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See, that's all about oWoD. In nWoD, a starter Ventrue or Daeva can pretty handily deal with combat - the Daeva is going to have a dot of Majesty and therefore be surrounded by adoring fans whenever they want, and the Ventrue will have a dot of Dominate and can pick one guy in a fight, catch his eye and give him a single sentence order like 'shoot your friend.' But overall, vampires definitely want to avoid combat with other supernaturals still, though they can pretty easily ignore mortals as non-threats in most cases, due to extreme resistance to mortal weaponry.
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Dec 8, 2017 17:33
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A local young noble pissed off a local witch with his terrible manners, so he's been cursed with wereporcine. Every full moon, he'll turn into a literal boar. To break the curse, the PCs must have a charming dinner with the noble, or just find the witch and ask her nicely to reverse the curse.
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Dec 8, 2017 17:40
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There are a surprising number of problems that can be solved by being polite to people.
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Dec 8, 2017 17:43
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Or 5 dots in Presence. Politeness is priceless. For everything else, there's Mastery.
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Dec 8, 2017 17:45
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I’m pretty sure changeling characters just lump all other supernatural types as, “Oh, great, these jerks again.”
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Dec 8, 2017 17:49
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I still laugh at the later-edition oChangeling rule that lets them manifest in the real world for brief, combat-length periods.
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Dec 8, 2017 17:51
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Bieeardo posted:I still laugh at the later-edition oChangeling rule that lets them manifest in the real world for brief, combat-length periods. Yeah. Of course, if it wasn't for that, most of the time they were effectively just very serious LARPers as far as the rest of the world was concerned.
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Dec 8, 2017 17:55
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Well, Larpers who got low cost Celerity that gave extra actions based on the successes on a relatively low difficulty roll. So they could hit you a lot of times with that boffer sword, at least.
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Dec 8, 2017 17:59
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Oh gently caress, I forgot about the Dragon's Ire completely. Every ST I ever played with banned it at the table (or the forum, whatever). For the uninitiated, this was like a 3e DM banning some fighter feats for being too powerful.
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Dec 8, 2017 18:07
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Halloween Jack posted:Oh gently caress, I forgot about the Dragon's Ire completely. Ah, so a thing that happened with startling regularity.
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Dec 8, 2017 18:28
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Specifically it's like a 3E GM banning Greater Weapon specialization because an extra +2 damage on top of regular Weapon specialization's +2 is -too OP-.
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Dec 8, 2017 18:41
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What's the deal with Changelings being so weird? Should I just read up on inklesspen? Unrelated question: how does Dark Heresy 1e compare to 2e? Are there gameplay merits to playing it instead of 2e?
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Dec 8, 2017 19:50
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JcDent posted:What's the deal with Changelings being so weird? Should I just read up on inklesspen? oChangelings use 'chimerical reality' which is to say, Changeling stuff is only real to other Changelings. A changeling's magic sword is just a stick to anyone else. E: nChangeling has nothing to do with this and does not do this thing. If an nChangeling has a sword, it might not look as fancy to you as it does to him, but if he hits you with it, you are cut by sword.
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Dec 8, 2017 19:52
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oWoD Changelings are literally LARPers and it's just the dumbest thing.
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Dec 8, 2017 19:54
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JcDent posted:Unrelated question: how does Dark Heresy 1e compare to 2e? Are there gameplay merits to playing it instead of 2e? Not especially, they're the same base system. 2e is just an update to be in line with Only War and puts in the Aptitude system. If you liked Only War, 2e will probably work better for you.
