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Simian_Prime posted:I vote for Ferrinus's idea of allowing Protean 1 to grant wallcrawling abilities. It's an ability we've seen in everything from Dracula to Anne Rice, yet it never appears in Vampire unless it's a special Devotion or something. It's thematic enough that we should change it. At least just make Protean 1 somewhat useful. It was Attorney at Funk's idea, I was just the first one to post it. Disciplines to rework include but are not limited to: Majesty 1. How come its resolution mechanic is different from every other power in the game? Why can't it just be dicepool vs. dicepool as normal? Auspex 2. How come it's so god drat fiddly and consists of three separate powers? Can't it be consolidated a little? Do we need a huge penalty-accumulating subsystem for a power that costs nothing to invoke and can therefore simply be used for an arbitrarily long time until you learn everything you want? The Coils of the Dragon. Most of these are good, but some are really, really crappy compared to the good ones. Every Coil should be as dramatically game-changing for your character's night to night unlife as the first three tiers of Blood. Cruac 5, Feeding the Crone, along with Cruac 3, Touch of the Morrigan. They're incredibly swingy and huge in their effect, especially FtC, which is next to useless for your run of the mill witch but crazy strong on an acolyte who also happens to be a pro wrestler. They should more straightforwardly and dependably let you leverage your Cruac rating as a weapon - in my games, for instance, the effect of Feeding the Crone is just "You can use your Cruac casting dicepool as an aggravated close-combat attack dicepool." In general, I'm not sure that blood magic rituals need to take multiple turns to cast. Like others have said, any conflict measured in turns rarely lasts long enough to make any sort of multi-turn effort worth it. Every Instant Action a character takes should involve some sort of dramatic and meaningful change in situation, not boringly set up an Instant Action that might change the situation later. While you guys are at it, can you make grappling less of a huge deal-
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Sep 2, 2012 15:28
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 23:52 |
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I always assumed cWoD referred to Monte Cooks WoD. How mistaken I have been.
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Sep 2, 2012 15:36
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It pretty much does, though, when you think about it.
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Sep 2, 2012 15:50
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I always think it means currentWoD and it throws me every time.
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Sep 2, 2012 15:55
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moths posted:I always think it means currentWoD and it throws me every time. Hehehe "Classic". Like Coke.
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Sep 2, 2012 15:58
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It stands for clownWoD.
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Sep 2, 2012 15:59
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Ferrinus posted:It pretty much does, though, when you think about it. Whoah whoah whoah. Let's not say things we can't take back.
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Sep 2, 2012 15:59
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I want to put my thoughts in order about what the WoD's combat system is good at and should, ideally, be tuned to accomplish even better, and I've decided to do it somewhere public so that the rest of you can sigh loudly before vigorously spinning your mousewheels downward. You win fights by having higher stats: The WoD has stats that measure your combat effectiveness (Brawl, Health, etcetera) for the sake of realism, among other things: skilled and powerful fighters are supposed to defeat unskilled and weak fighters. The WoD isn't a game that runs completely on metanarrative "storygame" mechanics - if you punch harder than someone else, you will beat them in a boxing match. This means that in the World of Darkness, characters can be broadly aware of and make decisions based on relative combative prowess; they can say things like "The Sheriff could break our entire coterie in half without breaking a sweat, man, we can't just walk in there!" or "Leave that guy to me - I can take him." It's easy to make someone who wins fights by having higher stats: It should always be obvious to someone who's just been introduced to the system what they need to do if they want their character to kick rear end. Combat stats should all straightforwardly add onto each other to produce your character's overall combat effectiveness, and there should never be any question as to what you should buy if you want to get better at fighting than you are. You should not need to know the nitty gritty of esoteric combat subsystems in order to create an effective character. Combat stats shouldn't saddle your character with weird dice tricks that may or may not be better than straightforward stat increases depending on a host of other factors. The stats that make you win fights should be genre-appropriate: It shouldn't, for instance, matter much or at all whether a vampire is wearing body armor, or whether a werewolf has a powerful machine gun on them. Supernatural statistics should obviate mundane statistics, not stack with them. You win fights by caring more: The effect of combat is that you expend character resources. Obviously, engaging in a fight causes you to lose free health boxes by temporarily (you