believe Vampire and Mage are the only ones who base a setting out of there, besides Demon itself. Vampire has the Lancea et Sanctum having taken control and essentially attempting to run LA's nightlife out of The Mission, and Mage has some kind of Goetic storm that has Gotea of famous people (read: Anyone famous enough to have impersonators) possessing people and having them act like the celebrity in question. There's, like, faction conflicts and poo poo, but that should probably be left to only being relevant if your players care. Of note, Demon the Descent - The Demon Seed Collection actually has a whole writeup of LA. It's the third section, titled "Dream Factory". Edit: Holy poo poo I must not have noticed the page turned over, this is an extremely late answer.
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Oct 18, 2019 00:52
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I just use a modified version of the rule of six from Shadowrun. Mundanes get six dice on things they're supposed to be good at, subtracting dice the farther away from their concept they're acting. Supernaturals usually start at eight or more, depending on power level.
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Oct 23, 2019 03:25
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ilikedirt posted:What game should i play if i want to be a wizard in modern times that maybe shoots fireballs at vampires, but also have rules that i can explain to people i want to play with without immediately and suddenly turning them off from the system for 100% of all time d20 Modern! Which is a fun answer because it satisfies the question while also being bad.
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Nov 3, 2019 05:20
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MonsieurChoc posted:Coteries of New York is out. What happened to my pal Calebros? It's got 7/7 positive reviews on Steam right now, which I don't think rear end-Eater Chronicles managed. That's a bar low enough for mice to trip over though, so no idea about the actual quality. I'll probably pick it up and read through it with my partner who is somehow convinced V5 is the best Vampire game ever put to paper. Don't know which edition's lore it's leaning on, but different perspectives and tastes would be fun.
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Dec 12, 2019 01:01
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I have returned from 1.2 playthoughts of the new game, Coteries of New York. Verdict: It's Not Great. The writing is fine, but English mistakes abound with comma cruelty, misspellings and missing punctuation. There's some technical stuff that's busted as well, with some first person narration being delivered by other characters as dialogue, or dialogue that should be delivered by other characters presented as narration. Sometimes when using a power the game would increase your Hunger (we're using V5 lore and mechanics, you see), and other times it wouldn't, leaving you as a player very confused at the cost of not just spamming your Disciplines. [Note: I only played the Ventrue path, so the things mentioned below may not happen exactly like I describe on other paths.] The Good: The two (of potentially four) coterie members I focused on were pretty interesting, Hope the Malk and Agathion the Tremere. If nothing else, I know enough about V5 now that I could jump into a tabletop game and be able to know what's going on both mechanically and in the setting. The Bad: Choices - there are none. Not really. Over the long tradition of False Choices in video games, you've had Persona Choices and TellTale Choices; the former giving you three options to respond that all amount to the same thing, the latter giving you a bunch of branching choices that all ends in the same place and situation anyway. CoNY does both. Many, many times you're given choices that only practically serve to give you different pieces of exposition, as barring a couple major signposted moments, you're going to go along with the plot whether you like it or not. Your Companions are a decent example; the game makes a big point that you're going to need allies, and when you complete the four-part series of missions to formally bring them into your crew...they show up once to save you in the finale, then leave and are never spoken of again. Dropped Threads - I completed two sidequests, one with a vamp getting weird about a Priest's True Faith hurting him, and a stalker Malk who wants to vampire-bang you. I completed both, and...nothing happened. Not even a nod to finishing the questline in the finale. The Ugly Bugs - So, at some point on the path, you're asked to infiltrate the Anarchs to arrange a meeting with a smaller Baron in order to take down the big one. You do a quest to gain the Anarch's loyalty and to get them to arrange the meeting, then you get grabbed by the Big Boss's goons and told to knock this whole thing off. Except...well, that whole night just...didn't happen. Skipped over it entirely. The flags got set, and when we meet the goon later we have a reaction like he beat the poo poo out of us, but that didn't at all happen