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Dec 8, 2017 19:57
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JcDent posted:What's the deal with Changelings being so weird? Should I just read up on inklesspen? I'm going off of memory here. (Changeling 2e was one of the first games I ever bought, and it says something that I never got to play it enough to have nearly the same knowledge I do of Vampire, Mage, or for that matter, Street Fighter.) Changelings came to Earth from Arcadia in a mythical time-before-time. When the gates to Arcadia closed, those trapped here survived by reincarnating their changeling soul in a human body. (So to start with, changelings are like, astral cuckoos.) Changelings' big deal is that they exist half in our reality and half in the "chimerical," and they get the worst of both worlds. You see, the modern world is suffused with Banality, which is the evil grey drabness of office buildings, and daytime television, and science, and modernity in general. (You know how oMage gets criticized for being anti-science and romanticizing the distant past? So does Changeling, but also for being painfully adolescent about it.) All this Banality threatens to literally kill your changeling soul, and you need Glamour, which is the precious force of wonder and creativity and riding a unicycle to class, etc. etc. A lot of changelings' stuff is bound up in the chimerical world, and chimerical stuff just doesn't affect the real world unless you spend Glamour and Willpower. Changelings have chimerical weapons and armor, and deal with chimerical beings like dragons and living nightmares, but none of this is visible to the rest of us. Changelings can be pretty weird looking, but unless they spend points to drop the veil, you'll just see a tall guy and not a 7-foot Troll with blue skin and horns. Their magic system, called Cantrips, is also rigged so that anything you want to do usually starts at a high Difficulty which you have to buy down with Glamour. And like, vampires are considered extremely Banal by default, because their whole thing is that they oppress people and make life lovely, so it's an uphill battle to use a simple cantrip against a vampire. So changelings can easily exist side-by-side with vampires or werewolves or whatever in the same city, and never know it. The only hint that changelings exist is that sometimes some office workers will go to the park and wave sticks at each other, and one of them will later wake up with a hangover and an amnesiac fugue because he was chimerically clubbed to a chimerical death by a chimerical warhammer. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Dec 8, 2017 |
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Dec 8, 2017 20:07
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wiegieman posted:oWoD Changelings are literally LARPers and it's just the dumbest thing. There is a fair pile of deeply awkward SCA lurve in the line. I met a few people who were into both, and I still sometimes get the urge to scrape myself raw.
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Dec 8, 2017 21:07
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C20 rejiggered most of these systems so that chimerical reality works more consistently, and I think changelings are a lot closer to the mage end of the spectrum now, but I'm not sure how the chips fall in practice.
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Dec 8, 2017 21:29
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Dallbun posted:304: Boarish Behavior
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Dec 8, 2017 22:08
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Probably there would have been a wereboar? Does anyone else have the deck and the copious amounts of free time needed to comb through it? Failing that, just give me your best
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The party are hired by a wereboar to help court a local fair maiden. there is only one problem: His voice is suave and charming while shifted, but guttural and incomprehensible while human.
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Dec 8, 2017 23:50
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Dallbun posted:Failing that, just give me your best wereboar encounter. A traveling merchant sells the PCs a "truffle hunting boar of magnificent skill and intelligence" but it is in fact a man cursed into a boar and in addition to hunting out rare and delicious truffles (which he attempts to eat) he also constantly breaks away or erratically skews to find whatever natural-growing alchemy ingredients are in "turn a boar back into a man" potion. Sometimes it tries to communicate its situation with snorts or scraping patterns in the ground or whatever. Oh and he fights to the death, of course.
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Dec 9, 2017 00:16
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TBH, a wereboar scares me more than a werewolf. Pigs are assholes.
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Dec 9, 2017 00:23
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Boars are also significantly more dangerous, one on one, than wolves.
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Dec 9, 2017 00:24
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You approach a clearing, around which is strewn the dead and dying. A scarred squire runs forward at the sound of the party and tells the horrifying tale of his Knights quest to slay the fey creature that has been running riot in this small valley, said Knight lies dead in the centre of the forest. The party can easily (DC12) follow the tracks of the monster, which turn into a persons, who they can then encounter in a small grove. She gives them a shy wave and a noncomittal shrug. "They started it." She suggests the PCs take what is left of the dead in the prior clearing, and they can call it even. The squire demands vengeance.
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Dec 9, 2017 01:15
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So I read "squire" as "squirrel." And I think that makes it better.
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Dec 9, 2017 01:20
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Mors Rattus posted:Boars are also significantly more dangerous, one on one, than wolves. there's a reason why there's a specific spear for boar-hunting, with massive crossbars, because a speared pig will continue to push itself down the haft and gore the wielder if that crossbar isn't there to stop it.
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Dec 9, 2017 01:20
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Zereth posted:A wereboar is selling dozens of +1 longswords at suspiciously low prices. This is due to some backstory that he will fight to the death rather than reveal, and the card seems to think this is enough to conceal it from determined PCs. That sort of thing has to be the most common blind spot I see in adventure/encounter design, where the designers simply say "x will not work" or "will never do y". I mean, forgetting for the moment all the magical ways of overcoming pretty much any of these problems, there's plenty of things a creative player could do to change someone's mind or trick them. And then there's all the magical ways of solving those problems. I noticed a lot of that in my F&F for the world's largest dungeon, there's things like people keeping secrets they will never reveal! (i.e. unless they're mind-read or charmed) or writing in unspecified dead languages (as though comprehend languages isn't a first level spell), which they never bother to detail. The even more egregious blind spot is the "dying dragon/mentor/messenger/angel/whatever" who manages to gasp out a plot hook but somehow can't be saved by a cure light wounds spell.