hope) filling them with points of damage, but on top of that if you're actually playing for keeps you'll almost certainly be spending willpower points to try to take away more of your enemy's resources at once, and (in Vampire) blood points to replenish your own resources or further deplete the enemy's by increasing your attack dicepools and activating your powers. Combat in the World of Darkness is in many ways a game of chicken - whoever's willing to pour more of themselves into a fight is more likely to win that fight, but is going to have less points to spend on other things they do later on. You make choices in combat to accomplish different things, not to try to find the most efficient way of accomplishing the same thing: The World of Darkness's rules are really straightforward. Having a higher dicepool is better, rolling more successes is better. Combat stats give you a higher dicepool to roll in combat, therefore allowing you to roll more successes. Separately, combat stats reduce the successes your opponents can roll against you, and allow you to withstand more rolled successes before falling over. The World of Darkness shouldn't contain rules which give you cute ways to short-circuit the basic high stats -> high dicepool -> high success count progression, and they shouldn't make you choose between different dicepools and different ways of using your successes to accomplish the same basic goal. So, for example, you shouldn't ever have the option of making a "called shot" where, in exchange for a greater risk of doing no damage, you have a chance to do a lot more damage than usual. You shouldn't ever have to choose between a variety of different combat manuevers, whether they come from fighting styles or special weapons or the core rules. If your objective is to take another guy down, "Make a totally normal attack" should be the absolute best option available to you, each and every time, with it being up to you how much vitae, willpower, or other depletable stuff to spend on improving that attack. When you do make choices in combat, it should be to accomplish things besides straightforwardly winning a fight. For instance, maybe instead of attacking your opponent you attack their getaway vehicle, or try to knock the artifact they're holding out of their hands, or try to set the entire combat arena on fire, or stuff like that. Put another way, fights are exciting because of the potential consequences, not because of the opportunity to demonstrate tactical superiority. Combat is easy to escape: Unless there's an enormous power disparity and or an incredible run of luck, it's pretty much unheard of for any character - even a total noncombatant - to just drop as a result of suffering a single attack. Crushingly powerful and inescapable alpha strikes simply don't exist in the system, or at least shouldn't. Because combat is a turn-by-turn attrition game whose major consequence is that one or both sides end up expending resources they'd rather not expend and can't easily recover, fights don't really need to result in one side or the other falling down unconscious or dead. It should be common and totally appropriate for whoever looks like they're going to win combat to realize this mid-combat and immediately retreat or surrender, meaning that the de facto winner is free to continue to do whatever they were doing before the fight broke out. Fights should only actually run to the death when they happen in such dramatic circumstances that neither party can possibly countenance surrender for any reason - maybe the losing party is defending something utterly crucial to their plans or ideology, maybe both parties are fighting over something of fantastic value, maybe the fight itself is the expression of a deadly vendetta rather than a simple clash of short-term goals.
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Sep 2, 2012 17:10
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lodoubt posted:I always assumed cWoD referred to Monte Cooks WoD.
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Sep 2, 2012 18:23
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Volume posted:Speaking of which, did any one actually play Monte Cooks WoD? Any good? No and no. It's basically the Shadowrun storyline, except with WoD game lines and lovely D&D rules. Literally everything about it is derivative in the worst ways possible.
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Sep 2, 2012 18:32
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Fuzz posted:No and no. I remember seeing the book last week at a game store, saw Cook's name on the cover and literally pulled back my hand from the grognardy flames.
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Sep 2, 2012 18:41
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Volume posted:Speaking of which, did any one actually play Monte Cooks WoD? Any good? I've not actually played it, so it may turn out to be a subtle masterwork of game design that only reveals itself at the table during player interaction with the mechanics. That said, a thorough reading of it makes it look absolutely terrible, with all the problems of d20 bolted on to a weirdly generic, Shadowrun-esque setting (god help me for agreeing with Fuzz) and inheriting some of the inherent plotting and pacing issues that can come up in Wolrd of Darkness. You know the phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none"? While reading it I couldn't help but get the feeling that it was meant as some kind of gateway for hardcore d20 players to dip their toes in World of Darkness. I don't think it's ultimately successful at that, since I reckon it'd give a very different experience from actual nWoD play, but I'm not that strongly into d20, so who the gently caress knows?