on screen. Thankfully I was able to figure out what happened from context clues, but that completely ejected any building immersion the game was getting with me. But in general the game seems to have a problem with the wrong flags getting set, like in the beginning where the Sheriff says that I mouthed off to him when that literally did not happen. (I checked to see if he was just lying and played through the scene again, and sure enough if you choose to drink from the blood bag and vomit all over yourself because of the Ventrue Bane, your character is too embarrassed to mouth off to him. You could say he made up the lie anyway, but I'm skeptical) Bane, Schmane - That's another thing that might be very minor, but the game has you vomit up a few feedings before telling you that you have a type. Since this isn't the tabletop game, you don't know what your type is and have to figure it out. This is neat. However, every feeding opportunity after that, your character keeps down fine. Now, this might be because all the feedings happen to incidentally match your type (it's not hard) but it's enough of a challenge that it's a weird coincidence it never bothers you again after the opening. Rushed Ending - This might be the most route-specific complaint, but the ending was a shitshow. You're kidnapped by the Second inquisition, then broken out, then send to a place, then monologued at for a while as everyone has their motivations laid bare, then you go to another place, a fight breaks out that you can't influence at all, and that's it. You have exactly one impactful choice in that entire scene Question; in V5, does Vampire blood sustain a Ventrue even if the vamp doesn't match the bane?
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Dec 12, 2019 08:02
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Nessus posted:I don't know about V5 in specific but vampire blood was always kosher for our Ventrue brothers before then. Potentially also those demi-ghoul revenants the Sabbat had laying around. Oh good, no lore fouls there then. Shrecknet posted:Please let me know if its any good, im an absolute slut for princess makers like Long Live the Queen and Vlad the Impaler Sadly, there's none of that. The game mentions learning other clan disciplines through experience, but it's lying. You have no stat sheet, there is no improvement. You wouldn't even know what your powers were unless you played V5.
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Dec 12, 2019 08:13
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So the Memento Mori supplement for Geist 2ed dropped, and it's got two new spook powers, Void and Well. They're based around Underworld features; Well has you pulling from the Rivers and Ocean of Fragments to do some memory trading, and at the highest level you can essentially respec other characters with enough Plasm. Void is...well...The Void Condition, because everything has to be a condition posted:You have welcomed a kernel of the Void into yourself, Which, like Well, has a caster-specific 'gently caress-you' condition for if the roll goes bad (because these are Very Bad Spooky Powers), along with a way worse one. Void Storm, the least worst one posted:You’ve awoken a kernel of the Void, and you’ve done it The Maw, AKA The scene is suddenly about you now posted:You have let too much of the Void free, and now it will So yeah, that's the baseline we're working with. First level has you spawn a Void-wake from anywhere between a whole room to a large building, second level gives you shadow-blasts, third level gives you angry Void teeth along with an upgrade to not be blinded by your own Void-wake, fourth level is The End of All Things described above, which spawns a black hole inside your void-wake with the original wake's area of suction around it, consuming everything and growing larger until it potentially spins out of control. The fifth level busts a hole into/out of the Underworld, regardless of if an Avernian Gate was there. So yeah, pretty metal all around. My question is thus; how does a Mage look at this and come up with an explanation that isn't the Abyss corrupting some Underworld feature? That's what it reads like, to me.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:48
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I should also include the text I saw to come to this conclusion:Three Dots in Void posted:Virtually everything she consumes is Black Hole Ghost posted:Wise Sin-Eaters wield the Void with great care, knowing Those two bits stuck out as Abyssal flavor to an otherwise Death Arcana based phenomenon. I agree that it is a danger Mages might want to look into regardless.
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Dec 23, 2019 10:09
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Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good Magechat.
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Dec 25, 2019 19:55
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While we're on the Vampire talk, is Night Horrors: Spilled Blood any good? I'm not in a vampire game, but I might grab it if it's interesting reading.