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Dec 9, 2017 01:20
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 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness Revised Edition, Part Nine: "He does not allow racial or sex discrimination in any of his businesses, he condemns dictatorships or racist behavior, he is generous with friends, employees, educational institutions and the poor."  That can't be sanitary. Doctor Feral: The Genius of Bio-Spawn Though billed as an "adventure", this is more just a really detailed antagonist writeup with some vague hooks. Dr. Victor Oban Feral is a brilliant scientist and the head (no title is given) of a company known as BIO-Spawn. Feral is an ideal corporate citizen; his businesses are progressive, banning sexual or racial discrimination, he refuses to deal with those he finds ethically bankrupt, obeys both the spirit and letter of the law personally, and makes generous donations to charity. He more or less has the police in his pocket. He claims to be on the cusp of developing an "immortality drug" and has a number of wealthy and powerful patrons as a result. The catch is that he's massively racist towards mutant animals, not really considering them anything more than slaves or test subjects. In addition, he's obsessed with studying them scientifically. Why?  Of course, this being a Palladium book, it wants to give him the alignment of "Scrupulous" (aka Neutral Good) despite his tendency to torture or vivisect mutant animals, which doesn't follow. If I take care of orphans in my spare time 29 days out of the month, and then 1 day a month murder somebody in an excruicating fashion, my good deeds to not obviate the bad deed. It notes that the PCs are likely to encounter him by direct invitation if they're out in public, and he will make attempts to invite others to his home, where he will politely offer hefty cash payments for blood and tissue samples. Afterwards, he will contact his hired goons to attempt to shadow and kidnap them later. However, he will never personally involve himself in combat or illegal activities. Because of his pull, any dead or captured mutant animal will likely be handed over to him by the police. Lastly, he has a number of mutant animal slaves which he controls via shock collars that can cause suffering or death. A number of staff members are detailed who are all unswervingly loyal and generic. His main animal henchman is Otto Rattus, a mutant rat who originally was a pet of Feral's, and the only one not to wear a collar. He's been surgically modified to look (mostly) human, and is unswervingly loyal of Feral and paranoid regarding those who might threaten him. He's partially bionic, mainly in the form of replacement organs made by Feral to increase his lifespan. He has a ridiculous and superhuman Physical Strength of 34, which would require near-perfect rolls for a PC to achieve. Karl is a mutant rabbit who acts as Feral's chief assistant. He's a brownnoser and sadistic, though he secretly hates Feral and would very much like to escape. He tries very hard to fake being smarter than he is, but not too much, as apparently Feral has a tendency to vivisect any animal he finds curiously intelligent. Lastly, Igor is as short white rat with only partial human hands, biped, and speech features. He's psionic (with Hypnotic Suggestion and Detect Psionics) and works to make sure other psionic creations are destroyed. Like Karl, he enjoys torturing other animals, because we can't have any of Feral's creations being slightly sympathetic. We're told he also have "special purpose Combat Animals" based on rats, mice, or rabbits designed specifically to take on other animals, but they're undetailed. We also get details on BIO-Spawn's vans they use for mutant animal kidnapping, or to take on wounded or dead animals taken by the authorities. The control collars are also detailed, as well as an extensive listing of the multimillion / multibillion dollar companies BIO-Spawn has a stake in. Feral is a decent idea at heart for a game like this, but the ham-handedness of the "Is he really such a bad guy, makes you think huh?" routine and, once again, being made to fight the victims of abuse is... a recurring theme. In addition, the near-universal loyalty he seems to inspire in anybody he winks at gets pretty wearisome; you'd think his activities would start to draw some scrutiny, especially with his white-furred animal death squads. Well, hope you like him, because he shows up in the majority of core supplements...  Terror on Rural Route 5 So, eighteen years ago, a farmer named George Boswitch struggled to maintain his family farm. When he bought load of "bargain" feed, it turned out to be laced with a chemical that killed all of his animals. However, before they died, several animals gave birth. He was able to support himself with the resulting settlement from the feed company, but the baby animals that survived started developing strange human-like characteristics. One of them was Ferd, a mutant bull who discovered that George was going to sell them to a circus at an early age. Ferd turned out to be a hypno-bull, and was able to brainwash George into holding off on his plan indefinitely. He and the other growing mutant animals were largely taught about the world by TV, and have difficulty distinguishing fiction from nonfiction. When George died, they hid from local officials evaluating the property, and when they heard it was torn down, they decided they needed to take hostages to survive. So, a number of them armed themselves and went to the local rural school, taking nearly a hundred children hostage and a half-dozen teachers. The news will report that "an unidentified group of terrorists" have taken the school hostage, though the police quickly become aware that they're dealing with mutant animals. A figure known as "The Liberator" - that's Ferd - demands a live news conference just in time for the evening news, where he'll issue his additional demands: 6 million in cash, two helicopters with pilots and transport to a "remote northern location". If his demands are not met, he'll start killing a child every hour in the morning. Later that evening, he'll release 16 of the kids. It makes it pretty clear that if threatened directly, the farm animals will pull the trigger. The irony of an adventure in which dozens of children could die in a property that would soon become a massive, decades-long kids' franchise is thick. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness posted:The situation calls for Ninja stealth and infiltration... Good thing the PCs are ninjas!... they are ninjas, right? You guys all decided to roll as a group? And got the 30% chance of being ninja? Or are playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Well, the adventure says "Just about any number or level of players should be able to handle it." Hope they all picked up the Prowl skill, at least... In any case, this isn't the sort of adventure with a defined structure; it's a sandbox where the PCs wander in and try and save some kids on a sneaking mission. As such, we get a very basic layout of the school, how it's being guarded, and the antagonists. So let's go over them. Ferd is their aforementioned leader, a mutant cow with a high strength and mental endurance. He's mostly driven to protect the other animals, but is willing to go to extreme lengths to do so, obviously. He has cow looks with partial speech and hands, is a full biped, and has bull burns. His main weapon is an axe, but he's got a revolver and grenades. He'll be in an office in the school with several kids, along with one of his pig underlings. Oh, and as mentioned, he has hypnotic suggestion as a psychic power. Buck is a agile hound dog mutant who's his main lieutenant, and calls the old cartoon character Droopy to mind. Apparently he used to keep an eye on things by pretending to be a normal dog; apparently, people didn't notice his freakish near-human hands. He's got full hands and bipedalism, as well as advanced smell, but only partial speech and still looks like a dog. He was actually against the hostage idea, but has been brought over by Ferd's mind control. He's patrolling the school hallways and looking out the windows with two of the pigs every 15 minutes. "Hello there, happy people, it's time to kill some children." Three of the pigs are watching over the rest of the kids. The pigs are presented in the ugliest possible light: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness posted:... all the pigs at the school are pushy, egotistical and loud creatures who argue about whether or not everything will come out all right. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness posted:All the pigs are ignorant, argumentative creatures who are going along with Ferd's plan simply because they have no plans of their own. The pigs are the result of neglect and an education no greater than network television. With help they might become useful members of society, but as they are now they're pretty hopeless. We get some names for them, but they're indistinct. They're about as mook-ish as Palladium gets, which means they have no combat bonuses but can still soak up a farcical amount of damage (it's going to take about 6 whicky-whacks of Leonardo's katana to bring one down). And they have guns! And a flamethrower! It's a rough fight if nobody remembers that Palladium has disarm rules. There are also a dozen of the pigs at the farm, communicating with Ferd via radio. We also get a brief write-up of Captain Sam Reynolds, a police captain in charge of the siege, and he might be willing to go along with a crazy scheme by some mutant animals, but only if they can sell him on a plan and don't piss him off in the meantime. It's honestly not a bad intro scenario save for some issues with tone; the adventure seems to presume the PCs will be victorious and doesn't have any suggestions as to what happens if we get into child-murdering failure state. Also, it once again has the PCs going after the victims of abuse and disadvantage... which doesn't seem deliberate, mind, it just seems to be the default background this book uses to give "depth" to his baddies. It also suffers from the lack of social mechanics in the game - the idea of talking them down and finding out more about their background seems like it would be an interesting solution - as it is, the PCs seem intended to stab them without ever really worrying about the details, and that's not as compelling. Next: Ninja, ninja, ninja! 
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Dec 9, 2017 01:32
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Dallbun posted:
The PCs encounter a dying man. His final words "Beware... the boar..." Naturally, adventurers will try and hunt down this beast, and as they do, they encounter a ranger out hunting in the woods. He's not aware of any especially dangerous boar, but he'll offer to help them out. As they journey, he tells them tales of his various hunting exploits, particularly fine trophy kills, the best way to store crossbows, what that particular species of moss is, and why it's different to the other type... He is actually an Illithid, and his words are a psychic attack trying to dull the minds of those around him, until they can be safely picked off one by one.