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Sep 2, 2012 18:49
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Here's some of what I've noticed playing and running Vampire, discipline-wise: Auspex is almost a required power after a certain point because of how many things it can do. The first dot ensures that you're probably going to succeed all Wits+Composure checks, Aura Sight is so kitbashed together I honest to God didn't know about the initiative boosting aspect until I went back and read it more carefully, Spirit's Touch can completely derail a whodunit plot unless the ST is careful with the visions, Telepathy is...telepathy, which is ungodly useful any day of the week, and Twilight Projection only gets better the more you think about what it can do. This is all atop the ability to see people hiding with Obfuscate, who are otherwise totally invisible. The way Majesty 1 resolves is so janky one of my players, who basically built his character around being a social juggernaut and has a huge pool for it, still only rarely succeeds with it unless it's one on one with someone with low Composure, or it's a crowd of people with low Composure. Not only that, since it has no cost, he can just keep doing it over and over until it works. Protean 1, glad to hear that's changed because it's worthless. The Vigor boost to jumping literally never comes into play. As Ferrinus mentioned, almost all of the Coils of the Dragon all pale in comparison to Blood Seeps Slowly (and the Coils of Blood in general), which is a complete and total game changer. I actually like the rewrites he's posted and have been considering using those. Also - and this is a personal house rule - I've changed the way spending EXP on Coils works, because by the time you get past a certain point you'll be waiting months and months and months of zero EXP expenditure to get one often mediocre effect. The first Coil your character buys costs [new dots x 7] per dot as usual, but the second Coil's abilities cost [new dots x 8] instead of stacking on top of the first. So, you can spend 21 EXP to buy up to Coil of Blood 2, and then spend 8 EXP to buy Coil of the Beast 1 instead of spending 21 more. Each subsequent Coil ups the multiplier by one, so the third Coil is x9, the fourth (if you use the Ordo Dracul book ones) is x10, etc.
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Sep 2, 2012 18:52
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Ferrinus posted:Fightin' Words I pretty much completely agree with you on this, and it's how I always approached combat.( X+Y+/-Z =) is how literally every other action in the game is expressed, and I'm with you that combat should be no different. The slight difference we have is that, while combat (and other actions) boil down to who cares more. I also believe that people who aren't strong have just as much to offer in a fight, and I prefer someway of representing that mechanically (along with ways for the fightymans to help with like...research, it's a team effort thing) That's why I personally prefer to use my houserule/merit that allows non-strength optimized characters to use one of their other non-resistance attributes instead of strength in brawl and weaponry rolls. (I call it Fighting Style, natch) It preserves the (X+Y+/-Z=) format, and to use your terminology, allows more characters to care about a fight, while reducing the burden on the party's fightyman, your brute is still gonna be king poo poo if that's his thing, but it's nice to be able to have back-up.
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Sep 2, 2012 19:27
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If you can buy a merit to use something other than Strength on Brawl and Weaponry attacks, you lose a lot of incentive to have a high Strength rating at all. In general, the more I play roleplaying games the less I like rules that let you substitute one trait for another - it makes the system less transparent and creates increasingly more opportunities to save XP or other chargen resources by paring down you character and replacing as much stuff with other stuff as possible. I'm with you that noncombatants should be able to contribute to fight scenes and vice versa, but I think the way you do that is by: A) Making buying basic competence in a field really cheap while buying mastery is really expensive, which the WoD's scaling XP costs do, and B) Making sure the difference between basic competence and mastery isn't so huge as to make the former invalidate the latter, which is already true in the WoD if you're being careful not to use any of the fighting styles actually present in any of the game books.
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Sep 2, 2012 20:06
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I bought it, which is probably the closest anyone has come to actually playing it. It looked like what you'd expect, except the default setting isn't the World of Darkness, it's Shadowrun. Edit left the window open and got beat. There was a really interesting take on spells though. If you want a real laugh, there is always GURPS V: tM. moths fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Sep 2, 2012 |
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Sep 2, 2012 22:36
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Hey guys, where's that online character sheet for all the different games? My google-fu fails me.
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Sep 2, 2012 23:19
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I think that sheetgen.dalines.net is the consensus favorite. I use Infinite Personae for my games, though.
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Sep 2, 2012 23:31
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crime fighting hog posted:Hey guys, where's that online character sheet for all the different games? My google-fu fails me.
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Sep 2, 2012 23:31
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crime fighting hog posted:Hey guys, where's that online character sheet for all the different games? My google-fu fails me. http://sheetgen.dalines.net/wiki/WikiStart Is the one I always use.