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Feb 20, 2020 04:09
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Mage Question: I really hate Pierce Deception. Wait, that's not a question, let me try again. Pierce Deception is a one-dot Prime spell that does a bunch of useful things, and also automatically tells you when someone is lying. If you have some sort of supernatural effects helping your lies, the Mage gets a Clash of Wills, and since according to a rules-lawyer player who in this case is correct (and also a Problem, hence the post) a Mage automatically knows when their spells are Clashing even if they don't win, hiding them supernaturally in the first place is pointless. I do a lot of Social Intrigue in the Mage game, which gets difficult when Everyone Cannot Tell A Lie. (Also, I've talked to the Player, and he's agreed to stop calling out rules violations in the middle of sessions, but he still gives his lovely look at me when it happens and 'corrects' me after the session.)
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Sep 20, 2020 19:31
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From the way people talk about Scion 2e, I'm convinced I live in a separate reality. There's just something about this book that doesn't make sense in my head. When we get to Combat, I have no idea what to do with Fields. I cannot for the life of me understand what Hero is trying to say regarding Feats of Scale (except in combat, which has a specific section in Origin). The Piercing weapon tag, "Reduces a target's Hard Armor value by 1 or Soft Armor value by 2." Hard Armor has a value of either 1 (for one additional health box) or 3 (for two), so does that...get rid of a health box? Soft Armor increases the difficulty of the 'Inflict Damage' stunt by one, but as far as I know tags can't stack, which means the Soft Armor value will only ever be 1. What does Piercing do in that case? Then the powers have these little things that are always tripping up my players and I. It's just all very confusing for a game I very much want to enjoy.
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Sep 29, 2020 22:16
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So, the Lunars book is out for Exalted. Is this the time I should get into that game? People say the new book is quite excellent, and I have no frame of reference to doubt those opinions.
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Oct 8, 2020 21:22
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Just picked up the Mummy 2ed book because OPP emailed me to remind me that it existed. Quick question: wtf is Duat within a larger CofD context? I understand that the gamelines aren't intended to be ran together, but I at least describe unified lore for my Mages who like to dimension hop. Is Duat the Underworld? Or are the Judges the Cthonic Gods that the Giest book was talking about who actually run the afterlife cosmology, meaning Duat is the spooky after-afterlife that Sin-Eaters go to during Catharsis? Or is it just entirely incongruent with the Geist Underworld? (Sorry if any of my questions are Just Wrong, my brain is a bit scattered)
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Sep 16, 2021 05:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:it's probably a Lower Depth, a type of kind of parasitic sub-reality missing one or more of the properties embodied by the Arcana Interesting. Any idea what it might be missing? Preliminary guesses would be Prime, since one of the judges is pretty explicitly anti-Mage.
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Sep 16, 2021 05:51
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Ferrinus posted:If we ignore context-shaping "nyah nyah I'm floating out of reach or perhaps across the Gauntlet" tricks, Maximized Mage 2E combat durability is going to come out of, in no particular order: Unless I've been playing Mage wrong for three years, (I could be; these things have happened before) most Shielding spells aren't limited by Potency. Buffs usually are, but Shielding spells tend to work for however long the Duration is, as many times as it's tested. I do like the idea of DDoSing wards, though.
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May 14, 2022 05:28
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So the wards printed in the book do ablate and it's just not referenced due to poor editing, or they don't ablate and only off-book wards do? I'm confused.Ferrinus posted:I had the exact opposite read on Wards and Signs: it IS an omnishield that works vastly better than any other Arcanum's defensive measures precisely to exist as damper against magical rocket tag. If Prime had to play by the CT rules, then my ability to turn you into a pair of smoking shoes comes down to a clash of wills coinflip pretty much no matter what, but the published W&S creates a straightforward and fairly-easily-accessed game mechanic that means it's not enough to simply buy up to Potency 6 if you want to auto-win any conflict (whether "win" here means physical incapacitation, stealing a secret telepathically, etc) (as long as you win the clash, but you only have to get lucky once). Wards and Signs has a pretty big gap in the armor, namely that any attack spell made into a praxis nullifies it with 3+ successes. As long as I'm not relying on Potency for damage and just need the spell to take effect (or even if I do, if I buffed up dicepools with Fate and WP) that's not terribly difficult.