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Dec 9, 2017 02:55
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oriongates posted:The even more egregious blind spot is the "dying dragon/mentor/messenger/angel/whatever" who manages to gasp out a plot hook but somehow can't be saved by a cure light wounds spell. New modules solve this problem by making you cure the messenger before they give up the info, but then of course your newfound companion "will not help the party after that in any way, even if charmed etc" Elfface posted:He is actually an Illithid, and his words are a psychic attack trying to dull the minds of those around him, until they can be safely picked off one by one. Now that I think of it, "Fight to the death for a +1 longsword" would be a p good encounter for a low-magic setting where it's the only one they've ever seen. Btw do people in-game call it a "plus one longsword" or what? HCFJ fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 03:19
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HCFJ posted:As long as he fights to the death with his +1 longsword. +1, +3 vs humans
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Dec 9, 2017 03:27
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oriongates posted:That sort of thing has to be the most common blind spot I see in adventure/encounter design, where the designers simply say "x will not work" or "will never do y". I mean, forgetting for the moment all the magical ways of overcoming pretty much any of these problems, there's plenty of things a creative player could do to change someone's mind or trick them. And then there's all the magical ways of solving those problems.
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Dec 9, 2017 04:09
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Mors Rattus posted:the Ventrue will have a dot of Dominate and can pick one guy in a fight, catch his eye and give him a single sentence order like 'shoot your friend.' In 1e you need relatively calm circumstances to use that ability, though one-word commands like "Flee!" are fine. In 2e that works. It also has limited effect if you're ordering someone to do something that makes them experience a breaking point, which shooting a friend probably is, because that instantly ends Mesmerize. Better hope they kill their friend on the first shot! If they succeed in killing said friend, they also instantly stop being Mesmerized, because killing is always a breaking point. (There's also the somewhat bizarre interaction where it's very reasonable to have "experience a supernatural compulsion" as a breaking point, which means that the very first command you give a random NPC is probably going to break the control the vampire has over them and give them a +3 to resist a subsequent attempt...)
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Dec 9, 2017 04:25
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LatwPIAT posted:In 1e you need relatively calm circumstances to use that ability, though one-word commands like "Flee!" are fine. In 2e that works. It also has limited effect if you're ordering someone to do something that makes them experience a breaking point, which shooting a friend probably is, because that instantly ends Mesmerize. Better hope they kill their friend on the first shot! If they succeed in killing said friend, they also instantly stop being Mesmerized, because killing is always a breaking point. (There's also the somewhat bizarre interaction where it's very reasonable to have "experience a supernatural compulsion" as a breaking point, which means that the very first command you give a random NPC is probably going to break the control the vampire has over them and give them a +3 to resist a subsequent attempt...)
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Dec 9, 2017 04:58
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Nice boar encounters, people. Good hustle out there.  The parodies made me laugh, but to be fair, I don't think there are quite as many +1 weapons, irrelevant backstories, or "fights to the death" in this deck as people remember. I mean, don't get me wrong, they're all regular features, but they aren't present in the majority of the cards. Zereth posted:Yyyyyyeeeep. And the Deck has done that sort of thing a few times. "This is caused by runoff from a wizard's bullshit!" "Okay, so what if the PCs want to go deal with the wizard?" "I don't understand." In most cases, I think it's not that they don't foresee that happening, it's just that they're deliberately leaving it to the DM to develop. It does annoy me, though, especially the most egregious examples like 81: The Talking Tree (a magic mouth says all who enter this forest are dooooomed! But what's up with the actual forest?) or 91: A Light in the Darkness (there's a cave that might have something in it!  ).
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Dec 9, 2017 05:09
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Nessus posted:the NPC's original domitor So does it seem kinda skeezy to anyone else that VTM has specific jargon for this?
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Dec 9, 2017 05:14
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If it's a regularly occurring situation, it's often practical to have specific jargon for it. And if it sound like someone trying to romanticize something horrible, that's pretty appropriate for the tone Vampire usually goes for, which is that vampires dress up the horrible things they're forced to do with pretty words to live with themselves.
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Dec 9, 2017 05:36
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wiegieman posted:So does it seem kinda skeezy to anyone else that VTM has specific jargon for this? I mean, that's kind of the entire game in a nutshell. Competing domination effects is probably something that comes up often enough for vampires to have specific jargon to talk about it.
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Dec 9, 2017 05:37
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wiegieman posted:So does it seem kinda skeezy to anyone else that VTM has specific jargon for this?
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Dec 9, 2017 05:47
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wiegieman posted:So does it seem kinda skeezy to anyone else that VTM has specific jargon for this? It annoys me more that it's bad Latin, because domito and dominor aren't the same word even if they're related, and domitor is a first person conjugation anyway. (Third person for domito is domitatur, I think, but I'm awful at Latin.) It should really just be 'dominatur'... or just dominator. Edit: Though I guess being pretentious and not great at Latin is perfectly in character for vampires. Prism fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 06:04
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