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Sep 2, 2012 23:40
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moths posted:I bought it, which is probably the closest anyone has come to actually playing it. It looked like what you'd expect, except the default setting isn't the World of Darkness, it's Shadowrun. GURPS: V:tM was my first exposure to the World of Darkness. I was at a friend's house and started browsing through it, and he told me I could borrow it. Later I tried to return it and he insisted it wasn't his.
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Sep 2, 2012 23:41
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Baby Babbeh posted:http://sheetgen.dalines.net/wiki/WikiStart This is the one I've always used.
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Sep 2, 2012 23:50
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Pope Guilty posted:Later I tried to return it and he insisted it wasn't his. Was he a big guy named John? Because thats who stole my copy in college.
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Sep 3, 2012 00:02
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I like Mr.Gone's character sheets.
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Sep 3, 2012 00:04
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Protean 1 was first against the wall when the Revolution came. in tolth's game it gives you spiderman wallclimbing powers which is sick as hell, and also straight out of Dracula
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Sep 3, 2012 00:14
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Liesmith posted:in tolth's game it gives you spiderman wallclimbing powers which is sick as hell, and also straight out of Dracula This scene creeped the gently caress outta me as a kid. http://youtu.be/GG-TwX5A49g?t=2m54s E: And thanks for the links, guys. Those should go in the OP! crime fighting hog fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Sep 3, 2012 |
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Sep 3, 2012 00:26
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crime fighting hog posted:
Good idea, I will do this.
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Sep 3, 2012 01:01
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Can my bonus dot to Will since I'm Mekhet get me that fifth dot or is it limited to four since it costs two dots to buy the fifth?
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Sep 3, 2012 02:02
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You can, in fact, and it's basically a pro strategy for vampire and mage character creation to turn your free attribute dot into a 5.
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Sep 3, 2012 02:08
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Ferrinus posted:You can, in fact, and it's basically a pro strategy for vampire and mage character creation to turn your free attribute dot into a 5. Hello, wits 5! At least I assume wits is decent enough to want 5 in.
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Sep 3, 2012 02:14
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Wits is one of the best attributes to have a five in, since you can usually argue that you can use it for any mental roll because most mental rolls you need to "think quickly."
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Sep 3, 2012 02:18
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Sweet. I'll have my sheet ready soon. Is okay if you guys look it over? I have my concept down but I don't want to waste merit points in stupid poo poo that never comes up. E: Hooray! http://sheetgen.dalines.net/sheet/20430?message=true Again, sneaky sneaky guy. I'd most likely run from any real fight than stick around. crime fighting hog fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Sep 3, 2012 |
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Sep 3, 2012 02:23
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Pope Guilty posted:GURPS: V:tM was my first exposure to the World of Darkness. I was at a friend's house and started browsing through it, and he told me I could borrow it. Later I tried to return it and he insisted it wasn't his. The GURPS adaptations are the only WoD poo poo (well, plus Cook's) I'm not even going to try and touch on for this project.
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Sep 3, 2012 03:29
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Loomer posted:The GURPS adaptations are the only WoD poo poo (well, plus Cook's) I'm not even going to try and touch on for this project. If memory serves the starting adventure has the characters as archons, which is all kinds of wrong.
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Sep 3, 2012 03:58
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That's not too bad. With a careless storyteller and the V20 Companion, you can roll a starting character - a bog-standard neonate, 13th Gen and all - as a Justicar.
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Sep 3, 2012 04:44
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I guess if you're the last Ravnos, you can call yourself whatever you like.
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Sep 3, 2012 12:29
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I wish I'd paid more attention to Wraith back in the day. It's still a really interesting concept. Of course it's also tricky to categorize a lot of wraiths, but that's life.
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Sep 3, 2012 16:55
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If I ever get a chance to play Mummy, o or n, my character description is just gonna read "I put the pussy in a sarcophagus."
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Sep 3, 2012 17:17
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Liesmith posted:If I ever get a chance to play Mummy, o or n, my character description is just gonna read "I put the pussy in a sarcophagus." Character Quote: "And yo bodywraps look like a dishrag."
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Sep 3, 2012 17:18
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 23:52 |
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You motherfucker. I just got Kanye out of my drat head and now you put him right back in there.
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Sep 3, 2012 17:19
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