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May 14, 2022 08:23
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Which one is Irem? That's the only thing on that list I couldn't describe in an hour long video essay disguised as a lecture to Mages at my game's Wizard School.
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Sep 10, 2022 21:52
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I do wonder if there's some workability in porting over Mage into Changeling. Could work out a Common -> Royal -> High/Fae/Arcadian tier system, with purviews already rolled into the contract's Regalia type. That way the book could describe sample contracts on the fly, but the game becomes players learning to manipulate their contract-making powers over their Regalia and being creative with it like Mage Thaumaturgy. Hell, 1e True Fae basically worked this way already, with Gentry being able to pick a handful of Regalia and negotiate new powers on the fly from them.
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Oct 3, 2022 09:07
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I have a Mage: The Awakening question that's one part rules question and one part thought experiment. Let's say I'm a pretty competent mage, with Fate 4, Mind 2, Matter 2, Space 3, and Prime 2. I'm infiltrating an enemy Mage's house, when I come upon an office door on the north wall that is magically enchanted to compel all those around it who desire to enter by any means to knock on it first. Assuming I have all the following Wards on me, how many will activate and I need to roll a Clash of Wills for*? 1. Prime Ward*, Potency 5 (This one doesn't Clash, it would lower the potency of the spell by 5 if it applies) 2. Fate 4 Attainment (Blocks me from taking actions against my will) 3. Mind 2 Ward, Potency 3 (Protects me from mental compulsions) 4. Fate 2 Ward, Potency 2 (Protects me from being forced to do anything foolish) 5. Matter 2 Ward, Potency 45 (Protection from Doors) 6. Space 2 Ward, Potency 1 (Protection from Turning Any Part of My Body North For Any Reason) 7. Space 3, Break Boundary (Doors are not real) Spector29 fucked around with this message at 12:49 on Dec 11, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 12:46
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They couldn't possibly be aiming for an "Actually, the game's done!!"-type reveal, right? I assume somebody would've reported that development restarted.
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Jun 7, 2023 16:18
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Speaking of, how come I hear so much about Luna but never anything about the Sun? They have Solar spirits, right? It feels like there's no gameline book that really explores that at all.
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Aug 16, 2023 21:34
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Hello, welcome back to Mage Chat.Signs of Sorcery posted:A handful of Isn't it, though? That which is considered 'natural' is what is reflected by the Supernal. If ol' Hegemony (The Exarch of...Life or Spirit, I don't remember) says Racism is Cool then challenging that should be a mystic act, yes?
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Oct 24, 2023 15:58
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Rand Brittain posted:The Supernal contains multiple perspectives, in fact is multiple perspectives, so Exarchal opinions are not a priori correct. No, but it feels like correct and 'natural' have very different meanings in this context. My understanding is that it's called The Lie for that reason; that what is Good and what is Normal have diverged, largely because of the Exarchs.
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Oct 24, 2023 16:25
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Over the five years I've been running Mage, the player opinions have been: gently caress Time Magic (because time travel is hard and time assassins are scary and/or killed my mom) gently caress Mind Magic (because of sleeper agent paranoia, rampant memory modification, and also someone thought it would be hilarious to bind my vice as their Familiar) gently caress Spirit Magic (because thinking about the Spirit ecosystem is hard and I'm scared of Werewolves killing me if I mess it up)
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Nov 5, 2023 08:31
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drat, I hadn't heard about the OPP stuff (mostly because I was trying to keep away from bad internet poo poo in 2020), it's too bad the game I love so much I'm getting it tattooed on me is currently run by shitlords. Anyway, catching up on ~14 pages of thread, Forsaken is pretty cool but my players have been strictly Mages for half a decade now. Is the combat in other CofD games actually good? In Mage it's usually clusterfuck rocket tag, with a side of "time-travelling back two turns where you lost Rocket Tag to try and re-win it again instead".
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Mar 14, 2024 05:48
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